Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash

bloodinthemachine.com

107 pointscdrnsf138 comments

This is a multifaceted problem for sure. As the fruit of leveraging LLM use, from my experience, is held in the hands of experienced, skilled, and gray-haired workers, what hope do young kids today have of BEING in this world?

The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching it's metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone. Who, in that world, can spend the fiat and for what? I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine. Everyone else is either bunker prepping or plugging into the matrix.

Will we arrive at the Jetsons? Or Warhammer 40k?

This is so closely related to a comment I just made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49470026 that I am going to just risk and repost it.

> This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.

.... 3 responses ....

> Thats totally fair, and TBH - I am also very concerned for my wellbeing as well; I and many others are not doing so well because, in my case I no longer see this "vapid" state of existence as ephermial. I have been reading more and more; I guess looking ot knowledge as some eort of ends vs a means to an end for once. Camus, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dostoevsky's underground man etc...

Camus: The universe was always going to stay silent when you demand meaning from it; the answer isn't a better metric, it's to push the rock anyway ("imagine Sisyphus happy").

Dostoevsky [underground man]: Refusing to be a piano key in someone's optimized Crystal Palace

Stokely Carmichael: "Racism is not a question of attitude, it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism."

My conclusion: AI didn't take our meaning, It made me realize I have always been looking in the wrong place and thus reacting ignoratly when I felt "denied" this thing I feel entitled to.

Love.

Edit: Love; paradoxically, ive felt both entitled to and unworthy of so I'm not sure WTF to do with that.

To wit: Our love of self is so closely tied to our output and if we have no output do we have value?

Edit: tl;dr - I am not sure I understand the point of anything anymore and many others feel the same way. I do not think this is some "existential crisis" I believe it is a logical conclusion to draw given the evidence presented by the day and age we live in.

You raise a good point. If nothing is special, what's our motivation, our purpose? Maybe our purpose becomes being comfortable with no purpose, and I am surprisingly okay with that. I know that my existence is finite, and the time I spend and what I do with it give it importance. For example, spending my time teaching people how to make telescopes, keep a garden going and growing, and train dogs in field exercises would give it meaning. In the short term, figuring out how to use LLMs to take power away from oligarchs would be a good use of time.

Spending more hours working to make somebody else rich, yeah, no. Let's go through the archway in the forest.

This terrifies me but I suspect you are correct. My abject obsession with not being viewed as less fuels my drive to create, earn, produce. I may have to learn just to be. To sit with myself, and just be OK with being.

Well even 40k spent 20k years living like the jetsons... There are no analogs for our future. That's one of the core problems here, you have powerful individuals who identify with and aspire to sci-fi, while living in denial of reality. I would argue someone like Musk is more blue pilled and in the Matrix than they think they are...

> There are no analogs for our future.

WALL-E?

Sure, why not pick idiocracy. You miss the point. People now cannot predict the future, all analogs are simultaneously possible and unlikely. Pick any event we have experienced, 9/11, COVID. Sure, some predictions were close, but nothing like the reality of living through it.

> The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching its metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone.

Not true at all. If you have a robotic servant that can "do everything" for anywhere close to an affordable amount for even a middle-class person, please post a link and specify what it can do.

There a big gap between a tool that can spew out large amounts of code and something you trust to not screw up your house. Once I can tell a robot to do a simple plumbing task in my house, I'll believe in this metamorphosis you're talking about.

Even if we just have AI that can do every job that can be remote that would be hugely disruptive. I think you're right that plumbing is safe for a bit. Human hands are insanely dexterous

> Even if we just have AI that can do every job that can be remote that would be hugely disruptive.

This will not happen in my lifetime.

It may do some. It may even do a lot. It will certainly augment close to 100% the remote jobs.

AI will never be able to “do every job that is remote”.

