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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 9, 2026, 6:29 PM

    Some people think that venture capital is a fundamentally evil business structure. I disagree.

    Thought experiment:
    If you could press a button tomorrow, that would cause 50% of the entire population of the continent of Africa to die within 5 years😮, but would 50X your profits and create dozens of trillion dollar companies, and help humanity become interplanetary 10 years earlier, would you press it?

    If you're on this weird little Mastodon thing reading this, then you are most likely:
    1) A technologist of some sort
    2) Not a genocidal maniac

    So you would of course say no.

    Some of you suspect that I'm going to *imply* that many VCs would say yes. But I'm not going to imply anything. I don't have to. Because many of these VCs have written papers and blog posts under their real names, celebrating the fact that they believe that it's wrong *not* to press that button.🤦🏿‍♂️

    The problem with VC is neither the profit motive, nor the business structure.

    The problem is that the vast majority of the funds that our entire society uses to solve hard problems, are controlled and allocated by people that believe that it is their duty to create new buttons like the one above, and then mash it repeatedly.

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Replies

  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 9, 2026, 6:43 PM

    All I'm saying is that if you believe that your problems are caused by:

    "1) technologists, 2) that are genocidal maniacs, 3) and that allocate most of society's resources"

    then maybe focus on the "genocidal maniac" part, or the "most of society's resources" part, before the technology part.

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  • Ben Royce V͎O͎T͎E͎ ᶜʸⁿⁱᶜⁱˢᵐ ⁼ ᵃᶜᶜᵉᵖᵗᵃⁿᶜᵉbenroyce@mastodon.social
    May 9, 2026, 7:18 PM

    @mekkaokereke

    #socialMedia didn't invent #bigotry, but it turbocharged it

    1. a bigot can be their true selves online with few consequences

    2. moderation is a cost. say "freeze peach", gut the mod dept, and save $

    3. "don't feed the trolls"? outrage means clicks and eyeballs, good engagement metrics. for-profit social media is incentivized to push bigotry

    so fuck social media?

    nope

    clean it the fuck up

    luddite mental gymnastics won't make social media disappear

    the problem

    is bigotry

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 9, 2026, 7:39 PM

    @benroyce

    Yup. With one clarification: social media objectively, unequivocally, reduced bigotry.

    I'm a nerd. I went to a fancy prep school, then a fancy liberal arts college, then work with computers. I'm a classic nerdy jock. I don't do hard drugs, I don't steal I don't get in trouble. I didn't even drink in high school. Super square!

    But I started getting pulled over and harassed by cops starting from age 12, because I'm a Black boy.

    Before social media, no one that wasn't Black believed me about my experiences. Now, after social media, people believe it.

    Before social media, no one believed Black people when we said how often cops lie and plant evidence. Now, after social media, people believe it.

    No one believed Black people about how many evil, racist, white ladies there are, being racist and attacking Black people and kids, and trying to get us killed by cop or vigilante. Now, after social media, people believe it.

    Elon bought Twitter, in large part because racists are mad at how effective social media is at calling racists out on their nonsense.

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  • icasticoicastico@c.im
    May 9, 2026, 7:49 PM

    @mekkaokereke @benroyce

    This resonates. I am white, but have spent my career working in communities of color. I saw all the bigotry you describe, but couldn’t get people to believe me about it. Now more white people see it and believe it. What I am less sure of is whether this visibility has reduced the frequency of the behaviors. Does the visibility impact the perpetrators? I mean, the bigots brag to me all the time about their bigotry because they think I am on their team. Here in Seattle, I am regularly approached by the bigots for that quiet racist or sexist comment because I am a grey haired white dude with a beard. They assume I must agree that the problems come from our tolerance of “those people “ - they are proud to share their vile view.

    It’s an intractable problem we (white people) need to solve.

