The multi-billion dollar question is whether someone with serious technical acumen is prepared to step up and fight for a law that meaningfully restrains surveillance capitalism while allowing startups to compete. Or build a compliance-as-a-service business and give it away to startups for free.
People love to trash talk WordPress, but by being consistently correct and committed to its principles, it got this single line in this article:
"WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon."
It's because Matt Mullenweg and co have held the line on open source and the open internet for more than a decade now, and we should all be grateful.
Everything cool I've gotten to do in my life I owe to learning to code via building WordPress websites. I hope in the next decade WordPress and companies like Automattic become the example to aspire to instead of people throwing more fuel on the never-ending VC trash fire.
Automattic was founded 15 years ago, and despite being a profitable and growing company for most of that time, has only raised $617.3 million, mostly to fund specific expansion projects. At no time have they sought 10x returns or some kind of spectacular exit for the benefits of its shareholders. It’s not even close to the disaster that is most of VC world.
"Well of course the models were right", you say to yourself. Who is still arguing about this? The evidence has piled up to the extent that being "skeptical of the science" is unacceptable in educated, elite spaces (such as Hacker News and the tech industry generally).
But now, as you can already see proliferating in the comments to this piece, the new acceptable contrarian take on climate change is that of course its happening, but since life thrived on the planet during other climactic conditions there's nothing to worry about.
The message is the same as it's always been: trying to do anything in response is foolish, and we should all continue to just focus on making as much money as possible.
But the real issue with climate change is and has always been that it will socially and politically de-stabilize the planet, because quite a few people live in places that will become less livable in the near future, and those people will want to go somewhere else.
Those people will have a quite strong claim on land and resources in wealthy countries that emitted most of the pollution and have lots of mostly empty and more habitable land. This will cause global conflict on a scale beyond any that exists in living memory.
Yes, "life" will survive. Our societies in their current configurations will not, and decisions we make now will determine how messy or violent (or not) that transition will be.
Pedantic retorts about geological time should embarrass you in the face of the leaders of the tech industry evidently using their immense wealth to prepare for social collapse[1].
And although these people are clearly willing to spend money to prep for climate change, I still can't get a single one of the recruiters who cold-call or email me about HOT NEW SILICON VALLEY OPPORTUNITIES to find me a single credible company working on anything climate or energy adjacent. I can just hear their jaws slackening every time I bring it up.
Me too. I don’t think there are many people making enough money to eat working on Open Source software. If you see GitHub, the largest most active projects are funded by Mega Corps like Micro Face Goog.
I wonder how many companies are successful with open source but paid licence for commercial use.
> I quit reading media, and eliminated all social media from my life, and I've never been happier.
Staggering numbers of people are dying from opioid overdoses, many of them from opiates that doctors were incentivized to push onto their patients by drug companies, or that were illegally distributed from pharmacies who looked the other way when there were enough pills going out the door to kill the entire population of the town they were in. It's bad enough that someone might even finally be held criminally liable for it.
It isn't the media's fault that any of that happened, and it's largely because of media attention that anyone is being held accountable for it. Blaming the media for accurately reporting on the state of the world is always the last refuge of the person who's run out of real arguments.
The argument from people who would rather not engage with the state of the world for a long time has been that anyone who complains about the state of the world is just watching the news too much, because "the data" always show that the world is getting inexorably better, all the time. That was always a specious argument, and now that life expectancy in America has been declining for three years in a row, that argument should finally be laid to rest entirely. But here you're reviving it, by blaming the decrease in life expectancy itself on the media. It's very innovative! But it's just as wrong.
> Blaming the media for accurately reporting on the state of the world is always the last refuge of the person who's run out of real arguments.
If you really believe the media, any media, is reporting things accurately in 2019 you are not thinking critically or actively searching for the truth.
> The argument from people who would rather not engage with the state of the world for a long time has been that anyone who complains about the state of the world is just watching the news too much
How much of your own time and money have you spent fighting the opioid epidemic? If you are willing to get ACTIVELY involved in an issue then by all means, consume media on the subject.
> If you really believe the media, any media, is reporting things accurately in 2019 you are not thinking critically or actively searching for the truth.
Please tell me which media source you consume that's telling you the other media sources are lying to you.
Their argument doesn't hold up under the slightest amount of scrutiny. You can go to your friends' pages and manually extract their email or other contact information. If it's visible to you, its because your friend made a decision to make that information visible. They designed the data export tool that way knowing that the main thing someone trying to leave Facebook wants is contact information for their friends that they may only know how to reach on Facebook.
If I put my number or email on my page, and I adjust the privacy settings to "only friends", I understand I am making that information available to my friends. They are free to copy that information by hand, or by copy-pasting, into their own address book. I have explicitly made it available to them. Facebook includes information about your friends, such as their birthdays, in your data export. Their decision to not include off-Facebook contact information is a business decision designed to make leaving Facebook harder. It has nothing to do with privacy.
Haha, remember more than a decade ago when we all thought that interoperability was more profitable, and that everything would just naturally tend toward open standards? Wow. We were all just stupid?
