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Jimmy Nicholls's avatar

My impression is we've traded off a lot of stuff for convenience, and we're paying the price. To take the Amazon example, you can buy a lot of cheap stuff, but it's often very low quality. In some categories it's difficult to find even mid quality items, and forget about advice and support.

I think you see this everywhere. By slashing barriers to entry markets have been flooded with crap, and every day we swim in it. Social media (of which Substack is included) is a case in point, with the ratio skewing to low quality. Maybe it's progress, but the caveats are considerable.

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Chartertopia's avatar

My experience has been the opposite. Just as I know I can buy cheap not-sturdy tools from Harbor Freight which I expect to use once a year, and expensive sturdy tools elsewhere which I expect to use more often, so I can find the level of quality I want from Amazon, as long as I pay more and pay attention to the reviews. Amazon has begun adding warnings to some items that they have a higher-than-average return rate.

I remember spending far too long traipsing from store to store looking for just the right kind of tent, buying books and magazines, and finally settling on one from out of state which was illegal in California (made of GoreTex and could have flame retardant applied). I have zero interest in returning to those days.

I will guess that in 20+ years of buying from Amazon, I have only had a couple of bad buys. If I had been limited to brick and mortar stores, it would have been higher simply for the lack of choice and the expense + hassle of traipsing all over to find even that limited choice and talking to employees who either didn't know enough or were so biased that they didn't know about alternatives.

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Jimmy Nicholls's avatar

I guess you can be rosy about the past. I actually found Amazon pretty good in terms of quality for most of the time I've used it. But the past few years standards seem to have dropped. It's good for things like books. But if I wanted a specialist item I'd probably go elsewhere, albeit still online.

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Sheldon Richman's avatar

Love it!

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

I generally agree, but "Google gives us the totality of human knowledge!" is false on many margins. At best Google gives all the publicly available explicit human knowledge, and clearly that is far short of what it actually finds, which is the subset of that knowledge that people bothered to make available on the internet in a reasonably structured fashion.

It isn't central to your point, I know, but I hate to see knowledge flattened down in such a fashion, especially by someone who knows full well the importance of implicit knowledge, and all the little things that are not easily explicable and seemingly not worth uploading.

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Shawn Willden's avatar

"Totality of human knowledge" is obviously hyperbolic... but are you old enough to remember life before the Internet? Unless you lived in a university research library, you had access to far less than you do now... and that's being generous to the library.

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

Yes, I am, and you are not wrong that it is a lot of knowledge compared to previous options. However, relatively little of what is worth knowing shows up in books, no matter how much I love them.

The key distinctions are between intrinsic and explicable knowledge, and what gets recorded vs what doesn't. To make it to a book or to the internet knowledge has to be explicable and someone needs to think it worth recording. That's a very small amount of total knowledge.

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Boring Radical Centrism's avatar

If you're willing to break the law and google for some piracy websites, it still gives the access to a vast amount of human knowledge. Although some corporate and government secrets will still be unavailable.

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

Vast yes, but not all. Certainly not the totality. It doesn’t even know how many eggs I cooked this morning (probably) much less how my kids felt about them. Never mind the same numbers for 5 years ago. Seems trivial I know, but then much of what drives us is trivial, and much of what matters is not recorded or recordable.

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Debkin's avatar

This is interesting and there’s no denying the lack of appreciation for builders and what they’ve made for us. I think Louis ck summed it up.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U&pp=ygURTG91aXMgY2sgYWlycGxhbmU%3D

But this isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate complaints. You can say just get off Facebook but as you highlighted people use it as an intranet, google too. Some sites you can’t sign up without google or a social media. Free financially yes but they aren’t hiding their attempts to addict and cocoon people and to monetize by keeping you on looking at ads hopefully shopping and society is seeing the ill effects of excessive device use and I don’t know where to point the finger because it’s very difficult to not use the internet and social media at all. I do not think we are living in a golden age of privacy quite the contrary. Depends on how you define privacy. A lot of people are thrilled to document every embarrassing or personal moment to lasso in followers so that’s a strangeness we’re living in- no end to oversharing or the performative. It’s funny to me because I never thought a video of myself falling down the stairs would make me seem “real.” Everything you buy online has a permanent receipt. I do think we are snooped on and it’s not a coincidence items you were just talking about pop up in ads. Does this matter? Why would the state or social media ever weaponize this against 99% + of people? But I’m a pretty personal type and I don’t rather enjoy the constant photographs and recordings from cameras everywhere and the documentation of so many things. I would prefer to wear sunglasses go into CVS buy an embarrassing cream (it’s just to enhance my natural beauty!) and pay cash but I don’t because I’m lazy.

