121–130 of 182 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1984 has newspeak, doublethink and a protagonist who's job is falsifying the newspaper archive. But everything is state owned, so it's "us vs the system" not the cyberpunk "Walmart vs Amazon" happening here.
Makes sense, competing vs. centralized fascisms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Instead, we just go along with this fake-grassroots idea of "oh yeah Amazon is an evil empire"? Perhaps people really feel that Amazon is an evil empire regardless of this competitor's actions.
I think the point is that the danger may be more with the competitor than with Amazon. Or even worse, they're all equally terrible. Which would mean that no matter what we do, we lose privacy and freedoms. The public is being manipulated into taking actions directly contradictory to its own good either way. One road to death and despair, the other to disease and destruction. You could say, "choose wisely", but it doe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out the ingredients on your favorite soft drink. There's probably all sorts of stuff listed that has been shown to cause cancer in rats.
It’s odd how that goes. We are never going to subject as many monkeys to coke as people drinking the stuff. So we need to compromise, but rats are not a great model resulting in some false positives. However, presumably some false negatives exist that are silently killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Okay so wait, we have corporations trying to turn the public against a competitor for being "too successful," in the hopes that it will let them use the apparatus of government to hobble said competitor in any way without repercussions, and no one is upset about this? Instead, we just go along with this fake-grassroots idea of "oh yeah Amazon is an evil empire"? This doesn't process for me. I mean seriously, Amazon i…
Personally that's why I tend to like the American anti-trust standard of consumer welfare, and it bothers me that politicians are trying to dislodge it. It really does bother me when the facets of the complaints against the giants boil down to basically, they're too good at that, or they can do things that others can't. At a blunt level, isn't that the point? Isn't it what we want? When we talk about services, not pe…
Okay so wait, we have corporations trying to turn the public against a competitor for being "too successful," in the hopes that it will let them use the apparatus of government to hobble said competitor in any way without repercussions, and no one is upset about this? Instead, we just go along with this fake-grassroots idea of "oh yeah Amazon is an evil empire"? This doesn't process for me. I mean seriously, Amazon i…
I think too much efficiency in retail allows people to over-consume, and is a net negative for the environment and mental health... so i would support initiatives like this from a purely philosophical worldview.
progress isn't always progress.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that the danger may be more with the competitor than with Amazon. Or even worse, they're all equally terrible. Which would mean that no matter what we do, we lose privacy and freedoms. The public is being manipulated into taking actions directly contradictory to its own good either way. One road to death and despair, the other to disease and destruction. You could say, "choose wisely", but it doe…
I think we're still better off if we have multiple equally terrible competitors keeping each other in check than one dominant company unrestrained.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that the danger may be more with the competitor than with Amazon. Or even worse, they're all equally terrible. Which would mean that no matter what we do, we lose privacy and freedoms. The public is being manipulated into taking actions directly contradictory to its own good either way. One road to death and despair, the other to disease and destruction. You could say, "choose wisely", but it doe…
I think we're still better off if we have multiple equally terrible competitors keeping each other in check than one dominant company unrestrained.
This whole thing requires more thoughtful consideration. You're talking about "better" off, but we are "best" off without any of the terrible competitors even having the ability to play the game.
Instead of going the anti-trust route for instance, we may just want to make the entire practice of using private data for any commercial reason at all, expressly illegal. Collecting private data at all, should be expressly illegal without the consent of the individual in question. Like a HIPAA-GDPR combo move, except with prison time.
Basically pursuing solutions like that, we should get serious with all these guys.
I'm surprised more cyberpunk authors didn't anticipate that wars between corporations wouldn't be fought using hackers or "street samurai", but with teams of propagandists competing to do a better job of bullshitting the general public. Yes, I'm calling marketers and advertisers propagandists. As far as I'm concerned, marketing and advertising are nothing but private-sector psyops.
By that logic, my Tinder profile is nothing but self-sanctioned psyops manipulating people into liking me. I can use scary words to describe mundane things too.
Okay so wait, we have corporations trying to turn the public against a competitor for being "too successful," in the hopes that it will let them use the apparatus of government to hobble said competitor in any way without repercussions, and no one is upset about this? Instead, we just go along with this fake-grassroots idea of "oh yeah Amazon is an evil empire"? This doesn't process for me. I mean seriously, Amazon i…
Large companies always use the government - when they can - to kneecap their competition. It's the very rare exception of a corporation that won't stoop to that level of behavior. There's practically an unlimited number of excuses a company can come up with to rationalize proceeding (with using the government as a leveling club). It's exactly what many of Microsoft's peers did in the 1990s. They waged a large, persis…