DanielBMarkham

Related question: I do hour-long, 4-10 party video conference calls about once a week. Each one might have between 10-200 viewers.

This seems like a good area to get screwed, ie, pay a huge difference between a COTS black-box solution and just doing it myself. Last week I started playing around with setting up a RTMP server.

But hell, I'm still back to bandwidth. Are you saying there's a way to directly cache realtime streaming video on the cloud providers, skip the store-and-publish route entirely?

One thing I was amazed with was the huge amount of money a company could spend going into this area without doing some serious research. There are too many options and too many variables for most non-tech folks to consider.

No problem if you don't want to answer. I thought it might be something other HNers would want to know.

I'll take a shot, assuming that you are asking how to manage a technology team, not how to understand technology at a wider scale. You need both tech leadership and end-to-end/shallow-deep abilities. But the tech side is a different question entirely. Looks like some other folks have provided answers so I won't go there. (The tech side is a lot to go into in a thread, and would include some kind of conversation figuring out where you are technically. "I'm a SWE" doesn't begin to cover it.)

Without any thought at all:

- One Minute Manager

- Debugging the development process

- The Culture Code

- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

- Difficult Conversations

Take some negotiation and interviewing hands-on courses.

I find with a lot of more interesting topics, I have to come up with my own definition, then measure it against what various people say.

Good art, at least to me, is art that has emotional impact over time. I can view a painting by a master and it will affect me. I can hear one of Beethoven's symphonies and somehow I'm inside his head during that time.

These do not seem to be things you can measure in the moment, or at least I can't. It takes decades to sort out art that people like from art that continues to carry strong emotional impact. So, in my mind at least, there's a lot of room for subjectivity when talking about modern art. As things age, however, much of that subjectivity goes away, and it goes away for the exact reasons pg outlines.

There is such a thing as good taste, but in terms of modern art it's difficult if not impossible to put your finger on it.

It's interesting. There _is_ a monoculture here, perhaps even an echo chamber, but it doesn't break down along the usual lines.

I like good conversations, like most. Not arguments, but folks simply talking and asking questions about things that they have massive internal disagreements about. I find such conversations useful to understand better both others and myself. (And I don't mean necessarily politics. Anything, really, except perhaps for that tabs-versus-spaces thing. Ain't going nowhere near that one)

In that spirit, I remember posting links to essays I've written like "Does God Exist?" (It was a recap of a Summer spent reading and listening to essays and lectures on the subject)

I would not do that today. In a big way, the site has gotten more, well, mediocre. It has somewhat unwritten standards and dang and the bunch do a great job of helping us keep them. But there's this huge list of rules and topics about content that are strictly enforced by the mob, and they wax and wane throughout the day. For instance, I am more likely to get a lot of traction on an interesting article if I post early in the morning, when my European friends are starting their work day. I get better traction on comments later in the day, when my California friends are finishing up their day. Beats me why and I haven't looked into it.

About every month or two I get a comment downvoted. The last one was back in March when I pointed out that types can completely replace unit tests for pure FP code.

I used to consider such downvotes an indication that I had misread the room, I was venturing somewhere I shouldn't. I would delete them if I could. Then I noticed some getting downvoted a lot only to come back with a positive score after a few days. There was a big element of randomness to it and not much useful signal in all of that noise. Now it's about 50/50. Half the time I delete those comments if I can. The other half of the time I wear that like a badge of honor. I meant no disrespect and was only trying to move the conversation along. Hell if I'm going to read a lot into what's mostly noise.

I've been on the net since it went public. I'm a slow learner, and it's taken a lot of time, but I no longer worry about all of the wrong people on the internet. I still wonder where the guardrails are, and how groups of people solve problems, but I'm much happier watching than I am adding to the noise.

Great comment by @dang downstream in that thread. I missed it the first time around. Thanks @jackquesm!

My little bit to add here, for what it's worth. (I've been here since the first few months or so). Good conversations don't have to involve a back-and-forth with your ideas always being involved. In huge groups of people, many times I find it good enough to try to add something useful to the discussion, provide a link for more depth if necessary, and then shut the hell up. It's not the "me" show.