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Steve Cheung's avatar

I’m not sure I’d characterize tech as “free”.

You’ve acknowledged that the users are in fact the product, but made a fair point that the type of information given away may only rise to the level of nuisance.

But you haven’t accounted for “attention”, and the resultant loss of efficiency or productivity that might engender.

And you haven’t focussed on the disparate cost to young people vis a vis the case made by Haidt, Twenge, and others (admittedly their beef is with social media and not Google or Amazon).

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Chartertopia's avatar

Ancient Sumatrans and Egyptians were intimately aware of the tides and moon phases. We are not. Has anything useful been lost, compared to what we have gained? I sometimes marvel at being caught unawares by a bright full moon and my ignorance beforehand. I no longer marvel at having a full time internet connection in my pocket. The ancient farmers would be just the opposite.

At the Gettysburg commemoration, Lincoln gave a 5 minute speech when the standard was two hours. Which one is remembered today?

I know which set of marvels I prefer.

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Max Abecassis's avatar

Response to Bryan Caplan’s March 2, 2025, article: "Historically Hollow: The Cries of Populism"

The celebration of tech industry advancements overlooks fundamental concerns that go beyond simplistic "populism." While the article champions "incredible selection and unearthly convenience" at "cheap" prices, this framing exemplifies a Siren's Call that highlights immediate consumer benefits while obscuring profound systemic costs.

Take Amazon, which is praised as "simply the best store that ever existed." This perspective ignores Amazon's role in accelerating the elimination of small retailers and local businesses that once provided pathways to private wealth creation, meaningful employment, and community connection. The "cheap" prices celebrated come at the expense of distributed economic participation and relationship-building that sustained communities for generations. Amazon represents the culmination of a transition that began with Walmart and urban malls, but with far more extensive automation across the entire value chain.

The dismissal of privacy concerns as things "no prudent person loses sleep over" demonstrates a narrow understanding of data's role in our economy. Beyond targeted advertising, vast data repositories enable the development of advanced AI systems that could accelerate labor displacement across economic sectors. Privacy isn't merely about "embarrassing purchases" but about the raw materials fueling technological developments that may fundamentally reshape human economic participation.

The characterization of critics as "impossible to please" sidesteps substantive concerns about market concentration, labor practices, and wealth distribution. Many critics aren't opposed to technological progress itself, but rather to specific implementations that concentrate economic power while shifting risks to workers and communities. Reducing complex critiques to mere "populist complaints" avoids engaging with legitimate questions about who benefits from technological advancement and who bears its costs.

More fundamentally, the argument rests on a flawed assumption: that today's technological transformation follows historical patterns where new industries create new opportunities that replace displaced jobs. Advanced AI systems and automation technologies differ qualitatively from past innovations in their potential to replicate both physical and cognitive capabilities across nearly all economic domains. This represents a potential break from historical patterns of technological unemployment and reemployment that merits serious consideration.

What appears as "efficiency" and "business progress" often masks the transfer of productive capacity from distributed human labor to centralized capital equipment and AI systems. The resulting economic benefits flow primarily to the owners of these systems rather than being broadly shared. This pattern of misattribution has characterized technological advancement throughout industrial history but reaches its logical conclusion with systems capable of comprehensive capability replacement.

The comparison to historical criticisms of Standard Oil, tenements, and meatpacking plants reflects a selective reading of history that dismisses valid concerns as "neurotic activists searching for dark linings." Yet many historical critiques led to important reforms that balanced technological advancement with human welfare. The Pure Food and Drug Act, antitrust regulations, and labor protections emerged from legitimate concerns about technological implementation, not opposition to progress itself.

The services listed as evidence of tech's uncomplicated benefits – "free" social media, search engines, video platforms – rely on monetization models that extract value from users' attention and data while creating few employment opportunities relative to the industries they displace. The true costs of these services aren't captured in their monetary price but in their broader economic and social impacts.

