Re:Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface
by TeMPOraL on Tuesday March 30, 2021 @06:46AM
(#26633077)
> This is important lesson. Capitalism is a great system, but it cannot be narrowed to greed. Capitalism requires working ethics since we are not able to regulate every aspect of life - it is practically impossible.
The market is literally a big, greedy - in algorithmic sense - optimization engine. It optimizes away everything that stands in the way of making more money. It optimizes away quality, and it absolutely optimizes away any and all ethics. Marketing and advertising are a clear example of this in two separate ways: on the object level, they're already doing everything they can that isn't strictly illegal[0]; on the meta level, you see that competing on marketing and advertising has a better ROI than actually trying to make better products.
You cannot expect a sense of ethics from a system which requires ethics as a containment vessel, and continuously tries to erode it. Much like you can't expect water to just keep flowing in a straight line, in absence of a bank or pipe that would constrain its expansion.
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[0] - And enforced. GDPR demonstrates that with insufficient enforcement, otherwise reputable companies will absolutely break the law.
The market is literally a big, greedy - in algorithmic sense - optimization engine. It optimizes away everything that stands in the way of making more money. It optimizes away quality, and it absolutely optimizes away any and all ethics. Marketing and advertising are a clear example of this in two separate ways: on the object level, they're already doing everything they can that isn't strictly illegal[0]; on the meta level, you see that competing on marketing and advertising has a better ROI than actually trying to make better products.
You cannot expect a sense of ethics from a system which requires ethics as a containment vessel, and continuously tries to erode it. Much like you can't expect water to just keep flowing in a straight line, in absence of a bank or pipe that would constrain its expansion.
--
[0] - And enforced. GDPR demonstrates that with insufficient enforcement, otherwise reputable companies will absolutely break the law.