Yes. The only question left is when does the terror begin? And it will--it will be our own governments clamping down on all of us. The digital norm globally will be China under the CCP. That is the future for all of us unless we turn it off, but we won't because humans are stupid.
I believe the entire western world is sleep walking into totalitarianism. It's soft glove right now, but mass surveillance, no matter what the original purpose, only needs concentration of power to turn into something truly inhumane. We've seen it already and that was well before technology pushed the boundaries of what is now possible.
I just want to remind everyone that the technology and the police and all of that crap utterly failed to prevent the attacks at Brown and MIT. Total and complete failure. The only thing that mattered was some burned out genius that the world forgot who was illegally living the basement of the engineering building because he had literally nowhere else to go. And then they didn't even catch the killer, he controlled all the events and killed himself two entire days before he was found.
Mass surveillance is a false god as are background checks and pretty much every other measure human take to try and feel safer because there is no safety and never was.
I worked at a major university that used ColdFusion. They had one guy furiously writing all these websites that were total one-offs. They didn't use source control. Every project was a copy of his original. If there was a bug, he had to update dozens of projects instead of maintaining common source across those dozens of sites. He was totally insane and making bank.
The thing that bothers me about the whole story, apart from the deaths of course, is that we live in a surveillance state. While I want major crimes to be resolved and there to be deterrents to future ones, I just don't know about turning the whole US into East Germany. It's not going to work out well for any of us. As you can see, it didn't help solve the crimes, either. It was witnesses who did all the heavy lifting here.
It's not that helpful. What stops this technocratic authoritarianism is shutting down the electrical grid. If that happens the surveillance state dies instantly and all of the top echelon becomes vulnerable again. They live in a house of straw.
I'm planning on dystopian cyberpunk, which is how we already live, tbh. There was never going to be a golden age because humans are not capable of such.
So we need color changing cars and we need to make changes to stickers, wheels, and accessories more frequently. It will be like the characters in cyberpunk novels with the odd face paint and stickers that they can change so as to frustrate facial recognition.
Every time someone hits back in the name of individual rights and privacy, the same thing happens. The state (aka government) does not want us to be able to protect ourselves from its intrusions. The US has become a surveillance state, it's plain as day where it is heading. The weird thing is, we aren't prosecuting actual crimes when they are discovered. So one must assume that the surveillance is political in nature, much like what the USSR did or China currently engages in. It is for repression.
A large number of adults I encounter are functionally illiterate, including business people in very high up positions. They are also almost 100% MATHEMATICALLY illiterate, not only unable to solve basic algebra and geometry problems, but completely unable to reason about statistical and probabilistic situations encountered in every day life. This is why gambling is so popular and why people are constantly fooled by politicians. It's bad enough to be without words in the modern world, but being without numbers makes you vulnerable to all manner of manipulations.
I wrote my dissertation on information privacy back in 2003. Post 9/11, privacy was WILDLY unpopular thanks to government propaganda. It's never recovered. I walk around all the time thinking about how we are so close to what East Germans had to deal with, it's just soft glove tyranny here <for now>.
I've experienced similar. It has definitely made me less enthusiastic about working for any of those fools ever again. It's all just an exercise in mediocrity. The illiterate emails people send out are even worse--I swear that a lot of US born adults are functionally illiterate.
I agree with all you said, but it's not like it is well advertised by the companies--they should come right out and say "we MITM TLS" but they don't. It's all behind the scenes smoke and mirrors.
I'm glad someone is speaking out about this. When I first found out that the major Fortune 500 company I was working for did this, I was happy I never did any online banking or any personal finance logins using the work computer. It's obscene, quite frankly. I have many criticisms of big-corpo security and how overbearing and paranoid it has become such that developers can barely get a thing done in a lot of these big firms.
Plus, most of the internal threats are embezzlers who get away with it (for awhile, at least). I did work for one place that had a Chinese national attempt to make off with the entire customer database, but he did it by burning CDs (circa 2006).
I don't see the danger of pornography, tbh. Oh, much of it is sick, sure, but violent video games are far more harmful. Would it be better to depict loving, caring relationships? Hell, yes! But there are so few of those these days.
My teenage son struggles to have any meaningful dialog with any of the girls his age. It's like he doesn't exist. The few kids who are "dating" is basically the exact scenario that MGTOW depicts--girls only go for the elite jocks and ignore everyone else like they don't even exist. Everyone is miserable. Many will eventually grow out of it, but I don't think the females will ever view themselves as doing anything but "settling" because of the nonsense programmed into their heads. And yes, social media is largely responsible for how extreme the situation has become. In the 90s, girls were picky, but nothing like now. So all that young men have left is like AI chatbots and porn and it's better to not take that away from them, too.
People in power just want total control of the narrative and they don't want you to find out the truth about anything. Look at Walz in MN--he's like the ultimate Jedi "nothing to see here" mind trick with his wholesome grandfatherly persona, which is furthest from the actual reality of who and what he is. They all just want to force you into their reality and they hate it when you don't go there.
My son is 15. My talk to him went something like this: There's a lot of porn and nasty things that you can't unsee, so be careful what you look at. Also, those extortion gangs target teenage boys, so if some girl is suddenly hot for you online, come see me immediately so we can troll the ever loving fuck out of them. I think it went pretty well. We like doing things as a family, but more like the Addams family...
I'm 52 and I'm alone and isolated, so age has very little to do with any of it. There is no reason to pass laws to solve what technology caused and technology will undo or we will go extinct and it won't even matter anyways.
I made my Dad buy me a 387 math coprocessor when I was in college because I was taking math and physics courses but I bet none of the software I used ever even accessed that chip. It was more about the empty socket on the mobo looking out of place.
My solution as a consultant was to build some artifact that we could use as a starting point. Otherwise, you're sitting around spinning your wheels and billing big $ and the pressure is mounting. Building something at least allows you to demonstrate you are working on their behalf with the promise that it will be refined or completely changed as needed. It's very hard when you don't get people who can send down requirements, but that was like 100% of the places I worked. I very seldom ran into people who could articulate what they needed until I stepped up, showed them something they could sort of stand on, and then go from there.
Mythical Man Month had it all--build one to throw away.
Yeah, that's not a comparison to the kinds of highly complex internal systems I worked with the Fortune 1xx companies, particularly the regulated ones (healthcare). The whole "my son's school" thing is very nice, and it's cool you can knock that out so fast, but it's nothing at all like the environments I worked in, particularly the politics.