Corporations don’t just sit out on new technologies, and no matter how hard you try you can’t force them to. Defederating from Meta’s new project preemptively is naive, and will not do much of anything.
Protocols are going to be adopted by corporations, whether we like it or not. SMTP, LDAP, HTTP, IP and 802.11 are all examples of that. If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end. Something would then clearly need to be different in order to prevent future abuse of the protocol.
FOSS is propped up by corporations. By for profit corporations. If you want to stop those corporations from killing projects, you put safety guards up to make sure that doesn’t happen. You don’t just shut them out and put your head in the sand.
Similarly, if the Earth can’t survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.
I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn’t be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it’s something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.
It isn’t sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.
Actually, yes. The reason Exxon is fucking the planet right now is because of weak regulation. If we can’t build a system that is resistant to the threat of earth destroying corporations, we were never going to succeed in the first place.
Do you apply this reasoning to everything in life?
If a house catches on fire, it’s because it has weak fire suppression?
Your post is arguing (by analogy) that we shouldn’t even bother trying. But I guess you don’t need a suicide note when you can just leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged by your body.
On the contrary, I’m just saying if you build something and it gets co-opted by a corporation it probably wasnt meant to be.
It’s like when people talk about politicians being bought out by corporations. If that’s something that can even happen, it’s the fault of a broken system that would even allow that to happen.
This is a very computer sciencey view, which is why I leapt past the intermediate logic straight to its conclusion. But I’ll spell it out.
There is no rules-based system that will actually stand in the way of determined, clever, malicious actors. To put it in CS-style terms, you’ll never cover all the contingencies. To put it in more realistic terms, control systems only work within certain domains of the thing being controlled; partly this is because you start getting feedback and second-order effects, and partly it’s because there’s a ton of stuff about the world you just don’t know.
If a system is used as intended, it can work out fine. If someone is determined to break a system, they will.
This is why the world is not driven by rules-based systems, but by politics. We’re capable of rich and dynamic responses to problems, even unanticipated problems. Which is to say, the only actual solution to Exxon and Meta is to fight back, not to bemoan the inadequacy of systems.
Indeed, this belief in technocracy is explicitly encouraged by malicious elites, who are aware that they can subvert a technocracy.