Whose fault? And what about solutions? My short reaction is that evading those questions mostly short circuits Mr McNamee's complaints about Facebook. The first question is important because Mr McNamee contributed so much towards making things worse, but I'm only going to write a little bit about corporate cancerism here. Instead, I want to focus on the second question, because a problem with no solution is essentially meaningless.



Corporate cancerism is what replaced the dead economic philosophy called capitalism. Unlike communism, which died an unnatural death of its own making, capitalism was murdered by religious zealots. Their creed? "There is no Gawd but profit and <put your favorite joke here>." My current favorite is "... and #PresidentTweety is no prophet." Other versions use top prophets of Gawd Profit from such sources as Forbes, where the google is in the top 10, though the list is mostly dominated by financial speculators like his truly, the Mr McNamee himself. How much of the fault is thine own? However there are many insane aspects of corporate cancerism beyond the insane worship of money. For now I'll just reduce it to my second reaction: No corporate cancer can ever solve the "problem" of obtaining an infinite profit. The cancers can only devour each other until their host (AKA our society) is destroyed.



So let's consider the solution to the Facebook problem. Actually, this is part of a generalized solution to many of the problems the giant tech companies are creating. In short form, they should share some of the information they gather with us. Rather than using our own information against us to manipulate us, they should work with us to increase the mutual benefit to everyone. In Mr McNamee's recent interview with Bill Maher he actually worded it in terms of offering a better business model, but he didn't say anything to hint what his proposed concrete solution might be, if any, and in particular, I haven't been able to find anything along the lines I'm suggesting here...



Facebook's specific form of corporate cancerism is based on increasing the time spent on Facebook by the users. Facebook has no real incentive to increase the quality of that time, but just focuses on the quantity. It's just too complicated to consider the quality question because it's a matter of opinion. So my suggested solution is to let US decide what constitutes quality by revealing the earned public reputation of the people who are commenting and sharing on Facebook. People who have earned a negative reputation, for example by sharing fake news, will become increasingly invisible, and the qualitative value of the remaining material will increase. It's not like there's any shortage of material to share. It's the TIME that's ALWAYS limited.



I've actually glossed over lots of details such as dimensions of reputation, various symmetries, logarithmic scaling, and standardized representations of multiple dimensions, but my time is also limited. I'll leave off now with the ancient joke of additional detailed suggestions being available upon polite request.



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#1 Freedom = (Meaningful + Justified - Coerced) Choice{~5} ≠ (Beer^4 | Speech | Trade)



It took me so long to learn patience that now I have no time to be patient!