| ▲ | conartist6 5 hours ago |
| They're not afraid of the idea of programming people. When I worked there every week there would be a different flyer on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out about things that really mattered to the company. One week the flyer was about how a feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds. The flyer promised that if this was done, the result would in essence have a scientifically measurable addictive effect, a brain-hack. The flyer was to try to make sure this message reached as many advertisers as possible. It seemed to me quite clear at that moment that the users were prey. The company didn't even care what was being sold to their users with this brain-reprogramming-style tactic. Our goal was to sell the advertisers on the fact that we were scientifically sure that we had the tools to reprogram our users brains. |
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| ▲ | cm2012 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Another way of describing this - they find people lose interest almost immediately, and so if you want to actually show a consumer something new, you have to get to the point with your ad. |
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| ▲ | Teever 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of a policy that promotes ads that hook the user within the first 200ms. 200ms isn't enough time for significant information to be transmitted to a person and for them to process it. You don't 'get to the point' in 200ms. That means that the way to the user's brain and attention is with some irritating little jingle, a picture of a bunny beating a drum, cartoon bears wiping their asses with toilet paper, a picture of a caveman salesman or a picture of an absolutely artifical thing that looks like food but isn't. Stuff that stands out as unnatural. But that isn't enough. You gotta pair it with spaced reeitition. Let them think about this every time they take a shit in the office. Hammer them with the same shrill sounds and garish images on every commercial break. Or after every couple of songs they're trying to listen to on youtube. Or in institials that are algorithmically optimized to pop up in their feed as they mindlessly scroll looking for gossip about their neigbhours to scratch that social group animal itch in all of us. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Exactly, 200ms is rather different than 'get to the point.' Here is a 'reaction speed test' site: https://reactiontimetest.net/ for somebody who doesn't intuit what 200ms is like. You will likely be unable to click the screen in response to a box turning green faster than 200ms. To hook somebody on something within 200ms is largely appealing to casino like stuff where every single jingle, color, flash of light, and other aspect of their games is carefully researched in order to maximize addiction on a subconscious level. | |
| ▲ | butlike 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To add to your list: ...or a hot body. | |
| ▲ | jayd16 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 200ms isn't enough time for significant information to be transmitted to a person and for them to process it. I think the point of the flyer is that, surprisingly, it is. | | |
| ▲ | pahkah 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think there are two different definitions of "significant information" at play here. I interpreted the GP comment to mean "information about the thing being advertised". The point of the flyer is that you need to get the person to process one bit of information in the first 200ms: scroll or stay. GP's point is that that has little, if anything, to do with the ostensible purpose of advertising, informing people about a product. | | |
| ▲ | jayd16 an hour ago | parent [-] | | If you're selling a new GPU, showing the GPU in the first frame seems like a good bet and perfectly ethical, no? Same for a game, movie, food, car. |
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| ▲ | WarmWash 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | ...which has been known for at least a century | | |
| ▲ | RRWagner 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Here is an important difference. A century ago, the predator (seller) and the prey (buyer) were on equal evolutionary terms. Each generation of humans on either side of the transaction came into the world, learned to convince, learned to resist, then passed, and some balance was maintained. In this century, corporations and algorithms don't die, but the targets do. This means that the non-human seller is continuously, even immortally, learning, adapting and perfecting how to manipulate. The target, be it adult, adolescent, or child, is, and will be ever increasingly, at a severe disadvantage. | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Right, because we know that parents never pass down useful skills or life tips to their children, like skepticism of propaganda and advertising, and instead send their children into the world like sheep into a lion's den. There might come a day when advertising is too flawless for a human mind to resist it, but we're not there yet. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Most of everybody thinks their behaviors and decisions are not meaningfully influenced by advertising. Companies spend literally trillions of dollars running ads. One side is right, one side is wrong. And advertising largely relies on this ignorance of its effects, or otherwise most of everybody would go to much greater lengths to limit their exposures to such, and governments would be more inclined to regulate the ad industry as a goal in and of itself. | | |
| ▲ | cm2012 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands. None of them rely on weird ad magic to persuade people secretly - just showing off different aspects of the product or service. | | |
| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". This is such a naive view of advertising that if you're really this unaware of how manipulative ads are, you can't possibly have defenses against them. You should seriously spend some time looking into the secret magic of dark psychology they use to manipulate people because while knowing about their tactics won't make you immune to them, it really can help to be aware of how they work and to train yourself to recognize when they're being used against you. | | |
