Hacker News Reader

Comment by uncomputation | Hacker News Reader

There’s something… different about how people (techie people are most of my sample) would write before the 00’s. I’m not sure if it has to do with the medium, or the constraints of the time, but reading it always fills me with something I can best describe as peace/nostalgia. The belief that technology honestly can change the world for the better and that the most influential people driving it have good motives instead of profit motives. And they were real visionaries most of the time. By contrast, anything seemingly after the dot com boom (I can’t draw a clear line, this is just throwing a dart) seems, I don’t know how to describe it. Too self-aware, too clever? It’s similar to the contrast between HN and other forums/social media out there. I’m not sure, but whenever an older article or something shows up, I usually enjoy it. Perhaps it’s that only the best have survived till now.

View on HN

I am with you. But I think I know what it is, you touched on it and almost had it. It was indeed peace, we almost had it, world peace - feeling utopian and all loving in the 90s.

Then came 9/11. It’s the single point in history where just about everything to do with American society can be defined to be before and after.

Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described, the fact of the matter is that America as a country has been locked in this sort of country wide PTSD since and have changed completely. Along with it went peace, calmness, secularism, egalitarianism and altruism. We’re constantly the hunted now, the ones who need security, everything needs to be dumbed down, so called common sense rules and it better be mine common sense and not yours. And on and on it goes. We’re operating like a demented, schizophrenic who has woken up from a nightmare every day of their lives and have lost the fact they are living in their head instead of in the real world.

> Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described

Interesting small mention. Is it common in America to disbelieve in the mainstream history of 9/11? I’m just getting glimpses from the new world via the internet and have no ear to the ground there

The answer to that is a personal one and I suggest for anybody on either side of any argument to recall Nietzsche’s saying - Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

I'm not sure what the original commenter was talking about, but no, it's not. There is vast agreement in the US about what happened.

Not as vast as you think [1]. Also as of late it appears the victims don’t want their president there in their 20th reunion for similar reasons.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_con...

>Then came 9/11

The rising pessimism and negativity since 2008/09 is a global phenomenon. I think it's wrong and very US-centric to attribute that to 9/11.

The 2008 financial crisis and the rise of social media has probably more to do with the rise of millennial pessimism and negativity.

We had worse crises before that didn’t change societies so deeply. With 9/11 we started renouncing to the concept of freedom that we gained with illuminism and the French revolution. Then we started putting “safety” before everything else.

> Then we started putting “safety” before everything else.

One caveat.

It's safety first, unless they decide to go to war to ensure continued access to cheap commodities (Iraq) or to play weird sociopath power games (Vietnam).

It's going to be kind of rich when they ask people from podunk towns in "flyover country" to go fight their next war, after years of ridiculing them and decimating their local economies.

We had worse crises before that didn’t change societies so deeply

During the Red Scare, loyalty review boards were instituted and civil servants insufficiently 'American' were sacked in the thousands.

But there isn't a singular date to associate with the Red Scare... that's more a nebulous period of time. It was also a gradual process. The West was already preparing for the oncoming cold-war with the USSR before the end of WW2.

The loyalty boards and Hollywood blacklisting were definitely a change is society, but it was so slow moving that I wouldn't compare it to a shift like 9/11.

The world wasn't really different before and after something like the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, even though that is what would be a likely event you'd associate with the Red Scare.

When I think of 20th century cultural events that had an shift in society, I think more of the Cuban missile crisis, the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin wall, etc... shorter events (not necessarily instantaneous, but well defined times) where you could define shifts in culture to before/after.

Change can still be change without being sudden.

I agree with the poster below me.

While the financial crisis might be more of a root of all problems in Millenial and generations that followed minds it’s not where it all started (I am a Millenial)

Also don’t forget 2008 was the year of the iPhone. The year we started inching towards being an always on society.

I agree, I think the difference is that in 1999 when he wrote that piece, there wasn't a clear audience in front of him that could react immediately. Nowadays, everything that gets written is immediately posted into social networks to be given instant gratification.

I think the 2008 financial crisis showed most millennials that they would never be able to own anything of real worth and value from their work alone, that they would not accrue their own generational wealth but instead inherit from their parents (if they inherit at all), and that unless you're born into the big club, are useful to the big club, or are a massive outlier, that hard work and personal sacrifice will not materially improve your condition in life.

