21 ms·

Let’s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech

163 points by magoghm 9y ago

taeric 9y ago
Our technology can make our lives better, can give us more control, can give us more privacy – but only if we force it to live up to its promise. Not only can it. It has. Any talk to the contrary is completely ignoring how much higher our bar has risen for quality of life.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  ...for some. It’s a bit less clear if you’re a kid mining cobalt in the DRC, right? The wonders of tech probably don’t matter to teen who is doxxed and bullied until they take their own life. Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage. Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste. You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones if your experience with them is being bombed by them. So yeah, if you can afford it, tech is wonderful. If you’re a Chinese Uigher, maybe not so much, and “any talk to the contrary” is disingenuous at best.
  - taeric 9y ago
    This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech. Homicides/lynchings were common before modern tech, as an easy example. Similarly, suicides are not only not a new phenomenon, but they are actually not as high as they have ever been historically. This is precisely what i meant by us having a higher bar. And we should continue to raise the bar. But don't talk about how tech could possibly make our lives better. Instead, lets continue the progress we have made.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech. Oh totally, war was much less dramatic before atomic bombs. /s Edit for substance: Tech is a massively double-edged sword, and looking only at the benefits is dishonest. You have nuclear power, which is truly amazing, and nuclear weapons, which may yet end us all. You have vaccines, but also biological weapons, medicines and poisons, better plows, better swords. You can argue that tech is a net positive, but if it’s anything, it is dramatic.
      - tomnipotent 9y ago
        Despite the incredible destructive weaponry we can deploy today, the last half-century has been the least bloody in history. Technology has drastically improved both our ability to create and destroy, but fortunately we're doing more of the former. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
        kitsune_ 9y ago
        Let me argue that the only reason for this is the atomic bomb and not 'technological progress' as a whole. Technology's 'ability to create' has virtually no bearing on any of this in my opinion.
        IntronExon 9y ago
        To add to what Kitsune has said, the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers. The other part is that for the first time in over a thousand years, Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars.
        tomnipotent 9y ago
        > the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers Still thanks to technology (e.g. radio, satellite, improved espionage capabilities). > Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars Once again, thanks to technology. We're now able to do more for less, and many of the motivations for war (resources, land) are no longer as much as a contributing factor.
    - s73v3r_ 9y ago
      "Bad things happened before" isn't really a rebuttal. The point of the original article was that tech can improve the outcomes of those things, but it's not, because we're not demanding it.
      - taeric 9y ago
        Worse things happened before, is the rebuttal. We are getting better. To the point that we now hold ourselves to standards we didn't even imagine before.
        mr_spothawk 9y ago
        yet our stories of their past don't include any history before colonial forces, slave capture, or the faintest possibility that anything other than improvement could have come with the civilizing forces.
        taeric 9y ago
        What? Even without the conquests of societies in the past, most other societies were much less likely to survive nature. A simple walk through the forest before antibiotics was ridiculously risky. Again, the claim is that the bar is rising. Not that it always rose fairly. Nor that it has equally reached everyone. Just that, by and large, technology has made our lives better.
        mr_spothawk 9y ago
        I mistakenly thought your double-grand-parent was related... so my comment is without context. yeah, "tech" is changing things and I couldn't imagine life without it... I imagine there are beings on the planet that can't imagine life with it, and they seem to live fine lives. we're special animals... in that technology is part of "us". but I don't know that makes our lives better. bill joy and some others disagreed, too
  - harryh 9y ago
    It’s a bit less clear if you’re a kid mining cobalt in the DRC Worldwide incomes have risen more in the last 30 years, especially for the poor, than at any other time in history. Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage. This is mostly a myth. Gig workers tend to make a bit more than minimum wage. Which, sure, isn't great but these are unskilled jobs where you make your own hours. It's not surprising that the wages tend to be on the low side. Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste. GDP per unit of energy consumed has risen dramatically due to better technology. You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones I’d your experience with them is being bombed by them. Deaths due to warfare are at all time historic lows. I can't say that this is due to new technology but it is worth noting.
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      Now let’s just apply some regional filters there, so that skyrocketing benefits for a minority don’t play statistical games with the majority.
