Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 267 posts

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#151

Post by specialist »

rememberlenny wrote: post #134
pitaj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not they are governments is a question of definition. Definitions are important, and social networks don't fit very well into it. They are fundamentally different from modern governments as they do not have a monopoly on coercion. If social media are governments, then every corporation - no, every association of people - on Earth is a government.

The key here is governance . ------------ I think if you click into the linked post, you get the analogy regarding governments and governance . Web platforms have to concern themselves with governance of their users and the respective eco-system that their users operate on. The point is less to be abstract or symbolic, and instead look at the concrete decisions they have to make. Corporations or general relationships…

Emphatic agreement.

Governance is the final frontier. By that I mean "How are grievances adjudicated?"

Any one struggling with the "platforms as government" analogy might think of MMORPGs instead.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#152

Post by danjc »

Barjak wrote: post #43

Am I alone in thinking this isn't heresy? A country or federal state is just a company with a monopoly over law in a certain geographical region. Facebook's "monopoly" is at least subject to the whim of the market, as the Delete Facebook campaign shows. Look at last week. The senate was on their high-horse, admonishing facebook for privacy infringements, totally unaware of the irony they are an appendage of the same…

hearsay

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#153

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Nav_Panel wrote: post #145
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who will be setting those limits The same ones who set the limits on the railroads and oil tycoons, after they abused their power, or on AT&T, after it abused its power, et cetera . This is why we have government.

The situations you mention involve antitrust law and unfair competition, with the intent that consumers would benefit from increased competition. Internet companies are different, and specifically Facebook is different, because its customers are advertising companies and its product is the eyeballs of its users. Ironically, the closest contemporary internet analogy to your examples is Net Neutrality... Any legislatio…

Antitrust law, specifically the Sherman Antitrust Act, does not talk about customers as much as "protecting consumers" from "abuses", broadly defined. In my discussions in New York political circles, many see a Facebook antitrust case as a paved road to a Governorship.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#154

Post by thesagan »

vkou wrote: post #143
nickpp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking an average over the world, most governments are badly functioning and they've been that way for years if not centuries. Business on the other side, tend to be punished by the markets when misbehaving and then course-correct.

Businesses get punished by markets when they operate inefficiently. They do not get punished by markets when they poison, cheat, rob, or kill people - especially when those people aren't their customers.

This is mainly true in competitive markets. Markets aren’t always competitive. We could argue we live in an oligarchy which isn’t as competitive as we are taught.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#155

Post by pluto9 »

rememberlenny wrote: post #105

Web platforms are governments. "Facebook is a government. Facebook's users are citizens, and Facebook's applications developers are the private companies that drive much of the economy. Apple. Twitter, Myspace, Craigslist, Foursquare, Tumblr and every other large network of engaged users (including some services of Google) plays a similar role. We have always tacitly acknowledged this. We talk about these networks as…

By that definition, every conceivable grouping of human beings that has any sort of leadership has a government, but that definition is so broad as to be useless. An after-work football club is governed by its rules, organizers, customs, etc, but the idea that it has a government is laughable.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#156

Post by PeterisP »

jrs95 wrote: post #49
wybiral wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes counter to the idea of a globally connected internet though. Without a degree of oppression of free speech you can't stop the flow of culture and ideas no matter how big of a wall you build.

How does respecting national sovereignty rather than letting your government be trampled over by international corporations run counter to a globally connected internet? This sort of attitude might seem like "nationalist populism" now, but it wasn't that long ago that "the left" was on the same page. I still am personally, but there seems to be a disturbing trend where anti-Trump sentiment is being leveraged to promo…

One issue is with diverging values and rules.

If national sovereignty overrides everything, one country mandates X, and another mandates not-X - then that's not compatible with a globally connected internet; since each of them will require the "other" thing to be removed from "their" internet, and that leads to segmentation, blocking and separation.

What do you do when country A requires all maps to show that some territory belongs to them, and country B requires the same?

What do you do when country A requires particular data to be stored so that they have access to it, and country B requires that the same data is stored so that country A does not have access to it?

What if country A wants people to be say X without restrictions, and country B wants everyone to be prohibited from saying X?

