This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world

Re:This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world by lacker on Sunday October 05, 2008 @06:07PM (#324385)

It's not like if you outlaw corporations, suddenly a new form of organization will appear where nobody is greedy any more. It's not like "the corporations" are sitting on the secret to infinite wind energy and they're just afraid of change. Corporations are made up of people. They are not perfect because people are not perfect and organizing large groups of people is hard. Outlawing corporations will not solve either of those problems.

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Re:This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world by jmtame on Sunday October 05, 2008 @08:29PM (#324476)

Which would you rather have:

A resource-driven society where technological advancements allow humans to offset work with newer innovations.

Or a financially-driven society where technological advancements put humans into unemployment and make a few guys at the very top extremely wealthy.

I'm not saying get rid of corporations. I'm saying we don't need them. They fight to maintain the status quo.

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Re:This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world by unalone on Sunday October 05, 2008 @07:40PM (#324443)

Yeah. And you can't exactly say that corporations never do good, either. Because an overwhelming amount of the time, they do. Even when they do bad things, they often do it at the whim of the public. (To pick a lesser example: remember that the people really DO like sensationalist news and cheesy, humorless sitcoms.)

Blaming corporations does nothing. Trying to FIX corporations, yes. Trying to REMOVE them is ignorant and short-sighted.

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Re:This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world by JulianMorrison on Sunday October 05, 2008 @08:27PM (#324475)

A broadcast medium, or a mass producer, makes more money making something a lot of people like a little, than something which polarizes customers into love and apathy.

From this springs every horror and alienation in the 20th century pop culture.

Upside: it's a passing technological phase, and we're nearly all the way through.

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Re:This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world by unalone on Sunday October 05, 2008 @09:05PM (#324499)

I wish it was a passing phase. But people love it everywhere. I saw it two years ago on Reddit, and have since seen it flame up into a ridiculous deluge of fringe theories and an absolute death of everything interesting.

People like everything but fair and detailed reporting. News reflects this. Same with culture. People like buying vast amounts of worthless things. It doesn't matter what field it's in. Geeks collect as much as rifle hunters, they just collect different things. That's led to an industry that specializes in creating excess.

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Re:This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world by JulianMorrison on Sunday October 05, 2008 @09:16PM (#324508)

Reddit is still a mass producer of sorts, and the score stands in for money - the same dynamic occurs. That which titillates the many out-scores that which fascinates the few. (Reddit has tried with limited success to protect enclaves: subreddits. They have created smaller and more elite lowest-common-denominators. Better than nothing, for now.)

I say it's a passing phase because where tech is headed is: auto-generated completely personal everything. The limit of "the few" is "the one", and the mass production dynamic breaks down at that limit.

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Re:This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world by unalone on Monday October 06, 2008 @12:52AM (#324625)

They've been predicting that since, what, the 20s? I've seen every attempt to give personalized information and it never works. In fact, every attempt I've seen is nothing short of laughable.

The problem with that concept is that it assumes we know exactly what it is that we like, and that it's easy to communicate that. Neither assumption is correct. As we learn, we constantly adjust what we like, at a fairly extreme rate, and it tends to be impossible to express in any way other than the extremely specific.

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