from Plus Public Activity Feed for Rob Fisher https://plus.google.com/115288849695545002165/posts/Ai8uZQyQm9u
No blogging has happened here since I started blogging at Samizdata, although there hasn’t been much of that lately either for various reasons. In theory, I’ll continue to post things here that don’t fit on Samizdata.
My best bits from Samizdata:
I just caught the last half of a documentary about Facebook, which was fairly decent despite being on the BBC. This link should show you when it’s repeated:
Decent in that I learned something about the various business models that I didn’t know. And the journalist talked about technical details of a subject I understand without being wrong, which is rare. And it wasn’t a hatchet job about the dangers and risks and general awfulness of Facebook and business in general.
In fact the criticism of Facebook was pretty weak. If I “like” a company on Facebook, it can pay to display adverts to my friends that say, “Rob Fisher likes [company]“. This could be construed as using me in an advert without my consent. Or maybe not. The documentary did not seem to have a strong opinion.
And there were academics interviewed who made arguments such as: by keeping in touch with more people, we are having fewer close friendships. Well, anyone can tell for themselves whether that is true, and whether it is a problem.
But the best bits were the bits explaining how Facebook makes money. This included a demonstration of the information available to someone creating an advert. The example was a product for brides, and showed how various filters could be applied (“female”, “engaged”, “interested in beauty”) to see how many people would see the advert. This looked powerful. But not as powerful as the use of Facebook to talk to customers. This segment concentrated on companies’ attempts to get people to leave comments on their pages so that the comments get shown to friends, thereby generating a kind of word-of-mouth advert.
It strikes me that the best way for a company to use Facebook is to let your employees have real conversations, like real people. The documentary didn’t really go there, unfortunately.
This is from an interview with William Gibson (H/T Michael Jennings):
It gave me the idea that you could question anything, that it was possible to question anything at all. You could question religion, you could question your own culture’s most basic assumptions. That was just unheard of—where else could I have gotten it? You know, to be thirteen years old and get your brain plugged directly into Philip K. Dick’s brain!
That wasn’t the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-advertisement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about science! It didn’t tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J. G. Ballard.
And nobody knew. The people at the high school didn’t know, your parents didn’t know. Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of thinking that wouldn’t have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that little world I lived in.
I love the idea that SF is so subversive. I experienced it too, around the same age, but I didn’t realise at the time what was happening, and I don’t think I realised it since until Gibson pointed it out to me. There does seem to be a correlation between SF fans and, say, libertarians, who are certainly in the habit of asking more questions about the world than most people. But I don’t think it occurred to me that SF was the *cause*. Perhaps, to an extent, it is.
Twice recently I have encountered arguments that libertarians don’t believe in global warming because if true, it would invalidate their world view. The first time was a comment on Eric Raymond’s blog, and the second a comment at Samizdata.
Presumably the idea is that since only government action could reduce emissions enough to avert global warming, you need big government to solve any such crisis. Libertarianism can’t solve this because the atmosphere is the ultimate commons.
But whatever the seriousness of global warming and whatever its causes, more freedom will always be a better solution than less freedom.
There is no conceivable problem that cannot better be solved by a free society than by a society ruled by a large state.
Free people are richer, more innovative and can respond more quickly. Governments are slow, and because they are centralised have a tendency to make the wrong choices. A government can only make one choice at a time, so it goes to its best experts and they decide what is to be done and it gets done, and then we find out what the unintended consequences are and start again. This is far inferior to a free market of competing ideas where lots of things get tried and winners emerge.
But what if the only way to prevent catastrophe is it dramatically reduce emissions immediately? Then there will be catastrophe! Governments are not able to co-ordinate the whole world into reducing emissions. They’ve been trying for long enough and not succeeding. Now, how do you want to face catastrophe? Free, or constrained?
