Technology

They are important to capitalism. Not us.

https://thefreeonline.com/2015/10/20/capitalism-is-unnatural/

A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be published next month, reveals two transformative findings. The first is that a large majority of the 1000 people they surveyed – 74% – identify more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and power. The second is that a similar majority – 78% – believes others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people’s minds.

The revelation that humanity’s dominant characteristic is, er, humanity will come as no surprise to those who have followed recent developments in behavioural and social sciences. People, these findings suggest, are basically and inherently nice.

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So why do we retain such a dim view of human nature? Partly, perhaps, for historical reasons....

Another problem is that – almost by definition – many of those who dominate public life have a peculiar fixation on fame, money and power. Their extreme self-centredness places them in a small minority, but, because we see them everywhere, we assume that they are representative of humanity.

The media worships wealth and power, and sometimes launches furious attacks on people who behave altruistically. In the Daily Mail last month, Richard Littlejohn described Yvette Cooper’s decision to open her home to refugees as proof that “noisy emoting has replaced quiet intelligence” (quiet intelligence being one of his defining qualities). “It’s all about political opportunism and humanitarian posturing,” he theorised, before boasting that he doesn’t “give a damn” about the suffering of people fleeing Syria. I note with interest the platform given to people who speak and write as if they are psychopaths.

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Misanthropy grants a free pass to the grasping, power-mad minority who tend to dominate our political systems. If only we knew how unusual they are, we might be more inclined to shun them and seek better leaders. It contributes to the real danger we confront: not a general selfishness, but a general passivity. Billions of decent people tut and shake their heads as the world burns, immobilised by the conviction that no one else cares.

Most people who use social media disagree, and unfortunately for you, it's their opinions that matter most as to whether they use a given social media platform.

I don't really care to follow celebrities and athletes either, but I recognise at least that I am in a minority.

You're not wrong, but that's a minority opinion to the vast majority of the population.

I was talking about this with someone here the other day, and this seems like the logical direction for them. They'll create a cloud of instances that users are able to utilize and create their own communities with relative ease compared to compiling the code and doing the base level software management, and also develop Meta-specific featuresets on those servers to lock people onto their platform. Oh, you want to break away from us and manage your own instance? Have fun doing it the hard way, and without features XYZ that are only available from us!

I’m just waiting for Microsoft to start pulling shit with the Linux foundation now that they have majority seats

A majority?! Fucking hell!

Using the iMessage analogy, we're currently in a state where green bubbles can't interact with blue bubbles at all. Nobody should be expecting full interop with a corporate platform, but for the long run I'd rather have partial interop at arms length.

Embrace extend extinguish only applies if platform is so focused that it cannot sustain itself without the extend phase, and the extend phase cannot happen without something to embrace.