Comment by freefaler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freefaler | Hacker News Reader

Cory Doctorow has a prescient talk: "The coming war on general computation" from 2011 (12 years ago) in which he argues that all general computing platforms (OS, phone OS, browser) would face challenges by governments and corporations. This looks like another way to control content distribution and put more control in Google's hands. They've made a great strategic choice in building Chrome browser and effectively superseded Microsoft and Apple on desktops as a platform.

The talk can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

When people have means to consume or produce content without control any governmental bureaucrat will try to control this activity. History supports this argument.

No printing press > no cheap books > illiterate population > easy to control what spreads as information and what do not.

Printing press arrived > cheap books > growing literacy > control over the presses. Lenin's first targets were the post/telegraph (communication), bridges and railways (movement of people) and all big printing houses (Lenin's Full Collected works - vol. 32, page 282)

Radio arrived > Fixed Frequencies Radio sets sold & Governmental Radio jamming stations

TV > Licence to broadcast

Internet > Big Firewall of China & etc...

And don't even think about moving money freely as experienced by requirement to show why are you paying someone and those nice people from bank compliance departments.

The cost of enforcement in digital economy is way cheaper than before. The tools are there or can be built cheaply and sadly they're only built one way, from the government to the people. Open governmental data and strong society control over governmental actions is almost non-existent. "Brave new world" is here.

There should be a way to support important open-source projects with fundraising drives for features and etc ... Open source is one of the very few ways to sustain important digital freedoms.

"more control in Google's hands."

I'm much more worried about more control in the government's hands.

In theory at least, there can always be browser or search alternatives. And even if not widespread there will be options for motivated individuals who want a more permissive browser and internet experience.

But I can't escape the government - certainly not without the risk of imprisonment or other legal trouble.

I don't want to be controlled by either corporations or the government, but more and more they seem one-in-the-same. The government uses corporations to administer the control, with the force of law to back it up. As in this case - this is censorship that the government wants, but they force browser companies to administer that censorship under penalty of law.

> In theory at least, there can always be browser or search alternatives.

In theory, you can also get a non-Apple/Google mobile phone, but in practice you cannot. In some cases these corporations have more power than the government. It's also very easy for these companies to work with the government to give them access to your data, so there's not really much of a delineation anyway.

Just a reminder dumb phones exist, are still widely available, and very cheap. You may not see them much but you can buy them. It's far from theoretical

Imagine that you have a dumb phone that just makes calls and you have the unfortunate luck to be forced into using id.me while paying your taxes. Guess what your options are:

1) using the id.me app that doesn't work on your phone

2) doing a video call after waiting in line for several hours, which your phone may not have the selfie camera to do

3) going to a physical kiosk that may be hours away

Having a smartphone is practically required in modern life. Commercial services assume them. Government services assume them. Social interactions assume them.

Ah yes I love not being to use Uber , rent scooters, rent municipal bicycles, check in at my gym, use Duo app 2FA to use SSH at work, or open the doors at my apartment complex.

Turns out, dumb phones are not actually an option anymore.

Carry a smartphone that you only use to do those things. Powered off all the way when not using it.

Almost everything in that list, is not actually an impossibility for you to get around using. The first half is basically conveniences you're used to having. Buy a bicycle! Print your gym ID or provide name/phone number (this has worked at every gym I've been to)! Tell your job you need them to provide hardware if they want you to use the app. If your apartment really only opens with an app, I'd see if you can clone the RFID and toss it on a keychain.

Everything is an option, it's a decision of convenience. More and more I am thinking it's not worth the convenience.

Yeah… I kinda need this job. They’ve told me it’s a hard requirement. Maybe some day I won’t be in such a desperate situation. Until then your suggestions sound untenable for my situation, but thanks.

The apartment is not RFID/NFC. It’s HTTPS. Yes, that’s as insane as it sounds.

Also, “you can just hack the HTTPS API to trigger via SMS over twilio” is not a convincing argument towards “people don’t need smartphones”. Arguments towards your thesis are kind of going off the rails there, if I’m being honest.

This is a good point. Your apartment building requires a smart phone to get into and therefore everyone lives in apartment buildings that require smart phones to enter. It is silly to discuss living without a smart phone given the homogenous nature of our shared reality.

Per this logic, what topics ever can be discussed?

Troubleshooting Bluetooth.

I understand, but it frustrates me that your job gets to bully you into giving up your mobile devices for them to use. Depending on where you are, you may be able to make them provide a device or subsidize your bill/contract. For them to say it's a 'hard requirement' yet not provide for it.. it's like having employees pay for their safety equipment they need (which is illegal per OSHA). At the very least, if you're using your phone for work, look into tax deductions for your bills...

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/cochran-v-schwans-home-ser...

Also re: the door situation, maybe carrying around a smartphone on airplane/powered down for this? Personally I also need a few apps, so I'd keep it around for that?

