Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology

195 pointsmorpheos137188 comments

Technology seems like a giant waste of time and energy for human civilisation.

Specifically the social media giants and advertising funded tech companies seem like the definition of emotional vampires. So do cryptocurrencies.

They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world.

Now we are being led into an orwellian hell hole.

For what tech produces it is overly rewarded economically. The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative.

What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

I think it is already too late. The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.

View on HN

Some lessons that will come with age.

1. There is no magic that will change human nature.

2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important.

3. Don't expect to live a "special" or "great" or "revolutionary" life. Aspire to something extraordinary if you see an opportunity, but ordinary things like health, moderate wealth, and family are also good enough, and will have to be good enough for most people. And there is something very special in simply living a very good ordinary life.

4. Try not to be pushed into doing things that corrode the moral goodness within you. You will not regret spurning material rewards to live in accordance with your values, but you will regret the opposite.

Let's start by making revolving doors illegal.

Revolving doors -- when people work for companies and then that industry's regulators, and back -- are a symptom of the problem. The problem is the government is too large and engages in too many activities that pick winners and losers. The government should be a neutral referee. End corporate subsidies (including regulatory cross-subsidies) and flatten the tax code to reform this area.

Also a ban is plainly unconstitutional, people have a right to free speech, free association, and to work for whom they choose.

Certainly they do, but the public also has a right to insist that its servants (regulators, in this case, but also the other branches of government) be free of conflict of interest. In the particular case, they should not hire directly from the very industry they regulate. Ensuring that the regulators have expertise will be a problem, but at least no conflict of interest

> In the particular case, they should not hire directly from the very industry they regulate. Ensuring that the regulators have expertise will be a problem, but at least no conflict of interest

That feels like trading a problem for an even bigger problem. Everyone has greed but not everyone has competence. The world is in desperate need of more competence. Greed isn't necessarily a problem as long as it's regulated e.g., most people want nice stuff but don't burglarize their neighbors.

We all have conflicts of interest.

Profoundly disagree. If you have worked in an industry for a few years, you have internalized its rules and logic. An outside perspective is valuable. Technicalities rarely stops people from achieving a goal and it is the second step.

You want competence for strategically sound decisions to achieve a goal, but setting it should be done with input of people that have not been groomed that advertising is a human necessity.

We might be talking about different things then. Or maybe not.

You want people in government making long term strategic decisions that steer society. They should be listening to the will of the people as to what direction to steer it. I hope we can agree on that much.

I think people forget that "regulators" though are really just large organizations that enforce/interpret laws. The obvious example is the SEC; it has 4200 employees and none of them create laws, their rules are an effort to enforce the laws created by congress using their technical competence in finance.

> You want competence for strategically sound decisions to achieve a goal, but setting it should be done with input of people that have not been groomed that advertising is a human necessity.

That's the world we live in. Congress has been completely incompetent when it comes to regulating finance and I'd expect them to be even worse when it comes to technology.

There absolutely has to be a layer of industry specific competence (from "insiders") to make any sense of industry specific laws. I don't want insiders choosing direction though; I want congress to be less reprehensible idiots.

You don't need to be part of an industry to say if their product is safe for humans.

The idea of making the government smaller is pretty much dead politically. The idea of choosing to inflict even small amounts of economic pain in order to correct gross social and political ills is too much for people.

That boat has sailed. Those who aren't financially incentivized to push for ever more monetary easing are politically incentivized to push for it. We were one vote away from another $2 trillion of government spending and tomorrow the Fed is having an emergency meeting to address inflation. Like pouring gas on the fire while the fire department sets up the hoses.

So instead of banning revolving doors we should have fewer regulations on them? That somehow fixes the problem?

Maybe allowing private money and politics to mix at all is the problem.

That's what actually happened with the FDA literally. The oxycodon debacle happened because the funding of the FDA went from being public to private. Companies wanting a permit for some drugs have to pay fees which end up holding huge power over the FDA.

Behind the Bastards had 2 good episodes about it.[0][1]

[0]: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

[1]: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

I support revolving door regulations, but I agree with you that a big cause of the problem is the extent and complexity of government regulation.

At the same time, certain areas of regulation seem inevitably complex. Environmental regulations come to mind. There is an endless variety of environmental hazards and regulations must balance costs and benefits in light of the best available scientific evidence.

It's hard to imagine how this can be anything but the province of elite experts. Politicians or the private sector handling it seems like a guaranteed nightmare (and was historically, that's why we have these agencies).

> The government should be a neutral referee

Has this ever worked in any place on earth ?

Also your very notion of having a referee means applying rules made by a higher entity, which is the gov itself ? Even assuming your vision of the gov just makes fewer simpler rules and don’t change them, we fall into what we are seeing right now with the Olympics: outdated rules that are as arbitrary as it can, and fall short at every corner of reality, gamed through every nook and cranny , with everything staying in place only because the main actors have never been the participants but the countries and corporations.

> Also a ban is plainly unconstitutional, people have a right to free speech, free association, and to work for whom they choose.

You mean like a company who force an NDA on you or force you to not work with the competition? Also working at the FDA and be the one to approve a drug and then leave and work for the same company that made said drug, is just pure corruption.

You can negotiate the terms of your contract or choose to work elsewhere - even if a lot of companies do this saying that they're forcing you is wrong

Their tactic is worse than being compelled by the government. If you want the money you worked hard for you better sign, it's more akin to blackmail than anything else.

No competes are thing. That wouldn't be so different from a no work in the industry you are regulating agreement to be signed on becoming a regulator.

You'd rather appoint regulators with no industry experience?

Of course. You don't need to be part of the industry to know if some food is safe for consumption.

You sure? There have been a lot of misconceptions by laypeople about what is "safe for human consumption" through the years

Even if this is trolling, I don't understand? who doesn't like revolving doors?

I guess it refers to this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

3a) However, most interviews and opportunities are full of themselves, so make sure you can spin a tale of how extraordinary you are and how your whole life has led to this job interview on an as-needed basis.

This is excellent advice.

5. Resist empty generalizations

You'd be surprised at how vehemently people can disagree with seemingly innocuous platitudes.

When there’s no meaningful content then the only message is the feeling they arrive with.

I wonder why statements that are devoid of meaning would stimulate vehement disagreement.

Feeling isn’t meaningless

A bit glib don't you think? I thought you disliked meaningless statements.

I dislike smarmy self certainty, present company included

We agree on that much!

Self-awareness is another quality that may come with age.

2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important.

u mean mandatory vaccination?

Sometimes. They were required for smallpox in the army in the 1700s. They're required for measles, mumps, and rubella in most US schools today.

Which diseases and how wide the requirement tends to be context-dependent. MMR in school, for example, is generally justified because school attendance is mandatory, so forcing people to be in an environment where a preventable disease will spread is inhumane if the spread can be stopped.

but i heard covid-19 vaccination doesnt stop spread.

That's true but inaccurate (in the same sense as "wearing a seatbelt doesn't guarantee you'll survive a car crash").

COVID-19 vaccination doesn't guarantee a person cannot become infected or infectious. It significantly diminishes spread (a person stricken with the virus and extremely symptomatic is more contagious than a person who is carrying the virus but asymptomatic; mechanically, coughing, sneezing, and gasping for air with fluid-filled lungs sprays more virus-laden particles into the air; it also seems likely that a vaccinated person who picks up an infection throws fewer virus particles in regular breathing, though the studies that I've seen seem to have mixed results on that).

The other reason to vaccinate people is load on medical services; even if someone who is vaccinated is infected, the odds they'll get so symptomatic they wind up in the hospital go way down. Hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients have far fewer resources to dedicate to "everyday" emergencies (heart attacks, car crashes, etc.)... The result being that COVID-19, left unmitigated, can cause systemic collapse of a country's health infrastructure and resulting death due to preventable conditions (because there's nobody available to prevent them).

It's easy to forget (now that most people are vaccinated) how virulent this virus is, and how severe the symptoms are, unmitigated. There's a good reason the world medical community snapped into action on this one.

fauci once said the amount of virus is same in both vaxxed and unvaxxed. guess they'd spread out the same way too.

