28 ms·

Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt for the wrong person

239 points by williamsmj 5y ago

yial 5y ago
I strongly feel that an app like this is not appropriate or beneficial to the public. Notifying people of safety issues effectively? Very admirable and wonderful. Offering bounties to track down individuals as a private organization? It just comes off as rocky to me, perhaps unethical, and ripe for abuse and mistakes.
j4yav 5y ago
> And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote. Lesson definitely not learned.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> “Let’s find this guy, activate safety network completely,” Frame wrote, according to screenshots of internal Slack messages obtained by The Verge. “This is a great transition of Citizen back to active safety. We are not a news company. We are safety and we make this sort of heinous crime impossible to escape from. That needs to be our mindset.” The bounty was later raised to $30,000. > However Frame first saw the false identification, the Slack messages show he saw it as an “opportunity” for Citizen to fulfill its “true mission.” > “We know the guy is out there,” said one host, according to Castle. “We need our users to get out there and bring this guy to justice.” > And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote. These are scary quotes. The Citizen [app] CEO apparently wants to reframe their company as some sort of vigilante justice machine instead of a simple crime alert app. And he's willing to throw money at it. Of course their first push for vigilante justice is against the wrong person. Given that The Verge has obtained company Slack transcripts, I assume some of the employees are pushing back from the inside. Let's hope the employees continue fighting against this.
- ronsor 5y ago
  >vigilante justice machine That is illegal, and I feel this company is setting itself up for lawsuits.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    From the article: > In the hours that followed, it became clear the app was mistaken. The man pictured had no connection to the fires, and once he was located by law enforcement, he was quickly released for lack of evidence. "Released for lack of evidence" sounds like he was arrested which can show up on arrest records in background checks. IANAL but if this individual gets a job offer that's later rescinded after a background check due to that arrest, that sounds like grounds for a libel lawsuit. The CEO also put up the money himself, so whatever safe harbor exception Citizen could have claimed is probably unworkable (again, IANAL in bold letters).
- gumby 5y ago
  This apocryphal quote comes to mind, "We may be arresting the wrong people but at least we are arresting people." (variously attributed to Himmler, Beria, Mao or Stalin; th verb is variously "kill" or "arrest")
- williamsmj 5y ago
  "The Citizen [app] CEO apparently wants to reframe their company as some sort of vigilante justice machine" The app was literally called Vigilante until they were forced to rename it.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    With a name like that you don't need to wonder what's going on in the CEO's head. Why is such permitted in civilized society?
    - alpha_squared 5y ago
      Because it's the sort of mentality America was founded on. Not trying to be political, though I'm sure this can be an unpleasant topic. A couple hundred years of, "you're responsible for defending your land and it's your right to defend it," has fascinating and, often, disastrous outcomes.
jhawk28 5y ago
My first impression was, why is my watch company going after someone. It is not the watch company, it is an app trying to make a name for itself.
- kangaroozach 5y ago
  But is it, though? Seems like they actually are the Watch Company.
pstuart 5y ago
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Edit: the ostensibly good intentions are to "empower community policing".
- darkhorse22 5y ago
  Pretty sure it's paved with ill intentions.
- simonh 5y ago
  I don't see anything good about these intentions.
- YeBanKo 5y ago
  There were no good intentions. It was a cheap marketing publicity stunt under pretense of good intention.
Invictus0 5y ago
Reminds me of the /r/FindBostonBombers nonsense on reddit years back. People need to leave this sort of thing to the professionals.
- bombcar 5y ago
  > And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote. At least reddit seems to have learned their lesson (both the company and the users).
  - avs733 5y ago
    "get it right next time" they BELIEVED they were getting it right this time.
