Discussion
Trump has been bellyaching nonstop about the DSA and DMA, threatening EU nations and businesses with tariffs and other TACO retribution if they go ahead with DSA/DMA enforcement. Let's hope the EU calls his bluff.
Of course, Musk *could* get out of paying these fines by moving all his businesses out of the EU, which, frankly, would be a major result for Europe.
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@pluralistic Higher fines, though - you don't deter someone who has everybody's money from anything with a fine that amounts to shaking out his couch cushions.
Fines could be a pain level, 0 to 100. Thousand bucks hurts working folk bad. 100 billion would hurt musk, maybe. Constant pain, scaled number.
@tomjennings @pluralistic Precisely. It's not about the amount, it's about what the punishing effect is on the person. Like, if you took 10K from me now I'd be mostly (!) OK, just pretty miffed, but a year ago I'm eating oatmeal for months & a few years earlier it would have put me on the street - the way it should work is we figure out what kind of consequence we're aiming to place on a person with effects like that & then translate it, including to billionaires.
@jwcph @tomjennings @pluralistic Finland, Norway and Switzerland have income-based fines for some motoring offenses, resulting in some pretty impressive penalties for wealthy speeders.
Growing up, August 15 always meant two things for my family: my mother's birthday and the first day of the CNE, a giant traveling fair that would park itself on Toronto's waterfront for the last three weeks of summer. We'd get there early, and by 10AM, there'd always be some poor bastard lugging around a galactic-scale giant teddybear that was offered as a prize at one of the midway games.
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Now, nominally, the way you won a giant teddybear was by getting five balls in a peach basket. To a first approximation, this is a feat that no one has ever accomplished. Rather, a carny had beckoned this guy over and said, "Hey, fella, I like your face. Tell you what I'm gonna do: you get just *one* ball in the basket and I'll give you one of these beautiful, luxurious keychains. If you win *two* keychains, I'll let you trade them in for one of these *gigantic* teddybears."
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Why would the carny do this? Because once this poor bastard took possession of the giant teddybear, he was obliged to conspicuously lug it around the CNE midway in the blazing, muggy August heat. All who saw him would think, "Hell if *that* dumbass can win a giant teddybear, I'm gonna go win one, too!" Charitably, you could call him a walking advertisement. More accurately, though, he was a Judas goat.
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Digital platforms have the ability to give out giant teddybears at scale. Because digital platforms have the flexibility that comes with running things on computers, platforms can pick out individual platform participants and make them King For the Day, showering them in riches that they will boast of, luring in other suckers who will lose everything:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
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That's how Tiktok works: the company's "heating tool" lets them drive traffic to Tiktok performers by cramming their videos into millions of random people's feeds, overriding Tiktok's legendary recommendation algorithm. Those "heated" performers get millions of views on their videos and go on to spam all the spaces were similar performers hang out, boasting of the fame and riches that await other people in their niche if they start producing for Tiktok:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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Uber does it, too: as Veena Dubal documents in her work on "algorithmic wage discrimination," Uber offers different drivers wildly different wages for performing the same work. The lucky few who get an Uber giant teddybear hang out in rideshare groupchats and forums, trumpeting their incredible gains from the platform, while everyone else blames themselves for "being bad at the app," as they drive and drive, only to go deeper and deeper into debt:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
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