      - harryh 9y ago
        Apply whatever regional filters you want. Most of what I said will still hold most of the time. I'm not playing any statistical games.
        IntronExon 9y ago
        Ok, let’s look at the Middle East and Northern Africa. Edit: Or better yet, stick with my original example of the DRC, which is not a happy tale.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        It’s been pretty great for Bangladesh and India.
        IntronExon 9y ago
- hueving 9y ago
  For privacy and control? Definitely not. A huge chunk of my family uses Facebook as the means of communication which means private correspondence is being mediated and read by Facebook's platform. At any whim they can ban a user, delete a message, etc. The same applies to Gmail but at least there is an escape hatch to a different email provider if you are using a custom domain. The centralization of stuff into Amazon, Google, and Facebook's offerings has been extremely destructive to the status quo for control and privacy.
  - taeric 9y ago
    This is only true with our modern bar. And yes, we should continue to get better. I am not calling for a halt of progress. However, women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically. There are some ways you can look at this so that it seems that corporations have more ability to see into your life. In large, it is really just a rise in their accuracy. Their attempts and actions are actually lessened.
    - Maybestring 9y ago
      >However, women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically. Why should technology get the credit?
      - taeric 9y ago
        Why shouldn't it? Different technologies, sure. But the liberating effects of labor saving devices is pretty tough to dispute.
      - maxerickson 9y ago
        Because a lot of it is pretty simply rooted in economics. If you want your kids to go to school, there needs to be resources for that to happen (and you personally have to have enough resources that you aren't using them for labor).
    - jstarfish 9y ago
- jstarfish 9y ago
  By what metric? American life expectancy is declining. Suicide rates are stable. And the cost of healthcare related to either of these issues is increasing. Meanwhile, wages remain stagnant and automation threatens the jobs of everyone without an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering or a PhD in computer science. And literally every internet-connected device in our lives are surveillance tools being exploited for some corporate interest. Yet there are piles of laundry in my home that aren't washing or folding themselves. Anything other than a TV dinner won't cook itself. Cars...might eventually drive themselves, I suppose, until enough bored teenagers poking around on Shodan decide they'd like a turn at the wheel. Tech has risen to meet the needs of the average household by providing us...cellphone apps that put us in contact with some desperate human willing to perform tasks for those who can afford it, invisible money whose value fluctuates and gets stolen in more ways than is possible to spend, and gypsy cab/delivery services. I can't think of a recent technological development that has made my life any better or easier. Instead, I spend more time troubleshooting half-assed, overcomplicated black-box shitware (with even less support!) than ever before. No thank you. It's been a race to the bottom since the late 2000s.
  - taeric 9y ago
    I have a hard time reading this as other than paranoia. There are concerns over expectancy going flat or down. My understanding is that a few points down does not indicate the swing down has started. Should be looked at, but evidence is equally indicative of standard variance in growth. That is, the anomaly was the constant growth in expectancy. Certainly an outlier in our histories. And you should try harder in looking for things that are easier in life. It may not have got your life, yet. We should do what we can to spread the rewards to everyone, including you.
tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
Did the site do down?
news_to_me 9y ago
Reminds me of the Scuttlebutt culture docs, which I found recently: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/modern-design.html https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...
ninorena 9y ago
This is a great reminder that it always helps to think deeply about a problem before spouting out a solution. I appreciate that Cory moves beyond the "protech" and "anti-tech" rhetoric and allows for us to be humans together on the same journey. However, I find it increasingly frustrating that there are many voices out there involved in this "techlash" yet there seems to be little thought given to the actual ethics and morality they continue to cite. Who gets to define what is right?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Obviously video game journalists should be in charge.
- roguecoder 9y ago
  Well, there's a great tv show called "The Good Place"...
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  I don't know that he's thinking more deeply than willing to be a bit contrarian... he seems to loosely throw around concepts without seeming to care whether they make sense or could withstand scrutiny in context. He seems perfectly happy with half-baked thinking and poorly defined buzzwords as long as it sounds good for a moment. Example: "Reagan deregulated business and defanged anti-trust, and so newspapers were snapped up by private equity funds that slashed their newsrooms, centralized their ad sales, and weakened their product. When Craigslist came along, these businesses had been looted of all the cash they could have used to figure out their digital futures, and they started to die." He laments this as an example of a more tech-neutral but also "complicated" story but it's not just complicated it's also, you know, easy to poke holes in. It was merely the "deregulated environment", not craigslist. Right. I could spend half an hour on this but "neoliberal capitalism" means I have other stuff to do right now, so...
