Re:Cal Newport: It's Time to Dismantle the Technopoly
by bediger4000 on Monday December 18, 2023 @06:50PM
(#38690003)
I read this, and I'm not sure what concrete steps Newport wants us to take. Sure, social media sucks, and if Facebook and TikTok disappeared we'd all be better off. But what should we do? Declare Meta a monopoly and bust it up? This just seems like verbal flailing about.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Cal Newport: It's Time to Dismantle the Technopoly
by antonvs on Monday December 18, 2023 @07:06PM
(#38690130)
With problems like this, the path from identifying the problem to identifying concrete steps to address it is not necessarily trivial. It also ideally involves society as a whole.
As such, discussion of the nature of the problem and broad-strokes ideas about how it might be addressed - e.g. "techno-selectionism" - can be an important part of the process of improving the situation.
As for your proposed solution, breakups of companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and probably quite a few more, is certainly one potentially promising possibility.
Re:Cal Newport: It's Time to Dismantle the Technopoly
by ParseItAgainSam on Monday December 18, 2023 @07:32PM
(#38690300)
Even short of breaking them up, I would love to see more scrutiny of acquisitions. The buy all your disruptors to kill them would be good for everyone, except maybe VCs
Re:Cal Newport: It's Time to Dismantle the Technopoly
by floxy on Monday December 18, 2023 @07:27PM
(#38690270)
Newport is the "Deep Work" guy whose first step was "off-load your trivial tasks to your secretary". He lost me at that, since I need the 5 steps before that where I get a secretary.