(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)
Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.
I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.
Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).
The ol' "The real evil overlord is just you and me" retort is a bit undermined by the existence of products like this one that actively constrain people's actions and pressure them to perpetuate the system. Like, who gave the order to design that product?
It's also not true. "Companies" on their own don't do anything. The operational decisions are made by CEOs and board members who do have a lot of leeway to decide how they want - and often do have an ideology they follow.
Shareholders are also not "you and me" in the common case - especially not with index funds, where you have zero agency to influence the market even despite being a shareholder on paper.
Significant amounts of shares are held by wealthy individuals or other companies with humans at the top - people who are in the same social group (or often the same individuals) as those in the C-suite.
At the level of wealth concentration we are in, I think talking about the "billionaire class" is more constructive than talking about "shareholders" and then noticing full of surprise that we all are shareholders.
If you take these into consideration then it makes sense why one would make such choice. Whether they are aware of building an evil device is irrelevant at this point -- they're making best choice for themselves and their family. Employers love employees who follows orders so they'll craft environment where only those kinds of employees would survive.
IMO this isn't really the problem between employers and employees. They are doing what the system incentivizes them. It's the regulator's role to govern to protect individuals.
The irony is U.S. allows lobbying and SuperPAC which essentially makes the system in favor of those with money.
There should be outrage at both, but woefully it seems only a fraction of it trancends a company label.
People like Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy who already have more money than they could ever need but still feel compelled to cause others to suffer in order for them to make even more money likely have some other kind of mental sickness. Either some form of pathological greed that causes them to never be satisfied with what they have and obsess over hoarding, or something that causes them to derive some sort of sick pleasure from causing suffering.
Unless/until they can treated our world would be better off if we locked these kinds of people up to keep the rest of us safe from them, but right now those with enough money can get away with just about anything which only further emboldens them. They can bribe law makers to prevent regulations that would stop them from releasing harmful products and services. They can hide behind corporate shields. Hopefully we find a way to hold them accountable for the harms they cause soon because they're never going to stop hurting us, or our children.
Amazon doing it will make it really horrible.
Unless this is 100 open source and ad/telemetry free? Right..
Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.
Every day I see a celebrity in an ad for gambling and they all have the same defence "well, if people choose to gamble if they have a problem, then that's on them". Everyone knows it will destroy lives. But they say "that's on them for buying what I'm selling".
People are walking around perpetuating the moral compass of a heroin dealer like it's normal. You are responsible for your mark on the world and your fellow human beings. Yes, even if you only did the bad thing to get the money.
Some things are difficult to regulate, even as we know they are harmful and difficult to control for adults due to their addictive nature.
You don't have to think about it very hard to realize that kids, who have not yet learned to emotionally regulate themselves, will be even more vulnerable to these things if we push it on them.
For the record I think the gin industry should in fact be regulated from marketing their product as a pacificer for kids. I find it very difficult to believe that you don't.
My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.
In 1962, there were allegations that Marx fathered a son, Freddy, out of wedlock by his housekeeper, Helene Demuth, but the claim is disputed for lack of documented evidence.
There are lots of wildly profitable enterprises that we regulate or make illegal.
If everyone else is selling boiled orphan elixir, you'd be leaving money on the table not to boil yourself some orphans. But maybe we decide that boiling orphans isn't an industry we want as a society, and legislate consequences for doing so.
I'm sure someone's thinking that, and it's a bullshit rationalization. Don't turn yourself into a villain because you think someone else might beat you to it.
Also, if true, it's a stark indictment of capitalism, and how it pushes people towards malign and harmful activities.
The biggest issue with capitalism is that it rewards the people with no moral compass with power. In a broken system like this, no change will ever come unless people start to decide to do something about it. This comes in two forms: replacing the system, and reforming the system. Both of these require influence. The more influence a person has, the more change they can enact. And let's face if, we live in a system where money can directly be converted to power and influence (see our elections and politics as a whole). To make real changes you have to play the game, and unfortunately there are a lot more evil people playing the game than good. To try to skew that ratio in the right direction a little bit is a good idea in my books.
And you do that by developing, building, and marketing, a tablet for toddlers?
I don't think any of what you say makes sense, if you think about it for even a little bit:
1. Even an individual at the top of capitalism doesn't have the right kind of influence to "replace or reform it."
2. Even if one could amass that kind of influence for that goal, the path to get there through "winning at capitalism" would probably corrupt the person before they had any influence to wield.
3. And even if you could get that high without being corrupted, there's no guarantee. Most of the people trying will end the game accomplishing nothing better slinging cancer-sticks and brain-rot for babies.
4. The actual path towards fixing it may not be an "only I can fix it" collaborationist arrogance. It could be letting it get worse and putting your efforts into highlighting those contradictions to motivate more robust collective action.
5. etc.
Technology is not linear. There are many paths it can take.
Your contributions are somewhat unique. To a certain degree, if you don't make it, no one will.
I don't understand the argument here. 100 Years ago they were abused more, but last year they were abused less. So increasing the dosage of the abuse is ok as long as it doesn't exceed your random benchmark of 100 years ago?
Technology is harmful, starting from fire and farming. So what?