  - news_to_me 9y ago
    > I could spend half an hour on this but "neoliberal capitalism" means I have other stuff to do right now, so... I wish you would. I agree with your complaint that the article leaves a lot of details to be desired, and I have the same complaint of your comment.
Elzair 9y ago
When I try to access the site, I get "Error establishing a database connection" Let's indeed demand better from tech!
- tyingq 9y ago
  I'm guessing that eventually, Azure and Google Cloud put enough pressure on AWS that the whole elastic solution situation is affordable enough that people stop skimping on affordable hosting. At the moment, there's a fair amount of pennywise/poundfoolish behavior because of crazy high cloud egress costs. There's a huge pricing chasm between, for example, a cheap Digital Ocean non-elastic hosting solution and AWS. Digital Ocean, though, is moving closer to an actual cloud, and the big 3 seem to be starting to compete on price.
sinak 9y ago
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-S8H-gzazOMJ:https://locusmag.com/2018/03/cory-doctorow-lets-get-better-at-demanding-better-from-tech/&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-S8H-gz...
- news_to_me 9y ago
  I get stuck on that too, but viewing the text version + browser "reader" mode gets it for me :)
- azdle 9y ago
  Since this is an article on privacy in tech here's a mirror not hosted by one of the top invaders of online privacy: http://web.archive.org/web/20180305203213/http://locusmag.com/2018/03/cory-doctorow-lets-get-better-at-demanding-better-from-tech/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180305203213/http://locusmag.co...
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
>It may sound improbable, but revolutions always rely on fifth columnists who change sides. In China Miéville’s October, a masterful, novelistic history of the Russian Revolution, he recounts how the Cossacks, the Czar’s most brutal shock-troops, took the revolutionaries’ side, refusing to mount cavalry charges on protestors and keeping their horses perfectly stationary while protesters openly crawled between the mounts’ legs, technically complying with their officers’ orders to “hold the street and do not move from your positions.” Unfortunately, for the Cossacks, the Soviets basically committed genocide against them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decossackization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decossackization This goes to show you that before you switch sides, sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know.
- sp332 9y ago
  That also depends if your goal is self-preservation, or living in a principled way.
  - oldcynic 9y ago
    I wonder how many would maintain their principles if they knew the consequences, not just for themselves, but for their family too. Not too many I think
    - aalleavitch 9y ago
      Your username is perfect.
  - shanghaiaway 9y ago
    You can have as many principles as you can afford.
- gowld 9y ago
  The history of genocide is the history of human civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom "Modern historians give estimates of the scale of the murders by Khmelnytsky's Cossacks ranging between 40,000 and 100,000 men, women and children,[21][22] or perhaps many more.[23]"
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> The reality is that these early “techno-utopians” were keenly aware of these risks. They founded organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, not because they were convinced that everything was going to be great – but because they were worried that everything could be terrible, and also because they saw the potential for things to be better. Yeah, but then Google, Facebook et al started throwing six-figure salaries to CS graduates to steal your data and, well, that's what happened to hackers' ethics and technology morality.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > Yeah, but then Google, Facebook et al started throwing six-figure salaries to CS graduates to steal your data and, well, that's what happened to hackers' ethics and technology morality. I still believe that there are enough hackers who would be willing to work for a much worse salary if they could obey hacker ethics and morality. Of course this implies working at a place that is much cheaper than Bay Area. But even under this premise: Where is the money supposed to come from to pay an even much lower salary reliably?
  - aphextron 9y ago
    >I still believe that there are enough hackers who would be willing to work for a much worse salary if they could obey hacker ethics and morality. Of course this implies working at a place that is much cheaper than Bay Area. But even under this premise: Where is the money supposed to come from to pay an even much lower salary reliably? I think this is essentially the role Mozilla fills in the SF/SV ecosystem at least. Everyone knows Mozilla engineers are equally or greater respected than anyone from Facebook or Google. The problem is there's only room for one Mozilla. There simply isn't enough donations to support more.
    - igorkraw 9y ago
      Mozilla makes bank mainly as a non-profit company, not via donations: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ Which i am very happy about, they are still on the right side of history in my book. The recent issues with tracking and marketing channels have burned me a bit, but there is still good will left. I hope they don't fuck it up