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  Yeah, that was one of the worst instances of mob “justice” I’ve ever seen. Innocent people were identified and targeted and investigators were forced to release information about the suspects early, which may have been directly responsible for even more bloodshed [1]. A bunch of internet obsessives playing detective from their keyboards is almost always a bad idea. As is everything that Vigilante/Citizen is doing. Having the CEO put out a cash bounty, even if it was for the right person (it wasn’t) is gross. Putting out “patrol cars” on the streets of LA when you have no authority is disgusting. Creating a rent-a-cop as a service model, especially when buoyed by bad data, is quite literally going to get people killed. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside-the-investigation-of-the-boston-marathon-bombing/2013/04/20/19d8c322-a8ff-11e2-b029-8fb7e977ef71_print.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/insid...
jchw 5y ago
This is an absolute disaster. A startup where you give people scraps of allegations and sicing them to go perform acts of vigilantism in exchange for bounties has to be one of the most reckless and idiotic things I have ever heard of. Even if this eventually results in a solved crime, how many other times will it result in innocent people getting piled on for no reason, potentially hurt or killed, or cases against actual criminals being muddied due to interference from vigilantes? There is already countless cases of failures like this from the Internet. Random people are just not qualified to do this kind of thing. I vehemently oppose this. In fact, I am genuinely pissed off.
- challenger-derp 5y ago
  Agreed. if something bad and irreversible happens, who gets held responsible, the mob who participated in the hunt? the board of directors?
  - ronsor 5y ago
    I'll take all of the above for a $5 million lawsuit.
- babelfish 5y ago
  This. I’m surprised the incorrect suspect isn’t suing for libel/defamation.
- adrr 5y ago
  It won’t launch once the lawyers realize they will be liable for damages. No way section 230 will shield them.
  - curryst 5y ago
    I'm genuinely curious how they plan to handle that. Not a lawyer, but this can't possibly be legal, can it? It seems like negligent libel at the very least, and maybe reckless endangerment? I also can't imagine that the lawyers are unaware, so what's their angle?
- 5y ago
alpha_squared 5y ago
What happens, for example, if (or when?) this company gets acquired by a malicious actor? It would've built a user base that bought into its mission statement, actively believes they're making society safer, as well as conditioned to get rewarded for following instructions to do so. What happens if this is weaponized for economic or political gain? This is a recipe for even worse and prolonged events than what's happened on Jan. 6.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  I think an app like this is depicted in Westworld. It’s basically Uber for “crime” fighting vigilantes/mercenaries.
  - sithadmin 5y ago
    Yes, and no. The app depicted in Season 3 is a gig economy app for hired muscle in general, for jobs both legal and illegal. The implication is that the latter is the norm.
- abvdasker 5y ago
  Honestly it sounds like Citizen is already being run by a malicious actor.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Don't think any acquisition is needed for that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
alex_young 5y ago
This plot seems ripped straight from Nightcrawler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)
y-c-o-m-b 5y ago
I get safety alerts from Nextdoor for my neighborhood. Even then over half of the alerts are misleading/inaccurate interpretations of people's paranoid biases. For example the other day somebody posted a Ring video of a "dangerous man" knocking on neighbor's doors. I recognized the person right away as a pest control representative that was at my house just the day before. Turns out the person posting the alert never answered the door and apparently didn't see the pest control logo on the man's shirt and hat. How they came to the conclusion that someone was "dangerous" based on zero interaction is not only negligent but interestingly is in itself dangerous. Taking that up a notch to vigilantism is a horrible idea and will lead to Ahmaud Arbery types of situations on a much wider scale.
- Balgair 5y ago
  The twitter account BestOfNextDoor is a pretty good and funny highlight of the paranoid lunacy that you get there: https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor Personally, I prefer to think of my neighbors as a bit kinder than their reality. I've since deleted the app and my head is firmly buried in the sand.
throwitaway1235 5y ago
Citizen is another example of the trend towards private security systems over public. Not good. (Your neighbor, while a member of the public, does not constitute public law enforcement)
- umeshunni 5y ago
  Part of the reason is the utter failure of public security systems in much of the US over the last year - whether it's the riots and occupation of public buildings in Portland or the takeover of city blocks in Seattle (and no one needs a reminder of how bad things are in SF).
  - cycrutchfield 5y ago
    Any reason why you neglected to mention one particular incident in Washington DC?
- courtf 5y ago
  Tech-enabled feudalism is considered very innovative by the wealthy sociopath club.
aml702 5y ago
What a complete moron this CEO is.
YeBanKo 5y ago
