How is it going in the other countries that are trying this? Do we know yet? If not, why move forward with legislation based on untested theories, especially when other countries are currently testing it for you?
If you are actually looking for an article on "How the Tech World Turned Evil", you are going to be sorely disappointed.
This article is, as you might expect, the usual cast of villains and the usual cast of saviors. The villains only act like villains, and the heroes only act like heroes. Never once are the heroes actions suspect, and never once are the villains actions sympathetic.
If you support the heroes of this article, and your dopamine lights up when your opinions are echoed in a publication, then you may love this article. Having said that, I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.
> I am sure you have read this same article over and over again in many different forms, I certainly have.
Is it possible that we read it so often because it's obvious and undeniable?
In fairness, I do agree with your assessment that the moralizing of figures like Musk and Zuckerberg has gotten old. But it's old because we've been criticizing them for years and nobody responds. Elon and Mark are net-negative fraudsters that manage to stay liquid by spiting humanity. They do not bristle at the thought of invading your privacy, surveilling you or deceiving you through complex marketing campaigns. We have seen the same behavior from Nadella, Pichai, Cook and just about every other executive capable of redirecting their respective business.
In the interest of discussion, I'd challenge you to defend this trend instead of downplaying it. Why shouldn't we prosecute anticompetitive and misanthropic market abuses? Help me understand the sympathetic angle.
I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it, which the article promises but doesn't deliver.
To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece. The article lays out clearly the negative desires of the villains, and the positive desires of the heroes, but do the heroes have any negative aspects? Does the EU simply want to protect consumers or is there an argument that they are the law to unfairly targeting American companies? What about the villains, do they have any positive aspects? Does Musk want humanity to keep existing to the point where he is willing to put capital on the line to give our species a backup planet?
The point of this comment isn't to defend the villains or vilify the heroes, its to recognise that these issues are not simple as defined by the article, and in presenting them as simple you don't end up with an understanding of the core question: "How the Tech World Turned Evil".
> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.
I disagree.
To properly understand this, you need to focus not on the specific people who happen to have ended up on top of it, but the systems that enabled them to get there.
And to (probably over-)simplify it for the sake of a short post, I believe the root cause is in Ronald Reagan's deregulation and gutting of antitrust. With a robust antitrust regime through the '80s and '90s, we would not have had the kind of tech behemoths we did then, leading to the unstoppable tech juggernauts of today.
> To begin to understand this, you have to examine the actions of the heroes as critically as the villains as defined in this piece.
The possibility of EU betrayal or Musk's saviourdom is speculative, and also entirely subjective as to whether you think it's fair or righteous. I don't think either of those topics could be meaningfully explored to explain resentment towards American tech.
Consumers do not evaluate businesses with a reciprocal mentality, they don't need an absolute good to identify evil. This is a pretty poorly-written article that would not be improved with both-sidesing.
> Does the EU simply want to protect consumers or is there an argument that they are the law to unfairly targeting American companies?
Straight out of the corpos' DARVO. The motive isn't really relevant. The fact is that the GDPR creates an individual-empowering legal concept of having some control over the dossiers being kept on us, which is something sorely lacking in the US.
> I'm not interested in defending the trend as much as I am in understanding it
If you're actually interested in understanding, there is a very short answer that is as old as time: power corrupts.
We, by which I mean the collective tech/hacker community (especially those directly working for the surveillance industry), promulgated technical architectures that agglomerated too much centralized power. From that, the vectoralist class / capital taking hold of those reigns of power and using them for oppression of individuals was inevitable (motive: economic extraction).
Of those early individualist ideals, some earnestly believing founders fought and/or retired. Some changed as they became more powerful. And I'm sure some were simply masking from the start. I don't think picking through individuals to suss out the distinction really matters.
Something I have noticed about tax and spend advocates is they have shifted their messaging from "these taxes will pay for great services" to "these taxes will hurt the rich". It's telling that even they have lost faith in the ability for tax increases to provide meaningfully better services as an advertisement. I suppose no one, including myself, would seriously believe it.
I am referencing only the American zeitgeist, I assume other countries might have better systems.
"The government shouldn't help people" is such a bizarrely popular American attitude, that so many people take as gospel. Therefore "The government can't help people" emerges as reality. It doesn't have to be this way, but we make it this way due to the majority's stubborn choices.
You look at a lot of places and between unions, procurement rules, or an obsession with certain classes of contractors, government capacity is badly hobbled from the start.
They have a panel who are reviewing it’s effects across all aspects of teen life including sleep patterns, school grades ect and then nationally test results ect
“The regulator would need to assess whether platforms were taking reasonable steps. If they were not, it could take that platform to court to seek fines.