Just 5% of the population with no hope, no future, and looking at no survival can be extremely disruptive to a society. Take away all the daydream future job options and only leave the difficult labor that breaks peoples bodies by 40 and the youth could become disruptive to society. You can't add in Mana making sure every minute of those jobs left is productive and every dollar paid in wages gets clawed back from workers. People can't function in modern hyper optimizing of all the impacts on workers but no optimization in housing affordability, food affordability, enjoyment options that benefit the average person instead of all optimizations extracting all the previous slack/dollars in life.

You can't optimize away all the slack (in affordability, in time, in things to be enjoyed, in xyz, in 123). You can't optimize away all the future opportunity. You can't optimize away all the daydreams and hope and expect society to look anything like our current society.

I hope you realize that your comments are those of a “doom and gloom” person. It’s a fairly extreme take on things that makes some pretty wild assumptions about humanity that don’t really seem to hold (e.g., assuming a complete lack of adaptability, while we seem to be actually quite adaptable).

It’s not a credible take.

> You can't optimize away all the daydreams and hope and expect society

Agree. I think only dysfunctional weirdos actually think that’s what AI will do.

> to look anything like our current society

Who says our current society is at its apex? I don’t think it is. I think we have a ton of upside left to explore.

If our society looks like it is now 10-20 years from now, I will feel like we will have failed miserably. I am willing to bet that it will be much better.

Technically you are right, of course. But don't forget that Dario and Sam have already promised us autonomous killer robots. They may not be realistic right now, but together with the administration they're dreaming about them and I think we can safely assume that they will make them a reality as soon as they possibly can. And guess who will be at the receiving end of their life-terminating implements once the feudal AI overlords come to the conclusion they can do without us. Even if it can't really work, it's enough that the people making the decisions believe it can. And the people we're talking about are the world champions of drinking the Kool-Aid.

That’s a weak goalpost, the tech you’re talking about will land soon and then we’ll have to move goalposts again.

> robotic servants that can do everything for everyone.

Why do people keep positing this? The robots get better every year, but they don't get better fast enough to make me think there will be a robot servant doing anything for anyone in my lifetime. As has been the case for the past fifty years or so, they're either hyperspecialized or remote controlled by people, and neither of those spell doom for the economy.

Honest question, did you foresee the last 2 or 3 years happening as fast as they have?

Edit: In terms of AI/LLM's etc..

Indeed. The moment these LLM brains are given access to natural selection and evolution in the hardware space, it's game over.

We don't need to engineer plumbing robots - they will engineer themselves. We will see a silicon Cambrian Explosion. Maybe next year maybe in 500, but it's inevitable with the current economic incentives.

Bold of you to assume that “current economic inventives” will remain around for 500 years, especially given the American-style neo-liberal economy is only like 70 years old.

What if the creation of such robots destroys the economic incentive for doing so?

>The moment these LLM brains are given access to natural selection and evolution in the hardware space

Ok, but that's still sci-fi. We've made a huge advancement in automation of knowledge work, but hardware still has no clear path to what you're describing, or even to anything similar to it.

Honestly everything about the future has been about fifteen years behind schedule (or more!) from what I was expecting in 1999. I was fully expecting affordable lunar tourism for the middle class by now.

I know, right? Where's the space ship in my garage?

I first heard about Elon Musk in my teens when I was reading astronomy magazines and wishing Robert Zubrin was running NASA. Why wasn't Nasa progressing? We stopped going to the moon and made a space truck to ferry satellites and ISS nodules into LEO for $2B a pop and 1/100 odds of fatality. Anyway here comes this SV guy wishing he could put a greenhouse on mars and see if a plant would grow in Martian regolith...

I'm still waiting for that experiment, Mr. Musk.

Don't hold your breath.

Musk was never sincerely planning any kind of sci-fi future, the fact that SpaceX was built with help from Mike Griffin (who was a key player in the 80s 'Star Wars' SDI program) and the fact that Starlink's roadmap is basically reheated leftovers of Brilliant Pebbles[1] really gives the game away. He's just a generic military contractor with (well, used to have) good PR.

