Just catching up to this. Very interesting discussion, and I’m going to read the book. The externality problem on issues like AI, facial recognition, polarization, cancel culture, etc are real. But I don’t think (like Adaam) we can ignore the broader cultural questions on the US v. Europe. And the deregulation of the 1980s happened in not just in the US, but in Europe too (albeit not to the same extent perhaps). And the states aren’t uniform - I like France’s focus on nuclear power, v Germany, for instance. And the polarization/populism problem is happening across the West, regardless of how much regulatory expertise/competence there is/was. Hard to generalize too much.
I enjoyed the discussion a lot. Adaam gave his opinion that the revealed preference on privacy is that people don't really care. If you care a lot but aren't heavily invested in the knowhow to preserve your privacy with respect to e.g. ad optimisation, you just can't, without withdrawing from the online sphere as a participant and not just an observer, and this biases the conversation. Most people cannot do that anyway, because they have to engage with schools, jobs, etc, so the preference question is moot if you need a smartphone. If you rephrase privacy as being in control of the copyright for your data, as opposed to privacy, perhaps the financial aspect of the conflict is more apparent. Most media companies have the same interests as the tech companies here in pushing for no consumer privacy, (at least financially, based on who they partner up with cookie-wise) whereas free speech can be an incentive of the media landscape, so that debate gets more media heat.
Interesting point on incentives. Maybe you're right and if privacy was an issue that institutional media was more interested in it would have effected a louder backlash resulting in a different regulatory regime. Then again, European media seems much more invested in the issue and I don't think they benefit any less from cookies and data collection. I still suspect that there's a cultural component weighing heavily here.
Another explanation I've been toying with recently is that the metaphor of an online public sphere doesn't really work for us. We don't yet have a clear sense of what the public/private tension really means online. That means we don't yet have an appropriate ethical framework for it. We're still stuck at trying -- and failing -- to apply local, real-world norms on our global, virtual existence.
That said, I have a few friends who truly make an effort to limit their online profile, including a blanket moratorium on turning on cameras during video conferences.
"Tech" does not have externalities. These are all internalities. Jeremy Weinstein is not an economist. He's a lawyer and politician. His talk of externalities is to make himself look smarter than he is. Its all typical politician bullshit. When one person uses a service consensually and all effects flow through the consensual actors, there is NO externality, regardless of how those things affects the consensual actors invovled and how those consensual actors then go on to act in the outside world.
The rhetoric of monopoly and externalities for companies like Google and Apple is straight up bullshit. Do I like that Apple has a shitty closed ecosystem and acts anti-competitively? No I don't. And that's exactly why I don't buy any of their products. Do I like that Google absorbs all my information and provies products that get shittier every year? No. But I still use them voluntarily because for some reason no one has stepped up and offered better products for search, maps, and various other things. Even with Enshitification, Google still provides some of the best products on the market. They don't have a monopoly, they simply made good products 10 years ago that remain top of their class.
P.s. I also don’t think the regulatory state in the US is quite as non-existent in areas like zoning, environmental regulation, health care (FDA)...the US state federal system is just different than Europe and states usually lead the federal government (CCPA, in CA), and that experimentation can be good. I need to read the book, I don’t want to punch an imaginary straw man, but I also think the issue of climate change is really complex, and that the impulse of both technologists and regulators is often to try and jettison politics. Congress has almost completely devolved its legislative responsibility to the executive branch, which is both polarizing and leads people to vent all of their frustrations on “government” on both sides of the aisle in pursuit of zero sum policies. One final thought: given the revolt against liberal democracy at the moment, it just feels like we’re becoming low trust societies in the West. That’s a huge problem that is exacerbated by technology but I’m very hesitant to pawn it off on technology. Radio was the tool of mass movements in the early 20th Century, but not the cause of virulent politics (See Roosevelt’s fireside chats.). Technology can help boost healthy or unhealthy forms of community. How do we get more of the former might take us a while to figure out with social media, generative AI, and rapid social change.
