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The title itself and the fact that it's posted here almost implicitly contains every comment within its seed.

> "Your 'little men,' your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better."

I have since about 2010, sensed better. Snowden helped me trust my instincts. At this time I am left with no moral choice whatsoever but to speak up about the direction of technology and what we are helping to create. It now seems like a Pascal's wager. If I'm wrong it won't matter and I'll simply look like a fool. I am really, really praying that I end up looking a fool.

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The sad thing is that most often, the actual villains trick everyone into thinking it's a different party.

When bad people rise to power, they often do so vilifying one or more other groups. The odds are not in our favor, collectively, we will be tricked as well.

Yes, of course, that’s what it’s like for the other side. Those people are all bad. We on the correct side don’t have that problem.

You're being sarcastic, but I can think of a number of cases where someone could have expressed that opinion seriously and been pretty much correct, including Jews under the Nazis, and the Ukrainians now.

You can't reduce politics to a game of pattern-matching where every time someone says something which pattern-matches to "you called someone bad people!" you should react just like the last time someone said it. Sometimes people are bad, sometimes they're not, and there's no shortcut to figuring it out other than by taking the time and effort to actually figure it out, (Which isn't really a shortcut at all.)

Of course, no one is arguing that all sides are equally bad or that when one side says that that the other side is evil they are always wrong… the problem is that it is hard to know if you are being tricked or told the truth.

>I can think of a number of cases where someone could have expressed that opinion seriously and been pretty much correct, including Jews under the Nazis, and the Ukrainians now.

The problem is that if you place yourself in a random time and party, you are more likely to be a Nazi than a Jew, because a crucial element of evil is the power to do it, which is associated with having greater numbers, and that rigs the odds so that your random insertion will be among them rather than their heroic enemies.

In early 30s the Nazis only got 33-37% of the vote not too much unlike the portion of the electorate who support ending democracy in favor of our own would be dictator.

"Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule..."

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-r...

If you place yourself at a random time of trouble you will 2 to 1 find yourself behind the eyes of someone indifferent or scared neither victim nor victimizer.

You seem to be arguing in favor of the ability to declare one side entirely bad, while I (using sarcasm) argued against it. I am still not entirely convinced that the ability to completely denounce one side as entirely evil is somehow an important freedom which must be preserved, even if it is sometimes true.

Regarding your examples, I couldn’t possibly comment, for obvious reasons.

I think that when it becomes culty and reality-denying is where the real problems come in. For example, 47 years ago the city of Phenom Penh was forced at gunpoint to march into the wilderness to farm rice because of how some people interpreted Marx. Those that weren't simply marched off to be killed--often beaten to death to save on bullets--were made to farm rice despite not knowing how and with no plans made to actually feed them. So most of the rest worked 16+ hour days and simply starved, because you could get shot for high crimes like catching a fish to eat when it was swimming between your legs.

> I think that when it becomes culty and reality-denying is where the real problems come in. For example, 47 years ago the city of Phenom Penh was forced at gunpoint to march into the wilderness to farm rice because of how some people interpreted

This! Absolutely. Technological backlash is one of the grave dangers I address in Digital Vegan. Anti-intellectualism lies just beneath the surface in a technological society that is out of touch with itself and has alienated its members through the very technology that could unite it. It grows prone to regressive catastrophes like Mao's brutal projects and of the Khmer Rouge you mention. "Strong Leaders" attach themselves easily to ruralism, "back to basics" and other regressive ideologies. In many ways I think Putin may be one of them. Technological cults beget anti-technological cults.

A problem is that nuanced (but 'inconvenient') tech critique gets labelled as precisely that regressive anti-intellectualism by those who profit from technologically mediated alienation. Simply count the allusions to Luddism in responses to my comments. That "shutting down" and trying to place reasoned technological critique as beyond discussion is mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and is the road to trouble.

> When bad people rise to power, they often do so vilifying one or more other groups.

No. When times get tough, everyone is naturally drawn to their own. Visit any prison.

> The odds are not in our favor, collectively, we will be tricked as well.

Nobody is tricked. The person who appeals to the masses' self-interest will become leader.

> but to speak up about the direction of technology and what we are helping to create

Shot in the dark here, but maybe it's worth asking: how exactly are you managing your (remaining) relation with technology going forward? How do you see it (in the future, that is)?

