Ed really likes to be heard in articles and on social media. He does NOT like being corrected especially not by people who are mostly agreeing with him. This is not uncommon to culture journalists.
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My agreements with him are limited almost entirely to “yes, there is a problem.” What I disagree with him on is crucial bc it’s the difference between the problems we both agree on actually being solved or just reset back to their earliest developments.
I'm involved in the designing of software for a living and have been doing it professionally/personally since the 1980s. End users telling me they KNOW the prime moving forces behind bad decisions annoy me. Some of it is ideological but middle management can take a lot of the blame here.
Which is where my biggest disagreements are. Ed thinks these problems are the result of individuals, I say the system of capitalism creates this and if it wasn’t Zuckerberg or Musk it would be someone else doing the same shit bc the system WANTS soulless profit motivated ghouls.
The system isn't a person, it doesn't want anything and anthropomorphizing trends of people following stupid decisions for short term profit is a matter of laziness and blame shifting to abstract concepts that can't defend themselves.
Look, I studied economics, completed half the major with a 4.0 then jumped ship to literature because I don't believe it's a useful social science outside of some measurement techniques. Trying to make it a field for discussing human behavior beyond buying/selling is an 18th century concept.
I will 100% agree with you that had neither Zuck nor Musk been born, the forces would have favored others to achieve similar roles. Where I don't agree is that a PARTICULAR economic system is somehow more conducive to this occurring than others.
The economic or social system does not exist without creating its own type of exploitative bad actors, because that's a side effect of being descended from the primates who *couldn't* afford instinctive altruism to survive.
A system that rewards human exploitation, as capitalism does, is more conducive to an environment abundant with people who exploit humans, than a system which is collectively ran & in which any wrongs done would be done by the collective against itself.
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