maxxxxx 9y ago
I would like to hear the same demands on business people. In the last few decades it has slowly become accepted that business should behave like total psychopaths that should only be concerned with enriching themselves. In the end the people with power (money) will always find people doing dirty work for them, be it tech or something else. I think that's the real problem that needs to be addressed.
- empath75 9y ago
  There are two parts of this— one is the exploitation of the weak by the powerful using technology as a tool, and the other is the technologists that are willing collaborators. It’s been this way since before daVinci designed war machines for the prince.
- nicolashahn 9y ago
  That the most powerful have been the ones that are a combination of selfish, good at deception, and able to toe the line of morality has been the case at least since mammals evolved.
- ignoramceisblis 9y ago
  Beneath the popular messages that everyone should be respected, that all members of certain groups should be treated well, hides the fact that there are people who do true evil, who exploit and deceive, on a daily basis.
cromwellian 9y ago
Maybe we could get better at demanding better from Gun Manufacturers, Fossil Fuel and Chemical Companies while we’re at it? The tech community has to get better at avoiding navel gazing. Hyperbolizing threats from tech, some theoretical and far off, while ignoring serious threats that affect he lives people everyday. The majority of the real, actual suffering going on right now has little to do with tech. It’s the people turner into refugees thanks to geopolitics, it’s the DACA kids afraid ICE is just around the corner to break up their family, it’s the women being systemically assaulted, it’s the malnourished and maleducated kids among America’s poor. I wish half the attention spent on net neutrality or vertical search was targeted at lower items of the hierarchy of needs.
- ethbro 9y ago
  That's the No True Scotsman fallacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman > The majority of the real, actual suffering going on right now has little to do with tech. > It’s the people turned into refugees thanks to geopolitics, it’s the DACA kids afraid ICE is just around the corner to break up their family, it’s the women being systemically assaulted, it’s the malnourished and maleducated kids among America’s poor Tech has non-trivially contributed or stood idly by while all these happened.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    Everyone has stood by while this has happened, more so than Tech in many cases, for example, with respect to immigration, the major tech companies have filed amicus briefs with courts, lobbied politicians, and pleaded with the Trump administration to stop what they're doing. And while tech companies have been accused at various rates of sexual harassment, do we really think the big tech companies aren't trying to mitigate these issues to a greater degree than say, Hollywood or Wall Street Investment Banks (or the VC industry)? Are tech companies destroying the environment as fast as Koch Industries, or are they actually trying to be carbon neutral? Are they at least trying to cleanup their supply chain's bloody parts, or are they lobbying politicians to legalize pollution and bloody exploitation. (e.g. Apple and blood minerals vs Union Carbide/Dow) Your usage of the fallacy is incorrect BTW, this isn't a No True Scotsman fallacy, no where did I assert that tech companies don't do things which could harm society. My point is, the focus of HN is to obsess about tech companies behavior and avoid the far greater harm that non-tech (i.e. non-software) have done, principally because their interests are primarily talking about tech and how it relates to everything, and it is a myopic view of tech as the center of the universe: it either is the center of great harm, or the utopian solution to everything. The real problems of the world require messy, political problems that don't include the skills of geeks or silicon valley, they include things you can't calculate, engineer, or apply rigid principles to. So at worst, you can say my fallacy is "whataboutism", but in this case, the "whataboutism" is real. Lots of people crying about AI Skynets and full spectrum surveillance, and none about basic inequality. Why? Because a tech geek can imagine a way to filter cookies, or implement Asimov laws, but they can't imagine how to convince millions of people to stop voting for candidates who promise not to raise their taxes and stop giving money to "freeloaders" The real squishy, soft problems can't be solved with code on GitHub. Yes, we can tackle both issues, both what tech companies are doing wrong and what non-tech companies are doing, but it is a false equivalence to say they're causing equal levels of damage, right now we haven't even cleaned up the historical legacy damage caused by the old economy, and we're talking about paying large amount of attention hypothetical threats and damages?
none_to_remain 9y ago
I would like to draw attention to Gallup's "Business and Industry Sector Ratings" as polled in August of 2017. http://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/Business-Industry-Sector-Ratings.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/Business-Industry-Sector-R... "Computer Industry" ranks first in net approval, while "Internet Industry" ranks fifth (in between are "Restaurant Industry", "Farming and Agriculture", and "Grocery Industry"). I don't particularly buy into this "techlash" as a prevailing phenomenon.

