"We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth and, and continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know that it is destroying the planet and we know that it's going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best results. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What's frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending that time living our life in a rich way."
And I 100% agree, and would go even further to say that the same has always been true under capitalism, except instead of just doing that in terms of exploiting our labour-power during the work day, they're now able to do it almost every waking hour of the day. And it's going to be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to change this under the logic of capitalism. That's why I'm so critical of it. It compels the maximization of profit over everything. It compels the accumulation of capital, and with it, social power, into fewer and fewer hands. It turns everything into a commodity to be exploited and mined for profit. And to change that logic, we have to change the system and the social relations of production that currently exist.
A huge issue that relates to this is the contradictions inherent to private property rights and how it's never really the community or aggregate of users or workers, with a few exceptions such as strong unions, who have a say in the shape and operation of any platform, service, forum, workplace, etc. It's a huge area of tension. Owners have full control; others struggle to have their voices heard in a meaningful way. Which is why I think whatever we create to challenge and replace these platforms, and capitalist social relations in general, must allow for some community/worker control and engagement. And in the case of something as massive as FB or Twitter, possibly a form of nationalization as unpopular as that might be. If you live in a system with logic that drives most owners towards profit and monetization, you get what we have now. And it seems so bad because of the speed in which it's gone bad.
In the past, the speed of serious issues of capital consolidation and widespread negative effects were often slower in accumulation as they spread and became more commonplace. But the exponential rate of processing power, among other things, has made these problems arise faster and spread faster than most people's understanding or our electoral system can keep up with, especially since that system was purposefully made to be slow to change to begin with. In addition, any changes that are made to these platforms and within corporations in general are at the whims of owners, and most are geared towards what makes these things addictive and manipulative and so profitable in the first place. And even the very existence of these platforms, services, forums, etc. are at their whims. In the blink of an eye, they could simply shut them down and kill/displace communities, lay off workers, etc. And whatever arises in their place will be subjected to the same logic and financial incentives to grow, increase use, increase the manipulation of users, increase profits, etc.
I think the main question is, what alternatives to community ownership and control are there? If you're going to regulate these things, we still have to contend with the fact that these companies help write the legislation and/or lobby for loopholes and other means of defanging them. Even in highly regulated areas, such as media companies by the FCC and agencies of that nature, there's a massive amount of consolidation and essentially monopolization. Most local stations are now owned by these media giants (e.g., Sinclair Broadcasting Group), affecting everything including the kind of news that people see on a local level as well as national. That doesn't necessarily mean that every user should have a say in something like code writing, for example, just as you wouldn't let just anybody walk into a hospital to be a nurse. But I certainly think we need to move in the direction of more socialization.
So, for instance, workers at places like Google should all have some amount of ownership and control over their labour and the products of it (since that labour and those products have serious, real world effects), having some leverage and decision-making abilities besides having the choice of doing their jobs or leaving. (Much of the criticism of these platforms comes from within, but those who offer it are often powerless to do anything without the approval of the CEO, board, stockholders, etc., who have no financial incentives to change them in ways that are more healthy and ethical.) Another level would be mandating or at least normalizing some levels of community/user ownership or decision-making and finding ways to prevent or discourage the distorted views individuals get through algorithm-oriented content orders designed for maximum time usage, ad revenue, etc. I think some of that could be implemented through legislation, but I definitely think that workers and users themselves need to be empowered as well.
Coincidentally, a friend of mine just wrote two blog posts about something similar, albeit from a different POV inspired by a section of Nadia Eghbal's Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, that of the difference between a platform and a community. It's worth reading if you have the time: part 1, "platform syndicate" and part 2, "black box." I'm glad there are at least people in tech like him thinking about and trying to work on these problems, because I very much doubt the radical changes I suggest will happen. So it'll be up to people like him to try and stave off the worst possible scenario.
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