Remorseful Tech Insiders R US
September 19, 2020 10:19 AM   Subscribe

The Social Dilemma is a Netflix documentary-drama on "the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations." But is their solution of "humane technology" the right one? An essay on LibrarianShipwreck argues that in a world of empowered arsonists, "humane technology" seeks to give everyone a pair of asbestos socks.
posted by adrianhon (49 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite
 
This documentary is worth watching, but the linked essay articulates really well (and thoroughly) what didn't sit right with me after watching it: it's like half of the story. The other half would be people not part of and/or not completely enthralled by the tech industry, talking about how conceptually myopic all the people whom we did hear from are all being...really, they're still holding hammers, but noticed that banging everything with hammers is destructive, and are now trying to find more humane ways to bang everything with hammers? The documentary never seems to posit that the problem may in fact be the damn hammers.

The medium is always the message, and the folks in this documentary have been responsible for some really terribly effective applications of their media, but if they hadn't done it, someone else would; social media itself, as it exists today with its unavoidable, intrinsic commodification of human beings and our lives, is the problem. Like the posted essay details, this documentary is good as far as it makes an important set of problems clear, and bad because it is stuck within the conceptual boundaries of the problem itself when imagining solutions.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:07 AM on September 19, 2020 [18 favorites]


I don’t have a lot to add to this excellent review (jesus, the bicycle part! why do tech people so consistently misrepresent transportation history?) and I work for one of the problem companies. I’ll just echo that this film’s gang of remorsefuls can’t possibly be the people to implement the reforms they’re describing. In the U.S. there must be FCC and SEC oversight and maybe even a reformed Congressional Office of Technology Policy to counterbalance big tech’s free-for-all, all paid for by taxes levied on people growing wealthy from this industry.

Harris specifically is a boob. His “Google ethicist” job title was something he was able to self-grant because Google does not give enough of a shit about ethics to treat it as anything other than a joke tech job title.
posted by migurski at 11:14 AM on September 19, 2020 [12 favorites]


Also, an additional gripe: appeal to authority is writ large all over this documentary. There are actual experts all around on human culture, its history, the history of various technologies and their impacts, and so on. Just because someone is a successful expert at creating for-profit technology applications does not in any way qualify them to comment on human technological or social history. The essay's nailing that guy for his utterly dumb and ignorant comment about bicycles was spot-on and well-deserved.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:15 AM on September 19, 2020 [18 favorites]


Adding on to why tech people so consistently misrepresent transportation history: I think it’s that transportation options are shaped by government policy but individually experienced as personal choices. Most tech people have very little experience with government at any level and they can’t see the ways in which long-running government programs influence behavior. Their experience with influence comes from getting people to view ads to meet business growth goals, a legitimately new area in Silicon Valley tech.
posted by migurski at 11:23 AM on September 19, 2020 [7 favorites]


My experience was interesting -- I agree with the critiques (centering white male tech folks who created the problem vs. outside critics, women, people of color) and the moments of bad history made me shout at the screen. However -- it led to some GREAT conversations with my kids (14 and 11) for whom a lot of this was a newer discussion. So I am both grateful to the documentary and wish it had been a better one.

A related point -- this doc was really about ONE root problem we have right now, social media giants with advertising business models. It is a real problem and I think grappled with it somewhat reasonably, with the caveats above. But it also is just one of the many interwoven problems we're dealing with now. Jaron Lanier's Wikipedia analogy is helpful -- Wikipedia as it exists now does not have this problem, because it's not a for-profit advertising based business. But it ... has problems! Racism, sexism, harassment, abuse, hijacking by state actors, and more.
posted by feckless at 11:29 AM on September 19, 2020 [7 favorites]


hello, I am a third world brown woman and I am in your base manipulating the pixels of your platform.