163 points by magoghm 9y ago

Our technology can make our lives better, can give us more control, can give us more privacy – but only if we force it to live up to its promise. Not only can it. It has. Any talk to the contrary is completely ignoring how much higher our bar has risen for quality of life.

IntronExon 9y ago
...for some. It’s a bit less clear if you’re a kid mining cobalt in the DRC, right? The wonders of tech probably don’t matter to teen who is doxxed and bullied until they take their own life. Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage. Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste. You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones if your experience with them is being bombed by them. So yeah, if you can afford it, tech is wonderful. If you’re a Chinese Uigher, maybe not so much, and “any talk to the contrary” is disingenuous at best.
- taeric 9y ago
  This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech. Homicides/lynchings were common before modern tech, as an easy example. Similarly, suicides are not only not a new phenomenon, but they are actually not as high as they have ever been historically. This is precisely what i meant by us having a higher bar. And we should continue to raise the bar. But don't talk about how tech could possibly make our lives better. Instead, lets continue the progress we have made.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    This sort of rhetoric is borderline insane, though. Yes, bad things happen even with tech. But they are typically far less dramatic than what happened before the tech. Oh totally, war was much less dramatic before atomic bombs. /s Edit for substance: Tech is a massively double-edged sword, and looking only at the benefits is dishonest. You have nuclear power, which is truly amazing, and nuclear weapons, which may yet end us all. You have vaccines, but also biological weapons, medicines and poisons, better plows, better swords. You can argue that tech is a net positive, but if it’s anything, it is dramatic.
    - tomnipotent 9y ago
      Despite the incredible destructive weaponry we can deploy today, the last half-century has been the least bloody in history. Technology has drastically improved both our ability to create and destroy, but fortunately we're doing more of the former. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
      - kitsune_ 9y ago
        Let me argue that the only reason for this is the atomic bomb and not 'technological progress' as a whole. Technology's 'ability to create' has virtually no bearing on any of this in my opinion.
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        To add to what Kitsune has said, the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers. The other part is that for the first time in over a thousand years, Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars.
        tomnipotent 9y ago
        > the violence has simply changed into a series of proxy wars between nuclear powers, at the expense of non-nuclear powers Still thanks to technology (e.g. radio, satellite, improved espionage capabilities). > Western Europe isn’t almost constantly killing itself in endless wars Once again, thanks to technology. We're now able to do more for less, and many of the motivations for war (resources, land) are no longer as much as a contributing factor.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    "Bad things happened before" isn't really a rebuttal. The point of the original article was that tech can improve the outcomes of those things, but it's not, because we're not demanding it.
    - taeric 9y ago
      Worse things happened before, is the rebuttal. We are getting better. To the point that we now hold ourselves to standards we didn't even imagine before.
      - mr_spothawk 9y ago
        yet our stories of their past don't include any history before colonial forces, slave capture, or the faintest possibility that anything other than improvement could have come with the civilizing forces.
        taeric 9y ago
        What? Even without the conquests of societies in the past, most other societies were much less likely to survive nature. A simple walk through the forest before antibiotics was ridiculously risky. Again, the claim is that the bar is rising. Not that it always rose fairly. Nor that it has equally reached everyone. Just that, by and large, technology has made our lives better.
        mr_spothawk 9y ago
        I mistakenly thought your double-grand-parent was related... so my comment is without context. yeah, "tech" is changing things and I couldn't imagine life without it... I imagine there are beings on the planet that can't imagine life with it, and they seem to live fine lives. we're special animals... in that technology is part of "us". but I don't know that makes our lives better. bill joy and some others disagreed, too
- harryh 9y ago
  It’s a bit less clear if you’re a kid mining cobalt in the DRC Worldwide incomes have risen more in the last 30 years, especially for the poor, than at any other time in history. Tech might not have improved the lives of people who lost their jobs to “gig” workers who are paid a fraction of minimum wage. This is mostly a myth. Gig workers tend to make a bit more than minimum wage. Which, sure, isn't great but these are unskilled jobs where you make your own hours. It's not surprising that the wages tend to be on the low side. Tech has downright hurt the environment, even if you only look at sheer waste. GDP per unit of energy consumed has risen dramatically due to better technology. You probably don’t appreciate the future of drones I’d your experience with them is being bombed by them. Deaths due to warfare are at all time historic lows. I can't say that this is due to new technology but it is worth noting.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    Now let’s just apply some regional filters there, so that skyrocketing benefits for a minority don’t play statistical games with the majority.
    - harryh 9y ago
      Apply whatever regional filters you want. Most of what I said will still hold most of the time. I'm not playing any statistical games.
      - IntronExon 9y ago
        Ok, let’s look at the Middle East and Northern Africa. Edit: Or better yet, stick with my original example of the DRC, which is not a happy tale.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      It’s been pretty great for Bangladesh and India.
      - IntronExon 9y ago
hueving 9y ago
For privacy and control? Definitely not. A huge chunk of my family uses Facebook as the means of communication which means private correspondence is being mediated and read by Facebook's platform. At any whim they can ban a user, delete a message, etc. The same applies to Gmail but at least there is an escape hatch to a different email provider if you are using a custom domain. The centralization of stuff into Amazon, Google, and Facebook's offerings has been extremely destructive to the status quo for control and privacy.
- taeric 9y ago
  This is only true with our modern bar. And yes, we should continue to get better. I am not calling for a halt of progress. However, women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically. There are some ways you can look at this so that it seems that corporations have more ability to see into your life. In large, it is really just a rise in their accuracy. Their attempts and actions are actually lessened.
  - Maybestring 9y ago
    >However, women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically. Why should technology get the credit?
    - taeric 9y ago
      Why shouldn't it? Different technologies, sure. But the liberating effects of labor saving devices is pretty tough to dispute.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Because a lot of it is pretty simply rooted in economics. If you want your kids to go to school, there needs to be resources for that to happen (and you personally have to have enough resources that you aren't using them for labor).
  - jstarfish 9y ago
jstarfish 9y ago
By what metric? American life expectancy is declining. Suicide rates are stable. And the cost of healthcare related to either of these issues is increasing. Meanwhile, wages remain stagnant and automation threatens the jobs of everyone without an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering or a PhD in computer science. And literally every internet-connected device in our lives are surveillance tools being exploited for some corporate interest. Yet there are piles of laundry in my home that aren't washing or folding themselves. Anything other than a TV dinner won't cook itself. Cars...might eventually drive themselves, I suppose, until enough bored teenagers poking around on Shodan decide they'd like a turn at the wheel. Tech has risen to meet the needs of the average household by providing us...cellphone apps that put us in contact with some desperate human willing to perform tasks for those who can afford it, invisible money whose value fluctuates and gets stolen in more ways than is possible to spend, and gypsy cab/delivery services. I can't think of a recent technological development that has made my life any better or easier. Instead, I spend more time troubleshooting half-assed, overcomplicated black-box shitware (with even less support!) than ever before. No thank you. It's been a race to the bottom since the late 2000s.
- taeric 9y ago
  I have a hard time reading this as other than paranoia. There are concerns over expectancy going flat or down. My understanding is that a few points down does not indicate the swing down has started. Should be looked at, but evidence is equally indicative of standard variance in growth. That is, the anomaly was the constant growth in expectancy. Certainly an outlier in our histories. And you should try harder in looking for things that are easier in life. It may not have got your life, yet. We should do what we can to spread the rewards to everyone, including you.