At least that's what I got from it as an "elder millennial" (born in the very early 1980s).

I wouldn’t understate the role of companies like Google that pioneereed “exploiting idealism as a PR strategy.” The IPO listing claimed “Google is not a conventional company and does not intend to become one” and their recruiting tag line was “Do cool things that matter.” They leaned hard into social issues like gay marriage and paid lip service to FOSS and hacker pet topics. But over time they’ve shown willingness to sacrifice any amount of user privacy, willingness to censor and suppress, willingness to illegally collude against labor, and willingness to embrace special rules to protect elites in their club.

People nowadays complain that gay pride parades have gotten too corporate, but especially by companies that are willing to exploit people in other ways. But this is simply the playbook Google pioneered, to take good will around certain social issues and use it as a decoy while you pick people’s pockets and put your boot on their face. I don’t think we can understate the extent to which good causes have been infiltrated by bad corporate actors and how much that had undermined our trust in our communities.

> It was indeed peace, we almost had it, world peace - feeling utopian and all loving in the 90s.

Think you might need to qualify that. The mid-90s saw the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides.

It won’t be the first time in history, Americans and with them the “western” world turned a blind eye to who’s backs their hedonistic party was carried over.

If you look at what was life like. What people cared about. What songs sang about. What households looked like. War was as far a concept from the average American.

Sure we had the gulf war early 90s. We had Bosnia during Clinton years. But most Americans were more concerned with becoming stock traders from home, saving willy and the earth and how Clinton’s cigars were used.

Americans bombers dropping bombs by the ton to the backdrop of western advancement has almost become an expectation in our campaign of spreading our brand of democracy and its freedoms or else.

> We had Bosnia during Clinton years.

Oppose them or support them, it was literally American bombing campaigns that stopped the Bosnian genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

Admittedly the Yugoslav wars are not my strong suit in history, but if protecting genocide is all that is American, it makes you wonder where have we been the past decade when it came to Yemen. Same with the Uyghurs in China. Same with the civil war in Syria. I can list a few more...

Feels like there was something more that led America to Bosnia, and it wasn't just our benevolence and saving the world from itself.

> Feels like there was something more that led America to Bosnia, and it wasn't just our benevolence and saving the world from itself.

There was a lot of pressure to "do something" in the Balkans, and the military wasn't averse to showing off its goods, so something was done. Imagine the media pressure with Yemen x1000. That was Bosnia and Kosovo (probably mostly because it was in Europe).

Also, US military has intervened militarily in Syria, many times, and even with troops on the ground. Did you miss it?

The Uyghurs are a poor analogy, because despite the intense oppression they're under, they're not being mass-murdered. And a humanitarian intervention in China due to Uyghur situation is just not in the cards, because realism.

So sure, Bosnia+Kosovo interventions weren't just "benevolence". It was a convergance of factors (power dynamics, US President open to idea, media+public pressure, limiting intervention to air campaign, etc). But it wasn't an oil pipeline or some ridiculous conspiracy, either, like I sometimes hear.

9/11 is an inflection point in modern day America, but there have been other equal/greater inflection points. Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW2… lots of war

Absolutely, and wars waged without declaration that were equally traumatic. Within the lifetime of the Internet, I think 9/11 is the major inflection

> America as a country has been locked in this sort of country wide PTSD since and have changed completely.

Population wise, that was the case for a number of years after 9/11. In terms of government policy, it's still the case. But in terms of the former, it's fading away as more time passes. People who were born in 2001 are or will turn 20 this year. Just like events like the attack on pearl harbor and the Cuban missle crises, 9/11 will also become an event that's just known by reading history rather than a first hand experience.

They won't remember the transition or really realize it happened, but the cultural echoes last a hell of a lot longer than direct memory of the event. Hell, the reverberations of the civil war still echo today.

> Then came 9/11

> American

Yes, except the world is large and frankly in most parts of the world 9/11 doesn't factor very large in memory. As such, I doubt it was the single most important factor in changing this feeling of world peace which again, definitely didn't exist outside of the US. All you need to think about to see that is look at why 9/11 happened and think of all the murdered people those folks must have seen to get that angry.

> and think of all the murdered people those folks must have seen to get that angry.

Come now don't be naïve: those same folk get just as rabidly homicidal over a silly little cartoon.

