Specifically the social media giants and advertising funded tech companies seem like the definition of emotional vampires. So do cryptocurrencies.
They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world.
Now we are being led into an orwellian hell hole.
For what tech produces it is overly rewarded economically. The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative.
What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?
I think it is already too late. The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.
1. There is no magic that will change human nature.
2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important.
3. Don't expect to live a "special" or "great" or "revolutionary" life. Aspire to something extraordinary if you see an opportunity, but ordinary things like health, moderate wealth, and family are also good enough, and will have to be good enough for most people. And there is something very special in simply living a very good ordinary life.
4. Try not to be pushed into doing things that corrode the moral goodness within you. You will not regret spurning material rewards to live in accordance with your values, but you will regret the opposite.
If the next president ran on a platform of regulating social media as the harmful and addictive product it is, people would probably be receptive. Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.
No social media company is going to regulate themselves, but if there was industry wide regulation they could probably find some peace of mind knowing they can implement more healthy practices without fear of a competitor undercutting them.
> What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?
We have to use extreme lateral thinking and build systems that support themselves and over time outcompete garbage like social media and "crypto". Neither are long-term stable anyway.
One of the problems, though, is that this needs to be worked on over time. People who see the problem need places to cooperate. Social media is clearly not the place to do that, because pretty much by definition it is ran and inhabited by people who aren't interested in solving these kind of problems. (In fact, they are interesting in the opposite.)
One of my biggest regrets right now is that I spent too much time on my normal work in tech, while spending not enough time and effort on cultivating independent communities of people who actually think about stuff like this. It was easy to find interesting and interested people to cooperate with in late 90s and early 00s. Today it's really hard. Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.
Another problem is that we have no good conceptual vocabulary or an analytical framework to precisely talk about these problems. Everyone just repeats terms like "misinformation" and "censorship". Public conversations about this spin in place, going nowhere good. I understand (at least I think I understand) what you're talking about because I've already independently reaches the same conclusions. That's not enough to conceptually advance anywhere.
(a) big picture. Read about the past centuries, millennia. In a lifetime that only lasts an hour, appreciate how much, how little is within our power. Democracy is an outlier. Individual freedom is an outlier. But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected).
(b) appreciate that the balance of bad and good that we see is not a zero-sum-game, we aren't presented a ratio. We are presented with negative and positive narratives independently. Some of the negative narratives we see today are over-rated, and many of the lesser seen positive ones remain very valid.
(c) almost nothing is a tipping point. The systems of our world are full of feedback loops, and often extreme outcomes are averted by (super-)exponential costs that ultimately change our behavior. There are dynamics that humans can't run away from, and they will (probably) not be the spontaneous destruction of earth, but rather a gradual forced change of behavior.
Reminds me of a certain manifesto from the 90s. It starts like this: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
More happily, it also reminds me of Douglas Adams:
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
Recently Facebook had a drop in daily users for the first time ever and the stock plummeted. Quaranteenies aren't signing up for it and adults are increasingly walking away from it.
It is absolutely not too late, it is never too late.
I have been free of almost all big tech for a long time and love the freedom from surveillance, censorship, and manipulation.
The list of alternatives are long to list here in a post. The challenge is in marketing to get your friends and family onto small tech too. Because these solutions are free and don't take anything from you, they have no multi billion dollar marketing budgets like big tech. You learn about them by following HN, Mastodon, and Reddit.
I am currently building out my own servers from home to host these services using Yunohost which makes it quite easy. I do like learning a lot of new things, but my motivation is to help my friends and family. This can spread one group at a time.
First: have faith. Nothing of what you mention is really new under the sky. Many people lost their wealth (and sometimes lives) in tulip mania in 17th century, yet we learned important lessons about how markets work, collective behaviour, boom and bust, financial instruments. We are bound to repeat the same mistakes again, with different things, but that is just how learning works.