I post stuff I've created all of the time here that doesn't get traction. As the old saying goes, thems the breaks, kid. Every now and then some oddball thing I've said or posted will take off, and that's a pretty cool feeling, but I learned not to chase that feeling. Instead just try to be a decent and respectful participant and delete more content before you hit the "send" button than you actually post. The rest of it is pretty much effectively random. (Insert discussion here about how some folks have such a good reputation that it doesn't matter. I don't like it. Many of them don't like it. But it is what it is)

> However, as Michael Gordin, professor of the history of science at Princeton University, notes early on in his lively and thought-provoking survey of multiple dodgy and perhaps-not-as-dodgy-as-you-thought scientific areas, falsification invariably fails almost before it starts. How do you know that you’ve actually falsified a theory? Is getting a weird, unexpected result enough?

I blogged about this thing a few months ago. We misunderstand Popper. Hell, Popper probably misunderstood his own ideas. Falsifiability works precisely because it's imprecise. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

For more depth, obligatory link: https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-...

Yes we are still talking about Facebook.

In regards to boiling the ocean, it is a hugely-complex system involving billions of people all interacting in millions of various dynamic subgroups using technology sometimes in ways even the designers can't anticipate. There's that.

No, this historian idea would not work. We need to look at these examples from a CS perspective, not from a historical one. Those guys wouldn't have a clue. You'd end up with 50 essays and a lot of nothing. Put a different way, what we want is a collection of generic classes that we could instantiate that would describe all of those systemic failures. That's it. You could do that in an afternoon, a week, or a year. I don't think it is as long as a year.

But like all coding practices, the key here is a small group and agreed-upon code. This isn't a sample-the-universe problem. Perhaps a way of looking at it is that yes, it's an ocean. It's an ocean of oceans we have to boil. Tech, people, and all of that beyond anybody's ability to grasp. But because it's so huge, we're free to then come at this in much the same way as mathematicians began reasoning about types of infinities. You don't have to know the infinity or collect all of the information required in order to effectively reason about it.

I'm not talking about a big-bang, monolithic solution to social media. I'm talking about a few commandos arriving on a strange beach, taking a look at their surroundings, coming up with some heuristics, then testing them. It's not a long, drawn-out complex process. In fact, just the opposite. (But it is a fundamentally different kind of problem than computer folks are normally exposed to. We're looking for quick set of heuristics to test, not an accurate or complete definition of the overall problem and solution. We use CS knowledge and complex systems understanding to make informed categorical guesses that we can then test)

Hope that makes sense. I'm outta here.

EDIT: You may be asking for a solution to the FB/Social Media problem. I am saying that the best I think we can do is come up with a workable way to score possible solutions. That's it. Since it's scoring, we could use the Great Pumpkin or something more formal. I'm voting for more formal.

As one wag said about a famous politician many years ago, "That guy's got a hundred ideas a day! But only one or two of them are worth a damn" So yes, I got some ideas.

I hate going so far down in a thread. I will try to be as meta as possible.

I think the type of work we're talking about, identifying the problem and making progress here, is meta-analysis. That is, I think the first thing to do is to describe the categories of things that are creating the systemic interlocking dysfunction. It is definitely _not_ to look more and more closer at the current problem. The only thing you're doing there is subtly reinforcing the problem in everyone's minds. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem like this using the same old ideas and terms that got you here.

So you get a small number of literate, smart, and historically-minded people. You try to come up with half-a-dozen or so similar systemic dysfunctions that existed and were resolved throughout history. That's a conversation. Probably will take a while. Based on that conversation, you come up with 3-7 overall concepts that seem to categorize the types of misconceptions that exist in all of these examples. As an example, perhaps you decide that definitions of incentives, mission, conflict, and identity are areas in which in each example participants had one idea on one side of history and another on the other (as the dysfunction was resolved).

Once you've got that group of commonly-incomplete assumptions, then and only then can you take your mental blinders off and come back to the present situation and bounce what you've learned up against what's happening now (and the tech involved). At this point you'll have a framework for looking for behaviors and tech that might make a difference. That may be as far as you can go because of the before-after problem, but it gives you places to explore and support and some idea of the types of disruptions to look for that might break us out of this.