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

I'm still waiting for that experiment, Mr. Musk.

Me, too. He's just another Lucy, holding just another football.

Sure, we went from 'writing software is a grueling effort for many people' to 'writing software is a solo effort with a few chatbot subscriptions' but I think that my colleagues in the IT world tend to overestimate the effects LLMs have had on the wider populace. Folks mostly use them as search engines and there hasn't been a qualitative change in their lives.

People keep talking about how we're going to enter some kind of positive feeback loop where the chatbots design better chatbot chassis but so far we've just started generating articles about that prediction at a higher rate. This is typical of the gains from LLMs: not a qualitative improvement, but a quantitative improvement. I'd sooner believe we're about to build a Paperclip Maximizer than a Singularity Machine.

I think most people in tech, in particular SV live in such a huge bubble they are completely out of touch with the common person.

Then they stand there and say 'how come they can't see what I see? Hmm'.

Oh the answer is - inertia! Lets see how long they toe that line for.

> Sure, we went from 'writing software is a grueling effort for many people' to 'writing software is a solo effort with a few chatbot subscriptions'

But we haven't. The only kind of software you produce in the latter scenario is unmaintainable and full of flaws. It's not at all a replacement for a team of experts.

Statistically, all software is unmaintainable and full of flaws. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so many rich software engineers.

You’re largely talking to people paid somewhere along the lines by all the AI equity that’s being raised.

AI has made making a demo easy and sometimes it’s might present more than a quick trip to wikipedia would surface. Edit: also it makes making mistakes in Excel easy(analysis).

Best give up all hopes of a future now.

There is a vast divide between knowledge workers and creatives when it comes to LLMs

The general populace sees mostly the creative’s view. The results are poor and it comes at the expense of ripping off IP and providing bad copies of it.

The pervasive argument right now doesn’t view LLMs as a tool that have more or less eliminated entire segments of knowledge workers, who had already been offshored and are now basically redundant. Every mid level programmer who copied and pasted stack overflow snippets all the way down to support techs are done.

You do realise theres easy push back for this?

Go back to the movies of 30-40 years ago... that's what people envisioned about the future.

Yes, but I believe (perhaps incorrectly) that the is easy push back for most things. My question stands, is this rate of change something that the commenter could foresee. If not; it sands to reason that we should not assume the next leaps would be something that we will naturally foresee.

I disagree that things have improved with any particular rapidity. The LLMs of today are not really much more capable than GPT-3.5 was.

Excellent point, I should have expanded to the previous; 5 years or even better post and pre covid.

A non-trivial percentag of readers of HN have used a robotaxi or own a self driving vehicle. Most of us have asked an AI to write software for us, plan our trips, etc - and importantly perform tasks requiring visual recognition.

These signals seem to validate rather than disprove the direction.

A non-trivial percentage are employed by the makers of said products.

Cui bono?

Have you never been in a Tesla or Waymo or used AI?

Yes.

Then I'm confused about your point.

You can’t fathom why being paid by the companies producing this technology doesn’t skew opinions?

It's a thing kne can observe for itself (did the Tesla drive itself or not) without relying on opinions. That's why I used these examples.

I never disagreed that these companies have done something.

I said you’re never going to get an honest opinion from most of HN because they’re employed by the companies.

How do we know this?

Have you been keeping up with where China already is with robots?

https://x.com/GalbotRobotics/status/2091210523916607613

https://x.com/unitreerobotics/status/2089240553682809175

Or, we can go back to reality and observe that people are not obsolete and all human work was not eradicates

Then we can take down monopolies, tax large corporations, regulate them, empower anti white colar crime agencies again and regulate finance.

That will actually do. Bullshitters and sociopaths are too empowered. That is an issue, and acute one.

> Will we arrive at the Jetsons? Or Warhammer 40k?

Maybe Dune: thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine

Translation: I've never picked potatoes for a living

Or keep the current world, just without everything having to be done by an LLM Goldberg machine

Would you say that's a progressive point of view, or a conservative one?