The question isn't whether technological advancement brings benefits – clearly it does – but whether those benefits are distributed in ways that sustain broad economic participation and social cohesion. When technology eliminates pathways to meaningful economic contribution without creating comparable alternatives, the result isn't just "business progress" but a fundamental restructuring of society that deserves critical examination.

Rather than dismissing critics as having a "deeply corrupt" way of thinking, we might better understand their concerns as attempts to grapple with unprecedented technological change. This doesn't mean uncritically accepting all critiques or halting innovation, but it does require moving beyond simplistic framings that characterize any questioning of technological implementation as irrational "populism." The future relationship between technology, human labor, and economic participation deserves nuanced discussion rather than dismissive certainty.

________________________________________

The response was prepared by:

Max Abecassis in collaboration with Claude AI (2025-03-02)

Max is an inventor (51 U.S. patents), innovator/entrepreneur (customplay.com), and futurist/philosopher ("Beyond the Romantic Animal" 1970). In collaborations with LLMs, principally Claude, the author has published a sequence of essays at nissim.com investigating the feasibility of establishing one or more "Isolated Self-Sustaining Human Sanctuaries" (ISSHS).

max@nissim.com

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Chartertopia's avatar

Cry me a river about small local establishments. The market has decided they don't offer enough benefits to make up for their higher prices, lower selection, limited hours, and travel time.

I don't shed tears for small farmers either. Creative destruction and all that; the road to progress is paved with more automation and replacing grunt jobs with thinking jobs. Talking with bank tellers is fine; standing in line for five minutes is not, limited hours are not, and that is why I choose ATMs every chance I get. The price is not worth the benefit.

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RE's avatar

Recommend Lina Khans “Amazon and the anti-trust paradox” in response to this post

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Quansteli's avatar

The “price” of social media has been the stunted socialization and complete rewiring of the collective brain of a generation. That’s something that’s harder to quantify in monetary terms, so you and Hanania will have a harder time computing

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Minimal Gravitas's avatar

You can see the benefits of technology and also understand what the negatives are: what is lost, even when things improve.

In trying to make your point against populists, you’d actually be more convincing if you could demonstrate that you understood these tradeoffs rather than coming across as oblivious as you do in this essay.

I say this, by the way, as someone who is overall optimistic about the bent of history. But just because I see improvements doesn’t mean that literally everything doesn’t come with tradeoffs.

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Rodney Rockwell's avatar

Im in agreement with the thrust of it, but

“In a functional world, we would have a few start-ups catering to privacy fanatics – and the rest of us could enjoy the bounty of the tech industry without this absurd digital red tape”

The benefits of many of these tech companies come from network effects, no? Amazon is so good at what it does because it’s one of the world’s biggest logistics networks, to say nothing of social media where the whole point is to interact with other people.

Sometimes I can’t fell if you’re just being dogmatic to the point of myopia or if you’re just writing to be stronger as an activist for what are important and underrepresented perspectives.

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Chartertopia's avatar

There are a few startups already catering to privacy issues. The price paid is older technology and time spent taking care of them. Some people think the price is worth it. Most don't. It's choice.

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Rodney Rockwell's avatar

Duckduckgo for google is an example that’s functional where there’s little tradeoff, what’s there for a social media analog? Cost to consumer of switching that service is far greater than a search engine

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Chartertopia's avatar

I agree: people think the tradeoff is worth it.

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Rodney Rockwell's avatar

I think what I’m saying isn’t clear;

What option do people have where they can make that tradeoff with social media? I’m not aware of any, and I’m saying I think it is specifically because of the aforementioned network effects of the large companies in the respective niches.

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Chartertopia's avatar

People can log off social media. If they don't, it's because the benefit exceeds the cost.

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Rodney Rockwell's avatar

OK you’ve been intentionally ignoring the point I’m making because you don’t want to have a conversation, thank you for making that clear but I wish you would’ve done so five posts ago instead of wasting my time.

People can quit heroin/drinking/cocaine/percosets at any time, if they don’t it’s because the benefit exceeds the cost is an insane statement, and (separately) ignoring that socials are ALSO intended to be addicting as possible is insNe.

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Chartertopia's avatar

A1: No I haven't.

A2: You've been ignoring my point.

Choose the answer you want.

The shift from MySpace to FaceBook shows the addiction is to social media, not the particular brand.

If you think social media is as harmful as illegal unregulated street drugs, then I wish you had made that point 5 posts ago instead of wasting my time.

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