@susannah@octodon.social @Tarnport ☹️
i'd be more positively disposed if the plan was to divide Canada into states, each with the population of Wyoming. Republicans like small states, right?
@Nichol not at all clear! they only come in packages of two, i think!
@carolannie like California!
@realcaseyrollins agreed. i'd like him to stop threatening our friends and allies too. it's enough that he threatens us.
people act like Trump is trying to strong-arm Canada or something, but actually he's offering them a sweetheart deal with two whole senators.
democracy depends upon collective cognition, and we cannot cogitate well or sanely while dopamine machines owned and manipulated by Musk and Zuckerberg constitute the public and coordinate the effort. cf @henryfarrell https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis
@realcaseyrollins @11112011 yes, and it matters to them who wins those competitions, but the structure of the game still ignores the interests and perspectives of everybody else doing different things. just because a tournament is competitive — even genuinely, bitterly competitive — doesn’t mean it’s open and serving everyone.
@billseitz (Drum often hides behind aggregation in ways that arguably miss important things. It’s the second half of the piece, reminding us that regulation has its virtues as well as costs, that I thought particularly worthwhile, although it doesn’t mean the structure of regulation shouldn’t be improved.)
@realcaseyrollins @11112011 they’re competing to do the same thing. oligopoly is not decentralization, and yes, true decentralization requires not just multiple nodes but nodes that are diverse on the situations and interests. pluralism among influential parties is not optional if one wants institutions that attend to the full public’s interests.
@realcaseyrollins @11112011 a handful of platforms mostly owned by similarly situated people with similar incentives does not constitute a diverse marketplace of interests. (TikTok is a bit different, though not necessarily in reassuring ways.) Musk’s influence over Trump comes from writing checks and owning and being willing to crassly manipulate one of those influential platforms. it is not some happenstance prior to these things.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins yes. it does. read the Krugman piece. also, we saw the same boom in the countries whose manufacturing capability was destroyed. France, Germany, Japan all boomed along with the US during the postwar social-democratic era, it wasn’t some kind of lopsided winner-takes-the-spoils.
@realcaseyrollins @11112011 when private sector forces are decentralized, they check one another, they constitute participants in a kind of marketplace of ideas even as they try to influence. when private sector forces are very lopsided, the beneficiaries of that lopsidedness are so much more capable of influence that any marketplace of ideas becomes heavily rigged in their favor.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins yes. much of the design of contemporary institutions is about organizing things so that people who think themselves good can participate on systems that do a great deal of bad. your doctor heals you (good!) while getting paid from extraordinarily and just and predatory financing arrangements, but her work is segregated from those arrangements.
@realcaseyrollins @Phil not everyone. some people are extraordinarily willing to sacrifice for abstract ideas of virtue. most try to do the right thing, but are susceptible to pragmatic compromise. at a systemic level, the most win. the Mother Theresas get fired by the people willing to make compromises to advance. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5031.html
@realcaseyrollins @11112011 private sector influence is not oligarchy, it can be part of democracy, if it’s pluralistic and balanced. but as wealth becomes concentrated, private sector influence does become oligarchy. the same set of rules that work well in a reasonably egalitarian society (some richer, some poorer, but within a moderate range) can yield oligarchy under a more skewed wealth distribution.
@realcaseyrollins history. the US had its strongest business performance during the postwar decades when income and wealth dispersion was least.
@Phil @realcaseyrollins you’re going to end up with a symbiosis of cronies and sycophants when the scale of differences in wealth is so vast. competitive markets, regulators who can serve as trustworthy referees, all depend on a baseline of equality. everybody in the game performs their role in a trustworthy way, can afford to beat the consequences of calling out those who don’t, no one is above the law, outside the rules, because their favor is so valuable.
@seachanger it’s been a bad pneumonia season this year.