They worked fairly well on covid original, not very well on Omicron.

In our current context with COVID? I don't really think so.

But keep in mind we've had mandatory childhood immunizations for decades and almost everyone supports them.

In the U.K we don't have mandatory childhood immunization, only recommendations.

You can get out of it in the US too but it's a condition of entry to public schools that isn't easily evaded.

First, very condescending to assume a certain wisdom comes with age. Downvoted just for that.

I think you're completely wrong, especially about 1. Human nature doesn't shape our technological reality, it is becoming more and more obvious that technological reality shapes human culture. And people mistake culture as "nature".

Human nature is very plastic, trying to fit any one thing into "human nature" is (this is my humble opinion, please don't be offended) very bigoted.

It's okay to me if you disagree with the concept that you'll learn these things with age. I don't think it's condescending for me to think this. I am sure there are people of all ages who are wiser than me, and that I could be wrong in what I am confident about today. If you are confident in your beliefs, go ahead and believe that you're right and I'm wrong. But if you're offended by my statements, I think you're not that confident in your beliefs.

On the plasticity of human nature, here are a few of the many unfortunate things that will never be excised from human nature: self-absorption, self-deception, groupthink, dehumanization of the outgroup.

Culture can modulate the expression of these things, and if we're lucky, mitigate them somewhat. But they never quite go away. They always find a way to manifest themselves. And it is the people who think they've transcended these things who are most at risk of indulging in their worst excesses.

If you don't recognize the durable aspects of human nature, you're setting yourself up to be at best a dupe and a mark, and at worst a monster.

Why is it condescending to state that certain wisdom comes with age?

For the same reason it would be condescending to say that a person is too old to understand something.

If you are young you surely expect to acquire more knowledge and experience over time. So you should expect to make better decisions in the future. You cannot say that every old person is wiser than every young person, but you can certainly say that older people (before dementure kicks in) are wiser on average.

Of course, I didn't believe this when I was young either.

The appreciation and nuanced interpretation of simplified general principles is also a skill that comes with age.

There is no conversation we can have if all you say will be "you'll learn with age" especially without knowing other commenters age. You sound nothing other than like a religious zealot.

After all that's been said in these comments to explain and nuance this idea, you seem awfully confident in an interpretation that ignores all of it. Instead you assert an extreme, black-and-white, overgeneralized interpretation that has already been repudiated multiple times.

I agree that zealotry is best avoided.

Although you mentioned the word "nuance" in your comments, I don't find your world view particularly nuanced, especially since it's an extremely common one (in US culture I'm aware of it's the standard world view), also one I grew out of throughout my life. As you might agree, it's particularly hard to agree with someone when you used to agree with them and changed your view later with conviction. I imagine this is also why you think my view is un-nuanced.

However, please note that cutting people out of discussion "because this is something you'll learn as you age" is not a great way to convince them of something (which may not be your goal).

I'm not excluding you from the discussion in the slightest. You've made assertions and I've engaged with those assertions. Because, despite whatever little wisdom I've gained from age, I'm still curious and interested in learning from different perspectives.

You've ignored the majority of what I've said, including everything about how age is not a bright dividing line between the wise and the foolish.

Evidently you want to keep believing what you believe. So, go ahead and do that. I really can't stop you and don't wish to.

Social media giants are like tobacco companies in the 1950/60s.

If the next president ran on a platform of regulating social media as the harmful and addictive product it is, people would probably be receptive. Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.

No social media company is going to regulate themselves, but if there was industry wide regulation they could probably find some peace of mind knowing they can implement more healthy practices without fear of a competitor undercutting them.

> people would probably be receptive

I wish I shared your optimism. It would be immediately weaponised (on social media, of course) as an attack on free speech, or whatever is needed to get the right people riled up.

Social media is awful but a) the vast majority love it (if you told my mother she was losing Facebook she’d be livid) and b) it serves the interests of the powers that be.

I strongly support regulation of big tech, particularly with regard to privacy regulation, control of information and destruction of competitors/cornering of markets.

But I beg folks, please don't use 'weaponizing' and 'freedom of speech' in the same sentence, because doing so renders this principle/moral into a cynical shell instead of something that is part and parcel of core democratic values (and has had an ancient political history and evolution, with many sacrifices along the way).

> I strongly support regulation of big tech

Everyone says that but what specifically are you looking for? What’s the social media equivalent to no smoking indoors?

I support regulation of big tech to protect individual privacy (i.e. surveillance marketing, long-term storage of sensitive information, re-selling of individual data to third parties), and protect competition.

There's no (in the U.S.) legal precedence to regulate "misinformation" and hate speech, not because these things are good, but because they, unlike smoking, require authorities to create sets of approved and unapproved information, . There is a precedent of governments controlling harmful information and it isn't good - thus the bar should be set way high.

I'm not sure what you mean by "everyone says that." A lot of people say these are private platforms and rebut that one can always create a competitor, for example. Certainly it's a common refrain about techie communities such as this.

What I mean by "everyone says that" is that I often read that big tech should be regulated but I don't know what specific end they are trying to achieve.

Tech (big and small) is regulated today and there are rules on the books which protect at least some of the individual privacy points you highlighted. [1] You, and many others, have stated that you find those rules insufficient and would like new/different rules in place.

Can you provide specific goals that address the issues that you think exist, and that law makers could use to draft new policy?

[1] https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business... and https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business...

>Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.

Sorry, but it's literally as simple as closing the tab. I stopped using Facebook on a regular basis in 2019 by uninstalling the app from my phone as well as just not logging on from the desktop. I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile.

> it's literally as simple as closing the tab

It’s literally as simple as not putting a cigarette in your mouth and smoking it.

> I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile

Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.

> It’s literally as simple as not putting a cigarette in your mouth and smoking it.

Literally the approach I used when I quit smoking.

> Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.

Well, that sounds like something everyone can agree on. Or do you just mean your opinion is bigger than anyone who disagrees?

My point is not everyone can turn it off like that. To assume that everyone can because you did is wrong.

Which is fair, but also don't assume everyone is addicted because you are. Don't assume everyone is trapped by their addictions because you are.

Most of all, don't try to legislate away everyone's freedoms because you have a problem with something.

Please cite your sources that using social media is just as addictive as smoking.

According to some studies, social media is worse:

https://m.economictimes.com/tech/internet/social-media-more-...

An important difference between tobacco companies and big tech is that the latter sells tools to political campaigns.

So far as I know, there was never a system where each cigarette could advertise a politician, but if there were, when world today may look different.

This. The ability to reach people from very specific demographics and behavioral segments is something every politician from all sides want. That's why they will always complain and promise regulations, but will never really do something - it's against their best interests.

Outside of the west, tobacco companies are like tobacco companies in the 50s and 60s.

They haven't learned anything except how to be sneakier. They haven't changed, except as to the minimum possible extent demanded by law.

Which I think helps prove your point.

I strongly bet that the government instead wants to control the beast to their own benefit. Imagine the power if you could more precisely shape the public discussion. China has demonstrated this quite well.

Edit: i mean political parties and not just a single supposed monolith that is government. The two aren’t quite separate though.

Fantastic analogy with social media to tobacco, both seemed innocent at first, then as more research surfaced with tobacco causing lung cancer and now social media causing depression/anxiety in teens and adults, hopefully now we can actually view social media like the disease it is and come to some solution involving regulation.

There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website three decades after the innovation that was the WWW.

However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) and everybody is too busy arguing about something on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook and watching the latest viral 30second tiktok vids to care. Everybody is in one pasture or another being shepherded by vampire corporate interests harvesting their time and emotions.

>There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website

You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids.

I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061

That may well be true (and FWIW I agree with you) but that just kicks the can down the road. It just raises the question of why this incredibly valuable "Rolodex of real names" should be the owned property of a single private corporation? They are our names and relationships, after all.