Some societies are just not compatible with legal systems that a) limits the use of force to the government alone, b) place the rules and rights of men above religions.

Never the two shall meet.

Or alternatively, then came Internet for the masses. Before that a lid was kept on a huge part of the population, the dream of raw global information sharing turned out to be a nightmare our societies/species is no ready for.

It's the "Eternal September" or "September that Never Ended" for the internet in general. With mass use came mass marketing and a switch from authentic information dissemination Internet to pure and absolute profiteering of everything you see on the internet.

Do a random search in Google (DDG, or Bing) of ANY term at all, and you will see that the full first page links to pages that wrote whatever content for a profit (either by selling ads, or by a paywall, etc).

Long lost are sites like Xoom, Geocities or similar where people wrote about their knowledge just for the sake of it. Long gone are the "web rings" that took you into cliques of people wanting to share knowledge of some specific subject.

Nowadays the closest you can get to that sort of information is in forums like this or reddit (and this last is questionable). That's why adding "site:reddit.com" when searching for some opinion is becoming more useful compared to pure serach engine results.

Wikipedia and community wikis also centralized (drained?) a lot of knowledge that might have otherwise existed on separately hosted sites linked through webrings.

Aside from shifts in morality and underlying cynicism that took place online from around 2007, once the "unwashed masses" because addicted to Facebook, I think the biggest thing that killed good writing online was analytics.

Once most people discovered their well thought-out blogpost got only 100 page views while a meme with a cat got 10 million, many just gave up. But what's missing in those numbers is, of those 100 page views, perhaps 10 were people you actually respect, have influence in your field, were actually using your Open Source project etc.

By optimising metric like page views we lost sight of the genuine impact we might have had with good writing.

By now the concept of competing for attention, for the limited 3-4 hours of free time you have a day is well known. To maximize engagement and clicks you just have to appeal to the shittiest parts of human nature - anger, fear, low attention spans. A few people figured out how to make the equivalent of cocaine (e.g outrage porn news, gamified social media) and now there is no going back - you compete with cocaine whether you like it or not. The more technical phrasing is that "intermittent variable rewards" are highly addictive - and this basically explains the entire design of social media or the shitty mobile games you see now.

You can read statements/watch videos by Chamath Palihapitiya or Sean Parker admitting to this being an explicit strategy at Facebook. "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport is also a nice book that covers some of the same ground.

If you ask me, our current way of managing society is a failure. You have large, well-coordinated organizations basically selling cocaine (fast food, youtube, social media, cigarettes) on end, but the other end (consumers) are necessarily less coordinated and informed because they don't operate within an organizational hierarchy with centralized decision making, shared knowledge and people dedicating 8 hours a day to maintaining those systems. Theoretically, companies live and die by how much value they create for their their customers. Practically, many companies resemble organized militia waging asymmetric warfare on unorganized masses in an increasingly zero-sum world.

I think we need to focus a lot on organizing as people outside of the structure of a for-profit corporation. Theoretically the government plays this role but it's not enough.

(inb4 omg you hate capitalism stupid commie)

>> in an increasingly zero-sum world

I don't understand this part - what do you mean by that? Why would the world be increasingly zero-sum?

Most of the developed economies of the world have seen lower productivity growth since the booms after WW2 and have never recovered to previous levels. There are some arguments to be made that much of our current economic growth is artificial as well. The IT revolution has also not made much of a dent in overall productivity growth, at least as of yet - I don't know whether this is an artifact of how its measured, or the growth is yet to come, or perhaps there really isn't any growth. The bigger point is that our economies are simply not designed to work in a world where there is low growth [1]. In a zero growth world, the only way to make money is to take it from someone else, so you get more zero-sum behavior. The slow growth is also in line with what folks from the WEF are saying [2]

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

[2] https://investmentmonitor.ai/global/the-urgent-case-for-stak...

One difference (in this article at least) is that there are no jokes or unnecessary cultural references.

Another might be called moral clarity. Unfortunately, it's usually an illusion. We have much more experience with technologies invented under optimistic assumptions turning out to be a moral gray area at best, when you look at how they're used.

I found this paper interesting:

The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf

I'd put "jokes" and "cultural references" together under "tone". Recent articles often feel like they're trying to catch the attention of children. There are lots of "candies" to make you read: pictures, GIFs, jokes, an attention grabbing title, colors, emojis, a friendly tone, lots of exclamation marks. On the other hand, that article is mostly black on white text, that's plain in a good way.