tytytytytytytyt 9y ago

Did the site do down?

news_to_me 9y ago

Reminds me of the Scuttlebutt culture docs, which I found recently: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/modern-design.html https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...

ninorena 9y ago

This is a great reminder that it always helps to think deeply about a problem before spouting out a solution. I appreciate that Cory moves beyond the "protech" and "anti-tech" rhetoric and allows for us to be humans together on the same journey. However, I find it increasingly frustrating that there are many voices out there involved in this "techlash" yet there seems to be little thought given to the actual ethics and morality they continue to cite. Who gets to define what is right?

maxerickson 9y ago
Obviously video game journalists should be in charge.
roguecoder 9y ago
Well, there's a great tv show called "The Good Place"...
nerfhammer 9y ago
I don't know that he's thinking more deeply than willing to be a bit contrarian... he seems to loosely throw around concepts without seeming to care whether they make sense or could withstand scrutiny in context. He seems perfectly happy with half-baked thinking and poorly defined buzzwords as long as it sounds good for a moment. Example: "Reagan deregulated business and defanged anti-trust, and so newspapers were snapped up by private equity funds that slashed their newsrooms, centralized their ad sales, and weakened their product. When Craigslist came along, these businesses had been looted of all the cash they could have used to figure out their digital futures, and they started to die." He laments this as an example of a more tech-neutral but also "complicated" story but it's not just complicated it's also, you know, easy to poke holes in. It was merely the "deregulated environment", not craigslist. Right. I could spend half an hour on this but "neoliberal capitalism" means I have other stuff to do right now, so...
- news_to_me 9y ago
  > I could spend half an hour on this but "neoliberal capitalism" means I have other stuff to do right now, so... I wish you would. I agree with your complaint that the article leaves a lot of details to be desired, and I have the same complaint of your comment.