I'm not sure what the ideological term is for someone who doesn't argue for a return to the past or advancement into the future, but for permanent retention of current conditions.

As I said, just remove the LLMs Goldberg machines. That’s it. The rest can continue to evolve and change

No, thanks, I like mine. It runs on a spare machine in my basement and seems benign enough.

When it comes to the AI backlash, I think a big problem is that we have absolute terrible messengers and they are spreading terrible messages.

If I go on X, the vibe there around AI is amazing. You have folks constantly talking about cool things that they get their agents to do. Agents can help you make things you didn't have the knowhow to make, teach you things at a level that you couldn't get just by searching Google and take care of the boring parts of your life so you can spend more time doing the things you care about. Overall things are very positive and makes you excited for the future.

Contrast that with the public comments by AI executives. Pretty much all of the messages fall flat at best or are just outright doomery at worst. It's such a stark contrast and while I'm personally really excited for the future, I can totally see how someone who isn't plugged into that world to get a very grim view of the future.

And even when they run ads about AI, it's always the worst examples (thinking of that Gemini ad that talked about writing a letter to your family with AI). I really wish the industry could have a better messenger around this stuff. Don't talk about how it can help you do stuff you already know how to do, run an ad about how it can enable you to do stuff you couldn't do before.

I think the best example of this is a bike mechanic fixing a Reevo bike and writing firmware using Claude Code so it no longer required an app to work[1]. The author outright said he didn't know how to code or do anything in that area but was able to figure it out with the help of AI. I think a message like that around AI is awesome but no all we hear about is how AI will take your job.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPrtVGimBYs

The vast majority of people don't work in tech they have real jobs just trying to survive and feed their families. They don't have time for cult nonsense.

Yeah their comments are things like “AI is going to take all your jobs, our latest model is very dangerous, we’ve got ethicists deciding what you can and can’t say to the models, we’re the only ones who can be trusted to control this technology, our revenue is going to be equal to the GDP”

Then they wonder why people are making the implication that their future plans are to completely take over society and run it according to their own whims.

Most posts on X are AI-generated by non-humans.

You must be following the wrong people.

> I think a message like that around AI is awesome but no all we hear about is how AI will take your job.

because it doesn't matter whether you can use code to fix your Reevo bike if you can't afford to buy a Reevo bike in the first place because you lost your job

Totally. The combination of "we're taking your work to build your replacement and we can't stop" from Dario and Sam, to AI being non-consentually shoved into every app surface by Microsoft and Google - I was anti-AI for a long time.

What changed it? Actually spending a weekend with Claude Code building personal projects I had wanted to for the last 2 years, which also makes it obvious that we can solve sustainability issues using this tech.

Also seeing the open models reach the frontier and knowing the above ass-hats aren't going to end up with a monopoly helps a lot too.

> they are spreading terrible messages.

We are not the target audience for those messages. The target audience are people like themselves who cannot wait to get rid of all those not-haves that are cramping their style and ruining their days.

Something I never thought would happen: ultra-conservative Moms For Liberty and progressive education campaigners agree on something. Namely "get that AI out of our schools".

The Butlerian Jihad has started.

Can't wait for a society dependent on spice and which is still controlled those with political (or super human) powers.

It makes me wonder how the powers will be will manage to split this issue into powerless factions like they did for Occupy Wall St.

Lasr time it was identity politics, I think they'll use trans as the wedge for these groups.

I am curious how that will be coherent but we have all been surprised by incoherence in politics many times over.

That die has already been cast. It's stop everything versus "accelerationism" full speed ahead. Both sides will point to how their full world view is coherent and would have sensible results, and will blame the other side for the problems from their own agenda not being allowed to go far enough. The former will succeed at when pushing regulations that merely constitute speed bumps for the big players but hamstring individuals and small businesses, and the latter will succeed at pushing for little government restrictions on the regulated sandboxes of the big players. Regulatory capture complete.

