That “treated like a utility” approach involves reliance upon the state, which is sometimes controlled by the hostile parties. This is what I don’t like in Internet political discussions, such solutions feel as if they assumed that you make it good once and it remains good.
I don’t believe in nationalization. I only believe in a simple, small and very firmly enforced set of laws.
It’s not about for-profit or not for-profit, it’s about laws being used to force you to pay to a certain kind of businesses. And not to whoever you like.
Because a paid library is kinda fine as a concept. A library has to function, repair chairs, change lightbulbs, pay security guards and, ahem, librarians, pay for new books and electricity and so on.
So - laws forcing you to predictably pay to someone involved in making laws. Copyright laws, surveillance laws, other laws. And the state having its secrets, and doing a lot of that funding and pressure and what not in secret.
And the more complex your set of rules is, the more it turns into “money buys right”, because it turns into a game where the side with more money on lawyers and technical solutions to loopholes wins.
The rightmost parties which want to defund public services are perfectly complemented by the left-center parties which generally want to have unaccountable funding of some public service. It’s not a left\right\yellow\blue issue. It’s an issue of a political system where only those representing some power interest are able to act. Just there are some power interests in replacing a public service with a private monopoly\oligopoly, and some power interests in feeding from the public service itself. I’m pretty certain that, similar to hedge funds, these ultimately end on the same groups of people.
One can even say that this is a market dynamic.
So - the political system is intended to ideally function like a centerpoint, not the milking mechanism described.
The problem is
in a too complex set of laws (honestly I’d suggest a limit on the total amount and a limit on the length of one law, and a referendum week once in 5 years on every law from the list suggested for the next 5 years, dropping all that was before ; when the laws are so complex that you can be right or wrong in any situation depending on being poor or Bezos, it means that the idea of having a specific law for every situation has just failed),
in too many levels of representation allowing power to affect representatives,
in there being no process to at any moment initiate recall of a representative,
in not wide enough participation, it would be best if the majority of population would participate a few times as a representative in various organs, this can be made with making those organs more function-separated and parallel, with bigger amount of places and mandatory rotation, so that one person could become a politician on one subject once for a year or so,
in there being too much professional bureaucratic entities inside the government,
in no nationwide horizontal organizations allowing to 2A through any situation,
in trade unions and consumer associations (there was such a thing too, ye-es) being almost dead.
So just have to fix these 7 points, and life will be better.
LOL, this is something averaging the classical (as in ideal, never really existing) American Republican ideas and the classical (as in functioning for a few years in early 1920s and late 1980s) Soviet system. Why do they mix so well, LOL.
yes that’s precisely what i implied, because they control it in the first place. companies like amazon are more powerful than nation states, and they exercise that power.
And I’m trying to say that the state helping them was first.
this has been the capitalist state’s modus operandi for more than 100-200 years. and the oligarch’s power precede it, they shaped it that way back then.
Not really. Every month, year, decade is different.
aaron schwartz was literally just a dude, not remotely comparable to oligarchs.
He had the right ideas of how to solve one particular industry which is the spearhead of barbarism. And he somehow committed suicide in jail.
I think it’s the other way around. See, hosting a service on the Internet carries some obligations.
The state treats them so that those are much easier to fulfill for these platforms.
The state gives them very expensive projects.
The state kills Aaron Schwartz, purely coincidentally also the author of the RSS standard. That thing that comes the closest to a uniform way of aggregating the Web, which would kill a lot of what platforms provide.
The state makes some of their products standard for the state, making those commercial things necessary to interact with the state.
So, the state does a lot to give them that monopoly in the first place.
Disco Elysium is a more recent look.
Yes, because without one government that was helping them out, punishing their competition and funding them, also making regulations convenient for them, Alphabet, Meta and others would be even more powerful. /s
GNU Taler is supposed to be a solution. Sort of a federated one. If I understand it correctly.
Power finds a way, so I wouldn’t hope for nationalization itself to be anything good.
Maybe the idea of BTC was fine. What wasn’t fine is the idea of mining.
And maybe payments over the Internet or over PSTN are fundamentally different from messaging, conferencing, downloading files, all that stuff.
But what’s important is the ability to pay for a service with something resembling cash IRL in the sense that an ATM machine from which you took that cash can’t take it back because you are paying for an adult journal with it.
But at the same time how can there be so few payment processors that they can affect a platform’s decision to do a kind of business?
That’s where we should look. Why is it hard to be a payment processor.
The situation has been made possible by the enormous trust in progress and “technical fashion” that existed recently, that seems to be drying out.
Say, 10-15 years ago offline-enabled means of communication were a matter of toys for people with no clear idea of future.
