> The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation.
The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc.
But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.
It's a for-profit company and they have never tried to hide that.
If you know a way to make money from exclusively showing users content that makes them happier, better informed, better rested, etc., then by all means go ahead -- I sincerely wish you the best. But you won't need my good wishes, because you will soon outcompete YouTube and all the rest with your healthy-yet-still-profitable alternative.
It's almost as though basing our society around profit maximization yields negative outcomes. But I'm sure this is just a blip that the Market will correct for.
Or we could collectively ask ourselves what we want and do that, instead of leaving the decision to the most selfish of our kind. That was never a good system to begin with.
>we could collectively ask ourselves what we want and do that
That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years -- and TTBOMK the system that gets chosen has so far had capitalism as an important component every single time, despite the option to vote for parties that eschew it partly or completely.
>>we could collectively ask ourselves what we want and do that
>That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years
Not sure what country you live in but in Canada they just give you a list of 4 or 5 names of people and you choose one, there's no asking of people what they'd like to do in the slightest. In fact, it's even worse: the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
It is fascinating how well done story telling can make people oblivious to what physically occurs.
Is there a law in Canada that prohibits people from forming political parties opposed to capitalism, or other prohibitive hurdles (e.g., a large registration fee) that prevent most people from doing so in practice?
If the answer is no, then the fact that no one currently on the ballot represents such a party is just evidence that Canadians, today, have almost no interest in these political approaches.
>the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
I agree this is a serious problem with existing democratic systems, but I don't know what to do about it. In theory people punish politicians who fail to deliver by voting them out, but in practice, a lot happens between elections, and people's attention wanders.
Maybe, but nobody has invaded the US or Western Europe for a while now.
I think the counterargument that I would mount is that what people want, or think what they want, isn't necessarily what is good for them. This is obviously a very dangerous line of thought - because it can justify all sorts of oppression - but I think it's nevertheless true.
I find solace in knowing that I don't have a say in it. Because regardless of what the idea was, whenever someone tried to force everyone to go along with it and base a society on it, it turned out disastrously.
The only thing we can all do it be open minded, honest, and set a good example for the next generation who will take over and hopefully improve on what we did, while making their own mistakes.
Profit-maximizing business is the engine of economic growth. Looking over the past couple hundred years, I’d say the outcomes have been nothing short of spectacular.
I think that entirely depends on the outcomes you value. If you value economic growth, then yes -- it's been spectacular. However, it has also come at great cost in terms of other desirable things.
It's a tradeoff. Some things are better, other things are worse. There's nothing wrong, and everything right, with examining those tradeoffs and deciding if they need adjustment.
Unregulated profit maximising business has killed how many people through the trans atlantic slave trade?
Without regulation, this is what happens - the bank would collect your organs for payment if they could. Buinesses have no ethical standards.
Profit maximing business did not invent antibiotics, did not invent sanitation, did not create public sewers, running water, soap, GPS, and clorination of water.
Because I'm generally aware of western economic and political history from 1600-1800. I'm not conflating them, they were in fact conflated.
Soviet russian and chinese industrialization was different, but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
> Soviet russian and chinese industrialization was different
Of course. "Industrialization requires profit, except when it doesn't". Got it.
> but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
I didn't realize they used steam ships to transport slaves from Africa to Americas, where they made them work in factories to produce industrial goods.
There is no ideological war, it is just an unfounded statement that has no direct line of reasoning. What does slavery have to do with industrialization? There weren't slaves in many pre-industrial societies. And the fact that you switched 'industrialization' for 'profit maximizing businesses' as if no one would notice (then acknowledging that communists did figure out how to do it) makes me wonder if you even thought about for more than a few seconds.
I was under the impression that most pre-industrial societies had slavery. Or at least most societies that were successful.
The Bible has passages on how to be a moral slave owner.
As far as conflating industrialization with capitalism, I'm sorry, I'm actually very far left politically but this is just a fact. It's underappreciated in the west that 5 year plans worked well, but they were following a template 200 years, 2 full centuries, later. 100 years after successful British capitalists banned slavery.
You can be under any impression you want but that doesn't make you not completely wrong. The Bible is not a history book, and if it was, it wouldn't be the only one.
And calling 'industrialization' 'capitalism' and 'profit maximizing business' all the same thing and then shrugging it off after getting called out, you are just showing that you ignorant of what any of it means. And your last two sentences are non-sensical -- I literally cannot figure out what 5 year plans have to do with slavery in the west.
I'm not calling those things the same at all. I actually draw distinctions between them. But there's a historical record of how they happened together after not happening separately for thousands of years.
There's a principle of charity when reading that you may want to consider.
Sorry but you don't get charity when you are asserting a point which is completely unfounded. Please find something which will back up your point besides 'they all happened at once' because that isn't even true. There is no correlation with 'capitalism' 'industry' and 'profit' with 'demise of slavery'. I beg you to look up what was happening in the Congo by Belgium when the automobile was being popularized.
There happens to be a correlation with a bunch of nice things because we happen to live in the modern era, but you can't attribute everything to capitalism because, as we noted it was not the only system in place which did these things.
I would like you to find some scholarly research which can bolster your theory.
Before industrialization, slavery and serfdom are common for thousands of years.
After industrialization, it goes away within 1-200 years every place that industrialized. Probably because it's not economical anymore in the presence of industrial production.
You're saying that this observation is so out of pocket that it doesn't deserve a charitable hearing?
Sure -- it makes sense in the same way that it makes sense industrialization got rid of eunuchs. A barbaric practice has died out in certain parts of the world because we live in the modern age.
To say that wouldn't have happened without industrialization, which wouldn't have happened without profit maximization, which wouldn't have happened without capitalism, is not logical. There is nothing inherent in capitalism which requires profit maximization at the expense of humans, it just requires exploitation of private property (note exploitation here means 'being used' not 'being used in a necessarily harmful manner). There is nothing inherent in industrialization which requires profit maximization, it just requires a cheap source of energy and labor and a market (note that this can be a planned market as in communism, or a market in which the demand is created only for war production and is fed by looting conquered territory, as the fascists did in WWII).
And there is nothing which precludes slavery existing because any of those other things exist. In fact, there were massive amounts of slaves who toiled under Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the modern era, and we only don't have them now because they lost the war.
My "theory" is a straightforward recollection of the way things did in fact happen, on this planet and in this universe. Europeans started the industrial ball rolling with for profit companies. Sorry if you don't like it.
It's an entity permitted by society under the premise that allowing such entities is a net benefit. We can and should continuously re-evaluate that benefit and adjust what we allow accordingly.
The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc.
But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.