Sublime

It is profoundly unfair to expect individual users of exploitative platforms to simply stop using them, especially when their livelihoods and/or relationships are tied to these platforms.

Yet they have largely been unmatched by the emergence of appropriate labor market institutions (such as unions and labor regulations) that allow workers to share the potential benefits of these arrangements. Thus, they have tended to raise workplace precarity and contribute to the “hollowing-out” of the middle class in many developed countries[7].

David Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, has updated both the utilitarian and the humanistic arguments for the networked age by calling for a new “informational environmentalism.” Just as we fight to save marsh lands and old-growth forests from development and pollution, he says, so we need to fight to save

by deploying alternative news feed algorithms on in-silico social media platforms, where large language model (LLM) agents that mimic human social media users interact with one another, we can explore and test the impact of these alternative algorithms on macro-level social outcomes, such as conflicts and polarization.[385]