I disagree that it’s down to the individuals. While individuals can throw themselves into the gears of the machine it is understandable why they do not.
I see things in terms of a sharecropping analogy, feudal lords (corrupted government) allow the scammers to harvest the crop (victims) for a share of the proceeds. We cannot fix people to the point they are un-scammable and there does not exist a democratic force strong enough to fix the government. Almost all ads I’ve ever seen are for obvious scams, especially on twitter. You’d think the richest guy in history (possibly?) could afford not to allow industrial exploitation of his users but apparently not.
You have gambling sites and binary auction scams that have a turnover that includes a significant percentage of suicides. I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not. While many of us here may be smart enough to avoid falling victim to these scams we have family members that we care about who are not so this still indirectly costs us wealth.
Absolutely! I think this was kind of what OP was driving at with the suggestion to "start demanding better of others." It doesn't work to expect they should do better from their own motivation, we need to fix the broken incentives and consequences that result in those bad decisions being attractive.
While I agree with that ideal I’m not sure how realistic it is. Trump was elected on a populist platform and quickly betrayed his base again, this time before he has even taken office. What are people to do, vote harder? It’s not like Kamala would have fixed this either. If Kamala had a better chance of winning the ‘Tech Titans’ wouldn’t have switched teams. They would have done anything the government asked for so long as the scamming ad revenue kept flowing.
If we mean ‘we tech workers’ then you’ll just be replaced, just like how I was when I quit being a researcher at FANG companies over this and other ethical concerns. The only observable outcome is that my clear conscious came with the cost that I’m far poorer than I could have been. I’m lucky as I’m still well off but not everyone can make that call and survive. These scamming behaviors are trivial to detect and especially so at the large internet company level. It exists on these platforms because the owners want them to.
The US is rife with scams and has been for a long time, and the US has had the two party system for a long time. It would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that this time 4 more years of Democrat rule would have been when the they finally decide to actually do something about it.
> I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not
Doesn't this rely on us as the individual? We get the government we allow. We, humanity, could've had anything we wanted, this is what we gave ourselves.
‘We’ are animals who have evolved to be a certain way. You could maybe at tremendous effort fix one person but you cannot fix a population. Ever try to get an alcoholic to quit drinking, a junkie to quit drugs, a gambling addict to quit gambling.
Humans have built in innate weaknesses that are easily exploited by the unscrupulous. People have been exploiting others since time immemorial, secret police keep libraries of exploits and you can see them used repeatedly and effectively throughout history. Pied-piper strategy (basket of deplorables), Operation Trust (Q-Anon).
Unfortunately the "first past the post" system used in the USA and UK are effectively a form of prisoner's dilemma. The best thing to do is for everyone to not vote for one of the two oligarchy parties, but if only a small number do that it's meaningless.
It does and yet this seems to highly simplifying things.
Consider the US scoped studies studies showing that the population doesn't get what it wants. They showed that policy follows the whims of the wealthy even in the cases where the population overwhelmingly agrees on a contrary direction. So the data says "no", control has been removed from us.
Part of the complication is that the determined action of a few actors can efficiently spoil the efforts of communities.
I see things in terms of a sharecropping analogy, feudal lords (corrupted government) allow the scammers to harvest the crop (victims) for a share of the proceeds. We cannot fix people to the point they are un-scammable and there does not exist a democratic force strong enough to fix the government. Almost all ads I’ve ever seen are for obvious scams, especially on twitter. You’d think the richest guy in history (possibly?) could afford not to allow industrial exploitation of his users but apparently not.
You have gambling sites and binary auction scams that have a turnover that includes a significant percentage of suicides. I wish we had a democracy that could prevent this but we do not. While many of us here may be smart enough to avoid falling victim to these scams we have family members that we care about who are not so this still indirectly costs us wealth.