Reading this, I feel less offended (really, I don't understand the use of that word in politics) and more scared and threatened. I'm a :sparkles: gender minority :sparkles: so politics can get really directly influential really quickly, and the picture of a gun-owning person who thinks taxes are theft is less than encouraging: that type of ideology usually does not account for people like me's existence. It's possible that it's just a hobby (heavy benefit of the doubt here), but it reads like a political statement against my ability to live freely.
Anyway, you asked: that's why I'd be scared to put much into the OP's hands.
As an addition to your request, I'd recommend reading some philosophy. If you want left-leaning, you can jump straight in with Marx, Foucault, and Judith Butler (some of my favorites), but you don't really need to.
I'd just recommend this because the news is useless without a meta-understanding of its purpose in public opinion, ideology, and power. If you want to skip dense philosophy readings, just make sure to ask yourself, "Who benefits from the story being told?" Try to seek out a large variety of sources in respect to this answer. The reason that this is hard though, I'll personally leave to Marx and Goldman.
I'd go one step further in that analysis. Why does it feel that large companies are the most representative to the people (like me) claiming that consumption under capitalism is unethical?
Well, I'm a bit of an anarchist, so I'm going to go down the 'distribution of power' line here. It doesn't matter that purism or system76 is ethical when Google controls my every waking moment. When the mega evil Corps have all the power and the influence. When they control not just my life but also the ecological and political environment around me. Denying the power of Google is akin to climate change denial. So yes, I'm not going to point to a small company built off of open source and pretend that my life is okay.
Or I could go a bit further down the Marxist line, and say it's because capitalism requires large scale exploitation at a large scale. Ignoring that exploitation is supporting that exploitation, and is immoral. I'll not get into the theory to support this in this comment, but when Amazon warehouse workers literally work themselves to death for my shitty orders, we've got a problem. And it is immoral to point to the existence of Purism and say that everything is fine.
This is coming off more intense than I intended. I'm sorry. I swear this isn't personal criticism, just an attempt at productive engagement with ideology, but the world is breaking. It's really fucking hard to be kind.
Honestly I think this opens up a really interesting discussion in open source. I know this is satire, but bear with me.
If I see a project, and I get curious about its test results, I can just look at the logs of the tests running and the ways in which they're run. I can see exactly what's going on, and if something weird's going on, I can fork the project, enable tests, and start a discussion with the maintainers. Maybe it's important enough that the tests are enabled and the code is fixed.
What's really interesting to me about this is that there's no competition in sight. There are no market pressures that make someone look at the code or fix it, it's just the desire for good code. Whereas with market pressures, I'm incentivized to lock down code and hide test results! You can say that's an edge case or uncommon, but the fact of the matter is that it happened. Anyway, this makes me curious about two things:
1. In software specifically, does the reduction of competition necessarily contribute to a more collaborative and more productive development process than what we expect with traditional systems?
2. If 1 is true, how widely does this scale? What could be better if some of the control of owners was removed? For instance, if the test processes of VW were public, none of this would have happened.
I've spent so long being told that competition is the be all and end all of productivity, so I'm just curious about what's happening here, and I want to know how far it goes.
Came here to say this. I also want to add that there are no solutions with the West's current consumption habits. If we all switch to electric cars today, oil might be doing okay, but we'll still be exploiting workers and raiding resources in environmentally costly lithium mines. This is not a technical issue. This is a political issue. The question we should be asking is how we reduce our consumption and how to increase our reciprocity with the environment, not at an individual level, but at a systemic and societal level. And here's the hard part: this isn't done through innovation. This is done through reducing the capitalist pressures to consume and produce. This is driven locally, slowly, and radically by pushing back against what capitalism has done.
I do not expect this to be a popular opinion, but I am slightly entertained reading this from more of a Marxist perspective.
> We used to make things. Now we have meetings.
Well, of course. This is what happens when the purpose of a corporation isn't production but profit, and if the workers, the people who by definition exist in the company to make things, were to own their means of production, this would look very differently. But anyway, I digress.
First off: no, that is not the abolish the police argument. The argument for police abolition is as part of a massive restructuring of how we think about crime, not how we think about police. It's about taking our focus away from police themselves (the antithesis of 'imagine the police doing horrible things to you') and onto the factors that make people victims of the police: systemic racism, drug addictions, mental illnesses, and the exploitative nature of capitalism at its worse. When we redirect our attention to solving the root issues, focusing on policing is redundant and harmful.
