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Comment by macinjosh | Hacker News Reader

Western democracies are falling into authoritarian behavior at a remarkable rate. I am legit worried.

I guess to be fair, there always has been an authoritarian bent to Western democracies. It's just that most of us here on HN are not members of the groups against which those democracies employ authoritarian practices. It just kind of shows you why you have to stand up as soon as you see a practice or law that's F'ed up. It's pretty much a guarantee that on a time-scale long enough, that government will use that practice on you.

Even better, the folks who frequent HN could stop aiding authoritarianism by building the tech, but that would require turning down lucrative RSUs, so I'm not holding my breath.

We should not only stop building tech that aids authoritarianism but start building tech that fights it.

Time for a cypherpunk revival.

Dystopia is where the real money's at.

And they'll just infiltrate your open source project, in the name of preventing petty "harassment" of developers. That way they will allow weaknesses in the protocol to arise, due to attrition of the best developers. And there you go, everything has been handed over to intelligence agencies, who can now easily break its security.

I totally nuked my career in communications and networking as a result of Internet mass surveillance and the prosecution of Orwellian "thought crimes". It really is a modern day witch hunt. Had to do something else, and am so much happier now that it's gone.

Yes, I was so outraged and shocked from it, what the government was doing, specifically regarding Internet pornography, that I had "moral injury". A condition not dissimilar from PTSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury

We are living in the 21st Century and we are still behaving, on some level like it's 1692. The year when the Salem witch trials were carried out.

And few people speak up about what's going on. They consider it normal. Because of how the Overton window works. How the frog has boiled so slowly over the decades.

It has a specific name: inverted totalitarianism.

Yep.

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

Also democratic backsliding, which I think "new" Labour really set into motion starting all the way back in 1997.

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

Apparently there was Soviet influence on the Labour party and it was going on for decades, and may explain its particularly nasty authoritarian streak. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1225637/How-Kremlin...

From that Daily Mail article (2009):

" The unpalatable truth is that many ministers in Government today rose through the ranks of a British socialist movement that was heavily influenced - and even controlled - by the Kremlin in Moscow. "

" As the Spectator says: 'Indeed, New Labour, which has governed since 1997, cannot be understood unless these communist influences are taken into account. 'Many of New Labour's characteristics - its deep suspicion of outsiders, its structural hostility to democratic debate, its secrecy, its faith in bureaucracy, the embedded preference for striking deals out of the public eye, and its ruthless reliance on a small group of trusted activists, result from the lengthy detente with the Kremlin.' "

So russia is not only causing trouble in Ukraine, it also seriously affected politics here in the UK. And it might be why we are living in such a precarious situation, when it comes to our liberties, here in 2023.

One major problem with these descriptions of inverted totalitarianism is how subject they become to ideological preference, even by those who create them. Note that Sheldon Wolin came up with his definition in 2003 during the hysterical Bush years (hysterical on the part of both the government with its war on terror justifications and by the progressive left for styling Bush as a new Hitler).

Would he have applied the same label to the same things under Obama later? After all, the later president expanded on nearly everything Bush did and took it to new levels. Trump after him did the same thing in many ways too.

In all cases, criticism is often divided along ideological lines against tendencies that can be used in either direction with just as much evil or authoritarian intent, and this selective blindness by critics becomes idiotica and absurd.

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