Because social media is just that: media. They’re platforms for ads and marketing that are more akin to broadcast media with a parasocial interactive twist. Contrast that with social networking which facilitates connections between actual people.

At some point in the last two decades, those distinctions have blurred, often to great shareholder benefit.

That’s a really good point. I’d add to that: instead of performing well in a narrow domain and being able to scale just on that specialty, large orgs tend to diversify in order to expand into other markets and make more money. Those different business goals can be in conflict, like we see with Google’s ads vs search vs cloud vs AI.

Can’t predict the future but a system like this could be better than our current state of affairs where we already suffer user-hostile services and corrupt action all concentrated in a few private companies to which we have no alternatives.

If cooperatives were a more prevalent structure, there would likely be more of them since the power incentives to consolidate are lessened, but not eliminated. Because there would be more competition in the marketplace, there would be more incentives to provide good products and services. We can assume that underperforming cooperatives would generally be less successful.

Also, with more participants in the marketplace and greater decision-making by members, less power would be concentrated in the hands of the owners and managers. While that’s not a guarantee against corruption, limiting power concentration lessens the impact of any individual’s corrupt actions and provides opportunity for others not to have to do business with them. Compare to the current state of Google’s leadership directing so much of the company’s efforts not toward providing service but toward manipulating people and markets to squeeze more money out of them.

There are, however, things we likely would lose out on with a more cooperative-based economy. For one, while there would be more incentive for co-ops to produce higher quality products and services, they would probably spend less effort on the “high polish” (for lack of a better way to say it) that attracts marginal customer/user growth. In other words, things would work better but probably be less pretty.

Another potential drawback is in economies of scale. Theoretically, market-dominant and tightly integrated companies can produce more for less while every piece of the puzzle just fits together. I don’t see this as a very compelling argument since the efficiency gains don’t usually benefit anyone but the owners, with excess profit directed not to increased quality but to marketing and manipulation. Since cooperatives would be less able to build up their own “walled gardens,” interoperability may be more incentivized and this drawback may be mitigated.

Really, though, anything has got to be better than having so many smart people working toward finding new ways to squeeze money out of us rather than doing something actually productive.

Oh, look, another law that will never be enforced:

18 U.S.C. § 953. Private correspondence with foreign governments.

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

While you’re right that there’s a vast difference between a credit score and a social credit score, I would argue that the US credit score system does have a bigger impact on one’s life than just not being able to get a loan. It is used to deny housing and employment and makes purchases more expensive due to higher payback rates. Since so much of our economy is built on consumer spending without the needed growth in wages over the last fifty or so years, some kind of personal debt is needed especially for people with low incomes who have to cover essentials one way or the other. It creates a self-reinforcing spiral that keeps poor people poor.

Things have improved here and there with the CFPB and some anti-discrimination ordinances at the local level, but it’s hardly enough to narrow the effect as you described. Heck, it took us until the Biden administration to propose to ban medical debt from affecting credit scores.

In both cases, these scoring systems are part of a suite of incentives to get people to play by the rules of the power structures that exist: social credit for national authoritarians hierarchies and TransEquiSperiFax for the authority of capitalist hierarchies.

Again, you’re not completely wrong and I don’t want to claim that one system is anywhere close to being as pernicious as the other, but the US system not quite so harmless as you say. Sorry for making this so US-centric but that’s where I have the most perspective.

I’ve been searching for so long for a way to have my software and configs and project deps tracked in a way that doesn’t have me setting things up every time I switch to a new machine or–worse–opening an old project. I found some things that get me most off the way there like docker, rtx/mise, direnv, stow, or the package manager for whatever language I’m working in at a time. Still, nothing quite does what I need.

I tried our NixOS and have it on three machines as well as Nix on WSL. It took a while for me to figure it out, especially moving to flakes and separating user config out to home-manager. But it was fun enough to try and fail and fail and fail then succeed that I kept going. I think it might be what I’m looking for. I was able to set up a new machine by just cloning a repo and any time I cd into a project on NixOS or a remote Linux server or even Windows with WSL, everything is just ready for me. Do wish it were fully POSIX compliant, though.

I know this is from more of a developer perspective, but even for gaming and graphics I’ve never had an easier time getting Nvidia drivers set up.

I promise I’m not shilling. I still have a lot to learn. I think I made it past the cliff on this meme but I might be surprised.