I grew up, to a large extent, on various message boards in the 00's, and I remember when many of us got blogs and it was great. But this was the major change with Facebook, and that's really what made it mainstream to put your thoughts and feelings on the internet. Suddenly you were the same self on the internet as off it.

this is very insightful. I realize I don't have socials because I want to present content, I have it to receive chronologically sorted updates on people I know in real life. Except now it's not chronological, and so I'm disinterested

It shouldn't, but as network effect shows it works. It is easy. It provides some (felt) value for the people using it.

A cigarette does the same. It provides value the moment it is lit and the first drag enters the lung.

I quit smoking a little more than 9 years ago. There are still quite a few moments I miss this felt value.

I quit Facebook about a year ago. I still keep the account but removed everything I ever posted there. Still as I recently started to do genealogy my SO showed me the groups she uses for that on Facebook (it is the only thing she does there). So probably I will start using FB again once I dig deeper into my ancestors as these groups are really helpful and provide value.

If these groups were some other place I would gladly be there. Sadly they are not.

The inability to over customize your page with html/css and blast autoplay music are one of the reasons Facebook won out over MySpace.

Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.

> However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora)

I don't mean to be obtuse, I hate Googlebook more than most, but... have you tried? Where I lived before I had a fixed public IPv4, and I put a box up with Caddy on it serving markdown to the world and people actually did find it and sent me e-mails about it. All I did was post links to small forums. Granted, it wasn't exactly mainstream content. But it worked.

Social media isn't about making a website - non technical people can already do that with services like squarespace and carrd. The point is to be able to communicate with other people in various ways over the Internet.

Funny. I was literally recording a podcast about this very subject today and yesterday. No, it's not published anywhere at this point.

I hate the gaslighers who try to downplay this by putting into some BS "context". The situation with tech is abysmal right now. I do think it's fixable, though.

> What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

We have to use extreme lateral thinking and build systems that support themselves and over time outcompete garbage like social media and "crypto". Neither are long-term stable anyway.

One of the problems, though, is that this needs to be worked on over time. People who see the problem need places to cooperate. Social media is clearly not the place to do that, because pretty much by definition it is ran and inhabited by people who aren't interested in solving these kind of problems. (In fact, they are interesting in the opposite.)

One of my biggest regrets right now is that I spent too much time on my normal work in tech, while spending not enough time and effort on cultivating independent communities of people who actually think about stuff like this. It was easy to find interesting and interested people to cooperate with in late 90s and early 00s. Today it's really hard. Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.

Another problem is that we have no good conceptual vocabulary or an analytical framework to precisely talk about these problems. Everyone just repeats terms like "misinformation" and "censorship". Public conversations about this spin in place, going nowhere good. I understand (at least I think I understand) what you're talking about because I've already independently reaches the same conclusions. That's not enough to conceptually advance anywhere.

>Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now.

What's an example of the anti-social media that fits the mould you seek? BBSes? email groups ?

I agree about mindless repetition of terms like misinformation and censorship. These terms are used to attack political opposition rather than advance any progress.

I define "social media" as anything that manipulates content visibility based on metrics that aren't related to the content itself or user's direct inputs. Because of deliberately deceptive terminology in play this definition will inevitably sound kooky.

Yes, BBSes/forums, chats, NTP news groups and mailing lists are not "social media" in my book. It's important to note that the word "social" in social media was always a kind of marketing ploy.

Would you include voting systems within threads and messages such as the one we're on, where visibility can be affected?

Absolutely. Like I said, we are on social media right now.

I think that means Mastodon also doesn't count as a social media (not disagreeing)

Three things help greatly.

(a) big picture. Read about the past centuries, millennia. In a lifetime that only lasts an hour, appreciate how much, how little is within our power. Democracy is an outlier. Individual freedom is an outlier. But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected).

(b) appreciate that the balance of bad and good that we see is not a zero-sum-game, we aren't presented a ratio. We are presented with negative and positive narratives independently. Some of the negative narratives we see today are over-rated, and many of the lesser seen positive ones remain very valid.

(c) almost nothing is a tipping point. The systems of our world are full of feedback loops, and often extreme outcomes are averted by (super-)exponential costs that ultimately change our behavior. There are dynamics that humans can't run away from, and they will (probably) not be the spontaneous destruction of earth, but rather a gradual forced change of behavior.

I highly recommend the book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order" for helping see the big picture. I am also saddened by the state of the world, particularly in regards to inequality which I think is the source of many problems. After reading the book, I realized that social media (or the internet in general) is a technology like any other and the countries that can harness its power for good will likely lead the next century. For instance, a country that sets aside short term profits from anxiety inducing ads and instead focuses on inspiring its people will win in the long run. Same for crypto, it is just technology and it depends on people to put it to good or bad uses. We've been fortunate to live through extremely easy times, but that is the exception not the rule. Think about how people must have felt during WWII or the Great Depression or any of the other countless tragedies we've faced. They also probably though the world was ending, but at the end of the day most people figured out a way to work together to get through it. Finally, be careful when reading news because almost everything you read has an agenda behind it.

> But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected).

Depends on which groups of people and time periods you're talking about. Many groups of people have suffered through total dystopias throughout history.

Focus on yourself and what you can improve about your own life and the lives of others close to you. If you focus on things outside your sphere of influence (ie, you can't fix it), you will only upset yourself and live in a state of unhappiness.

This is true. I find I have wasted a huge amount of my time with technology for very little real reward. It is kind of like a monkey in a cage pushing a lever to get a shot of some dopamine releasing substance. I am seriously considering disconnecting the internet at home. The thought seems unfathomable on the one hand on the other how did we as a society let this anti-social, time wasting vampiric force take over so much of our lives. It truly is like the frog boiled slowly. It is true valuable and useful information can be found online, but at the end of the day so much of it just does not matter to our daily life and even good information or positive social engagement can serve as a distraction from better, more real world uses of time, like going for a hike or building a house or falling in love or planting a garden or taking care of elders.

Get involved in local politics so you can expand the sphere of people that you can influence.

That's an even better way to become disillusioned. Knowing how local government administrators operate, I'd be reluctant to call tech companies that give everything away for free a bunch of monsters like OP.

This is a common thought and hardly a new one.

Reminds me of a certain manifesto from the 90s. It starts like this: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

More happily, it also reminds me of Douglas Adams:

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Recently Facebook had a drop in daily users for the first time ever and the stock plummeted. Quaranteenies aren't signing up for it and adults are increasingly walking away from it.

It is absolutely not too late, it is never too late.

The absolutely terrifying thing about Kaczynski's manifesto is that much of it is a rational, if utterly cynical, reaction to modernity. How a man who could think so clearly about the implications of our societal choices could conclude that the answer is to mail nail bombs to innocent people both bewilders and scares the bejesus out of me.

On balance, Adams definitely had the more relaxed, froody attitude towards it all.

The Hitchhiker's Guide is such a good meditation and exploration on the randomness and ridiculousness of the universe. Personally I would recommend the original radio series rather than the book, I think Adams was a better script writer than author.

The revolution is over and the result isn't good. Sorry, addicting people to their narcissism is not very positive, no matter how it is spinned

Only because even worse alternatives have sprung up.

I'm honestly out of the loop these days, what are the worse alternatives, in the sense of their impact on society?

I feel like Instagram is utterly toxic in the materialistic ideals it spreads, but TikTok mostly seems to have been fairly harmless compared to Facebook and Twitter which just seem to be rage amplifiers.

Also Telegram groups seem to be a hive of scum and villany, but also the organising ground for people fighting for their freedom, so I don't know how I feel about it.

Young people seem to have drifted away from the "broadcast" social media systems and towards messaging systems, but as a middle-age person without teenage kids I suspect I'm probably being naive.

TikTok is far from harmless. Google "West Elm Caleb" for an idea of TikTok's own brand of insane toxicity.

Since alternatives are springing up perhaps a good one can emerge, no?

That's what I've been working on. With self-hosting (or paid hosting) the incentives change. I'd love any feedback people have. https://havenweb.org/

It's the survival of the fittest. Whoever can make the most number of people feel the worst wins.