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  • cognitively accessible mathgeonz@mathstodon.xyz
    May 9, 2026, 8:25 PM

    @icastico @mekkaokereke @benroyce It is still helpful that we know about it; and it's why I am going to have a conversation w/ a relatively elderly student about their attitudes towards Black folks; there was an uncomfortable interaction wiht somebody and I could *easily* think it was just "finals stress" but ... I know better now. Yes, they'll prob'ly get defensive - but I did, too, first callout.

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  • Corinna Balkowcoba@gruene.social
    May 14, 2026, 6:38 PM

    @icastico @mekkaokereke @benroyce I learned a lot from social media about racism that I did not learn in school or from my rather white family. I don't like it when racists talk to me like I am one of them. But I am still in the process of learning how to call them out, because offline I had no role models.

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  • Dianealienghic@timeloop.cafe
    May 9, 2026, 7:56 PM

    @mekkaokereke @benroyce

    I kind of wonder if part of the reason the white supremacists worked so hard on maintaining segregation is so the more empathetic whites wouldn't be able to see just how cruel the treatment of Blacks was.

    Early social networks offered a way around the physical inconveniences put up to block meeting people from "different sides of the tracks".

    And I believe the white supremacist billionaires have been buying up all the TV and digital media to trying to tweak the algorithms to suppress the type of political content that's about caring about other people

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  • cwicseolforcwicseolfor@zeroes.ca
    May 10, 2026, 12:14 AM

    @alienghic @mekkaokereke @benroyce Both to avoid empathetic folks of privilege seeing how bigotry unfolds, and to avoid humanizing the targets of bigotry to people being groomed toward said bigotry.

    Compare how terrified people are told to be of letting their children share a class with a trans kid, or thirty years ago with a gay kid. There's an ongoing project to insulate "the innocent" (property: women and children) from evidence lest they begin to question the decisions made by "the worldly."

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  • Queen of Anxietyqueenofnewyork@newsie.social
    May 9, 2026, 8:10 PM

    @mekkaokereke @benroyce One of the first steps on my anti-racism journey was a woman in the UK I was friends with on Livejournal. She was Black, dealt with poverty and harassment, and was patient with my white girl questions. Technology let me connect with someone I would otherwise never have met who had a major impact on me.

    So yeah, not the tech. It’s the ghouls we let dictate things that are.

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  • Dr. Robert M Flightrmflight@mastodon.social
    May 9, 2026, 10:34 PM

    @mekkaokereke @benroyce yep. I joined Twitter in 2011 or 2012, and got exposure from Black people posting about their everyday experiences.

    That really opened my eyes to the systemic racism all around (especially in US and Canada) and helped me to deal with my own prejudices (which I'm still working on).

    Similarly for hearing from women about their life experiences. I was not someone who women confided in growing up. My eyes have been opened to a lot due to social media.

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  • Jayjaystephens@mastodon.social
    May 10, 2026, 12:47 AM

    @mekkaokereke @benroyce

    Yup, both things are true:

    1. All horizontal/peer-to-peer mass-media including actually-existing oligopolistic SocMed (TwiX, FB etc) massively increases ordinary folks's understanding of the lives of those in different circumstances

    2. SocMed in the hands of the West's genocidal nutter 0.00001℅ who control the advertising-industrial complex, has supercharged & sped up various destructive spirals.

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 10, 2026, 2:14 AM

    @nomdeb @benroyce

    Both.

    Phone cameras and camcorders existed before social media, and it wasn't enough. Even Rodney King was viewed as an isolated incident of how rogue cops act, and Caroline Bryant was a rogue example of white women trying to murder Black men by pretending to be harmed. It wasn't until social media that people could see how widespread the issue was.

    Before social media, video of racist police abuse of Black people could only reach the masses through the news. And the news was actively complicit in hiding this truth. Every major newspaper in the US knew that Black people were telling the truth, and knew that cops lie constantly. And every major newspaper in the US lied about it and covered it up. Evil, unjustifiable behavior.

    Which is why social media is much more important than newspapers for civil rights, and it's not close. And why video evidence without a distribution channel doesn't drive change.

