Clinical RawlsianDec 23, 2022
Read every word of this banger from @pluralistic. It captures perfectly what I've been thinking about Mastodon, Twitter, the Fediverse, social networks, and the web generally. https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies
Pluralistic: What the fediverse (does/n’t) solve (23 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadClinical RawlsianDec 23, 2022

@pluralistic This is why Post and Hive are not the solution.

"No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, it's still a dictatorship, and subject to the dictator's whims. We must demand that the owners and leaders of tech platforms be fair and good – but we must also be prepared for them to fail at this, sometimes catastrophically."

Show threadClinical RawlsianDec 23, 2022

@pluralistic And this is just so everything...

"The corporate person is a selfish narcissist, a paperclip-maximizing artificial lifeform forever questing after its own advantage. It is an abuser. Like all abusers, it is keenly attuned to any social dynamic that it can use to manipulate its victims, and so social media is highly prized by these immortal colony-organisms."

Show threadClinical Rawlsian
@pluralistic I know that by "corporate person", Doctorow means the entity of the corporation, granted the status of personhood by the law. But it made me think about the actual people who work within corporate "leadership" roles.
Dec 23, 2022 at 9:33pmWeb
Show threadClinical RawlsianDec 23, 2022
@pluralistic Corporations are super-organisms that see human beings the way we see gut bacteria, but corporate executives are like Remora fish that attach themselves to super-predators like great whites, entering a symbiosis with a thing that would otherwise devour them in order to avoid the fate of other fish their size.