I have been there too, but then I found solutions, hope, and excitement. Small tech provides alternatives to just about everything being done by big tech. Small tech is run by you or your community using free and open source software. You control it instead of it controlling you.

I have been free of almost all big tech for a long time and love the freedom from surveillance, censorship, and manipulation.

The list of alternatives are long to list here in a post. The challenge is in marketing to get your friends and family onto small tech too. Because these solutions are free and don't take anything from you, they have no multi billion dollar marketing budgets like big tech. You learn about them by following HN, Mastodon, and Reddit.

I am currently building out my own servers from home to host these services using Yunohost which makes it quite easy. I do like learning a lot of new things, but my motivation is to help my friends and family. This can spread one group at a time.

I hear you and I often have thoughts along the same lines. Here are my (very unorganized) thoughts on this.

First: have faith. Nothing of what you mention is really new under the sky. Many people lost their wealth (and sometimes lives) in tulip mania in 17th century, yet we learned important lessons about how markets work, collective behaviour, boom and bust, financial instruments. We are bound to repeat the same mistakes again, with different things, but that is just how learning works.

Second: look into both sides. Social media, while rightly blamed for feeding the fires of division in the society, brings a lot of good into the world: extended families spread over the world keeping in touch, charity and community organizers using it for outreach, people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts. Even with all externalities and mistakes, you can reach out to so many people anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, get any peace of publicly available information without going to the library and sifting through the books and newspapers, or get almost any imaginable product shipped to you in a matter of days and sometimes same day.

As to what can be done: tools are also well-known and have been working for a long time. Education and teaching critical thinking. Creating wealth and spreading it around. Reducing inequality. Elimination of menial labour. Finding new solutions in energy and raw materials, so that some countries having those resources and ruled by oppressive leaders are not able to exercise undue influence. Cheaper energy. Inventing new materials. Creating new tools. And yes, applying regulation and better legislation, where needs be - it worked for alcohol and tobacco, workplace safety, fire safety... We are still trying to figure things out as is the case with war on drugs, but there is no reason regulation would not work for social media or "web3".

>people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts

This extends to democratic systems as well. It seems as if a veil has been lifted on the workings of governments and corporations because information and reporting is no longer processed and packaged by a compact, semi-corrupt media system or fourth estate. No one is going to believe a Weapons of Mass Destruction lie anymore, few are buying into the Ukraine crisis etc, multiple government dissenting views on Covid have proven to be accurate despite censorship and banning. Time scales are shortened, information leakage is everywhere, distribution avenues are many orders of magnitude larger than they used to be, and people really do have a lot more time to look at and think about things. It seems like we are just now more aware of the crap that is happening at large corps/govs.

There is a fifth estate now – a formidable alternative to legacy media, of small and independent, more numerous and interesting, analysts and interpreters of the world and human affairs. This is enabled by more easily usable social media – it is twitter/YouTube/podcasts. This is special and new and I am thankful for it. Now, we have to diminish the negative addiction and consumption effects that these same systems can have.

I suspect these systems do not actually need that much money to operate and manage, and can eventually be treated as water/energy utility type businesses - regulated to fixed profits and with anti-addiction rules. This is no longer advanced technology.

There's a fundamental problem that not many people see. It's our attitude towards time.

This attitude is setup as an unfair game. Instead of just living our lives alongside time, we are actively fighting against the time we have and wanting to make every second count.

We then go to these platforms to find some sort of social validation and compare ourselves to others in the process. This makes us more lonely than ever. That gives us some sense of failure in our own lives as we might not be as successful or as far along in our journey as other people who are publicly sharing theirs. It's a losing game. The house always wins.

It's not about blaming humanity or ourselves for letting it get this bad. It's about taking drastic action today to do your part. Practice digital minimalism and have digital sabbaths on the weekends. Only use technology when it's necessary for you. Find better ways to spend your time on things you're truly passionate for. It's a long journey, but it sure as hell is worth it and makes you happier.

You need better filters, as there are plenty of technologies and social groups that are doing the exact opposite as what you are lamenting. If you put your time and effort into these groups then you will realize that there are whole other ways of living and producing that are convivial.

For example, there are decentralized social medias built on gossip protocols and mesh networks, and ipv6 that are creating participatory platforms and economies.

There are also a variety of alternative fuel, permaculture and solar punk groups creating living environments that are sustainable.

Join up with them. Our physical needs are minimal, our cultural needs are to help one another.

When I got into college, I had a professor who was working on how internet can democratize the world. A bit after that the Arab spring erupted and a bit later it turned out that the internet could be used for repression. Being wrong ones, makes me think that we could be wrong again. The doomsday scenarios around social media and ads are like scifi distopias - they won't happen because they show up exactly when the pendulum is about to reverse. To reverse it, we just need more general awareness and a healthy discussion about the goals, problems, and solutions.

A thought I had a few years ago was what sort of technology was in Star Trek (TNG, but any of the series is a reasonable point), and what technology we have now.

Star Trek had a very utopian sense about technology, were tech giants have a much more distopian sense about it. For instance, in both cases, we want an AI that can understand regular language, and give us accurate results for our requests. In Star Trek, every ship has this tech, and it's all used without any thought of privacy concerns or what it means for a computer to be always listening. In fact, as far as I can think, Star Trek never really had self-awareness about what the technology the people of that time used and it's implications (like privacy, but there are likely many more ethical concerns).

This led me to a bit of a split mind on technology. Using speech recognition as the example. Yes, it would be great if I could ask a computer something and it can answer me. No, it would not be great if that information was used to manipulate me or exploit my situation (like suggesting products to buy).

I do think all advancements are a two-edged sword. Is it orwellian? I definitely agree. My phone is always listening (even when there are claims it is not, or it's in standby mode), cameras are small enough to fit in a pocket and be used any time. Outside of living in a cave, you can choose what you participate in. You don't _need_ a smart phone - your emails can be answered when you sit at a computer, your calls can go to voicemail when you're not home. You don't _need_ to be on facebook - get your photos printed, save your videos to DVDs, share them with people when you invite them over.

A popular saying is vote with your wallet, but it can also be vote with your attention, too! Don't use social media if you think it sucks. Just log out, deactivate your account, and live your life. Don't share information on the internet you don't want to be used against you, and that even includes things like purchases on amazon, your address, or anything else.

It's only too late if you're not willing to do anything about it. Don't blame big tech if at the same time, you're logging in and feeding them your attention. It's not up to you how other people waste their time, either, but you can encourage different behaviour by having real-life interactions without technology in the way.

I just spent 8 years totally off the grid. No tech. The biggest thing I missed was Wikipedia.

Tech is what you make of it. It was depressing to tune back in and see what a mess the Web was with advertising destroying most sites. Support has gone to the birds. You used to be able to get hold of humans who could help you. Now, you're just fucked, there is no way out.

AI is starting to get scary, like we might actually make an AGI that destroys us. Even now you can do some fucked up shit using GANS to create fake videos. Take this for instance - we know Tom Cruise is fake, but is Paris a deepfake or real? I cannot tell, and I've worked in CG:

https://www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise/video/7060950433082182...

This shit gets better, not yearly, but monthly. Soon it'll be possible to fake anything of anybody. So AI is already taking us towards destruction. Perhaps we can turn it around and AI can be used to save us. I hope that's the end game.

Without tech though I couldn't do some awesome things, like see my loved ones on video chat half a world away. So, it's not all bad...!

In the big picture Facebook etc are a bit of a blip. Tech as in antibiotics, sewers etc have increased life expectancy at birth from 20-40 years to 80 or so, famines are rare, stuff like smallpox gone. Going forward we have AI, uploading, immortality, interplanetary travel and the like. I'd chill out over the current stuff.

Aslo check out stuff like Pinker on war https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_the_surprising_decli... and Ridley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxe73iJPbo It's easy to think things are getting worse because that's what the press reports because 'horror crash' get's more clicks than 'things not bad really' but if you look at history they are getting better in most ways. For instance as to things getting Orwellian, Orwell was writing after the holocaust, WW2 and communist famines killing tens of millions. Facebook ads are quite mild in comparison.