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  • Martin Vermeer FCDmartinvermeer@fediscience.org
    May 10, 2026, 3:41 AM

    @mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce Yep. The word you're looking for is 'sousveillance'. It's BLM. It's Gaza. It's Minneapolis/St Paul. The old copaganda / hasbara ways don't work any more.

    And I'll never forget seeing Fergusonians and West-Bankers exchange tear-gas experiences on Twitter.

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  • Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦osma@mas.to
    May 10, 2026, 4:12 AM

    Media implies centralized editorial selection and control. Twitter attempted to cherry pick just the advertising income model of media, without the centralized editorial part, and it didn't work. That made it vulnerable to the fascist takeover. It being centralized made the fascist takeover attractive.

    Zuck's version never was anything but living room fascist to begin with.
    @mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 10, 2026, 4:25 AM

    @osma @nomdeb @benroyce

    Didn't work *for you*. Twitter worked great for the Black people that finally had an outlet for highlighting racism.

    And advertiser model or no editorial board, are not what made Twitter vulnerable to a fascist takeover. What made Twitter vulnerable to a fascist takeover was the fact that one of the world's fashiest dudes was rich enough to buy Twitter on a whim. Billionaires can and have bought newspapers on a whim too.

    I agree that Mastodon isn't as vulnerable to billionaire drunk purchases, as there are too many little pieces to buy. It's like squeezing jello. But again, by percentage, there are more fascists on the Fediverse than on Twitter, and it's not particularly close. And the abuse Black people experience on the Fediverse is worse than on Twitter and in other places. The Fediverse isn't magic.

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  • Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦osma@mas.to
    May 10, 2026, 5:25 AM

    I said nothing about whether it worked for *me*, or for Black people. It didn't *work*. They couldn't make it profitable enough to be protected from a fascist takeover.

    I also said nothing about the moderation models of fedi. This place has a LOT of designed-in issues, which I've not been shy to talk about.
    @mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 10, 2026, 5:58 AM

    @osma @nomdeb @benroyce

    If the definition of "work" that you are using is "profitable enough to prevent a fascist takeover," then no publicly traded company can work. So it's a statement more on capitalism and publicly trade companies than about Twitter in particular.

    Maybe that's the point that you're making? You're focusing on the attractiveness of a centralized target?

    I'm not trying to be argumentative. I think we agree on most of it, but I want to make sure that I understand you correctly.

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  • Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦osma@mas.to
    May 10, 2026, 7:12 AM

    I could name a number of long-term profitable publicly traded companies that have been able to avoid (as well as resist, and even actively block) takeovers. Nevertheless, in the case of Twitter, that is a sidetrack. Over its history, Twitter was a capital-destroying enterprise, yet because it was a media, with ability to excert editorial control over content, it was attractive for those who seek such control - eg, fascists. That's the nature of most media.
    @mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

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  • Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦osma@mas.to
    May 10, 2026, 7:22 AM

    To be clear, my argument is not that centralized enterprise is necessarily bad, or that capitalism is necessarily bad, or that technology is. But what is bad, every time, is allowing *anyone*, whether that's Elon, Orban, Goebbels or the New York Times, to excert editorial control over the public (social) conversation. There must never be one "town square". Media MUST be a collection of competing voices.
    @mekkaokereke @nomdeb @benroyce

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 10, 2026, 5:48 PM

    @osma @nomdeb @benroyce

    Profitability cannot stop a fascist takeover. Only valuation can. If a publicly traded company gets a takeover offer large enough, they have a fiduciary responsibility to consider it. They will probably have to put it to the board. If the board says yes, then they have to sell.

    The main way a publicly traded company can avoid this, is by making themselves more expensive so that they don't get an offer. Puffer fish are harder to swallow. KKR stuff.

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 10, 2026, 8:45 PM

    @osma

    First of all, this is my thread, and my mentions. I decide what's main track and sidetrack.

    Now that we've cleared that up: the fact that Twitter was effective for combating the harms that I want to talk about are important to me. Mastodon is not effective at those things, because there are not enough Black people here. But there could be.

