Why the Internet Is Turning to Shit

I'm genuinely curious, what better idea are you referring to that would replace the concept of companies?

Similarly, skilled workers will still find that their labor is more efficient when they work together. And with scale comes the need for sales, administration, and all the other components which make up a company as we know it today.

I assume by "we" lacking imagination you mean humanity as a whole, and that just isn't true - we have lots of imaginative people who have attempted lots of different ways to arrange an economy, with varying degrees of success. We've tried flavors of state-run enterprise (from "crown corporations" here in Canada all the way to full collectivization in leftist and fascism in rightist systems) plus voluntary co-ops like kibbutz or communes. Not to mention publicly traded vs privately held corporations.

Humanity has the imagination and often has had the pleasure of "experimenting" with various methods.

If you work for an evil company, you're complicit. Even if you're working on a weird corner of open source esoterica.

Meta delenda est.

The reason regulations exist, is because humans -- for whatever god damn reason -- are willing to throw their fellow humans under the bus for a quick profit.

What if a company could figure out how to profit from destroying the social fabric of the US, even if it wasn't a direct intention of it's original inception? Well now you're talking about all of social media in 2025.

Companies (and I guess capitalism) is a great system. But it needs to have checks and balances. The problem isn't the idea of a company. The problem is companies with so much influence that the historical checks and balances do not work any more. The Internet, which was a public resource, is how those companies got to be so influential.

If we look at the Amazon example most of the issues could be solved via regulation. The company can be broken up. There can be laws that govern its behaviour (like extending consumer protection laws to cover newer situations). The problem is that where in the past law makers were less "afraid" to take on businesses now they are. Especially in the US where money talks and companies spend large amounts influencing policy makers. This is by the way not a partisan issue, it's a systemic issue.

EDIT: Maybe a precursor, or another variation, of some of this was allowing companies that had a business model of "circumventing" the law to operate (Uber, Airbnb etc.). Being a taxi without requiring a taxi fee, being a hotel without the requirements of a hotel etc. If this is our innovation then it shouldn't be a surprise when more laws are bent and worked around.

For each of the Fortune 500, assemble a committee of 100 random citizens. Have them spend a couple months deliberating on the conduct of that firm, before finally voting on what corporate income tax should be levied on that firm in the coming fiscal year.

The beauty of this solution is that in principle, it solves the problem of virtually any possible corporate misbehavior in a single fell swoop. No need to play whack-a-mole with mountains of laws and regulations. If a random citizen might learn about it, and decide that it isn't right, you shouldn't do it. If you do it anyways, you'll feel pain in your wallet (on expectation at least), and acquire a cost disadvantage relative to competing firms which are more virtuous. Simple.

Moreover, if corporations are people, then it is not moral to parcel them out as property. No person should be owned, whether wholly or in shares. The legal doublethink sustaining both ideas simultaneously reveals a fundamental contradiction of principles and profound lack of moral clarity.

In the most debased extrapolation of the ownership scenario, the corporation must obey even the most shameless demands of its owners, taking all the blame and liability upon itself, whilst forwarding any gains back to the owners.

Of course, this has already happened.

Consequently, in this era, corporations have become primarily a liability shield for the exploitation and concentration of wealth.

Seems to me that whatever might have happened 90-500 years ago is of no modern relevance, for good or ill, and that what the author of the article alludes to is a foolish and indeed childish criticism.

Your claim that merely using a different website is an unacceptable cognitive load is truly bizarre to me. It is a form of illiteracy.

Quite a bit before Doctorow started emphasizing his feelings about a particular type of stink, I was having a bit of hindsight that we had already entered the Garbaceous Period which seemed like it could have the potential to permeate in a lot more different ways if something isn't done.

China is not impacted because it has a tight grip on what its citizens can consume. Society will not collapse all over the world it will just become an authoritarian dystopia.

1. They heavily prioritized commercial sites, especially e-commerce sites, for monetary reasons. 2. They deprioritized everything but yhr first page of results. Clicking the “next page” buttons on Google is almost completely irrelevant. This further stymied the growth of the non commercial internet. 3. They let blogger go stale after purchasing it. Again, this damaged the growth of the independent Internet which hurt search, since information was now siloed in non open private platforms 4. They killed Google Reader which was the final nail in the blogging coffin. 5. They spent vast amounts of energy pushing AMP which meant Google was now prioritizing a standardized version of news sites, essentially, instead of encouraging freedom to experiment and express. This further stymied the open internet.

IOW, Google, after establishing itself as the gateway to the open, independent internet, through its excellent search, took many steps that destroyed the open and independent internet, which in turn made its search worthless

They are unquestionably the dominant player in the search market. They are the ones that all the SEO is aimed at gaming. They could have made it a top priority to ensure that search results were useful to the average person. Instead, they made it a top priority to ensure that search results were maximally profitable for them. This is what enabled the rise of SEO slop polluting search results.

And yes, I can absolutely blame them for that: the idea of "maximizing shareholder profit" as a primary goal of companies is a cancer on our society and needs to be destroyed utterly.