>This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.
Your ability to moderate your usage of these services doesn’t make them not toxic. Your statement is victim blaming.
These services are still major proprietors of surveillance capitalism. They sell your future behavior to the highest bidder. This is toxic in itself.
Beyond which, your participation in these services is a signal to those who trust you that these services are safe for them to use. They are not, because they are not safe for anyone to use. That you have mitigated the harm through devoting even more of your attention to them doesn’t change that.
Really? You're going to equate this to crimes someone perpetuates against another?
For weeks I've seen posts blaming Ukraine for being invaded and having genocide committed against them. That's victim blaming.
Social media users aren't victims of anything except their own inability to limit and moderate usage. Back in the day people would sit in front of the TV, now it's just a different screen. That's on them. Many people also use social media constructively; to do things like run their business, keep in touch with friends and family, etc...
The naïveté of this take is astounding for someone who frequents a technology message board. You’re just going to ignore the part where these services employ A/B tests to make their services more addictive? You’re going to ignore the countless stories about how Facebook knew that the content they boost is bad for mental health and is addictive but they did it anyway? You’re going to ignore .. the entire surveillance capitalism aspect where an entire industry is predicated upon keeping people engaged?
Have a feeling you’d get a long with the Sackler family famously. Christ.
You can be an impartial observer of predator/prey behavior without considering yourself part of either group. But it doesn’t change the fact that there is a predator/prey relationship. In the case of social media, just like many addictions, there are too many variables at play to propose a simple solution like “just stop doing it.” So when you say people (who are indeed targeted) should “just” do the simple solution or else suffer the consequences, that is victim blaming.
> And commercial food producers make their products more addictive too... How about the tobacco industry? How about illicit drugs? Porn?
How about them? They also designed their products to be addictive.
“Personal Responsibility” is just the shield that powerful companies use to avoid being regulated.
Shift the blame to the exploited and make it clear that their problems stem from their moral deficiency. Pretty convenient all told —- the personal responsibility of the architects of these systems and products somehow evaporates.
Personal responsibility cannot overcome AI designed to addict you. These services are not your friends. You are not the customer or the product. Your future behavior is the product. The only way to win is not to play.
> Personal responsibility cannot overcome AI designed to addict you.
I agree with your general arguments but you're going too far here. Individuals can overcome addiction. That doesn't change the big picture of how additive substances and services effect society as a whole, and I agree corporations use personal responsibility rhetoric to stave off government regulation. But you're going too far by suggesting that individual addicts have no chance of quitting. Many people have quit, proving that it's not impossible. It's good to see the whole forest, but don't forget the trees.
There's a few different things to unpack with this feature.
(1) It would be useful in the context of a general style guide, like a white-label Grammarly. Corporations could set their own prompts for words, phrases, and structures. This would make documentation more consistent.
(2) This is dystopian as fuck. Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail. Who is making the decision on what to "correct"? Is this algorithm explainable?
Bias: I already disagree with Grammarly as an entire category of product.
They claim not to be a keylogger, but, you know, Amazon claims that Alexa isn't always listening too and/but/yet also that it'll wake up immediately when you say the right wake word. So, I'd take their claims with a lot of salt.
> Amazon claims that Alexa isn't always listening too and/but/yet also that it'll wake up immediately when you say the right wake word
Strictly Alexa, the device, is always listening in order to trigger on the wake word. It's just that audio doesn't get sent to Amazon until it hears a wake word (then it just streams the audio to Amazon to process it. locally it's only smart enough to listen for a wake word). This is verifiable from sniffing network traffic, it's not sending enough to be a live audio stream at all times unless the wake word is said.
You'd agree that this creates a hypertechnical situations where slight changes in the hardware or software create undetectable situations for non-technical consumers. For example, we do not know for certain that Alexa devices never stream audio when they have not yet processed the wake word. A device that you test it on may have a different policy from a device sold a year from now, yet the Internet (archives) will say that, no, it doesn't listen.
Snowden called this "turnkey tyranny." The idea that the technology for dystopia already exists and is widely distributed, but the key simply hasn't been turned yet.
