It's not oil or eggs or toilet paper—but something far more important
  • @LouNekoEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    The CEOs at these companies (Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft) clearly don’t understand how much people crave trustworthy sources in the current moment. If they would focus their investments on enhancing trust, they would actually make more money in the long run.

    Making money in the long run isn’t the goal of any of these people. They are already beyond wealthy, with enough money to influence global politics. I see the purposefull deterioration of trust is a form of perversion. If you have a good and trustfull image it’s a lot of work to maintain. There are limitations as a company or individual on what you can get away with while maintaining a good image. But if you are untrustworthy and still successful, you can get away with mostly anything, since there are no expectation of you to act in good faith.

    This is in my opinion what those people or corporations are trying to achieve. If there is a veil of distrust between everyone they can do as they please and just point a finger at the next bad person. The goal is to bring everybody down on the same level.

    Those people could already get away with mostly anything by paying themselves out of trouble, now they will be able to get away socially by convincing you that they aren’t worse than others.

  • maegul (he/they)English
    1•1 year ago

    One of my speculative critiques of the fediverse is that, technologically, it isn’t terribly relevant any more, or at least as much as it was just a year or two ago, because it doesn’t seem designed to cope with this new threat to the internet and media landscape. Rather, it’s designed to counter big corporate social media and the attendant lack of privacy, circa 2012.

    Naively, to me, closing things down from public accessibility, encrypting and creating + enforcing chains of trust, seem to be the sort of things we might need to think about to create good human spaces against the pestilence of the modern internet. My naive impression is that to add that to ActivityPub would probably require just starting again.