Just catching up to this. Very interesting discussion, and I’m going to read the book. The externality problem on issues like AI, facial recognition, polarization, cancel culture, etc are real. But I don’t think (like Adaam) we can ignore the broader cultural questions on the US v. Europe. And the deregulation of the 1980s happened in not just in the US, but in Europe too (albeit not to the same extent perhaps). And the states aren’t uniform - I like France’s focus on nuclear power, v Germany, for instance. And the polarization/populism problem is happening across the West, regardless of how much regulatory expertise/competence there is/was. Hard to generalize too much.
I enjoyed the discussion a lot. Adaam gave his opinion that the revealed preference on privacy is that people don't really care. If you care a lot but aren't heavily invested in the knowhow to preserve your privacy with respect to e.g. ad optimisation, you just can't, without withdrawing from the online sphere as a participant and not just an observer, and this biases the conversation. Most people cannot do that anyway, because they have to engage with schools, jobs, etc, so the preference question is moot if you need a smartphone. If you rephrase privacy as being in control of the copyright for your data, as opposed to privacy, perhaps the financial aspect of the conflict is more apparent. Most media companies have the same interests as the tech companies here in pushing for no consumer privacy, (at least financially, based on who they partner up with cookie-wise) whereas free speech can be an incentive of the media landscape, so that debate gets more media heat.
Interesting point on incentives. Maybe you're right and if privacy was an issue that institutional media was more interested in it would have effected a louder backlash resulting in a different regulatory regime. Then again, European media seems much more invested in the issue and I don't think they benefit any less from cookies and data collection. I still suspect that there's a cultural component weighing heavily here.
Another explanation I've been toying with recently is that the metaphor of an online public sphere doesn't really work for us. We don't yet have a clear sense of what the public/private tension really means online. That means we don't yet have an appropriate ethical framework for it. We're still stuck at trying -- and failing -- to apply local, real-world norms on our global, virtual existence.
That said, I have a few friends who truly make an effort to limit their online profile, including a blanket moratorium on turning on cameras during video conferences.
"Tech" does not have externalities. These are all internalities. Jeremy Weinstein is not an economist. He's a lawyer and politician. His talk of externalities is to make himself look smarter than he is. Its all typical politician bullshit. When one person uses a service consensually and all effects flow through the consensual actors, there is NO externality, regardless of how those things affects the consensual actors invovled and how those consensual actors then go on to act in the outside world.
The rhetoric of monopoly and externalities for companies like Google and Apple is straight up bullshit. Do I like that Apple has a shitty closed ecosystem and acts anti-competitively? No I don't. And that's exactly why I don't buy any of their products. Do I like that Google absorbs all my information and provies products that get shittier every year? No. But I still use them voluntarily because for some reason no one has stepped up and offered better products for search, maps, and various other things. Even with Enshitification, Google still provides some of the best products on the market. They don't have a monopoly, they simply made good products 10 years ago that remain top of their class.
P.s. I also don’t think the regulatory state in the US is quite as non-existent in areas like zoning, environmental regulation, health care (FDA)...the US state federal system is just different than Europe and states usually lead the federal government (CCPA, in CA), and that experimentation can be good. I need to read the book, I don’t want to punch an imaginary straw man, but I also think the issue of climate change is really complex, and that the impulse of both technologists and regulators is often to try and jettison politics. Congress has almost completely devolved its legislative responsibility to the executive branch, which is both polarizing and leads people to vent all of their frustrations on “government” on both sides of the aisle in pursuit of zero sum policies. One final thought: given the revolt against liberal democracy at the moment, it just feels like we’re becoming low trust societies in the West. That’s a huge problem that is exacerbated by technology but I’m very hesitant to pawn it off on technology. Radio was the tool of mass movements in the early 20th Century, but not the cause of virulent politics (See Roosevelt’s fireside chats.). Technology can help boost healthy or unhealthy forms of community. How do we get more of the former might take us a while to figure out with social media, generative AI, and rapid social change.