Comment by eat_veggies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eat_veggies | Hacker News Reader

I've written similar thoughts before on computing's mutual recursion with the offline world, and the software engineer's place as code-reader and code-writer-hallucinator [0]. Computers, like any means of production in modernity, are only furthering inequality in the world (along the usual lines: wealth, race, geography, social standing, etc). Computing can make the world better, but right now it can't and it won't -- and that kind of sucks.

I really like the author's sentiment that "It's okay to invent useless things, create beautiful projects for their own sake, etc." and I think that's the first step to creating something that doesn't take computing as capital, as dead labor.

Computing can be alive, experimental, playful, and helpful to our communities. It doesn't have to scale, make big profits, or attract billions in VC bucks; in fact, all of those things just seem to bring us misery. And importantly, they are all orthogonal to the software itself. I'm inspired by Robin Sloan's "An app can be a home-cooked meal" [1] and initiatives like NYC Mesh [2]. It's okay if our software merely brings joy to our families and local communities.

[0] https://blog.jse.li/posts/software/

[1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

[2] https://www.nycmesh.net/

"Computers, like any means of production, are only furthering inequality in the world"

1) 'Means of production' do not arbitrarily further inequality. The Industrial Revolution, which we may very well be still living through (ask a historian in 500 years ...) smashed the old class systems and enabled standards of living unheard of before.

2) 'Tech' is in its infancy, the measured surpluses i.e profits are going into the hands of the 0.1% but consumer surpluses are huge. The value of the things we can buy today are immensely greater than before. I play a free video game that has provided me with countless hours of entertainment. From 'older tech': I get this amazing stuff called 'electricity' out of my walls and literally fresh water (hot and cold!) for literally pennies - this is revolutionary. You can live better than a Roman Emperor by shopping exclusively at Walmart.

3) A few billion people have come out of 'extreme poverty' in the last 40 years, as basic material prosperity reaches every corner of the planet. Computing has been part of that. Despite our own ugly inequality, and all the ugly externalities (pollution etc.) - we shouldn't denigrate this fact: having 'a roof, food, the ability to communicate with people at a distance, basic medicine/healthcare, basic rule of law' ... this is heaven compared to any situation their ancestors would have lived in.

Computing is as worthwhile as we want to make it, much like most other things.

> we shouldn't denigrate this fact: having 'a roof, food, the ability to communicate with people at a distance, basic medicine/healthcare, basic rule of law' ... this is heaven compared to any situation their ancestors would have lived in.

It's only heaven compared to how it was before. If you are born under the current system, you don't know what it's like to have lived in a worse time. So while our ancestors are probably astounded at our prosperity, having tasted the before/after, someone born now will not be grateful, because they don't have a hellish alternative to compare it to (besides people in other countries).

This "relativity" extends to other areas too, not just poverty. For example... torture. For our ancestors, torture meant having your spine stretch until it broke or being stuck in an iron box filled with spikes or being starved and beaten and stuffed in a tiny locker or any number of horrifically macabre prospects. Now torture is "being alone in a room". I'm not downplaying the psychological damage of solitary confinement, but relative to the torture POWs went through or the torture methods used in medieval times, solitary confinement almost seems like a reward.

The standard by which we gauge poverty, torture, happiness, etc. shifts as society improves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

So I see your point, but it's not purely relative.

There is an existential jump when going from starvation and oppression to having basic means. Going from basic means to 'advanced means' is much less of a jump.

Life was brutal 200 years ago for almost everyone, and it's simply not brutal now.

So yes, overall, I understand that in 100 years, people will find it hard to fathom 'how we lived' but really, I think that all future humans could handle living in our era without to much problem.

> like any means of production

I don’t think this is necessarily the case.

It’s not the means of production in and of themselves that are the issue.

It’s the historio-socio-cultural-political framework, or zeitgeist, within which we find ourselves, and the decision we make, continue to make, and tolerate.

A lack of leadership in any real sense of the word.

There is, as you say, a mutual recursion, but the tools are only doing what we’re making them do, and in that sense they are amplifying our poor choices.

Blaming the tools seeks to externalise responsibility.

I made this throwaway to reply to this.

I'm the son of political exiles from a third-world communist country who taught myself programming through reading the web. Everyone around me, including my family, insisted I was wasting my life with software and didn't support that erudition. They would joke I would be watching porn all day. But because it was available online, they couldn't stop me.

By the time I was in my early 20s, I made it to FAANG to the most expensive city in the world, and made three times what my family household had made. Everyone else from my socio-economic class in my birth city remains in that city without exception; I even had offered to teach my friends programming in middle school but they refused.

In that regards, I don't care about this abstract objective of equality, that's certainly worth eschewing to increase income mobility and move people from poverty. Concern for financial equality over welfare just inspires disgust in me.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I would note that there are not enough FAANG jobs to allow everyone to follow the same path as you did, even if they worked just as hard. Software can surely elevate a select few out of poverty, and at the moment, there is still enough room for a few more people. But what we're seeing in e.g. India is that it's not enough:

https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/

I will admit that it's a privileged position to even have the opportunity to think about broader inequality. My personal needs are thoroughly met, and that's why I'm in a position to make personal decisions based on this stuff. Lots of people's needs aren't being met, and I'd never blame them for putting those above abstract ideals.

But it sounds like inequality and the abuse of power are the very things you escaped, no? Surely you at least sympathize with those still in that situation, whether your current circumstances allow you to take any action on it or not?

I escaped very low welfare not inequality. I choose welfare over equality any day, equality is an abstract objective that doesn't have any meaningful effect. If inequality is what it takes to increase welfare, then I openly welcome that beneficial status quo.

Tragedy of the commons really. Makes the world worse over all while making the lives of people who know how to use computers better.

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