E-mail or IM me if you'd like to talk farther. As much as we love to gesticulate, rant, and moan about this problem online, actually making progress is real work and not just something we do with a morning cup of coffee typing into a text box into the void. :) (Although that's a lot of fun too!)

I don't think this ends by something or somebody you can point a finger at and say "that did it"

Looking throughout history, these kinds of interlocking systemic crises always end in ways the participants did not expect and could not have been expected to deal with even if they had known.

Taking the Roman Empire as a loose example, if you had sat down with the Senate and Emperor in, say 100 AD and told them exactly what would happen? First they wouldn't have believed you and second even if they had believed you there was nothing they could have done about it. You see, the Romans expected a state that was the same as a religion, they expected threats to the Empire to come in the form of large armies with single, great wars. They expected a cultural "soft power" that was unmatched.

None of that was true. Or rather, it was true until it wasn't, and even then it took hundreds of years to completely fizzle out. As an economist once said, things that can't continue won't continue. But in this kind of situation, by definition we're unable on this side of it to see what it'll look like from the other side of history.

Systemic problems get worse the more you pull on the levers that are normally used to correct things. That's why they're called systemic problems. Good, intelligent people in various symbiotic systems can act wisely and with good intent and intelligence and still things get worse. To use a recent HN headline, it's a meta-stable catastrophe. In fact, the greater the attempts to correct, the worse it gets. Intuition fails us.

Apologies that I have no advice as far as what to do. My plan is to keep being the annoying person every now and then in the back of the room that says "It's broken. Here's why" without being too obnoxious or over-the-top. As I used to tell teams I managed, we can't always solve all of the problems we're given, but it's our responsibility to publish our problems to others in the hope that somebody else has a missing piece. A big part of the mess we've created so far has been people thinking they could understand the entire thing and just tweak it a little bit to get it to do what they want. We should not join that crowd.

Spot on.

I have a golden rule of social media discussions. If I can tell your politics by listening to your complaints about social media, you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation. These are systemic issues. They exist because the systems exist in symbiosis. What you would like social media to do or say is not only besides the point, it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem.

And that's not getting into the self-serving nature of saying something like "I love everything I did and the jobs I took, but somehow we lost our way"

No, you did not. You built a business on a model that shouldn't exist. Made a ton of money doing it. Now somebody's got to fix it. If all of us can't admit to ourselves or others the root cause of the problem, it'll never go away.

This is the best rebuttal to my thesis. Thanks.

There is a tension between art and commercial art. Beethoven should have never written that battle symphony.

When done well, I think you can get both. Start with the story and then weave in the commercial aspects. Or start with the story and only choose to finance movies that have both art and commercial value. What you can't do is start with the commercial side and then try to hammer in a good story. There have been a few masters that managed to pull that off, but it's rare. Add in committee-management instead of having an artist's eye and it becomes total crap.

It's in nobody's interest to only have arthouse flicks that nobody watches. Happily it's not an either-or decision. Good drama will draw in the commercial part than can then be exploited. Everybody's happy. What I'm seeing now is that majority of films start with a locked-in fanbase and then try to do their best at creating an n+1 episode. That's how they're getting around the quality problem: they make it moot. They know the locked-in fanbase is coming no matter what they produce, and if it's a real stinker? Well hell, all of the press and arguing about how bad it is will just drive up interest for n+2. Not only is that not trying to mix a good story in with a commercial line, that's putting the story quality pretty far down the list. It's noticeable.

ADD: I'd say that in the heyday of arthouse flicks, say 65-80, you had the peak of movies that covered both bases well. Nobody's doing another Midnight Cowboy.

Good question. To clarify, in China any company or business enterprise has to have political officers sprinkled throughout. This makes sure that the organization is following the party line appropriately.

So when I said the problem was China, I didn't mean the Chinese market, I meant that a huge amount of money currently being spent financing film entertainment comes from groups like this. They kill these kinds of things before they ever get financed.

Most folks don't talk about the money side of movies. It's nothing like talking about which star is in rehab or where the MCU is heading with its reboot. But at the end of the day, that's the thing driving content creation.

