I'm in.
Most people have an unfortunate tendency to project their own values and preferences onto the world at large, and fail to recognize when they cross the boundary out of their own spaces and into other people's.
Recognizing this means advancing solutions that primarily aim to minimize conflict among many parties, each pursuing their own particular concept of the good within their own boundaries, and avoiding trying to universalize any singular set of terminal values.
Attempting to pursue solutions that depend on everyone agreeing on the same set of terminal values will always fail, and will often generate intense conflict that escalates well beyond the bounds of the original question and causes a great deal of collateral damage.
Yes, that's called compromise. It's basically one of the foundations of society and civilization. It's not a blocker for public-interest projects.
That's not what I'm saying, in fact 'perfect utopian' projects are exactly what I'm expressing skepticism towards. The problems we have with the internet are mostly just symptoms of deeper societal issues, and they arent infrastructure problems that can be easily fixed like a road or bridge with some massive spending bill. If the US actually enforced anti-trust laws and broke up the tech cartels it would solve a whole lot of problems with the internet, but I doubt that idea would get much traction with whoever ends up on the 'new internet committee'. And I dont see it as a lack of idealism, its just plain pragmatism
We don't currently have a select group of people who share a vision of "common good" making decisions for us, and yet things keep improving. So I'd advocate we stick with what we know is working, rather than the above surrendering of autonomy in exchange for the promise of some utopia..
And back then nobody really thought all that mich about financing, so these spaces weren't about extracting user data or shaping their opinions. The algorithms were simplistic as hell and the timelines still deserved that name.
The state runs libraries not just to give people access to books, but also because they are social community spaces. Why not provide something like that, just online. Something that doesn't need to make money, but provide a service that people can trust in a different way that a corporation.
What if the interested party is clever and defines "in my favor" to be equal to "the common good"? ;)
I do have a feeling we're not talking about the same thing here, so could you clarify how it's "obviously not true" that things have been/are improving?
I think we'd maybe both agree that Google and Facebook ushering in "absolute surveillance" probably came about from a single-minded view of "common good" within those companies - aka an example of a group of people aligned on a common good leading to things going poorly.
But it's silly to think that some other group with a different (but also single-minded) definition of common good is going to somehow fix all the problems and not cause new, potentially worse, problems. That's what I was attempting to get at with my initial comment.
Given that we weren't even really talking about the same thing from the start, and that I don't care enough to continue, I'm gonna opt out from this convo. Have a nice day though.
Far from being the opposite of idealism, this approach is in fact the only one by which high ideals can be approximated in reality.
> You seem to be complaining that something is impossible because it can't be implemented in a perfect utopian way.
Quite to the contrary, the complaint is not merely that the pursuit of these goals would fall short of perfection, but rather that the consequences would largely be the inverse of the intentions.
In essence, idealism is its own opposite -- if you're looking for a single word to describe this critique, some good options might be "correctness", "efficacy", and "reasonableness".
Societies are not monolithic blobs with a singular "common good" -- they're complex networks of relations among different people with fundamentally varying worldviews and value systems. Making public-interests projects work entails respecting pluralism and individual autonomy. There's no alternative: projects that depend on conformity will inevitably fail.