211–220 of 350 posts
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Perhaps, in the financial sense. But that's very different to the people who are typically refereed to as "the elites". That typically includes - for example - journalists - who aren't well paid at all.
Journalists aren't the elite. They're the PR people working for the elite.
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Capitalism is the paper clip maximizer, non-metaphorically. Science fiction is pretty much always just about things that already happened. “What if we maximized a non-human value?” is just a subconsciously repressed way of asking “Did anyone notice we’ve been maximizing non-human values for a couple hundred years?”
It happens in capitalism, and it happens in socialism, because it happens everywhere. It is like saying "entropy increases in capitalism"; technically true, but misleading. Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law happen regardless of political regime or economical system. In different situations they take different forms: in capitalism, companies try to maximize (short-term) (perceived) shareholder…
There's N.Korea, but that's not controlled by a communist party. It's notionally controlled by people who call themselves Communist, but they don't appear to do anything ideologically communist.
World politics isn't my strong point, where did you have in mind?
I note that your structure was "in capitalism, {capitalist ideological outcome, those with capital own the means of production and leech off the value of others labour}; in socialism, {activity directly opposed to socialist ideology}".
I'd say 99%, at least, of companies are run under capitalist ideology; to accrue wealth for the owners. So why blame socialism for the upshot of capitalist activity.
Rather than encourage better behaviours of those targeted by the mob, it would be better to encourage better behaviours of the mob itself.
Forgiveness is absent in every social media or comment section and yet it's one of the crucial ways we get along with people. Having others visibly but perhaps silently forgive another would allow social proof that its okay to forgive this perceived offender. Forgiveness also allows a person to signal a change in views.
Where before they would only be able to signal disapproval, now they can still pile on and be toxic but then later signal forgiveness. Not being able to correct and reflect upon your own potentially negative actions would be one of the aims. By forgiving others you can forgive yourself of past negativity.
Forgiveness might say "I recognise you did something wrong. I do not expect public repentance, but I forgive you and go about my life feeling better".
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Like altruism, ethical behaviour is ultimately an expression of enlightened self-interest. People know this on an individual scale, and it's just as true on a corporate scale. When a company acts unethically, it is almost always paying a high price later for a small immediate win. We see this kind of behaviour a lot in companies that have been taken over by short-term MBA-style management, who temporarily boost quart…
> Like altruism, ethical behaviour is ultimately an expression of enlightened self-interest. I somewhat disagree on a generalized form of "altruism is in the individual's interest" (as in "always"), but for ethical behavior, this essentially means that their is no ethical behavior for companies, only a mirroring of the perceived values of customers. You need very different actions to not tarnish your reputation when…
The principle "do anything of any moral values that brings me value from others' labour" is still a position wrt ethics, though one can't really call it "ethical" without confusion.
Complete moral plasticity according to what "sells" seems to define our age quite well.
I'm afraid social media and their AI-powered "optimization for engagement" has exposed something deep and visceral in the human nature. It will probably take years to finally understand what the massive social technology-driven experiment named "social media" actually is.
This experiment has made a few people very rich, and millions of people unhappy and insulted.
Forgiveness. Rather than encourage better behaviours of those targeted by the mob, it would be better to encourage better behaviours of the mob itself. Forgiveness is absent in every social media or comment section and yet it's one of the crucial ways we get along with people. Having others visibly but perhaps silently forgive another would allow social proof that its okay to forgive this perceived offender. Forgiven…
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> No well known advertiser wants their brand associated with something unpopular or toxic. That's pre-historic thinking. No reasonable long-term user of Social Media would think that a Frozen ad showing next to some BLM/white supremacist content means that Disney endorses violence/racism. It just means that you've liked Frozen (or similar things) before. The dinosaurs will die out. They'll be replaced by social-media…
That may be true at some point in the future, but I believe we're quite far away from it. Most users on the internet are not savvy at all, and I don't see that changing. I had expected the younger generations to be "digital natives", but they're not. They know their apps and services, but it's not a generalized understanding to how things work or what's common. Imho the fact that adblocker-usage isn't approaching 100…
I imagine TV before I was born was a little more like this since you could't just buy generic ad space - you needed to deal with the producers of a show specifically to get into their ad slots - but for TV when I was growing up, ads were ads. They'd target your age group (ads for kids toys during breakfast cartoons), but it just never occurred to me that anyone would think it was an endorsement of anything.
This is such a confusing concept to me. Do people really think like that? I know they do now, because it's a self-reinforcing concept. Yelling loudly that ads are an endorsement of content makes it true - since if you're an advertiser and you know that attitude is out there, and you still run an ad, that's now a conscious decision and everybody knows it. But it seems like this came about artificially, via activism, rather than people naturally making the link that ads imply endorsement.
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That may be true at some point in the future, but I believe we're quite far away from it. Most users on the internet are not savvy at all, and I don't see that changing. I had expected the younger generations to be "digital natives", but they're not. They know their apps and services, but it's not a generalized understanding to how things work or what's common. Imho the fact that adblocker-usage isn't approaching 100…
This is so weird to me. When I saw an ad for Toyota whilst watching Unsolved Mysteries in the nineties, I didn't think for a second that Toyota thought aliens were real or whatever. There has always been a complete disconnect between ads and content for me. In fact only recently has that shifted with e.g. podcasts and YouTube channels having sponsors that are explicitly worked into the content and are topical because…
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I don't think twitter is not allowing de-escalation as much as they haven't figured out how to do it. The product itself hasn't changed much in a long time, and there are likely many internal reasons for that that have little to do with revenue. Meanwhile the FB misleading articles example is a much more nuanced problem that has less to do with engagement than simply being a political hot potato and a really challeng…
I find twitter to be friendly and helpful. It depends on who you follow what experiences you get. You can have real or filtered experiences. Twitter is going in the real. The problem is twitter brings in so many people to the discussion tribes form. I would elimate tribes by removing identity. When you reply it is no longer in your name connected to your profile, the identity is a secret. This allows users to go back…
People Be Having Just amazing creativity when it comes to working around imposed restrictions.