The overseas market, specifically China, probably plays a much bigger role in self-censoring cinema than most people are comfortable admitting. Nobody wants good cinema, movies that dig into and challenge the human condition. They want money. In the last 20-30 years, we have seen the strip-mall-ization of the movie theater. Every city has at least one, they all look the same, and drop in at any time and you'll see the same kinds of movies: cool-looking, easy, bowlderized, with paint-by-the-numbers plots.

I love real cinema. For all intents and purposes it's gone now. We need a new art form to take its place.

A big part of the problem with any commercial art form is the plethora of folks who love to be reductionist in one way or another. Leads in TV shows from the 1950s forward wanted to know and control how many lines they spoke. John Wayne famously gave the advice to another actor that if you're leaving a scene, first move in the opposite direction and then leave the way you're supposed to. Gives you a bit more screen time. (Apologies that I cannot source that offhand)

Once everything becomes reductionist, it's then much easier to argue about some oversimplified version of the art than the contents of the art itself. Were there enough tall people in that film? Did that essay have the right amount of third-grade level adjectives? Is the playwright using a meter for the supporting roles? If so, what is it?

We can go on and on about such things because they are easier to measure, require almost no understanding of the art form itself, and lead to all sorts of debates. Sometimes I think the number one rule of modern media is "I don't care what you're arguing about, just argue about something!"

If we placed the story first, and only created anything in an art form to support and enhance that story, we'd get all sorts of interesting and self-challenging art, depending on which artist is telling the story. Whatever trivial reductionist thing you'd like to experience, there'd be art that let you experience it. But if we try to create and tell stories through art by way of committee and marketing research, it's just going to be more and more bland populist pablum.

The saddest part of all of this is not that businesses are acting in their best interests. The saddest part is what it says about the average consumer. I love modern theater even though it's a completely new art, but I try very hard not to do the "reverse math" and figure out just what the creators think of me. Otherwise I'd get pretty pissed.

I went self-hosted about a year ago (again) using ghost and commento. So far I love it. I've been writing online since the first web pages and I started blogging around 2000 or so. (I think)

The demise of blogging and the crap that is social media are both due to the same combination of two factors: zero friction to create content and instantaneous, perhaps wordwide feedback on whatever you create. Serious writing just isn't designed to work in this kind of world. You'll be drowned out by emotionally-manipulative crap and then people will build engines to churn out even more crap faster that's even more manipulative. I love the future, but my vision of the future of VR/AR/brain interfaces is something along the lines of getting instantaneously angry or sad at something and wanting to talk about it before you're even consciously aware of what you're angry or sad about. The words will come later and are besides the point. (Which is just like our brains work)

Because of many innovations, printed text is simply too easily-manipulated and dispersed by technology to survive in any fashion similar to what it used to. I don't know what the answers are, but I'm experimenting. Because of social signaling, my blog is ad, pop-up, and tracking-free. I'm mixing in new formats with weekly video called "Nerd Roundup" where I just shoot the shit about tech stuff. I tried twitch and a couple of other new delivery platforms. I do have e-publications, but I do my best to downplay the idea of anybody buying them who are not serious about the topic. In short, my current strategy, like George in that famous episode of Seinfeld [1], is take whatever most people are doing and invert it. There might be a space there to make some kind of progress. I'm not sure. It's worth trying.

I know that we need more people reasonably talking about various topics and doing so in-depth, and I know we're getting less and less of that.

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697744/

There's an interesting efficiency/reverse-opportunity-cost issue here.

If you set up your ML so that it works x% of the time, you might very well have a profitable business even if you end up accidentally screwing over a bunch of folks. But no competitor can challenge you in the marketplace because the human cost of answering phones and emails to find that last little bit of efficiency is overwhelmingly disproportionate to any economic value the business would gain.

Many of us like to bang on businesses as being amoral and impersonal, but most are trying to do something people want, only better and more efficiently. ML may be providing an upper limit to efficiency by taking out any opportunity to do some serious analysis. Because in many cases removing that last 1-5% in inefficiency is the bit that leads to a completely new way of working, in many areas we may be boxing ourselves in to a very long-term status quo.