Nothing of value to add, just to thank you sincerely for putting into words what I had been feeling for the last 3-4 years, but didn’t know how to do it concisely or how not to sound like a Cassandra. My individual solution is to stay employed in an IT job that pays the bills and that’s it, I do not want to change/improve the world through IT, much less so do I want to do something interesting at work. Ellul was right.

So maybe the direct effect of those companies is negative, but overall the indirect products, causes multiply revolutions, specially in the field of AI and deep learning.

Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies.

The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc.

Perhaps the issue is that consumers lack the choice to pay? We're seeing a proliferation of online services that charge money. I only wish that the standard when I pay for a service is to have an ad-free experience.

Just look for free app vs paid app in the app store. Most consumers do not even want to pay 0.99 for apps which took at least 6 figures to develop.

Most apps in the app store are pretty useless or one offs. I pay for photo storage, file storage, grammar checking, IDEs, and useful/interesting content.

"Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies."

The three projects chosen for the argument were started by companies, but let's dig a bit deeper. Kubernetes wouldn't be possible without container technology, enabled by modules contributed to Linux, and Linux did not start in a company, but rather by a student at the University of Helsinki. Pytorch wouldn't exist without Python, which was started at CWI (another research institute) in the Netherlands. Heck, we are having this argument over a protocol developed by CERN. The references seem to indicate a bias towards machine learning, but I can tell you that the researchers working on these tools would still be doing so at a university even if the companies weren't bankrolling the salaries, and even though they are at a company, they still act as if they are in academia.

Thus, I would claim that saying "most of the open source tools today are not coming from academia" is short-sighted at best. The revolutions are happening in academia, where it is safer to do more greenfield research, as opposed to working in a company where you have to have a shorter runway to profitability.

"The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc."

IMHO, the problem exists on both sides. Yes, someone needs to pay to keep the lights on, and consumers should be expected to pay a nominal fee for some services. But they shouldn't need to pay with their privacy, or by shady manipulation, or by disingenuous EULAs. I don't know the solution, but I do know that cookie tracking isn't it, nor forcing people to watch ads with eye tracking like MoviePass is suggesting, nor surreptitiously spying on people's watching habits to subsidize TVs.

So, specifically for containers, cgroups were donated by google. Of course innovations build on existing innovations.

My point is that the by-product of big tech is a useful set of tools which would not exist without substantial R&D investment subsidized by revenues from ads.

Also, I am looking at reality vs what should be. If given an option, consumers would not pay, not even 0.99. This is reality. I.e. consumer are willing to give away their privacy for 0$ and free tools.

No, it's not that bad. Not at all.

There is some truth in that, but think of the incredible value just in your smart phone. It's a: - weather forecaster - GPS - phone - news source - email client - gigantic resource library - pedometer - entertainment provider. Music, videos, etc. - and on and on.

All this in a little device owned by even people of modest means. It's a miracle!

Social media lets you stay in touch with friends and relatives. You can make connections that would be impossible just a few years ago.

Our lives are so much better. Sure, there is some trash, too. But rise above that, open your eyes to all the good. It's a wonderful time to be alive.

Why not include Google, Apple, TikTok and Twitter!?

Apple has funneled $275 Billion to China [1], 10x more than what Intel got to start the Ohio fab. Gutting out American rust belt is one of the key problems in US and no one seems to care. It has brewed a whole political movement and we will suffer for decades.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) VR, and then Neuralink, used to suck many people into virtual worlds and keep them “engaged” to feed the profit motive of the Wall St quarterly earnings (capitalism requires platforms to extract rents after all)

But why stop at the virtual world?

Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace.

Artificial intelligence with access to this info is used to predict all kinds of inconvenient gatherings and movements taking place and nip them in the bud, leading to precrime.

Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone

Drones become cheap to manufacture, and rogue drones can drop grenades anywhere without any way to figure out who launched them

Swarming autonomous slaughterbots that bring down the cost of eliminating anyone, first by governments, then by private actors.

Guns become cheap to 3d-print while replicating biological agents become cheap to release.

Bitcoin mining rewards make it more profitable to spend kilowatt-hours on using Proof of Work to secure those same 7 transactions per second than on air conditioning and brownouts regularly occur worldwide.

Think this is far-fetched or we can somehow solve these problems? How are we doing with the last few decades of problems:

  the anthroposcene

  ecological collapse

  plummeting biodiversity

  (insects, birds, tigers)

  non-biodegradeable plastic

  greenhouse gas effect

Humanity is like a young teenager that lives on a credit card, that future generations have to pay. We think we are so clever and so much smarter than previous generations, because we know the truth revealed by science. But we aren’t wise enough to use it sustainably.

At best, humanity is building a zoo for itself to be run by a benevolent AI, while the rest of the planet is turned into monocultures and factory farms.

At worst, the AI will not understand human needs and we’ll just all be frustrated all the time, or perhaps countries will just nuke the planet. Where is that nuclear clock?

>Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace. >Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone

I'd say that those two scenarios directly contradict each other in many ways.

You’d be wrong.

First of all, the cameras would have watermarks signed with private keys to authenticate the video so the deepfakes won’t matter.

Secondly, no need to prove anything, in order to do the AI thing and precrime.

And thirdly, when it comes to court cases, however you make arguments, the AI can help you make lots of plausible info for parallel construction.

you specifically mentioned cameras being everywhere for the sake of collecting evidence, and then right after spoke of deepfakes that make ANY camera footage subject to fakery. So whether what you say about watermarks and so forth is correct or not, based on your own words, I still see something of a contradiction.

"for the sake of collecting evidence" is your interpretation. I said: "Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace."

I find that it's important to periodically understand the big picture. I ask myself, are we doing better as a whole for society and can technology aid in that?

I get inspired by reviewing the following things: 1. Child mortality rate over time: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality?country=

2. DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough signals a promising decade for the science of proteomics. Most directly, being able to predict protein shapes will enable us to discover drugs more rapidly.

3. The cost to produce PV modules: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

4. Advancement of geothermal as a potential energy source. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry who think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions.

5. Space exploration. The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981 and launched successfully 134 times. The payload cost to low-Earth orbit (LEO) was $65,400/kg. Today’s Falcon 9 is at $2,600/kg.

6. The improvement in adult literacy rates over time. So much more to do here, but a literate population is one that is more likely to contribute to our global productivity and success. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literacy-rate-adults?tab=...

7. Quantum computing experiments and trails are doubling the number of qubits every couple of years right now. Quantum computing will cause a re-imagining of security and cryptography of digital assets if it becomes production grade. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59320073

I am sure there are many other examples. Even though I am an enterprise software guy working at Dell, the progress we made in the areas of technology that we get to work in have some contributing impact to all of these trends.

Comments:

Direction of society: If you are a small player like me, you have no control on it. The best that can do is what you can do for yourself along with similar minded people. For those that are disillusioned with people in general follow the link on my profile. ( summary: if you are a misanthrope, actively from alliances with 'level-headed' people, whatever your definition of 'level-headed' may be)

Direction of technology: No comments.

Note that technology advancement always needs a large sum of capital so whoever has it controls technology. I in my life never had the illusion of the other way around.

It's true that technology advancement requires capital and seemingly absent military threats the government is happy to allow private interests to supply that capital.

There's another distinction to be made which is also useful, that between open and closed systems. The PC ecosystem in the 1980s democratized computing yet was privately funded, so I don't think the private funding barrier is impossible to overcome when trying to make progress.

One thing I don't hear much about is how any system that relies heavily on a large database produces concentration. The internet era came to be dominated by companies with huge databases.

That's different from the PC era. This is mostly just a technology yo-yo between centralized systems and decentralized systems over the years, and you have to ride out the storm when your favored flavor is on the outs.

Techno-optimists should be focused on building decentralized databases and many are. Until we've solved the problem of systems with huge databases outperforming systems with decentralized databases, concentration will continue.

> They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world.

LOL. Peak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

> The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative.