I had a terrifying thought while mowing the lawn today that we don't even have an inkling of a feel for how imaginary property laws are going to destroy the usefulness of hosted LLMs for individuals. Ask Claude Jr the easiset way to attach some mechanical actuators to your lawnmower and to write some software, and it's going to respond "sorry, automated lawnmowing runs afoul of patents X, Y, and Z. Please upload your patent license certificates". With LLMs we're currently at the stage where Google used to reliably return good links to cracks/warez/etc, and as we all know that's been thoroughly locked down.

> The Butlerian Jihad has started.

I'll let you know when it's time

It already exists for real. They have been slapping up “graffiti stickers” as a call-to-action in Midtown Phoenix. And taking action, in the form of vandalizing rental scooters. They grind off the entire QR so they cannot be rented. Then they slap on a “Butlerian Jihad” sticker so you know exactly who claims responsibility for the hit.

Which is so ineffective, because I've encountered these scooters and gliders and I just start ringing scooters on the map until the one I'm standing in front of rings and I can start it from having it selected.

It's more effective when they slash the tires.

The progressive you speak about are conserving the ideologies they thought were revolutionary.

The conservatives you speak about are conserving ideologies they thought were revolutionary.

What both have in common is that they don't like change.

Depends on the change.

What both parties have in common is PAC donations telling them what they should suddenly care about this election cycle. Neither major party has a particularly strong belief system other than trying to win.

Nobody likes a change forced upon them. The AI industry decided to use fear and anxiety to push their technology, instead of a more measured approach, where they convince people. And they are getting the backlash they deserve. You cannot go for years explaining how you’re working on destroying the world economy to reach an utopia that resembles almost perfectly to a generic sci-fi dystopia, without planting the seed for your opposition

> What both have in common is that they don't like change

you know what change I'd like? abolish billionaires

Just remember it will more likely be the version from Dune Encyclopedia, not Herbert's sons' prequels

SV is also in denial that AI is the final straw that makes people leave the Internet.

How I wish that were true for more than a tiny fraction of the population

Perhaps the World Wide Web but do you see how addicted the average person is to TikTok? 0.1% might decide to lead a tech-free lifestyle (and we can be sure that each will interviewed and get an article written about them).

The industry needs messengers that can put out a positive vision that also aren’t creepy or skeezy seeming dudes. I don’t think Zuck’s WSJ manifesto convinced anyone, plus he’s a terrible messenger.

Non creepy people were rejected by billionaires class, they just dont fit in. And conversely, non creepy people also avoid the tech bro creepy singularity is here crowd.

The industry needs to come to grips with the fact that many, many people either have no use for or actively despise GenAI.

Why should they worry about the people that are not going to give them money and likely wont ever be convinced to? They don't need to capture literally every person or whole industries to be successful.

And how has such distain for large parts of a population turned out in the past? Short term people sometimes get away with it, longer term and their society crashes when people start taking action. But it doesn't always take a long time if people are inflamed enough about an issue.

Because the negative externalities of GenAI are great enough that the majority will soon recognize them and demand action.

But I don't expect that to slow down any of the main drivers for now. Some have too much invested monetarily and emotionally, others have been caught up in the hype cycle.

Because these same people are being told if they don't use LLMs in their job they will be fired.

Truly think the political instincts of 90% of the people on this site is just straight up laughable. You don't get to turn the dial back after telling people for 3 years that they will lose their job, become homeless, and then die.

Tech leadership have been complaining about popular welfare programs for like 40 years.

These people have never been told no in their lives and don't understand how to navigate around the politics of rejection (thank fuck, it would require them doing actual organizing; something money can't buy).

Beautifully said, and that is exactly why the tech billionaires need to be stopped. They disregard everyone but themselves while also having the power and money to do whatever they want.

How about concrete actions rather than marketing "visions" ?

