Comment by reverendsteveii 5 days ago
Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause people to trip over themselves to give us what we want and need because that would naturally be where most of the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is you.
I'm 100% with you on the idea that it's time to start paying for services on the internet instead of the ad-funded model we have today. The problem is that the people who decide when and how to monetize things seem to be moving toward a model where they charge you for the service, sell your data and feed you ads.
If lawmakers regulated data retention to make targeted advertising unprofitable, then businesses would have no choice but to compete for customer’s money directly by providing value.
The missing ingredient is usually "competition"
Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented
ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price.
See also: enshittification
In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else.
Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.
For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know what to call that other than blatant corruption of our government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a bipartisan way.
Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of being the only company in US history to have been tried and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two example measures under discussion in the court at the moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
Foreign competitors is how you get competition usually. The big 3 auto companies can lobby Congress and discourage competition. When American Cars started installing tailfins (purely cosmetics) instead of competing on fuel performance, maintenance or price, they were opening the door for the Japanese auto industry to eventually take over, with the crisis of the oil shock being the instigating factor for people changing their consumption habits
That only works as long as the companies don't pay Congress to keep foreign competitors out of the market. To continue the automobile example, consider why the market for light trucks in the US is almost exclusively American brands.
The missing ingredient here is that there is a gulf between what people really need, and what they do. Capitalism/market forces/etc. optimize on that "what people really do" and not what they need, and especially not what they say they want. See also, for instance, the layout of your grocery store.
The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.
The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.
And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.
For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.
I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.
[1]: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...
We talk about capitalism being really good at serving revealed preferences, but the thing becomes a bit more twisty when you start talking about capitalism and mass media's ability to shape those preferences. From Bernays to Chomsky we have reams of literature about how mass media is used to tell people what they want, then capitalism supplies it to them, then mass media tells them how free and blessed they are to receive just what they want.
Definitely hard agree on the split between slow, deliberative, rationally-focused thinking and quick, subconscious, emotional, pattern-seeking thinking and the way that most people to their own detriment don't ever examine which of those two they're doing. Hell, I still pretty regularly have trouble differentiating between thinking and reacting and I'm the kind of nerd who spends a lot of time thinking about how I think.
Ultimately capitalism "works", but only if externalities are incorporated into the price.
Hence vice taxes on liquor, cigarettes, the short-lived Bloomberg tax on soda. See also - carbon pricing.
What would that look like for social media, I don't know. If we're truly brainstorming, what if Facebook were forced to charge you cash money for usage beyond a half hour per day? Or past a certain amount of posting?
I'm well aware that politically this would die even faster than the soda tax... selling a policy is often more difficult and important than policy itself
The main problem the vast majority of policy proposals for this sort of problem face is that the proposals almost invariably slip in the idea of some sort of human being, if not an entire population of humans, that is abstractly above the problem and can be trusted to administer the policy. But if that was the case, we often wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
It's really hard to policy-fix something that literally 99% of the population is doing. Who is going to propose it? Who is going to enforce it? Who is going to pay attention to it?
And to be clear, this is commiseration with you, not argument. I have no solution even in principle.
Or, hear me out, what about "competition exists but I also get to vote and be represented." Where I live, there are two ISPs, the local cable conglomerate, and a telecom coop.
The cable company, as you might expect, is completely and utterly awful. They go for all of cable's greatest hits, from low introductory payments that explode after the first year, to service that is constantly down, to sending you to collections for equipment you returned. They do it all. The speeds are slow, and the customer service is non-existent.
The coop, on the other hand, is beyond delightful. The speed always exceeds what I'm paying for, and every couple of years they readjust their packages to give me more speed for the same price. Only three times in almost a decade have I had any problems with them: One was an outage that was caused by a natural disaster, and the other two were problems with my ONT that were fixed next day at no charge. Oh, and since it's a coop, I get a check every year as part of the profit sharing. For me, it only equates to about a free month of service, but it's still pretty nice.
So I guess the tl;dr of it all is that you don't need to get rid of free markets to have social control of things. And since the profits go to the people paying for the service, there's no incentive to extract extra value, so there's no real enshitification.
Honestly, everything would be much better if either a.) people just paid for stuff or b.) governments decided ad-tech in its present form should not be a thing, and regulated the retention of personal data as a liability, to make targeted advertising less-personalized/unprofitable.
As a system for discovering price, free markets work really well. The downsides comes from politicians not understanding/caring the limitations of free markets and what kinds of problems they're simply not intended to solve. These are the economic factors beyond price. More broadly, they're our values.
If we outsource the need for philosophy/wisdom to the free markets then there is no reason why the market will not demand child labor, 7 day work weeks, single use everything, and privatized security forces. We failed to take action earlier, and the same kind of stuff has already happened to the environment. Not to mention that gambling and security fraud are making a comeback.