Comment by normalnorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by normalnorm | Hacker News Reader

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Am I the only one getting depressed with all the excuses and rationalizations in this thread? It's the same with "adtech" and the like... "Hey, I'm not killing anyone, what's the harm?"

Technology has the potential to raise humanity above its current conditions and limitations. But we can't have it, because we are selfish and short-sighted monkeys. Take a big dump on all the ideals if this delivers the paycheck. "Business" justifies everything. Fuck humans.

A global instantaneous network of information exchange? Let's turn it into a dystopic market of bullshit covered in distasteful advertising, Idiocracy-style. AI breakthroughs? Will help make the Skinner box much more effective! A search engine capable of finding any public piece of information in human record? Replace the entire thing with ads in disguise! Still, autocratic regimes want to censor some of the ads? Can do, they are a huge market!

Space programs? Canceled. We now have a Rube-Goldberg machine made of human suffering that can deliver whatever trinket you want the next day to your door, nicely package in a cardboard box with a corporate grin printed on it. But don't worry, some guy who sells cars is taking us to Mars or something.

Fuck all this.

No you're not the only one.

I find especially baffling the rationalization over the type of crime. You don't need to physically harm someone to be committing a crime, and there's a lot of different crimes that happen in paper and/or bytes that don't (directly) physically harm people.

That doesn't make them right or okay by any means.

The issue is when people try to stack-rank the "badness" of crimes. "Is bankrupting a thousand people through fraud worse than killing someone?" The answer is: it doesn't matter which is worse. Both destroy lives in different ways.

Fraud and spam are crimes that ruin lives in their own ways.

I suspect that if someone did bankrupt a thousand people through fraud you are going to have a number of suicides on their hands.

Agreed. If you account for second-order effects, the result could look pretty grim. That's why I'm of the opinion that some white-collar crimes can absolutely be worse than violent ones - including murder - and that they should be punished accordingly.

> The answer is: it doesn't matter which is worse. Both destroy lives in different ways.

Though it is very natural for people to think "how bad I am" or "how bad is that company compared to the other companies" and so on. Also in the end the justice system has to sentence these crimes and there has to be some kind of "badness" metric that should be seen as fair by the general public. I don't think this "they are all just crimes" approach works.

Sure, I understand why people want to. I just think it's a futile effort. In order to determine whether bankrupting 1000 people is worse than killing 1 person you have to quantify all those variables, including the value of a human life (an actuary will gladly do that for you). By some measures, say economic impact, killing a single person may not matter at all, depending on who they are. What people want is to quantify morality. Good luck.

However what we do see that correlates to some "badness" metric is the punishment we mete out for crimes. Years of imprisonment is a simple, linear measure that can be used to measure crimes against one another.

You see it all the time. So and so killed a person and got X years in prison, but this other guy ran a Ponzi scheme and got Y years in prison. Whether X is greater than Y, and your viewpoint, will determine if you think that's fair or not. But my original point is I think it's a rather pointless determination to begin with because it isn't really telling you anything. It doesn't answer the question of whether one crime is worse than another because that's fundamentally a philosophical question that I don't think can be measured.

> Fraud and spam are crimes that ruin lives in their own ways.

I never denied that. I wanted to know what exactly is the fraud that the company is causing. Also, spamming is all about matter or perspective. All major consumer companies send billions of emails. I would love to know what this company was doing differently .

Right on.

Similarly, people often conflate something morally good with something morally bad and ask/argue ”If I mix the two is it overall good or bad?". Which similarly doesn’t matter.

The good should never be conflated with the bad. Otherwise, the good will just be used for rationalizing the bad...

(That’s not to say morality is not somewhat ambiguous. I just often see people trying to justify immoral behavior by doing this)

You're not the only one. And don't even get me started on adtech. I share your sentiment 100%. See [0].

--

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

Excellent blog post. You mention several things that we are so used to, that we don't even notice the abuse, such as the polluting of culture by association of works of art with commercial brands through relentless advertising. To this day, I associate Carmina Burana with cheap male cologne.