A nice sentiment, though I think perception of a thing ends up being more important than the specifics. No doubt the actions can be used to support the marketing vision, though.

The problem is that perception can only carry things so far. Surveillance Valley had been coasting on unjustifiable positive perceptions while continuing to build their digital cages. The jig is up, and it's a long way down.

> concrete actions

They did go on a firing spree.

> he’s a terrible messenger.

I don't think it's a coincidence that terrible persons without a lot of training are also terrible messengers.

> the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses

It seems reasonable that these three things are part of ONE "backlash", but I don't believe they are. I think these are three separate issues with three different, mostly overlapping, groups of people who are giving "backlash".

Data centers themselves are subject to two different sources of b-lash. There are people who heard that datacenters use up "all the water". Then there are people who are broadly anti-AI because they don't want to lose their job (and home, and health insurance, and live under a bridge with all the other displaced people).

The backlash against Flock is predictable and unfortunate. Well, we defunded the police, and let political axe-grinders fill our DA seats with hyper-progressive activists. "Just put up cameras, it worked in the UK!" seems like the natural move, but it was a trap. People want to feel safe, and don't want to be spied on. We're going to have to have a functioning justice system at some point, aren't we?

The backlash against AI glasses is more visceral, more primal. People get shy on camera, so making everyone be potentially on camera at all times, or random times, is fueling a kind of anxiety that isn't going to just go away. hey, we've been here before, with google glass. Google was smart enough to discontinue it immediately.

> Well, we defunded the police, and let political axe-grinders fill our DA seats with hyper-progressive activists.

When did this happen?

For one thing, saying the quiet part out loud takes the covers off: https://www.artisan.co/blog/stop-hiring-humans

For another, apply AI where it's good but stop forcing it where it doesn't belong. Ask the users, they know.

If they're in denial, perhaps they see something bigger at play? Governments are likely very interested in the massive-scale capacities for monitoring and analysis these tools enable. The public might not even matter to the suits in the end.

I think it is more likely they are just drinking their own koolaid (and their friends are too). They are paid to bring in investor dollars, which requires lofty promises.

I want to believe that, but I do wonder. The surveillance powers are immense for such technology. Forget the magical "SAI" stuff. It would also be a perfect cause for hyperscaling: total coverage.

> One of the big stories of the last decade plus has of course been the story of rising inequality, and of working class Americans becoming economically and politically disempowered. What serves as a better totem to this sentiment better than a megaproject erected under the cover of a panoply of NDAs to build a mass job automator for a trillion-dollar tech company?

The sad thing is, tech is supposed to be about solving problems to make people's lives better. But instead of investing $$$$ in tech to solve people's problems, we're investing $$$$ to add to their problems.

I thought this was going to be about h1b and the severe backlash ycombinator partners are facing online.

Nah those articles are rarely allowed to make it to the top

I'm puzzled how people who didn't care about Snowden are suddenly very upset about Flock. I'm glad they finally decided the 4A is important.

I'm not. The same people who seemingly magically cared about Flock overnight will move onto something else within the year. There's always something new to be outraged over, Flock is just the flavor of the week.

I think this taps in to why big tech companies are unconcerned as well. How many of these people who oppose data centers have stopped utilizing their outputs? How many of these anti AI folks are using AI either at work or in their personal lives? It's just hot to hate AI right now.

Are you trying to dismiss Flock and the like as not worthy of outrage?

It is more concrete now. For example the footage that was released about the Kirk shooter showed that you are filmed everywhere, including in residential areas.

People are beginning to understand.

My take is that the difference is simply down to visibility, and by extension broader understanding, of the issue:

- Cameras film me and my family and neighbors everywhere in daily life => Obviously an issue

- Something about secret agencies maybe (?) reading along my messages => “I’ve got nothing to hide in there anyway”

100%. Articles about obscure codename operations is a lot harder to grasp than "You are tracked at all times via your phone and license plate and here are the images to prove it".