| ▲ | bryan_w an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't know, I just went to find an ad in my feed and the first one was for a house plant that was easy to take care of. I'm not saying I'm the smartest cookie in the shed, but I didn't detect any manipulation. Seems like it was a person who just wanted me to know about their product. Let me know what I'm missing. |
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| ▲ | anonymars 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Um, off the top of my head: "You'll be happier if you purchase this thing" "You're not good enough as you are now, but you will be if you purchase this thing" "Other people you admire or respect have purchased this thing, and if you do too you'll be more like them" "Other people will like you more if you purchase this thing" "You'll be more attractive if you purchase this thing" "This thing will be worth more in the future so if you purchase this thing it will make you money" "This is your only chance to purchase this thing, so if you don't it now you'll miss out on this price" I don't think any of them has to do with how awesome "the thing" itself is. Obviously there's more to, say, an expensive watch, than its ability to tell time | | |
| ▲ | cm2012 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The only products that sell this in advertising actually provide those brand features. Essentially people pay money to increase their perceived status. Like, if you sell a luxury handbag. When people buy it, they know 70% of the value comes from the advertising saying "this is a high value product" as a status signal. I think that's really dumb, but that's what people want. It also existed a long time before ads itself did. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent [-] | | So you've never seen like, a beer ad that promises status and attractiveness? | | |
| ▲ | cm2012 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Beer/liquor is in the same category of status good. People pay a lot to show the brand. |
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| ▲ | freejazz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands Oh, okay. Well if you say so. | |
| ▲ | wat10000 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I can't remember ever seeing an ad that was just showing off different aspects of the product or service, outside of things like Craigslist. |
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| ▲ | coryrc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | USA here: our schools brainwash children to remove that skepticism. It makes them easier to control and order is very important to the kind of person who becomes a teacher. Seattle area, they're brainwashing my children to celebrate the "seahawks" team. They came home yesterday being excited that team won the superbowl. I ask "why do you care? You don't like to watch football, none of your friends like to play it". Hard to influence when the kid is there 6.5 hours every day. | | |
| ▲ | linkregister an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | My child's San Francisco Bay Area school has taught media literacy / skepticism every year since 3rd grade. Curricula are determined by the teacher, but N=1 is sufficient for a counterexample for a broad country-wide generalization. Celebrating a local sports win is about as apolitical and low-harm as possible when it comes to promoting a shared cultural bond for a community. | |
| ▲ | sumtimes89 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Former USA teacher here: I assure you that the 17.5 hours parents have with kids are much more influential. It's likely that a lot of the students were really excited that their home team won and the teachers leaned into that excitement. | |
| ▲ | irishcoffee an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | My dad was a lot like you. He would shit on things I was excited about that he didn’t like. We haven’t talked in years. | | |
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| ▲ | jayd16 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What if I told you younger sales people were trained by more experienced sales people and its not a new thing. | |
| ▲ | thrwaway55 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ah yes because trade secrets were never a thing at any of these companies. The companies always shut down when it's founding members died wiping out all the knowledge it had built up. That is to say organizations have always had this edge on individuals. |
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| ▲ | daveguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And only recently could be optimized in real time, individually, for each target. I remember when there was a big moral scare about "subliminal advertising". People were appalled that an ad on TV could manipulate you without your awareness. That is 100% the business model of modern social media advertising. It's not embedded in a specific ad, but the entire operation of the promotion algorithms. |
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| ▲ | crystal_revenge an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm always a bit surprised by the degree that non-tech people don't understand how much they're being openly and transparently manipulated in various ways. Most of my work has been statistical/quantitative in nature from complex A/B testing setups to dynamic pricing algorithms. Yet so many of the most benign parts of my work in the past unnerve some people. Measuring human behavior and exploiting it for some hope at profit has been an obvious part of my job description for many years. Yet I've had friends and acquaintances that are shocked when they accidentally realize they're part of an A/B test "Wait, Amazon doesn't show the same thing to everyone!?" I've seen reddit conversations where people are horrified at the idea of custom pricing models (something so mundane it could easily be an interview question). I had a friend once claim a basic statement about what I did at work was a "conspiracy theory" because clearly companies don't really have that much control. To your point, at work the fact that we're manipulating people algorithmically isn't remotely a secret. Nobody in the room at any of my past jobs has felt a modicum of shame about optimization. The worst part is I have drawn a line multiple times at past jobs (typically to my own detriment), so there are things that even someone as comfortable with this as I am finds go to far. Ironically, I've found it's hard to get non-technical people to care about these because you have to understand the larger context to see just how dangerous they are. I have ultimately decided to avoid working in the D2C space because inevitably you realize you aren't providing any real value to your user (despite internal sloganeering to the contrary) and very often causing real harm. In the B2B space you're working with customers who you have a real business relationship with, so crass manipulation to move the needle for one month isn't worth the long term harm. |