All it would take for Amazon (or whichever government twists their arm) to listen to millions of households surreptitiously is a quiet software update.
> Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail.
Interestingly Microsoft has that power with the Office suite for nearly 40 years now (only a decade if we want to focus on the cloud connected area), do you see specific dystopian influences on society stemming from that ?
There is a big difference from the 'possibility' of adding remote reporting of local data (essentially zero for e.g. Word 95) vs. the possibility of having a server do one more thing with information already on the server (trivially easy)
People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation they were after this forgiveness than they were before: that is, they have no student loan debt.
People in the US are not punished for being financially responsible. They are rewarded for taking risks, but not punished for being responsible. Very different.
> People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation they were after this forgiveness than they were before: that is, they have no student loan debt.
You're missing the point, either deliberately or on accident.
(Prefacing this with: we should keep and honor the terms of the existing PSLF program that students relied on when taking on debt.) There's no particular reason people with current loan debt, but ineligible for PSLF, should get a wealth transfer from other taxpayers with similar income, net worth, and expenses -- but no current student loan debt.
> People in the US are not punished for being financially responsible. They are rewarded for taking risks, but not punished for being responsible.
In fact, a hypothetical student debt forgiveness event like GP was discussing would punish those who responsibly paid off their student debts relative to similar-earning classmates who did not.
>In fact, a hypothetical student debt forgiveness event like GP was discussing would punish those who responsibly paid off their student debts relative to similar-earning classmates who did not.
Punish how? This word keeps being used but it does not fit any definition of punish I'm familiar with. I'm not being obtuse.
Some background of where I'm coming from: Worked 40+hrs/week for $7.25 to $10/hr from 2005 to 2009 to get a four year degree from a state school. Graduated with $35,000 in student loan debt myself and about $20,000 in debt through Parent Plus loans. My parents sent me some money for rent on occasion, but overall -- that's how I di it.
I also paid off all my student loans, and my parent plus loans.
If someone graduated with $100,000 debt because they partied all the time, didn't work, and tomorrow Biden just gave them a tax-free forgiveness....
I am not punished by this. At all. It has no impact on my life whatsoever. I made the best choice I could make with my circumstances, and I paid off my loans because at the time that was the best way to secure my future. The day before the party-guy got his $100k write-off and the day after, I wake up in the same house, with the same car, with the same job, with the same spouse. My life doesn't change at all.
> If someone graduated with $100,000 debt because they partied all the time, didn't work, and tomorrow Biden just gave them a tax-free forgiveness....
> I am not punished by this.
Imagine a fair and equitable spending program that distributed $100k to everyone. It's fair, and people with debt could use it to pay off their loans (you could even require it to be used to pay off student loans first). If your goal is to help people with loans pay off their debts, it is an effective program. It's also obviously fair.
Then, tax 100% of the distribution for people without student loan balances. This is the step that imposes a punitive expense, relative to a fair program, on people without student loans.
That's what these proposals look like. There's no particular reason recent college students as a group should be the sole recipients of a wealth transfer.
They are not, though. You wrote your comment as though every proposal is necessarily a tax on everyone that does not have student loans.
This is an entirely made up claim. A hypothetical strawman useful to only those that seek to victimize themselves when this topic comes up. Student debt is a contractual arrangement between the government and the borrower. It can simply be ended. The government has the power to do that without imposing a tax on everyone else.
> The government can simply write off the student debt
And now those people have 1.75 trillion dollars more to spend on the economy instead of paying debts which creates inflation which is effectively a tax on everyone with cash and bonds. There is no free lunch with the economy, just distortions.
If student spending inflates the economy to the point where there is significant impact on the dollar, what you are saying is we NEED this generation debt-burdened so the rest of us can live decently. If that is true we never really had a functional economy in the first place.
We need to grapple with that truth instead of perpetuating this suffering.
Congratulations, you will eventually own a house and car. I'm sure you paid quite a handsome price on that house to ensure the people formerly living in it could live off the proceeds for the rest of their lives. What will your peers own when they pay off their student loans?
Banks deemed you creditworthy because you make enough to pay these loans off. We're currently discussing the people that don't make enough to pay their student loans off.