I love the comments i've been seeing everywhere on this doc.

definitely didn't pass the PoC/WoC bar for depicting lived reality.
posted by infini at 11:46 AM on September 19, 2020 [5 favorites]


I keep repeating myself here on the blue, but back in the seventies, when personal computers appeared, they were seen as tools of liberation that would free people to become creators who would use them to make things, to express themselves, because computers could free us to have more personal time, as well as give us tools by which we could create. But computers, whether on our desks or in our pockets, have really just become more powerful TVs that we passively just watch. We don’t use them to create, we use them to consume, shopping, music listening, movie watching, etc. Technology is, in most cases, tools. But we need to ask, for whom are these tools. Now, computers in the hands of most people, are not tools for them to use to create. Instead, they are tools by which other people, organizations, use to capture information to commodify the existence of the person staring at the screen. Media, in general, exists to sell eyeballs and ears to the advertisers. The internet and computers are delivery devices for advertising. And they make it a lot easier to target, shape, and deliver the advertising. But also, they are being used to shape us, to make us better targets, and make us act in ways that better suit the politicians who get their money and power from those who have something to sell.
posted by njohnson23 at 11:47 AM on September 19, 2020 [23 favorites]


Agreed that the essay is excellent. I thought the doc was kind of a mess and expected Gavin Belson to pop up at any moment with a Tethics peptalk (the fact that the Center For Humane Technology was established after Silicon Valley [the show] skewered this exact thing is hilarious/depressing).

I'm still wondering, however, why the makers of smartphones continue to get off so easy in these critiques. The fact that a lot of alarming behaviors associated with social media exploded after 2008 is referred to but never focused on. The device in peoples' pockets and on their nightstands with all those alerts seems to be a huge part of why social media became such an absolute addiction. But in the movie we just see Steve Jobs held up once again as the saint of tech (I'll leave Woz alone here but yes I saw him in the CfHT audience).
posted by queensissy at 11:52 AM on September 19, 2020 [8 favorites]


why the makers of smartphones continue to get off so easy in these critiques

There was a sentence about mining and waste disposal that would constrain cellphone manufacturing a lot.
posted by clew at 12:12 PM on September 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


I keep repeating myself here on the blue, but back in the seventies, when personal computers appeared, they were seen as tools of liberation that would free people to become creators who would use them to make things, to express themselves, because computers could free us to have more personal time, as well as give us tools by which we could create.

This has been a horrible argument that's only served to justify the collapse of the creative economy (since if everyone is a creator, why should creators be paid for their labor?) The reality has always been that tools do not alone make creators - and yet this argument persists, as if to argue that the real problem is that not everyone has the desire to be a creator, and not about the way the tech industry continues to reject responsibility for the things they create.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:17 PM on September 19, 2020 [8 favorites]


The question posed right at the start of the documentary - "is there a problem, and what is the problem" - had me immediately shouting ADVERTISING at the screen as the gormless tech-heads looked uncomfortable while trying to cast around for a vague and obfuscatory form of words to avoid having to say the same thing.

Ever since the first spam was sent over email, advertising has been steadily ruining the Internet just as it had already ruined print journalism and television and everything else it touches.

Vance Packard nailed it in 1957 and there's really very little more to add.
posted by flabdablet at 12:24 PM on September 19, 2020 [29 favorites]


Nope, and the 'depth boys' are still at it in chicago.
posted by infini at 12:37 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


I haven’t watched the documentary, but found the critique to be a good commentary on remorse from the builders of social media tech. I had no idea the show included a parallel fictional narrative, sounds like that would play like a parody.

On a related topic, Cory Doctorow wrote this lengthy counter point to Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism thesis: https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

Curious if anyone had thoughts on the perspective that weakened anti-monopoly policies are the root of the problem. It was not how I thought about this before reading Cory’s argument.
posted by stumbling at 12:50 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


Curious if anyone had thoughts on the perspective that weakened anti-monopoly policies are the root of the problem.

My thought, which I expressed in the thread we had on that essay/book, is that weakened anti-monopoly policies are not the "root" of the problem, as though their weakening was just some happenstance and they could be put back into place, but the entire context of the system in which weakened anti-monopoly policies were possible. We're just not going to pass strong anti-monopoly policies in the governmental context that we have. It strikes me as a little disingenuous or stupid, depending on intent, to propose a "solution" that simply won't take root in the soil that exists, now. Like telling someone "the problem is your vitamin D deficiency" while ignoring the perpetual storm clouds preventing them from getting any sunlight.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 1:31 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


METAFILTER: now trying to find more humane ways to bang everything with hammers
posted by philip-random at 1:33 PM on September 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