> “We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again,” the company said in a statement after the release. “This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.” How about a hefty fine and payment to the person in the order of 30 million paid by CEO personally.
- avs733 5y ago
  this seems like the perfect use of the corporate death penalty...this is an attitude and philosophy problem that cannot be solved with tools of behavior modification. It is also one of the least believable statements ever made by a corporate spokesperson ever.
Gunax 5y ago
Obviously getting it wrong is a problem--but i think you folks are conflating two issues. If the FBI had wanted to detain this man, would that have made it okay? What if this app had just broadcast the FBIs own reward? You're reading into it too much, and acting like people want mob justice. People have been offering rewards for apprehension or 'information about' for my whole life, and no one thought it was weird. But as soon as a tech company does it, the media goes bonkers. This is another example of the ridiculous axe the nedia wants to grind against anything tech.
- mplewis 5y ago
  The CEO does want mob justice. The original name of the app was Vigilante!
  - Gunax 5y ago
    I think to take the name of an app and extrapolate that it means mob justice (and not just community watch style activities) is another example of reading into it too much. It sounds like they wanted a catchy name (and its a much better name than the bland 'citizen'). I suppose you can argue that it reveals a true motive that they have since wisened up to. Although I agree it looks bad.
    - mplewis 5y ago
      Yes, the CEO has certainly "wisened up to" vigilante justice, and that's why he offered to fund a manhunt of an innocent person less than a week ago. Are we living in the same reality?
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        I think it is relevant that Manhunt =/= vigilante justice and people are widely conflating the two. When the police, family, or NGO post rewards for info, this isn’t vigilantism.
        5y ago
abvdasker 5y ago
If you boil this story down to its simplest form it has pretty dystopian implications. A rich tech CEO used his wealth and lynch-mob-as-a-service platform to personally issue a $30,000 bounty on a complete stranger based on nothing more than a picture. It sounds like something an ill-tempered feudal lord might have done 600 years ago. Imagine being on the receiving end of something like this.
soheil 5y ago
For people who find this terrifying and asking how can anything like this exist in a civil society, maybe start with their list of VC investors [0]? Sequoia Capital is ranked very prominently among them. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/citizen-d7ce/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/citizen-d7ce/company...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tyleo 5y ago
It's always good to remember that we are not so different from our ancestors. For example, we are very close in time to the people who held the Salem witch trials. What would those same people have done with a high-powered tool that let them find and witch hunt anyone, anywhere on the planet with many more people involved?
- laurent92 5y ago
  I’m always surprised to see that scriptures from 2000 years ago are intelligible for us and do not sound dumb or ultra-simplistic. Similarly, the relationships described in those books are very similar to today’s times. On another topic, when studying historic documents of feminism, I’ve noticed there were the same opposition (and arguments) one century ago and today. Despite having to recognize the immense _scientific_ progress, the _social_ progress is always touted as immense but I rather have the impression that humans remain as flawed as they were 2000 years ago.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    It turns out that the timescales to develop civilization and then to evolve to fit in it work on different orders of magnitude.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
dang 5y ago
Ongoing related thread: Leaked emails show crime app Citizen is testing on-demand security force - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520
ArlenBales 5y ago
I'm surprised Twitter allowed this company to use its platform to advertise vigilantism, with strong provocation orders such as "hunt down" and "bring to justice", which with vigilante types essentially encourages violence.
johnorourke 5y ago
Art becomes life.. in "The Circle" a randomer gets chased down and accidentally killed as a "product demo", and in Westworld series 3, Caleb gets assigned vigilante tasks via the RICO app.
- asdff 5y ago
  Imagine you just got hit by a car. You are lying on the ground. You see a stranger pull up their phone. Are they calling 911 for you? No, they are there to record you being hauled off in a stretcher on perhaps the worst day of your life to be the first to post it online. The Black Mirror writers must have invented this app.
Axsuul 5y ago
It’s amazing how quick people can jump to conclusions with no evidence. Highly recommend the Danish film “The Hunt”