I especially hate this "corporate fun" style when it's a big tech repository where each bullet point of a list is replaced by an emoji.

I really have a hard time with emojis outside of communications. Either they are saying something that was already said by the word or words before, and in that case they are useless, or they replace a word and make text harder to read. I also really don't like the concept of making objects into emojis, as we already have words to describre that, and emojis reflect a very limited world. For example, if you look at the food emojis, this is basically "I live in San Francisco and all of the food I get is from restaurants". I think I've heard it described one day as "the world of people that live in airports", and that fits well.

That's because young people have very short attention span and they must be fed with instant gratifications all the time to continue reading. Those "candies" are targeted at them.

Is it really just young people?

Don’t old people who sit in front of the news get a similar rush?

That was my experience working with developers of different ages. Those who were born before 1995-2000 year are fine spending hours focusing on books. Those who were born after, prefer to learn from short engaging videos. I don't judge anyone, that's just my observations, I don't claim if one method is better than the other.

Where do you get that? Do you mean software developers specifically?

No those "candies" are to create feeling that you are peers and that it is informal communication.

That is why most people like movies made by Quentin Tarantino and not by Andrei Tarkovsky.

I don't like when someone puts memes in each paragraph but at the same time I don't like to read "guru on a high horse" that comes like he is a smart ass because he pretends to be professional and all that.

I think both types of candies can coexist. If someone makes a joke, it's probably to grab your attention. If someone talks about politics, it's probably to signal something to their peers. If someone uses the last marvel as an example, it's probably a bit of both.

> I don't like when someone puts memes in each paragraph but at the same time I don't like to read "guru on a high horse" that comes like he is a smart ass because he pretends to be professional and all that.

That's fair, I don't like this style too. Which is why I like to describe what I like as "plain English". I'd say the characteristic is that the content is mostly information, and not signalling or entertainment.

I think you are biased, and falling to the age-old "young/old people bad" where young/old is picked on which one you are not

Commodari E, Guarnera M. Attention and aging. Aging Clin Exp Res. 2008 Dec;20(6):578-84. doi: 10.1007/BF03324887. PMID: 19179843.

I don't think they are targeted only to them. The short attention span can be a thing, although I'm not sure it's generational. For example, the usual newspaper has a lot of small articles).

On the other hand, part of the candies is to reassure your audience and try to bring them to you with something else than your content. That part applies to everyone, regardless of their age. For example, if you do a blog post on a programming technique, you could try to brand it (and yourself) as "software craftsmanship", insert a few references to people in that space, add a few paragraphs talking mostly about this ideology and not the content. Or you could use a lot of examples, references and jokes from something cultural (the current popular thing on netflix for example). These "candies" aren't targeted at people with short attention span.

> [...] young people have [...]

I hope you will forgive me for saying this but every generation leverages criticism on preceding generations for some perceived flaw. When you look back at other similar criticisms it generally can be seen as very overblown. I think in this case it's fair to say that this is not something that must be done to them, it's just something that is done to them. When you get used to something, that's what you like - it's not an intrinsic trait like you're making it seem.

It's the recurring critique on my blog posts: that there is too much text and too little pictorial content. I'm not going to change anything because of that but it is interesting how you have identified this as a good thing when the bulk of the feedback that I get about this is negative.

I've just read "Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano" from your blog. I like it. There is a video to show everything, and a direct link to the software. The tone is what I called "plain in a good way" in my comment, it's mostly information organized logically. I wish more blogs were like yours.

Thank you! The software has come a very long way since that first blog post (and so have my piano playing skills :) ).

> One difference (in this article at least) is that there are no jokes or unnecessary cultural references. As someone who started his professional career in the mid 90s, working in what we now call cyber security, and having written both then and after a long gap… now. I was initially baffled and then somewhat put-off by the way style has changed between say 2000 and 2010. First I put it down to just being older. Then I wondered if authors were encouraged to “put more of you” into writing (which I am not a fan of unless you are explicitly writing autobiographically). Part of “bring your whole self to work”? Then I wondered if it was just an attempt to add colour to what may be a rather dry subject for anyone other than those working in our niche. Finally I thought that perhaps it was something a little more profound. A desire by the author to connect at some deeper level than the dry content, with an audience, a tribe if you will.