Do you think they should be forever renters? Carless in public transportation deserts?
A functional economy allows people to thrive by participating in it. It is not dependent on an artificially created underclass of people in debt to purchase no asset.
> We're currently discussing the people that don't make enough to pay their student loans off.
If we are only discussing just those people, then I think it is a different story. I could get behind a x% of income over y% of years and if it not paid off in the end it is cancelled deal.
However, usually when I see people talking about cancelling student debt they mean wiping the slate clean for everyone even those who just graduated that can pay.
What type of student loan cancellation program are you thinking we should implement?
"People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation they were after this forgiveness than they were before"
Not:
"People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation as those whose loans were forgiven"
You may have a valid point about why it's bad that the two people are in different situations (if you elaborate), but the parent did not say that the two people are in the same situation.
Correct - both people in your scenario end up having no student loan debt.
But Person A, who paid their $30k loan in full, now has $30k less to spend on a home, a car, savings, etc.
Person B, who did not pay their $30k, now has effectively $30k more in buying power either immediately or spread across what would otherwise have been their repayment timeline.
Person A's responsibility for their obligation has set them back $30k, while Person B's lack of responsibility for making payments has put them ahead $30k. Maybe we shouldn't call it a direct punishment, but they're certainly coming out of the scenario worse off than their counterpart.
>Maybe we shouldn't call it a direct punishment, but they're certainly coming out of the scenario worse off than their counterpart.
It's hard for me not to sound flippant when I say this, but -- this is life. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who has the means to pay off their student loans themselves practically won the lottery and they should be thankful they're not totally fucked like those who need the forgiveness.
There's an ugly, underlying impression I get from this discussion that is oddly reminiscent of the "welfare queen" stereotype.
>As far as I'm concerned, anyone who has the means to pay off their student loans themselves practically won the lottery and they should be thankful they're not totally fucked like those who need the forgiveness.
Let me share my personal experience with you so I can try to shed some light on our varying interpretations of what "won the lottery" means. I went to college full-time, four days a week, and was a commuter. I was responsible for my entire car payment, my parking pass, my books/material, and for taking out a loan for tuition. I took it upon myself to get a part-time job while continuing to study and go to class for four and a half years. I then got a full-time job upon graduating and lived very frugally for two years with a huge chunk of my paychecks going towards paying off my car and student loans. The thought of paying interest killed me, and I did everything in my power to put every penny I could afford towards paying down my debt. I didn't go on vacations, didn't spend money frivolously on a new iPhone every year, didn't buy anything that wasn't necessary until my obligations were fulfilled.
Now let's revisit Person B (and to be clear, I personally know a Person B who's a close friend of mine who fits this description). They did not consistently work in college, but partied, went to festivals, took vacations, had a much easier schedule not having to factor in a job. They then graduate just like me. They have a few hundred dollars more every month that can go towards more vacations than I had the option to take, a more expensive car that I could not afford to buy, and more discretionary spending power than I had during that time. They work a job now, but have yet to begin repaying their loans yet (I understand the pandemic was a once-in-a-lifetime situation, but even so, there's a grace period after graduating where you aren't forced to pay). And even when payments resume, they will likely pay the bare minimum each month because they now have the prospect of having that debt potentially forgiven in its entirety.
How do you tell me with a straight face that I won the lottery, and that Person B is actually the one who is "fucked" (as you so eloquently put it) and needs the forgiveness?
Well, that is a fair point. I think the US Government should give me 1 billion dollars. This actually is a Pareto-optimal action too, since I will then have 1 billion dollars and the rest of you will be no worse off. In fact, you will be exactly the same amount off as before.
Your ability to moderate your usage of these services doesn’t make them not toxic. Your statement is victim blaming.
These services are still major proprietors of surveillance capitalism. They sell your future behavior to the highest bidder. This is toxic in itself.
Beyond which, your participation in these services is a signal to those who trust you that these services are safe for them to use. They are not, because they are not safe for anyone to use. That you have mitigated the harm through devoting even more of your attention to them doesn’t change that.