If you want to understand how startups and venture capital work, go to 26:24 on the recording of my talk “Excuse Me, Your Unicorn Keeps Shitting In My Back Yard, Can He Please Not?” from 2016:
@petpet Thanks. And yes, it’s clear that nothing is going to change unless we make viable alternatives and people start using them. Not easy to do with zero funding but some of us are trying. Statistically speaking, though, we don’t exist.
@aral
I agree, but then we also need legal certainty and law enforcement, and politicians who also understand digitalisation and its consequences, which unfortunately I only see to a very limited extent at the moment
@petpet Yep. Institutional corruption – lobbying and revolving doors – make it nigh on impossible to regulate effectively. That, and the EU Commission’s “single market über alles” framing.
@aral Great talk! I thoroughly agree with your take on startups, but I'm curious what is the alternative when someone comes from the working class with no capital and has an idea for an online service which has the potential to sustain them. What other structures can we use to fund some initiatives, because, speaking as someone who's been working on FOSS for the past year, donations don't cut it.
This is why must fund things for the common good from the commons. But we’re not. Not really. Not as we should be. (We’re in the same boat with Small Technology Foundation as we build the Small Web with zero EU funding.)
This is what I told the EU parliament a few years ago. It hasn’t made a difference as far as I can tell:
and then, watch as we magically fall in line with all the other mainstream platforms on what we ban and don't ban, for instance, start banning female-only nipples as "sexually explicit nudity" while content subtly advocating for violence against women is front-paged to millions!
@aral This might be a bit of a weird take on this, but I think the most concrete thing most of us can do against this is use and encourage the use of ad-blockers.
We can't compete at scale with this sort of money. Free services will always trump donation-based or paid services, because that's what we're used to as consumers.
We can however try to make this industry totally not worth it for VCs to invest in. And this is where ad/tracking blockers at a massive scale come in.
@imsnif Having made and maintained a tracker blocker for quite a few years, it’s a losing game.
The surveillance capitalists control the browsers. You can only be as effective in policing them as they allow you to be (see what’s happening with Chrome, etc.)
And it doesn’t even have to be free for this to apply. Venture-capital-funded is the core issue. Because with VC you’ve already sold your company,you’re just waiting for the sale to mature (the exit) – which it will do if you’re successful.
@aral I've been told this - and I totally believe your superior experience - but honestly, I use firefox (and used Netscape before that) and have not seen an ad in twenty years. So I'm not sure what I'm doing differently.
@imsnif It’s not just the ads; it’s the tracking. Sure the ads are the visible symptom. Many ad blockers (e.g., adblock plus) are actually part of the advertising industry and they unblock folks like Google for money (that’s their business model – see “acceptable ads”). And they usually don’t block trackers, opting for a cosmetic approach. (Assuming you use uBlock Origin, which is good.)
These folks don’t limit themselves to tracking you on the web either. They buy data from brokers, etc.
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