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SYSTEM_ERROR
December 16, 2022
"System Error" (2021) by
Rob Reich, Meharan Sahami and Rob Reich is a philosophy guy at
Jeremey M. Weinstein Stanford, and is not to be confused with
the economist Robert Reich (like I did).
The subtitle is:
"Where Big Tech Went Wrong and
How We Can Reboot" This now-long-past-trendy usage of
"reboot" is familiar with film
They don't deliver on that promise, of franchises, but has little relation
course-- here in the Internet Era it's to it's meaning with computers.
standard for every single title that
claims to know How or Why to be a lie. Rebooting a computer is a
reset, it's not a good
synonym for upgrade.
They're advocates for
government regulation in
general, and of the big
internet companies in In many places in the book
particular: they're mainly there's an odd reluctance to
trying to persuade that say something like "Our
regulations can be a good recommendations are--". If you
idea, but are less concerned couch it passively that makes
with specifying which ones. them feel more neutral? But
there are other places where
they're more direct... It's
almost as though it was written
But there are some actual by three different people.
policy recommendations:
They believe in:
SYSTEM_ERROR_AGENDA
o "the right to data protection":
They want a legal requirements for ways users
can easily move their data across platforms
They approve of Kirsten Gillibrand's proposal
in 2020 for a "data privacy agency".
o "stakeholder capitalism"/"accountable capitalism"
They approve of Elizabeth Warren proposal from 2017,
an "Accountable Capitalism Act" which featured:
o "a new federal charter for companies"
requiring consideration of the "interests
of all stakeholders"
o direct election of 40 percent of governing
boards by workers
o "restrictions on the ability of directors and
officers to sell shares of a company they recieve
as equity" to reduce a focus on short-term profits.
o They also like the idea of a Universal Basic Income
(promoted by Andrew Yang in 2019) and suggest it
could be funded by Bill Gates' idea for a "robot tax"
o "restricting anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions"
(one wonders if the Wall Street Journal read
this far before giving them a cover blurb).
But the main point of this book is not to endorse ideas
like this, it has no particular roadmap of the future
it's pushing-- the central point they want to argue
is that government regulation can be a good thing and
the "big tech" companies in particular need to be
regulated even more so than they are now.
Who exactly is going to be in charge of this and
how it's going to happen isn't really spelled out,
they mostly just say it's up to the democratic
process-- and there could easily be a chicken-and-egg
problem here: we can fix democracy, but we have to
fix democracy first.
SYSTEM_ERROR_DEMOCRITICAL
This is a book with a lot of historical reporting
in it, typically (but not always) recent history,
and typically about things I know about already,
but reading their accounts usually suppies me with
more details than I was aware of, and sometimes
they're very interesting details.
But... shouldn't there be more *data* here?
If you figure: published in 2021, written in
2010, then it comes out of a time 5 years
after the 2015/6 cluster-fuck, and hasn't My vauge impression
there been a lot of actual studies of this is that there are
stuff? dueling studies
about whether
They finger shills and filter bubbles Russian shills were
as The Problem, and this can at least a key element in
at least be made to sound plausible, the 2016 election.
but shouldn't they have something to
confirm this? There's no mention
of that literature
here: you'd think a
trio of Stanford
guys would do
The various arguments presented better than this.
here are often well-written, but
aren't impressive for breadth or
depth of thinking.
They call for a discussion of
*values*-- I smell a VTS class SYSTEM_ERROR_VALUES
here-- and use various strategies
to avoid making direct statements,
e.g. phrases like "it is worth
noting that" without saying why Though on the other hand,
it's worth noting or drawing any sometimes they surprise me
firm conclusions from it. and make a direct statement
about what they believe...
and sometimes it's almost
comprehensible.
SYSTEM_ERROR_DEMOCRITICAL
I have to admit to having an odd
psychological bias in trying to review
this book-- I'm inclined to be hostile
to it (I'm not entirely sure why), and
there was a temptation to skim, jump to
conclusions about what's being said, and
run off re-writing one of my familiar
rants that might only be tangentially You could call
related to the actual text. this "Internet
Syndrome"...
Then belatedly I'd remind myself I should
really check whether my shots are being
fired at the right target, and go back
and clean things up...
But there might be some fragments
of free floating unjustifiable
hostility that remain here. As
time allows, I may continue to
correct this problem.
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