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| ▲ | chasemp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Users as prey is a terrifying but not unrealistic narrative. Thanks for sharing. |
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| ▲ | doron 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The only business that call customers "users" are software development and drug dealers :) | | |
| ▲ | InitialLastName an hour ago | parent [-] | | Many of the software developers whose end users are their revenue source return to calling them customers. |
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| ▲ | 1vuio0pswjnm7 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Facebook employees may be the easiest "prey" to program If something as crude as flyers in bathroom stalls is effective |
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| ▲ | danny_codes 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | FB uses its addict money to pay those employees. I assume the pay is what’s effective. Actually a good business model. Pay employees to improve how addictive your drug is, get more money from addicts, and use that to pay your employees more money, completing the loop. But then drugs being profitable isn’t really news | |
| ▲ | dylan604 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It also says a lot if that's the most effective way vs normal ways of disseminating the info. | | |
| ▲ | conartist6 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Honestly 95% of the time it was about technical stuff and I loved it. I've never worked at another company so active in shaping its own culture. Problems other companies had conditioned me to expect could never be fixed would often be gone in a few months because someone had made it their mission to fix. That was part of something else I loved about their culture: there was room for anyone to move up if they could show they were creating value for the company. Other companies felt like everyone was competing for the same two promotions, but Facebook did not. In retrospect though this also kind of looks like an unaccountability machine. If each employee must take independent action to justify their own paycheck in terms of their value to the company, most ethically questionable outcomes are the result of cumulative choices made by rank and file employees who know which side their bread is buttered on. |
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| ▲ | ludicrousdispla 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >> on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out I wonder if anyone considered the bias of this communication channel towards women, or did they also post them above the urinals? |
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| ▲ | QuercusMax 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If this was Google, Testing on the Toilet and similar flyers were both above urinals and in bathroom stalls. |
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| ▲ | bodge5000 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I haven't worked at FAANG so maybe I'm out the loop, but flyers on bathroom stalls seems bizarre, like almost less of a corporate action and more of a personal one (like you might get for unionisation), but with all the messaging of corporate, like something you'd see in a company memo. Like I say, maybe everyone else is accustomed to this idea, but if you have any pictures of them I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing it, unless I'm misunderstand what it is |
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| ▲ | nostrademons 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It started as Testing on the Toilet, which was an effort to get people to actually care about unit-testing their code and software quality and writing maintainable code that doesn't break in 6 months. Later was expanded to Learning on the Loo, general tips and tricks, and then Testing on the Toilet became Tech on the Toilet. It's been going on for a good 20 years now, so that's about 1000 articles (they change them out weekly) and there aren't really 1000 articles you can write about unit testing. The insight is actually pretty similar to Google's core business model: when you're going to the bathroom, there isn't a whole lot else you're doing, so it's the perfect time to put up a 2-3 minute read to reinforce a message that you want people to hear but might not get attention for otherwise. | | |
| ▲ | pfortuny 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Actually, that is also a way to surrepticiously abuse you: not even your toilet time should be "yours". | | |
| ▲ | irishcoffee an hour ago | parent [-] | | I was in a fraternity in college, 20 years ago. We put weekly bathroom notes on the inside of the stall doors. Something interesting, something funny, upcoming news. The elected fraternity secretary was responsible for making those weekly, among many other things. If they were a day late the amount of pestering they would get until the did that weekly job was hilarious. We all got a kick out of them. Your toilet time can be yours, just don’t fucking read them lol. Back then razr phones were the hotness, nobody sat on a smartphone and had ads blasted at them while they took a shit. |
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| ▲ | trueismywork 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I play chess on the toilet at work. |
