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by ian_j_butler 32 days ago
> you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money.

Why? Just eliminate surveillance.. no tracking is no money. There's another theory that maybe no money is no content, but that's sort of what tfa (and other stuff on HN lately) is actually talking about. Lots of people who would make content or just conversation for free are still relying on some sense of community which is under attack everywhere if not already destroyed. Community means organic discovery, organic participation, and some reasonable expectation of continuity / non-enshittification that's actually independent of corporate interests or sponsorship.

2 comments

How do you limit the tracking? The site always gets the private data, it can't work without it. Sites farm out ads but they could be done by the site with no way to tell difference between an ad and a puppy pic.
> How do you limit the tracking?

Seems easy in the way that a lot of things are easy, and this definitely isn't about making everyone and everything untraceable.

We don't really need to play ads at 15% extra volume from content. GDPR didn't mean that every website has to do the passive-aggressive "Just following the rules here, click this so I will leave you alone" popup. Facebook could track users and sell ads without eagerly getting involved in things like election interference. Gas stations and airplanes could enjoy the good thing they've got going without pushing ads at captive audiences, increasing their margins some tiny percent of a percent while increasing friction and misery a lot more than that. A lot of this stuff is like arson, or stealing clothes that don't fit.. often the bad guy barely profits so it just seems pretty self-destructive and crazy.

I'm no idealist and I take for granted that greed and evil is going to happen, but I think most people can see that we need to pump the brakes. No-limits enshittification just blows up everything in the long term, including profit margins. Why the board and shareholders always tolerate this stuff from the person temporarily in the executive office is mystifying.

> Gas stations and airplanes

Gas stations, not sure, but someone the other day here suggested that airlines would be operating at a loss if they didn't have financializstion gimmicks like that.

Also, this current system selects for profitability. You don't have to financialize everything, but if you don't and your competitor does and therefore has more capital than you, then, eventually your competitor will eat you, either through a buyout, price starving you, or buying more politicians than you and regulating or lawfaring you to death.

This is an absolutely hard rule of capitalism, baked into the very premise of it.

I think we should make it so profit generating algorithms (corporations) can't behave this way - regulation seems a short term solution since capital == power so eventually corporations will just unregulate by buying politicians.

“Just eliminate surveillance”.

That’s a lot easier said than done.