9 ms·

"Hey, Google, use every discernible iota of my personal information to build the foundation of a Chinese-style, authoritarian, digital dystopia, because I'm too

"Hey, Google, use every discernible iota of my personal information to build the foundation of a Chinese-style, authoritarian, digital dystopia, because I'm too lazy to learn basic, self-managed organizational skills."

bhhaskin 7y ago
Pretty much this. I think users today are extremely lazy and are unwilling to learn anything. It's to the point where they are the ones being used instead of doing the using.
- Fwirt 7y ago
  "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
  - partialrecall 7y ago
    "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." Given that a Butlerian Jihad seems unlikely, what are our options? If we can't stop it, maybe we need to keep pace with it instead. If this is a Red Queen Race, then we need to give people the tools needed to compete.
  - harshreality 7y ago
    Only at the margins are other people with machines enslaving anyone. I think it's mostly an emergent phenomena enslaving everyone into some cultural and behavioral paradigm that nobody intends or particularly wants. But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained.
    - partialrecall 7y ago
      > "But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained." So the industry is too big to fail?
    - autoexec 7y ago
      > But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap) I couldn't care less if predatory companies collapse. None of the tech itself is inherently evil, its only being used against us instead of working for us. If google were disbanded or broken up today new companies would rise up continue to do what they do now under more responsible terms. Those companies can continue to provide cell phones and email accounts without using those things to build dossiers on the people who just want to communicate with friends and family. Many people today think it's impossible to offer anything if you aren't abusing your users because that's all they know, but I remember when there were hundreds of free email providers long before it became technically feasible to read every last email stored on the server to spy on users.
      - laurex 7y ago
        As someone working on the problem of "how do we have a hugely popular free product that doesn't make money off user data or selling information to advertisers" - the reason why there used to be a bunch of free email programs and most people now use Google is that it's incredibly hard to scale free technology without doing it in a way that isn't creepy (or being acquired by a company that will eventually insist on creepiness). Hopefully not an impossible problem.
      - bilbo0s 7y ago
        >new companies would rise up continue to do what they do now under more responsible terms. I think that's a naive position to take. People are people, and human nature really is hard to fight. It's a virtual certainty that anything replacing google, will be violating your security and privacy. Especially if it's "free".
        autoexec 7y ago
        I think it'd end up like what happened when Ma Bell was broken up. Over time the companies have merged back into just a few and not everything got better, and tech evolved rapidly which complicates direct comparisons but at the same time, I've got several phones in my home and none of them have "property of AT&T" engraved into them. Some things improved. Companies are amoral monsters who care about nothing but making money and there will always be a struggle with regulation followed by deregulation followed by more regulation as people push back against abuse, but that cycle has kept things in relative order. Companies have gotten very good at inserting themselves into government, directly and indirectly, to stand in the way and prevent the people from keeping them in line, but I don't think it's entirely hopeless yet.
    - phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
      Google is doing this on purpose.
  - fouc 7y ago
    Unfortunately the machines can easily be turned against the men that think they have control over the machines.
  - tripzilch 7y ago
