And this very news site's settings are "Data processing by advertising providers including personalised advertising with profiling - Consent required for free use," funnily enough
I’m interested in a new kind of license which I’m calling “relational source” - not about money or whether a product is commercial but instead if there’s an actual person who wants to use the code with some kind of AGPL-esque mechanism to ensure no mindless ingestion- perhaps this would never work but it’s also breaking the spirit of everything I love about OSS to have AI erasing the contributions of the people who put their time into doing the work.
AA is less anarchic in practice than is principle.
AA being used by the justice system puts it at odds with anarchy, as anarchy is whatever you and your group want it to be, which is somewhat incompatible with state-mandated fill-in-the-blank.
Bill W. wanted to introduce LSD to AA in order to help folks understand what he meant by higher power, but the centering of Judeo-Christian ideology by other early AA members almost pushed Bill W. out of his own group.
AA was subverted long ago from within by the status quo it attempted to break free from. Whether or not it functions as an alcoholic support group is a separate issue.
I've seen other drugs used in therapies too. MDMA phychotherapy is more common and even legal in some places. Because it can temporarily remove internal barriers that make it much easier to reach the painful spot your brain is trying to shield. And without reaching it you can't really work on it. Several of my friends have had great experiences with this but I don't do any drugs so I never tried. I think there's too much stigma on these things. In another example, in the Netherlands cannabis can be prescribed as a pain killer for chronic issues, it works better and has way less side effects than other strong painkillers.
But an official program using illegal drugs is of course a bit of an issue. Though I'm not sure if LSD was illegal in the 50s?
That is part of the issue, as AA isn't an official program at all, in that it is a nonprofit group, but it is used as a kind of stopgap/interim solution to paper over the lack of research-backed government-funded alcohol treatment programs. However, court-mandated alcohol treatment programs don't exist in many areas, so AA is a quasi-offical program that creates a very scammy web of self-interested grifters posing as helpers, some of whom actually do help in some ways while enriching themselves and exerting undue influence over others' lives. The catty-corner halfway house cottage industry is full of usually Christian-presenting faith-based and faith-adjacent flophouses for addicts, recovering and otherwise, which is a kind of revolving door of desperate people being fleeced of all of the nothing they have, up to and including their dignity, leaving only shame.
In the 50s, LSD was being used in many clinical counseling settings. Time magazine was writing about it positively. LSD wasn't scheduled in the US until 1968.
> In one study in the late 1950s, Humphry Osmond gave LSD to alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous who had failed to quit drinking.[25] After one year, around 50% of the study group had not had a drink—a success rate that has never been duplicated by any other means.[26][27][28] Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, participated in medically supervised experiments on the effects of LSD on alcoholism and believed LSD could be used to cure alcoholics.[29]
We have ceded a lot of good-for-our-brains—and-wellbeing in order to be where other people are without friction. It’s a bit of a chicken or an egg situation that has created gravity wells in cesspools.
There's no reason why a subscription model could not also be used to subsidize people who can not pay, other than that companies are structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
There are good network effect arguments about why this strategy can be effective, not simply 'altruistic.'
Ads simply make the extraction happen across the board, except that the ad model somewhat privileges technical users who know how to circumvent ads.
Our only recourse is that we punish them with our wallets, advice and habits and reward good actors.
I'm a firm believer of this but we need more people to join in.
And it already works to some degree.
I've now had a working search engine for almost 3 years.
My last 3 jobs (9 years) haven't forced me to use Windows.
I can chat and organize events without Facebook knowing.
And it is not like the quality has gone down either. My choices have mostly given me better experiences in a number of ways.
Edit:
If more people start
- advocating for better hardware and software,
- canceling subscriptions and memberships when it becomes clear they are reducing value or increasing price,
- building skills both to get independent from their current cloud (so you can move around or at least having a credibile possibility to do so)
- and for individuals to get better jobs
then I think things will change.
For inspiration: at least here in Norway, with several gym memberships, if you cancel they will quickly approach you with good offers, and they can get really good: I got several months free, a friend got offered free months and a sizable gift card.
Bonus: if more people join in this will get picked up by Wall Street and they will begin punishing this nonsense too ;-)
My base salary has doubled and I enjoy my work a lot more now that I don't have to accept all kinds of MS shenanigans to play a part in how I work.
Having a working search engine shouldn't be underestimated either: living from 2012 to 2022 knowing that search used to be a solved problem but wasn't anymore was really annoying.
Indirectly by pushing down the stock price. CEO compensation is usually tied to the stock price through options, bonuses, etc.
Directly through activist investors and shareholder groups (which nowadays usually are institutional investors) who vote to change company policies, fire the CEO, or in some cases fire the whole board.
> structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
This is not true and it’s not what fiduciary duty means. Stop repeating it, it’s really dumb.
Companies very frequently do not monetize things that they could under the guise of “building brand recognition” or “establishing a user base”. It’s even as easy as “raising the price will alienate customers we think are important to long term revenue”.
It’s trivial to justify not extracting maximum price and public companies do it all of the time.
Look at Costco’s business model if you want an example
Think of Discord. Anyone can create and participate in a discord server. There are no ads. People with money pay for the premium features and perks and that is how the company makes money [1].
Not every product category is amenable to such business models but many are.
[1] To be fair, Discord likely sells user data to advertisers to make additional money.
I mean, we could also just direct-pay websites (for example with Brave's Basic Attention Token model).
Imagine a utopian world where you just pay per site visit, and in return all companies selling stuff don't have an inflated advertising budget and free market effects force them to pass the savings on to you, meaning the net cost increase for you is zero. And as a side-effect, quality products float to the top, since you hear of them mostly by word-of-mouth, meaning products compete on value-per-dollar.
Sadly human psychology and economics does not work that way haha. We pay what the market will bear, and increasing sales via a torrent of ads is cheaper than increasing the value-per-dollar ratio of the product.
I love this idea, thanks for putting this together. I'm biased, but I also wish more FOSS/OSS projects had a realistic contributor path for UX folks to contribute- so many (non-dev-tooling) projects suffer as a result of building without collaboration from people who might use the product.
I should have included that in my list of asks for OneBusAway. We have a ton of need for people in every user experience, discipline: visual design, usability, you name it. Also, product management would be a huge help.