    Mastodon not being attractive as an acquisition target has nothing to do with whether or not there is or is not algorithmic content viewership here or editorial control. It is because even if there were 1000 algorithms and 1000 editors, they would all be independently owned. We agree on the decentralized point. I've already said that.

    But we don't agree on what makes a platform vulnerable to fascist takeover.

    As in, even if every major instance on Mastodon agreed to a single editor standard tomorrow, it would still not be as vulnerable as Twitter, because everyone could switch away from that the day after if they chose to. And because Mastodon is not a publicly traded company with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder returns.

    If I email Eugen and Renaud tomorrow, and show them definitive proof that Mastodon is unlikely to generate $10B over the next 5 years, but that if he takes my $10B, me and my fashy friends will return that to shareholders within 2 years, Renaud can just laugh in my face, tell me to get stuffed, and block my number. He won't be sued later for not considering the offer. This has nothing to do with Mastodon being a media or not.

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  • Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦osma@mas.to
    May 10, 2026, 11:57 PM

    Okay then. Do you know how many times in its history was Twitter able to post a positive earnings result and how much capital it destroyed while publicly listed?

    Twice in ten years and approx - 1.8 billion $. That's what made it vulnerable. No one wanted to compete with Elon's ketamine induced crazy bid. Not even Elon himself.

    Did you know that Netflix, meanwhile, did fight off a hostile takeover by Carl Icahn?

    Did you know Paramount was fought over in a bidding war?
    @mekkaokereke

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 11, 2026, 12:06 AM

    @osma

    OK, I'm disengaging because we're not going to agree on this, and because we've reached the weird part of the conversation where you're trying to 'splain specific corporate takeover attempts and their successful defenses to me, when the executives that defended against those takeovers are personal friends of mine.

    Be well.

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  • Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦osma@mas.to
    May 11, 2026, 12:11 AM

    So you did know that profitability does lead to valuation and makes a public company defensible. I did suspect as much. I hope we still do agree that competing voices on a level playing field matter. Be well.
    @mekkaokereke

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  • Jérôme Petazzonijpetazzo@hachyderm.io
    May 10, 2026, 8:20 AM

    @mekkaokereke @osma @nomdeb @benroyce

    Are there some reliable metrics on the safety of various social networks for different populations? (I feel like this is a hard question because I don't even know where to start if I were to measure that. Number of hateful messages received per N messages seen? Sent? Per unit of time? Which population categories should we consider? How do we determine what constitutes a hateful message?)

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  • Chuck Fry 🏳️‍🌈SVChucko@sfba.social
    May 10, 2026, 2:10 AM

    @mekkaokereke @benroyce I joined Twitter during the Ferguson police riots, precisely because I wanted to hear what was happening on the ground, unfiltered through official channels.

    I make a conscious effort to follow people who are not my race or gender, or raised like I was in upper middle class whitebread America. I need their perspectives.

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  • Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦osma@mas.to
    May 10, 2026, 4:06 AM

    Social is good, but media is a problem. Networks were a solution that centralizing to media model eliminated.

    Technology plus capital has a built in tendency to centralize, because both reward scale. Very few systems exist that work better at small scale - but without interconnected, small scale systems, we end up with a form of fascism winning by default.

    Social networks, not social media.
    @mekkaokereke @benroyce

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 10, 2026, 4:36 AM

    @osma @benroyce

    I disagree on "scale equals centralization." The exact opposite is true in many cases.

    It's easier to get scale by decentralizing than by centralizing. Map Reduce for the win. A data center is a decentralized supercomputer. Chinese restaurants are a decentralized mega franchise. There is no central governing franchise over Chinese food restaurants. They're almost all independent. And yet I can go into any one and order orange chicken and lo mein and have a pretty good idea of what I'm about to get. Norms over "guidance from corporate." The decentralized Chinese fast food chains are 7% of the US fast food market. That's bigger than Taco Bell, Wendy's, Chick-fil-A, Burger King, Dominoes, Etc.