I'm asking because I assume (this being HN) that you're somehow employed in a technology-related field and, as such, you can't/didn't just "quit" technology cold-turkey. I'm also asking because I'm sensing that I'm in the same both as you, i.e. I'm a computer programmer that has started to see more and more clearly the way technology is going and what bad things it does to our society (for me it started about 4-5 years ago, when I actually got to read Ellul first-hand, and before anyone starts asking, no, I'm definitely not a fan of what Ted Kaczynski did).

Later edit: Seen your other comments on this thread after I had written down my comment above, saw that you also mentioned Ellul and some other very interesting stuff/authors that I didn't know about, so thanks a lot "from a distance" for all those suggestions, comments/inputs like yours is what still keeps me active on this website.

> how exactly are you managing your (remaining) relation with technology going forward? How do you see it (in the future, that is)?

Thanks for asking. Definitely one for a personal email which I'd be delighted to chat about (follow my book site).

What do you sense about technology? Can you describe what you're worried we are creating? Obviously there are unintended negative effects, but I think it's not certain how they'll play out.

That's literally the point of the quote and their statement, I think. Any specific thing can be convincingly shot down in a forum of relative experts like this one.

We don't know where it's going or how it'll play out. But we can feel that it is already bad and is going to get worse. Some day people will try to say "we didn't know" but that will be a lie. Some of us did and tried to convince y'all. But because we aren't able to convincingly predict the future in minute detail we've been ignored.

The worst part is whenever bringing up such points others are often quick to dismiss them as wacky "conspiracy theories" or even just unfounded pessimism about the state of things as they are today. Merely bringing up comparisons of certain observations about society today to those of Nazi Germany (or other reprehensible regimes throughout history) risks getting oneself cancelled or targeted in other ways. "How dare you compare the horrors of World War II with the relative ease of things today! It's nowhere near as bad today as it was back then!", cry the detractors. And they may be right about that in some sense, but those who don't learn from history and apply its lessons to the present are doomed to repeat certain mistakes, or at least to make history rhyme, as the saying goes. The chilling effect caused by the stifling of open discussion about how things are today and where they could risk going wrong in the future is how we all end up sleepwalking into the well-known horrors of the past that we'd otherwise all wish to avoid.

We can thank Snowden for giving us a pretty good example of what has gone wrong and how conspiracy theories cannot all be dismissed - all the more effective, probably, because of the discontinuity it represented in this slow "boiling the frog" business.

History is full of groups opposed to technological progress. Perhaps the most famous being the Luddites who are now the namesake of a word that signifies someone who is opposed to technological advancement. How do you differentiate your senses now compared to what they sensed back then? As it turns out, they were incredibly wrong and the amount of suffering has reduced as a direct consequence of technology. Technology has also made us more aware of human suffering but we should be careful to adjust for information available. The truth is that, since WWII, the quality of life has increased tremendously due to technology.

You should look into what the luddites were actually doing and why. There's definitely a lesson there but not the one you think.

Anyway yes, as I said. Dismiss excuse invalidate. I will truly be happy if I turn out to be wrong about this. Where will you be if you are wrong?

They were angry because factories could produce their crafts more cheaply and then they could not find a job (in their choice of craft) because the factories had reduced the demand for those jobs. So they burned down factories in order to protect their jobs. The same sentiment has been rediscovered every technological shift. Refrigeration, computation, internet, etc. Last time I checked, no one feels bad for all those iceberg harvesters that used to bring ice cubes to millionaires in the Southern US who no longer work. We are too busy enjoying our iced teas I suppose.

> Where will you be if you are wrong?

You do not know my stance on the matter. You presume, because I responded inquiring into how your senses were different, that I was not on your side. But I would most likely be in a little cabin in the mountains. I have quit Meta for the past 6 years, have de-Googled myself (in so much that you cannot really what others do), and generally agree that many technologies are more harmful to society than help. Particularly, what people call surveillance capitalism. That being said, I recognize that it is not the underlying technology that is problematic but the institutions and decision makers. If you read the article, they are recreating the exact widening of the gap between themselves and the people under the guise that they know better (since the have the data, they made it, only they understand the tech, etc.) I would never advocate for the destruction of the internet to prevent these institutions but rather educate and elucidate my peers to narrow this gap. I asked you to help close this gap by telling me what you see and your response was "you're the problem for even asking".

