Businesses are society, we are forced to spent the vast majority of our waking life under the thumb of one so we should absolutely decide how we want that life to go.
Well yes, this is a good idea, democratization of the workplace and worker co-ops generally promote better quality of life for employees and the surrounding community, less exploitation, less corruption, more justice and similar or better efficiency as the normal dictatorial corporate model.
You're right, it's important to note they are more powerful and exercise more control over the lives of their employees than many governments, though employees often have the same opportunity to leave their company as they do their government (none).
>It isn't, unless your definition of "personal rights" includes "things I personally want which are neither codified in, nor protected by, laws."
Yes that's literally exactly what personal rights always means. Legal rights are legal rights, personal rights are a conception of what the person who uses the term wants or believes rights to be.
> You're right, it's important to note they are more powerful and exercise more control over the lives of their employees than many governments, though employees often have the same opportunity to leave their company as they do their government (none).
Especially when they're also dependent on their corporation for healthcare and retirement...
This is exactly my point, it's effortless to compare corporations to government, especially in this context. For the other comment to base his argument around the word "totalitarian" seems nothing if not disingenuous, given that the meaning behind the word is clear.
Did we even see the same movie? We're talking about the social network, right? The movie lauded nearly universally, winning and nominated for all sorts of awards (including best picture!) by every organization in every category? The movie regularly voted as one of the best films of the last 18 years?
I don't recognize a single one of your bullet points as being about my experience of the movie. The whole conceit was that a brilliant technical expert's unexpected success pushes him into a world he is not emotionally or socially prepared to handle, and ultimately his arrogance and hubris leaves him alone and unhappy as he pushes away the people in his life one by one, ending SPOILER ALERT
beautifully with him quietly desperately refreshing his ex's facebook page alone, starting to recognize how much he regrets everything that he has lost in his pursuit for wealth and power...
Most of the movie isn't about college, or sex, or booze. If you had to could you have broken a site from that era in 2 hours? I'd be shocked if you couldn't. Lots of these sites would die when they get a little too much traffic. Some sites still do today. Security was an afterthought back then. Zuck had a girlfriend, and his friends do just fine. The lawyers are dealing with so much wealth and power in the hands of people who are so young and emotionally immature and they handle it exactly how I'd expect them to.
Zuck in the movie is driven by a lust for wealth and power, which is a universal theme in basically every story in human history.
> The movie lauded nearly universally, winning and nominated for all sorts of awards (including best picture!)
Yes it is the same movie. If the judgement of the entertainment industry and public were any measure of quality then "Big Bang Theory" should be an excelent show, when in truth it is just a childish nerd version of those blackface movies from early 20th century. Millions loved it? Millions are wrong.
> I don't recognize a single one of your bullet points as being about my experience of the movie.
I just described scenes. Watch the movie you'll see those scenes.
I don't see the "brilliance" you describe, just a lot of clichés in fast montage to blur out the shallowness.
The problem in both cases is a capricious and whimsical ultrapowerful organization with the ability to destroy a person's life for any reason with no repercussions. In China, it's the state, in the US it's in the private sector, in the form of your employer.
On the one hand, I would certainly like to know, for example, if the person I trust to teach my children in a public school is explicitly posting on the Internet about how she uses her position to indoctrinate children into extremist white nationalist ideology, Nazism and hate groups, and the "Internet lynch mob" did a great service by exposing this woman [1] -- there is no universe in which she should be allowed to be a teacher.
On the other hand, I think such firings should always be "for cause" with some kind of due process. We need to take away the ultimate power employers have to fire their employees, and make them go through some negotiation, process, discussion before they do so -- like through a union, who is obligated to stand up for wronged employees for example. If someone is failing to perform, provide evidence. If someone's publicly stated values are incompatible with the values of the business, prove it and let them respond. Either that, or we need a strong enough social safety net so that employment is optional for all people.
I think most opponents of stop and frisk disagree with you: it's both. Police routinely "predict" that black and brown people are criminals, and stop and frisk allows them to act on these predictions without evidence. I think the argument here is that systems like Palantir quickly and easily become a technological proxy for these "predictions" and makes permanent the biases and racism used to create the data sets that drive them.
If NYPD set up patrols on wall street to stop and frisk bankers on their way home from work searching for cocaine or evidence of fraud it would be a very different issue.
Spoken like someone who hasn't spent much time on reddit recently. Since the massive surge in white nationalist, alt-right, and other right-hate ideologies online (and particularly the creation of the_donald, a subreddit which has shockingly avoided the ban hammer for an inexplicably long time given its obvious explicit purpose: to be an echo chamber to spread hate, scream slurs, threaten people with death and genocide, and dox enemies).
In literally any part of reddit, if there is any post on anything that could be construed as racial or about any gender, even innocuous, hordes of extremist right wing trolls descend upon it and spew horrifying screeds of hate. They abuse people into silence. They are toxic. These things leak. And toxicity is real. Hate begets hate, saying nasty horrible things to people and advocating for genocide are not innocuous "beliefs that other people might have" they are unacceptable behavior in civil society.
