I think, like Obsidian, it stores them as markdown files.

Then Logseq. It’s an outliner (each line can be it’s own…thing…), but it’s open source and a direct competitor of Obsidian. In fact, I was ambivalent between the two when I first started with online note-taking.

This is just standard (and good) criticism of capitalism. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” as they saying goes.

But there’s the question of whether the mass murder in Myanmar would have happened without Facebook. That’s impossible to know for sure, admittedly, but I still believe it’s possible to think about it meaningfully. Because my answer is mass murder would have probably happened without Facebook.

The core of my argument is that technology merely allows humans to act more effectively and amplifies what we already do. What humanity does is not fundamentally changed by technology in most cases. And Facebook is one of the cases where the previously existing social division was amplified, where bad faith actors could act more effectively. Yes, Facebook had an important role to play by trying to make the platform addictive via algorithms that emotional content could hijack and spread like wildfire. However, while that doesn’t absolve Facebook’s instrumentality to mass murder altogether, it contextualizes it enough for me to treat it as any tool.

In other words, a murder-shovel digs just as effectively as a non-murder-shovel, and I don’t really see an intrinsic problem with using the murder-shovel.

The analogy of the tool fails when it comes to Zuckerberg’s role in directing Facebook to act as it did. A shovel doesn’t have a CEO dedicated to digging as much as possible; Facebook does have a CEO dedicated to making the platform addictive, the mechanism by which social divisions were amplified. I think his responsibility is complex…but he absolutely shares some responsibility for the tragedy.

And so, that’s why I believe your post is a good, moralistic criticism of capitalism: it demonstrates how market relations obfuscate moral responsibility. Facebook mediates and helps satisfy our social needs while allowing us to ignore our role, however small it is, in perpetuating the means by which others can influence others to commit tragedies.