They were angry because said factories took away their livlihoods, and that of their children as well. And because there was no social net in place to soften the decline in demand for their trades.

> History is full of groups opposed to technological progress.

That is a disingenuous comment or you gravely misunderstand the issues.

There are almost no groups ever in history "opposed to technological progress", even the "Luddites" that inevitably will get mention a dozen times in this thread.

Nobody is opposed to technological progress. The opposition is to technological tyranny. I do hope you understand the difference between the two.

> There are almost no groups ever in history "opposed to technological progress", even the "Luddites"

I would agree that the Luddites were not opposed to all technological progress, just the part that impacted their jobs. But this type of reasoning leads to the tragedy of the commons where each group refuses technology that replaces themselves. The end result is no technological progress. Anyway, "technological tyranny" is poorly defined and people just pick whatever they deem wrong as tyranny and whatever is good as a non-issue. We are under rule of the internet. Without it, society would cease to function. Are people opposed to the internet tyranny? We require a functioning society to have advanced health care, regardless of socialism/capitalism, are we under "advanced health care tyranny" because it is being used to push people into a functioning society?

They were not, in fact, opposed to progress that impacted their jobs. They were opposed to elimination of their agency. Very, very different.

Destroying equipment was a tactic, not an ideology. The worst that can honestly be said about it is that it didn't work.

You make some astute and fair comments but this one just jumped out at me as terrifyingly wrong

> "We are under rule of the internet."

Good Lord! No! If we are "under the rule" of anything it is the Rule of Law. In Britain, unlike USA, we are "subjects of Her Majesty", such that the Law is mediated through a parliamentary democracy. You have it slightly different under a republic. Either way, despite general cynicism we are lucky enough to enjoy governments that serve us, and long may that last.

The internet is nothing but a tool. It damn well serves us. And it does so if and only if we ask it to. Your's is precisely the sort of expressions that gives me concern, please reconsider what you are saying.

I'm confused because you are the one who said that they were opposed to technological tyranny. Like, somehow how factories were controlling their lives/agency as another commenter puts it. I am the one that is saying that technology is but a tool (which we agree?). I was just extending this nebulous definition of "technology running our lives" to mean "technological tyranny" which I prefaced was ill-defined and took it to its absurd logical limit that we were being "controlled" by other technologies.

In response to your deeper comment.

> I'm confused because you are the one who said that they were opposed to technological tyranny.

Yes, sorry if my lazy parsing (overzealous response) means we're talking at cross purposes. I think we are more in agreement than not.

If there's anything we are confusing each other over it may be "what already is" versus "what we want to avoid".

respects

We can at least sense that the potential is there for technology to become something horrible and oppressive - either on its own, or underlying some kind of oppressive government.

We don't have to know the exact form it will take. We should oppose all the forms that tech can become oppressive.

Well, the 20th century gave us a lot of examples already...

But are you seriously rejecting the post-WW2 paradigm where tech was made sacred and engineers and scientists were turned into its high priests ?

I know some people like that, but I wouldn't have expected to see them on hacker news !

It's def interesting to see a pushback commentary on cybernetics (catchall term for what I think OP is describing), so I'll wade in.

The overall system and how it is applied and incentivized, not the random non-deterministic effects some of which are cool and some very bad, is the issue.

Tech introduces a governance layer with increasingly par relevancy with the rest of our civil social contract. I have to pay taxes to the city, and I also have to do it through a website. I want to go out to a restaurant, I have to pay via a toasttab app. I want to use public transportation, and its a cashless affair. I want to go to a concert, I need a ticketmaster app on an updated smart phone with geolocation services turned on (and so on). I want to get car insurance, I install an app and list my social media for discounts.

Worse, the system leverages massive network effects, so there are stronger links everyday to enforce tech and civil society, not just the civil society part. Worse, the automation will eventually start drowning the knowledge class careers as well.

While I am definitely letting my ideology leak through above, this area has a tremendous amount of research behind it so this just isn't me and my luddite buddies. Big Tech discovers it occasionally, cypherpunks(tor, pgp, bitcoin) have been on it for a while, non-technical observers (pysch, lib arts) often notice it from external evaluation especially around misinformation, and so on. MIT pioneered cybernetics research, which specifically aims for the above governance.

It's really hard to miss this dynamic if you work in the industry and look beyond your company, and even if you do miss it or don't believe your own take, there is a mountain of cross-disciplinary research on it.