I'm disabled and in the winter I can't even leave my apartment building. I get almost everything I need from Amazon and I honestly don't know what I would do without them. Their overall economic value may be negative but they sure have a lot of positive value for me.

There is a lot of things that people value but it is impossible to monetize. Monetization control is a huge factor for the current shape of the internet

And then, there is no public internet. Wikipedia is valuable, and it sustains itself, but we don't have public email or public blogs. Why? Expression and association are rights

> They are making society worse not better.

Perhaps a component of this perception is that these technologies are exposing a rotten tree stump that was already there. You only think it's making things worse because you couldn't see it was already bad.

But only part of it. The mental destruction out there is real.

I'm puzzled that Amazon - a company which made its billions disrupting the retail economy, and subsequently the datacenter/managed infrastructure economy - is lumped in with Facebook. I think it might be worth unpacking what you are uncomfortable with in more precise terms.

Time to go back to the lab and develop new materials and processes. Capital will one day notice that the social media adtech space is way overfunded for the little benefit it gives and will move on to more interesting things. It is taking longer than I expected though.

Issue lies in how fast changes are happening. We are simply not ready for that. This is the moment when ppl who are a bit further on the evolution cycle should take things into own hands and stop others from hurting themselves.

It will take a small disaster now to get back on track.

Hey, I've been there and I have found no answer at this level of abstraction. Most people are great - but there are enough psychopaths to cause mayhem. The way out of this pit of thinking is to take a more spiritual viewpoint. Read around what human beings are capable of, mysticism, and ideas like Yugas - most technology is just trying to replace what we have lost as humans. Learn to be at peace with yourself and the world will slowly join you.

> most technology is just trying to replace what we have lost as humans.

Truth. Try and find what void technology is filling and fill it with non-tech solutions

first, breathe

In the midst of this emerging, high-energy system-of-systems, please notice that there are other systems-of-systems also, quite vigorous. Like two painted dots on the surface of an expanding balloon, those dots are expanding away from each other, but also from all other possible dots, at once. Systems-of-systems are growing (or dying) right now, at the same time as the energetic emergence that you rightly call attention to here.

Your own stable intelligence and committed efforts, are required to steer away from these self-referential and empowered systems. Overall, I tend to agree, but differently in degree and specificity. best from California

> Technology seems like a giant waste of time and energy for human civilisation.

And yet here you are sharing your thoughts with supportive strangers who will hopefully provide some meaningful responses to your concerns.

Every generation feels this way. Humanity will be alright. Earth will be alright. If it isn’t you won’t be around to feel bad about it. Just live your life and find things that bring joy.

Maybe the internet has peaked in how much good versus evil it brings upon the world.

In the same time, hackernews has become a negative spiral of death. Every third post is negatively fatalist in some sort. From cancer to civilization and environmental collapse. Keep in mind, you can be fatalist in a positive way.

Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. As wallstreet people say, it is never as bad or as good as you think.

I suggest you do:

    echo '0.0.0.0 news.ycombinator.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

and just unblock it from time to time if you wanna see whats up. (thats what I do)

whenever i get into this sort of mood I try to focus on one small thing I can make better

sometimes that's a small open source tool, maybe that's remembering to help a neighbor out, or going out to a public trail and picking up trash, something positive that I can do immediately and that takes my focus off the negative stuff

there's a lot of good in the world, but the little black mirror can obscure it

Well then, let's learn from events, and choose a better timeline!

I believe in this causal chain

    Computers are insecure
    Which many bad actors find profit in exploiting
    Which makes new web sites a risk
    Which makes users prefer their known "safe" spaces
    Which leads to walled gardens
    Which then sell the "users" for profit to advertisers
    Which incentivizes dark behavior of those walled gardens
    Which then attract the rentier class
    Which then leverage control for more power

I believe this causal chain can be broken by fixing computer security. The necessary research was done in the 1970s. The Bell-Lapadula model [1] in 1973 was one of the significant results.

The Principle of Least Privilege [2] was adopted in the Unix system in a weak form. The superuser (root) account was a special privilege, which administrators and code was supposed to use as little as possible.

There were (are???) implementations of a multi-level secure systems, which saw limited application in the military, and briefly elsewhere. However, for general use, the root/user separation was widely seen as good enough.

There are now efforts to fully extend operating systems so that they can provide tools so that the users can also use the Principle of Least Privilege. I believe that eventually it will be as easy to use these as more conventional systems.

In these systems, no default permissions are given when running a program, the allowed resources, also known as capabilities, must be specified. This is similar to deciding which bank notes you are going to hand to a cashier, instead of handing over your wallet. It is up to US to demand that it be as easy for any user to do so, in a transparent way.

It is my hope, that should this model be accepted, a new causal chain will arise

    Computers will be made secure
    Which users will grow to trust
    Which will allow experimentation
    Which allows new ways of communicating
    Which don't require corporate sponsorship
    Which doesn't require the rentier class
    Which helps innovation
    Which helps society

1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20060618092351/http://www.albany...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege

Whenever I read anything like this I think people have a weirdly rosy view of the past.

30 years ago people have libraries and encyclopedias. Now billions of people take it for granted that you can have a handhold device in your pocket that has access to virtually the entire body of human knowledge.

Sure people use that device for all sorts of crap that ranges from the inane (eg "look at how amazing I am or my life is" IG posts) to the dangerous and outright harmful (eg cyberbullying, QAnon BS) but let me clue you in: I challenge you to find a point in history where this wasn't the case.

I mean a few centuries ago we were burning witches in the US. Only decades ago we had racial segregation. We had lynchings. The 20th century saw people killing millions of other people. We dropped nuclear bombs on cities. In the 19th century (and earlier) we literally bought and sold people and ripped them from their homeland to drag them against their will to a new continent.

The fact is when it comes to social media you can completely ignore it and it won't have a negative impact on your life. In fact it's probably the opposite.

I'm genuinely curious: when were things better? And why?

I once had a conversation with the head of an Aboriginal group in Australia - until recently (i.e. when the Europeans came) they could get by on a couple of hours of hunter-gathering a day and spend the rest of the day enjoying themselves. Makes you think!

I believe you're shooting the messenger.

Tyrannical, greedy, and well-resourced psychopaths have been using technology to lead us into an Orwellian hell-hole.

Without them, all of this tech is a fantastic opportunity to empower and connect our world.

And that will happen - they've overstepped their mark and most people who matter know this already.

If you build a weapon it will be used as one by those with the will to do so. Much of technology is a psychological weapon against the human psyche. It pretends to fulfill our wants and needs like a drug but actually it is feeding off our energy and emotions to empower and enrich the few at the expense of the many.

The real threat of technology is not some rogue AI taking over the world but human intelligence and energy being harnessed and shepherded for nefarious ends.

Informatics is an extremely powerful tool that can help with almost any task. It's not a gun.

The first thing the computer did was break the German codes.

The second thing the computer did was model atomic explosions.

Computers are war machines first and foremost.

IBM was selling computers 4 decades before they were used to break the German codes.

What do you mean? IBM didn't sell computers until 1952:

> IBM built the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, an electromechanical computer, during World War II. It offered its first commercial stored-program computer, the vacuum tube based IBM 701, in 1952.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History

Oh, I remembered one less decade, it was 5.

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

Things didn't use to be name "computer" before Turing, for reasons that are a bit less obvious than they appear to be at first, but the idea is quite old.

edit: Have we had this argument before?

- - - -

> Oh, I remembered one less decade, it was 5.

Not to split hairs but IBM was founded in 1911.

> Things didn't use to be named "computer" before Turing, for reasons that are a bit less obvious than they appear to be at first, but the idea is quite old.

Babbage and Lovelace had the idea a couple of centuries ago, but tabulating machines and the business machines IBM sold aren't quite the same thing as what we think of as a "computer" today. Arguably the thing that most differentiates them- easy of re-programmability -is exactly what makes our modern machinery so untrustworthy.

