If history is any guide, regulation will strengthen the incumbents. This would prevent people from moving to decentralized platforms like Mastodon: <a href="https://joinmastodon.org/" rel="nofollow">https://joinmastodon.org/</a><p>There is a threat worse than the power of Google or Facebook. It's the threat of the surveillance state. Just look at how China is implementing a ranking system for its citizens. Regulation that strengthens the incumbents will pave the way for it, since it will concentrate everybody's data into a few regulated data brokers.
A note to the readers - the real article starts somewhere after the middle point - the whole first part is just rehashing all the information YC readers know by heart.<p>The main thesis seems to be that framing the problem as health issue (as the so called Tech Humanists try to do) is:
- hiding the political issues related to the power the tech companies have on our lives
- giving them even more power - because they are the experts here and in health we defer a lot of our judgement to the doctors
- is based on a mythical 'human nature as separate from our technology' idea<p>What to do with it: use anti monopoly laws, tax, introduce rules about the usage of private data and build public/coop infrastructure.<p>I am not so sure about public/coop infrastructure part - I don't think government is automatically better than a company - but maybe it should be tried. But the most difficult part will be the 'rules about usage of private data', that goes much deeper than just 'protecting privacy' and I am not sure how it can work - you cannot stop an individual from thinking about you and using all his memories in his thinking, sure a person is not a perfect analogy to organization.<p>By the way, the Facebook 'time well spent' project priorities our private communications over public ones - it is really about hooking us even deeper into the machine.
"...but the solutions they are offering could just help the big players get even more powerful." That's why we should support startups from outside the valley, especially the smaller ones.
It's great what their trying to do. But if we can't talk about the fact that sometimes we don't even need technology around us is worrying. E.g. Sometimes you don't have to be on facebook, you shouldn't be on facebook, it's detrimental for you to be on facebook.<p>Good, human centric design is part of the solution, but sometimes technology just needs to get out of the way completely.
> One can easily imagine a version of Facebook that embraces the principles of tech humanism while remaining a profitable and powerful monopoly. In fact, these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities.<p>I'm sorry but I can't.
It’s extremely telling that this <i>huge</i> article uses the words ad/advertise/advertising only twice. This is basically a puff piece that talks about all the great changes coming that change absolutely nothing about the fundamental reality of modern SV companies.<p>Of course advertising is not the problem! Design just has to be more “<i>humanising</i>” and the problems inherent with surveillance capitalism would disappear.
tldr; "In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention. To guide us out of that wilderness, tech humanists say we need more humanising. They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us."
Why do these articles always have to mention Russia, fake news and the 2016 US election? I've noticed this pattern a while ago and it's always somewhere in the second paragraph.