Second off, you're totally right. Abolish the police.
"The free marketplace of ideas" (and also classical liberalism) is hugely reliant on the idea of humans as rational agents (both the people selling and the people consuming). But when we're not, everything opens up to tons of propaganda (especially that from fascists who are more than willing to engage where leftists will reject premises).
You can't have "enragement equals engagement" AND the "free" marketplace of ideas is good. The first is the natural consequence of the existence of the latter. If you take issue with the first, you should not accept the second either.
As for what should replace that 'free' market, I honestly don't know. But deplatforming (not censoring, deplatforming) hate speech is a good place to start.
Is it fair to say you're citing identity politics and the presence of ideology as a cause of problems in society?
Re identity politics, I'm trans and it helps me a lot. It feels like an intermediate between misogyny and the abolition of the categorization of gender. Focusing on the rights of one group (trans rights, trans liberation now) feels essential.
Re the presence of ideology, there is no way to not have an ideology. Liberalism and neoliberalism consistently say that they are neutral, but they are also a story about the world and a way to interpret facts, on the exact same scale as Marxism. It's just that because (neo)liberalism places weight on the individual and discounts systemic factors, it can feel neutral if you don't need to think about systemic factors (this is what privelage is).
Not really relevant to your overall critique, but it's just something that stood out to me reading your comment.
Here's my controversial opinion - the best individual solution is to do less stuff. To me, it doesn't make sense that a problem caused by over-zealous production will be solved by over-zealous production. We can't really expect making more stuff to solve our problems caused by making too much stuff. The new stuff we make should be targeted at increasing the efficiency of production, but, while helpful, I can't help but view that innovation as only part of a solution. Another part of the solution is individuals trying to change the functions of corporations, and the only way I can think to do that is by doing and demanding less overall. Still, though, individual change feels like it's meaningless at this point. The building I live in is run on solar, and climate awareness has been baked into my school curriculums since elementary school, but if Exxon Mobil doesn't sort its shit out, I don't think my house is going to do much.
The rest of the solution, and this is controversial opinion number two, is that we need to reorient the purpose of corporations, and the economy as whole, from profit to humanity. Only 20 companies produced 35% of GHG emissions, and 100 produced 70%[0]. This isn't an individual issue, and it won't be fixed by individual solutions. Corporations, driven by innovation as an extension of profit, caused this problem. If we just request more innovation, I feel like we're going to be fucked.
I agree that climate despair is unhelpful, but so is the "let's let innovation sort it out" attitude - we need real structural change that innovation within capitalism can't provide. I'd suggest Marxism, but I doubt that's something most people want to hear.
Maybe some of this is due to how little variation there is: I've yet to see a politician who isn't neoliberal (though Trump was more than a bit fascist at times). Even 2019-20 Andrew Yang still built his ideas (mainly UBI) off of neoliberalism, and imo, appealed to a ton of more traditional neoliberal values: that UBI is about providing equally and flatly for everyone, not specifically and directly helping the disenfranchised and indirectly aiding worker control of the means of production (how I'd view its effects). And then he abandoned the UBI campaign this year, becoming even more centrist.
Then, if we shift our focus further left, we see Bernie Sanders, who is just not all that socialist because he's really working within the neoliberal framework that his years of politics conditioned him to work in. Further left than that, well, there are no anarchists or communists in politics.
I could make the case that this is here (and bad) bc neoliberalism will slide towards fascism if we give equal weight to everyone's ideas, but that does feel like I'm sinking further into divisions, and it presupposes that my positive opinions about the far left are actually supported by facts, regardless of any ground truth. But really, it wouldn't be an issue if we had more variety in ideology: discussion would be more varied and more thorough, we'd all question our own ideology's assumptions just a bit more, and overall it would be easier to engage in someone else's ideas if you knew they weren't coming from the same baseline as you.
Neoliberalism is not a neutral or balanced ideology: let's have more communists, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, hell, maybe a few fascists or stalinists could do some good.
