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Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#401

Post by MangoToupe »

klik99 wrote: post #20

> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these co…

Well, yes. Encouraging people to avoid Marxism and all the successive schools of thought has done irreparable damage to this country (and likely the entire west). And I'm not even dogmatic about this: you can read Schumpeter, the father of VC, to reach the same conclusion. Private investment will eat the world and our childrens' lives, even at the cost of self-preservation.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#402

Post by MangoToupe »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #60
klik99 wrote: post #20

> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these co…

I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product. When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse. That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit plan." I feel that the very existence of an exit plan, dooms the user. N…

> I would love to see the tech industry return to concentrating on truly delivering good to the end-user. I

How do you force an industry to ignore profit incentive? Seems a little pollyannish to hope for.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#403

Post by theturtle32 »

energy123 wrote: post #271
citizenpaul wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its bigger. Morality and social contract have eroded and continue to erode. Look at Mozila for the most insidious example. Take a privacy focused product. Rope in a bunch of suckers. Then literally delete the privacy focus from your mission statment and start the "slaughter" Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore. The Sodom and Gomor…

Another reason is optimization for profit, combined with competition making it a survival necessity to do this. Early in a nascent industry, you focus on the core product. You bring scale and scope economies. You make the supply chain more efficient. You improve the logistics. More abundant basic food stuffs for everyone, and more profits for agriculture shareholders. A true win-win. Later on when the industry mature…

This is what always frustrates me: why do companies need to bother with "pathological late stage optimisations" at all, if not for perverse incentives in the fundamental economic and political structure of how companies operate? Why is reaching a growth plateau perceived as stagnation instead of success? Why must a company feel pressured to grow forever, without bound? What's wrong with building a business to sustainability and equilibrium? Why does this almost never happen? Why do we instead see enshittification literally EVERYWHERE?

Re: Engineered Addictions

#404

Post by MangoToupe »

duped wrote: post #82
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders. We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.

The idea that executives have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a trope from business ethics class, not law. I say this because you used the phrase "fiduciary duty" which does not exist in this context.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

This is not statute, but it remains legally binding in Delaware so long as the courts uphold it.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#405

Post by theturtle32 »

baxtr wrote: post #170
klik99 wrote: post #20

> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these co…

Yes, and there is a huge problem connected to that: If you don’t play this game you’ll lose. Look at Europe for example, they haven’t played the VC game properly and thus have no really significant tech player compared to the US / China. So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those that play it. I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.

> I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.

Gross.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#406

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

wonderwonder wrote: post #390
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is capitalist mythology. You'll need to account for "best" here because millions of people under the thumb of large-scale genocide, such as the policy decisions to implement poverty (which capitalism requires), likely have something to say about what you think is "best".

Can you present me with an alternative that was implemented, ran for a significant period of time and resulted in a better quality of life for those under it? Also poverty is not genocide, if you are going to present an argument please make it factual. You insult victims of actual genocide and minimize what they have endured with this comparison. I didn’t say perfect, i said best.

I'm going by how people in the global majority, victims of imposed poverty by empires through debt slavery, who also experience OTHER forms of genocide & recognize poverty for the genocide it is.

Check out the quality of life of the Aka, Baka, and Mbuti tribes. They're genetically and culturally linked to a mother tribe 150k years ago.

So a culture has kept these people going for 150k years. Capitalism has no such capability.

Collaboration, spontaneous improvisation, counterdominant play/decision making/protection, egalitarian, matrifocality, immediate return. Those are values that flourish in an infinite game theoretically and in real life. We just have been taught so many backwards ideas these ideas seem foreign & barely recognizable.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#407

Post by jrowen »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #311
Nifty3929 wrote: post #234

I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage. Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse…

I think you are correct, the root problem is that the targeted advertisement model is far more profitable than any paid model, thus outcompeting every sustainable alternative. I personally think the solution is simple, yet fairly draconian and therefore hard to implement due to the inevitable political backlash: ban all targeted advertising. You can still run ads on digital platforms, but the outcome of the heuristic…

This is completely wild to me. I honestly do most of my clothes shopping through Instagram/Facebook ads. I enjoy that targeted advertising shows me new products and companies that I'm interested in, often very niche stuff that I don't come across otherwise. I would so much rather see that than ads for life insurance, penis pills, ambulance chasers, or whatever other bullcrap goes to the lowest common denominator. The ads that get read on podcasts are a great example of this.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#408

Post by trinsic2 »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #269
trinsic2 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of sounds like what is happening now in the west under our current financial/economic system, albeit slowly by manufacturing crisis's and health problems to whittle down the population. >To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population It sounds like you are conflating "common good" with authoritarianism. Common good happens at the grass roots lev…

> when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in. You may be interested in this essay from the feminist movement in the 60s: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm . It describes how the lack of structure or process forces the group to be run primarily by social dynamics like friendship, charm and influence. There are lots o…

Yeah I can see some truth in this. Structure and processes help us deal with this problem. And my experience has been that structures and process get corrupted, kind of like what has happens in or political systems over the years.

IMHO, it seems like it easier to deal with ego when the groups are smaller. When they get too large, we tend to use bureaucracies to manage decision making logistics. Bureaucracies make it easier for people that want power over others to hide.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#409

Post by sapphire42 »

jrowen wrote: post #407
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are correct, the root problem is that the targeted advertisement model is far more profitable than any paid model, thus outcompeting every sustainable alternative. I personally think the solution is simple, yet fairly draconian and therefore hard to implement due to the inevitable political backlash: ban all targeted advertising. You can still run ads on digital platforms, but the outcome of the heuristic…

This is completely wild to me. I honestly do most of my clothes shopping through Instagram/Facebook ads. I enjoy that targeted advertising shows me new products and companies that I'm interested in, often very niche stuff that I don't come across otherwise. I would so much rather see that than ads for life insurance, penis pills, ambulance chasers, or whatever other bullcrap goes to the lowest common denominator. The…

Worshipping the elite won't make you become one of them...

Re: Engineered Addictions

#410

Post by wonderwonder »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #406
wonderwonder wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you present me with an alternative that was implemented, ran for a significant period of time and resulted in a better quality of life for those under it? Also poverty is not genocide, if you are going to present an argument please make it factual. You insult victims of actual genocide and minimize what they have endured with this comparison. I didn’t say perfect, i said best.

I'm going by how people in the global majority, victims of imposed poverty by empires through debt slavery, who also experience OTHER forms of genocide & recognize poverty for the genocide it is. Check out the quality of life of the Aka, Baka, and Mbuti tribes. They're genetically and culturally linked to a mother tribe 150k years ago. So a culture has kept these people going for 150k years. Capitalism has no such ca…

Friend you are comparing civilizations that support hundreds of millions of people to small tribes of pygmies that total maybe 30k people and survive on hunting and gathering. Additionally they only exist in little groups of 50 to a few hundred individuals. How do you see billions of people surviving as hunter gatherers? Or do you forsee the need to cull 95% of humanity? This is not a realistic comparison friend and you know that. The only system that can keep hundreds of millions or billions of people fed and housed is capitalism.
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