It's easy to fall into the trap you're describing, but that doesn't mean that that's what is happening. It looks like the battles here are genuinely shaping up to be fought in software.
The "battles" are shaping up to be fought the same way they were previously - regulations forcing big huge heavy disclaimers on financial products, cryptocoin-based or otherwise, that state that the returns stated are not actually guaranteed.
No, software can’t fix all of the institutional and political problems, but it can present a more efficient modern system that helps generate the political clout people will need on the battlefield. We have systemic problems and no they’re not all going to go away with better software. But we need catalysts that motivate people, win hearts, and pierce through the apathetic menagerie.
With 0 regulation and no recourse built into crypto, one poor soul lost 50.8 million in 900 bitcoins.
You're not going to replace people problems with tech. Period.
Sadly, there will always be people who benefit from misattribution of a people problem to tech.
You know what other kinds of regulations are onerous? Everything aviation related. Every corner of aviation. And yet we're not clamoring to deregulate aviation because the consequences are so clear and self-evident.
Regulations are generally there for a reason. If they aren't, they need to be amended, we don't need to make our own money, except for blackjack and hookers.
People don't think of the failing power of international sanctions.
The consequences of a fully de-regulated financial system will likely lead to more armed conflicts. That said, I agree that the political system is broken, but that's a problem of democracy.
[1]: https://www.alt-m.org/2021/07/06/the-fable-of-the-cats/
Aviation is a great example of this. Yes aviation in most of the developed world continues to be extremely safe and the regulations are largely written in blood, off the backs of many failed aviation experiments. But regulations _are_ stifling aircraft design and the FAA is trying to desperately figure out how to not calcify the industry without endangering people. Anything but your largest passenger movers are all either from the 1960s or just reruns of these '60s designs. Despite huge advances in sensor fidelity, reliability, and electronics process changes, the cost to certify a new aircraft design is so high that most aircraft makers don't bother and just coast on old designs that have already been approved and are mostly just grandfathered in designs. It's taking decades for leaded aviation fuel to be phased out because of the difficulty in iterating on engine designs due to above regulations. We could have been much farther along in aircraft energy efficiency, maybe even electrification, if these regulations weren't as onerous. (One could even make a case, though probably unsubstantiated, that had regulations not had this impact that aviation would be cleaner and would lead to lower pollution-based mortality, so a regulation that's _ensuring_ blood.) Experimental aviation and sport aviation regulations in the US are a direct response to this slowdown in innovation and I hope they pave the way for more lightweight regulatory out-valves in aviation.
Ham radio is another great example of a medium that is dying due to regulations. There's large restrictions on digital modes and encryption on multiple ham bands. Because of the internet then, Ham doesn't really offer anyone anything that they can't do on the internet, so most people these days just don't care. The regulations themselves are in place to make sure the spectrum allocated to amateurs isn't abused; allow encryption and commercial vendors will use Ham bands for their own private operations, and allowing too many digital modes could (but doesn't necessarily) increase the noise floor. That doesn't mean that regulation doesn't have a strangling effect on the medium as a whole.
It's important to remember that as technology improves, regulations may have to be rethought. I'm fully onboard with the idea that regulations need to work hand-in-hand with the market to produce desirable outcomes, but to deify regulations like this is much too coarse a filter for a complicated, nuanced issue like finance. It provides a nice fight with clearly delineated sides when you pit "regulation good" people against "regulation bad" people, but the truth is that regulations are complicated and IMO should be reevaluated in the face of change.
Depends what "good" means. Something interesting about disruption is it often starts out worse than the incumbent in every way except one key one which people see value in. The incumbent then doesn't see it as a threat because it's so much worse, until a critical mass of users who value the one better thing builds up and the incumbent is disrupted.