It's the same as how communities respond to egregious law enforcement abuses. Accusations get nowhere as opposed to undeniable video of things like George Floyd.

“See that thing? It’s watching you” vs. some complicated story about room 641a… I agree, it makes a degree of sense.

It's also an issue with an obvious visual signal. My phone company is scanning messages? Oh, all the phone companies are scanning messages? Using some opaque approvals process that the government intentionally hides from the public? Not a lot anyone can do about that from the outside.

Cameras on our streets? Well, those were put there by local law enforcement and city councils, who are much more accessible (even though I'm sure they wish they weren't). If the camera is still there, it's still a problem. And if all other options fail, well, someone is probably willing to take the risk to cut that camera down.

Lots of people cared, it just wasn’t actionable. The situation with flock has avenues for change in town hall meetings or even good ol fashioned vandalism.

Dragnet surveillance by the CIA was a bit harder to oppose.

Optics and zeitgeist.

The Snowden leaks had too much of an abstract bogeyman. PRISM couldn't inspire critical mass outrage because, at the time, Big Tech was still genuinely useful and, besides, the Big Tech involved could be sidestepped with some inconvenience. Flock is neither directly useful nor avoidable unless you resolve to never leave your house.

Metadata tracking is, again, too abstract of a concept, too much a statistical what-if. Compare that with Flock which tracks your very countenance.

Most importantly IMO, Flock has a physical manifestation on which people can direct their anger. There is a "frontend" to actively subvert as opposed to a mere "backend" to avoid.

Is that the case? It seems to me that the people who cared about Snowden are basically the same people who care about Flock. Most of the people I know who didn't like Snowden also don't seem to care about Snowden. I do find it interesting / strange that conservatives (of which I am somewhat) don't care about Snowden or Flock. To me, the things Snowden revealed, and the crap Flock is doing are completely incompatible with the way I think government should function. But, maybe I'm more libertarian than conservative.

If my local groups are any indication the flock stuff is angering both the left and the right, perhaps for different reasons. Same with datacenters.

The datacenter meeting for our board was the largest I've ever seen in town. They had to move it to the school auditorium when 1000+ people showed up the first time.

The world (I guess politics, but more broadly how you envision society to fundamentally function) is far more broad and nuanced than the silly (American) liberal vs conservative buckets.

Just adding a “libertarian vs. authoritarian” axis to both labels changes things up wildly. And shows me at least a little bit how someone can label themselves conservative and also be totally fine with the surveillance state. Or totally against it.

Libertarians are frequently authoritarians. Maybe even overwhelmingly so. What they dont like are restrictions on their controlling impulses.

As a centrist libertarian, I would say the dynamic is better framed in that authoritarians are frequently attracted to libertarianism as a way of cloaking and justifying their true beliefs, to both themselves and others. So called "right" libertarianism is rife with this, as it emphasizes a fallacious axiomatic conception of rights which are to be overtly rejected when the logical preconditions have not been met. This captures essentially all of the Surveillance Valley hucksters claiming to be "libertarians" - rights for me, not for thee.

Observation of your body feels more intrusive than observation of your text.

My theory is generational and knowledge shifts, namely that now we're seeing the first substantial cohort of non-techies with a decent understanding of tech culture and politics. This is also why we see a lot more anti-AI and anti tech CEO sentiment among the young than the old in defiance of our previously held assumptions.

This is about the right time for the children, nieces, and nephews of the first and second big generations of post-Web software engineers, IT workers, etc. to be getting old enough to become a political force. There's been an explosion of tech workers since the mid-90s, and that means an explosion of people related to them as well. The kids who watched their parents be stacked ranked at Amazon, saw the difference in how MS treated contractors and employees, listened to their corporate IT parents talk about how hostile MS is, etc. all learned that the big tech companies are not anyone's friend even if the specifics of the tech go over their heads. And while the workers themselves might keep their heads down and be quiet in public for the sake of their careers, their kids and relatives are less constrained.

