Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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Not news to this crowd, but still important to note. So many times as commentators we focus on evil companies, or evil governments, or evil agencies.

Nope, it's all of the above. Or rather, nobody is evil, just each party needs data for various reasons. Governments trump everybody, so if your information is being recorded, it's accessible to a government somewhere. (And you can be assured that tons of information about you is recorded daily)

Interesting (to me) is the fact that we've spent the last twenty years cranking out various sci-fi dramas about all the things that could go wrong in a future society. There was cloning, nuclear war (an old favorite), alien invasion, designer babies, prison cities, artificial intelligence, memory wiping -- tons of stuff. All the time, the people who produced and consumed such fiction said "You know, it's good that we bring up these ideas. We're going to need to deal with this kinda thing in the future. It's morally important. This is deep, thoughtful work."

Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind. And now when you point it out to folks, they either think it doesn't matter or they're so overwhelmed they give up thinking about what they could possibly do about it. The unstated question is: Gee, why didn't somebody tell me about this!

just each party needs data for various reasons

They want it, not need it. But respecting privacy is like exercising self control with no tangible benefit, so they just don't.

SciFi thought 'Gray Goo' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo ) was a possible end of the world situation.

Instead, we have an informational-goo. Software is eating the world, turning everything into bitstreams, and contaminating everything it touches as more things become digitised, more things can become digitised. And we're being flooded, swamped, clogged up, with unusably too much data while at the same time adding more at accelerating rates.

It's a kind of digibesity and leads to organizational digibetus and immobility as every employee trapses round through a sludge of gigabytes of old email and log data, reports slow against bloated databases, decisions drag as more and more people need to read more and more procedures and look up references in ever-bigger, ever-slower reference silos.

It's a kind of global hoarding disorder.

I wonder what the mid-stages and end-game of a Gray G0o01100 catastrophe is?

People have been pointing out the problems with snooping, surveillance and the effect of technology for decades now. It is not something people can say that it just snuck up to them.

They either did not care or called people pointing the increasing attacks on our liberties "conspiracy nuts".

>> Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind.

Ironically that is caused by an increase in freedom that the internet brought about.

We have long had the right to freedom of speech but it was expensive to interact with a large number of people. The internet made it much easier to actually use the rights heralded by politicians.

I think sci-fi has done a better job of realising some of the social implications of this explosion in rights. For example in showing how national allegiance can be lost in favour of geographically desperate groups of like minded indviduals.

Yes, he has a strange definition of dystopia. In Star Trek the leadership clearly knows where everyone is at all times, is that a dystopia? Very few people go full Stallman, although they could.

Maybe he's thinking of a Huxleyan dystopia. Very few of us would call the setting of Brave New World a utopia, but very few of the inhabitants of that world would call it anything else. Our joyful new information-dense world has brought with it compromises that the culture hasn't really assimilated yet, often isn't even aware of yet.

Yes people are evil and these people manifest themselves in the form of corporations, governments and agencies. There is the second system effect as well where one of the mechanisms above manifests itself as something evil when the components are thoroughly innocent. An example of the latter is your typical defence contractor. Also reference the film "The Cube" which discusses this as part of the theme.

People are definitely evil when they shrug off the moral implications of what they're doing for a pile of cash or turn a blind eye to the consequences of doing something. There are a lot of evil people on here and each little action adds a paper cut to society.

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