Cybernetics, both as a term and idea carries an interesting history.

Norbert Wiener was himself a devastating critic of the immediate Dr. Strangelove type conclusions his generation of peers immediately took to. At the time a comparison was made to eugenics, though I forget by whom within that circle.

It has incarnations not just in the obvious twentieth century fascist/axis contexts (Germany, Italy, Japan) but then in South America and as a Soviet version, both with leftist spins.

The most modern condemnation I have encountered (other than of economists/doco-journalists like Varoufakis, Adam Curtis etc) is from "The Invisible Committee" which offers an anarchist take [1]. []

[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-commit...

[] This presents some really interesting dichotomies/contradictions for the libertarian-anarchists stereotypically of Silicon Valley.

Ya Chile in the 70's was a hub for it.

Thanks for the link!

If you're looking for a modernist take that's not econ or journalism, the way in is probably checking out the CCRU, which still has a lot of literature on it and by it around [0], and the Cybernetic Hypothesis [1]. CCRU is like if a technically aware philosophy department discovered this and extended it into total conclusion(idk, that's not really a good explanation), Cybernetic Hypothesis is like if like arts/anarchist types did the same, and then both filter into interesting pools. Cypherpunk and early bitcoin are definitely tuned in, but with probably different motivations and outcome goals.

What sort of blows my mind is especially those first two sources offer really clear eyed commentary on 'all of this,' but they are also dated - 1990's publishing date. It's like you have to tap into sometimes hokey "the information age" literature to get a clear read on 2020's tech. What's worse is the 1990's lit theorizes fairly radical (for the time) outcomes that came very true today even beyond the usual Neuromancer/Cryptonomicon/Sci-Fi mappings, yet there isn't much discussion on it (like this thread).

edit - would check out Jaron Lanier, 'who owns the future,' for a pretty modern take that discusses the above well and he has tech bonafides.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un... [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cyberneti...

> What sort of blows my mind is especially those first two sources offer really clear eyed commentary on 'all of this,' but they are also dated - 1990's publishing date. It's like you have to tap into sometimes hokey "the information age" literature to get a clear read on 2020's tech.

Yes that's weird isn't it. I don't believe in "suppression conspiracies" but am amazed how often deeply prescient things are passed over the first time around and must be dug up. For more archaeology dig around Phil Agre's "Red Rock Eaters" and the old Whole Earth where I first discovered Dana Meadows.

Evidence supported by links b/t diverse parties and/or similar conclusions without much of a shared background, defeated by the catch-all defense of Luddite accusations/general malaise, is what disconcerts me the most.

A drugged out 1990 Nick Land, the MIT crew (Meadows, Wiener), the original computers (Lanier, Agre, cypherpunks), Mark Fisher and the Occupy area, etc. etc. all come to fairly similar conclusions or exist in very similar orbits, "other research" by the same entities was or is fairly influential, but this area - cybernetic, the Concern, "idk but something isn't great" just does not exist currently and that lack of anchoring really concerns me. All that's available is ex-Social Media/adtech CEOs going on podcast apology tours like that Social Dilemma doc.

Really don't know what to think of it.

Nick Land (of the CCRU) supposedly recently "opened fire" on Moldbuggian hard-ons for monarchy, I'll need to check that out... (Likely related : Unabomber's criticisms of how the "left" cannot avoid becoming the tool (in both senses) of "the System" when taking power ?)

Found it (but not read yet) : from p45 on :

https://agorist.xyz/files/Agorism_XXI_I_2022.pdf

I'm guessing that they were always fundamentally opposed anyway, Land being of "bottom" and Yarvin of the "top" sensibilities (in the political compass sense) ?

Thanks a lot, I wonder how I missed that one...

I'm 30% in, and this does seem to be a potential seed for a vision of the future that the (bottom) left has been so sorely lacking since the failure of the Soviets !

You don't see something so radical often (last time would have been the Unibomber ?), since they seem to consider that the whole Western civilization has to be thrown away, including its Ancient Greek roots ?!

(But then we are in unprecedented times, with tremendous responsibility, and keep failing harder and harder, so at some point you have to wonder why...)

Not op, but I want to jump in. I sense that we're building a culture of surveillance and manipulation. Long-term none of us wants to live in such a society or culture, but we're building it anyway, because in the short-term it's incentivized, by economics.