Elzair 9y ago

When I try to access the site, I get "Error establishing a database connection" Let's indeed demand better from tech!

tyingq 9y ago
I'm guessing that eventually, Azure and Google Cloud put enough pressure on AWS that the whole elastic solution situation is affordable enough that people stop skimping on affordable hosting. At the moment, there's a fair amount of pennywise/poundfoolish behavior because of crazy high cloud egress costs. There's a huge pricing chasm between, for example, a cheap Digital Ocean non-elastic hosting solution and AWS. Digital Ocean, though, is moving closer to an actual cloud, and the big 3 seem to be starting to compete on price.

sinak 9y ago

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-S8H-gzazOMJ:https://locusmag.com/2018/03/cory-doctorow-lets-get-better-at-demanding-better-from-tech/&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-S8H-gz...

news_to_me 9y ago
I get stuck on that too, but viewing the text version + browser "reader" mode gets it for me :)
azdle 9y ago
Since this is an article on privacy in tech here's a mirror not hosted by one of the top invaders of online privacy: http://web.archive.org/web/20180305203213/http://locusmag.com/2018/03/cory-doctorow-lets-get-better-at-demanding-better-from-tech/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180305203213/http://locusmag.co...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

>It may sound improbable, but revolutions always rely on fifth columnists who change sides. In China Miéville’s October, a masterful, novelistic history of the Russian Revolution, he recounts how the Cossacks, the Czar’s most brutal shock-troops, took the revolutionaries’ side, refusing to mount cavalry charges on protestors and keeping their horses perfectly stationary while protesters openly crawled between the mounts’ legs, technically complying with their officers’ orders to “hold the street and do not move from your positions.” Unfortunately, for the Cossacks, the Soviets basically committed genocide against them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decossackization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decossackization This goes to show you that before you switch sides, sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know.

sp332 9y ago
That also depends if your goal is self-preservation, or living in a principled way.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  I wonder how many would maintain their principles if they knew the consequences, not just for themselves, but for their family too. Not too many I think
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    Your username is perfect.
- shanghaiaway 9y ago
  You can have as many principles as you can afford.
gowld 9y ago
The history of genocide is the history of human civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom "Modern historians give estimates of the scale of the murders by Khmelnytsky's Cossacks ranging between 40,000 and 100,000 men, women and children,[21][22] or perhaps many more.[23]"

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> The reality is that these early “techno-utopians” were keenly aware of these risks. They founded organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, not because they were convinced that everything was going to be great – but because they were worried that everything could be terrible, and also because they saw the potential for things to be better. Yeah, but then Google, Facebook et al started throwing six-figure salaries to CS graduates to steal your data and, well, that's what happened to hackers' ethics and technology morality.

wolfgke 9y ago
> Yeah, but then Google, Facebook et al started throwing six-figure salaries to CS graduates to steal your data and, well, that's what happened to hackers' ethics and technology morality. I still believe that there are enough hackers who would be willing to work for a much worse salary if they could obey hacker ethics and morality. Of course this implies working at a place that is much cheaper than Bay Area. But even under this premise: Where is the money supposed to come from to pay an even much lower salary reliably?
- aphextron 9y ago
  >I still believe that there are enough hackers who would be willing to work for a much worse salary if they could obey hacker ethics and morality. Of course this implies working at a place that is much cheaper than Bay Area. But even under this premise: Where is the money supposed to come from to pay an even much lower salary reliably? I think this is essentially the role Mozilla fills in the SF/SV ecosystem at least. Everyone knows Mozilla engineers are equally or greater respected than anyone from Facebook or Google. The problem is there's only room for one Mozilla. There simply isn't enough donations to support more.
  - igorkraw 9y ago
    Mozilla makes bank mainly as a non-profit company, not via donations: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ Which i am very happy about, they are still on the right side of history in my book. The recent issues with tracking and marketing channels have burned me a bit, but there is still good will left. I hope they don't fuck it up

maxxxxx 9y ago

I would like to hear the same demands on business people. In the last few decades it has slowly become accepted that business should behave like total psychopaths that should only be concerned with enriching themselves. In the end the people with power (money) will always find people doing dirty work for them, be it tech or something else. I think that's the real problem that needs to be addressed.

