this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
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Similarly, if the Earth can't survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.
I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn't be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it's something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.
It isn't sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.
Actually, yes. The reason Exxon is fucking the planet right now is because of weak regulation. If we can't build a system that is resistant to the threat of earth destroying corporations, we were never going to succeed in the first place.
Your post is arguing (by analogy) that we shouldn't even bother trying. But I guess you don't need a suicide note when you can just leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged by your body.
On the contrary, I'm just saying if you build something and it gets co-opted by a corporation it probably wasnt meant to be.
It's like when people talk about politicians being bought out by corporations. If that's something that can even happen, it's the fault of a broken system that would even allow that to happen.
This is a very computer sciencey view, which is why I leapt past the intermediate logic straight to its conclusion. But I'll spell it out.
There is no rules-based system that will actually stand in the way of determined, clever, malicious actors. To put it in CS-style terms, you'll never cover all the contingencies. To put it in more realistic terms, control systems only work within certain domains of the thing being controlled; partly this is because you start getting feedback and second-order effects, and partly it's because there's a ton of stuff about the world you just don't know.
If a system is used as intended, it can work out fine. If someone is determined to break a system, they will.
This is why the world is not driven by rules-based systems, but by politics. We're capable of rich and dynamic responses to problems, even unanticipated problems. Which is to say, the only actual solution to Exxon and Meta is to fight back, not to bemoan the inadequacy of systems.
Indeed, this belief in technocracy is explicitly encouraged by malicious elites, who are aware that they can subvert a technocracy.
You fight back by fixing the system, or making a new one.
What he said is right though. Let me put it this way, politics has a system it's relied on. Ancient Greece has its own style of democracy. Current US has its own style of democracy. The EU has its own kind of system. Here's the thing to consider, the content and state of the system can change over time, but the low level of it - the rule to how the changes can happens or how things operate - rarely changes. Politics can change the rules within the system, but it doesn't typically change or revise the foundation of the system. When revision of the system foundation is so rarely done, the things taking advantage of this foundation obviously don't get solved.
When you say someone who wants to break a system will, it's actually because the base of the system doesn't change so the abuse can keep happening. Let's use US politic as an example. Gerrymandering is a problem. There's no sign of it getting fixed and continue to be a problem even now. The reason is because the current system had made it so that the decision to do so could never come to past, at least not easily. It's a deadlock. If instead the system is revised from the ground up this would be as simple as reasoning during the redesign process that the current method is broken and it isn't good at representing the people so it should not be used. Currently that's not how it's being solved, and it's like trying to fix a problem on your computer without the option to shut down or reset the device.
What he's saying is the system is broken like that and we're not solving it by the most efficient method (mainly due to it being so costly). Even so, sometimes it's just better to scrap and start anew.
That said, I don't think it applies to Fediverse at the moment. It's so new that there are so many ways it could develop and if it fails that doesn't imply the concept of Fediverse is never supposed to succeed. It may just be because the best steps to manage it wasn't taken. Going back to the political analogy, it's like having just the concept of democracy as a framework. But it hasn't been decided yet whether this democracy is going to be dominated by just two parties (like the US), or has many different parties with ranked voting (like the UK). Both are democracies but the foundations and implementations are different. And well, one works better than the other.
Things are politically stagnant because people believe that politics is about systems. Politics is about power, and politics will always be an expression of the dominant power dynamics. Governmental systems are just how power is explained to outsiders; it's a mythology that's told to disguise the real nature of power.
So the question of systems is a red herring, that's been carefully instilled. This has been true for all history: Many kings don't really rule, courtiers do. Only kings who can effectively wield power rule, and they're historically in the minority. This should also be obvious in the US: corporate power is only ever checked in the presence of enormous public action. Not public bitching, public action—general strikes being the most important example.
Or to put it really bluntly, while there's a lot of pageantry in politics, what politics actually is, is power struggles. But they sure don't want people to recognize this, which is why there's so much pageantry and partisanship.
This is also why the government is going so hard against Trump, but letting Pence, Clinton, and Biden slide. It's not because they cooperated—if you or I had security clearances and just took documents out of a SCIF and kept them at home, we'd be in jail. It's because Trump clumsily challenged existing power, namely the federal bureaucracy (which he conspiratorially calls the "deep state"), and he wasn't up to the task.
Do you apply this reasoning to everything in life?
If a house catches on fire, it's because it has weak fire suppression?