> it frustrates me that your job gets to bully you into giving up your mobile devices for them to use.

Hard agree, but it seems that in most places it's perfectly legal. Similar to telling W-2 car mechanics or property maintenance technicians that they must bring their own tools.

That's fair. Definitely write it off on your taxes, then. Could be upwards of $700/yr depending on your contract/device's worth, though it might be a partial deduction?

at least in Germany it's not legal to require use of personal devices such as phones for your job.

The more I read and think about where it will lead, the more I fear it'll go to some kind of digital control with varying degrees of freedom in different countries. Liberal democracies are not the norm in history and for the longest time freedom was achieved by high cost of enforcement. You can do what you want on your farm because no one can see/track what you do there. (The downside is that there are no centralized services available too...)

If people are easily influenced (on mass) and cost to influence them is low enough, the voting system can be gained and the only real mechanism to remove bad government would cease to exist.

I hope I'm wrong, but as Romans knew: “Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses.”

Now technologies can make this cheap and efficient and the system will change to a worse one, when you don't need so much cooperation from the govern, since you can control them much more efficiently.

Uygur digital control is a telling warning...

>The downside is that there are no centralized services available too...

Downside?

Yes not all centralization is bad - roads, electricity and emergency services. Cities have economies of scale.

History tells us that societies evolve very differently and it’s a bit of a good intellectual exercise to think that maybe what you want now is not what people will want in the future.

That said, assuming human nature remains the same, I logically assume places with a larger degree of freedom will always thrive in comparison to places where there isn’t as much freedom (at least in the long run) simply because we know one central place dictating rules can’t account for all the trade offs and sooner or later will make a terrible decision no one can escape from, many times motivated by the flaws of the few people making those decisions. Meanwhile a larger degree of freedom allows people to choose what’s best for them at scale and trends happen more organically. This seems to be the idea defended in the book “Why Nations Fail” in general terms.

Also it seems to me that the governments don’t and can’t really control their populations as much as we fear it. To do that, it needs too much information, and even though we can process more and more information much cheaper today, I don’t think it makes the big picture any easier to understand. Any visualization of data is doomed to be reduced to simplifications that only tell a very narrow story of what is really happening, or gets locked in a machine learning black box that isn’t interested in helping you particularly. The more complex something is, the less likely it is for us to make sense of it, and I think all the subdivisions of human fields (politics, history, economics etc.) actually do more harm than good because when you isolate those things you lose perspective of how they’re interacting and a whole model of how something works can fall flat (see economists not being able to predict anything in practice).

The world or human behavior remains and I believe will remain unpredictable with all sorts of emergent behaviors in different scales, if that makes sense. Some even predict nation states are declining and will be replaced by smaller city-state governments that are closer to people’s needs or that different forms of organizations will be created to deal with different issues now that companies aren’t subject to one country in particular etc.

As the "cookie law" shows give a bureaucrat easier enforcement, you'll get more stupid laws enforced. The people who got them passed might be long gone from the system, but the laws would remain on the books and will be enforced more by more automation and AI.

I agree that absolute control wouldn't be needed or enforced and freer societies would do better in the long run.

But the main algorithm of populace control over the government can be broken by mass influence/mass control over voting systems. This is the thing that worries me most. Incumbents and people in power both benefit from the tools of automated enforcement of the laws so these would be invested in and improved.

You've done what 99% of this website's userbase cannot, which is grasp this embarrassingly obvious conclusion.

>I'm much more worried about more control in the government's hands.

To paraphrase the Office "find the differences" meme, "it's the same picture".

Corporations are all too excited to do the bidding of the government and vice versa. There's just some token resistance for show.

And honestly, the separation has a lot of utility. Companies like Raytheon or Lockheed might as well be DOD entities, but by having this layer of public private separation you are able to not only firewall sensitive technologies from certain forms of inquiry if they were held in the public government, but also have the opportunity to profit off these public investments through the stock of the private company.

See also: In-q-tel.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of government control happens because that's what the people demand. Whenever there's a tragedy or major event politicians (the government) are asked to do something regardless whether it's effective or not.

Governments are encouraging monopolies and oligopolies in media, discouraging independent media, and even discouraging foreign media in general. They are leaning heavily on alliances with multi-billionaires in order to do things in partnership that governments have been explicitly prevented from doing themselves. It is in the interest of both the governments and the massive media corporations to eliminate smaller or foreign competition, making the relationship ideal.

There’s not a functional between Google and USG. They act as two branches of the same unit.

As much as I like Doctorow, Max Headroom’s authors were a few steps ahead of current thinking way back in 1988. (S2E13: “Lessons”)

The end game has nothing to do with limiting piracy or controlling political speech. Those are just a means to an end.

Ultimately, there will always be some people in power whose goals are illiteracy and weaponizing general purpose computation.

This phenomenon is not new. We produce more food than humanity needs, but warlords and first world governments routinely cause famines by weaponizing food distribution.

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