The bad pushes out the good until you’re only left with bad.
A system that tolerates bad actors like this will in time only have bad actors. It’s tolerated because it makes a large amount of money for a small number of people.
This is exactly it. When things are horrible around us, there is a strong temptation to throw ones hands up in apathy and let the rot fester. "Eh, Honey is probably selling my data but I got $5 off my new mattress, so wtv".
We need to resist that call to apathy, stop acquiescing, and start demanding better of others. That, incidentally, often starts at demanding better of ourselves.
I work for a very large company. I'm very close to throwing my hands up in apathy because the company keeps throwing the teams in our area into chaos and disarray with little regard for the humans in them.
We have no investors to answer to. We're printing money. Yet at every opportunity company leadership reveals itself as this slavering beast where the only people in positions of power have gotten there through duplicity and a lack of empathy.
The tech job market is terrible. I'm trapped in the guts of a machine that was supposed to be one of the "good ones".
I'm not sure there's anything to do for people who want to act ethically and be decent to each other if even the "good" companies show a complete lack of regard for anything but making their profits take off into the stratosphere.
I disagree that it’s down to the individuals. While individuals can throw themselves into the gears of the machine it is understandable why they do not.
I see things in terms of a sharecropping analogy, feudal lords (corrupted government) allow the scammers to harvest the crop (victims) for a share of the proceeds. We cannot fix people to the point they are un-scammable and there does not exist a democratic force strong enough to fix the government. Almost all ads I’ve ever seen are for obvious scams, especially on twitter. You’d think the richest guy in history (possibly?) could afford not to allow industrial exploitation of his users but apparently not.
You have gambling sites and binary auction scams that have a turnover that includes a significant percentage of suicides. I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not. While many of us here may be smart enough to avoid falling victim to these scams we have family members that we care about who are not so this still indirectly costs us wealth.
Absolutely! I think this was kind of what OP was driving at with the suggestion to "start demanding better of others." It doesn't work to expect they should do better from their own motivation, we need to fix the broken incentives and consequences that result in those bad decisions being attractive.
While I agree with that ideal I’m not sure how realistic it is. Trump was elected on a populist platform and quickly betrayed his base again, this time before he has even taken office. What are people to do, vote harder? It’s not like Kamala would have fixed this either. If Kamala had a better chance of winning the ‘Tech Titans’ wouldn’t have switched teams. They would have done anything the government asked for so long as the scamming ad revenue kept flowing.
If we mean ‘we tech workers’ then you’ll just be replaced, just like how I was when I quit being a researcher at FANG companies over this and other ethical concerns. The only observable outcome is that my clear conscious came with the cost that I’m far poorer than I could have been. I’m lucky as I’m still well off but not everyone can make that call and survive. These scamming behaviors are trivial to detect and especially so at the large internet company level. It exists on these platforms because the owners want them to.
The US is rife with scams and has been for a long time, and the US has had the two party system for a long time. It would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that this time 4 more years of Democrat rule would have been when the they finally decide to actually do something about it.
> I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not
Doesn't this rely on us as the individual? We get the government we allow. We, humanity, could've had anything we wanted, this is what we gave ourselves.
‘We’ are animals who have evolved to be a certain way. You could maybe at tremendous effort fix one person but you cannot fix a population. Ever try to get an alcoholic to quit drinking, a junkie to quit drugs, a gambling addict to quit gambling.
Humans have built in innate weaknesses that are easily exploited by the unscrupulous. People have been exploiting others since time immemorial, secret police keep libraries of exploits and you can see them used repeatedly and effectively throughout history. Pied-piper strategy (basket of deplorables), Operation Trust (Q-Anon).
Unfortunately the "first past the post" system used in the USA and UK are effectively a form of prisoner's dilemma. The best thing to do is for everyone to not vote for one of the two oligarchy parties, but if only a small number do that it's meaningless.
It does and yet this seems to highly simplifying things.
Consider the US scoped studies studies showing that the population doesn't get what it wants. They showed that policy follows the whims of the wealthy even in the cases where the population overwhelmingly agrees on a contrary direction. So the data says "no", control has been removed from us.
Part of the complication is that the determined action of a few actors can efficiently spoil the efforts of communities.
That's not apathy, that's not caring and, frankly, there's nothing wrong with that.
You and I value our privacy but most people don't. That's the truth. The tone of your post assumes people agree with you but, clearly, most people don't.
This. Allowing bad actors to participate in a system allows them to externalize costs, which makes them more competitive than good actors. In human relationships, this behavior is punished by excluding bad actors from social relationships (i.e. the "no assholes" rule).
That does not work for corporations, because most people who are customers of these corporations are unaware of the corporation's bad behavior, are unable to avoid the corporation's products, or are stuck with a choice between bad options.
The main solution is regulation, oversight, and legal action, but the first two of these are unlikely to be enacted in the US in the current political climate. The Biden administration made some steps towards stronger regulation (e.g. by putting Lina Khan in control of the FTC), but received little to no political benefit from it and probably harmed fundraising for the Democrats.
Legal action is often prevented by arbitration clauses or disparate funding, where it is financially untenable to restrain bad actors using legal action.
> That does not work for corporations, because most people who are customers of these corporations are unaware of the corporation's bad behavior, are unable to avoid the corporation's products, or are stuck with a choice between bad options.
I mean laws are supposed to stop the bad actors but at this point the extreme cost of legal action and the street-crime fixation of police forces mean those laws don't constrain wealthy interests unless they harm other wealthy interests.
Protects and does not bind vs bind but does not protect. Same as always.
A system that tolerates bad actors like this will in time only have bad actors. It’s tolerated because it makes a large amount of money for a small number of people.