Obligatory Star Trek trivia: in "Spectre of the Gun", from the original series, Chekov finds a six-shooter pistol at the beginning of the show, making it a literal Checkhov's Gun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_of_the_Gun (Warning: this was not one of the better ST-TOS shows)

This is a good article. It's well-researched and it tries to be as even-handed as possible.

Trying to move beyond the immediate issues, something a lot of people don't talk about is the resulting lack of quality in those institutions affected by mob rule. I go to places for quality information that I used to go 20 years ago and in many cases it's a horrible pile of substandard, inadequate crap.

It's not a coincidence that the people who do the worst things are many of the same folks that sing the hymns that their side wants to hear. People in various professions and organizations are learning to play on the emotions of others. More troubling, they are learning that this public emotional manipulation is much more than adequate for their jobs. The quality of the jobs themselves suffer. We need those folks to actually do their jobs, not become or stay popular.

Yes. Find it. And when you do, you'll have something reproducible. The purpose of science is to advance the species. Given this, when that happens, this other thing(s) occur (or occur with a certain frequency)

I agree that this is a generalization problem. I just don't believe that this particular way of describing it is helpful. If you'll allow me an apocryphal example, when Newton saw the apple fall, if he had generalized to "all things from apple trees fall at the same rate", he would have been correct for a while, then ludicrously incorrect once the leaves started blowing off in Autumn. If at that point he had tried to figure out exactly what kind of tree produces this gravity thing, or which parts of trees, we wouldn't be any further along than we were before.

Generalizations work along multiple axes. With some degree of imprecision, every experiment can be a success (or failure). This is why we have the scientific method in the first place.

Now, perhaps you're making the argument that this is somehow, for lack of a better term, half-science. It's not right, but it's not wrong either. It's truthy. The logical follow-up would be: ok, where is the second half? In this and many other cases there is no second half. Papers were published, people received awards, wrote books, became famous, and lots of other folks used their work. So even if somehow this is better than nothing, in practice I'm not seeing it.

Author here. Thanks for the stylistic comments, folks. I purposefully did this in about 30 minutes in stream-of-consciousness format. It should be off-putting and odd. It's not like most of the polished (and admittedly marketing) material you see elsewhere on HN. I hope I didn't waste anybody's time.

My own research flow is to read and consume a lot on the material I'm trying to absorb, then try to put that into some kind of essay, either to others or to myself, once I think I have something useful that's resulted. Then, if I'm working on a larger work, months later I come back and collect the associated works and use them as a basis for a first draft of long-form material.

I had no idea it would get many votes. Frankly, I wanted to share this with another site but whenever I share there, it gets auto-posted here. So I figured I would go ahead and submit here myself if it was going to show up in the feed anyway.

If anybody is interested in carrying on the discussion please ping me! I'm finding it fascinating to develop a meta-model that covers both machine, human, and organizational learning. Not sure that anybody's done that before. So far it's been a hoot.

Three issues here.

One, "like a family" is a process, not an atomic label. It's not something you can just stick anywhere. Families are dynamic and a lot of work, frankly. Humans are messy.

Two, even if the label meant something, it doesn't mean the same thing to each person that uses it. Sounds like some of these folks are jerks. This might be because of an idea of what family means that's much darker than other people's. Also there are a lot of jerks in the world. The writer doesn't seem to like a lot of people they work with either. That's all fine and well. Families choose many times to disengage and only be together during certain special events. The question is whether or not these kinds of families are what the slogan means. Who knows? Sounds more like a crutch used by management than a real concept that everybody can grok.

Three, the author is playing right along. It looks to me like they're doing this passive-aggressive thing where the actively don't want to be like whatever this "family" label means to others at work and they also don't want to spend time with those folks. That's what they should say, to others. You just don't flip around a vague slogan and get something more useful. By translating it into the already vague "family" moniker, they're cheating themselves out of the opportunity to grow. "I don't like you people. You make me work too much, you're a bunch of assholes and I'm leaving." is a painful thing to say, and I'd wait until I have another job to say it, but rephrasing it as "I don't want to be like a family..." is just couching it in the same bullshit everybody is using. If you want to be that way, fine, just realize that you're doing the same thing as you feel is being done to you, i.e. using vague language to dodge difficult conversations.

