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Comment by monksy | Hacker News Reader

We seem to have a very authoritarian government in place. I don't understand how we've gotten here, or why people aren't more concerned.

When it comes to encryption D & Rs are both claiming "it's for the children" and scare tacits. We have incredibly invasive KYC rules that have corporations storing ids and live biometric data. We have a coast to coast driver tracker system. We also have "anti-bad thing" tracking on minor person to person transfers. (You can't say certain words in zelle, venmo, etc transfers) I don't think I fully understand why they're pushing for the digital dollar.

For person to person transfers, this seems to be highly suspect. Why does the president need to know that you exchanged 2.50 with your friend over a payment of potentially embarrassing product. (I'm talking non-illegal but no one's business for a private trade of say conterfit Star Wars actions figures)

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> I don't understand how we've gotten here, or why people aren't more concerned.

Iterated "Well, sure, the other team's guy is going to abuse the hell out of that power, but my team's guy will only use it to do the best, most right, wonderful things ever!" dilemma. Executive Orders, among others. Can't do it legally? Issue an EO and by the time it winds out being illegal through the courts, you've gotten most of what you wanted anyway. Among other games played.

D & R tend to fight tooth and nail for the 24/7 media ecosystem, but if you ask them, "Hey, could you use more data on what those little peons you rule over are doing in order to fight Bad Things?" - they both agree fully. And, even better, there are lots of tech companies (looks around the current place...) who have outdone each other to excel at "doing the bidding of the current government, or what they think the current government might like them to do," in exchange for the expected favors.

And... and yet. People still manage to do Bad Things. People still manage to fund Bad Causes (honk). If only they had a little bit more. If only people couldn't still exchange value with mostly untraceable methods (I assume, for no reason beyond "It's technically possible and someone probably thought it could be useful to someone," that the serial #s on bills handed out from the ATM are tracked - especially to the sort of people who ask for $100s - though bank tellers don't obviously log them unless the ordering of them is logged on drawer insertion).

All this is why I'm happy to offer "Metal, cash, computer hardware, or digital - in that order!" when I owe someone locally money.

The last few times I asked for $100s, the teller counted it once, and then ran all the bills again through a counting machine. I'd bet a kidney the newest counting machines also log serial numbers now.

Interesting. I've not seen that behavior, but I'm willingly in a pretty rural backwaters. I'll keep my eyes open for it, thanks!

> ssue an EO and by the time it winds out being illegal through the courts, you've gotten most of what you wanted anyway. Among other games played.

I forgot about the forced voluntary program to collect biometrics from Americans leaving the country. That was inacted by Trump by EO and hasn't been removed by Biden. (Thanks Biden)

> Iterated "Well, sure, the other team's guy is going to abuse the hell out of that power, but my team's guy will only use it to do the best, most right, wonderful things ever!" dilemma

It used to be that you had to wait for decades to be able to say “told you so.” These days the flip flops are happening so fast it gives me whiplash. People cheering for nationwide injunctions against the Trump administration have turned on a dime and are decrying the idea that one random judge in a forum shopped district can overturn federal policy in all 50 states.

The idea the government used to be less authoritarian is fundamentally wrong. Here's a few samples

Founding to 1920: women can't vote

1919 to 1933 - adults can't decide to drink alcohol

1942 to 1945 - Industry lobby group wins executive action to imprison competitors in concentration camps

1964 - Local law enforcement murder civil rights activists.

2023 - Local law enforcement reminisce about how it's harder to murder journalists, sue journalist who reveals their death threats against his family

Some of these are good examples and some are not.

women not being able to vote is not an example of authoritarianism in the US. Neither is the 18th amendment. These were democratically selected and the US did not appear to resemble an authoritarian regime at the time. Note that using authority is not the same as being authoritarian. The examples you gave from 1942 onward are though. It should be noted that the FBI was also famously involved in a number of illegal activities[1] See [2] for authoritarianism.

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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

If a country undemocratically restricts the right to vote then any decisions subsequently voted on aren't democratic.

Women didn't vote to not have the right to vote.

Just because something is democratically voted on doesn't mean it can't be authoritarian. A majority can democratically vote to repress a minority. Note that the comment I'm replying to is (correctly) calling potential laws the Senate might enact authoritarian.

Athens, the poster child of democracy, didn't have voting tights for women, and was generally pretty misogynistic. (OTOH Sparta, with its clear fascist tendencies, had very advanced women's rights for the time.)

Authoritarianism is not when citizens vote for things we currently find unpalatable. It's when elected, and especially unelected rulers oppress the populace, with the populace having little recourse, or ways to protest.

