How can he reconciliate these views with this spec, which he is the main author of? Surely Ben sees the parallels?
He writes: "Apple’s strategy with this is obvious, and it clearly works, but it still greatly upsets me that I couldn’t just build an app with my linux laptop. If I want the app to persist for longer than a month, and to make it easy for friends to install, I had to pay $99 for a developer account. Come on Apple, I know you want people to use the app story but this is just a little cruel. I basically have to pay $99 a year now just to keep using my little app."
It's honestly comical and a little sad.
[1]: http://benwiser.com/blog/I-just-spent-%C2%A3700-to-have-my-o...
It can be reconciled with love for money and total lack of moral fiber.
Aka « I don’t give a shit about my actions destroying every one, as long as I go get paid »
What this guy's doing is shameful, but I've seen dozens of otherwise lovely people, working for charities, spending much more time on socially-important and useful work than 90% of the crowd here... and the same people would push barely legal (if not illegal) targeting on masses of people, arguing to push cigarette ads in markets that still allow it. Advertising is cancer and the current model is not sustainable.
What I'm (poorly) trying to say is: be angry, let everyone know that you're angry, make more people angry, but remember that focusing on this guy is a distraction from a bigger systemic issue and it actually helps organisations like Alphabet.
As if you personally know 90% of the people here? And how many of those 10% would never ever push advertising on anyone, would you guess?
It's moot anyway, you cannot compensate for a lie by giving someone a lot of cake, even all the cake in the world. It's apples and oranges.
> Advertising is cancer and the current model is not sustainable.
"Advertising" is just a shorthand for the concrete actions concrete individuals engage in. There is no "model" outside of hundreds of decisions people make every day. It's like blaming "capitalism" and pretending people just play the "game" as if that existed outside of those actions. For any person you could name, I can find you someone in the same situation who refused to do the evil thing.