Are Hackers the New Luddites? [audio]
novaramedia.com
novaramedia.com
If Google's billions can't solve the problem, Rando Startup is going to have to be awful clever.
Yes. I turn CC on for most videos, even movies or shows watched at home.
Why not? Not everyone is in a room by themselves and can turn up the volume. Not everyone can wear big gamer headphones at work.
Posting a video on the internet and not including a transcript is like posting something on Instagram and no other platform and thinking, "That's good enough."
If your goal is to communicate your thoughts, you make them available to as many people as is practical.
You don't publish a book and slip it onto one shelf at one local library and then wonder why nobody reads your work.
I don't mind video or audio if i _know_ i want it. But it's obscenely slow to verify if video/audio content is worth my time.
So much content on the internet is shallow or misleading. Text is easier to filter for me.
Isn't there a variety of text-to-speech apps available?
Spoken like a true luddite! XD
For me, this is pretty contextual. Sometimes I want to listen to audio when I'm on a walk or doing dishes. Other times I want text so I can skip the audio and save time. The more mediums, the better, personally speaking.
Yet because there are a very select few megastar who became famous because they kept posting selfies taken with their smartphones, we are to believe that the smartphone "is the new computer".
Luddite? What about we talk about the specs of my workstation vs your IoT device? We'll see who's adopting modern tech ; )
Neither were the Luddites! The Luddites were a labor movement who wanted to ensure that workers in textile mills were being treated fairly. Many Luddites were highly skilled and happy to work with automated looms, they just didn't want factories to fire all the skilled labor and pay pennies on the dollar to unskilled labor. (While holding cloth prices steady.)
The Luddites are a good cautionary tale about when you should protect your working conditions and rights (when the demand for your services is at its peak). So many engineers I talk to these days say things like, "Why would I want to organize/engage in collective bargaining now? My life is good!" rather than, "My work is highly desirable, and my employer might actually come to the negotiating table because it is challenging to replace us right now."
It already is. It's called a compiler.
Once upon a time you needed to hire someone to get a website for a small business going, now you can do this yourself for a small fee.
I think textile manufacturing is distinct from software engineering, though, because unlike textile demand which is fairly limited (people only need so much fabric), the demand for new software will always exceed supply because the space of useful applications of general-purpose computation is effectively infinite. I don't think we've even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.
But at that point, you'd be doing exactly what the Luddites were doing, which was attempting to hold back the natural consequences of technological advancement.
The (temporary) end state of that kind of thing are artificially inefficient situations where someone is paid an unreasonably well to do something that could be done much more efficiently by a machine.
That's a temporary end state because at some point, the people and organizations doing that will be definitively out-competed, and that particular instance of Luddism becomes another historical footnote.
Fortunately, the explosion of affordable textiles resulted in many more jobs in textiles, which were unskilled. So the luddites were right - they were not worth the cost of their skilled labor. They did get replaced. But society as a whole gained a lot, as is usual for new technology.
And even more people than before were employed in textiles.
Absolutely not. They were absolutely willing to operate the machinery. They could have produced more cloth at the same price, or distributed more of the earnings back to the workers. It's not a boolean outcome where it's either "the machines or the Luddites". There are plenty of ways to solve the problems they raised without doing away with either.
Smashing the machines was perhaps a poor way to communicate that.
And how far do you take that? There have literally been union jobs where someone's shift consisted of doing nothing but pressing a button every now and then. That's a pointless waste of both human life and economic efficiency.
Someone else in this thread wrote:
> a Luddite opposes the automation of labor without a plan to support the displaced laborers
...which seems like a much more viable position, although perhaps not so popular in the US.
And in the professional field iOS has become quite useful for music. As a couple examples, there are numerous iOS instruments (often with external midi control) made by well known companies like moog and korg, and live sound engineers are now remotely controlling mixers with iOS devices. It’s possible the next concert you go to will be sound checked/mixed via an iPad.
Also worth considering is that mobile accessibility doesn't necessarily produce the next mass-appeal mega star. I think in many cases it instead allows smaller subcultures to connect and form which makes for stars on a smaller scale. Popular streamers are a good example, well know by their fans but not a household name.
The CPU in pricier smartphones outperforms the one in yesteryear's desktop for a while already. It's just that the UI and (usually missing) periphery isn't necessarily best suited for traditional computer applications like software development.
The basic gist is that software is eating people's jobs, and everything has to be an /app/ these days or it's not credible.
I actually don't agree that using the dark web is using older technology (but I can see why using the postal system to deliver contraband to households would be old tech). Tor is relatively recent tech that people can use. I think what the writer means is that hackers usually try to avoid prosecution by encrypting literally everything they do (an old cypherpunk tactic), so when they eventually get vanned by a LEA they have nothing to hand over for evidence.
How this is being a Luddite though is questionable. There is a disconnect there.
DRM, app stores, subscription models, SaaS... I would burn all of these things to ground if I could
I hate technology more and more. It's moving in the wrong direction. Almost everything technological seems to be used to increase control over individuals, extract money, track or predict.
