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Comment by clickety_clack | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).

It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.

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This is the best retort to the bag-escaping cat ever:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...

"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."

Motion to start a political platform for cats in bags. Our message is simple: Put the cat in the bag. Keep the cat in the bag.

Don't force it out of the bag if it doesn't want to leave.

> if it doesn't want to leave.

This is where the lawyers find the loophole to get the cat out of the bag.

Turns out, there was a hole in the bag.

That was originally meant for a carry loop, but alas.

That's how bags work

A great quote, thank you for sharing. It captures much of the five stages of denial (summarized below) in a much pithier form.

There's nothing in the bag.

The cat will never get out of the bag.

It wouldn't be a problem if the cat was out of the bag.

We cannot possibly keep the cat in the bag.

Putting the cat back in the bag is not worth trying.

No, the greatest is from the Sweet Smell of Success: "The cat's in the bag. And the bag's in the river."

And the river's in the canyon and the canyon's in the plateau and the plateau's in the volcanic shield and the green grass grows all around, all around, and the green grass grows all around.

> It’s a real tragedy of the commons

Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.

We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.

The government has few uses for total surveillance, and almost all are obviously bad. Private enterprise has a million uses, most of them various degree of bad, but as a society we've been blind to this kind of badness for many decades now - for at least as long as lying in the face of your fellow humans and trying to hurt them materially has been considered a respectable profession.

It's because capitalism won the (absurd black-and-white framing of the) cold war, with America as its the biggest winner. We don't even recognize the level of propaganda that has gone into convincing us all that "markets" are the best optimizer ever designed and that profit equals morality--we just accept these as base principles without questioning them. Surveillance produces profit? Well let's have more then.

Turns out the entities you control / regulate less, tend to do things that are less in your interest and more in their own.

Well, currently the free market is the government, while the nominal government is something less powerful than that.

> It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons.

When I ask people about things like this, I hear a lot of "If I don't build it, someone else will"

My goal isn't just to refuse to build this stuff, it is actively to resist the people who are.

I don't have much influence though

It's such a bizarre attitude. Like I think this stuff deserves decade+ long prison sentences for everyone involved, and they just don't care. Like imagine if mugging were legal and the people doing it just said "hey, if I don't rob you, someone else will."

Well, some people care and some don't. The people who care don't get to work on the technology.

I'm pretty unhappy with this, but are ChatGPT or Facebook really "the commons"?

They're each in different grey areas that were previously the commons.

Facebook didn't invent "talking to friends" or "showing adverts", but made itself "the place" hard enough most of the advertisers and most of the people intermediate through it.

OpenAI didn't invent "asking questions and recieving answers", not even "from an agent who knows which sites to search on your behalf"; but it is competent enough that I might have it read 50 times as many pages in a day as I myself would have read, and the sites' owners don't get real eyeballs looking at ads during this. (In my case, adblock even if I did it manually; but apply this massive increase in page hits to everyone who has their LLM research stuff).

I think any free platform with a billion people on it is, de facto, a commons. It would be great if we as a society acknowledged this and had come up with some better means of stewardship because the status quo is obviously heinous, but we've been happy to hand over absolute control of public discourse to a few trillion dollar tech companies.

Common people work there and built the tools. At any point, they could have chosen not to. Or told the boss guy it wasn't plausible. At the end of the day, we're choosing and building the world we're in, while also loudly complaining about what we choose to do.

Blaming a corporation takes away all the agency the workforce has.

I think the internet in general is a commons and I should be able to browse it without being spied on.

There should be general standards for what individual apps and websites should be allowed to do. There should be an expectation that the purpose of an app is what it does, i.e. a social connection app shouldn’t be an ad platform that suffers users insofar as they provide useful data to sell to advertisers.

Your issue is you are defining spyware too broadly. This is not spying on users, but rather 2 companies partnering and sharing data to result in either a better ads system or better understanding on how ads are performing. This is a positive value to society and the commons. Wasting space in a site or app with an ad that won't convert is the true tragedy of the commons. It's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.

Can't you see? We're just trying to build a better cigarette! Flavored to your specific tastes! You'll thank us, you'll see!

No ad has ever converted me yet the ad networks keep showing me ads.

Is this due to them being irrelevant or you being stubborn against ads. It's possible you would enjoy these goods and services if you tried them out.

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