[siliconsorcerer]

“The history of the tech industry and culture is full of this tension between the internet as an engineering plaything and as a surveillance commodity.”

Great article, wish it talked about how we might address the issue.

[SnorkelTan]

I think a prerequisite is Micropayments being ubiquitously available by using your existing preferred payment instrument. Content business models can’t really develop until this happens since the ad-supported business model has lowered the price consumers are willing to pay for it.

Although the unit price of content has decreased so much, I think the total value of content created has gone up significantly. It’s just that the new price people are willing to pay for is below the price floor companies can charge people using existing solutions such as debit/credit cards. With those solutions you can’t profitable go below a dollar.

The unavailability of the infrastructure prevents entrepreneurs from developing the business and related revenue models.

It’s less of a tech industry problem and more of a banking/payments/finance industry problem.

[AtlasBarfed]

I think the hints are in there, and I have my opinion.

1) Chinese Tiktok scaring the US government: Sure OUR corps can mentally rape our citizenry, but someone else? Nononononononono. This may provoke the first real debate on pernicious ubiquitous algorithmic manipulation.

2) Are we really out of "think of the children" political movements? With the polarity of Democratic and Republican parties changing, we may be ripe for protections for children (I mean, the tactics that childrens games use in the app store are utterly depraved: gambling games, social payouts, a litany of PTW strategies for fleecing adults applied to children) that may bleed into general society and adult welfare

3) fear of AI: AI is a boogeyman, and will continue to be. AI is just an algorithm, the next mass corporation/state algorithmic weapon to be deployed.

4) democratic institutions. maintain a functioning government and the core aspects of western "free" society such that they maintain a massive competitive advantage over totalitarian states in the long run.

One thing I will say is that people are smarter from the first (pre-social-network/mobiles) internet, and the initial stages of mobile/social network internet. I think people are educated at a rapid rate to deal with advertising and manipulation, and from an early age. I think it is making saavier people, even if in the short run your kids will get swept up in some manipulation/scam at some point. Better they get manipulated and conned early on by the Nigerian prince before they have real money to lose.

We shall see with AI.

What is abundantly apparent with the later stages of social/mobile internet is the massive distrust users of social networks now have of the platforms, even if they continue to consume it. This is what is underlying the very very correct distrust people have of corporate AI: if the social network corps have gone to such depraved degrees with the last round of algorithms, what will they do with new AI weapons? We already know: nothing remotely good.

The larger social network companies are firmly in their ossification phases: the biggest hallmark, publicly and openly having contempt for their customers. They are all ripe for collapse.

In a perverse gradiose manner, consider Conway's Law applied to the entire internet: the current internet mirrors the open trade period provided and maintained by post-WWII US hegemony.

Many many many people predict that globalization and trade is coming to an end, and the internet will change to reflect a less global and guarded real world.

We are also in a world of first-world demographic decline. Despite the rise of AI, people are about to get MORE important, because there will be less of them in the peak/prime years. If regard for human rights tracks the economic value of a productive human, it may increase substantially in the coming decades.

[zrn900]

> 1) Chinese Tiktok scaring the US government: Sure OUR corps can mentally rape our citizenry, but someone else? Nononononononono. This may provoke the first real debate on pernicious ubiquitous algorithmic manipulation.

It wont: It will be 'okay' for the US govt. and corps to do it, but it wont be 'okay' for others to do even a fraction of it. This kind of double standard and exceptionalism has been the lynchpin of the public discourse in the US throughout history. The people treat international things as if they were sports matches: They think that they are 'on a side', which is "their country's side", and they create group cohesion by uniting against the purported external enemy regardless of what happens at home. The problems at home are 'okay' to ignore until the external enemy is 'dealt with' because the country is 'more democratic'.

But the external enemies never stop coming up as they are manufactured by the establishment itself, based on real threats or, if none exist, made-up threats (at one point in mid to late 2000s they even went to the extent of talking about an extraterrestrial threat, which nobody bought so they had to drop it), and the fake democracy at home never allows the public to change anything. So things stay as they are at home, with the US govt. raping its citizens directly or by outsourcing it to private corporations and everyone just gets on with their lives in this horrible pandemonium - but at least feeling good about themselves because they live in 'the best country in the world', 'most advanced democracy', 'the shining beacon of freedom and prosperity'.

[mistermann]

> Chinese Tiktok scaring the US government: Sure OUR corps can mentally rape our citizenry, but someone else? Nononononononono. This may provoke the first real debate on pernicious ubiquitous algorithmic manipulation.

Also that western politicians and journalists are chronic purveyors of untruths/lies, mis/disinformation, etc.