No company can seem to withstand the lure and the power that comes from controlling, analyzing and aggressively tracking users.
Every traditional device that works just fine, now only has 'smart' alternatives available. The only value-add for the consumer appears to be that I can use my smartphone as the thermostat remote. The value for the energy company seems to be to better predict when to raise prices and bill & track me.
Software that's built with money, keeps making design decisions that increase profit.
Software that's built ambivalent to money, makes other design decisions.
Most software is built with money.
The only thing that feels like it will fix this is a software/hardware bill of rights. E.g. right to repair, right to source, etc. Otherwise, things will get more exploitive, as products get cheaper.
Of all the options, a free market with regulation to internalize social externalities seems the optimal solution.
There are movements for taking data entirely away from these companies, movements for repair and a host of other things. Eventually they will more than likely become mainstream and big tech is going to find itself on the end of a lot of regulation especially in the EU. There is no way they show self control before the point where DRM, gambling and engagement mechanics are involved they are simply too profitable.
Either the entity that sold you the software (or their successors) gives you standard access, tools, and specs to effect standard repairs.
Or if that entity cannot fulfill that responsibility (say, because they went bankrupt), their code is open-sourced.
The situation to avoid is "nobody cares about this thing, and nobody is available to service it."
Software that can afford to have 100 developers work on it will, on average, out-compete software that is sustained by 50 developers.
Software (note: not necessarily _good_ software, this could also be the shittiest software with a nice lock-in) that is good at making money, can afford more developers, lawyers and lobbyists.
It's nothing new under the sun, but it does suck in a major way.
As we get tracked more, algorithms will start making better predictions about us. The negative side of this is that you will get offered ads that are specifically tailored to your interests, at the time you are most likely to buy at a price point you can afford. Essentially you will get controlled and primed by machines to consume, feel certain ways, agree with certain sentiments etc. That's not the kind of dystopia I want to be in.
This is already happening, Facebook has done experiments about user emotions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
Youtube is using machine learning algorithms for suggesting videos https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
There is nothing to stop a company from manipulating user emotions enough to guide you down the path of buying a product.
Screwing with my emotions is my #1 beef with tech today. Even more than the freedom thing.
Friends of mine that jealously guard and maintain their emotional state seem to have issued a blanket exception for tech.
To me the current system doesn't seem all that different. It's more crude, but it's already trying to do that. So I think we both have been in this dystopia for some time now.
I don't see a problem though. Consumption of ads is a free choice. People have made the choice of wanting to be manipulated for thousands of years (religion or patriotism are common examples).
I removed all ads from my household nearly two decades ago. Anyone that doesn't do that, doesn't object to the manipulation. Everyone knows what ads are for, what they do. It's not like it's a secret. A lot of people just don't mind being manipulated. And changing that I suspect is impossible.
Thanks for looking out for me, Google.
I suppose you can call me a Luddite when the fashionable closed-source hardware/software companies declare that keyboards are now obsolete and demand everyone use touchscreens or voice.
Write your own operating system specific to hardware.
It’s either have the monolith for all or make it a black box so you’re special.
Personally I’d rather the resources be made available to all and not just cellar dweller squirrelly types.
What you have is a political problem: we optimize to reduce fiscal costs to protect aristocratic power.
If everyone wants to be highly atomic agents of self management, stop working for money.
What do you do when the technological world that you may have had a hand in creating turns on you, when technology and computing becomes an enslavement rather than a liberation? It makes sense for hackers to then find freedom without technology.
I automate all kinds of stuff for my job, of course; I'm a cyborg and my brain works better when I can offload processing to a CPU. When I make design decisions that impact laborers at my company, that's something I think a lot about -- if it can make their job less harmful (in terms of RSI, etc), that's great; if I'm going to put somebody out of work, I'll reconsider telling my boss about an option I see.
But lots of tech is totally out of my control. IOT bugs the hell out of me, especially with everything phoning home. I hate that people willingly allow google, amazon, apple, tesla and onstar to straight up listen to every word that's said in their house/car. Hell, I don't even like cars made after the 80s.
When I grew up, there were people who reliably knew how everything in the pedestrian world worked, and could generally be counted on to fix anything that broke (except perhaps RF electronics, people specialize in that because big caps go brrr). But today, pretty much everything is unfixable; even furniture is mostly ikea or (somehow) lesser-quality pressboard crap.
So to me, saying that hackers are the new luddites is a statement about control. We want to own the objects we buy. We want to hack them, fix them, repurpose them. I'm in a relative minority on the labor theory thing
Being aware of the effects of automation seems wise. My problem with Ludditism as a philosophy is that it seems to focus anger on the businesses that created the jobs in the first place rather than focusing energy on the government (ie, the people) making more jobs.
Why does offering someone something become a promise to keep doing so?
The Z's are shaping up to be... interesting. From what I've seen so far, they're turning out to be very much like Gen X.
