Re:Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine
by clairity on Tuesday August 23, 2022 @12:32PM
(#32567390)
the conventional counter-argument to that is that anything we care about can be valued, which in turn can be monetized, so everything under (and including) the sun can be compared and optimized for in a decentralized way.
that's much harder (and perhaps P=NP impossible) to do in practice for qualitative aspects of life (e.g., love, wonder, beauty, etc.), which is why we have such an imbalance of valuing things that are easier to value (food, machines, services, etc.).
It is an incentive system which maximizes on only one kind of efficiency.
Consumers and investors are not capable of making collective / aggregate market decisions on any criterion other than profit.
Moral judgements play no part in it. Explicitly not so, in fact.
The individual agents in this structure are merely transitory carriers of a larger overriding process. Even if as large as Oracle or Google or whatever.
You could make Oracle go away but the logic remains. The hydra has many heads.
And so here we are.