    Who are you quoting?
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Users today are users yesterday and tomorrow. People will be people. Betting against human nature comes with very, very, very long odds. Far better to organise a system by accepting human nature and working with it than against it. Safe by default, opt in, privacy protecting by default, etc, etc. People care, they do, but the feedback loop from shiny feature to creeping authoritarianism is too long for monkey brains to grasp. What you call lazy, I call dopamine. You can't expect us naked apes to just ignore that hit. Change the game instead. It's easy to blame it on "people". But if we put ourselves in a situation where we rely on us fallible beings swimming upstream day after day, on snowflakes feeling responsible for the avalanche, do we then really have anyone to blame but ourselves?
  - seph-reed 7y ago
    I have a half-baked theory... one which is not mine to bring to fruition alone, should it even be of value: the relationship between referees and players is probably the best analogy to a functional world order plausible. The players can't have a say on the rulings, and the refs shouldn't have an opinion on the winners. In other words, you're either in the game, or out, but never both. I imagine a world where there's a very clear delineation between people who are currently in and currently out. When you're in, you go with the flow. You follow your heart, sing, dance, try to be happy, be creative. And when you're out, that shits a no go. You remember what it was like to be emotional, you empathize, but decisions must be strictly non-impulsive. People take turns going from one side to the other. Too long on either side and you'd lose sight, ruin the game. It's also kind of analogous to trip-sitters.
    - pdkl95 7y ago
      > You remember what it was like to be emotional, you empathize, but decisions must be strictly non-impulsive. Bruce Sterling called that group "Zen Serotonin" in his novel Schismatreix[1] about posthuman ideologies. They enforced their "strictly non-impulsive" zen-like calm with biomonitor-regulated sci-fi drugs. They advocated strongly for social order and slowing the rate of social change. My username ("pdkl95") is based on the opposite ideology. It is another sci-fi drug from Schismatrix, used by another ideological faction to force (often destructively, as brain damage) a change in perspective; it forces someone out of the comfortably familiar paradigm that Zen Serotonin tried to maintain. This "clear delineation" between groups will eventually happen. All species eventually fracture into separate daughter-species. Instead of finding different ecological niches, human will speciate into different ideological niches. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix#Ideologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix#Ideologies
baxtr 7y ago
So we deserve it then?
- seph-reed 7y ago
  As long as 1940's Nazis are monsters and the very concept of "conspiring" is considered crazy talk, yes. I bring these two up because: 1. Saying 1940's Nazis are monsters exemplifies a lack of empathy. They did monstrous things, no doubt, but the vast majority of the army was young men, doing a duty, during a depression, while under one of the first and strongest propaganda campaigns ever. They as people were very little different than us now. It's a prime example of how the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. 2. The way that every single time anyone implicates to even the slightest degree that maybe powerful people might be smart enough to do something subversive and tricky, people jump over each-other trying to be the first to make a tin-foil hat joke... that shit is annoying. In conclusion, a society which managed to miss the whole "empathy" message of WW2 and actively undermines any attempt to pass blame towards the people in power is being extremely irresponsible, and the odds of things going badly are stacked against.
gowld 7y ago
Wholly off-topic. The issue at hand is whether other people can do that blah blah blah with your data, if you don't operate under perfect opsec all the time to conceall all information about you.