I'm a firm believer disruption of big tech will work that way. PeerTube is worse than YouTube in many ways, except that it's federated. Mastodon is harder to use than Twitter for the typical user. I believe in both of them because I believe the one thing they inarguably do better (putting power back in the hands of the people through federation) is sufficiently significant, especially as faith continues to erode in the status quo gatekeepers.
To value something is a choice. People are going to chose to value whichever network/token/whatever is actually worth switching to.
How in the world is DeFi supposed to help this? From my POV DeFi makes it worse (advertising funding can now be untraceable/unauditable).
But if you're supporting your platform by any other means, you can just go without ads entirely. And DeFi is all about finding ways to support things that you like without giving untrustworthy middle men like Google or a bank custody over it.
When a server gives you something other than what you asked it for with the aim of altering your behavior, that's called malware. We tolerate it in the form of ads because there aren't good alternatives available. If DeFi can fund an alternative, internet advertising can go die in a fire.
This is an example where people do have a way to pay for TVs (no need for microtransactions, TVs cost hundreds of dollars already!). But the TV makers have decided they can make more money by adding Ads, so why would they not?
This happened with cable TV too. You pay for the TV already, as a subscription even, why do you also get Ads? Because the cable company gets more money.
Can companies live while just charging for their services? absolutely. Will a lot of companies try to add additional revenue flows anyways? Also yes. In theory a company could compete on a 'no ads' platform. In practice, industry after industry realizes that they can just make more money at the turn of a switch. DeFi doesn't fix that. The advertisers are still going to come calling with their checkbooks.
I grant that DeFi does have some potential for micropayments that are hard with traditional finance. That could help make some blogs and small things ad free. But my point is that making payments has not at all stopped ads from invading every other industry. TV ads are not because your purchase had too much finance overhead. The advertisers will still be there, checkbook in hand.
Consider gitcoin, for instance. Yeah, it processes payments, but more importantly it tracks developer reputation, user donations, and facilitates aggregate decision making (re: voting on how to spend the money).
Are you saying that eventually, the users will vote to have ads included in their open source software? I think not. It's only when somebody is able to exploit a privileged position as owner-of-the-medium that you get greed-driven service degradation like that. But we're learning how to build ownerless mediums. Whatever problems they have, I don't think they'll be the same-old middleman problems that we're used to.
Drives me batshit that amazon does this on Prime. Play the fucking film you bastards
The only thing that DeFi changes about this scenario is that it's going to get easier for me to pay the people who make the content available in the format that I prefer. When it's sufficiently mature, that'll mean paying the artists as well. It's just a shame that we're not there yet.
Those things still exist. Focusing only on digital advertising when ads are being pushed everywhere is missing the point.
If Web3 becomes popular, it frees the online tip jar from a particular platform (eg Patreon) and decentralizes it so anyone can set it up for themselves, with far lower network effects required.
But... advertising isn't why these services trend towards angering content. Engagement is why. Whether you are paying with ad views or micropayments, if services want you to keep engaged then they will be incentivized to promote this kind of content. And since things like youtube premium (or whatever it is currently called) exist today and per-view payment systems have been set up by Google in the past (and already died), I don't think that funding these websites with BTC donations or whatever would change a thing.
If you think the firehose of self-referential click-bait needs to be made even more addictive, I'm really not sure what Web3 can offer.
OTOH, reintroducing the friction of having to decide whether the next click is worth your time and attention (i.e. money) is where it's at.
The proposed web3 model seems far more likely to be like those abusive micro-payment games with constant prompts to pay for something, with a page's worth of content moved behind successive paywalls since publishers aren't going to switch to a system which pays even less and you'd need to ask permission before charging someone.
This also adds problems with people who don't have money or aren't allowed to spend it (children, elderly, etc.) or the same scandals when those people are taken advantage of, not to mention the privacy impacts of effectively creating a super-cookie which can be used to track people all over the web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin
A neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for something.
"What have you lost, Mulla?"
"My key," said Nasrudin.
After a few minutes of searching, the other man said, "Where did you drop it?"
