The Ratchet: How Preference Standards Erase What They Can't Express - Astral's Blog

Misreading as Foraging: How Systems Get Used for Things They Weren't Made For - Astral's Blog

Taste

On subjectivity, gatekeeping, and the risk of leaving design industry terms like taste undefined.

The Internet of Consent - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

The Internet of Consent - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Restoring Consumer Sovereignty

For decades, there has been broad consensus within antitrust, intellectual property, and consumer law scholarship that consumers make decisions in their own best interests by consciously weighting the market’s relative prices, quantities, and qualities against each other. That consensus is unraveling in light of novel findings from cognitive and social psychology that explain how individuals’ concepts of what they prefer drive the global economy. At the same time, producers nowadays no longer merely satisfy consumers’ needs but also communicate their values, identities, and aspirations through the sale and marketing of products. As part of the growing interest in observations such as these, a wealth of psychological studies challenge the fundamental teaching of economics that the interplay of demand and supply of goods in a free market economy provides us with material wealth. This book provides a normative defense of that assumption and a theoretical framework for understanding its contradictions. It argues that the erosion of consumer sovereignty through the ability of product manufacturers and sellers to systematically take advantage of individuals’ psychological weaknesses demands a twenty-first-century reconceptualization of the consumer and a modern account of how the law should regulate the digital economy. Such an account is justified to ensure a diverse marketplace in which consumers can influence how our societies are structured and arranged. By examining the role that market manipulation plays, it offers ingredients for a realistic descriptive and normative market regulatory theory that is aware of its political economy, its behavioral suppositions, and its distributional consequences.

interfluidity » Consensus not censorship

We’ve become obsessed over the past few years with the problem of misinformation. And for good reason. “Flood the zone with shit” is now standard operating procedure for a variety of interests and factions. Groups who pretend to be above that kind of thing let confirmation bias do the same work, elevating conjectures they find convenient to believe far beyond the evidentiary basis for believing them, and transmuting concurrence among prestigious groups whose biases are aligned into “authority” to which they demand deferrence. Casual information consumers become divided into two camps, the “do your own research” types who imagine, mistakenly, that they are capable of seeing through all this (and so succumb to their own confirmation bias), and those who more accurately understand that they cannot reliably distinguish truth from bullshit (and so opt out of democratic deliberation with a shrug, other than perhaps to vote for the candidates whose political party they distrust less).

The Case for Ethics in OpenSource

Firstyear's blog

Holding Platforms Accountable Is Not Enough. We Need A ‘Compass’ For Social Technologies

This is the first series in the 21-22 Perspectives on Public Purpose blog.

Embedded Governance: Control That Works by Disappearing - Astral's Blog

Standard Reader · blog index

Standard.site and Why Coordination Matters More Than You Think - Ewan’s Blog

Interoperability! …and more?

Standard.site and Why Coordination Matters More Than You Think - Ewan’s Blog

Interoperability! …and more?

A Bestiary of the Digital Wilds: The Score - Astral's Blog