METAFILTER: now trying to find more humane ways to bang everything
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:44 PM on September 19, 2020 [10 favorites]


What about making it more difficult to profit from spreading hate speech or disinformation? Like if there is a fine every time youtube suggests a video by a nazi, or facebook runs a political add that's full of lies. And if that fine was compounded by the number of people that have viewed it, it's no longer going to be profitable for them to run or push that content. Right now they don't care if the information being spread is harmful, because they profit from whatever.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:51 PM on September 19, 2020 [3 favorites]


Near the film’s end, while the credits play, as Jaron Lanier speaks of Silicon Valley he notes “I don’t hate them. I don’t wanna do any harm to Google or Facebook. I just want to reform them so they don’t destroy the world. You know?” And these comments capture the core ideology of The Social Dilemma, that Google and Facebook can be reformed, and that the people who can reform them are the people who built them.

Lanier works for Microsoft, and while I have no special knowledge of what he’s up to there I do know that Microsoft has its own social network (LinkedIn). Their stated goal is essentially to become the Human Resources department for the entire world, basically turning employment into a Facebook like experience where your proficiency at various tasks or with different software is constantly measured and gigs are distributed to whoever has the most ‘likes’ associated with the skill set required. Lanier’s specialization in virtual/augmented reality, and Microsoft’s efforts in that area, are in that context perfect tools for surveillance and communication in a widely dispersed and fluid workforce.

There are a few intersections of power and intelligence/focus that, when I’ve learned about them, have emotionally impacted me to the extent that I remember where I was, the quality of light and air, when I first heard. Trump hiring Barr, for example. Microsoft hiring Lanier was one of those moments as well. He might not destroy the world, but I have a hard time believing that he is on the side of people who value privacy or equality especially when he singles out Facebook and Google without talking about his own work or employer. I haven’t watched the documentary though, maybe that comes up.
posted by soy bean at 2:40 PM on September 19, 2020 [6 favorites]


Almost everyone I know who is in the trenches in trying to fix the problems of the Internet (including people I disagree with) dislike this documentary, including those who agree with its thesis.

And I would add that this is nothing like a substantive critique, because many of them simply couldn't get through it. As somebody I know said "it's just like spending an hour with the most annoying people you've ever had to work with at a tech company."

That's often the case with documentaries -- most of the ones that touch on my work I can't bear to watch, because of the inevitable oversimplifications and exaggerations of people's real lives.
posted by ntk at 3:10 PM on September 19, 2020 [8 favorites]


My thought, which I expressed in the thread we had on that essay/book[..]

Ohh, I don’t remember seeing anything about this, and search didn’t show anything either :/ I might be failing at the right keywords.

I agree in general with your estimation, Steely-eyed Missile Man. Cory’s solutions in the book are about coalition building between anti-monopolistic partisans across industries, and less about regulating tech, but it all seems untenable in the political climate we are in.
posted by stumbling at 3:19 PM on September 19, 2020


Funny how so many of these rich white guys became remorseful after they cashed out options at two or more start-ups.
posted by COD at 5:11 PM on September 19, 2020 [15 favorites]


What about making it more difficult to profit from spreading hate speech or disinformation? Like if there is a fine every time youtube suggests a video by a nazi, or facebook runs a political add that's full of lies. And if that fine was compounded by the number of people that have viewed it, it's no longer going to be profitable for them to run or push that content. Right now they don't care if the information being spread is harmful, because they profit from whatever.

Who decides the parameters of hate speech and disinformation, and who levies the fines? Remember, the next fascist elected into power isn't going to be as stupid as the current one, getting to make those decisions.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:30 PM on September 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


Ohh, I don’t remember seeing anything about this, and search didn’t show anything either :/ I might be failing at the right keywords.

Here's the thread.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 5:38 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


We don’t use them to create

a.) lots of people do, even in the most traditional sense of artistic creation

b.) lots of people do if you expand the definition to include Instagram, the vloggier side of YouTube (obviously much of YouTube actually fits category (a)) or, hell, people writing jokes for an audience on Twitter.