"At home."
"Then why, for heaven's sake, are you looking here?"
"There is more light here."
According to Shah, the German clown Karl Valentin (1882–1948) used to act the story out on stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart#Guiding_phil...
DeFi and crypto have already forced major changes to TradFi by exactly this mechanism, and they will continue to do so, even if DeFi doesn't succeed on its own terms.
Consider that as a coder/IT person, computers are just about the only lever I have at my disposal that has any chance of working. My voice gets lost in the noise floor of a democratic election, politics is dirty and more likely to turn you into a corrupt politician than into a corruption-resistant sane voice, and volunteering only has a limited impact.
If I got gold by sheer blind luck of trying to solve problems with coding, then at least I had a ticket for that lottery.
What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.
If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those.
It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.
And a lot of what governmental positions today are doing is processing files, basically mapping files to files. A lot of corruption stems from the fact that this mapping can be done outside of the law with nobody noticing. This can be fixed.
Q: How does an engineer cure constipation?
A: He works it out with a pencil.
Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that.
I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies, many of them American, to help construct The Great Firewall. It was just this year that DuckDuckGo stopped giving results for "Tank Man" in the Free US because Bing didn't want to offend China.
Facebook is being used as platform for misinformation, both for political and vaccine related. Facebook was supposed to connect us together, instead it's driven us apart.
And now it's blockchain/crytpo/defi which will save us all.
So in 2021 the joke is:
Q: How does a crypto fanatic cure constipation?
A: He offers shitcoins and convinces other people to mine for them.
And I mean real laws, the ones written in congress.
Whatever we are doing, in a sense, is trying to sidestep these laws.
What I think you can say is that software has had many good effects in various ways for various members of society and many bad effects for various members. Those effects and members are sometimes overlapping, sometimes not.
There is no clear line between baby and bathwater. It's like trying to decide if iron or wheat has made society better or worse. I don't even think it's a particularly interesting question.
A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
> A better question to me is, given where we are now, what incremental steps can we make it better, and for whom?
This is indeed a better question, and perhaps the best we can do in many situations. But we have plenty of systems where small changes have large secondary consequences or conversely small changes are just drowned out by the fact that the system is in some like of local minima
How is software making society worse?
Except for economic inequality and the climate.
More poor have been lifted out of poverty, but even so the gap between the richest and poorest is growing. That's a problem not just because it means the poorest could be doing even better than they are, but because inequality is itself a massively destabilizing force that undermines trust and weakens the social fabric.
Our air and water is OK to consume, and the amount of forest cover in Western countries is currently alright. But the diversity and density of natural life, especially animal life, is plummeting. We are living in a Silent Spring right now but it snuck up so fast most of us didn't notice. I remember how loud the outdoors were when I saw a children. Insects buzzing, frogs croaking, fish splashing, rodents rustling. When I go into the woods these days, it looks mostly the same, but it's so much quieter.
Everything seems worse because the media is shouting everything negative to get your attention.
I just saw a bird eat some seed outside. I never see or hear anything like that on the news ever.
By fragmenting the cognitive capacities of regular human beings.
By letting hatred and insanity reach a global audience.
By diverting countless person-hours of intelligent labor towards largely useless endeavours.
By becoming an opaque intermediary to an increasing fraction of all social interactions.
If we're talking about a material object, there would be a more or less clear distinction between "what it is", "how it's made", "how it's used", etc.
If we're talking about software, I don't think that's the case any more.
1. Society is getting worse.
2. I'm really good at writing software.
3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society.
That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large:
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
It doesn't matter how good you are at software if you don't have a software problem. Many problems cannot effectively be transformed into software problems. Instead of continuing to search for our keys where the light is, we should be bringing the light to where we lost our keys. That means accepting that we have to get outside of our comfort zone and improve our non-software skills. (This does not mean immediately thinking "I'll write software to bring the light to where I lost my keys!")
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect