A nice set of examples can be found in Guido Palazzo's Dark Pattern.
“The Dark Pattern by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage teaches us about the power of context, which is stronger than reason, values, morals, and best intentions. It is an uncomfortable and painful lesson about the root causes of 'corporate infernos.' "
The context matters.
Think of the banality of evil in WW2 Germany.
We are capable of doing almost anything, good or bad, as long as the shoal around does it and pretends it normal.
I decided to breathe for a while after a startup was out of runway and minimized my consumption while figuring out what to do once grew up.
It was a revelation to find out how little one needs materially to feel happy.
But a basic income or something is mandatory IMO as it's the only thing that can remove us from the rat race and free us from the zillionaires. Oh, sorry. We need to get rid of the zillionaires first, the last thing they want is normal people who aren't hungry and desperate for pennies.
I wrote this just a few days ago here and it applies here too nicely:
"Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech.
Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional.
Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals.
Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural.
My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power.
Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape."
In order for the writer not to starve, we must bypass the zillionaires.
Send pennies directly to the artist and work for a just society.
I'd prefer a complete bypass of the enshittified economy. Replaced with a system that doesn't trust that people with absolute power won't turn into narcissist cunts.
We've seen this waterfall of a system in communism, capitalism and more recently technofeodalism so one would think the logical solution would be to replace it with a grassroots up system.
> I'd prefer a complete bypass of the enshittified economy. Replaced with a system that doesn't trust that people with absolute power won't turn into narcissist cunts.
I've been running a co-op for about 4 years now and I really want to expand the model since it seems to be working really well. Turns out giving everyone in the company ownership and an equal say in what we do with our profits (including simply redistributing it to everyone) results in ridiculously hard working people. I'm trying to leverage this into making our own internal product development happen but am kinda stuck coming up with ideas.
Anyway someone interviewed me recently and was asking, "why don't more companies form as co-ops? What's the hidden downsides?" I was surprised that there was this suspicion that there must be some sneaky hidden downside, when in fact co-ops are more sustainable, have lower turnover, higher profit per person, and happier employees. There's no actual downside, it's literally all upsides - oh, except for the fact that there's no way to get obscenely rich as the owner of a co-op. That's it, that's the entire reason. People with capital start companies so they can exploit labor to get even more capital, and only people with capital have enough time and money to start companies, so thus there's not many co-ops.
> replace it with a grassroots up system.
This is basically how Marx wrote about Communism, and how Kropotkin wrote about Anarchist Communism. There have been many... interpretations... of their work in practice. Spanish anarchist syndicalism actually worked remarkably well, they had nearly their entire economy syndicalized before they were betrayed by the communists and then killed en masse by the fascists.
Okay, this sounds awesome. Co-op is sounding good to me.
I'm not too familiar with the communist theory, but I have come to the conclusion that the system doesn't matter nearly as much as the direction.
Waterfall communism or capitalism will corrupt the ones on top. And the grassroots up one will keep absolute power and the human narcissist tendencies at check.
The moral comes from the grassroots as power corrupts.
As long as we wait for a godlike leader for rescue the end result is same as with Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Thiel, Epstein, Musk, ...
The godlikeness can come though in many forms, political (Trump), propaganda (Musk/Zuck7Thiel) or via extortion material and money like Epstein.
A good litmus test for a decision maker is the universal ethical principle mentioned in the article put into concrete and compare everything via the lens of "what if all eight billion of current humans and also the future generations would do this".
Right now nobody's daring to to this but as long as we start asking "who's afraid of the narcissist zillionaire" the world starts to make sense and the solution appears.
Power reveals rather than corrupt: it's easy to act moral when there are consequences (real or imagined) when you don't, but you see someone's true self when they know they could get away with it.
For example, this is why the way someone treats service workers is a good indicator of someone's character.
I'm looking this via the lens of moral development where:
Pre-conventional level is the narcissist me-me-me level, that seems to dominate the geopolitics and tech.
Conventional is most of us as the sheep. This level follows the loudest crowd that right now is the pre-conventional.
Post-conventional is the few that can do standalone thinking and morals.
Most conventionals can though understand the difference between and also the outcome we're headed to with the pre-conventional human gods, but we need to build the normalcy for the post-conventional ones together and make it structural.
My hunch is that first step could be to start the discussion on what is excessive on personal level. Consumption, wealth, political power.
Something like Mamdani or Polanski have showed, only more blunt. The majority of people are waking up that the current trajectory means the end of the world and extinction after the short period of accelerationist-dystopian hellscape.
“The Dark Pattern by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage teaches us about the power of context, which is stronger than reason, values, morals, and best intentions. It is an uncomfortable and painful lesson about the root causes of 'corporate infernos.' "
The context matters.
Think of the banality of evil in WW2 Germany.
We are capable of doing almost anything, good or bad, as long as the shoal around does it and pretends it normal.
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