I mean, it’s hard for me to see the idea of the Internet as a venue for self-expression as a failure without a lot of goalpost-moving. The distorting effects of the big platforms, who profits and how, the incentives created by the lifestyle-branding type stuff... that’s where you start to run into problems.
posted by atoxyl at 7:47 PM on September 19, 2020 [13 favorites]


Who decides the parameters of hate speech and disinformation, and who levies the fines? Remember, the next fascist elected into power isn't going to be as stupid as the current one, getting to make those decisions.

On one hand, indeed, the Right is already trying to bully its way into explicit protection on social media. On the other hand it’s hard to buy into arguments about not breaking fragile norms and pluralistic principles these days when nobody holds to any principles anyway.
posted by atoxyl at 7:52 PM on September 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


The author of the review makes some fine points. I only wish they could have done it with half the number of words.
posted by storybored at 8:58 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


I said something to the effect of "that can't be right" as I was watching when Tristan Harris went on about how "no one got upset when bicycles showed up", so I could do with many more paragraphs about how confidently wrong he was about that.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 11:30 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


these days when nobody holds to any principles anyway

PSA: it's really really important not to allow the Right's Gish Gallop of pure unprincipled bastardry to overwhelm us to the point where we start honestly believing that principle isn't even a thing any more. If it does, then that works and they win.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled wailing and lamentation.
posted by flabdablet at 12:07 AM on September 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


I felt this doc bordered infotainment, being a somewhat shallow look into the problems caused by Facebook, specifically. It definitely let those who profited greatly from it do a nice PR dodge on their responsibilities.

The use of "extremist centrism" was particularly odious, especially when social media networks profit from being used by extremist right-wing elements and autocratic governments to manipulate and misinform the public, which does and has done real damage to democratic institutions and civil rights. Money changes hands and people are murdered — those are real consequences.

And while I'm sure he's a nice person in real life, I was left having no real understanding what Tristan Harris was accomplishing at any functional level to stop this. Feel-good TED talks will not save us, but having a serious, adult conversation about enforcing regulations like antitrust laws and Section 230 of communications laws might save us from the worst to come.

Frontline did a much better and deeper dive in The Facebook Dilemma. I strongly recommend it to people who are interested in the challenges posed by Zuckerberg, whose business model manipulates and destroys democracies around the world.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:51 AM on September 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


I mean, it’s hard for me to see the idea of the Internet as a venue for self-expression as a failure without a lot of goalpost-moving. The distorting effects of the big platforms, who profits and how, the incentives created by the lifestyle-branding type stuff... that’s where you start to run into problems.

Came here to basically say this. Computers as creative tools have been an overwhelming success. Sure, the utopians who thought that everyone would suddenly become an Artist if given a computer were dead wrong (just like today's more common variant, the "everyone should learn to code" guy) but the increase in the accessibility of graphic design tools, video editing, audio recording, production, editing, etc, etc is incredible compared to just a few decades ago. And there are loads of projects that have happened that would never have been possible for the people involved if not for computers.

To me the looming threat to all this is the professionalisation of it all. Gone are the websites where happy amateurs put their mp3s up for free - it's on iTunes or BandCamp now, and there are limits on how easily you can give stuff away, so most of it is sold, which the platforms heavily encourage you to do. If you don't get a big audience, increasingly people see any creative endeavour as unsuccessful. You could've made the best ever video on whatever, but if you didn't get that silver YouTube plaque... So every video bore ends with an exhortation to like, share, subscribe, and increasingly everyone shoots for the same sort of in-vogue anodyne production styling (or the in-vogue, hyper annoying style, which anyone under 12 would likely view as the former). Etc, etc.

But the tools are great, the tools aren't the problem. The notion that everyone should be a creator is wrong, and worse is the notion that every creator should be professional. I understand the whole argument about paying people for their work, but the space to just be an enthusiastic amateur, engaging in whatever for the love of it? That seems to be shrinking, as everyone increasingly looks down their nose at it and demands professionalism. Even from their fucking meme makers, who they also expect to be able to pay on patreon.

I hate capitalism, and I hate its totalising influence on people's attitudes to creative fields in particular.
posted by Dysk at 1:57 AM on September 20, 2020 [15 favorites]


The "extreme centre" thing didn't sit well with me either, until I reflected that it was perhaps a deliberate attempt by the filmmaker to avoid triggering defensive responses in maybe half the film's potential audience.