On the other hand, I see very little difference between the Millennials and the Boomers. I find it amusing to see them trading barbs about one another, while exhibiting nearly identical traits. (Social media addiction, persecution complex, entitlement complex, obsession with money, etc.)
I will admit it, I prefer the downslope of the Hype Cycle. I choose boring technology. At the end of the day, I am trying to solve problems, and playing with new stuff often doesn't pay out for solving those problems.
I related this once on another site: we had this process that was heavily manual and the people performing the task would want this part at the end automated, or maybe a reminder email at the end, or some instructions here ... can we just do that part by computer? Bit by bit, the process maxed out on automation.
And then the people who asked for the automation were fired and replaced with minimum wage intern types. Also, the final product was inferior but hey ...
I think technology can be marvelous but we often do stupid things with it, ending up in unemployment and some crap results, like "American cheese."
I think people who take things apart for fun and mash them together in new, unplanned ways can tend to build up a healthy respect for unexpected consequences. That can translate into an extremely reasonable tendency to shoulder the role of doom-sayer for any large system that could have huge societal impact. That's the thing about the Luddites... They were, perhaps, short-sighted, but they weren't exactly wrong. The Industrial Revolution was absolutely disastrous for entire ways of life and paved over tens of thousands of people on the path of progress. I personally see their failing not in their desired goals but in their methods.
... but on the other hand, hackers are also the ones building cloud services, user tracking systems, and DRM protocols. Again, depending on how wide you cast the net.
> Your editor recently moved house; part of that move involved carefully packing up the dust-covered household television set, gently transporting it to the new home, and lovingly moving it to its new location — followed by gracelessly dropping it on the floor while lifting it into place. The search for a replacement involved asking a salesman for a reasonable "non-smart" television, a request that was met with mirthful incredulity. It would appear that such things no longer exist; all televisions are built to be placed on the network now.
This is true for a lot of stuff on youtube, coursera etc. I believe. It's for people who don't want to get to the destination faster, by reading a few books and doing the exercises in them.
I've worked in both of these kinds of domains and different kinds of people thrive at doing each. The kind of problems you face are different.
Most of the backend C++ types I've worked with aren't so great at "design for failure" types of environments whereas on the web development side of things I've found people are much more receptive.
I'm working with a few hundred backend engineers who all have a hard time with thinking infrastructure is always available and can handle infinite throughput. They absolutely stink at reasoning about the network. And these aren't dummies -- they're all MIT/Waterloo/etc grads.
Could you clarify this statement? Are you saying you work with hundreds of backend engineers:
- who all believe infra is always available and can handle infinite throughput (???)
or
- who can't wrap their head around an environment where infra is so scalable / high availability that it might as well be "infinite" and so they are always looking designing for tradeoffs that don't exist in your environment?
If the former, where do these people work? If the latter, where do these people work?
Engineers in general poorly understand the connection between their code and resources consumed. Until something bites them and they learn.
I'd say that this is pretty widespread throughout the industry.
My issue was with the statement that all backend engineers you work with (hundreds of them!) have this weakness. Does not match my experience, so I was wondering where you work.
Likewise, concepts in the domains of the languages you mentioned aren’t “simpler” — they’re just different.
I've been the C++ programmer with a week to learn a modern JS framework. I'll never do that again, and will always hire an expert to bring myself and a project up to speed. It's a massive waste of time and money.
You also won't be "better" than anyone else at it, since expert-level C++ knowledge is not very translatable to other domains (but that's a C++ problem more than anything, working in it is like playing a piano and not riding a bike).
Now I read perl for a living so who knows if I made the right move!
I know it's fashionable to hate Perl these days, but I think this sounds like great and rare fun in 2021.
Maybe that could a lucrative specialised role - Perl Reader.
I jest
Jobs have always been at risk of obsolescence. Jobs either require continual learning (typically the “professions”, e.g., physician, lawyer,...) or were at risk for being irrelevant. In the past, the pace of irrelevance was often slow enough to span a lifetime or multiple generations so people could still make a (slowly dwindling) living. Now the turnover just seems much faster that irrelevance can come at multiple times in ones career.
What’s the quote? “There future will belong to those who learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Oof, this didn't age well.
My take from reading some of each is that the disagreement is more superficial: Benanov has a soft spot for what automation could be but is very much keen on chronicling the economic context it's actually gone down in, while Mueller likes to criticize "actually existing automation" itself.
But, I guess we'll see how it actually goes down tomorrow.
They really want to burn them.
Hackers seem to oppose 'new' things in the technology space because most of them limit us and bind us to monolithic entity. Similarly, Luddites did not technically oppose technology but rather were outraged at their own loss of autonomy as crafts were replaced by mechanized, industrial production. Really the opposition of large, opaque, and closed software and services has very similar underlying drives as that of the Luddites. It's then not really a surprise when Marxist themes (some would say more libertarian but in practice not really) are somewhat common in open source & hacker spaces.
A few of them got it, but for most people what didn't exist when they were teens is some heresy that threaten society. Yet as usual, society will move on, and those unable to adapt will be left behind.