Second: look into both sides. Social media, while rightly blamed for feeding the fires of division in the society, brings a lot of good into the world: extended families spread over the world keeping in touch, charity and community organizers using it for outreach, people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts. Even with all externalities and mistakes, you can reach out to so many people anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, get any peace of publicly available information without going to the library and sifting through the books and newspapers, or get almost any imaginable product shipped to you in a matter of days and sometimes same day.
As to what can be done: tools are also well-known and have been working for a long time. Education and teaching critical thinking. Creating wealth and spreading it around. Reducing inequality. Elimination of menial labour. Finding new solutions in energy and raw materials, so that some countries having those resources and ruled by oppressive leaders are not able to exercise undue influence. Cheaper energy. Inventing new materials. Creating new tools. And yes, applying regulation and better legislation, where needs be - it worked for alcohol and tobacco, workplace safety, fire safety... We are still trying to figure things out as is the case with war on drugs, but there is no reason regulation would not work for social media or "web3".
This attitude is setup as an unfair game. Instead of just living our lives alongside time, we are actively fighting against the time we have and wanting to make every second count.
We then go to these platforms to find some sort of social validation and compare ourselves to others in the process. This makes us more lonely than ever. That gives us some sense of failure in our own lives as we might not be as successful or as far along in our journey as other people who are publicly sharing theirs. It's a losing game. The house always wins.
It's not about blaming humanity or ourselves for letting it get this bad. It's about taking drastic action today to do your part. Practice digital minimalism and have digital sabbaths on the weekends. Only use technology when it's necessary for you. Find better ways to spend your time on things you're truly passionate for. It's a long journey, but it sure as hell is worth it and makes you happier.
For example, there are decentralized social medias built on gossip protocols and mesh networks, and ipv6 that are creating participatory platforms and economies.
There are also a variety of alternative fuel, permaculture and solar punk groups creating living environments that are sustainable.
Join up with them. Our physical needs are minimal, our cultural needs are to help one another.
Star Trek had a very utopian sense about technology, were tech giants have a much more distopian sense about it. For instance, in both cases, we want an AI that can understand regular language, and give us accurate results for our requests. In Star Trek, every ship has this tech, and it's all used without any thought of privacy concerns or what it means for a computer to be always listening. In fact, as far as I can think, Star Trek never really had self-awareness about what the technology the people of that time used and it's implications (like privacy, but there are likely many more ethical concerns).
This led me to a bit of a split mind on technology. Using speech recognition as the example. Yes, it would be great if I could ask a computer something and it can answer me. No, it would not be great if that information was used to manipulate me or exploit my situation (like suggesting products to buy).
I do think all advancements are a two-edged sword. Is it orwellian? I definitely agree. My phone is always listening (even when there are claims it is not, or it's in standby mode), cameras are small enough to fit in a pocket and be used any time. Outside of living in a cave, you can choose what you participate in. You don't _need_ a smart phone - your emails can be answered when you sit at a computer, your calls can go to voicemail when you're not home. You don't _need_ to be on facebook - get your photos printed, save your videos to DVDs, share them with people when you invite them over.
A popular saying is vote with your wallet, but it can also be vote with your attention, too! Don't use social media if you think it sucks. Just log out, deactivate your account, and live your life. Don't share information on the internet you don't want to be used against you, and that even includes things like purchases on amazon, your address, or anything else.
It's only too late if you're not willing to do anything about it. Don't blame big tech if at the same time, you're logging in and feeding them your attention. It's not up to you how other people waste their time, either, but you can encourage different behaviour by having real-life interactions without technology in the way.
Tech is what you make of it. It was depressing to tune back in and see what a mess the Web was with advertising destroying most sites. Support has gone to the birds. You used to be able to get hold of humans who could help you. Now, you're just fucked, there is no way out.
AI is starting to get scary, like we might actually make an AGI that destroys us. Even now you can do some fucked up shit using GANS to create fake videos. Take this for instance - we know Tom Cruise is fake, but is Paris a deepfake or real? I cannot tell, and I've worked in CG:
https://www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise/video/7060950433082182...
This shit gets better, not yearly, but monthly. Soon it'll be possible to fake anything of anybody. So AI is already taking us towards destruction. Perhaps we can turn it around and AI can be used to save us. I hope that's the end game.