Right-wing nutjobs are already operating at off-the-scale paranoia levels thanks to their constant Fox consumption; if something purporting to be a documentary were to hand out explicit criticism of right-wing extremism they would immediately dismiss it as "fake news" and get essentially no value from it at all.

I think we're all better served if some right-wing nutjobs are actually somewhat motivated to pull back from social media as a result of watching this thing.
posted by flabdablet at 2:52 AM on September 20, 2020 [3 favorites]


I understand the whole argument about paying people for their work

If you (you in the general sense, not you specifically) want artists to be paid more for their output you should work towards a flatter wealth distribution, universal health care, affordable housing and free higher education etc., rather than badgering individual consumers to pay artists more from the disposable income they don't have.

Computers and social media and the 'cult of the amateur' are convenient scapegoats to avoid the fundamental problem that the entire economy has been concentrating wealth upwards for decades-- artists being underpaid isn't some unique predicament to the creative class but instead the baseline condition of the modern economy.
posted by Pyry at 4:25 AM on September 20, 2020 [16 favorites]


Computers and social media and the 'cult of the amateur' are convenient scapegoats to avoid the fundamental problem that the entire economy has been concentrating wealth upwards for decades-- artists being underpaid isn't some unique predicament to the creative class but instead the baseline condition of the modern economy.

We can point out that the economy has been concentrating wealth upwards and note that creative labor has been uniquely delegitimized in our society. The problem isn't just that artists are underpaid, but that artists aren't allowed to treat their creative labor as labor - that's the whole point of the cult of the amateur.

In short, just because artists are getting screwed in the same way the rest of us are doesn't mean that they aren't also getting screwed in ways particular to them.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:58 AM on September 20, 2020 [6 favorites]


>Funny how so many of these rich white guys became remorseful after they cashed out options at two or more start-ups.

Definitely, it was person after person using words to say 'oops, I really shouldn't have done all that,' while saying with everything else about their persons, 'but I kept all the money anyway.' It really puts the lie to their remorsefulness.

The author of the review makes some fine points. I only wish they could have done it with half the number of words.
posted by storybored at 9:58 PM on September 19 [+] [!]


Couldn't resist: eponysterical.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:40 AM on September 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


I feel like something inside me broke the night RBG passed away. I deleted Facebook that night. I could just see the next 2-4 months of partisan bickering, rage scrolling, and, ultimately, defeat by the Dems. I’m done with all of it. Social media, Democrats, democracy, the US.

The greatest lie ever told is that voting makes a difference.

In the immortal words of Jim Morrison, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen, man, but I wanna have my kicks before the shithouse goes up in flames”.
posted by karst at 8:23 AM on September 20, 2020


why tech people so consistently misrepresent transportation history

Because prominent among their group are the most visible example of a subset of privileged people who only bother to learn enough on any given topic to make a pitch, but because they are capitalism's golden children, conclude that their inferences about everything else are as good or better than so-called "experts" doing research or even just reading history?

I know people outside tech who do this, too, and many of them are otherwise quite intelligent. They are almost always men.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:41 AM on September 20, 2020 [3 favorites]






The greatest lie ever told is that voting makes a difference.

In the immortal words of Jim Morrison, “I don’t know what’s gonna happen, man, but I wanna have my kicks before the shithouse goes up in flames”.


If it made no difference, the fascists wouldn't be trying to break entire federal agencies and working overtime in general to prevent millions from doing it. This sort of defeatism is exactly what they want folks feeling. Nothing's over.
posted by EatTheWeek at 9:59 AM on September 20, 2020 [28 favorites]


The greatest lie ever told is that voting makes a difference.

In a democracy, the greatest lie ever told is that it makes none.

I wouldn't mind you believing that voting makes no difference - you do you, live and let live and so forth, and in some electorates in some representative democracies in some election seasons it might even be a statement of fact; but your expression of that belief, presented context-free as if it were some kind of universal principle, operates as a vote for making it self-fulfilling and giving self-serving spivs and thugs and grifters your consent to seize control of the works.