Now people going to protests use them, and the dangers of mainstream Internet services and platforms are also common knowledge.
So there is some immunity being formed. It’s even better that this happens slowly. I would be worried if this were some fashion spreading rapidly, but now we can see one crowd using Briar, another crowd using Bridgefy, another crowd jumping on Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat, LoRa and Meshtastic growing in popularity, all those things picking different approaches to the same goal, which signifies evolutionary convergence onto a commonly understood set of problems.
People who were simping for corps no longer do. People who were simping for social media no longer do. People simping for Apple and Google and MS seem to be a rare kind now.
The response is happening.
Yes, there are people who want to have authority and think that if they got to the very top - Google, Meta, whatever, or some government, - then their ideas about authority have become law.
In fact, of course, they are just jerks who’ll drop the soap at every step in prison for the rest of their lives when the problem is finally rectified, and it’s being slowly rectified.
Yes, one would expect human intelligence to benefit quite a lot from free access to information.
Become a more common occurrence too. Possibly an effect much stronger than that of AI requiring lots of computation with unpredictable shittiness of the output.
Yeah, so the difference in what I’d like from what you describe as existing is:
The representation should be spread thinner over the population, and with separate organs voting on separate kinds of matters. Ideally so that most of the population would have some short experience in participating in at least one of those organs by reaching the age of 30. Experience is needed to make your last paragraph less problematic, and wide participation - to gain that experience first-hand and also to make it very expensive to blackmail\bribe\threaten enough people. This might also make a referendum an event a bit more rare, because it won’t come to that.
In general it’s very cool that such a system even exists as a proof that nothing is impractical about it.
Fully direct on a Nation state level would maybe be possible now with the Internet.
That’s my point. It might seem dangerous to rely on the Internet for such basic matters, but it’s already being used to great effect to undermine all democracies. So there’s no choice, it’s like an arms race. (Still, probably for elections it’d make sense to have a countrywide parallel intranet, so that someone’s error in setting up a BGP router wouldn’t disrupt it.).
But yeah, this system has it’s weaknesses with complicated or emotional topics. But then again, we are all humans.
That’s the other side of the problem - modern easiness of propaganda.
OK, I live in Russia, just rather sad to see how many other countries are slowly drifting in the same regrettable unsavory direction.
None. I’m using “compromise” here in the sense of compromising between democracy and elites, with the world order normal 200 years ago. Today those compromises don’t work because of technological progress and different makeup of societies.
Just like those in the USA.
OK. Suppose so.
I’ve just been reminded that in the wonderful 70s people felt a bit similarly suppressed and the future dim as compared to 60s as we do now as compared to 00s.
Nothing is new.
What is important, though, is that nothing existing has been given to us be benevolent or harsh, kind or cruel gods. It has all been built by people just like us.
To dream and to work are the most important parts.
What else do people use itch.io for?
Strong means attractive. Not getting pummeled in WWII and making some profits, being complicit in some crimes (turning back Jews), and in general being on top for many decades make you look strong.
Democracy is an infant still learning to walk.
Bullshit. It’s older than gunpowder.
And this argument has been used for every political system in history. Even in USSR in materials approved by censors it was normal to joke about it.
You plug the holes and add new institutions for oversight.
Why don’t you do that with real-life mechanisms? A moving part of a machine has corroded enough to have a hole unintended by design. Go on, plug it. Oh, it’s better to replace the part.
That aside, I think you’ve missed my specific arguments, not providing any of your own. Those things about participation as wide as possible and rotation. This means that there should be as many political roles as possible (of a delegate or of a secretary or of anyone), often rotated, with the same person not being able to hold the same or similar post for longer than N months, and with sortition based on some pseudo-random mechanism (pseudo-random to be able to check the results for fraud). To reduce the power of any single delegate or bureaucrat and to make lobbying, bribing and blackmailing them harder. To simultaneously make the population more politically literate - by almost every citizen, ideally, participating in some kind of daily decision-making work. Not voting once a year (at best) from among choices given to them by someone else.
That’s what con artists do - provide the victim with an illusion of choice.
You don’t shoot the damn baby and start over because you know how you’d force everyone to do it.
That’s exactly what you do. One consistent system does one thing by design. Another consistent system does another thing by design. Something in-between organically evolved does neither. Evolution is the survival of the fittest - fittest for survival. So an organically evolved system is approximating the optimum of power. The status quo.
What it does not approximate over time is any idea of public good. That would be nuts - so, metaphorically, you’ve built a wooden bridge, do you think it’ll become more or less reliable over time under snow and rain and sun? Is a 100 years old bridge better than a bridge just built and tested?
And the optimum of power is formed by the existing system among other things.
Which means that it becomes more and more static and degenerate.
Enforcement.