@lauren Things are pretty bad! And monopolies can do things like Bell Labs at its best, but monopolies were necessary, not sufficient. It was the combination of monopolies and high marginal tax rates that meant firms took a broader view of what to do with their surplus than shareholder value. (We'd have more resilience in contemporary telecoms if their surplus could basically only be reinvested.) 1/

@lauren Systems at vast scale are hard, for sure, but maybe we want fewer of them rather than worship at the altar of the challenge. /fin

@lauren what we need is information microfiduciaries, from users perspective one-stop, but at an industry level multiple and competitive.

doing all the basic consumer things is not a natural monopoly, and letting it become a site of rent seeking, surveillance, and poor quality has been a profound social error.

@lauren “average people” don’t go around griping about hypotheticals they don’t know they are missing. they certainly do gripe about how confusing, poor, and riddled with ads Google’s products have become. but questions of what should replace a bad situation must necessarily look beyond what consumers are griping about. it’s not consumer griping that drives our social preference for competition in general, it’s dynamic analysis beyond gripes and competitor interests.

@22 yes. exactly. the hard thing, the very hard thing, is to discriminate btw what is good and what is bad in a thing, rather than consign the thing as a whole as good or bad. the US is both a political formation that has perpetrated genocide, one of history’s cruelest forms of slavery, hiroshima and more. it is also history’s most successful example of transcending the conflictual nationalism that has rendered human experience a constant drumbeat of genocide, and threatens again to kill us all.

@22 i really love the famous Solzhenitsyn quote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”

What is true of individual humans is true of human communities as well. We are complicated.

@22 i think @Daojoan’s “and” formation is right on. all these things are true, and to try to reduce them to one, a simple story, villain or saint, is to do violence to truth and to our capacity to act intelligently, constructively, as we go forward.

@candidexmedia Great! I'm going to write it up a bit more soon, but its a self-hostable service, backed by a postgres database, that watches feeds, determines when items are "finalized" in some sense, assigns them to subscription which can be one-post-per-mail newsletters, daily or weekly roundups, every-n posts, etc, and mails them out accordingly. The mailings are styled by templates you can modify or replace. I'm working now on documentation and tutorials. The code…https://github.com/swaldman/feedletter

@candidexmedia if you are interested in trying to self-host, i'd be glad to help. if you are less interested in that, would just like an RSS-tonewsletter bridge hosted, I'm glad to talk about that too.