Anti-monopoly legislation and strong unions would work. They worked the last time things got too centralized, the era of railroads and steel.
As with railroads and steel mills, what we now call "tech" has a scaling property which pushes towards monopoly. So there needs to be some force pushing back hard against monopolies.
It is a shame there isn't more creative discussion around ideas for regulation. Perhaps something as simple as "corporate tax rate should scale with revenue" might have prevented the walmarts of the world from eating the mom-and-pops.
> might have prevented the walmarts of the world from eating the mom-and-pops.
Be careful what you wish for.
Perhaps as a shopper there is a certain charm to the "mom and pops". Uneven, some good, some bad. Definitely more character
But as a worker, or as a poor consumer, Walmat is better.
The pay is regular. If mom and pop had a bad week, so might you
The hours are regular. Mom and pop work so hard, and their employees are "just like family"
The goods are a reliable price and quality. Walmat gets criticised for selling bad products, but they are reliably bad products, and cheap. You know what you are getting.
I am no cheer leader for capitalism, nor big box retail, but do not get foolishly romantic about the small scale capitalism they have pushed aside.
The problem is not the just the participants, the problem is the system itself.
Didnt walmart make the mom n pop so much shittier to begin with though. One could expect numerous local options for the thing you want to purchase in absence of the walmart, so one or two of them having a bad week isn't necessarily passed onto you. I wasn't alive when something like this would have existed in my part of america but it really seems like the monopoly stores made local shopping bad. I really don't need 6 breeds of apple to choose from anyway. Whatever fruit is in season would be fine.
I would be concerned that globalization has changed the economics. Railroads and steel mills didn't have to seriously compete with other countries, so you could break them up and they'd still be viable.
Apple's value proposition is that fundamentally everything they make plays well with each other, and that investments in one product frequently pay off in other (often future) products. Break that into silos and they're individually less compelling.
When it comes to tech, it doesn't have to be about breaking up companies. Most tech monopolies can be mitigated by technical solutions that are currently made illegal using a combination of the CFAA as well as copyright law.
Make reverse-engineering and emulating official clients legal and suddenly the monopoly problem goes away, because even if Apple only wants their iStuff to work with other iStuff, it will work fine with Android now that it can (legally) reverse-engineer and reimplement the protocol the iStuff uses and pretend to be an iStuff.
The Internet was always going to be a cultural amplifier. Those of us who grew up when culture wasn't just about greed, narcissism, and sociopathy assumed it would amplify all those old-fashioned values: intellectual curiosity, informed democracy, and public education.
It actually does that. Up to a point. It's far easier to get accurate information about almost everything than it used to be.
But it's been swamped by narcissistic garbage, automated exploitation and greed, and pathocracy.
That's not really the Internet's fault. It's just amplifying the culture it's a part of. The mistake the idealists (like me) made was underestimating just how toxic and self-destructive that culture is.
It is however, even easier to get inaccurate information. Most recently, see what happened to the Cochrane review on "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses". Mass media have readily interpreted it as "masks do not work" and even media which was not that hysterical https://www.health.com/cochrane-review-do-masks-work-7112631 had "A new Cochrane review, published last month, sought to answer how effective masks are at preventing COVID-19."
Those of us who grew up when culture wasn't just about greed, narcissism, and sociopathy assumed it would amplify all those old-fashioned values: intellectual curiosity, informed democracy, and public education
Wait a sec, I'm pretty old, but totally missed this era before human greed and narcissism. When exactly are we talking about?
It can't be an issue of reading comprehension -- the parent post actually quotes the grandparent, but then pretends the grandparent wrote of an "era before human greed and narcissism" instead of a time "when culture wasn't just about greed, [and] narcissism" (emphasis mine).
I get that it's easier to engage with what one wants someone to have said, rather than what they actually said, but why quote the relevant part just to ignore it? Fiendish!
Yes you did. You took my post in bad faith. You incorrectly assume I took the ggggp's post in bad faith, and now are engaging in your own battle against your own incorrect assumption. The hypocrisy is you are complaining about failing to engage with the main point, while refusing to engage and derailing yourself. Please stop, let's just move on.
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gggggp claims that culture is more narcissistic and greedy now. I dispute that, if you want to defend that claim, tell me what era you grew up in that was less so.
Americans are too busy being preoccupied on whats woke, whether teachers should say gay to kids under a certain age, and whether the same kids should be allowed to see… drag shows? Also what books can be allowed in libraries, what textbooks should say, and whether people should be able to wear guns visibly in holsters.
It seems challenging to avoid the noise if you want to consume news and know whats going on in the world. Even turning on 1010 WINS in the car I have to hear about some Texas college president arguing that Drag Shows are like Minstrel Shows.
Maybe I should change the radio out and put in something with an audio input or whatever the norm is to connect old car speakers to an iDevice :)