All those "jokes" are exhausting. I usually don't have the energy to finish reading an article. I assumed it was a problem with myself, lack of attention. Until some day I read an article from beginning to end, it was captivating. I found that weird, then I checked the date of the article: 1950.

Link? :D <- Emoticon for the short of attention span.

Honestly, I know it's popular to cast these things as 'Gen Z, kids these days don't know how it used to be'....but I know this 51 year old guy doesn't have near the attention span reading that he used to.

You are right. All the good movements in tech happened ~20 years ago. Free Software/Open Source, Wikipedia, etc, all date back to early days.

Now it's all about that SaaS money.I don't mind the money part, but sadly, tech has become a gold mine for predators who smell the money and are out for blood.

I think much of it has to do with that they were originally written for books, magazines with thorough editorial practices and a reputation to preserve.

'Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine'[1] another HN favorite comes to my mind. It was originally written for Physics Today magazine.

I don't think it's limited to only long form content, Even today printed news papers which have been in existence for >=~100 years does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.

But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.

I've noticed when I give interviews to online news the writer often has to work with their web-admin to fix errors in my statements after publishing(when it's different from what I actually said)and often it takes several hours if it even happens. Where as in printed news papers had the habit of error correction in the next issue.

[1] https://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machin...

To me, there was something to say vs people posting shit just to meet a quota. There seems to be much less thought/research/editing of content now. It wasn't so gamefied before HTML2.0 and social.

Not convinced HTML2 'gamified' anything.

"HTML 1" wasn't really a standard anyway and I don't remember what html2 actually brought - I remember not every browser in the mid 90s did tables, client side image maps etc but they were later additions to html2.

Javascript (which came in with html 3.2) was far more of a step change than html2

I think they meant "Web 2.0"

Yes, you are correct. Totally meant Web2.0 when things became interactive and sites started allowing users to post comments and what not.

HTML5 brings incredible things to the table however with its taints of corporate presence and those who hold a dictation in direction. This is not "free".

HTML doesn't have to be the only web transport. Build your browser and make your own protocol. IPFS is doing just fine.

HTML4 was the last true free-release from any corporate grab. And it has everything youll ever need. However it just sits there forgotten taken by the glory of HTML5.

I agree with you, but my hypothesis is straightforward -- it's the money. The internet in particular, but tech more broadly, is now a mainstream industry, generating and attracting a lot of money. In the US, even a poorly paid SWE, for instance, is almost certainly making well above the median income. Decently paid SWEs make a lot more, and well paid SWES... And of course those who actually employ well paid SWEs and are only paying their developers the least they can get away with, while still paying them a lot, are obviously raking it in.

There's good and bad in this, but it does clearly change things. When there's that much money on the line, ironically the stakes become higher and there's less genuine creativity and risk taking. The flip side is of course true -- too little money is a problem (I mean, I'm not about to trade my SWE gig for working in an Amazon warehouse as a means of spurring personal creativity), but given enough money past a certain baseline, things do change. There's a sweet spot at "enough money that people can feel free to be creative and take risks" and "so much money people are scared to take too many risks".

It was a different time. The people writing these things were more nerdy and more mature. The social internet hadn't taken over. People weren't concerned with votes, stars, comments, likes, splashiness, attention, or trading funny pictures of cats. You could take your time to write something considered just because you needed to get the information down. Software projects were idealistic because most software out there was proprietary and expensive; paid software was an entrepreneurial risk, and free software was transgressive.

If a culture is popular, it tends to saturate. The old internet simply couldn't compete with the new one.

The dot com boom is a reasonable point in time to make the cut. But it's never a single event. Ever other posters referenced 9/11, which was definitely another major event.

I'd add Columbine as another event, which occurred in 1999 [1]. That seemed to have a lasting affect on that cohort, which was also the group that got hit hard in the 2008 downturn.

But maybe a better line is the rise of Facebook, which shifted the story from the promise of tech to the promise of social connections.

Of course, technology will never be able to safe us, and the human condition is what it is. So, really, while a small passionate group seemed excited back in the mid 90s, it was always false gold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre

I suspect it is that there are a lot less abstractions and the thinking is much more moored in the material. In this profoundly technical article there is barely even a mention of computers or algorithms, and the vision is of a more analogue world (of paper bills, phone companies, physical wiretaps, human agents).

