maxbarry.com
Wed 29
Nov
2017

The World is Not That Doomed

What Max Reckons

Do you think the world is doomed in the near future?

Rose

Only in the sense that it will be a nightmarish hellhole by our standards. I’m sure it’ll be fine to the people who live in it. I base this on how young people seem happy all the time while old people complain that the world has gone to hell.

In fifty years, the world could be a desert scorched by permanent war between rival corporate city-states and people would still be like, “I would hate to live in 2017, when people got colds and just had to live with male pattern baldness.” You value the stuff you have and don’t miss what you don’t have, is what I’m getting at.

Also ethics are super malleable. I feel they misled us about this in school. Back then, I definitely had the idea that the future would be filled with difficult ethical decisions about which technologies we would pursue and which we would reject in favor of human decency and dignity. But in practice, what’s happened is anything gets to exist if it works and people like it. Like Uber. Before Uber, cities had all these rules about who could drive a cab and how, and for the most part they were eminently reasonable attempts to keep people safe and not ripped off. Then Uber came along like, “What if we DON’T have those rules,” and people liked it, so now we have that.

So the world is doomed in that way. But also full of promise, in that it will have things that I will personally dislike and not understand but which would have defined my life if they’d been invented when I was eight years old.

I’m optimistic that we will avoid destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons or runaway artificial intelligence. Not for any good reason. Logically, I can totally see that happening. But I have a good feeling.

Thu 23
Nov
2017

OMG Net Neutrality

What Max Reckons

What’s your opinion on net neutrality?

Anonymous

I’m against it. I just think it’s hypocritical to say we should live in a world where corporations are free to shape laws and pay no tax but not screw the internet. That seems unfair to me.

Don’t get me wrong: You definitely want to keep ISPs’ hands off the net as much as you can. ISPs are like water utilities that realized they should come right into your home and decide what kind of showers you can have, since it’s their water. You don’t want a bunch of water engineers trying to sell you eight-minute shower bundles. No-one wants that.

But I’m not comfortable with the portrayal of Net Neutrality as a fight between good companies and bad companies. That dynamic always gives me the heebie-jeebies. There’s just something about people praising the kindness and decency of an amoral profit-making machine that doesn’t sit well with me. I mean, I’m glad some companies are better than others. I appreciate that they’re not all dumping oil in the oceans and poisoning children and telling employees they’re family right before they fire them. It’s definitely a good thing that companies who get financially punished if they have a bad public image are compelled to act nicer than ones who don’t.

I just don’t like pretending they’re champions of freedom. Last time I checked, Apple and Google and Facebook and Netflix and all the rest were super-interested in sealing everybody into their own sections of the internet for money. Well, not so much Google. Google is still pretty great. But as a rule, they are big fans of the principle of removing user choice in exchange for cash. In this particular case, abolishing Net Neutrality means they might have to pay cash to ISPs, so they’re against that. But they’re all still busy working on their own forms of user lock-in.

The other thing is that this keeps happening. How many times has the battle for Net Neutrality been won? Four times? And each time the ISPs go away and sulk with their paid-for politicians and wait for everyone to stop cheering about how they saved the internet, and then they return with a new version that tries to do the same thing. So I would like to dispel the illusion that we’re actually accomplishing anything substantial here, and instead take a look at the system that allows a thousand things like this to pass a year, only more quietly because they’re not opposed by major corporations, steadily entrenching inequality, selling out the future for the short-term gain of a powerful few.

But since we’re not doing that, Net Neutrality is okay, I guess.