There would be an independent evaluation of the ban conducted by an academic advisory group examining the short-term, medium-term and longer-term impacts of the ban.
“It will look at the benefits over time, but also the unintended consequences,” Inman Grant said.
A 14-year-old boy looking at social media on his mobile phone. Tech giants Meta and TikTok said on October 28 they will obey Australia's under-16 social media ban but warned the landmark laws could prove difficult to enforce. Australia will from December 10 force social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to remove users under the age of 16. (Photo by David GRAY / AFP) (Photo by DAVID GRAY/AFP via Getty Images)
How is Australia’s social media ban affecting you and your family?
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“Everything from are they sleeping? Are they interacting or are they actually getting out on the sports fields? Are they reading books? Are they taking less medication like antidepressants? Are their Naplan scores improving over time?” Inman Grant said.”
Almost no laws are enacted with this in mind. The people doing it are neither scientists nor engineers and never suffer any consequences for failure of what most people will see as well meaning lawmaking. The idea that a law should be subject to quality control is not merely absent but also anathema.
Countries like Singapore figured out that high reward / high risk (e.g. punishment) is the essence of capitalism and thus retaining talent in the public sector.
EDIT: You will notice a lot of talk about high pay. It's important to note that this is not without major punishment for financial mismanagement. You can't have one without the other, it's not just a question of giving politicians a bigger trough to put their snout in.
also to keep it like Singapore, let's deport all people illegally (but beat the crap out of them first), execute all drug dealers, execute all drug addicts, and most other criminals - beat the crap out of them and release.
the nice thing about common sense beatings is the cost of prison, housing, food, etc. is all zero, and the whole prison political topic is a non-issue. beatings are in fact extremely efficient, effective, and cheap, which is why lee kwon yew adopted them
I dunno about you, but the USA has never been known for non-violent treatment of immigrants, and if anything, 2025 is not the year to claim such a high ground.
I assumed OP’s point was coming from a place of admiration for Singapore, not trying to claim the moral high ground. It’s remarkable what Singapore has been able to achieve through a disciplined society.
Singapore was a poor, backward c country within my parents’ lifetime. Harsh punishments is a tool they use to change the culture to make it more amenable to development.
Is there any evidence that this law is achieving the goals it was designed to tackle? If not, is there any reason it still exists? Why don't laws have to continually justify themselves as a matter of procedure?
Even a "Reject All" button is one more annoyance than I had before these laws. The dialogs previously didn't exist at all.
I'm willing to accept that some amount of personal data is being sold less, at least by some market participants. I'm still not sure how I could possibly measure even the tiniest improvement in my life, though.
I was being tracked by thousands of sites before these laws were in place and had no measurable negative impact on my life. I’m also skeptical how much practical reduction of tracking has occurred for me in the US.
What I’m 100% sure of is that the UX of the web has been made worse, and I don’t think it’s sufficiently acknowledged.
If your asking if the GDPR is effective, yes, it is.
The only ones ignoring it completely are either dodgy companies, or the clueless. The companies exercising malicious compliance are now (quite rightly) increasingly seen as dodgy and need to up their game if they want to become respectable.
You can ask companies for a copy of all your personal data they hold. There is no way this would be possible without GDPR and similar laws. In general, data controllers need to abide to some legal framework and not do anything they want.
I am not sure what OP asks. They should make their request more specific, what they want evidence for.
For example, my insurance company can no longer get away with selling my details to financing companies behind my back. Such shenanigans are no more in the UK and EU thanks to the GDPR.
A rather controversial opinion I have is this will begin to bend back very soon, once AI starts controlling more of the development process it will be able to reason about why we have these verbose frameworks at all, and start slimming them down to do only what it needs to do in the context of a program. I think stories like this will become more and more common: https://cybernews.com/security/curl-maintainer-stenberg-says...
Keir Starmer is trying to sell this to public with the promise that it will curb illegal immigration. But by how much? And if that target isn't met, will it be rolled back? It always amazes me when governments hold themselves to such a low standard, and just fall back on "if you don't like it vote it out" while not recognising that the signal of a vote every 4 years can not meaningfully extract consent on this particular issue.
Representative democracy sucks, it just sucks less than everything else we’ve tried. Plebiscites on specific issues are terrible: that’s how we got Brexit and woke up the next day astonished that our neighbors had been so daft.
Brexit is an interesting case to bring up. As someone who voted against it, it is also clear to me that it hasn't been implemented in any way that could have made it a success from the representatives, and looks like a clear case of the representatives maliciously complying with a decree that they didn't agree with.
I remain unconvinced that we can't do better than a system of government that is over 200 years old that only exists as a function of the technology at the time.
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