If you do this in real life you are ostracized, beaten, you lose your job, you are abandoned by your family and friends. And this is good. Social signals and actions to prevent "toxic" behavior have existed since forever. But the Internet is the property of a few companies who are loath to enforce those same social rules. Sometimes, they get pushed far enough they feel have to.
You're mixing beliefs with tactics/behavior. The behavior you described is "toxic" no matter what your beliefs are. I agree that the lack of repercussions and social feedback online lead to an increase in people acting like this and it is a problem for pretty much all public forums. However, it is neither constructive, nor is it truthful, in my opinion, to attach this behavior to a single group, side, or set of beliefs. All you'll end up doing is driving moderates of said group further to the extremes. You can call out ideas you think are bad and you can call out behavior you think is bad, but "other-ing" an entire group based on the worst actions at the fringes of their membership just isn't going to change any minds. It only widens the divide.
Edit: The exception, of course, is if the behavior that is at issue is actually encouraged by a foundational belief of the group.
>Edit: The exception, of course, is if the behavior that is at issue is actually encouraged by a foundational belief of the group.
I'm glad you added this, I agree with you in general. I'm not interested in "other-ing" right-wing people, Republicans, moderates, conservatives, but I'm very interested in "other-ing", e.g. neo-nazis or Klan members. I am not worried about neo-nazis becoming more extreme (? is this possible?) and I also am not willing to let their sensibilities or concern for their feelings dictate any part of my or society's behavior.
Well sure, it seems dubious if you frame it chronologically like that but that's not necessarily how it happened. "The idea that the solution to the core problem of X just happens to be the prescriptions of Y" is exactly the case whenever Y is purposefully and intentionally constructed to solve the problem X.
Who's to say social democratic policies (i.e. Sanders, FDR) don't usually arise in response to the toxic populism that austerity creates because they (anti-austerity) are the natural cure? Isn't that the story behind the new deal?
Is it so hard to believe that creating an entire generation of people who will have negative net worth until they are 40 fosters resentment?
That's a tautological argument. No good-faith participant in public policy debates aims to push whole generations into debt; they simply disagree about the best way to avoid that outcome.
I don't doubt that people who believe in single payer and subsidized tuition do so because they think it's the best way to keep generations out of debt. It would be weird for them to think otherwise.
What I'm doubting is that they can evoke public policy outcomes from the 1930s as a natural experiment proving that those are the best policy interventions. I think that argument assumes a whole variety of facts not really in evidence.
>No good-faith participant in public policy debates aims to push whole generations into debt
I agree, but I don't agree that even a majority of participants in public policy debates are acting in good faith. I think it's possible, but given the results and empirical evidence we have to the contrary you should provide some evidence or argument to back up this extremely controversial claim.
I don't think they actively wish to push generations into debt like mustache-twirling cartoon villains, but I do think they are not particularly concerned with this side effect of their other policy goals which are essentially a massive transfer of wealth and power to the private sector, like, e.g. privatization of the loan industry and education.
>I think that argument assumes a whole variety of facts not really in evidence.
The original argument was made by Blyth, who is a serious academic, not me, and you haven't made any attempt to engage with him at all. The crux of the argument is that "anti-austerity is the cure to the ills of austerity" which is honestly nearly tautological because of its obvious correctness, not because of a flaw in its reasoning. It's natural to look back at similar historical situations, like a gilded age of massive inequality and the destruction of working class power preceding a depression. The only real difference between then and now is that we've chosen to call our depression a recession, and pretended there was a recovery from it instead of creating one.
> No good-faith participant in public policy debates aims to push whole generations into debt; they simply disagree about the best way to avoid that outcome.
I feel there is more disagreement about the outcome itself.
Maybe no one could wish upon others financial debt, but a lot of people question why they'd need to help others achieve financial stability.
The idea that we need to actively find ways to raise the minimum standards of living and create a financial baseline seem to me like leaning on socialist ideas.
The other side can claim that there are winners and there are losers, and that's exactly how things should be. Reward the winners, and motivate the losers to work harder, simply make sure they are allowed to compete.
Technically it costs bandwidth and electricity I suppose to make information available...
Not suing people for repairing or tinkering with your hardware is also a "cost" I suppose if you want to phrase it that way, because of the lost revenue you would have gotten from locking down the market and only providing overpriced replacements yourself. It's a cost in the same way that a law against stealing purses imposes a "non-zero cost" on all of us, since we don't have that potential source of revenue available to us anymore...
Tech folks are incredibly smart on technical subjects. When it comes to politics, power dynamics, seeing through propaganda, empathy, we are not trained in or likely to be interested in any of these "softer" but very important issues at all and it shows. Why do you suspect there are so many Libertarians in tech? It is the quintessential political philosophy of a smart successful person who does not understand these issues.
