[thih9]

> Machine should be serving _us_ the buyers/users.

Yes.

But every now and then consumers get a tempting offer and trade a bit of their freedom for lower price, more comfort, more prestige, or something else. I.e. in practice buyers don’t mind that much and likely also don’t understand the difference and the consequences that well.

[dietr1ch]

Consumers don't get told prices are down because of privacy going away. Prices going down on technology is the norm, so it's not even suspicious.

[toofy]

> … and likely also don’t understand the difference and the consequences that well.

this could be a very good argument to explain why so many have become skeptical of companies.

we have example after example where companies take advantage of people.

hearing my grandfathers generation go on about “the days when you could trust a company to be fair” i used to think they were seeing with rose-tinted glasses, but more and more im convinced we’re dealing something much more nefarious than that generation.

[kjellsbells]

> the days when you could trust a company to be fair

Those days never really existed. It was simply that their misbehavior affected groups of people who didnt have access to the media and power structures. For the US, e.g.: central Americans (banana company inspired coups), native tribes (water pollution, deforestation), poor whites (coal ash pollution), etc.

I can see that companies treated their employees better, but that might also be correlated with strong unions, less regulatory capture, more competition, or some other factor, rather than intrinsic goodness.

[FredPret]

Companies used to hire Pinkerton detectives to put down strikes and make employees use company stores.

Behaviour has improved for various reasons.

All we’re seeing now is that people’s technological surface area is expanding from zero to infinity so there are lots of new little cracks and edge cases society still has to sort out.

[account42]

This is a false narrative. There is never any active consumer choice.

[naikrovek]

of course there is. it just takes a lot of people to make the good choices, and when money is tight, that is very hard for people to do en masse.

this is part of the trend lately that has money flowing upwards and not back down again. if the end-user/customer is at the bottom, wages they're paid are what go into the economy and do the work that money does all the way up the chain of commerce until it reaches some rich guy shaped like a sphere who smokes cigars and laughs maniacally all the time. but because he's been tightening budgets on all the companies he's on the boards of, the employees of those companies get less money every year to spend on things. so more of the money stays in his hands. so customers have necessarily less choice on things they can buy and choices they can make in the marketplace.

eventually people get laid off or fired and now they have no money to do anything with and in the end take any job they can, if they aren't found by some employer before then. so they have less and less agency while the people selling things have more and more and more.

the end result of this is that we will become pets of the bourgeois which is exactly what they want. they not only have a need to win (which is fine by itself) but a need for all others to lose (which is not ok in any way) and they can never ever be happy with what they have.

I truly wish I had not had children. Life is going to be hard for them.