Oddbean

@40cd5708 Pardon me, but many of us cringe and start to get suspicious when the techbros start talking about “smart people doing things for the common good”. What usually follows are scams, chaos, oppression and general fuckery. No social media platform survives contact with reality. Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc, are even now devolving into some version of X. Smart people are forever overetimating how smart they are….

@230738d5 C’,mon friend, that feels like a pretty gratuitous quibble. I get your point but who gives a fuck about what tech bros think or say. They don’t own our means of expression or our language. I don’t think many people would have read my words the way you did. It’s common knowledge that they don’t really give a fuck about the common good. I’m not going to let that dictate my words, thoughts or expressions.

@40cd5708 I am not smart enough (dumb enough?) to claim to even know what the term “common good” actually means. Whether owned by a corporation, co-op or other group or individiual, no social media enterprise can accurately claim to represent “the common good”. Personally, I can see a time - not far off now - where I will see no further good in using social media and decide to do something else with my time.

@230738d5 that’s certainly a choice you can make. But the concept of the common good has been near and dear to many of us for most of our lifetimes. I believe there is one. I believe we’ve strayed from from a collective nature (if not spirt) that built most of the modern world, however imperfectly.

@40cd5708 Appreciate the convo! I assume good intentions in your service of common good. I believe also that if those like you wish to serve some assumed common good, then you must have some responsibilty to define your terms better. One person might assume that content moderation (or even censorship!) is a common good, another might assume absolute free speech is a common good. Wherever one’s definition lies along that spectrum, one ought to be as clear as possible where that is.

@230738d5 I don’t know. It sounds like you’re insisting that aspirational precepts and goals be bound to specific use cases. I think the “common good” is more inate than that. Sure, it’s fluid, but I think it should be. Scoundrels will always distort the meaning of any phrase to suit their ends. Most people still assume it merely refers to putting the collective needs above the individual’s when making policies or decisions likely or sure to affect both.

@40cd5708 Aspirations are baseline. As you say, they are fluid & ambiguous by definition. The modern problem is that “aspiration” is now corporate speak for “pretty stories that people like to hear, but we dont really know what they mean” To call an idea or project “aspirational” in a meeting is a kiss of death for that idea or project. Aspirations are no substitute for principles.