NYTimes on ideas to fix the Internet: “[Tim] Berners-Lee is developing and proselytizing for a new system that gives each person his or her own personal online-only data store, or POD for short. The PODs let people decide how their data is managed, used and shared. The Flanders region of Belgium has already authorized PODs for all of its citizens, Berners-Lee wrote. He co-founded a company, Inrupt, that’s built on the concept of PODs and the computer servers associated with them….The key technology of [Frank] McCourt’s initiative, Project Liberty, is the D.S.N.P., for Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. It’s designed to allow customers to wrest away control of the data about them from the social media giants such as Facebook and TikTok. Your “social graph” — a map of your digital relationships — sits on a decentralized database managed by a third party who can’t see the data being stored. You can remain anonymous, but if you want to share your views widely you may be required to you identify yourself. One social network, MeWe, has moved nearly 700,000 of its roughly 20 million users onto a D.S.N.P.-based system that uses blockchain. These are just two of many overlapping and sometimes conflicting attempts to democratize the web.”
Donald Boudreaux: “I never describe competition as being a simplistic function of the number of firms in an industry (a surprisingly vague concept, btw). Instead, I teach competition…as rivalry among firms experimenting with different methods to better enable them to attract consumers – rivalry that is ultimately hampered only by government-imposed restrictions on the ability of businesses to enter different avenues of enterprise and to so experiment.”
FT: “So-called “iconic words”, which show a resemblance between form and meaning, include onomatopoeic terms such as “boom” and “splash”. They, writes archaeologist Steven Mithen in The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age, “would have obviated the need for learning [by early ancestors] because their meanings can be intuitively grasped”. Iconic words are just one clue in the enduring mystery of how Homo sapiens came to acquire the flowing, compositional language that is so different from the grunts and screams of our closest relative, the chimpanzee. That history includes genetic mutations that changed brain shape, sparking a cognitive fluidity that facilitated the development of metaphor and abstract thought. Metaphor “enhanced communicative power, including the ability to describe and explain complex technological skills and ideas to others”, Mithen suggests.”
Rathin Roy: “Fascist and populism are speedily replacing the social democratic consensus. Diminished self-esteem, accentuated by abandonment, provides a fertile seedbed for political mobilisation. This is further accentuated by social media, and ready acceptance of propaganda that offers the opiate of vilifying a primitive “enemy” — be it racial or religious minorities, “immigrants”, and so forth. Populist political leaders show little interest in increasing prosperity by democratising access to the better “whats” of prosperity. However, they have every technological and commercial incentive to encourage increased consumption at scale of the cheaper “whats” to keep their base satiated and their crony capitalist supporters wealthy. This has happened before in history and shall pass too as the hoax becomes apparent to a slumbering, wounded, citizenry. But history teaches that this could take a long time because the leaders today are not reminiscent of a Hitler or Stalin, but resemble weak authoritarians like Franco, Marcos, and Salazar. It is precisely because they represent the least common denominator that they reproduce it with political durability and longevity while condemning the populations they govern to a state of consensual mediocrity and low self-esteem.”
