Jim KillockBeen on a bit of a journey reading about Systems Thinking in the last few weeks. Why is that, you may ask? Well: point one, I wanted to understand the arguments for #SafetyByDesign as added to the UK #OnlineSafetyAct which says that services must be "safe by design".
Charlie Stross@jim I could actually buy that as a sensible requirement if social media platforms were actually designed by very serious people to meet social and cultural needs. But as a former dot-com era developer, all I can say is LOL ROFL. Nobody has a clue it's going to be a service people depend on and safety is an issue until it's too damn late! Until then it's just a neat toy a couple of devs are noodling with in their spare time for their own use.
@cstross It is a tall order for so many reasons. Closed vs open systems; adversarial or opposed goals of the regulator (risk reduction) and the platform (attention); low alignment between legality of content and risk; context dependency changing the nature of content and risk
@cstross Still: if alignment between the users, community and platform is high, eg with Mastodon, then safety is much more realisable.
@jim As I keep yelling at people, the profitability of a business model does not confer legitimacy: that kind of thinking—very much a silicon valley thing—is highly problematic in commercial social media, which monetize our social connections.
Open Riskhate to break the bad news to you 😜 , but profitability = legitimacy not just a silicon valley thing, its deeply embedded in the so-called neoclassical economic doctrine, going back to Milton Freedman etc.
The idea is that business focuses on financial profits and politics/legislation sets the ethical/legal boundaries.
What they "failed" to account for is that corporate profits can easily buy politicians.
Total corruption follows and the state of digital tech is proof😟
The list includes digital gambling (aka "prediction markets").
The idea of "markets" (=speculators) determining the likelihood (thus price and value) of everything goes also deep into the neoclassical mindset.
At its base its a dehumanizing mindset that as much as possible aims to ignore or bypass "annoying" moral questions.