> Athens, the poster child of democracy

Athens is a significant example of an early democratcy. They were still working the bugs out back then.

It's authoritarian to enslave people, and it's authoritarian to deny people rights on the basis of sex. They did both.

> It's when elected, and especially unelected rulers oppress the populace, with the populace having little recourse, or ways to protest.

Yes, but the critical point is it doesn't have to be 51% of the populace. If rules oppress 10% of the populace that can still be authoritarianism.

Suppose I agreed with your definition though. That could explain away Japanese internment, but I don't see how it justifies disenfranchising women. They made up close to or even an outright majority of the country. Unless they aren't people, and thus not part of the populace? Surely a minority can't declare everyone else doesn't count and thus claim to be the majority position?

I agree with your points! My point is that democracy by itself is not sufficient for what we'd now call a civilized society. It also takes certain values to be shared by most of the society. And these have changed significantly since the times of Pericles.

This is of course an extremely modern view of democracy. If you think everything other than our system today is authoritarian, you are going to find a lot of authoritarianism in every place you look. It isn’t a very useful definition of authoritarianism. It reminds me a bit of the word “heretic” the way you are using it.

At minimum it used to be much smaller in scope and reach.

Which enabled a higher level of regional and local tyranny.

Edit: The last example I gave up top illustrates the problem. Every iteration of the US government has had local law enforcement. They've always been able to abuse their power, but greater centralized government power has brought about some limited accountability.

I agree the national government should be shrinked a bit, but increasing the state and local government is the wrong way to go. Sub-national government should be shrinked an order of magnitude more than the national government.

While I don't think local government is more especially tyrannical than centralized government, I agree with you on the remedy in either case.

> We seem to have a very authoritarian government in place. I don't understand how we've gotten here, or why people aren't more concerned.

It's the natural tendency of governments. The founders of the USA understood this and tried to create a system of government that was very weak centrally. This has been slowly eroded over the past 250 years, and especially since WWII and the cold war.

The founders of the USA were local elites who didn't want their power checked, so they created a weak central government.

I'm more scared of local politicians than national ones. One reason is that natl politicians tend to get much more attention and oversight.

I feel the other way. Local elites may be bad but they are bt definition local and you can leave from where they are.

That is the best counterargument.

But it's not clear to me that there will end up being better and worse places, instead of each place having its own brand of shitty local elites. And I don't want to bow down to elites allegedly on my side of the political spectrum, I don't want any of them having power over me.

Many of the founders ended up winning president elections. If Mr. Jefferson or Mr. Madison, with all their disagreement, would like to obtain more tyrannical powers for the US President, they were in a position to do so while writing Constitution. They both were elected presidents soon after.

You're missing my entire point. The founders had significant local power their entire life. So they saw national power as something bad that could counter local power. They didn't want tyrannical powers for the president, that doesn't mean they weren't slaveholding authoritarians.

there is a pretty closed circle of people who end up being picked for non-elected, federal, bureaucratic directorships. It's not really 'public servants who have the best credentials and a history of achievement and knowledge in the field' and more like 'people who have been working on an agenda in and out of academia, federal agencies, and non-profits who are particularly well connected to party members'.

they have agendas that they have worked on long before they get selected and they are often chosen specifically to implement this plan without anyone in the public knowing what it is. This explains how the anti-privacy, anti-encryption agenda manages to appear simultaneously in both the US and EU. There are people working behind the scenes to push this stuff. Then it appears and suddenly elected politicians are voting on something with thousands of pages that no one in the public has read, or a non-elected bureaucracy is suddenly rapidly implementing something with a plan that appears very well designed.

I don't understand the conspiracy theories. These fast settlement services are already provided by private banking services. The government is stepping in and providing a cheap option for all banks. You aren't forced to use this any more than you're forced to use anything that came before.

And the reason the government is doing this is that it already provides a slow settlement service for all US banks. It only makes sense to upgrade it.

> I don't understand how we've gotten here, or why people aren't more concerned.

From what I can tell, the root issue is that most people are item-oriented instead of system-oriented.

People are animals and animals need to survive. Survival is path dependant, so people think today is more important than tomorrow. In actuality, today and tomorrow are the same thing.

The American experiment seems to be failing its two pillars of capitalism and democracy for the same reason: they require input from most people. Rather, they require _thoughtful_ input from most people - and most people ain't that good at thinkin.

As far as I can tell, the game is already lost. Competition in all key products is at best reduced to 4 players. Money's influence on politics is hiding in plain sight. At least taco bell delivers.

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