Trying to get this platter served before any supply-chain difficulties get in the way.
- The fundamental problem with antisocial media is that it measures success by engagement. The quality of information, of interactions, of safety don't matter; similarly, the actual results to its real customers — the advertisers — don't matter. If this sounds very much like a major industry in the 1940s through 1960s, it should (not just Faceplant, but other providers of tables for middle-school lunchroom cliques… all too often used to plan the humiliation of the nerds and the geeks in the locker room, but that's for another time).
Bluntly, it's a business model built upon social irresponsibility — that so long as one is making a buck, one has no responsibility whatsoever for the collateral damage caused by making a buck. (And that certainly goes for the advertising/marketing money sources, and even more for less savory customers of all the data gathered.) What? That's "just capitalism," I hear from the back of the room, followed by people nodding their heads? Just ask yourselves a question: If that actually is "just capitalism," why are there any antifraud laws associated with capitalism at all — and why are those antifraud laws more-frequently enforced in capitalist systems than otherwise?
- Which leads to the interesting question of the masking behavior of the Entitled regarding defamation, publicity, and invasions of privacy. The Entitled misuse their advantageous original positions in a way that undermines the system for the rest of us, and distorts the values of the system.
- Very much like immediate profit's monomaniacal focus on just in time supply and logistics, which presume that nothing will ever go wrong. Like Brexit. Or a pandemic. Or an unrelated breakdown elsewhere.
Amateurs think about weapons and kewl hardware. Dilletantes think about small-unit tactics. Politicians think about strategy. Statesmen think about grand strategy. And professionals… think about logistics. The maroons who decided that a "just in time" system was appropriate for everyone, regarding everything, were somewhere below amateurs on that scale, because they're not even thinking about what they're doing.
- Scientific literature has a problem. Fixing that problem, however, can't be allowed to eliminate the benefits of the system: That the publishing system, for all its flaws, promotes the exchange of ideas, without which there wouldn't be "science."
- A different kind of "replicability" (or nonreplicability) is in danger in the arts, and most visibly in recorded music. This is one of the few areas in which print publishing has been ahead of recorded music — the genre-like issues related to the breakout of the then-new "young adult" category in the 1990s presaged this problem.
- Last for now, one of the reasons that I despise golf and golf courses. (We'll just pretend that excessive water consumption of golf courses isn't an issue.) It's the kind of people who all too frequently are their patrons, and I don't mean just the players. Consider the assholes who prefer to honor traitors once even assholish governments shy away.
Just because I say that your great-great-grandfather was a bigoted pro-slavery asshole doesn't mean that I'm saying you are, Mr Beasley. Unless, of course, you imply that I'm wrong in not visiting the sins of your ancestors upon you. "Fabulous piece of art" my previously-removed toenail; one wonders if the art would be so "fabulous" if it instead depicted Col Charles McGee… or had been created by a Hispanic sculptor.