Leaving aside the argument that accounting and tabulating are themselves tools of "the state" (e.g. the tabulating machine was "designed to assist in summarizing information ... for the 1890 U.S. Census.") can you deny that what might be called "computational supremacy" has been and continues to be a crucial aspect of international relations?

I kind of agree with some of this - but not the conclusion you seem to have drawn.

The most nefarious weapon invented previously has been around for 75+ years and was developed as far as to reach the capability of completely destroying all human life in a matter of minutes. But... it never has.

And this is despite it being repeatedly under the control of those whom are arguably the worlds greatest and most inhumane psychopaths.

That is, there must be something in human nature, or the nature of life itself, that prevents it from using technology to annihilate itself with it, even when such power is given to those most likely to use it for that.

Not to say there isn't a danger, even a great one. And I could understand being disillusioned by the present state of affairs. But, as with all such dualism, there exists just as strong a pull to catapult the other way.

Just as there were greater, bloodier and more heinous wars prior to the invention of nuclear weapons, it would seem that with such mastery of destruction comes a greater responsibility - that ultimately we rise to embrace.

Some bits are, some bits aren't - look at the good things! We've got high volume DNA sequencing all over; we've got rapidly produced mRNA vaccines (with modified bases!). We can mostly work from the comfort and safety of home. The web is being used to share vast amounts of genetics info (heck the Bio people have incredible web sites). We're generating a fair amount of electricity now from wind and solar; on a good day. We've got growing numbers of electric cars. With a few clicks of the mouse I can order kg of chocolate to appear at my door. It's the future - it's not all bad!

"But do you know the names of your neighbors?" - an Amish man asked in an article I read recently. Technology took over the space that previously was devoted to real human relations.

I think many of us fell into what I'll call "hacker's fallacy", that given society free access to information and communication, people will be free to educate themselves and others and we will progress as a species. At first we were going to that direction, before the status quo caught on. Now people are being exploited and misinformed more than it was imaginable before the information age.

I'd like to thing the hippies had a similar fallacy, where they thought they could overthrow the system with flower power (mainly psychedelic drugs).

Looking forward to the next iteration.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

I like how a lot of the discussions on this site are about hating capitalist economic incentives in tech but almost no one acknowledges the underlying framework of capitalism and what is at its center: exploitation.

He who has seen the light calls the others sheep.

Technology's consumerization[1] has crushed & squeezed out all the earnest genuine enthusiasm & excitement that personal computing & earlier conmected computing brought about. There's no on ramps for humanity to engage in the mediums, to participate & create as a peer tp technology where we are: we are deeply deeply downstream of the act of creation & creativity, using strokes & lines already assembled before us.

Nothing obstructs computing from re authenticating itself, from becoming more than a industrialist workshop. Personal computing will happen again. Open source desktops and phones are doing ok, but the bar is higher- personal computing needs to meet society's new raosed bar & be more connected, working across systems, working across people. Personal systems need modernized technical underpinnings, with coherent, respected, operationalized basis, that both newcomers can start to learn and onboard into, but which the advanced seasoned developer also finds fit to purpose, is interested in tinkering on.

Finding thr community & time to grow, to bridge humanity & technics is a slow project, a much loftier, nobler, harder, & more important quest than selling product. Technics matter in this world. Finding alignment between parties matters, is much harder. Many different pieces need to flow together, each particular & important, building up & up the stack, towards a competitive, flexible, malleable, comprehendible medium of computing. All based around standards, if at all possible, to stir diversification & groth & prevent ossification.

Personally, there's a couple projects i'd list as contendors to re-owning computing: ActivityPub, Kubernetes, Pulsar, Gitea, ForgeFed, Json-ld/rdfa/microdata. Projects like Node-Red, Tekton, Matrix/Xmpp, and Yunohost and the home-cloud folks inspire me greatly & show aspects that are important, but im not sure i believe in them as quite right enough to fully endure. There's still a huge missing hole for what front end systems work & make sense but there are at least lots of interesting social systems built on ActivityPub, matrix and xmpp.

More than the tech itself, I see there as so little joint community. So many dispirate partiuclar projects, of great promise & potential, but in their lane. Becoming more generic, more flexible, creating assemblage we can jointly believe in & practice on is key. We have to find new paths where we can go it together.

[1] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/02/cons... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317827

First of all, welcome to the club. You've noticed that we arguably do not live in the best of all possible worlds, to put it mildly. Let's get you a membership card and a tee-shirt. "We accept you, we accept you. One of us, one of us."

Second, yeah, kiss your ass goodbye, it's too late, and you should probably move into the woods and learn to make fire with sticks and hunt and gather. You're still going to be fucked when the climate goes wonky, but at least you'll be happy and more-or-less bullshit-free until then (unless you wind up needing a dentist or surgeon! Brush your teeth and don't jump around too much.)

Third, and this is general advice, try not to go by what the masses are doing. Humans are only really intelligent as individuals or small groups. Above a certain size (roughly 25) groups of humans are actually pretty dumb. If you predicate your emotions and outlook on the mass behaviour of humanity "you're gonna have a bad time."

- - - -

With the preliminaries out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks.

We do have already all the technology we need to live well on this planet even with a few billion more people. We can reduce our fossil fuel use by 100x-1000x without sacrificing quality of life. Look into applied ecology (Permaculture, Syntropic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, etc.), and passive solar design et. al. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design ),

We also already have technology for dealing with our psychological and emotional issues. Things like Nonviolent Communication ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication ) and weirder stuff like Core Transformation Process ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ ).

But you seem to be much more concerned with the effects of the Internet on people and culture.

> The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.

Pretty much. I mean, my neighbor is into NFTs.

I don't know what you and I as individuals can do about it. To me it seems like billions of people are happy to be reduced to peasants in a newfangled techno-plantation. The lure of convenience seems to overwhelm all other principles and values.

The wedge is that most of them aren't happy, so there may yet be room to get in there and pry people from their digital thralldom. I have no idea how, though. :(

- - - -

The one concrete idea I do have is something I call "A Machine for Easy Living". It's sort of like a vertically integrated real estate development company that build (ecologically harmonious) neighborhoods and rents homes at a drastically reduced rate (like 10% of market value) with the covenant that the residents use some of their free time (freed up by lowered cost of living) to "pay it forward" culturally and economically.

My hope is that folks would spend more time doing things like participating in local government or volunteering for elder care or whatever rather than vegging out on their screens.

- - - -

I think we're seeing the emergence of vast AIs that have humans as neurons. I don't mean in the future, I mean now, right in front of us. These corporations with their unprecedented insight into the daily lives of billions of people are like nothing we've ever seen before.

The thing you’re worried about is actually fixable. But it requires someone to build open source alternatives to Facebook and other Web2 social networks.

I wrote a comment showing far worse and more dangerous trends. But now let me address what you wrote 42 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759615

Yes, capitalism gets like this when the small thing you built becomes bigger than you. And if you take VC money and then IPO to Wall St they will force you to perpetually every extract rents from your users in the form of their attention, engagement, advertising tolerance, and your “slow AI” will push out of management anyone who doesn’t get with the program to satisfy quarterly earnings. People who bought shares at $200 will make a lot of noise and can be quite persuasive to make sure their shares don’t drop to $5.

That’s why Google dropped “don’t be evil” motto and now gets “right up to the line without crossing it”: profit motive of shareholders.

Web3 was going to fix it but (the network would be owned by the participants) but the industry got stuck using outdated technology (blockchain) because it perversely promised things built on it to become slower and more expensive over time, so buying the block reward / fee token would pay off by making it “worth more” in the future.

This is going to be fixed. We are working on exactly this microtransaction alternative: https://qbix.com/token

However, keep in mind that advertising may always be more lucrative than microtransactions, for Facebook and other capitalist “privately owned” social networks. There are many goods and services in the world that pay far more in commissions to the social network, and as long as that is the case, it would be more lucrative to get money from them than having the users pay some membership fees to access content. And besides, if you can get free content, why pay for it?

No, the way to get out of this mess is to finally realize that capitalism and the profit motive has diminishing returns the bigger an organization gets, and that transitioning to a gift economy with no profit motive and no celebrities (wikipedia, science, creative commons, peer review) is far better for humanity.