Yup. They don't think about it, but the mind is a funny thing. If you ask them why they've done something a certain way (without bringing up the topic of complexity), folks usually have some good reasons for the things they do.

However, if you bring up the topic, then take a look at some code or architecture? Then suddenly we're talking about all the ways we might have done it better/less-complex if things had been different.

Most every coder I know understands the topic, and most are even willing to go on at length about how important it is, including me! (grin). It's the actual application where things fall apart.

>> I don't have a good single rule for a "second step," though.

I do. It was bugging me so I spent a couple of years coming up with one. Seems to work great for me. YMMV. I do not believe it is as context-dependent as most in our industry seem to think. (It's very much problem dependent, though. It's just vastly more related to the business problem than the technical considerations. [Discussion goes here about tech-related problems not related to the solution foisted on the solutions team])

>> I think every talk on complexity is meaningless, without taking into account the difference between accidental and essential complexity.

Yeah. This is both true and pointless.

Nobody codes things too complex on-purpose, at least not normal people. So it's not the difference in types of complexity, it's the difference in our ability to understand accidental and essential complexity.

I find that I do a really poor job at this, and I'm the first to stand on the soapbox and rail against systems being too complex. Just like programmers naturally introduce bugs into code without realizing it, programmers naturally introduce complexity into code without realizing it.

We may theoretically be able to talk about the differences in type, or how to manage each, but our real problem begins in our conceptual models inside our brains or various types of problems, and this happens a long time before any code is ever written.

In my personal practice I've come up with a few gimmicks that help me refactor my preconceptions. It is very difficult, however, for people to adopt practices that continue to inform them that they make lots of mistakes. Everybody wants to code as if they're conquering the boss-level at the end of a game. We sell coding, tooling, frameworks, and practices to other coders under the assumption that they're going to have a blast, not that they're going to continuously be reminded that they're screwing things up.

So yes, I agree, but without moving past that statement into something more tractionable, it's more of a truism than a starting point.

My second book is all about how to code solutions as simply as possible: https://leanpub.com/info-ops2

As for this particular exercise from the book, I think I did a video on YT. It probably isn't around, though. As a tech coach, I've had programming, management, and consulting experience in this kind of work from solo developer up to 150-person programs. So there's a lot to cover in a stand-alone piece, at least three in-depth topics. (For instance, I'm willing to bet a lot of other consultants with similar experience would say this result wasn't possible. This is what made the exercise so worthwhile; our intuition about the complexity required and the actual complexity involved in solving problems is commonly off by at least a couple orders of magnitude.)

A year or two ago I was writing some training material on how to keep your software solutions as simple as possible. (In my mind this is the most critical skill in software development that nobody seems to actually teach)

I decided to use project management as an example. It's a known field, it's something most everybody can relate to, it looks like something a lot of coders kick around, and it's commonly way, way overdone. So I started with first principles and went at it.

Ended up with a few dozen lines of code and a text file. That's it. That's all you need to manage projects from a single person on up to a large-scale program. I integrated with Trello and Google sheets in order to provide whatever graphics people wanted, but with the same general amount of complexity you could integrate with a bunch of other stuff.

I remain convinced that the greatest learning experiences I've had in software development over the last decade or so have been these little experiments where I take a commonly over-engineered solution area and poke at it to see just how much complexity is actually required. Every time I do it, it astounds me at the amount of counter-productivity we coders bring to many of the things we create in order to increase productivity. A humbling experience, to say the least.

I do a weekly roundup of tech stuff.[1] I flagged this story for inclusion, mostly because of the types of conversation I'm seeing on HN today.

This is not "New age bullshit", although I understand the sentiment. The most frustrating part about studying how teams self-manage for success is that management theory consists of a lot of words and emotions and very little concrete theory. That doesn't make any of it wrong; it just makes it very difficult to discuss in the same logical way we'd discuss, say a new theorem.