The modern internet is almost entirely clashes of abstract concepts. It also shows up in the slight breakdown on the internet of basic, verifiable facts. Nobody is relying on real-world stimulus to form opinions. It is a bit draining to keep up with.

That and there is less optimism because it is clear how slowly the world changes. Consider the "The government has a track record that does not inspire confidence..." paragraph. Written 30 years ago, part of it could credibly be talking about Assange, have names swapped for Trump, etc. At some point intelligent people are going to get jaded pretending that this is new based on the overwhelming evidence that the internet gives us access to.

Money/Greed attracts a certain type of person who has different values, priorities, and interests.

I think it mostly comes down to that.

Ever watched old commercials? It feels like they were less "in your face", not constantly jumping up and down for your attention. Calmly spoken and more likely to actually say something about the product. That shift is another indicator of the shift of things getting dumbed down in a way.

The utopianists saw what they had wrought, and did not like it.

Very similar to the cryptocurrency field. Lots of noise nowadays.

Bitcoin was born in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the occupy wall street movement.[1] Events where, giant banks and institutions received trillions of dollars in unprecedented bail outs while 'main street' suffered with record unemployment, foreclosures, and destruction of small businesses.

People rightfully realised that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system. That a 'Plan B' may be in order.

Unfortunately, today it's 90% people trying to get rich quick.

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

> Unfortunately, today it's 90% people trying to get rich quick.

And that is, unsurprisingly (and quite banally), used by many detractors to dismiss it all while handwaving away:

> Bitcoin was born in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the occupy wall street movement.[1] Events where, giant banks and institutions received trillions of dollars in unprecedented bail outs while 'main street' suffered with record unemployment, foreclosures, and destruction of small businesses.

> People rightfully realised that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system.

Like people still hand wave away all the metadata and other work-arounds to compromising popular crypto systems that are highly touted because they are popular/convenient/etc or all the "get rich quick" mentality/motivations that exist outside of cryptocurrencies and have always existed…

> And that is, unsurprisingly (and quite banally), used by many detractors to dismiss it all

There is a stronger argument against crypto: the main use case (outside speculation) seems to be illegal activities. If what you are doing is legal, why not use government currency? If what you are doing is illegal, crypto is great. A currency outside the control of the government (police) is almost by definition made for illegal activities.

In some countries, illegal activities are morally correct, though. Crypto helps here.

But crypto has enabled entirely new types of crimes that did not exist before: ransomware.

I have not completely for or against crypto. I am responding to your comment that people are dismissing because it seems like speculation only. I don't think that is true and that there are better reasons for dismissal?

1. Why does FedEx exist? If what you are doing is legal, shouldn't you use USPS?

2. There are plenty of things that are federally illegal but many consider to be morally legal. Examples include, for example, weed dispensaries operating in states that have legislated cannabis.

3. What happens if a future government makes funding of ETE encrypted software, without CSAM scanning, illegal?

If by trying to avoid aiding and abbeting the system described as:

> …giant banks and institutions received trillions of dollars in unprecedented bail outs [1] while 'main street' suffered with record unemployment, foreclosures, and destruction of small businesses.

> People rightfully realized that perhaps government should not have absolute and total control of the monetary supply and financial system.

Is defined as illegal in of itself by a government, then sure, there's no argument against dismissing it as illegal. Just like PGP falling under being illegal (from another comment) because it could exist as:

> digital copies of the binaries and source code were prohibited for export as a munition

There's no successful argument one can make against such illegality to said government. And I wouldn't bother, such people will never acquiesce if they haven't felt the lack of sufficient recourse to [1] (because they quite possibly may gain a lot of benefits by being indirectly or directly involved in [1])

Luckily, reality isn't so rigid as to what people (or even other traditional governments abroad) will actually accept (then and now) and have sovereignty over deciding what they want for themselves and side stepping based on what can actually be enforced in totality in practice regardless of what any given institutionalized jurisdiction may think of it.

I think FOSS didn't predict that work done by volunteers will be appropriated repackaged and sold by big corporations without sharing profits with contributors nor sharing any patches. This caused people to develop defensively - contribute as little as possible and only for their own benefits. Developers no longer wanted to be taken as fools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com