Without tech though I couldn't do some awesome things, like see my loved ones on video chat half a world away. So, it's not all bad...!
Aslo check out stuff like Pinker on war https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_the_surprising_decli... and Ridley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxe73iJPbo It's easy to think things are getting worse because that's what the press reports because 'horror crash' get's more clicks than 'things not bad really' but if you look at history they are getting better in most ways. For instance as to things getting Orwellian, Orwell was writing after the holocaust, WW2 and communist famines killing tens of millions. Facebook ads are quite mild in comparison.
Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies.
The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc.
There is some truth in that, but think of the incredible value just in your smart phone. It's a: - weather forecaster - GPS - phone - news source - email client - gigantic resource library - pedometer - entertainment provider. Music, videos, etc. - and on and on.
All this in a little device owned by even people of modest means. It's a miracle!
Social media lets you stay in touch with friends and relatives. You can make connections that would be impossible just a few years ago.
Our lives are so much better. Sure, there is some trash, too. But rise above that, open your eyes to all the good. It's a wonderful time to be alive.
Apple has funneled $275 Billion to China [1], 10x more than what Intel got to start the Ohio fab. Gutting out American rust belt is one of the key problems in US and no one seems to care. It has brewed a whole political movement and we will suffer for decades.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...
Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) VR, and then Neuralink, used to suck many people into virtual worlds and keep them “engaged” to feed the profit motive of the Wall St quarterly earnings (capitalism requires platforms to extract rents after all)
But why stop at the virtual world?
Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace.
Artificial intelligence with access to this info is used to predict all kinds of inconvenient gatherings and movements taking place and nip them in the bud, leading to precrime.
Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone
Drones become cheap to manufacture, and rogue drones can drop grenades anywhere without any way to figure out who launched them
Swarming autonomous slaughterbots that bring down the cost of eliminating anyone, first by governments, then by private actors.
Guns become cheap to 3d-print while replicating biological agents become cheap to release.
Bitcoin mining rewards make it more profitable to spend kilowatt-hours on using Proof of Work to secure those same 7 transactions per second than on air conditioning and brownouts regularly occur worldwide.
Think this is far-fetched or we can somehow solve these problems? How are we doing with the last few decades of problems:
the anthroposcene
ecological collapse
plummeting biodiversity
(insects, birds, tigers)
non-biodegradeable plastic
greenhouse gas effect
At best, humanity is building a zoo for itself to be run by a benevolent AI, while the rest of the planet is turned into monocultures and factory farms.
At worst, the AI will not understand human needs and we’ll just all be frustrated all the time, or perhaps countries will just nuke the planet. Where is that nuclear clock?
I get inspired by reviewing the following things: 1. Child mortality rate over time: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality?country=
2. DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough signals a promising decade for the science of proteomics. Most directly, being able to predict protein shapes will enable us to discover drugs more rapidly.
3. The cost to produce PV modules: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
4. Advancement of geothermal as a potential energy source. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry who think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions.
5. Space exploration. The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981 and launched successfully 134 times. The payload cost to low-Earth orbit (LEO) was $65,400/kg. Today’s Falcon 9 is at $2,600/kg.
6. The improvement in adult literacy rates over time. So much more to do here, but a literate population is one that is more likely to contribute to our global productivity and success. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literacy-rate-adults?tab=...
7. Quantum computing experiments and trails are doubling the number of qubits every couple of years right now. Quantum computing will cause a re-imagining of security and cryptography of digital assets if it becomes production grade. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59320073
I am sure there are many other examples. Even though I am an enterprise software guy working at Dell, the progress we made in the areas of technology that we get to work in have some contributing impact to all of these trends.
Direction of society: If you are a small player like me, you have no control on it. The best that can do is what you can do for yourself along with similar minded people. For those that are disillusioned with people in general follow the link on my profile. ( summary: if you are a misanthrope, actively from alliances with 'level-headed' people, whatever your definition of 'level-headed' may be)
Direction of technology: No comments.