Another one for you: in Berlin, buildings under renovation are allowed to place gigantic ads on the scaffolding. I imagine the original ideas was benign, to sort of subsidize the loss of revenue by business owners and renters, and thus encourage maintenance for the good of the city. Of course, there is nothing that marketers won't try to pervert, and this is an easy one. In the most desirable advertising locations, buildings tend to enter states of perma-renovation. This got particularly horrible during the last Word Cup, with historical buildings in my area covered with gigantic ads with tacky things written on them in gigantic letters, such as : GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! BUY THE NEW XYZ VR HEADSET

What depresses me to no end is how apathetic everyone is to this relentless erosion of culture and quality of life.

Thanks. I'll be adding this to the article.

I've heard opinions that something similar is happening in my country too (Poland), and it would explain some strategically placed buildings in Kraków that can never seem to finish being renovated, and that also happen to feature ridiculously large ads on the scaffolding.

This is a great article.

> I remember reading about cases of scientific papers that were advertisements pretending to be research work. I'll update this point when I find some actual examples.

Not exactly the same but related: soda manufacturers have been stressing the correlation between inactivity and diabetes, and in the process sliding in the message that sugar intake is not that big of a factor. That messaging goes with ads of healthy people in movement enjoying life and drinking sugar water.

Thanks. It's related enough; if you know of a decent article on the topic, I'll happily link to it.

Here are a few links that contain some pointers:

NYTimes Blog: Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away From Bad Diets - https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-sc...

Endocrine Web: The Coke Controversy: The Marketing Message That Could Spell Trouble for People Dealing with Diabetes and Obesity - https://www.endocrineweb.com/news/diabetes/coke-controversy-...

Study: Coca-Cola – a model of transparency in research partnerships? A network analysis of Coca-Cola’s research funding (2008–2016) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5962884/

Union of Concerned Scientists blog post: How Coca-Cola Disguised Its Influence on Science about Sugar and Health - https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-coca-cola-disguised-its...

Thank you!

Advertising companies also act as censors. If some advertiser takes issue with something, it will be deleted. Therefore, every community ends up being sanitized so as to avoid offending advertisers and their policies. I've seen site administrators purge their own community after Google turned off their ads because someone complained about one page.

To be clear, my comments were pointing out that what's described was not criminal. I didn't take a position on what's ethical or not.

That said, I think helping VPNs is a good thing ethically. If he'd been arrested for running a Tor node that was used to download child pornography (which has happened), I suspect most people here would defend him.

Helping spammers is bad, but, at least as described by OP, not illegal.

Thanks so much for calling this out, including the coarse language used, because in my opinion, it's really warranted.

We could do so many good things with technology, instead we use it more and more for bullshit to maximize profits instead of maximizing social value. It really is depressing really.

Imo, the basis of the problem is that we look at the GDP as a major health indicator of the economy, while this works against the idea that we should be consuming less, not more. From this follows adtech, and indirectly people being rewarded for doing stupid stuff.

> Let's turn it into a dystopic market of bullshit covered in distasteful advertising,

I mean absolutely no disrespect to you and I understand your feelings are probably coming straight out your heart. However I would like to point out that when you say that the world does not meet your expectation and that somehow is a problem with the world and not your own self is very arrogant.

> But we can't have it, because we are selfish and short-sighted monkeys.

These distasteful comments about fellow humans are nothing but the same arrogant thought process that has caused havoc around the world through ideologies like communism and colonialism. It reeks of Rudyard Kipling's disgusting poem "White man's burden". Without knowing you are claiming that you have the power to know what is good for world and you only need power to fix it. In this process you actually get depressed. You are describing the world as "Fuck all this."

> I would like to point out that when you say that the world does not meet your expectation and that somehow is a problem with the world and not your own self is very arrogant.

Notice that this kind of argument could have been (and probably was) used against the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, universal suffrage, gay marriage or religious freedom. If you have a minority position against the status quo, you can always be accused of arrogance. "Who are you to think you know better?". However, sometimes the arrogant are right.

> These distasteful comments about fellow humans are nothing but the same arrogant thought process that has caused havoc around the world through ideologies like communism and colonialism.

And capitalism, don't forget. The ideology of infinite growth is destroying our habitat.

fwiw I also agree entirely.

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