Once everyone is in VR and using neuralink, it will be even more pronounced. The problem started when your computers were miniaturized into mobile phones and had always-on internet. You’re already a “cyborg”. Now, consider … would you want your back end software to be produced and hosted by a for-profit capitalist company beholden to wall street? Or by an open source thing like Wordpress, Matrix or Qbix that you can at least control your own metaverse and not pay rents?

Most people, like a slowly cooked frog, will just choose to become the borg basically. Not as a conscious decision, but by a thousand cuts from friends who urge you to get that latest VR headset with the brain interface so you can smell their latest pot pie, which is a limited edition sponsored by Friday’s, of course. It’s like the movie “Eagle eye” where everyone is recruited to keep you on track, and everyone is peer-pressured by N people.

Unless permissionless open source platforms become compelling enough to compete and disrupt centralized for-profit platforms, as Web 1.0 disrupted and destroyed America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, Minitel, magazines, newspapers, and other gatekeepers — while VOIP / multimedia on the Internet severely undercut the telecom cartel ($3 a minute calls), cable channels, the companies using the radio spectrum etc.

We are currently living in digital feudalism. That’s what you are describing: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

Life expectancy has increased dramatically virtually everywhere in the world [1], and not just due to dramatic reductions in child mortality.

Poverty, presumably one of the major causes of human suffering, has also declined dramatically worldwide. [2]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

At the same time, industrialization has created the very concept of leisure time. Vacation, travel, two days off per week, much less a 40 hour work week — these would have only been fantasies before industrialization.

Maternal death during childbirth, child mortality, and plagues dominated peoples' lives and offered no escape other than dumb luck before the rise of technology. Superstition provided the only hope of escaping the grim reaper who was omnipresent — could strike at any time and without warning.

Mass starvation was commonplace throughout history, but is now quite rare — due to high tech farming and distribution of foodstuffs.

All of those fears have faded enormously since the rise of modernity and public health advanced tech. COVID-19 would have been FAR worse (especially to the elderly and unhealthy) than it was but for the advancements of modern tech, especially the MRNA vaccines which, through the rapid advancements of tech, were created at an ASTONISHING rate. And it was only through the presence of tech that we've all been able to continue sharing our lives with friends and family during this, the first truly GLOBAL pandemic in history.

No, I'm thankful for the rise of technology EVERY DAY, and it gives we a lot of hope to continue improving everyday life in years to come.. It's the failures of humankind individually to advance emotionally and rationally that I fear. Humans still have a lot of growing up to do before we start responding to the vicissitudes of life like responsible adults still. In far too many ways, we still behave like children convinced the best response to difficulty is to behave badly and tear our hair in despair.

Fact is, living now, with all the plenty that tech has given us, should offer more hope for a better future than ever before. Yes, tech is disruptive, as it always has been. But tech has made the world a far better place in the past 300 years, and I for one expect that to continue, once the public gets some perspective on what life was BEFORE industrialization gave us hope for a better future.

Life expectancy != quality of life. In the modern world many more people are alienated and kept alive when nature would release them. Many people are spiritually alienated. The newest version iPhone does not give meaning to your life. Neither does buying a bunch of crap you don't need every week off of Amazon.

What does it mean to be spiritually alienated? I think also you are projecting a large part of your own unhappiness onto the world by suggesting that people are buying the newest iPhone to give meaning to their life.

I'm not going to claim life expectancy is equivalent to quality of life (although I do think it correlates). But I was just responding to the comment which claimed life expectancy had only increased in advanced countries.

For those who aren't immediately getting the quote:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski#Industrial_...

I got a good laugh at how many people replied sincerely to this comment, not knowing it’s literally the opening paragraph of the Unabomber’s Manifesto.

It is a great practical joke indeed, but the feelings themselves are not illegal. What we choose to do about it matters a lot.

I posted it sincerely, even though I don’t completely agree with it.

Subsistence farming in the year A.D. 22 is just as unfulfilling as repetitive factory work in 2022.

What makes unfulfilling work meaningful is it going to yourself. When you work and your earnings are not going to a feudal lord or bank, it's worth it.

Modern finance engineering is ruining everything, and tech is beneath it.

I personally think we a converging on some kind of an apocalypse rather than a singularity as the fanboys thought ten or twenty years ago.

Thanks, Ted.

> they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities

Wait till you learn about serfdom, slavery, French revolution and so on

I think the industrial revolution was great. What puts us under pressure today is the economic arms race it accelerated. Religious work ethics also played a role here, but a minor one.

Just read about how a software glitch lead to conviction of people for alleged theft in the UK. This is a severe example of people being overwhelmed with technology they don't understand and I don't mean the clerks.

I'll play Devil's Advocate: "advanced" nations went through the same suffering and exploitation on their way to being advanced as newly-industrialized nations are going through now. Much of the modern discontent with society and technology is simply due to greater awareness and better education, rather than actual change in the nature of society or how technology is used.

I don't necessarily disagree that Big Tech is driving dystopian changes in the nature of governance, but I don't think a rose-tinted view of the past is very helpful. Spying, disinformation, and corruption in the controllers of communication technologies has been a thing since the telegraph, if not earlier.

That sounds like an unhappy delusion. Life was not magically better before the industrial revolution, unless you were the king. The problems we have now are mostly related to a greatly increased number of people, so unless you want to be Thanos, we'll just have to learn to deal with it. And if we fail, reversion to the mean will do it for us.

Eh, so was agriculture. You can't really go back though, we all have to run the red queen's race.

>Technology seems like a giant waste of time and energy for human civilisation.

He says using technology.

>Specifically the social media giants and advertising funded tech companies seem like the definition of emotional vampires. So do cryptocurrencies.

Im not sure about this emotional vampire factor.

>They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world.

Good luck fixing it though. Imagine I waved my wand and made you emperor of the world. You then instant ban and shutdown these social media entities. Their stock prices go to $0. Nobody on earth had a chance of selling. What happens? Tons of retirees just got their benefits drastically reduced. Most likely all of them are headed to the job line. Too big to fail.

>For what tech produces it is overly rewarded economically. The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative.

Hard to prove.

>What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster?

Not too late, but you cant take down goliath, you have to displace it at this point.

>I think it is already too late. The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.

Out of curiousity, what is your opinion of Trump?

I put Amazon and Facebook into two opposed categories. FB may well be negative, but Amazon gave us excellent breadth of selection and logistics, very good e-readers, excellent HDMI-output android devices, flexible and easy utility computing, and probably several other broad categories that I’m not thinking of at the moment.

I think Amazon has added a ton of value to end-users. (No affiliation with Amazon.)

> So do cryptocurrencies.

C'mon man don't let the narrative get to you!

Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will separate money and state, no more wars no more lopsided battles no more power asymmetry, no more printing and giving to those closest, no more printing machines in the hands of the 3 letter agencies, etc.

It will bring great progress to humanity if we adopt it.

> The internet is like an opiate

Yeah

> as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions

The people that are manipulated by Big Tech would be manipulated anyways by Big Media, sadly. But maybe it's more worrisome with Big Tech.

I think what you are describing is witnessing the passage of time and it's affect on what we consider normal. I don't think technology is ruining the world, I think it's ruining the world you thought you would be living it, but in fact it's just pushed past it. When someone invented toliets, do you think everyone thought it was a great idea? I imagine people that lived without them thought they were an unnecessary advancement in technology.

That is an obscure comparison. Toilets fulfilled a very real issue. When did you last get cholera?

Most tech does not serve any real utility like this. Beyond generating money through increasingly deceitful means, what does Google do nowadays? The search engine has helped turn the internet into white noise. It has essentially become the obstacle it was designed to bypass.

If it wasn't for extremely targeted and manipulative advertising a lot of tech products wouldn't have a place in the world at all.

Do you think omnipresent screens, access to media and visual stimuli has a more profound impact on psyche or being able to use toilets? I would think the former has a way larger impact on our brains.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com