I would prefer the democratic institutions where I live to remain viable if it's all the same to you, so I'd be grateful to you for keeping a lid on that opinion in future.
posted by flabdablet at 4:46 AM on September 21, 2020 [3 favorites]


We are all truly in our own worlds. I grasp completely why a tech insider would find this film simplistic and annoying; we haven't talked about it much at all, but the dramatization aspect of the film (the family) was a bit much for me in particular. But I don't think this film is intended for tech insiders. It's intended for people to whom Facebook IS the internet, and if you don't know how many people that is, if you don't know many or any of those people at all, you probably don't need to see this film.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:53 AM on September 21, 2020 [5 favorites]


I would prefer the democratic institutions where I live to remain viable if it's all the same to you, so I'd be grateful to you for keeping a lid on that opinion in future.

On one hand the “assume we are all U.S. residents” nature of MeFi is a real issue, much discussed. On the other hand you are responding a person who is complaining about living in a country where the electoral system is specifically designed to make a lot of people’s votes not count, telling them to keep quiet lest their negativity infect people where you live? It’s one thing to say gently “hey, you know, this defeatism isn’t really helping anybody anywhere” but when I think about the lecturing tone of your comment in context of the situations we’re actually dealing with in the U.S. it definitely rubs me the wrong way.
posted by atoxyl at 2:23 PM on September 21, 2020


I watched parts of it here and there, and yeah I think it would do a good job at explaining this kind of stuff to people who are immersed in social media but not very aware of how exactly it all works; I'm thinking of both my younger teenage relatives, and also my older relatives who (since they retired) do nothing but sit around watching videos on Facebook or WhatsApp. Adam Ruins Everything did the same though, in just 2 minutes.

I had the impression, though, that they did kind of allude to what the root problem was, right at the end? There was this part where they kept talking about how the problem was fundamentally the business model. It felt to me like they were trying to say it was advertising, and more generally, capitalism (especially the part about how trees are worth more money dead than alive), but didn't dare to just come out and say so.
posted by destrius at 8:05 PM on September 21, 2020


telling them to keep quiet lest their negativity infect people where you live

If you honestly believe that people who live in what are generally still regarded as democracies can improve their own circumstances or those of their compatriots by failing to exercise even such pitiful amounts of civic power as their badly flawed electoral systems do extend to them and discouraging others from doing so as well, I can only recommend that you spend a little longer thinking that through.

when I think about the lecturing tone of your comment in context of the situations we’re actually dealing with in the U.S. it definitely rubs me the wrong way

It's not all about you.
posted by flabdablet at 10:52 PM on September 21, 2020 [1 favorite]


I am surprised that nobody in this MeFi thread has commented on some of the aesthetic choices the filmmaker made:
  • The whole story of the fake family affected by Social Media - Why in the hell have a fake fiction film in the middle of a non-fiction documentary? I guess to have more understandable examples of what the talking heads were saying?
  • Mixing footage of actual protests with the enacted protests of the fiction film within film without clearly distinguishing them - Ugh!
  • Taking liberties with mixing Pizzagate/QAnon/Anti-5G/Anti-Vax style protests with less conspiratorial protests such as the Yellow Vest (gilet jaune) ones in France.
posted by thaths at 8:06 AM on September 23, 2020


Most tech people have very little experience with government at any level and they can’t see the ways in which long-running government programs influence behavior.

It's more than that - the tech community actively sees government as the enemy, thanks to anti-government propaganda that they have swallowed wholesale.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:30 PM on September 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


In my experience, perceiving governments that way is a very very marked difference between the US tech community and many others.
posted by flabdablet at 12:08 AM on September 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


In my experience, perceiving governments that way is a very very marked difference between the US tech community and many others.

There's a reason for that.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:19 AM on September 26, 2020


Obviously, yes. Things have been going backwards at a steady pace since Thatcher and Reagan drank the Friedman kool-aid, but seemingly-wilful blindness to private-sector tyranny has been part of US culture for much longer than that.

It's a shame the presenter of the linked video treats his material so flippantly; his presentation style makes him unlikely to be given more than two minutes by the very people who might actually benefit from being introduced to it.
posted by flabdablet at 7:50 AM on September 26, 2020


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