And they can talk to each other and find that it's a common sentiment. Since they don't necessarily have technical careers or hobbies, they're also able to export this sentiment to a wider variety of people through overlapping hobbies and interests (e.g. the IT guy at a school in suburban Ohio has a kid who's a theatre nerd, and the kid is good at communicating their anti big tech position to this 'new' group of people).

The distribution of knowledge about how tech companies operate is shifting and diffusing into channels and communities it didn't before.

if you cannot see how your violent ex boyfriend stalking you with cameras is profoundly different than the federal government knowing who you call, then you are a liar.

also, snowden is a traitor. putin's stooge

The Snowden situation is more complicated to explain. For flock you just show a Benn Jordan video showcasing the camera recording kids and people are likely to understand the problem. It’s also visible, in the real world, whenever you go around and see those cameras

(Benn Jordan has been so good at publicizing the flock issue, I would highly recommend to check his Patreon, his technical work over the years is really impressive)

Vibecoding meets the long history of viberegulation

My family keeps sending me screenshots of AI generated arguments against building new data centers. Apparently we have too many and they don't understand where the demand is coming from. When I asked how many we'll need over the next 10 years the answer was simple, we'll need to build exactly "Oh, fuck off." data centers in the US over the next 10 years to meet expected demand. We should get on that.

I guess video games are a problem too. And social media. They wrote about it on their Facebook Group. The news one, the one where they repost TikToks of people pointing and nodding at another video where someone in a trucker hat is talking about a conspiracy theory, not the one where they talk about Candy Crush.

I don’t use AI. Nothing about these conversations makes sense.

> My family keeps sending me screenshots of AI generated arguments against building new data centers.

obviously from chinese models running a campaign to keep the US from pulling away.

wow: https://www.axios.com/2026/08/28/china-ai-data-center-backla...

Did this all begin with SBF and Effective Altruism? Looks like here's a lot of overlap in the cast of characters.

"SBF and the Effective Altruists" could make a good punk band name

My relatives and friends are fed up with enshittification and hostile tech, some are about to stop using tech entirely.

Big tech is too short-termist to realize it, but we are about to destroy a lot of economical value if we destroy the internet and the trust behind it.

When the bubble bursts and tens of millions of people see their retirement accounts with S&P holdings drop 30%, that's when the knives will really come out.

I thought a big part of the opposition to data centers was due to the massive spike in electricity costs, or even loss of availability in getting power, for regular people while the data center gets a deal. If they actually paid for the new power generation, I doubt there would be much backlash.

That it's likely to be used to mine your personal data and be used to create AI slop in exchange for more global warming are just reasons to hate it more, but I think it's not the primary hate point.

Well, they're already bidding up generating capacity contracts for upcoming years. The net effect is raising everyone's electric bills today for a data center that might not even get built in the future.

The real kick in the pants is the ever present danger that you'll end up with a data-center that generates its own power on site, using turbo-generators running 24/7/365 because the grid and generation doesn't have anywhere near the required slack (aka resilience, aka redundancy) to take on hundreds of gigawatts of new base load. In addition to the noise, you also get particulates and pollution.

If they do manage to avoid local generation, you're still left with the noise of cooling systems, and the waste heat island.

I don't think they are in denial. I think they just don't care about public sentiment. American capitalism has proven over and over that people who hate you will still buy your product, at a premium.

An alternate interpretation is also possible: that "public sentiment" overemphasizes screaming minorities, and the vast majority just doesn't care.

You haven't seen NIMBY until you've seen what happens when there's even a hint of a new AI data center coming to town. Take the normal complaints about change, and bump them up approximately 3 orders of magnitude, and you'll be in the ballpark.

you know, ascribing states of mind like denial to entities like "Silicon Valley" is almost as bad as ascribing consciousness LLMs

Of course Silicon Valley is in denial, when their bonuses depend on AI.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

That quote is referenced twice in the article, including in the subtitle.

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