LOL. Peak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
I'm disabled and in the winter I can't even leave my apartment building. I get almost everything I need from Amazon and I honestly don't know what I would do without them. Their overall economic value may be negative but they sure have a lot of positive value for me.
And then, there is no public internet. Wikipedia is valuable, and it sustains itself, but we don't have public email or public blogs. Why? Expression and association are rights
Perhaps a component of this perception is that these technologies are exposing a rotten tree stump that was already there. You only think it's making things worse because you couldn't see it was already bad.
But only part of it. The mental destruction out there is real.
It will take a small disaster now to get back on track.
In the midst of this emerging, high-energy system-of-systems, please notice that there are other systems-of-systems also, quite vigorous. Like two painted dots on the surface of an expanding balloon, those dots are expanding away from each other, but also from all other possible dots, at once. Systems-of-systems are growing (or dying) right now, at the same time as the energetic emergence that you rightly call attention to here.
Your own stable intelligence and committed efforts, are required to steer away from these self-referential and empowered systems. Overall, I tend to agree, but differently in degree and specificity. best from California
And yet here you are sharing your thoughts with supportive strangers who will hopefully provide some meaningful responses to your concerns.
In the same time, hackernews has become a negative spiral of death. Every third post is negatively fatalist in some sort. From cancer to civilization and environmental collapse. Keep in mind, you can be fatalist in a positive way.
Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. As wallstreet people say, it is never as bad or as good as you think.
I suggest you do:
echo '0.0.0.0 news.ycombinator.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
sometimes that's a small open source tool, maybe that's remembering to help a neighbor out, or going out to a public trail and picking up trash, something positive that I can do immediately and that takes my focus off the negative stuff
there's a lot of good in the world, but the little black mirror can obscure it
I believe in this causal chain
Computers are insecure
Which many bad actors find profit in exploiting
Which makes new web sites a risk
Which makes users prefer their known "safe" spaces
Which leads to walled gardens
Which then sell the "users" for profit to advertisers
Which incentivizes dark behavior of those walled gardens
Which then attract the rentier class
Which then leverage control for more power
The Principle of Least Privilege [2] was adopted in the Unix system in a weak form. The superuser (root) account was a special privilege, which administrators and code was supposed to use as little as possible.
There were (are???) implementations of a multi-level secure systems, which saw limited application in the military, and briefly elsewhere. However, for general use, the root/user separation was widely seen as good enough.
There are now efforts to fully extend operating systems so that they can provide tools so that the users can also use the Principle of Least Privilege. I believe that eventually it will be as easy to use these as more conventional systems.
In these systems, no default permissions are given when running a program, the allowed resources, also known as capabilities, must be specified. This is similar to deciding which bank notes you are going to hand to a cashier, instead of handing over your wallet. It is up to US to demand that it be as easy for any user to do so, in a transparent way.
It is my hope, that should this model be accepted, a new causal chain will arise
Computers will be made secure
Which users will grow to trust
Which will allow experimentation
Which allows new ways of communicating
Which don't require corporate sponsorship
Which doesn't require the rentier class
Which helps innovation
Which helps society
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege
30 years ago people have libraries and encyclopedias. Now billions of people take it for granted that you can have a handhold device in your pocket that has access to virtually the entire body of human knowledge.
Sure people use that device for all sorts of crap that ranges from the inane (eg "look at how amazing I am or my life is" IG posts) to the dangerous and outright harmful (eg cyberbullying, QAnon BS) but let me clue you in: I challenge you to find a point in history where this wasn't the case.
I mean a few centuries ago we were burning witches in the US. Only decades ago we had racial segregation. We had lynchings. The 20th century saw people killing millions of other people. We dropped nuclear bombs on cities. In the 19th century (and earlier) we literally bought and sold people and ripped them from their homeland to drag them against their will to a new continent.
The fact is when it comes to social media you can completely ignore it and it won't have a negative impact on your life. In fact it's probably the opposite.
I'm genuinely curious: when were things better? And why?
Tyrannical, greedy, and well-resourced psychopaths have been using technology to lead us into an Orwellian hell-hole.
