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Medium, Twitter Founder on Media: We Put Junk Food In Front Of Them and They Eat It (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader points us to an interview of Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, and founder of publishing platform Medium: Ev Williams is not a fan of the increasingly homogenised media he currently sees, with its emphasis on feeding the great, gaping maw of platforms like Twitter and Facebook too often producing what he describes as tantamount to junk food. "It's understandable why media on the web is like it is today," Williams tells the Guardian. "That's not to say there's not a lot of great stuff out there, but a lot of people are dissatisfied with it. A lot of journalists who want to do great stuff are dissatisfied. Advertisers and brands are dissatisfied. We're still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that's what they want -- it's like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want."
I would be more impressed by what he's saying if I didn't know he founded Medium, the biggest McIntellectual pile of crap since TED talks.
I think a lot of that, even with well-informed people, is that people know there's corruption they can't do anything about. Some people are connected, and others aren't. Wealthy people will be able to pay for loopholes that allow them to hide their money, just like tech companies use the H-1B visa rule loopholes to skirt the spirit of the original program.
My reaction to this was twofold:
1. This is going to be a very interesting election cycle in Europe - but nothing will change in Russia or China
2. The US already has so many 100% legal, custom-created tax shelters onshore that there's no need for rich people to transfer their wealth somewhere else.
The only way to stop stuff like this is to play the corruption game yourself. Get a bunch of like minded citizens together, take up a collection, and hand your politicians paper bags of money. Most people don't want to do this, so the system goes on as it always has. FYI, local politics is way more corrupt than national politics, but the scale is smaller so it's less noticeable.