What the heck kind of take is that? We should be fighting tooth and nail today to not let that kind of future come into existence.

We should, but we are not doing that. We have been cleverly manipulated to care more about what a soon-to-be-ex president said or didnt say or how many genders actually exist. You can protest against everything except those things that are against the interests of the rich and powerful. The protests are channel to serve their interests, not the other way around. Dont believe me? Just a sample: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Some of us have tried for decades. But people like cheap/free stuff and don't care what happens behind the curtain for the most part.

And many people matching that description are also running corporations. And the wheel turns.

Agreed. I was being sarcastic. We should be striving for better working conditions.

No, this doesn't solve the problem for anyone. They need to cancel it immediately, or make it opt-in, again immediately.

The vast majority of software companies are not producing things that matter beyond the scope of capital accumulation.

Other than outright thievery is there any way to accumulate capital with providing something that matters to someone?

I guess it depends if you believe psychological manipulation or deliberately facilitating addiction count as thievery.

Regardless, “customers buy your product in a marketplace” absolutely does not indicate or have really any connection with “providing something that matters to someone.”

Do you believe people routinely buy things that don't matter to them? Do you buy things that don't matter to you?

Yes and yes. Saying otherwise would be like the foolish attitude “advertising doesn’t work on me.”

Everyone in developed nations buys tons of shit they don’t want, like or need, from sheer ad manipulation and repetition.

Tobacco companies literally employed chemistry PhDs to discover how to add ammonia to make uptake of nicotine more rapid, to literally physically addict you to their product.

Companies spend capital T Trillions a year on corporate research in branding, impulse packaging, habit formation, etc. etc.

There are two competing worldviews here:

In one, some subset of humans are just mindless automatons who are helplessly subject to manipulation. They only buy things they have been tricked into thinking they want. They have no personal agency. In this world, how do you ethically conduct any business? Is it even possible for you to do anything? How do you know you're not one of the mindless automatons who's just being manipulated into doing something against their interest? What choices can you even make?

In another view, humans can be lied to and manipulated to some extent, but ultimately have agency and can make choices for themselves. I've been a smoker. I can tell you from experience that smokers want, need, and like to smoke cigarettes. They are not stupid. They are not unaware of the risks. Many eventually decide, yes, they decide using their own brains and free will to stop smoking. I know it happens because I did.

If you decide there's no such thing as personal agency, I suggest carefully following the consequences of that logic and seeing where it leads you.

> Companies spend capital T Trillions a year on corporate research in branding, impulse packaging, habit formation, etc. etc.

How do you know they weren't just manipulated into spending that money on advertising services they don't want need or like, since that's apparently a possible thing to do? Why would anyone bother building a product at all if you could just use advertising to manipulate people into giving you money for something that is of no value at all to them?

I’m sorry but this is just rhetorical nonsense. Manipulation can exist and be a primal cause of someone’s actions even if generally personal agency exists. It’s not some philosophical epiphany to try to mix up some grandiose concern of determinism vs free will vs basic social manipulation.

I’d flip it around and say _you_ need to think about the consequences of your viewpoint. Social manipulation is just a basic phenomenon. It happens. If you’re espousing some philosophical perspective that doesn’t comport with just basic 101 human behavior, your philosophy is wrong, no matter how principled.

> “ Your basic contention is that nobody ever buys any product because it's something they want need or like.“

This is a complete misrepresentation of what I wrote. Either you are not understanding or are deliberately creating a strawman.

I think the misunderstanding comes from you saying "A does not imply B" and the other poster misunderstanding that as "A implies not B". This is a rather common mistake in arguments I find ):

The comment went beyond saying A does not imply B to say that A is completely unrelated to B, even outside of degenerate scenarios such as addiction. Claiming that purchases are completely uncorrelated with receiving value from something is a much stronger and obviously false claim to anyone who thinks about it for more than a minute.

As a data point I understood the same thing as imgabe from the "any connection with" bit.

> Your basic contention is that nobody ever buys any product because it's something they want need or like.

No this is the question you asked which they answered affirmatively:

> Do you believe people routinely buy things that don't matter to them? Do you buy things that don't matter to you?

Routinely != Exclusively

EDIT: I can see how the "does not have any connection with" could sound like that, but as someone says below their argument is just "Buy does not imply need/like"

Provide value of some sort? That's what most businesses actually do. Someone needs something and they provide it.

That is not what the article is about. The article is about choosing what projects to do to do at work, not the usual “things that matter” schtick.

Is this a form of mechanomorphism, where we try to reason about how human cognition might work by drawing an analogy from how computers work (specifically, overfitting in ANNs) and try to apply it back to humans?

That's sad friend. Your community failed you when growing up. This makes me want to weep.

"Well they'll just hire someone else to do it if I quit. Might as well keep doing it myself."

Fortunately, not what I said at all.

Spot on. To quote Marshall Rosenberg quoting Hannah Arendt:

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which documents the war crimes trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt quotes Eichmann saying that he and his fellow officers had their own name for the responsibility-denying language they used. They called it Amtssprache, loosely translated into English as “office talk” or “bureaucratese.” For example, if asked why they took a certain action, the response would be, “I had to.” If asked why they “had to,” the answer would be, “Superiors’ orders.” “Company policy.” “It was the law.”

From Nonviolent Communication, page 19 on “Denial of Responsibility”.

Sad to see there's a lot of office talk being used in this thread.

But it is most definitely not the shareholders. Definitely just the users and employees. Yup. ;)

You've never actually opened and ran a bike shop have you?

Even just the zoning, taxes and permitting process alone will be political.

I'm loving seeing all these responses. They're hilarious.

There's no difference except size. Facebook and Google were small businesses once.

That’s the argument imo.

That if you took Apple, Google, Facebook and started them today under appropriately matches circumstances... they would all either be purchased for meager amounts or put out of business.

I believe in free markets, but also monopoly wrangling. FAANG will absolutely work against the very landscapes they came up in.

Or, why are so many of our current politicians ex-executives or ex-lobbyists?