Without them, all of this tech is a fantastic opportunity to empower and connect our world.
And that will happen - they've overstepped their mark and most people who matter know this already.
I'd like to thing the hippies had a similar fallacy, where they thought they could overthrow the system with flower power (mainly psychedelic drugs).
Looking forward to the next iteration.
Nothing obstructs computing from re authenticating itself, from becoming more than a industrialist workshop. Personal computing will happen again. Open source desktops and phones are doing ok, but the bar is higher- personal computing needs to meet society's new raosed bar & be more connected, working across systems, working across people. Personal systems need modernized technical underpinnings, with coherent, respected, operationalized basis, that both newcomers can start to learn and onboard into, but which the advanced seasoned developer also finds fit to purpose, is interested in tinkering on.
Finding thr community & time to grow, to bridge humanity & technics is a slow project, a much loftier, nobler, harder, & more important quest than selling product. Technics matter in this world. Finding alignment between parties matters, is much harder. Many different pieces need to flow together, each particular & important, building up & up the stack, towards a competitive, flexible, malleable, comprehendible medium of computing. All based around standards, if at all possible, to stir diversification & groth & prevent ossification.
Personally, there's a couple projects i'd list as contendors to re-owning computing: ActivityPub, Kubernetes, Pulsar, Gitea, ForgeFed, Json-ld/rdfa/microdata. Projects like Node-Red, Tekton, Matrix/Xmpp, and Yunohost and the home-cloud folks inspire me greatly & show aspects that are important, but im not sure i believe in them as quite right enough to fully endure. There's still a huge missing hole for what front end systems work & make sense but there are at least lots of interesting social systems built on ActivityPub, matrix and xmpp.
More than the tech itself, I see there as so little joint community. So many dispirate partiuclar projects, of great promise & potential, but in their lane. Becoming more generic, more flexible, creating assemblage we can jointly believe in & practice on is key. We have to find new paths where we can go it together.
[1] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/02/cons... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317827
Second, yeah, kiss your ass goodbye, it's too late, and you should probably move into the woods and learn to make fire with sticks and hunt and gather. You're still going to be fucked when the climate goes wonky, but at least you'll be happy and more-or-less bullshit-free until then (unless you wind up needing a dentist or surgeon! Brush your teeth and don't jump around too much.)
Third, and this is general advice, try not to go by what the masses are doing. Humans are only really intelligent as individuals or small groups. Above a certain size (roughly 25) groups of humans are actually pretty dumb. If you predicate your emotions and outlook on the mass behaviour of humanity "you're gonna have a bad time."
- - - -
With the preliminaries out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks.
We do have already all the technology we need to live well on this planet even with a few billion more people. We can reduce our fossil fuel use by 100x-1000x without sacrificing quality of life. Look into applied ecology (Permaculture, Syntropic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, etc.), and passive solar design et. al. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design ),
We also already have technology for dealing with our psychological and emotional issues. Things like Nonviolent Communication ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication ) and weirder stuff like Core Transformation Process ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ ).
But you seem to be much more concerned with the effects of the Internet on people and culture.
> The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.
Pretty much. I mean, my neighbor is into NFTs.
I don't know what you and I as individuals can do about it. To me it seems like billions of people are happy to be reduced to peasants in a newfangled techno-plantation. The lure of convenience seems to overwhelm all other principles and values.
The wedge is that most of them aren't happy, so there may yet be room to get in there and pry people from their digital thralldom. I have no idea how, though. :(
- - - -
The one concrete idea I do have is something I call "A Machine for Easy Living". It's sort of like a vertically integrated real estate development company that build (ecologically harmonious) neighborhoods and rents homes at a drastically reduced rate (like 10% of market value) with the covenant that the residents use some of their free time (freed up by lowered cost of living) to "pay it forward" culturally and economically.
My hope is that folks would spend more time doing things like participating in local government or volunteering for elder care or whatever rather than vegging out on their screens.
