Comment by chromacity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chromacity | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is a weird side effect of how we portray evil corporations in fiction and in journalism. We imagine that everyone working there is a moustache-twirling villain. And then we get a job at Meta or Flock or Palantir, look around, and don't see any moustache-twirling villains. There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun". So, it must be that we're the good guys.

Even if some of the outcomes seem reprehensible, it's not really evil because we're good people. We do it in a responsible and caring way. We're truly sorry that your grandma is now hooked up on endless AI-generated slop, but shouldn't the media be talking about all the other grandmas whose lives are enriched by our AI? We have strict safety rules for the types of cryptocurrency ads that can target the elderly, too.

Let me tell you. I worked at a IRS equivalent service in another country, and a lot of what I did was not very different from spying in our own citizens.

And you know what? there's a pervasive ideology in the place that justifies it all.

One day you wake up, and you realize that you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer, even if the official documents say otherwise.

And we are talking about Tax Payers here. Now imagine an organization like Palantir that can de-humanize their targets marking them with the Terrorist label. It is easy to convince people that they are on the right side.

> you see the tax payer as a cunning and evil adversary that needs to be reigned upon, and you see that all the jokes, the water cooler talk, the general ethos is toward this vision of the tax payer

Any force employing threat of violence for control does the same. Police presence, military occupation, hell you even see it in the eyes of loss prevention folks.

> There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun". So, it must be that we're the good guys.

It can get pretty close at times. Witness Meta and Zuck being told, in clear terms, that there was clear material threats to Burmese dissidents with some of the asks of Facebook. "The features matter more."

Or like, anything peter thiel says ever.

> There's no one saying "ha ha, we should hurt people just for fun"

Yes, there is.[1]

[1] https://archive.is/ngaj4

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