As I wonder what can be done about the messes we humans keep suffering rather than fixing them, occasionally I have an idea that others don’t seem to have thought about. Here’s one.
Centralization of power grows as unequal power structures are accepted and tolerated. Though we use “monopoly” to describe them, monopoly presumes that power only involves a market with money exchanges. I’m skeptical that “antitrust” can deal with the problems we see with Facebook and Wikipedia (and Google, too, but I’ll lay off them for today). E.g. Facebook is only a monopolist in the “advertising services” market, technically. The fact that it dominates social media interaction isn’t a matter of economics for the exploitation of its users. It is a matter of power – control of communications among users.
Perhaps I’ll be posting more frequently here, ideas that I hope others might pursue regarding preventing Climate Disaster, Privacy as a technological goal to be provided, sharing the “wireless medium” (not Spectrum, never Spectrum). It’s a way to memorialize stuff I’d normally just babble about…