    Most of the centralized Twitter alternatives have failed already.

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  • Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦osma@mas.to
    May 10, 2026, 5:22 AM

    I did say technology plus capital. That's economies of scale, in everything from factories, to conglomerates, to political control. While a Chinese restaurant isn't technology dependent, even food is centralized everywhere where technology and access to capital matters - and you might be surprised how many "independent" restaurants are actual franchises.
    @mekkaokereke @benroyce

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  • La Guirilaguiri@neopaquita.es
    May 10, 2026, 7:56 AM

    @mekkaokereke @benroyce I'm sorry to mention a white man as example, but this was my experience as a child.

    The singer Peter Gabriel was in some human rights stuff in the late eighties or early nineties and he was on the news on TV, describing an ambitious project to give activists video cameras of the lightweight sort my dad used on holidays, so that they could be very effective eyewitness of injustices. I was young and naive and thought "when they report, that's enough, right?" I thought the project was frivolous.

    As you can see I have never forgotten how stupid I was. The advent of activist social media showed it.

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  • MinmiTheDinominmi@sfba.social
    May 9, 2026, 7:38 PM

    @mekkaokereke I don’t totally understand. It’s definitely a problem genocidal maniacs have this kind of power. But I feel like the problem is that we allow anyone to have that kind of power. Because there will always be a few genocidal maniacs in the mix, and they’ll always be the most adept at exploiting paths to power—cause the rest of us just don’t want it as much.

    So shouldn’t we be focused on the structure that concentrates power?

    I guess I’m making a big assumption that there will always be genocidal power hungry maniacs…but it seems true given my lived experience.

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  • MinmiTheDinominmi@sfba.social
    May 9, 2026, 7:58 PM

    @mekkaokereke oh ok! I was reading it as like “just convince people not to be evil or give power just to nice people” and… I had a hard time believing I was reading it right 🤣.

    Thanks for clarifying!

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  • Nicolai Hähnlenh@mastodon.gamedev.place
    May 9, 2026, 7:54 PM

    @minmi @mekkaokereke Any system that allows the accumulation of excessive wealth and therefore power will at least weakly filter for genocidal maniacs. Because if you are one, you are more inclined to make the kind of exploitative decisions that make it easier to accumulate huge amounts of wealth.

    I don't think there is any way to reliably prevent this without putting some sort of de facto cap on wealth accumulation.

    And even that is probably only a necessary step but not a sufficient one.

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 9, 2026, 8:05 PM

    @nh @minmi

    Kinda? That's true in Western governments and societies. Less so elsewhere. For two reasons: Wealth not equalling power, and being a genocidal maniac is disqualifying in many normal places.

    You can roughly categorize all governments in the world into 3 categories:

    1) billionaires are more powerful than the government

    2) government is more powerful than the billionaires

    3) the government is the billionaires

    Most Western governments are clearly 1) so yes, if you get wealthy enough, you can kinda do what you want. That's not true everywhere. Some places take 2) to the extreme. I'm not saying that's good, but I am saying that it's not hard for a society to put reasonable limits on the power of billionaires if it chooses to. We just don't choose to.🤷🏿‍♂️

    And being a genocidal maniac or a racist (same thing) is not disqualifying in US society, but it should be. Being a pedophile and predator is disqualifying to ~70% of the US. Different societies have different rules on what behaviors are disqualifying. What I'm saying is that it's a choice to select for genocidla maniac tendencies, not a given. We could just make better choices as a society.

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 9, 2026, 8:10 PM

    @nh @minmi

    Paradoxically:
    Most billionaires in the world would rather live in a world where there were a few more limits to the power, and a little less lawlessness.

    They don't like it that Trump was able to leapfrog them in power and influence. He started with much less money than them, but indexed much higher on the sociopathy scale, and in this society, that gave him an advantage over them.🤷🏿‍♂️

    They would much prefer a world where he was below $1B, and they were comfortably above, and they don't have to pretend that they like him.