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| ▲ | hibikir 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's not really a FAANG thing. I bet you've seen the memes about X days without a serious accident, or without stopping the production line. It's the equivalent in a restroom or a urinal: A place you can make sure people see key information. You can find this in many industrial sites. A call center might have reminders of core principles for how to close calls quickly, or when to escalate. A lab might have safety tips. A restaurant will remind you of hand washing. An industrial site of some important safety tip or two. While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common. | |
| ▲ | conartist6 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're right that it was just other employees who decided what to print there. But I don't think that absolves the company (Facebook) really... Everything a company does is just things that its people do! Nothing about the flyer was outside the parameters of the job of its maker. Their job was to make the company money by helping advertisers maximize ad revenue, and that's exactly what they were doing. | |
| ▲ | tantalor 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://testing.googleblog.com/2024/12/tech-on-toilet-drivin... | |
| ▲ | toast0 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Facebook had a serious internal propaganda arm when I was there. Couldn't manage to get floor length stall walls in most of the bathrooms, but every stall had a weekly newsletter about whatever product stuff. Every high traffic flat space on the wall would be covered with a poster, most of them with designs lifted from US WWII propaganda, many hard to tell if satire or not. I was surprised there was never one about carpooling with der füher. | |
| ▲ | 3vidence 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I can say at Google we usually just had engineering tip posters in the washrooms they were usually very insightful and just written by other engineers at the company. Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc. People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here. | | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yep, I frankly thought Testing On The Toilet was pretty great. That and nice washing toilets. |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Alright. I may object to the wording, but ... isn't what you
described also a good website? I am aware of how much propaganda
Google uses too, e. g. "engage the user" - you see that on youtube
"leave a like". They are begging people to vote. Not for the
vote, but to engage him. I saw this not long ago on Magic
Arena by Wizards of the coast. They claim "your feedback is
valuable" but you can only vote up or vote down. That's not
feedback - that is lying to the user to try to get the user
to make a reaction and tell others about it. I just don't really
see the difference. You describe it that they manipulate people, but ANY ad-department of a company uses propaganda and manipulates people. Look in a grocery, how many colours are used in the packaging. Isn't ALL of this also manipulative? |
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| ▲ | direwolf20 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Google doesn't beg you for likes. Channels beg you for likes because it's one of the metrics they are stack–ranked by. Someone will lose, and they don't want it to be them. | |
| ▲ | intended 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is an entire agency that focuses on Food and Drugs in America, and its similar around the world. We have many rules on food. Food is actually a great place to think about social media, because there was a time where the FDA didnt exist. Its need was felt after cities grew larger and the food supply chain became longer. At that point food could be adultered and the old systems which people relied on to know the provenance of their food failed. Some of the things that changed this was when people started doing indepedent testing and finding out exactly how much adultery was actually taking place. Eventually we got rules about what was to be done, which we don't consider anymore since its part of daily life. | |
| ▲ | 6510 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > isn't what you described also a good website? No, good software is and feels empowering. It should scream the developer understood what YOU want to do at that specific point. Most notable, the faster the job is DONE the better. Putting up flyers in the toilet isn't to enhance your toilet experience. It is the opposite, if we want to enhance the flyer engagement the easiest way is by de-optimizing all parts of the toilet UX. Say we remove all but one toilet rolls and make the side a bit wet. If some of the locks don't work we could dramatically enhance the number of walls and doors people look at. Ideal would be to lock everyone in the stall until the next prey arrives. Should release them just early enough that they don't inform the next victim. |
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| ▲ | RegW 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Did you take a copy of that flyer? I would be interested to see it. |
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| ▲ | Gud 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Don’t be evil |
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| ▲ | SpaceManNabs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds Is this even possible??? It takes me *at least* 2 seconds to see if a video game clip is interesting to me. That is kinda crazy. |
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| ▲ | Atlas667 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| To me this is simply a consequence of the capitalist mode of production. |
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| ▲ | jerf 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, because governments are so restrained in their use of propaganda. What it is is the consequence of the power existing. 200 years ago nobody was arguing about how to hook people in the first 0.2 seconds of video, but it's not because nobody would have refused the power it represents if offered. They just couldn't have it. It's humans. People want this power over you. All of them. | | |