I alos think it's less productive to interpret the phrase absolute evil as a comment on an entity's moral alignments (because it's a corporation, it's not chaotic evil or neutral good, it just is) but as a comment on the foundation and effects of the economic and political systems defining of the corporations (capitalism under neoliberalism). Absolute evil seems like a fairly decent personification of those metrics to me: every extra push to manufacture another product pushes us closer to a climate catastrophe (even 'green' products like Teslas, especially green products like Teslas[1]). Even if you deny climate change, you can't deny that workers are being taken advantage of near habitually. If we're going to personify the destruction of the earth and the worker, absolute evil does not seem too far off.
idk though, I'm going to take the anarchist approach here and say we shouldn't need regulation to make this ethical. The fact that some of us benefit off of manipulation and nondisclosure feels like a result of an unjust power structure, specifically corporations over the individual (the anarchist interpretation), and more largely the economy over humanity (the communist interpretation). I think the only way to not have ethical problems with advertisement is to make advertisements unnecessary, and to start valuing the effects of people over the effects of products. Regulation here is good, but its necessity is a symptom of a problem solved only at the individual level.
> Think of the classic campaigns from Apple, Volkswagen, Absolut, and Nike.
Is this not the definition of selection bias? If you only think about the classics, everything seems better than it was. It also rests on the point that those classic ads were 'good', and that's something I disagree with - I don't think there's any moral form of advertising, which is my second problem with this article.
> Ads aimed to be compelling.
Ads aimed to redirect your attention without your knowledge and artificially create an urge to consume. I interpret the author's use of the word "compelling" as an admission that ads are story-telling, and give a narrative that does not need to be beneficial. The classics of Absolut apparently (I don't know for sure - I'm just looking at the images on the website) are about Vodka, and encourage consumption of alcohol unilaterally, despite and because that's not a choice consumers would make unguided and without external influence. Alcohol kills people, and that's not something ads are going to mention.
Apple is of course into their slave labor and suicide net model of production, and VW lied about their car's energy efficiency. It's a cliche to say this, but there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Please, for the love of all that is good, let's stop acting like there is.
> It wanted people to feel something.
Yes, that's called emotional manipulation, and it's both bad and not gone.
> Sadly, we’ve lost those great, Ogilvy-esque, creative campaigns and replaced them with the digital equivalents of windshield flyers, direct mail campaigns, and door tags. What a snooze.
Why exactly do we want the fine-wine equivalent of emotional manipulation? This does not feel like an art form, much less an ethical art form.
> 96% of consumers don’t trust ads. (source)
Thank fuck? Why on earth do you want people to trust ads? What good to society does that do?
> I’m a creator and I need an image so I can make something I care about.
If this is what was encouraged by economic dynamics, I'd be all for it. But no matter who runs the ad, individual or multi-million dollar corporation, it'll still be pushed towards an image encouraging consumption to an excess. *That is how capitalism works*. This article is the advertisement equivalent of addressing climate change by consuming more products. It completely fails to address the root problems and favors a near straw-man argument to substantial change and effect. Honestly, this feels like a parody of neoliberal ideology meant to poke fun. I really hope I'm not missing a joke.
Honestly, this is about what I expected. I have the admittedly niche and somewhat impractical opinion that it's within no one's rights to have ownership over an idea, an implementation, or a solution to any problem at all. When businesses try to base themselves off of that type of ownership, of course they'll be threatened by someone putting together a small side project for the fun of it. Ideas aren't something you can totally own: someone else will come up with them simultaneously, make a derivative work, or just have fun with it in a way you can't physically stop. I think I'm seeing that play out as a business in a bad position and a person trying their best here. I mostly just feel bad for the OP and a bit irritated at capitalism, as always.
I feel there are plenty of reasons to not write your own anything, from prioritizing other projects, not having time, or just not having all of the required expertise. As a student I'm lucky enough to be able to drop basically everything and work on this one cool project idea so long as I get my essays in on time, but that just doesn't seem to be something universally applicable.
> instead of complaining on the Internet
Where else would you prefer they complain? I agree it may be more effective to open an issue no the repo, but does that also count as `copmlaining on the Internet'? Talking to people is how we change things. In this case, that's contributing to the usability of technology that grows ever more central in our lives.
Personally, I think a focus on accessibility is a great focus to have, and it should be obligatory if it isn't voluntarily universal. There is no reason for our society to provide more opportunities to humans with perfect vision than to humans with impaired vision.
Anyway, you asked: that's why I'd be scared to put much into the OP's hands.