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Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's time to rethink the visibility and permanence of HN discussions.

For a supposedly intellectual site that I clearly am at best in the middle tier of intellectual ability, this place is shockingly passive and accepting of the converging futures of authoritarian AI and the marked collapse of political discourse, if not rule of law.

Maybe I'm just a dumb one that speaks up, everyone else has gone dark forest.

Never stop speaking out, and if they come for you do not go peacefully. That's about all an individual in an authoritarian society can control.

Dictatorships tend to do worse economically, the biggest example was the Soviet bloc which fell for economic reasons mostly.

You can accelerate this effect by doing sabotage. The WW2 CIA sabotage manual contains a lot of ideas that have pretty good ratio of problems created to personal risk.

That’s the truth, if we remain silent we will be targeted eventually. I am extremely disappointed by the lack of tech colleagues calling this out. I took an oath of ethics to do no harm and I see many people willing to use technology to find and silence critics of the government.

Fuck Donald Trump and his gross, weird, pathetic mafia.

This regime is a rogue autocracy strangling anything good about this once great country.

I hope every single person responsible for the many crimes they have committed (and they have committed crimes) faces justice, if not in this life, then the next one.

Oh, that feels good to get off my chest.

There is no next life. This is all we got. Let’s make the most of it.

That has been the case for years:

IME the authoritarian politics had much more support here; I'd say it was the majority of voices heard. It diminished considerably when Trump was elected and then took office.

But the silence has been a long-standing problem: HN has long been largely silent on the social and political dangers of IT - really an outrage; here are the people most responsible, and the outcomes are predictable. That would include especially disinformation and misinformation, and propaganda more generally; and also the power of social media. Those are what makes it impossible to do anything.

When things became so polarized, years ago, shutting down discourse everywhere, HN didn't work to solve the problem - they stopped talking too. Again, a big failure of the people with the knowledge, skill, and power. But shutting down discourse is not politically neutral - it's a great help to the corrupt and evil to hide what they do and prevent people from responding to it. Democracy dies in darkness, I've heard.

There's this macrocycle of fatigue related to Godwins law for, what, 30 years of online discourse.

The undeniable long term trend during this period has been increasing surveillance, control, centralization of power in the executive, weakening of rights, due process, legal authority, politicization of the judiciary, and majority minority slowly building a core base of manipulatable populism.

Maybe I'm naive about the past, even the last 75 years of what was really going on in Washington, but a Seig heil on national television with no pushback or consequences beyond grassroot pushback (and it has been ALL grassroot) was a crystallizing moment.

This isn't stuff to roll your eyes over as just Godwins law style hyperbole.

The only in the I mean only saving grace, is that the stock market exists for immediate political blowback. But the fact that the only functional political bulwark against trump is the second by second ticker of financial health of the oligarchs is really depressing.

The saving grace is you, and what you do. It's each person here.

I'd say it goes beyond silence. Anything political used to be flagged and pushed of the front page in minutes till about a couple of weeks ago.

Not very surprising given the current political environment.

Lets say that a ton of us got a leaky look at what the likes of thiel datamimed from the humanity dataset. The last mile of the enlightenment wrecks all those romantic ideas of eternal progress by technology, self actualizationa and retardation repair by education pretty thoroughly. Those that are not in the know mimic those that are or just develop a amoral stance to whether and survive the times which are a changing. It turns out the civil liberty lessons do not survive the contact with the lovecraftian reality beneath. This whole 10 year ride since 2016 was not foreseen, predicted, effectively countered and not even mitigated by protecting cultural artifacts and institutions against the decay. The science whose prediction power is zero, who has no eclipse to show, is not one.

That would be great, but I don't see it. HN has already been obviously violating GDPR and all other right-to-forget laws since forever by not allowong for account deletion, and everytime this has been brought up, dang has pretty much confirmed they don't care ("it would look bad if there were deleted comments [and that's more important than these laws]").

huge shock that y combinator doesn’t give a shit about legal risk considering the huge chunk of its successful startups were just law-breaking mobile apps.

Move fast and break democracy.

It turns out that in real life you don’t have any right to be forgotten, and trying to legally manufacture one is not only nonsensical, it’s impossible.

HN is a public forum, if you don’t want your statements here being public, don’t post.

The right to be forgotten is a natural consequence of reality - nothing is by default permanent. It's digital systems that have perverted reality by persisting information beyond its normal short lifetime.

If there's one law of the universe it's that nothing is permanent.

What if I did something and it was written down in a book?

Books have limited print runs. Many books in libraries are only borrowed and perhaps read a few times. Niche titles more so. Books go out of print and are hard to search for arbitrary text.

But digital can also be lost. I think my point is that digital isn't a clear line in this situation

The ease of making copies of digital data, the ease of indexing them is totally different from books, just as writing, clay tablets, scrolls and books were from a purely oral society.

We can "what if" ourselves into any position we want. The fact is that digital surveillance is here and does collect information about people in a scope that is qualitatively different than putting information in books.

There are many cases where laws that are made for humans before certain tech are not sufficient once certain tech arrives.

You don’t need the right to be forgotten outside of specific tech because human brain forgets by default, paper rots, and all of the above is restricted geographically and does not scale.

I have a hypothetical. Let's say you attend a rally and give a hate speech and the entire event is live-streamed / recorded for posterity. Can you use "right to forget" laws to impel all sites hosting that video record to blur out your face in the original videos?

What's the functional difference to writing a bunch of hate speech with your username and wanting it scrubbed from the "public record" (which I would argue a popular forum such as HN would be classified) using RTBF?

Same thing if you wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to the New York Times expressing something distasteful. I don't see how anyone should be allowed to wield RTBF as a tool for suppressing information.

Does it really matter if your name isn't connected to your real life identity?

Will that matter in a world of AI? Can't the connection be made - for example based on writing style, political opinions, time of day you post, networks you use, etc etc.

I'm sure it could be figurded out but not easily?

The whole idea behind right to forget is that people don't live their entire lives under condemnation for something they stopped doing. You can debate whether or not permanent ostracism is effective as a deterrent, but let's not ban the removal of gang tattoos.

You could be indoctrinated or paid to give the speech. You might regret it or change your mind. The video doesn't have to be real, it could be generated, it could be someone with the same name who looks like you.

Maybe you got drunk and climbed on stage naked 10 years ago. Should you be that guy forever?

When I asked dang about GDPR this is how he explained HN’s stance on not allowing broad comment and account deletion

> Re GDPR: our understanding based on the analysis done by YC's legal team is that HN does not fall under the GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but helping with privacy concerns in more precise ways.

> Re "aren’t these comments owned by the person who wrote them"? That's a complicated legal question, no doubt, and also philosophically. From my perspective, two other factors are that (1) the threads are co-creations (see pg on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226) and (2) posting to an internet forum is publishing something, not dissimilar to sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper.

> Obviously there are many reasonable takes on this. Ours is that we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum (mainly the interest of commenters not to have their comments deprived of context, and the interest of the community in preserving its archive) with the need to protect individuals. That's a lot of work—we end up taking care of requests manually for people every day—but we're committed to both sides of it because it seems like the only way to do justice to both sides.

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