| ▲ | _factor 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Is your name Epson? Because you’re really good at projecting. Your comment speaks droves about you, not humanity. | | |
| ▲ | afpx 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | History contains abundant, well-documented cases of ordinary people participating in atrocities without coercion. Most people will act decently in low-pressure environments and will act badly under certain incentives, authority structures, or group dynamics. There is no way to know what a person's threshold is until it's tested, but it can be assumed that most people have a low threshold. | | |
| ▲ | _factor 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Parent was implying “all” humans crave this power over others. This is patently false. “Most” people won’t act badly to attain this power, “some” will. Being placed into a position and choosing harm is not the same as pursuing it. | | |
| ▲ | afpx 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That is absolutely against the evidence, but yes people do like to think they are naturally righteous and good. | | |
| ▲ | klaff 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | What evidence is there that ALL humans crave power over other humans? |
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| ▲ | pluralmonad 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To be fair, it is basically one and the same. I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government. Very very few of us voluntarily gave up our right to hold people personally responsible for their actions, but this is forced on everyone on behalf of business interests. The corporate vale is materialized from government alone. | | |
| ▲ | Levitz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government. I really don't know. In my experience, it can about private property when talking about housing, it is about markets when talking salaries and work conditions, and it's just about having no idea of what capitalism even is and just vaguely pointing at economics the vast majority of the time. "Capitalism" can be safely replaced with "the illuminati" or "Chem trails" in the vast majority of complaints I hear and read and the message would ultimately make as much sense. There's not a lot of how or why capitalism doesn't work, but by God there sure is a lot of what it seemingly does wrong. | | |
| ▲ | Atlas667 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are displaying your ignorance with pride. Just because you don't know what capitalism is, doesn't mean other people do not know. Just because you only read sources from capitalist media platforms doesn't mean there isn't a lot of "how" or "why" capitalism doesn't work. My main message was about the profit motive incentivizing the creation of addictions for the profit of tech companies. The invisible hand may expand the development of tech, but the visible hand needs to make people addicted and unhappy. Think a little before you speak, please. Or read a little more. |
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| ▲ | QuercusMax 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do you mean "private property" or "personal property"? These are not the same thing, and those who want to scaremonger about non-capitalist modes of production like to conflate the two. | |
| ▲ | Atlas667 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nah, you're trying to misconstrue people. Corporatism is not a thing. Capitalists hold fundamental power over society, they collectively are the state. They own the things the rest of the people need to survive. Assuming you are a worker/proletariat: Can you survive right now, today, without interacting with a capitalist entity? Can you make your living as in food, money, housing, etc, right now, solely from your own property? Statistically not. Capitalists own most of what you require. "Corporatism" is just capitalism. Capitalists use their media platforms to say the government oppresses them equally to us. When it is proven time and time and time again that they have almost total control and influence over the government. And you buy the narrative. There is no "pure capitalism", bro. Capitalism will ALWAYS evolve into this. It's baked into the rules. This is very plain to see. Go to any main news platform, of any country, on the side of any political wing, of any other capitalist nation on earth and type "corruption" in the corresponding language. You'll be met with a flood of articles. I am against private property of production, because I know the people who need said production can also democratically run it. |
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| ▲ | measurablefunc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The system incentivizes seeking power by consolidating financial wealth. It doesn't have to be that way & this will eventually become obvious to everyone. | |
| ▲ | anonymars 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Who said anything about government? I thought it was humans and people? | |
| ▲ | ffsm8 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well adjusted people so not want that power over other people It's sociopaths and narcissists which want it. And as Atlas667 pointed out, it's also a direct consequence from a capitalistic world view, where it has replaced your morals. This is not in relationship to state propaganda. Multiple things can cause abhorrent behavior, and just because we've identified something as problematic doesn't inherently imply that other unrelated examples are any better. | | |
| ▲ | testdummy13 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "Well adjusted people so not want that power over other people" There are certainly well adjusted people that would like to fix things they feel are inefficiencies or issues in their government, especially when those issues are directly related to their areas of expertise. Thinking well adjusted people wouldn't want to be in a position of power is exactly how you ensure that only bad people end up with power. | | |
| ▲ | riversflow 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Power seekers acquire power, not knowledge seekers. This is from Plato’s The Republic so about as old as it gets. |