What's missing here is any sort of agreed-upon discernment function. Psychological safety is important. Ok. But how do we tell when we have that versus when we don't? Process exists in service of people. Ok, what does that mean? Should a process, for instance, inform people of things they don't like or want to hear? I would think that if a process wasn't ever uncomfortable, it's not much of a good process. But then again, we don't know.

The entire list is mostly like that. It's not things you can disagree with, it all sounds pretty good, but as a reader you're left with an empty feeling. Just what the heck am I supposed to do with this?

There's an old saying that much of being a management consultant is pandering to a natural type of person who wants to burn it all down. The rest of it is just telling clients what they already want to hear. It doesn't give those folks a good reputation.

Once again, though, it doesn't mean any of it is wrong, it's just intractable. As much as mankind has tried over and over again, it remains barbarously difficult to translate feel-good things we all instinctively know that work into practical and actionable advice, at least when it comes to knowledge work. (For assembly-line production/manufacturing work the situation is different, thank goodness)

I believe there's a lot of overstatement on both sides of this discussion, a lot of posturing and demagogurely, even by people who mean well and don't realize what they're doing. It's not that there's nothing there, it's that there is a lot of work still remaining. This is too important for all of us to simply bounce around off-the-walls about. There's something of value there. Let's go find it.

1. If you're interested in my weekly roundup, shameless plug: https://danielbmarkham.com

Related: I've been listening to the History of English podcast. If this kind of content is your thing, it's highly recommended.

I think a big part of the problem here is that our computers, and the associated data they collect, are part of our extended brains. They're not record players, hotel registers, or any other metaphor society or our legal system has used in the past. It's virtually as if you could take part of your brain out and hand it to somebody, perhaps to whistle a tune you remember from school or recount that chat you had with your previous SO.

It's not okay to take a person and hold them against their will, even if they've signed some sort of agreement. Indentured servitude and slavery are considered non-viable business arrangements. No matter what I promise you or what our trade-off is, these contracts cannot exist.

I think the only way this reasonably ends is when the rest of society catches up to that conclusion. It might be a while, though. I honestly don't think most people _want_ to know what's going on, since it's quite frightening and there's nothing they can do about it. This is going to have to get more and more stressful to the average citizen until most folks realize what kind of world we've crept into.

I _almost_ am completely on your side in this discussion. The facts of the matter are as you describe.

I disagree, however. Influence at the scale these companies have is its own power. There's a reason Zuckerberg is a fan of Caesar Augustus; with the proper and delicate application of influence in the right places, you can get whatever it is you want.

The game they're playing is not direct application of political power, it's subtly using influence over a decade or two to position world governments where they want them. If I had to guess, they'll leave those governments in place as polite fictions, much as the Roman Senate continued to "defend" the Republic for a long, long time after Augustus changed all of that.

By the way, astute observers in various governments know the game being played, it's just very difficult to directly move against companies that appear to be cooperating. Folks want their Farmvilles. My money says that we'll see a lot more regulatory capture with various reforms over the next few years, the political calculus being that it's better to absorb them than fight them (at least short term, which is good enough to get elected a few more times).

Over the last several years, it's become clear to me what the large social media companies want to be: de facto world governments.

They won't admit that, and you'll hear a lot of gab about algorithms and cooperation with various governments, but at heart it appears to me that this is cooperation with various governments as a government themselves. It's a negotiation among equals.

We can provincially argue about who can say what in the US on which platforms, or what the rules _might_ be to demonetize and/or kick people off platforms, but at the end of the day, the platforms themselves, through means mostly opaque to us, are negotiating as if they were our local tyrannical government with complete control over the public square and public places.

I understand that for many this is completely far-fetched and I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. This is a difficult thing to freely admit and grasp. It's also very difficult for those that are currently happy with whatever the most recent decisions are.

Yes, the net is still (mostly) free and open, and competitors _might_ come along and take the place of the current major social networks, but at heart this is a problem based on generalizing and universally abstracting social interactions. You could split up and/or dismantle every major player today and be in the exact same spot five or ten years from now when the next ones come along.

I am happy that more and more people are finally waking up to the danger here. If we are allowed to adequately describe the nature of this problem, we might have a shot at fixing it.