Making good regulations is like embalming Pharaohs, something the ancients practiced in mist-shrouded, unrecoverable antiquity - and that may not have happened at all.
Regulation is corruptible, but it need not be corrupt. Regulation, like science, is a process of neutrally adjudicated, adversarial peer-review.
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In a robust regulatory process, multiple parties respond to a fact-intensive question - "what alloys and other properties make a reinforced steel joist structurally sound?" - with a mix of robust evidence and self-serving bullshit and then proceed to sort the two by pantsing each other, pointing out one another's lies.
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The regulator, an independent expert with no conflicts of interest, sorts through the claims and counterclaims and makes a rule, showing their workings and leaving the door open to revisiting the rule based on new evidence or challenges to the evidence presented.
But when an industry becomes concentrated, it becomes unregulatable. 100 small and medium-sized companies will squabble. They'll struggle to come up with a common lie.
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There will always be defectors in their midst. Their conduct will be legible to external experts, who will be able to spot the self-serving BS.
But let that industry dwindle to a handful of giant companies, let them shrink to a number that will fit around a boardroom table, and they will sit down at a table and agree on a cozy arrangement that fucks us all over to their benefit.
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They will become so inbred that the only people who understand how they work will be their own insiders, and so top regulators will be drawn from their own number and be hopelessly conflicted.
When the corporate sector takes over, regulatory capture is inevitable. But corporate takeover *isn't* inevitable. We can - and have, and will again - fight corporate power, with antitrust law, with unions, and with consumer rights groups.
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*Knowing things is possible.* It simply requires that we keep the entities that profit by our confusion poor and thus weak.
The thing is, corporations don't *always* lie about regulations. Take the fight over working #encryption, which - once again - the UK government is trying to ban:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/24/signal-app-warns-it-will-quit-uk-if-law-weakens-end-to-end-encryption
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Advocates for criminalising working encryption insist the claims that this is impossible are the same kind of self-serving nonsense as claims that banning clearcutting of old-growth forests is impossible:
https://twitter.com/JimBethell/status/1699339739042599276
They say that when technologists say, "We can't make an encryption system that keeps bad guys out but lets good guys in," that they are being lazy and unimaginative. "I have faith in you geeks," they said. "Go #NerdHarder! You'll figure it out."
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Google and Apple and Meta say that selectively breakable encryption is impossible. But they also claim that a bunch of *eminently* possible things are impossible. Apple claims that it's impossible to have a secure device where you get to decide which software you want to use and where publishers aren't deprive of 30 cents on every dollar you spend. Google says it's impossible to search the web without being comprehensively, nonconsensually spied upon from asshole to appetite.
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Meta insists that it's impossible to have digital social relationship without having your friendships surveilled and commodified.
While they're not lying about encryption, they *are* lying about these other things, and sorting out the lies from the truth is the job of regulators, but that job is nearly impossible thanks to the fact that everyone who runs a large online service *tells the same lies* - and the regulators themselves are alumni of the industry's upper eschelons.
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Logging companies know a lot about forests. When we ask, "What's the best way to remediate forests," companies may well have useful things to say. But those useful things will be mixed with harmful lies. The carefully cultivated incompetence of our regulators means that they can't tell the difference.
#Conspiratorialism is characterized as a problem of *what* people believe, but the true roots of conspiracy belief isn't what we believe, it's *how* we decide what to believe.
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It's not beliefs, it's #epistemology.
Because most of us aren't qualified to sort good reforesting programs from bad ones. And even if we are, we're probably not also well-versed enough in cryptography to sort credible claims about encryption from wishful thinking. And even if we're capable of making *that* determination, we're not experts in food hygiene or structural engineering.
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Daily life in the 21st century means resolving a thousand life-or-death technical questions *every day*. Our regulators - corrupted by literally out-of-control corporations - are no longer reliable sources of ground truth on these questions. The resulting #EpistemologicalChaos is a cancer that gnaws away at our resolve to do anything about it. It is a festering pool where nihilism outbreaks are incubated.
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The liberal response to conspiratorialism is mockery. In her new book *Doppelganger*, #NaomiKlein tells of how right-wing surveillance fearmongering about QR-code "#VaccinePassports" was dismissed with a glib, "Wait until they hear about cellphones!"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine
But as Klein points out, it's *not good* that our cellphones invade our privacy in the way that right-wing conspiracists thought that vaccine passports might.
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The nihilism of liberalism - which insists that things can't be changed except through market "solutions" - leads us to despair.
By contrast, leftism - a muscular belief in democratic, publicly run planning and action - offers a tonic to nihilism. We don't have to let logging companies decide whether a forest can be cut, or what should be planted when it is. We *can* have nice things.
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The art of finding out what's true or prudent didn't die with the #Reagan Revolution (or the discount Canadian version, the #Mulroney Malaise). The truth is knowable. Doing stuff is possible. Things don't have to be on fire.
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@b92dcc07 this dovetails with something I was thinking about today: the sheer mass of capital encourages monoculture in a way that smaller entities can’t.
My family is visiting our favorite cidery today, in WA’s Olympic Peninsula. We took a tour they were offering, and our guide went through the list of all the “land partners” required to help lease and eventually buy the farm.
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