I think it's this unconscious desire to share strong opinions about any large enough bit of news. While I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to have personable opinions about anything large or small - I've noticed more and more that people just need to satiate this hunger to share it.
And it's typically devoid of any nuance, it's shallow, quick, and distilled down into this form that begs people to react.
I see it mostly on reddit on posts that have hundreds to one or two thousand comments where 50% of the replies have almost the identical opinion. Everyone has this need to share it, even if it isn't nearly that original.
There's probably some societal change that someone significantly smarter than I can speak to, but this whole "digital town square" approach has kinda turned into a maelstrom of the most toxic opinions that people probably don't hold _that strongly_ if you asked them face-to-face in person.
Just to provide an idea: work very hard, be the best qualified for something, earn it, own the merit based on performance, don’t get a chance because of [enter your favorite DEI reason].
This is messing people’s lives up. It’s excruciating.
For whatever reason this immediately made me think of NJ's laws requiring an attendant to fill up your gas tank. Does the law apply to electric charging stations currently?
If it does, I wonder what this innovation might mean to that law.
Its not any specific rule or action at this time. It is the power to create such rules that is the problem. Right now everyone is paying lip-service to freedom of speech/content or focusing on this as a win for net neutrality over big corporations or whatever but they are missing the forest for the trees.
This is a huge power grab and most people are missing the implications. As the OP (that I replied to) pointed out such locus of power then become the focus of effort to control or influence that power. Look up "regulatory capture" on Wikipedia and see what happens in the long run under these types of regulatory environments (an executive agency implementing a broad legislative mandate/authority for some goal with virtually unlimited power to regulate). So those people who think this law is a victory to stop the "evil corporations" from controlling the internet will see that it actually plays into their hands.
More importantly, the locus of power does not just attract monied interests trying to cash-in on and influence that power for financial gain (or to minimize loss) but it attracts really bad people with bad motives that want to control people politically with a gun. (Don't forget that ultimately the power behind the FCC is the power to confiscate property, money or incarcerate at the point of a gun). This is a real threat to freedom of speech and ultimately ALL our freedoms. To concretize this, say you run a controversial blog and it pisses off a bunch of people. Now they petition the FCC to shut you down under the so-called "hate-speech" laws. There isn't a controversial subject that someone somewhere can't construe as hate speech so now the FCC becomes the de facto arbitor of allowable speech on the internet. People can claim innocent motives all they want and that this is not the meaning of the law but history and principles say otherwise.
Of course, this will all take years if not decades for the logical implications to play out -- and the anti-freedom factions will be denying the implications the whole way until its too late.
Oh wow, that's a great point. I've always tried to compromise with opponents by agreeing that increased competition should alleviate many of my fears but now that you've mentioned it - I could absolutely see a HULU.net come in, sponsored by various content creators.
> But lets not kid ourselves. This isn't anonymized data. Uber's publishing in a format that is unspecific, but they have all of the detailed data and can poke through it and infer things at their leisure, and they have no compunction around how they're doing it or why.
That's a fairly large accusation to make.
This blog post was originally published in 2012 - two years ago. Since then has anything come out that would confirm your suspicions? I haven't seen anything.
