There's a ton of hype against social media. I very strongly pegged this as Yet Another Diatribe Against Social Media. As more anger from the malcontents.
Because what scares me the most is that broadly we seem sort of complicit in these monopolies. We seem to be staying on networks we know are mind of shit. Nothing really holds us here... except the network externality, that this is where everyone already is.
And that alone bespeaks a real & significant cause worth asking for change over. I have strong doubts about government regulation of social media systems (I much prefer bluesky's layers of moderation ideas). But the network lock in seems direly bad for all, seems to lock us into a bad system.
Kanter's write-up talks about the critical importance of competition. And yes, that does seem key to me too. Maybe I might take a note from Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee, a guest post by Kieran McCarthy. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... . The idea is that many services including a number of the now dominant ones rose to power by adversarial interoperability, by interfacing with other sites. But now the laws have been rewritten to protect & defend against interoperation. The new laws revoked the ideas of Carterphone vs AT&T, give the right to the neo AT&T's to deny anyone else access to the network except via approved tools. We can't use new clients, we can't connect to other systems, we can't detect bot behaviors happening around us: we are at the mercy of whatever software systems are granted us.
Watching Twitter shut down & remind capability after capability used to monitor, understand, make sense of the e-world around us has been a particularly demented crazy, a rapid fast jackbooted march towards the fascist network control system, from whomever happens to be trying the hardest to manipulate & soe disinformation. Kanter's words here seem so much more believable & scary in the wake of this new dark age, of this whole network doing from exposed & informed to dark & murky. And we still haven't found other places to go, there's still just a black dark maw of the role where Twitter used to serve. But as Kanter says, no one really can leave, not without starting naked and new at least, and that makes competition vulgarly impossible. What we have just rots, manipulated ever more by the vile, now under the platforms ever deeper provided cloaks of night (& sky high cost of doing any interesting analytics of ones own).
There's a ton of hype against social media. I very strongly pegged this as Yet Another Diatribe Against Social Media. As more anger from the malcontents.
Because what scares me the most is that broadly we seem sort of complicit in these monopolies. We seem to be staying on networks we know are mind of shit. Nothing really holds us here... except the network externality, that this is where everyone already is.
And that alone bespeaks a real & significant cause worth asking for change over. I have strong doubts about government regulation of social media systems (I much prefer bluesky's layers of moderation ideas). But the network lock in seems direly bad for all, seems to lock us into a bad system.
Kanter's write-up talks about the critical importance of competition. And yes, that does seem key to me too. Maybe I might take a note from Web Scraping for Me, But Not for Thee, a guest post by Kieran McCarthy. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... . The idea is that many services including a number of the now dominant ones rose to power by adversarial interoperability, by interfacing with other sites. But now the laws have been rewritten to protect & defend against interoperation. The new laws revoked the ideas of Carterphone vs AT&T, give the right to the neo AT&T's to deny anyone else access to the network except via approved tools. We can't use new clients, we can't connect to other systems, we can't detect bot behaviors happening around us: we are at the mercy of whatever software systems are granted us.
Watching Twitter shut down & remind capability after capability used to monitor, understand, make sense of the e-world around us has been a particularly demented crazy, a rapid fast jackbooted march towards the fascist network control system, from whomever happens to be trying the hardest to manipulate & soe disinformation. Kanter's words here seem so much more believable & scary in the wake of this new dark age, of this whole network doing from exposed & informed to dark & murky. And we still haven't found other places to go, there's still just a black dark maw of the role where Twitter used to serve. But as Kanter says, no one really can leave, not without starting naked and new at least, and that makes competition vulgarly impossible. What we have just rots, manipulated ever more by the vile, now under the platforms ever deeper provided cloaks of night (& sky high cost of doing any interesting analytics of ones own).