Hackworth

This is kinda the plot of Hudson Hawk.

Public perception can function like any other externality, meaning you can offload costs onto it. This is regularly done, but it’d be foolish to claim that’s the case here without more information. As it would be foolish to assume the hand of the market is gently guiding us to a better world.

Planned obsolescence, subscription degradation, ad creep, landfills full of cheap crap… It’s in their interests to sell the least useful thing for the highest price. If it costs more to put in pockets, they’ll spend a surprising amount of money trying to convince people they don’t want pockets. Or better yet, just buy up every competitor until there are only a few players and decide amongst yourselves not to make better stuff. I’m not saying that’s what happened, necessarily, it’s just not a foregone conclusion that pockets are scarce because demand is scarce.

Is the hypothesis that companies have their customers’ best interests in mind? /shrug I’m just going to base my worldview on the only data I could find rather than “I remember reading a comment.” At least until I run across new data.

Hey! An excuse to quote my namesake.

Hackworth got all the news that was appropriate to his situation in life, plus a few optional services: the latest from his favorite cartoonists and columnists around the world; the clippings on various peculiar crackpot subjects forwarded to him by his father […] A gentleman of higher rank and more far-reaching responsibilities would probably get different information written in a different way, and the top stratum of New Chuasan actually got the Times on paper, printed out by a big antique press […] Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revivial was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in society, the more similar one’s Times became to one’s peers’. - The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1995)

That is to say, I agree that everyone getting different answers is an issue, and it’s been a growing problem for decades. AI’s turbo-charged it, for sure. If I want, I can just have it yes-man me all day long.

Eh, people said the exact same thing about Wikipedia in the early 2000’s. A group of randos on the internet is going to “crowd source” truth? Absurd! And the answer to that was always, “You can check the source to make sure it says what they say it says.” If you’re still checking Wikipedia sources, then you’re going to check the sources AI provides as well. All that changes about the process is how you get the list of primary sources. I don’t mind AI as a method of finding sources.

The greater issue is that people rarely check primary sources. And even when they do, the general level of education needed to read and understand those sources is a somewhat high bar. And the even greater issue is that AI-generated half-truths are currently mucking up primary sources. Add to that intentional falsehoods from governments and corporations, and it already seems significantly more difficult to get to the real data on anything post-2020.

The only data I could find suggests women do want pockets, particularly in pants.

Reminds me of Diane’s Good Damage scene from BoJack.