I think the real question is trust. Once a company starts working with the Pentagon, people will naturally assume the capabilities will expand over time. Even if today’s contract has limits, those limits can always change later.
It has been proven and blessed by SCOTUS that an email and continued use is sufficient cause to derive implied consent. Contracts are now essentially pointless in their one sidedness. Anyone pointing to contractual limitations as justification of their position to a third party should find that third party looking them dead in the eye and pointing out all it would take for the justifier to be "right" in this circumstance is changing your TOS long enough to prove your point to me, sending an email that will never be read, then as soon as I'm gone changing the terms back to whatever else and sending another email. By de-frictioning contract law to enable click-wrap and EULA, we've completely undermined the semantic intent of the mechanism; which was to be a durable statement of an agreement between two parties that both agree to be bound to. When there is no binding on the originating party from changing the terms, there is no assurance to anyone else the terms don't change from second to second to the benefit of the originator of the contract.
What makes the Gervais Principle interesting is that it frames organizations as systems that are supposed to become pathological over time. Instead of reforming them the economy just replaces them through mergers, layoffs, and new startups.
In that sense, the real “governance mechanism” isn’t internal management at all but the external Darwinian churn of the market.
It survives because it already solves the basic problem well enough. You can reach almost anyone and communicate without needing to join a platform or build a network first.
It’s simple, open, and relatively low-pressure compared to most modern communication tools. A lot of newer products try to improve it, but often they’re mostly adding layers rather than solving a fundamentally missing capability.
What I probably need most right now is honest feedback. I’ve been building something and I’m trying to understand if the idea actually makes sense outside my own head.
The Belmont analogy is great, but the deeper point is even scarier: most of the industry is giving non-deterministic systems direct access to deterministic infrastructure (databases, shells, email, etc).
Historically we spent decades reducing automation privileges and adding layers of verification. Agents seem to be reversing that trend almost overnight.
Grifting is about as American as apple pie honestly. Melville is of course know for Moby Dick where he delves into the psyche of the Great American Man but he also wrote The Confidence Man. Mark Twain’s work is full of con men and grifters. Ponzi laid the groundwork for more complex schemes in the 20s. Pyramid schemes were all the rage in the 40/50s, Tupperware parties as an example, and of course still are huge today.
It seems like whenever American society is changing very rapidly or has changed very rapidly con men become the powerful ones of the time. Maybe this is true everywhere but as an American I don’t know the history of cons in other countries.
Maybe the best outcome from all of this will be the total destruction of security theater, at least in its current form, as all the box checking and "best practices" get blown to smithereens by people just doing things.
I'm building a human-curated map that organizes people and sources by topics (health, skills, business, mindset, etc.). Everything is categorized manually, no AI classification. Started as spreadsheets and now turning it into a prototype.
The uncomfortable part is that they try to solve a real problem (protecting minors) by requiring universal identification. In practice this means every adult has to prove who they are just to access any part of the internet. Once that infrastructure exists, it’s hard to imagine it not expanding beyond its original purpose.
Its hard to imagine that it won't launch _already_ expanded beyond it's original purpose. My expectation is that there will be precisely 0 seconds between it and it being abused. The people building it will plan the abuse before it's even launched.
Protecting children means protecting them from people who wish to harm them, that includes the government and platform owners, since these laws don't provide any actual protections to children from those two entities it's reasonable to assume that the law is trying to facilitate child exploitation rather than prevent it.
You have to keep in mind your idea of child protection is likely different from most of Americas'. The law makers' idea is to maximally enable them to perform (largely) uncompensated white collar work. Protected means that by the time they are 22 they have maximally warped their brain into an economically viable specialty and are in massive personal debt. If they make Roblox a $1M in the meantime of course that money won't go to their brainwashing, that would make them lazy.
Discord specifically wanted to solve this by assuming everyone was a minor until they proved their age. Minors still have access to most spaces unless that space (or DMs with adults) was flagged / identified as adult-content.
This is a pretty clear counter example to your snowball fallacy.
