Tantrums, rage-quitting, and playing the victim are pretty consistent with his schtick.
It’s sad, really. I used to respect the guy and still follow his work, but I think spending all of his time on conspiracies and abuses of power has maybe warped his perception of reality.
Being paranoid does not mean they are not after you.
Greenwald broke some of the biggest stories of the last 20 years. He’s seen the US government downing planes and trampling all over due process just to get hold of some of his sources. His partner was effectively detained and grilled in London for the sole crime of being his partner. He moved to a country that soon suffered a de-facto coup. I think his vision is actually less clouded than ours, to be honest.
Hypocrisy and PR spin aside, he’s not wrong. I think, on the balance, that social networks are a net negative development for humanity and should be destroyed.
Yes and no. Problem is the media which cherry-picks the one thing in a thousand good people say which can be misconstrued as sounding bad and then amplifying it to the world to profit off hate-clicks. By that standard Eric is in the same boat as the rest of us. We're all idiots no smarter than our worst moment since coming online.
I think you are absolutely right about mass social networking, where people/pages can have millions of followers and advertisers have access to extremely granular filters. This form of the internet is not good for us. It's too big, too impersonal, and too public.
I would be fine if Facebook and co. continued to exist - but the whole thing is maybe a little bit too connected. I really hope that the future of social media can focus on smaller and more intimate groups that (mostly) know each other IRL. For example I love my family's group chat, my little fitness group, etc. and all of those things happen on social media. Social media just needs to be scaled down to be a more human-friendly environment.
The internet is always hailed as empowering the people but in reality what it did was make the powerful even more powerful and give a voice to people who should not have a voice.
You certainly will always be disappointed if you have such vague notions of who "should be" and "shouldn't be". You will at some point be shocked that leopards ate your face after advocating for unleashing face eating leopards upon people.
Who shouldn't have been given a platform: Terrorists, cartels, corrupt elites and government officials. These types of people only got stronger. Not every argument on the internet needs be responded to with snarky quips.
That is true - but making the government smaller is still a proclaimed virtue of the GOP. Maybe I can clarify - it's not a tenant they actually appear to follow in any real way, but they definitely hold it near and dear and are outspoken in their criticism whenever it is broken by people not them.
Perhaps we should require a minimum % of post-consumer recycled content in new plastics going forward. I have decades of industry-sponsored research indicating that plastic recycling is cheap and effective.
Given that both organizations treat complying with legal and contractual obligations as a risk management exercise, I see no problem with their employees doing the same. It sounds like the subject of the story did the analysis, determined that the potential downsides aren't really that bad (for him/her/them), and acted accordingly.
The government, as specified in the US Constitution, requires that candidates for president must be born in the US and over 35 years old. Assuming those requirements (and any others that may be added via amendments over time) are met, THEN it's up to the people.
Wild speculation:
Customer service, support, and other direct interactions are difficult to scale. Large corporations tend to optimize direct-contact positions for cost and speed over quality. This act of endlessly “optimizing staff time” to control costs inevitably ends up with people rushing through things in order to satisfy an unforgiving productivity algorithm. Consolidation/competition displaces local businesses that solve the service problem with higher-cost service offerings, leaving everyone with worse-off except for the beneficial owners of these consolidated behemoths.
It’s sad, really. I used to respect the guy and still follow his work, but I think spending all of his time on conspiracies and abuses of power has maybe warped his perception of reality.