If enough people protest-vote then it isn't necessarily a vote for the winner - if the number of protest-voters is large enough to have changed the outcome had they all voted for the loser, then the losing party (if they are doing their job) has to take notice and listen to why this group isn't happy. If the protest-voters become a massive group of people (say 1/3 of the vote), they will probably become the focus of a lot of political debates and tv-news stories, and elected officials will have to start catering to them. But it all only works if lots of people can have the integrity to not blame "the system" for why they voted for the-crook-who-was-better-than-the-other-crook.
(FYI I'm aware this has very little to do with the point you were making. I mostly agree with that)
How do we fix that? Perhaps it can't be done democratically, and you just need someone to come into a high position of power who is willing to be dramatic and disruptive?
One way to address it: change very slowly. You can strangle the bad incentives by reducing their perceived utility by introducing alternatives. The bad incentive exists because it's trying to do something. Ideally, you set up a companion incentive that gets the system a little more in the direction everyone wants, you systemically allow folks to effectively "choose their incentive", and eventually you phase out the old incentive. Problems with this are: it's glacial, and it doesn't solve everything instantaneously. Folks don't like either of those things, so you probably need to use other tools of political change to make those things more palatable.
In general, it's a lot of work, it's all in the details, and it takes forever. So lots of folks will fall back on the "why not just give the small dictator(s) all the power?"
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. It must be sad for the people who dedicate their lives to slow-change to see everything get steamrolled by a quick-fix-salesman dictator. Do you have faith in this kind of approach or do you think it's more of a "better than nothing" longshot? Maybe it's the kind of thing where it can't really be done for big, politically "hot" issues, but for other, niche problems that are less visible to the news-watching layman, it's still an effective way of making change?
Just based on my own experience and knowledge of the animation industry, it seems to be more of a risk-aversion/lack-of-imagination problem. It is true that getting onto major streaming platforms requires insider knowledge/connections, but there sure are a lot of people using free platforms that anyone can upload to, like YouTube.
In the early 80s, the local pirate scene in my hometown revolved around a guy who I'll call George. George's entire basement was devoted to boxes full of diskettes (5 1/4" in those days) of pirated software and photocopied documentation. All kinds of software - games, office apps, scientific stuff, you name it. Some was downloaded from BBS's but the majority of it was shipped USPS from god knows who.
Thing is, he used virtually none of it. He collected software for the sake of collecting it. He didn't even play video games, just loaded them up once to make sure they ran. He was a hoarder basically, who had stumbled into a niche hobby, and like most hobbyists he would happily share it with anyone who asked.
I'm not saying every pirate is like that, or even most, but I am saying, I don't think the pirate scene works without people like that. The music fans are spokes, but people who do it for the sake of doing it are the hubs.
For the hoarders that don’t share, I don’t really see much of an issue. Sure, they have all that stuff, but they would have never bought it. It’s not actually a lost sale.
I’m half joking but all these tools to automatically download TVs and movies has absolutely led to this class of user that habitually downloads stuff just for the sake of doing it. Terabytes of movies they have no interest in. The psychology of it fascinates me.
I don't think you ever have to have innovated or developed anything significant to take issue with a major consumer product losing some utility - I don't know if you used Twitter ten years ago, but it was pretty sad to see the site slowly downgrade year by year, every new feature making it less functional and more addictive, fueling toxicity, becoming a black hole of individuals' attention. It makes you wonder what would have happened if the people put up more of a fight whenever some new stupid feature was rolled out, or a useful feature taken away to make the whole thing just a little more like a slot machine. (Hmmm... maybe Elon Musk should buy Google, so people will finally start complaining en Masse.)
As a defender of the new LLM-thingies, do you think they're doing a reasonable job of promoting AI-output literacy? I think it's their job to do so when they are the ones generating the content, whereas general media-literacy was not really their problem when Google was just a directory for the web.
Thank you. Yeah I’m still on borrowed time, but I’m doing alright and trying to come up with new ideas for shifting things. Probably going to change continents soon for a break / new start.
For the past eight years I’ve been telling myself that I was going to end my life if things didn’t improve by this year, and they only ever get worse and worse, so 2024 is my final one on earth. Currently in the process of wrapping up all my business and getting rid of all my stuff so there’s nothing left behind for anyone to deal with. Really not going to miss living or living the life I’ve lived. Eight billion other people on the planet who will get on fine without me.
That is some seriously cool stuff! It's a shame nothing came of it - but I suppose shipping something good with cool new tech is bound to be harder than shipping something good that's been done a million times. Not because the tech is difficult, but because there's less of a roadmap to go off of, design-wise.
Thanks for sharing!
