What do you think about the problem of unreachability of decision makers?
Businesses, especially in tech industry, sometimes have some okay support for clients, but in general the crucial things are walled off.
A simple example: someone in a company decides to place an ad and does that, people see that ad on YouTube, find it obnoxious, but cannot confront the original decision maker directly - they are unknown, unreachable.
Another example: many people used Google Inbox app and then Google discontinued it. Users are unsatisfied. Someone in Google, a person, made the decision. But they are unknown. A user cannot come up and ask them, "Hey you, why did you do that?" and at least get a clear honest answer. There are sugary press releases and damage control in such cases.
I understand that if many of us started a business we would want to wall our decisions off the external environment (users) too. It's a dilemma. But still, what do you think about that? How would you deal with this problem in a different way?
the total lack of accountability for really almost every technological decision (pertaining to the internet) that is made nowadays is arguably one of the biggest problems in technological fields currently--but it's one with a massive number of flavors and dimensions that make it hard to ever fix completely. in fact even the examples you give demonstrate that there's fluidity in how this works depending on the situation:
so in some respects, the unreachability problem is already no longer really a problem--but in others, trying to tackle it at all would probably completely change the face of the industry or necessitate massive restructuring of many companies, which will of course meet resistance. and so there's probably no one way to deal with this, because not every example of unreachability is going to be equivalent.
Maybe the world would be more humane, less stressful, if this leverage somehow became more bidirectional between companies and user communities.
Yes, but that would require that users as a group gathered together to engage in some sort of collective action that could put them on a roughly equal level of power and influence with the companies. That is, if our governments worked to protect our interests more directly.
I feel like the EU is the only major governing body willing to stand up to many industries. It’s no wonder to me that the EU gets a lot of hate.
to be honest, of all the things that make people dislike the EU, i don't think them standing up to corporations is really one of them (except with technocrats, corporatists, and the corporations themselves).
I don't like everything the EU does, but their recent stuff against Monsanto makes me think it's worth the things I don't like.
Now to find a way to get the american political system to similarly pin corporations to the wall...
Yes, but multinational corporations have capital to buy services like PR firms to build an outsized voice of anti-EU sentiment. I realize there’s other factors too.
I would go further than this and argue that we need institutions which empower the people. You could argue think that representative democracy is supposed to do this. But until capitalism is either abolished or massively reshaped, this will just simple never be the case.
The Liberal state is not an institution for liberation as the name might imply. It is a system for protecting property. If the state is to change we need it to be run by people with radically different attitudes towards the role of businesses.
I don't think access specifically is the problem in a lot of cases. Even if you could sit the decision maker down and give them a magical truth serum, the answer most of the time would be "yeah it pissed off a lot of people, but it was still more profitable overall".
We're actually living in a time with arguably better reachability than in the past: the prevailing sentiment on Twitter can and does influence and sometimes even reverse company decisions. Thing is, that demonstrates in a very stark fashion that reachability only matters if you can back it up with a few million customers' worth of profit going away.
This already sounds way better than the typical corporate sugary speech about such a decision. At least it sticks to reality.
The problem with such speak is it's not widely appreciated among customers, thus affects profitability. :)
"Yeah the way we worded that press release pissed off a bunch of people, but it stopped 99% of the complaints. Any new complaints are now about the words we used."
Modern corporation are totalitarian hierarchies for employees and customers. The contemporary failures of the big tech firms have major ramifications for the nature of justice in a world which is as much digital as physical. Modern regulatory apparatuses seem to be inadequate. We rely on technically unsophisticated representatives to somehow keep tabs on an intensely secretive and constantly changing space with literally limitless applications.
So it is expected that there would be massive shortcomings at the interface between what companies do and what their stakeholders want from them. This is reflective of shortcoming of hierarchical capitalist institutions in general. I don't think there is a model for these companies that isn't based on worker ownership and control and mandated civil oversight.
Piecemeal reform and patchworks of legislation have not in the past nor will not in the future protect us from encroachments by massive firms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. If we want big tech firms to respond to the needs of the people, the people need more power.
It's not especially in the tech industry, or even slightly more prominent in the tech industry.
Consider everyone's favourite industry: retail (this also works for food/hospitality). A front line peon is generally the only one customers interact with. The supervisor has no decision making power. Even the store manager has little to no say in anything that goes on and is pulling from a playbook. The decision-makers are entirely isolated from the issues their decisions cause and this is by design.
Pick ANY industry which has experienced any sort of corporatisation and you will see an industry with an unbreachable wall between the top brass and the mob that buy things from them. On the one hand, economies of scale don't work any other way, because the masses are by and large drooling morons who have nothing of value to say and their complaints aren't worth listening to in the first place (and when you're a CEO servicing a customer base of millions your time is at a premium). On the other hand, getting close to the users allows you to make a more productive service or product and increasing that communication can only be a good thing. And so we end up with filters, where 1 person saying something is pointless and ignorable and gets directed straight to /dev/null, but 1000 people saying something gets listened to and acted upon.
The issue is not actually one that is dealt with by increasing access. Because the problem isn't about access (since as you can see nobody really has if they ever did). The problem is COMPETITION.
This is the common thread in almost all markets the world over. When you have competition such that (forgive me as I'm going to need econ speak to make this work) you hit a market type of monopolistic competition, then suddenly consumer needs have leverage. This is why people can generally get what they want out of a car, or restaurants, or cleaning products. A blocking issue in one product will simply cause the consumers to shift to an alternative, because there is a close facsimile available and the barriers to change are low.
