Yes, it's like an informal representative democracy. Those who specialize in something should consider they are part of the minority capable of representing the interests of those who do not specialize in it - tech or otherwise.
The nice thing about tech is that it's possible for us to push back by hacking on stuff and opening it up rather than resorting to legislative tools, and this can have the same effect of forcing those manufacturers hand but without the artificiality of law.
Democratizing technology isn't fundamentally about Freedom and Openness and Fairness.
It's about making technology useable by everyday people.
You can do that by making everyone an engineer, or by placing arbitrary limits that increase the likelihood of people using the thing, or any number of ways. Limiting access to technology can absolutely democratize it.
I would like to point out that regarding moderation, tech companies have been asking for guidelines and new laws for a decade now. Ageing lawmakers have been unable to provide them and we start to see shy initiatives from the EU regarding privacy laws but roughly most of the water in which tech companies operate are still no mans lands.
All that make me think that even tough you're right that the end result will not be democratic, I wouldn't throw them the stone and accuse them of acting in bad faith.
While I certainly agree that tech has been able to 'dominate,' your use as an example of a 'stable approach' with 'as few regulations as possible' that 'removes such absolute power from a few unelected individuals' feels ironic, considering the... absolute power that unelected individuals like Zuck have.
Alas, I don't think it's likely any legislative body will pass meaningful tech regulation anytime soon.
There are already people lobbying heavily for all the shitty things I could see a tech lobby lobbying for. MPAA/RIAA, protectionist labor unions, 'military-industrial complex', etc.
Tech lacks representation though, particularly compared with how much lobbying much less affluent industries manage to do.
Yes, sorry I should have clarified I was referring specifically to legislature surrounding tech. I agree, many of the people who make legislation for tech barely understand how to use a computer in the first place and rely on crappy metaphors and explanations from other people. A more technology-literate set of politicians would help hugely.
Or to use a more successful example, it could look more like our chemical weapons conventions.
I'm generally all for democratization of technology, open data etc. but some technology (e.g. bomb design, the smallpox virus, chemical weapons, risky AI experiments) I don't think make sense to democratize.
It seems there are perhaps three(?) options that come up:
1) Constrain big tech via regulation (thereby in some sense transferring the power to regulators/government, with the hope that it would in turn be influenced by democratic processes)
2) Or, directly influence big tech behaviour through boycotts and other consumer action.
3) Or, break up big tech forcibly or again through consumer action to switch to alternatives, thereby diffusing this power.
Some of this may be reasonable, but many of tech regulation laws do not help the customers, and they would never pass in a referendum.
On the bright side maybe this kind of thing will help tech giants to understand that they must disrupt the harmful bureaucracy that infects governments all over the world. We already have technology to make direct/liquid democracy possible [1] [2], and a small push from a company like Facebook or Telegram can help to fundamentally change the way politics works, and the type of people it attracts.
Yeah, I don't necessarily think geeks will come out on top as far as these particular technologies go. Mostly I object on principle to the government enforcing controls on how I can modify/use/destroy/whatever my property. To me that principle's more important than any particular battle over circumventing dongles or whatever.
I see where you're going with that, and it's particularly an issue in France, where most lawmakers seem extremely ignorant about anything technical. However, I'd rather live with that than with, say, regulatory capture by Microsoft. Having businesses and governments live in symbiosis is never a good idea.
Exactly. The hard problem is to build and maintain the democratic institutions required by a developed country. I find some people seem to be willing to gamble that for a tech solution.
Being someone who has been in the tech field for well over 20 years, I always look upon any legislation that deals with tech, with suspect. Sadly, I venture that people in other fields feel the same way when legislation is geared toward their areas of expertise. Elected officials are truly like aristocrats, who are too far removed from the world in which the govern. And because of this, they rely too often on lobbyists and their overwhelmed staff to tell them what to do/what to believe.
I feel like we have to regulate this at a governmental level to get anywhere. We keep automating more and more of our society and its clear we're unable to protect it but the casuals don't get that and keep charging ahead and we enable them. The amount of power we gift to a given attacker seems to just grow and grow.
But how do we achieve political intervention when technologists and politics appear to be completely incompatible? The closest I've seen is the Pirate Party which never get more than a few percent or that democratic candidate (Yang was it?) and he was pretty fucking clueless on the tech when poked with any significant vigour.
Yes, but a big part of the problem is a lack of agreement about what regulators are actually trying to achieve, and there being a lose coalition of political forces on tech regulation who actually have mutually contradictory goals and just agree on the mechanism.
That is likely to cause significant issues in this process. For example, there is absolutely a political element that seeks to attack the market power of large technology companies because they want to force more control on public speech, and some who want to attack the power in order to explicitly prevent that.
That's a slippery slope argument. I know regulating tech is not going to be popular here, and maybe we leave it for corporations that are valued at over a certain amount, but right now foreign governments are hacking our financial services companies, communications companies, phones, laptops, everything. 95% of the time a it's an extremely easy hack that would have been discovered by a routine scan.
It's not "more power over tech," it's the job of government. Distribution of power, promoting competition, tweaking the rules as little as is deemed necessary.
Is it really so outrageous to consider there might be a consolidation of power in a way we haven't dealt with before, seeing Amazon crush partners overnight, or Facebook impacting elections?
The very same HN that longs for the early internet, with web rings and personality, doesn't have a problem with Google scrapping content from pages you would have otherwise visited, further limiting smaller website's revenue opportunity?
For those of you not seeing clear anticompetitive behaviors that warrant discovery -- where is your line?
Yes, corruption is a problem, but I disagree that it is the heart or bulk of the problem.
A 2018 Gallup poll found that only 25% of Americans thought there was too little government regulation. Another 33% thought we had the right amount, and 39% thought there was too much.
So I would say that for the most part, while the representatives are not representing your views, their views are consistent with the majority of America.
I say this as someone that believes the US desperately needs more environmental regulation. I would also love if congress could create some common sense regulations to standardize website/app TOS and privacy policies. But that's just me.
I think there is a trend to blame "politicians" for all of our problems as if they were some exogenous force. Unfortunately, for the most part I think they represent us just fine. If democracy is a government by the people, we can't reasonably expect that it will be much different from the people in it.
I dislike when politicians are reflexively held responsible for our societal ills, because I feel it is a kind of mental laziness to avoid having to engage with the large portion of the nation that disagrees.
Yes, yes, yes. Legislation and regulation towards proper competition in the IT space is the only way forward. For all of its history, high-tech has been the wild-wild-west: good for the powerful few, not good for others. GDPR or the-right-to-repair are baby steps. The monopolies we have now are like your grandma putting sleeping pills in your food so you don't leave. It's a rigor mortis hold on tech.
The nice thing about tech is that it's possible for us to push back by hacking on stuff and opening it up rather than resorting to legislative tools, and this can have the same effect of forcing those manufacturers hand but without the artificiality of law.
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