Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

> You can't decide to be black or Irish. You can very well decide to not have a smartphone.

I accept that distinction. But what makes you believe volition plays the role you imply (which I assume is that someone who decides something is somehow on a lower moral footing than someone without choice?)

Many people "decide" to join particular religious denominations. Or as we accept more commonly today choose to "identify" as this or that, Do we/should we afford them any less respect?

There's a good argument that a sane and reasonable person who decides something, should have more weight attached to that choice than the person for whom it is a matter of accident.

For example, murder is a more serious crime than manslaughter, precisely because someone pre-meditated rather than killing by accident.

I'm not suggesting you are not dismissing reasonable choice as if it were a lesser thing, just saying it's worth thinking about, because this is not philosophically/ethically clear.

edit:

There's also another quite strong and very different argument, but it's more complex:

There's a line in John Fowles book on the subject of poverty where the protagonist says "Being poor is not something that we are, it's just something that happened to us"

Many identity distinctions are not self-identifications but are imposed by another or group upon someone (or group). For example someone who was a proud Yugoslavian woke up one day with a "Bosnian" passport. Discrimination that come from "other-regarding" sources despite our choices, may feel as egregious as those of accident of birth.

The Amish are a good example of making an antitechnology stance religious, and they get pretty good accommodation. IANAL but it seems like would be a serious discrimination suit if they were denied service due to a lack of smartphones. This is in the context of the USA, not sure how it would work in Europe.

This is a good point. Some orthodox Jewish denominations find themselves in the same situation.

But I'd actually like to argue against that.

I wrote here [0] that we ought not conflate technology morals with religion.

It's important to give room to traditional religious beliefs, reasonable lifestyle choices and secular ethical stances. All are important.

Saying this as someone who is a practising Christian humanist but was also once an active secular humanist/rationalist-sceptic.

For most of us it would be best (in the face of all sorts of unknowns coming down the pipe in the guise of AI etc) to establish the primacy of secular ethical choice around technology.

I don't boycott Big-Tech because "Jesus told me to". It's because they're dirty criminals and gangsters who I don't want to give money to. I don't go without a smartphone because "God forbids it". It's because I fundamentally object to being under 24/7 surveillance and having to carry "papers" like in some vicious tinpot dictatorship.

These are just common, secular civic and personal moral choices.

I am surprised that we aren't doing more to stand up for them, and very surprised that Sweden (and Finland and Estonia) of all places have such a blind-spot around social rights and respect for different opinions and lifestyles.

[0] https://techwrongs.org/2023/03/06/microsoft-is-not-a-religio...

My issue (OP here) is that I have read and agreed to every ToS I've been given over the last few decades. I rarely upgrade macOS because of how long it take to read the new license. I use Firefox because I don't need to read the license.

In one notable case I told a client I couldn't accept their contract because it was incomplete. "What's the problem? Hundreds of other companies have accepted it." "It says that I also agree to the terms at $URL but that URL doesn't work." They told me the correct URL and I was able to sign it. (Real B2B contracts are pleasingly fair, when both companies are on even terms.)

I cannot agree with the Apple ToS because I do not want to give them the sole right to shut down my account. If a mobile phone is critical for daily life, then the government must be able to overrule Apple's whim or mistake, and do so quickly. If there were true competition, with many alternatives and the easy and guaranteed right to transfer to another provider, then I would also not have a problem.

This is nothing to do with religion, or distrust of technology, but of who has the right to control my daily life. I trust the government of Sweden far more than I do the commercial interest of Google or Apple, who have demonstrated they are not eager participants in EU laws regarding privacy and monopoly.

Totally get you.

Deeper problem: The average Western adult does not have the capacity to agree to most legal instruments (EULAs. contracts) used around digital technology today.

I include myself as a computer scientist who even read a bit of law at university and has helped draft and analyse contracts. No "reasonable person" is expected to read them. Tacit and coerced "agreement" to patently egregious terms is already normalised, and this makes a complete mockery of law in our culture.

At some point, if we want to rescue "the law" we must change the way people relate to technology legally.

Oh, I totally agree! When I started consulting in the 1990s I got a NoLo Press book which clearly and helpfully explained contract terms for computer consulting. I've since had a couple of decades of reading contracts to do consulting work. My knowledge does not go outside that domain, but it's still fun to read things like how the storage unit we rented prohibits keeping farm animals in it.

By the way, HUGE shout out to the OmniGroup, who have the absolute best commercial+proprietary license agreement I've ever read. They even allow some reverse engineering, just not to avoid the licensing system. That strongly influenced my own proprietary license to allow the same.

When I have these discussion with the government and political parties, I will be asking if the high school curriculum is being updated to include more training in reading ToS, and to ask if it's really reasonable to be personally bound to terms that no one reads.

Personally I think there needs to be the equivalent of the Uniform Commercial Code, though to harmonize, standardize, and regulate app service ToS. But that's a wild idea that I cannot pursue, only wonder about.

All I can focus on is that we should not require the permission of Apple or Google to be a citizen living a simple life in Sweden.

I agree we should respect secular ethical choices with the same protections as religious ones, but this is currently an aspirational goal in the US. For now to get acceptance and strong legal protection of ethical choices we sort of have to wrap them in a religious shroud since that is the framework the state has to deal with protecting such choices. The issue with this is that your choices might not align perfectly with the options you have and people will say it’s not a real religion if you are the only practitioner. Maybe a workaround would be to take a dead christian denomination and use that? Other religions wouldn’t get easy acceptance here.

Food for thought, thanks. I do see that bind.

Wondering what if anything you thought of that story of the woman who claimed a religious objection to using Microsoft?

(Perhaps you can read my article and follow the links to the original story... I also wonder if this would fly in Britain and think about talking to church ministers about it. I deeply and sincerely cannot bring myself to enrich these crooked bastards, but I feel uncomfortable "cloaking" that in religion even though it may inform my ethics. hope that makes sense)

That’s wild, but it seems like it would be difficult to argue that it does not impose an undue burden as is the standard, see https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/what-you-should-know-work...

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