This is a post by the founder of telegram, I thought this was a very interesting idea worth sharing and is a good way to contextualise the current fucked up state of the world.
>The "capitalism <-> socialism" opposition seems outdated. I prefer to think in terms of "centralization vs decentralization". Humans have evolved to perform best in small groups of less than 150 people. That's why wherever there's centralization and excessive hierarchy, there's inefficiency and underutilized human potential. Capitalist monopolies and socialist dictatorships are equally bad.
>In a natural environment, every small community is able to produce an outstanding leader and an independent thinker. In today's world of trillion-dollar monopolies and bloated governments, the potential of hundreds of millions of people is suppressed by the limitations imposed by our artificial societal structures.
>That is the reason why tens of thousands of people working at big corporations such as Facebook have failed to keep up with what our small team at Telegram has been implementing. That’s also the reason why countries like Russia fail to generate and retain global brands in their jurisdictions. Genuine creativity is rare in organizations and societies built on excessive hierarchies and lack of personal autonomy.
Pandemic aside, there has never been a better time to be alive than now. The past - even the relatively recent past - was shit.
If you want to seriously address the question of where we're going wrong, you need to meaningfully engage with all the ways that we're getting things very right. We're living longer and healthier lives than any generation of humans in history. Global poverty and child mortality have never been lower. The world today is more democratic and has more respect for human rights than ever before.
There's nothing wrong with being idealistic, but it's incredibly dangerous to let that idealism turn into a nihilistic black-and-white view of social progress. There are many ways that the world could be made better, but there are many more ways that the world could be made much worse.
>>92153 >He's described as the "Russian Zuckerberg"
*was
He was forced out of his own company and into exile for refusing to hand over personal data on protestors and opposition politicians in Russia and Ukraine.
Say what you like about him, but at least he has good principals and is running his business to them as best as he can.
Meanwhile there seems to be a propaganda campaign against him and telegram, allegedly with money trails leading back to facebook and other companies.
>>92152 >there has never been a better time to be alive than now
I would question this for the western world in recent decades. Depending on your criteria*, it's not very hard to see that a not-insignificant number of people in this country still haven't returned to the quality of life they had in 2007. Everyone calls to technology, to global poverty and to global democratisation as signs of progress because the data there is unambiguous. What winds lost in the wayside is that none of that is any consolation if your own life or your own town has gone to shit, especially if nothing and nobody is credibly going to improve it. We may live in a world with more democracies than ever, but most first world democracies have run into crises of legitimacy. It's worth asking why that is.
*And you can have some fun with this. I was assuming a mixture of actual financial position + perceived quality of life, but you can always factor in the hedonic treadmill for extra fun. I suspect that to the human brain, irrational as it is, it feels better to live in China and see your standard of living raise year on year from a low point to a middling one than it does to live in Britain and see it stagnate or moderately decline, despite staying better off in absolute terms.
