Sarah Valentine@SarahValentine@pawb.social

Replying to @⁨beep@piefed.world⁩

Social media has the power to do so much good: connecting people across the globe, enabling the sharing of information across language barriers and in circumvention of government censorship, and more. But because the world is run by greedy power-hungry pigs, we can’t have social media without it being exploited to the furthest extent possible in the name of profit. The mental health of the public is not even a secondary concern - it is completely disregarded in favor of squeezing further growth out of a saturated market for a service that should be both simple and free.

MangoCats@MangoCats@feddit.it

Replying to @⁨SarahValentine@pawb.social⁩

But where’s the motivation? How do you join the $10B club “doing so much good”? That would take soooo much longer than just being evil, evil is easy, evil is profitable, and evil can masquerade as good long enough to cash out to a level where you can hire lawyers good enough to never worry about being prosecuted for being evil.

Where’s the structural societal incentive to “do so much good”, and why would we need it? We are social animals, most of us are hardwired for altruism, we’ll do good without expectation of compensation, so our “great society” has chosen to just use those base human instincts to “do good enough” and meanwhile reward the rare psychopaths with wealth and power - because: it’s a dog eat dog world out there, if our dogs aren’t eating theirs, theirs will eat ours.

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Sarah Valentine@SarahValentine@pawb.social

Replying to @⁨MangoCats@feddit.it⁩

Where’s the structural societal incentive to “do so much good”, and why would we need it?

That’s a great question. There are some college courses that can help you answer that. The short answer is “because in terms of the flourishing of an entire species, cooperation trumps competition, but it’s a recent evolution and doesn’t come naturally to everyone”. If we are to flourish and advance instead of strangling ourselves in the crib, we need to stop tolerating the kinds of selfish behaviors that prove detrimental to every society that permits them.

MangoCats@MangoCats@feddit.it

Replying to @⁨SarahValentine@pawb.social⁩

we need to stop tolerating the kinds of selfish behaviors that prove detrimental to every society that permits them.

The “why would we need it” question was intended as rhetorical.

I feel that as society grows orders of magnitude larger, these overall detrimental selfish behaviors keep resurfacing as advantages in special niches where they flourish, with the potential as you say to strangle us in the crib.

There’s also the looming spectre of mandatory birth control, if the magically predicted end of population growth doesn’t happen we’re going to have to do something to lessen our resource demands on the planet, because we’re already significantly degrading it far more than previous generations with 1/4th and less of our current population which simultaneously made much lower per-capita resource demands…