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| ▲ | jerf 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We've always had sociopaths and narcissists, and if you're looking to "capitalism" as the reason why they exist, you're in out-and-out category error territory, not-even-wrong territory. Now that this power exists to be had, human beings are racing to acquire it. If you think you can fix that by "fixing capitalism" you are completely wasting your efforts. | | |
| ▲ | shermantanktop 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So if that’s not the answer, what is? Should we just throw our hands in the air and say that technology has defeated our monkey brains, and there’s no going back? | |
| ▲ | dwallin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Given that these tendencies are not evenly distributed throughout the population, you can have structures that leverage the large mean to mitigate the worst tendencies of the extreme tails. Given that the natural state of things is that power begets more power, these are harder to build and maintain, but it can be done. In particular, Democracies and Republics are major historical examples of this. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | pstuart 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > All of them. At least an unhealthy amount of them. I have no desire to have power over people, except I would like it if my kids actually listened to me... | |
| ▲ | Atlas667 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You didn't say anything. People do have this power right now, they are called capitalists, they are a part of the tech/info/policing industry. You don't have this control, I don't have this control. It's not humans in general, it's literally the capitalists. Right now, today. Try and "timelessly universalize" that. It's the people who make money from this who want it. I would rather that no one particular person or group of people have that much power, and I would rather help organize society to collectively and democratically decide what goes on with this tech but I guess that proudly makes me a communist. |
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| ▲ | seberino 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That may be true but I think the unspoken assumption in your comment is that somehow, without capitalism, greed magically melts away. How do you explain the constant extreme rampant corruption in communist and socialist countries over 100 years if not from GREED? | | |
| ▲ | conartist6 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I know that it doesn't. Greed will be ever-present, yes, but that doesn't mean that it's a one-way ratchet. It's something we have to keep fighting against all the time. Greed starts out as a driver of progress, then eventually becomes an impediment to progress. The other constant there is progress! No dam will block a river forever. | |
| ▲ | Atlas667 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The definition of capitalism is the private ownership of production and its use to generate profits. I think a coerced assumption you may have of capitalism is that corruption is an unintended side effect, but it actually follows from its principles. How is a society to maintain unmarred democratic institutions when its elements are fundamentally unequal? Put more clearly: How can people have the same amount of political power when one class (capitalist) OWNS the production of what the other class (workers) need? The mythology of capitalist society paints both them as equals and the state as neutral. This is a tactic to preserve the appearance of a democratic backbone. They afford this mythology because capitalists own the air waves and they have, and can have, the most influence in the state. In fact, due to this fundamental inequality capitalists are, for all practical purposes, capitalists are the state. Capitalist societies put political power up for auction; Corruption has its highest manifestation within capitalist societies. Now to your point. Greed will never "magically melt away". Greed can only be controlled through democratic control of what permits greed in the first place. Communism/socialism isn't about magically doing or undoing anything, it's the science of creating firm and unalienable working class power. It must start with democratic control of production and local peoples councils. Greed will not magically melt away, greed must be constantly cut out by everyone by everyone HAVING the political power to cut it out. This means peoples councils will be convened at the neighborhood level, peoples courts will be manned, not by professional judges, but by rotating locally elected citizens. Council delegates will be bound by law to only, and exclusively, be messengers at higher level councils, etc. This is just a small picture of what democracy is. It is not me to say specifically how, of course, but communism does not involve blindly and powerlessly trusting political candidates, like capitalist society requires. There is a reason communism is demonized by the people who control our society. |
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| ▲ | pmontra 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Capitalism or consumerism, a never ending offer and demand for goods, material or immaterial? |
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| ▲ | webdoodle 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The public got a peek at it with Cambridge Analytica creating hundreds of thousands of personality profiles, they then used to create Trump's MAGA army of flying monkeys. The Democrats could have done something about it, and made it illegal, but instead they just decided to build there own armies of flying monkeys. Why? Because both sides are bought and paid for by the same rich parasites trying to reprogram us. |
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| ▲ | direwolf20 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | did democrats create flying monkey armies? I haven't seen anywhere near as much Democrat propaganda as Republican, which is probably why they keep losing. Only recently, once Republican policies came into effect and people experienced their consequences, did Republican votes decline. |
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