If you separate everything cleanly into "areas of sovereignty" then you can't really have a single, globally connected, integrated internet, as services/content can't satisfy all conflicting requirements and thus be available everywhere the same; if you do not, then the sovereignty of at least some countries will be limited. For me, the best solution would be if we could come to some agreement about some global, universal rules/principles for the internet, but that inevitably requires countries to hand over some of their sovereignty and abstain from any making requirements contrary to these rules.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#157

Post by Bartweiss »

Wurlitzer wrote: post #50
Barjak wrote: post #43

Am I alone in thinking this isn't heresy? A country or federal state is just a company with a monopoly over law in a certain geographical region. Facebook's "monopoly" is at least subject to the whim of the market, as the Delete Facebook campaign shows. Look at last week. The senate was on their high-horse, admonishing facebook for privacy infringements, totally unaware of the irony they are an appendage of the same…

I didn't vote for Zuckerberg.

And I didn't vote for the President. Or perhaps more saliently, I didn't vote for Theresa May - and her government does an endrun around the surveillance protections I get from the US government.

I'm honestly confused by the idea that democracy means the outcomes we get are inherently more acceptable. Democracy only opens the possibility of influencing what one government does to us. Which beats the hell out of autocracy, but doesn't actually mean people are consenting to what the state does to them. Even assuming you get to vote your preference, 49% of people are still having things done to them against their will.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#158

Post by pitaj »

eloff wrote: post #147
pitaj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not they are governments is a question of definition. Definitions are important, and social networks don't fit very well into it. They are fundamentally different from modern governments as they do not have a monopoly on coercion. If social media are governments, then every corporation - no, every association of people - on Earth is a government.

I think the analogy is strained. But Facebook wields absolute coercion power inside their platform. Banning posts, pages, accounts, and apps without due process or recourse. My parents run a business on Facebook and they have so many horror stories about the times Facebook has completely held their livelihood hostage. Or cut their revenue 10x with a single algorithm update.

Facebook wields absolute power over the platform, true. They do not coerce anyone by exercising that power, though.

Everyone on Facebook is on there voluntarily. People don't get to choose where they are born.

Don't get me wrong. I don't use Facebook, and I don't think anyone else should either. I would love if there were a (decentralized) replacement for it, and I think Facebook is on the way out.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#159

Post by laughingman2 »

nickpp wrote: post #121
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the point is that what is 'misbehaving' is defined by market norms. 'Misbehaving' is engaging in behavior which decreases profit but it can never help us to escape the question of profit altogether. That's what government is for - when what is good for society and what is good for profit conflict government steps in to correct. The point of markets is that they rely on only individual decisions and what may s…

A well functioning government, does, ideally, what you describe. But most governments in the world (maybe except a few western ones) are, as I was saying, incredibly disfunctional. And when governments misbehave, they kill: wars, corruption, suppression, etc. Forgive me if I’ll prefer businesses over governments every day.

Even if the power of individual vote seems very small, It can be used to instigate change. One can argue that in order to increase the power of people, one has to reduce the power of corporation lobbying etc.

Corporations are vast entities of unaccountable power when they are unregulated by a government.

Chomsky's criticism of corporations holds good, and is becoming prophetic in all accounts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYxGkFxb7f4

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#160

Post by lovich »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #123
gm-conspiracy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, we have governments watching the interest of the corporations.

> we have governments watching the interest of the corporations Supplanting institutions with popular will is populism, an ideology that has a habit of bee lining towards authoritarianism. "Corporations" are employers, pension fund holdings, tax payers and instruments of foreign influence. The "people versus corporations" narrative is absurd.

I've seen this view stated several times this week on hackernews. Ive always seen it stated with no evidence. How is it not the people vs the corporations?

Take any environmental disaster, BP in the gulf for instance. They cut costs on construction which caused a disaster and ruined the environment and livelihoods for thousands of people. They did this to put more money in their pockets. It's not like they were trying to save money that would be dispersed among the citizenry and the gamble didn't pay off. It's not like they even planned on the extra profit to have taxes taken out as we've seen every large corporation try to avoid every cent of tax possible.

If the corporations are sharing their externalities and privatizing the profits, how is it anything but the people vs corporations? Because they pay wages? It's not like they won't stop doing that the second it's possible, all Uber's plan to rely on drivers until they have autonomous cars and plan to drop all of the drivers.

If someone has hurt you before, is openly planning to hurt you again, and openly states they don't see a problem with their actions, you don't have to wait for them to hurt you again before you call it a confrontation

Post reply on HN