bhhaskin 7y ago

Pretty much this. I think users today are extremely lazy and are unwilling to learn anything. It's to the point where they are the ones being used instead of doing the using.

Fwirt 7y ago
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
- partialrecall 7y ago
  "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." Given that a Butlerian Jihad seems unlikely, what are our options? If we can't stop it, maybe we need to keep pace with it instead. If this is a Red Queen Race, then we need to give people the tools needed to compete.
- harshreality 7y ago
  Only at the margins are other people with machines enslaving anyone. I think it's mostly an emergent phenomena enslaving everyone into some cultural and behavioral paradigm that nobody intends or particularly wants. But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained.
  - partialrecall 7y ago
    > "But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained." So the industry is too big to fail?
  - autoexec 7y ago
    > But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap) I couldn't care less if predatory companies collapse. None of the tech itself is inherently evil, its only being used against us instead of working for us. If google were disbanded or broken up today new companies would rise up continue to do what they do now under more responsible terms. Those companies can continue to provide cell phones and email accounts without using those things to build dossiers on the people who just want to communicate with friends and family. Many people today think it's impossible to offer anything if you aren't abusing your users because that's all they know, but I remember when there were hundreds of free email providers long before it became technically feasible to read every last email stored on the server to spy on users.
    - laurex 7y ago
      As someone working on the problem of "how do we have a hugely popular free product that doesn't make money off user data or selling information to advertisers" - the reason why there used to be a bunch of free email programs and most people now use Google is that it's incredibly hard to scale free technology without doing it in a way that isn't creepy (or being acquired by a company that will eventually insist on creepiness). Hopefully not an impossible problem.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >new companies would rise up continue to do what they do now under more responsible terms. I think that's a naive position to take. People are people, and human nature really is hard to fight. It's a virtual certainty that anything replacing google, will be violating your security and privacy. Especially if it's "free".
      - autoexec 7y ago
        I think it'd end up like what happened when Ma Bell was broken up. Over time the companies have merged back into just a few and not everything got better, and tech evolved rapidly which complicates direct comparisons but at the same time, I've got several phones in my home and none of them have "property of AT&T" engraved into them. Some things improved. Companies are amoral monsters who care about nothing but making money and there will always be a struggle with regulation followed by deregulation followed by more regulation as people push back against abuse, but that cycle has kept things in relative order. Companies have gotten very good at inserting themselves into government, directly and indirectly, to stand in the way and prevent the people from keeping them in line, but I don't think it's entirely hopeless yet.
  - phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
    Google is doing this on purpose.
- fouc 7y ago
  Unfortunately the machines can easily be turned against the men that think they have control over the machines.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  Who are you quoting?
nothrabannosir 7y ago
Users today are users yesterday and tomorrow. People will be people. Betting against human nature comes with very, very, very long odds. Far better to organise a system by accepting human nature and working with it than against it. Safe by default, opt in, privacy protecting by default, etc, etc. People care, they do, but the feedback loop from shiny feature to creeping authoritarianism is too long for monkey brains to grasp. What you call lazy, I call dopamine. You can't expect us naked apes to just ignore that hit. Change the game instead. It's easy to blame it on "people". But if we put ourselves in a situation where we rely on us fallible beings swimming upstream day after day, on snowflakes feeling responsible for the avalanche, do we then really have anyone to blame but ourselves?
- seph-reed 7y ago
  I have a half-baked theory... one which is not mine to bring to fruition alone, should it even be of value: the relationship between referees and players is probably the best analogy to a functional world order plausible. The players can't have a say on the rulings, and the refs shouldn't have an opinion on the winners. In other words, you're either in the game, or out, but never both. I imagine a world where there's a very clear delineation between people who are currently in and currently out. When you're in, you go with the flow. You follow your heart, sing, dance, try to be happy, be creative. And when you're out, that shits a no go. You remember what it was like to be emotional, you empathize, but decisions must be strictly non-impulsive. People take turns going from one side to the other. Too long on either side and you'd lose sight, ruin the game. It's also kind of analogous to trip-sitters.
  - pdkl95 7y ago
    > You remember what it was like to be emotional, you empathize, but decisions must be strictly non-impulsive. Bruce Sterling called that group "Zen Serotonin" in his novel Schismatreix[1] about posthuman ideologies. They enforced their "strictly non-impulsive" zen-like calm with biomonitor-regulated sci-fi drugs. They advocated strongly for social order and slowing the rate of social change. My username ("pdkl95") is based on the opposite ideology. It is another sci-fi drug from Schismatrix, used by another ideological faction to force (often destructively, as brain damage) a change in perspective; it forces someone out of the comfortably familiar paradigm that Zen Serotonin tried to maintain. This "clear delineation" between groups will eventually happen. All species eventually fracture into separate daughter-species. Instead of finding different ecological niches, human will speciate into different ideological niches. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix#Ideologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix#Ideologies

baxtr 7y ago

So we deserve it then?

seph-reed 7y ago
As long as 1940's Nazis are monsters and the very concept of "conspiring" is considered crazy talk, yes. I bring these two up because: 1. Saying 1940's Nazis are monsters exemplifies a lack of empathy. They did monstrous things, no doubt, but the vast majority of the army was young men, doing a duty, during a depression, while under one of the first and strongest propaganda campaigns ever. They as people were very little different than us now. It's a prime example of how the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. 2. The way that every single time anyone implicates to even the slightest degree that maybe powerful people might be smart enough to do something subversive and tricky, people jump over each-other trying to be the first to make a tin-foil hat joke... that shit is annoying. In conclusion, a society which managed to miss the whole "empathy" message of WW2 and actively undermines any attempt to pass blame towards the people in power is being extremely irresponsible, and the odds of things going badly are stacked against.

gowld 7y ago

Wholly off-topic. The issue at hand is whether other people can do that blah blah blah with your data, if you don't operate under perfect opsec all the time to conceall all information about you.