When your long-term goals and short-term actions don't line up, you're in for nasty weather.

Recently been seeing, uh, changes in some of my relatives. First Covid denial, then antivaccine in general (wtf), now that and war denial (yes, "there's no war").

Otherwise pretty smart people, but somehow they fall for the dumbest shit. Thinking back, I don't think I ever heard them express such views, and especially not be so adamant about it. They get angry when anyone points out why they're wrong. They're always right, everyone else is wrong...

I didn't believe in Fecebook/Twatter making everyone dumber (never used them myself), but maybe there's truth to that. I guess that's one way technology is affecting the masses, and it's scary because you can't stop the masses, the majority will win, as for now they're in a democracy, actively voting to destroy it and probably not even realizing it. All so a few rich assholes can gain more power.

Other than that, the centralization of everything, that just can't be good. Not only software, but hardware, too. I mean, half of the world's chips (and most of the best ones) are made on one tiny island - God forbid something happens to it.

The few big companies making computers will gladly solder everything and break a chip if you try to reuse it elsewhere, just so you throw it away and buy a new computer when the time comes (i.e. it breaks).

Can't even fix your own car anymore because disconnecting the battery means you need your onboard computer reprogrammed - at an authorized price gouge...errr, I mean, service center, of course.

Not to mention surveillance and the ability to charge you with something at any point if they ever so wish (thanks to "social media").

Technology itself is not at fault, but it does give assholes a whole lot of newpower.

> I mean, half of the world's chips (and most of the best ones) are made on one tiny island - God forbid something happens to it.

Resilience is one of the big issues I work with. It's one of the topics that's not about tyranny or malice, but is in some ways more frightening. It's because we don't see it as "other inflicted" that it stays beneath the radar somewhat.

Ya I'm not sure how anyone could have missed the numerous and very public insanity-descents from known figures or their own relatives, and think things are still business as usual.

I forgot to add that before 2015-ish, I've not heard this kind of stuff from these relatives. And their main hangouts are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, the usual suspects.

I believe in their mind, they're getting "the truth" and know better. But the reality is it's... self-propagandization.

When 50 channels say you're wrong but you find one that tells "the truth"... I dunno, it's like the common sense circuits have been fried.

Just like people in Russia are brainwashed by the state media, so do these people brainwash themselves online, likely reinforced by the recommendation systems used on the major platforms.

Which I notice on Youtube, btw, and it always skews towards some dumb/funny or just idiotic content. View a couple of funny videos and that's all I get for the rest of the month. I mostly watch stuff like DIYPerks, various machine & history stuff, tutorials on a lot of things and listen to music, but I never get good, or any, recommendations on that. Although to be completely fair, I don't subscribe to anything, just mostly look it up after Google+Wikipedia.

But social media existed long before 2015...

I don't think that it was a coincidence that a significant fraction of the "alternative" online places I was hanging out on (like Zero Hedge) suddenly went pretty crazy at the same time as the Russo-Ukrainian war started in 2014 ?

(They're typically called "alt-right" now.)

Not that this is completely new - I got my "conspiracy theory education" in 2005-2010 when I watched a pretty convincing hour(s)-long YouTube video about how the World Trade Center had supposedly been subjected to controlled demolition... and then shortly after that an even more convincing, detailed, and longer video describing how that previous video was wrong.

RIP Zerohedge.

What possibly happened to ZH, and what you're discussing, has a good operational walkthrough here - https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/blog/pdfs/Gh...

> Can you describe what you're worried we are creating?

Not in a casual comment. So I took some time to write a book that hopefully contains some insights if you're genuinely interested to know.

So did a bunch of other people;

For a gentle interest to modern tech critique I'd suggest Zuboff, Rushkoff, Lanier and so on, but to be honest of you want non-fictional/sci-fi accounts of the "Nineteen Eighty Four" and "Brave New World" type then I'd recommend starting with Postman, Illich, Ellul and Mumford as these lay firmer foundations.

IBM and the Holocaust (Edwin Black) is obviously worth a read in this context.

> Obviously there are unintended negative effects

Those are interesting. But so are the intended ones.

> but I think it's not certain how they'll play out.

I'd put good money it being uncertain too. :)

I second Ellul recommendation, FWIW. The Technological Society is a great place to start.

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