Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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I had this realization in stages.

1. Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes.

2. Some software comes already designed for surveillance purposes up front.

2a. This includes plenty of well-known mass appeal software; importantly, the customer-facing marketing copy and the investor pitch can present a completely different value proposition.

3. Software doesn't become used for surveillance or abuse by accident; there are actual human beings who make a decision to use it in this fashion, or commission it for this purpose.

3a. The "misguided programmers harming people by trying to solve social problems with technology" meme is dumb for many reasons, but it's also distracting (possibly purposefully so) from the fact that it's not software, or people who coded up the software, that are the primary culprits. The coders that were too naive or too self-interested to refuse work or blow the whistle may have some responsibility, but we should start talking about the people who made the decisions to commission or repurpose technology for bad purposes.

See also _Surveillance too cheap to meter_ https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2022/7/262077-surveillance-to...

> To stop the surveillance, [they] would have to get their equipment suppliers to make changes; they would have to change their own back-office systems; they would have to reformulate customer contracts so they would not rely on the data being available in case of disputes; and so on.

> [It] would cost [them] more money to stop the surveillance of their customers than to continue doing it.

> That is quite literally what "surveillance too cheap to meter" means.

Thing is, when the company that pays you actively wants to track everyone, there's little you can do as the person that creates tech form them.

If the piece of software you created is unbiased and unopinionated, it can be used for evil purposes. If you make the software deliberatedly against that, you have to (a) take measures without the company knowing (b) have the manpower to do it alone while still reaching development goals (c) those measures can be undone by another developer that cares less that you.

After all, software big enough is collective by nature. It's also unfair to us to think that we're responsible for any misuse as if we were mechanical engineers creating weapons for war

"Thing is, when the company that pays you actively wants to track everyone, there's little you can do as the person that creates tech form them."

You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit.

There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company, perhaps consequences that you won't enjoy as much as your current job stability and paycheck, but the choice is always there.

> There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company

This is why unions are so important, even in a field like software engineering. If you quit on your own, the company may not care. But using the threat of strikes, workers can demand better conditions for themselves and more ethical directions for their company.

Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action? Their owner employers sure are organizing adversarially in a multitude of ways in the open and behind closed doors

Tech workers disproportionally 1) believe in meritocracy, and 2) believe that the existing arrangement in IT is it, or at least closer to it than it would have been with unions in the picture.

Why that is the case is another interesting question.

Which is to say that even very intelligent people can be very vulnerable to believing in things which are patently false provided that the end result is the ability to continue to live in a state of complete denial, and a world of pure imagination, where no action is required on one's own part and you can just continue to hope that all of this is a temporary aberration that will get better on its own :)

Yep. Even clever engineers can be delusional fuckwits.

There's also a time component.

It's entirely possible that in the post-IBM microcomputer, pre-Google AdWords span, they were correct.

However, it's pretty obvious that current era, power has slid back from labor towards extremely-large corporations.

Obviously. Why else would people on hacker news advocate for all the socialist economic policies that humanity just spent the entire 20th century proving don't work?

Sadly history repeats so we'll probably just have another "cultural revolution" and "great leap forward" in the 21st century.

I disagree. I think most tech workers identify more with their employers and their class than their own status and that of their colleagues. They’re moving up, fast, and they’re satisfied with their prospects more than anything they might get from solidarity.

In Marxist terms, lumpenproletariat is a close approximation, but a weird accident of history.

That's not strange is it? If you're making 100k+/year, you're well into bourgeois territory, and FAANG benefits are practically near-instant-owner-class. Why would you expect anybody getting that kind of money to identify with the lower classes?

"Bourgeois" is not defined by how much you make per year. It's defined by your relationship to the means of production.

Anyone getting paid 100k+ is also getting stock options.

Sure, and many people getting less still own stocks via 401(k) etc. The important question is whether a person can live entirely off their rents, or they have to work for someone else for a living.

> That's not strange is it?

That depends on your baseline, of course. Or to answer your other question:

> Why would you expect anybody getting that kind of money to identify with the lower classes?

I don’t expect it, though I do have deep solidarity myself. Because, to return to the middle of your response:

> If you're making 100k+/year, you're well into bourgeois territory, and FAANG benefits are practically near-instant-owner-class.

I can speak to six figures, and I’m in no way into bourgeois territory. I’m approximately as comfortable as middle class boomers, ie I can make financial decisions to benefit my aging family with some hope I’ll still be comfortable myself. I don’t own anything in the sense meant by “bourgeois” in this context. I may yet, in the sense of a retirement plan. That’s a middle class aspiration. Which, having grown up poor and then broke and then getting by… I recognize very much is still working class.

There certainly is a larger segment of the tech work force than the general population which has reason to believe it can cross the bridge from gentry to ownership… but it’s still a minority of us and it’s mostly scraps. I don’t expect most of my colleagues to be comrades, but I certainly don’t agree with their class analysis which you have expressed so clearly.

> Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action?

If you mean software engineers when saying "tech workers" because unions make it harder to fire people. There's not much that makes a software engineer's job harder than a bad engineer who isn't getting fired and is destroying the quality of the product and the code and creating work for everyone else to fix, all the time.

Unions also result in gaining seniority by time spent in a job instead of competency, and that's also a miserable experience, when someone incompetent is dictating the engineering work. In software engineering you want people who are technically proficient and capable of mentoring to assume leadership positions and positions of increased responsibility, not people who've been there the longest.

Software engineers in my first hand experience have been able to organize around coordinated action to get their employer to improve their conditions and pay without unions necessarily. One simple example of that is to coordinate around pay transparency

> Why are tech workers so resistant to organized action?

I am not actually so much resistant to unions, as I do not see what benefit I’ll get from them. What exactly in my life would have changed for better if I had been a part of a union? Just one thing, can you name?

Probably better default settings when it comes to vacation, your off hours not being invaded by on-call, pay transparency, WfH/remote policies, etc.

If you have ever gone up against HR over anything ever, a union would have benefited you.

Vacation? I have unlimited days off, and my request was never rejected.

On call? They paid me $500 a week to have a cellular phone officially, but at the same time unofficially everyone was strictly forbidden to call it. It was an internal political move by the engineering department (see our commitment to this new product? we even put Mike on call), turned into an additional benefit to best engineers.

> If you have ever gone up against HR over anything ever, a union would have benefited you.

My wife (who is one of the best teachers in California, documented) was fired exactly because of the union rules. The principal wanted to keep her so much, that the district turned his desire into a political tool: oh you want to keep L? she is a good teacher? sign this paper (some financial cover up) and we will give you the money to keep L. The union did not care is she a good teacher, or not. Less seniority? Go away (but we keep your $1000 union fees).

Because most of them think someday they will be the owner employer.

They won't, but its a delusion that favours capital over labour.

Don’t most engineers loathe management positions and just want to focus on tech?

> This is why unions are so important

My favorite counter-example is a collective action of about a thousand medical workers in SF Hospital demanding from Facebook an increase in censorship (and the censorship is impossible without surveillance).

Why do you think a union will support your ethical choices? And if it would not - you’d have to quit the company and the union, loosing not only your salary, but also union fees.

This is an argument against democracy itself. If you don't think democracy would work for you, then I can't convince you a union would either.

The marginal cost of union fees is trivial in comparison to a salary.

A union gives you more choices than "surveil or resign".

And if the union fails you because it says "no, you have to surveil" then you can still resign.

That well has been poisoned in the US. It's tough to find any extant union which isn't a corrupt sellout organization leeching off the workers they're supposed to represent. It's hard to change, because laws around unions are designed to lead to the current situation. Cross-industry/informal/extra-organizational action and coordination using the internet is probably a far more workable idea than traditional unions.

Have you considered that that's what Porky wants you to think about unions?

Yes. I've also worked in a few union shops and experienced it myself. I'm a socialist through and through, but what is called a union in the US is not an organization of and for the workers, it is a co-opted parasitic extension of corporate and government policy. Workers can and should organize, but restricting ourselves to following the controlled opposition is stupid and self-defeating.

You can organize.

Why shouldn't workers in a factory have a say over how their labour is used by those who appropriate it?

Baffled by how obvious solutions appear to have fallen off the radar.

They do have a say. Their labour is being purchased from them, not appropriated. They can say no (individually or together) and ultimately they can walk away.

As you say, collective bargaining is usually going to be more effective than individual.

> As you say, collective bargaining is usually going to be more effective than individual.

It may be more effective in terms of salary and working conditions (though I doubt that in software engineering I would have been able to get better pay through collective).

But in terms of ethics?

Individually, it’s almost impossible to make me support surveillance and censorship. But a big collective is much more vulnerable to manipulation. Comes 9/11 and you’ll get “collective” support for Patriot act, comes 6/1 and you’ll get “collective” support for censorship.

> You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit.

If you had a union, or even a professional association whose code of ethics had teeth, you could refuse without having to quit. It's incredible to me that in 2022, most programmers are still anti-union.

Even in war, we don't universally take "I was following orders" as a valid excuse. People writing surveillance software are not innocent - not as guilty as those that gave the order, but still guilty.

It's also why employers prefer to hire young people over more experienced people, because the latter actually understand what's going on and might object.

I think to combat this you need to have laws like in Germany where this is pretty much explicitly illegal. We cannot put the technology back in the bottle

The problem is that "bad" is subjective and I'm sure most of the people making these decisions don't agree that they are being "bad"

That's fair, but the 3 and 3a. is not about whether a decision is bad or not, but about attribution. It makes no sense to blame "technology" or engineers in news stories for being used in some way, but completely ignore the people who ordered and bankrolled it to be used in that way.

Why would anybody care what they think?

Don't worry, Free Software will save us. /s

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