- - - -
I think we're seeing the emergence of vast AIs that have humans as neurons. I don't mean in the future, I mean now, right in front of us. These corporations with their unprecedented insight into the daily lives of billions of people are like nothing we've ever seen before.
I wrote a comment showing far worse and more dangerous trends. But now let me address what you wrote 42 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759615
Yes, capitalism gets like this when the small thing you built becomes bigger than you. And if you take VC money and then IPO to Wall St they will force you to perpetually every extract rents from your users in the form of their attention, engagement, advertising tolerance, and your “slow AI” will push out of management anyone who doesn’t get with the program to satisfy quarterly earnings. People who bought shares at $200 will make a lot of noise and can be quite persuasive to make sure their shares don’t drop to $5.
That’s why Google dropped “don’t be evil” motto and now gets “right up to the line without crossing it”: profit motive of shareholders.
Web3 was going to fix it but (the network would be owned by the participants) but the industry got stuck using outdated technology (blockchain) because it perversely promised things built on it to become slower and more expensive over time, so buying the block reward / fee token would pay off by making it “worth more” in the future.
This is going to be fixed. We are working on exactly this microtransaction alternative: https://qbix.com/token
However, keep in mind that advertising may always be more lucrative than microtransactions, for Facebook and other capitalist “privately owned” social networks. There are many goods and services in the world that pay far more in commissions to the social network, and as long as that is the case, it would be more lucrative to get money from them than having the users pay some membership fees to access content. And besides, if you can get free content, why pay for it?
No, the way to get out of this mess is to finally realize that capitalism and the profit motive has diminishing returns the bigger an organization gets, and that transitioning to a gift economy with no profit motive and no celebrities (wikipedia, science, creative commons, peer review) is far better for humanity.
Once everyone is in VR and using neuralink, it will be even more pronounced. The problem started when your computers were miniaturized into mobile phones and had always-on internet. You’re already a “cyborg”. Now, consider … would you want your back end software to be produced and hosted by a for-profit capitalist company beholden to wall street? Or by an open source thing like Wordpress, Matrix or Qbix that you can at least control your own metaverse and not pay rents?
Most people, like a slowly cooked frog, will just choose to become the borg basically. Not as a conscious decision, but by a thousand cuts from friends who urge you to get that latest VR headset with the brain interface so you can smell their latest pot pie, which is a limited edition sponsored by Friday’s, of course. It’s like the movie “Eagle eye” where everyone is recruited to keep you on track, and everyone is peer-pressured by N people.
Unless permissionless open source platforms become compelling enough to compete and disrupt centralized for-profit platforms, as Web 1.0 disrupted and destroyed America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, Minitel, magazines, newspapers, and other gatekeepers — while VOIP / multimedia on the Internet severely undercut the telecom cartel ($3 a minute calls), cable channels, the companies using the radio spectrum etc.
We are currently living in digital feudalism. That’s what you are describing: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
He says using technology.
>Specifically the social media giants and advertising funded tech companies seem like the definition of emotional vampires. So do cryptocurrencies.
Im not sure about this emotional vampire factor.
>They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world.
Good luck fixing it though. Imagine I waved my wand and made you emperor of the world. You then instant ban and shutdown these social media entities. Their stock prices go to $0. Nobody on earth had a chance of selling. What happens? Tons of retirees just got their benefits drastically reduced. Most likely all of them are headed to the job line. Too big to fail.
>For what tech produces it is overly rewarded economically. The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative.
Hard to prove.
>What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?
Not too late, but you cant take down goliath, you have to displace it at this point.
>I think it is already too late. The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.
Out of curiousity, what is your opinion of Trump?
I think Amazon has added a ton of value to end-users. (No affiliation with Amazon.)
C'mon man don't let the narrative get to you!
Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will separate money and state, no more wars no more lopsided battles no more power asymmetry, no more printing and giving to those closest, no more printing machines in the hands of the 3 letter agencies, etc.
It will bring great progress to humanity if we adopt it.
> The internet is like an opiate
Yeah
> as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions
The people that are manipulated by Big Tech would be manipulated anyways by Big Media, sadly. But maybe it's more worrisome with Big Tech.