Unfortunately more or less every tech submarket is sitting firmly in oligarchic market formats, which means the barriers to change are high, and due to a combination of that lock-in and the difference between 'key feature' and 'nice to have feature' mean consumers are forced to accept sum_total_of_issues < key_feature_perceived_benefit. Which when you understand the profit motive means sum_total_of_issues will be deliberately targeted by these oligarchic corporations to an optimisation towards (key_feature_perceived_benefit -1). Which will inherently generate complaints, but those complaints are not actionable and are considered nothing more than a rationally justified cost of doing business.
TL;DR: capitalism will fuck you precisely 1 unit less than capitalism will benefit you.
This is perfect. The absolute essence of why capitalism works, and of why it simultaneously doesn't, in less than 15 words.
Yup. Worst is when you come across a problem with a service, but can't reach anyone who can fix that problem.
Last week I tried logging into my bank account from my phone. It didn't recognize that device, asked me one of my security questions, and then after one single guess locked me out of the account. Only way to unlock it was to call them and sit on hold for 30 minutes.
This has happened to me twice now. The solution to this problem is incredibly simple. Just allow more guesses for the security question, or remember my phone. Or even if they can't do either of those, just give me a better way to unlock the account than sitting on hold for half an hour.
But it is impossible for me to reach anyone that can implement those fixes. I tried conveying the problem to the person on the phone, but they could not have cared less. I sent them an email (which was only possible to do after logging in), but got zero response.
I've forgotten the PIN on my credit card because I'm used to the tap for under $100 purchases and when paying online I can just use the credit card # and security code on the back. Why they don't have 2-factor auth for credit cards in some way (such as email or phone/SMS) is beyond me because I'm never going to remember the PIN. It's 4 numbers to remember that I rarely ever use.
And to reset the PIN it's a 30min call to get someone on the line who can help me out.
It's amazing how much friction there is in the world for things that should not require it.
Imo, this is the same fundamental problem as keeping government officials in check. Even in a system where decision makers are theoretically supposed to be reachable to the people they serve, they often aren't, for reasons that stick around no matter who's in charge.
I'd further divide this problem into visibility and accountability. The former is the ability to identify who made a decision and why. The latter is the ability to for decision makers to face consequences for their decisions. As Greg pointed out earlier in this thread, visibility is often much stronger than accountability unless you have a ton of people.
(also damn, links to other comments in the same post seem to work pretty well)
This is basically why journalism exists, because it's their full-time job to uncover things of interest to the public and that definitely includes unaccountable politician. However, they only do the awareness raising, someone else has to actually hold them to account.
When you pay for something you get to talk to people involved and have some say over what happens. You paid nothing for Google inbox and in return you get whatever google happens to provide you with for free and they will not spend any money giving you personal support.
The more you pay the more say you get. The website I work on has big corporate paying customers and they get an email address and phone number to send whatever feedback or requests they want. If their requests are easy and valid we will implement them, if they are willing to pay extra they can have whatever they want.
I was going to make some snarky comment about how the currency we use to pay for Google's products is our data, and so that makes us a customer. But I think ultimately you're right - Goole makes tools to entice users to give them their data. We're the product, not the consumer.
I think I can see the overall point that OP is trying to make. But I think the examples aren't very good. You hit the thing about Inbox on the head there.
OP's other idea that businesses somehow owe it to everyone to collect their feedback on their ads and act on them is pretty incredible. Businesses work hard to insulate themselves from random sources of feedback and an enterprise is going to have a hard time doing anything when every customer can go back to the specific employee at the company to complain at them. All companies want to push that feedback into monitored channels so they can categorize it, look for trends, and ultimately act on what makes sense to them.
I'm curious how OP thinks the world would look if everyone could reach the decision maker. I mean I can just see the person at Tumblr who got rid of NSFW content fielding calls every hour of everyday from a bunch of degenerates. Makes me chuckle.
But what they do owe customers is otherwise is upheld? The fact that this is incredible is incredibly saddening to me. No, they might not owe us anything but maybe if we as human beings develop a society were it's encouraged to act for the greater good this might not be the case and might even pay off in the end. Of course they shouldn't listen to every little angry customer but the fact that the mighty dollar is always a valid excuse for companies no matter what the issue is infuriates me.
The profit motive can be used to this end through creative legislation and is my preference for how we should proceed generally.
I'm not sure I understand why it would. To make money is literally the reason most companies (but not all) exist. And it's not really an excuse, we're just trying to help you understand corporate motivations. Did you know that most public companies are legally mandated to make decisions in the best interest of their shareholders? If a CEO starts making decisions for other reason then they can be sued (and rightfully so). We wouldn't want the companies that comprise our 401Ks to suddenly start giving away the farm.
Yes, I know this and I know I'm being overly idealistic but imagine a society where companies would strive towards making the best possible product for Us. The best costumer service, the best experience, have the most environment friendly approach etc. For Us. I think it will profit. Before you say lots of companies do this yeah maybe on paper but that's not their true intensions.
Just because business per definition is for profit does that mean we can't change that? Does that mean it's the best we can do for ourselves? Just let money always be the deciding factor and in the end rule every aspect of our lives because That's just how it is.
I don't know man...you're probably going to answer with some perfectly valid arguments and my points are going to fall flat. I just miss some truthfully good intensions sometimes.
I get the sentiment. I think the only thing that I can say here that may resonate with you is that the good intentions and the profit motive don't have to be exclusionary. There are companies that strive to do both things and do them well: Ben & Jerry's, CostCo, Saturn (too bad that one's gone), etc. Those are companies that strive to make great products while also treating their employees well. They're not as common as we might like, but they exist.
Also consider the charity that companies provide. A cynic will say "yeah but that's just for good PR" and they may be largely right, but those dollars are still real, and are still going to fund real change for individuals.