Hacker News Reader

Comment by wladimir | Hacker News Reader

I understand your feeling, I know it very well. But that isn't a choice. There is no way to "stop technology". Humanity has always been about technology, from the moment we started picking up sticks.

All we can really do is make sure that technology, and knowledge about it, is more evenly distributed, so that central control is more difficult: make sure it isn't seen as kind of magic to people that they deem is impossible to understand and out of reach to them. Technology is simply a set of tools and should be regarded as such.

Centralized technologies with easily controlled, single points of failure are by far the most dangerous, and the most attractive for oppression. This is why DRM, for example, is really bad. It lives by obfuscation and being hard and/or undesirable to understand.

View on HN

Also: the tech industry needs to grow up out of the prevalent libertarian attitude[1]. There's a lot of knee-jerk reaction against government action but because that's a fantasy, it usually becomes an excuse for doing nothing at all. As a community we spend far too much time protesting inevitable tends when we should be calling for reasonable, workable regulation – e.g. we're never going to have a world without your personal information being collected in various places (this is the tech-libertarian equivalent of the belief record company executives have about DRM) but as a community we could make significant improvements for security, independent oversight, liability for loss & errors, etc.

1. I would suggest the term “glibertarian” because a significant majority of people who talk about libertarianism do so without demonstrating awareness of how much government support their current lifestyle and success requires.

"glibertarian" and implying immaturity are a good start, but you missed references to roads and Somalia if you want to hit all the anti-libertarian straw men.

I guess it was a good thing I outlined the specific positions I was referring to – otherwise someone might have only made a cursory reading and complained about straw men rather than addressing the problem.

Except those aren't straw men. Those are valid objections to some extreme Libertarian and/or Anarchist positions that haven't been answered, only painted as straw men.

Unfortunately technology's progression via marketing has turned it into a king of magic that is impossible to understand and is out of reach of them (past consumption). Look at most consumer IT products these days - black boxes for milking people.

DRM, the cloud, closed source software, unified communications (commercial and government internet control) and surveillance already are enslaving us.

I'm fully aware of what is happening, and how things appear to be going the "wrong" direction, at least according to the tech news. Don't let that despair you.

What I proposed was something we (as in people with intimate knowledge about these things) could do to make this better. A lot of technical people are content with being high priests, and a lot of "consumers" content with not understanding what is going on. It may be possible to change that, albeit slowly.

Looking beneath the surface level hyper commercialized pooha, there are quite active developments by in distributed protocols, mesh networks, cryptocurrencies, and people working on technology that is open and can meet basic human needs (for example see http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...), and so on.

Another thing is that centralization makes things fragile. Even though centralization may be more efficient at first glance, once centralized systems collapse enough, people will look for more decentralized solutions.

I don't agree with you. The problem with IT technology is that it's connected. It is (evenly) distributed, but connected. This gives people who want bad a much wider perspective.

Centralized technologies are not dangerous because they can be easily broken by revolutions. That's why DRM does not work. It's being hacked all the time.

And ofcrouse you always have a choice. You can put down the stick, or disconnect. But the choice is becoming harder as we rely (too) much on technology.

The reason DRM gets broken all the time is because it's decentralised and it attempts to act like it like it is centralised.

There is a DRM system with a very high success rate , it's called SaaS.

It's not that high a success rate. We have escrow agreements and all sorts in place because people don't trust our SaaS.

Difficult to comment without knowing the specifics but I assume there is some transfer of data/code under specific conditions? As in your customers can't just say "gimmie your code , we want to fork it".

That's a little bit different and in most cases for consumer SaaS (facebook,gmail etc) there is no way to get at the software itself. All the consumer gets is a thin client layer.

What is the problem with being connected? I think it is good to strive for connectivity as it encourages cooperation. Of course you need to be careful with what you trust and what you don't trust, and spread the risk when a connection goes 'bad'. This means not relying too much on any one connection.

I don't understand what you mean by "easily broken by revolutions". I also don't see what is bad with a wider perspective, unless it is somehow restricted to "bad people" (the classical panopticon?), but that'd require a very centralized system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com