I read a story once about a billionaire who managed to flout a zoning limitation by building himself an absurdly huge high-rise single apartment. Once that was done, he waited a bit, and either using a loophole that already existed or one he finagled into the law, he added a bunch of walls inside is personal mega-apartment to and then sold off all these new units as regular apartments.
Now I think of this in the context of the American dredging and shipping laws. There’s a lot of rules surrounding dredges and shipping vessels, but there are a lot fewer surrounding luxury items like yachts. So imagine a group of investors building a big, state of the art shipyard that builds yachts, but which can be converted for little or no additional cost to build dredges or vessels suitable for river shipping or similar.
A simpler alternative scheme is to just comply with the laws but use yachts or similar less-regulated vessels as a lead product to build capacity for the more economic ones, analogous to how Tesla strategically built an electric sports car to generate interest and funds for eventually building electric sedans.
I wonder how feasible it would be to make something that would allow people to coordinate for consumption like unions for bargaining, parties for politics, or corporations for production. In particular I have in mind targeting entertainment and social media consumption because of the prevalence of recommendation algorithms here.
The intuition is that these algorithms are political computations: who gets the advertising traffic, what type of content is in demand, which consumers are catered to.
The thing being coordinated on is the consumer behavior; namely what people click on.
Examples:
like a union, but instead of collective bargaining to sell labor, it is collective behavioring[1] to consume content.
like the old website Massdrop, but instead of coordinated buying it is coordinated clicking.
like a political party, but instead of coordinating votes, it coordinates clicks.
like a company, but instead of coordinating work, it coordinates consumption.
Concretely, I have in mind something like a browser widget that overlays indicators of the most impactful consumption choice to make to influence the algorithm in the direction you want, such as an icon or a color filter. This would run over things like youtube, instagram, tiktok, etc.
Another way to think of this: a value handshake between whatever algorithm the company is using and an algorithm you would choose instead.
behavioring—by this I mean consciously conforming to a pattern of behavior so it shows up in behavior analysis, in this case consumer behavior tracking which is part of the function of recommendation algorithms.