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  • MinmiTheDinominmi@sfba.social
    May 9, 2026, 8:13 PM

    @mekkaokereke @nh

    Hmm, are there systems that highly concentrate power but manage to disqualify people from power based on character? Am I just really cynical and tunnel visioned to my own cultural context?

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 9, 2026, 8:47 PM

    @minmi @nh

    "Not Like Us" is the top rap song of the past 5 years. It's called Not Like Us because it is based on the idea that Drake has no credibility in the Black community, but has credibility in the white community, because they are more accepting of his disqualifying character flaws, but Black people in LA are not. Drake has wealth, because white people are most of the customer base for rap music, and they buy a lot of his records. But he has no power in the community.

    Kendrick Lamar is more powerful as a rapper, but Drake is wealthier, and acts with less care for others or for society.

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  • Nicolai Hähnlenh@mastodon.gamedev.place
    May 9, 2026, 9:23 PM

    @mekkaokereke @minmi I appreciate you giving this example. I don't know anything about rap, but I'm a little skeptical of how applicable this is, for two reasons: (1) it's an example about a slice of a society, not a society as a whole; (2) it only shows resistance against one bad actor as opposed to sustained resistance against multiple bad actors over time.

    That said, we can agree on an underlying thesis that we as a society can choose what we tolerate.

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  • Nicolai Hähnlenh@mastodon.gamedev.place
    May 9, 2026, 9:26 PM

    @mekkaokereke @minmi And I say we *should* claim and use that power to make that choice.

    My point is more that sustained resistance against the power given by excessive wealth is *hard* and is a never-ending battle. It puts too much of a burden on innocent people in the long run, and too high of a risk that something ends up slipping through a "loop hole".

    Better to *also* limit the extent of the problem at the source and prevent excessive accumulation of wealth in the first place.

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  • Nicolai Hähnlenh@mastodon.gamedev.place
    May 9, 2026, 9:28 PM

    @mekkaokereke @minmi Think of it as a "don't feed the trolls" approach.

    There's a grey area where you need to engage with people in good faith and set standards for a community that way. But you also just need to *ban* the trolls because otherwise it becomes unsustainable.

    Same logic applies to excessive wealth accumulation. There is zero reason why we should allow it, just as there is zero reason why we should allow trolls.

    The only real question is how much is "excessive"?

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  • mekka okereke :verified:mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io
    May 10, 2026, 12:27 PM

    @Waveway @nh @minmi

    There are thousands of billionaires on Earth. You only hear about the same 20 of them all the time, because many of the rest of the thousands are less genocidally maniacal, so they don't show up on anyone's radar. They just go through life being unimaginably rich, but not trying to end USAID or overthrow countries or end democracy.

    Of course, some of those other thousands are just as maniacal, just sneakily so.

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  • Nicolai Hähnlenh@mastodon.gamedev.place
    May 9, 2026, 8:14 PM

    @mekkaokereke @minmi Do you have any robust evidence that the difference between 1 and 2 is more than a matter of degree and *level* of wealth?

    The fundamental issue is that wealth *is* power, full stop, because it gives you the power to have other people do work towards your goals.

    And so if there are constitutional limits to the direct influence you can have, well, you fund a network of think tanks that put out "research" aligned with undermining those limits. Which should sound familiar...

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  • ShadSterlingShadSterling@mastodon.social
    May 9, 2026, 11:00 PM

    @nh @minmi @mekkaokereke every now and then I imagine a system where taxes on the wealthy fund a universal income, and the wealthy compete to be the one responsible for the largest fraction of that universal income

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  • Nicolai Hähnlenh@mastodon.gamedev.place
    May 9, 2026, 11:52 PM

    @ShadSterling @minmi @mekkaokereke I would tweak that slightly. Make those taxes fund a sovereign wealth fund that in turn pays out a universal income.

    The idea is to reflect the reality that a lot, and probably most, of the total wealth in our society really cannot be attributed to individuals in a desert theory sense ("desert" as in "to deserve").

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