empath75 9y ago
There are two parts of this— one is the exploitation of the weak by the powerful using technology as a tool, and the other is the technologists that are willing collaborators. It’s been this way since before daVinci designed war machines for the prince.
nicolashahn 9y ago
That the most powerful have been the ones that are a combination of selfish, good at deception, and able to toe the line of morality has been the case at least since mammals evolved.
ignoramceisblis 9y ago
Beneath the popular messages that everyone should be respected, that all members of certain groups should be treated well, hides the fact that there are people who do true evil, who exploit and deceive, on a daily basis.

cromwellian 9y ago

Maybe we could get better at demanding better from Gun Manufacturers, Fossil Fuel and Chemical Companies while we’re at it? The tech community has to get better at avoiding navel gazing. Hyperbolizing threats from tech, some theoretical and far off, while ignoring serious threats that affect he lives people everyday. The majority of the real, actual suffering going on right now has little to do with tech. It’s the people turner into refugees thanks to geopolitics, it’s the DACA kids afraid ICE is just around the corner to break up their family, it’s the women being systemically assaulted, it’s the malnourished and maleducated kids among America’s poor. I wish half the attention spent on net neutrality or vertical search was targeted at lower items of the hierarchy of needs.

ethbro 9y ago
That's the No True Scotsman fallacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman > The majority of the real, actual suffering going on right now has little to do with tech. > It’s the people turned into refugees thanks to geopolitics, it’s the DACA kids afraid ICE is just around the corner to break up their family, it’s the women being systemically assaulted, it’s the malnourished and maleducated kids among America’s poor Tech has non-trivially contributed or stood idly by while all these happened.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Everyone has stood by while this has happened, more so than Tech in many cases, for example, with respect to immigration, the major tech companies have filed amicus briefs with courts, lobbied politicians, and pleaded with the Trump administration to stop what they're doing. And while tech companies have been accused at various rates of sexual harassment, do we really think the big tech companies aren't trying to mitigate these issues to a greater degree than say, Hollywood or Wall Street Investment Banks (or the VC industry)? Are tech companies destroying the environment as fast as Koch Industries, or are they actually trying to be carbon neutral? Are they at least trying to cleanup their supply chain's bloody parts, or are they lobbying politicians to legalize pollution and bloody exploitation. (e.g. Apple and blood minerals vs Union Carbide/Dow) Your usage of the fallacy is incorrect BTW, this isn't a No True Scotsman fallacy, no where did I assert that tech companies don't do things which could harm society. My point is, the focus of HN is to obsess about tech companies behavior and avoid the far greater harm that non-tech (i.e. non-software) have done, principally because their interests are primarily talking about tech and how it relates to everything, and it is a myopic view of tech as the center of the universe: it either is the center of great harm, or the utopian solution to everything. The real problems of the world require messy, political problems that don't include the skills of geeks or silicon valley, they include things you can't calculate, engineer, or apply rigid principles to. So at worst, you can say my fallacy is "whataboutism", but in this case, the "whataboutism" is real. Lots of people crying about AI Skynets and full spectrum surveillance, and none about basic inequality. Why? Because a tech geek can imagine a way to filter cookies, or implement Asimov laws, but they can't imagine how to convince millions of people to stop voting for candidates who promise not to raise their taxes and stop giving money to "freeloaders" The real squishy, soft problems can't be solved with code on GitHub. Yes, we can tackle both issues, both what tech companies are doing wrong and what non-tech companies are doing, but it is a false equivalence to say they're causing equal levels of damage, right now we haven't even cleaned up the historical legacy damage caused by the old economy, and we're talking about paying large amount of attention hypothetical threats and damages?

none_to_remain 9y ago

I would like to draw attention to Gallup's "Business and Industry Sector Ratings" as polled in August of 2017. http://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/Business-Industry-Sector-Ratings.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/12748/Business-Industry-Sector-R... "Computer Industry" ranks first in net approval, while "Internet Industry" ranks fifth (in between are "Restaurant Industry", "Farming and Agriculture", and "Grocery Industry"). I don't particularly buy into this "techlash" as a prevailing phenomenon.