239 points by williamsmj 5y ago

yial 5y ago

I strongly feel that an app like this is not appropriate or beneficial to the public. Notifying people of safety issues effectively? Very admirable and wonderful. Offering bounties to track down individuals as a private organization? It just comes off as rocky to me, perhaps unethical, and ripe for abuse and mistakes.

j4yav 5y ago

> And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote. Lesson definitely not learned.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> “Let’s find this guy, activate safety network completely,” Frame wrote, according to screenshots of internal Slack messages obtained by The Verge. “This is a great transition of Citizen back to active safety. We are not a news company. We are safety and we make this sort of heinous crime impossible to escape from. That needs to be our mindset.” The bounty was later raised to $30,000. > However Frame first saw the false identification, the Slack messages show he saw it as an “opportunity” for Citizen to fulfill its “true mission.” > “We know the guy is out there,” said one host, according to Castle. “We need our users to get out there and bring this guy to justice.” > And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote. These are scary quotes. The Citizen [app] CEO apparently wants to reframe their company as some sort of vigilante justice machine instead of a simple crime alert app. And he's willing to throw money at it. Of course their first push for vigilante justice is against the wrong person. Given that The Verge has obtained company Slack transcripts, I assume some of the employees are pushing back from the inside. Let's hope the employees continue fighting against this.

ronsor 5y ago
>vigilante justice machine That is illegal, and I feel this company is setting itself up for lawsuits.
- akiselev 5y ago
  From the article: > In the hours that followed, it became clear the app was mistaken. The man pictured had no connection to the fires, and once he was located by law enforcement, he was quickly released for lack of evidence. "Released for lack of evidence" sounds like he was arrested which can show up on arrest records in background checks. IANAL but if this individual gets a job offer that's later rescinded after a background check due to that arrest, that sounds like grounds for a libel lawsuit. The CEO also put up the money himself, so whatever safe harbor exception Citizen could have claimed is probably unworkable (again, IANAL in bold letters).
gumby 5y ago
This apocryphal quote comes to mind, "We may be arresting the wrong people but at least we are arresting people." (variously attributed to Himmler, Beria, Mao or Stalin; th verb is variously "kill" or "arrest")
williamsmj 5y ago
"The Citizen [app] CEO apparently wants to reframe their company as some sort of vigilante justice machine" The app was literally called Vigilante until they were forced to rename it.
- HarryHirsch 5y ago
  With a name like that you don't need to wonder what's going on in the CEO's head. Why is such permitted in civilized society?
  - alpha_squared 5y ago
    Because it's the sort of mentality America was founded on. Not trying to be political, though I'm sure this can be an unpleasant topic. A couple hundred years of, "you're responsible for defending your land and it's your right to defend it," has fascinating and, often, disastrous outcomes.

jhawk28 5y ago

My first impression was, why is my watch company going after someone. It is not the watch company, it is an app trying to make a name for itself.

kangaroozach 5y ago
But is it, though? Seems like they actually are the Watch Company.

pstuart 5y ago

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Edit: the ostensibly good intentions are to "empower community policing".

darkhorse22 5y ago
Pretty sure it's paved with ill intentions.
simonh 5y ago
I don't see anything good about these intentions.
YeBanKo 5y ago
There were no good intentions. It was a cheap marketing publicity stunt under pretense of good intention.

Invictus0 5y ago

Reminds me of the /r/FindBostonBombers nonsense on reddit years back. People need to leave this sort of thing to the professionals.

bombcar 5y ago
> And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote. At least reddit seems to have learned their lesson (both the company and the users).
- avs733 5y ago
  "get it right next time" they BELIEVED they were getting it right this time.
filmgirlcw 5y ago
Yeah, that was one of the worst instances of mob “justice” I’ve ever seen. Innocent people were identified and targeted and investigators were forced to release information about the suspects early, which may have been directly responsible for even more bloodshed [1]. A bunch of internet obsessives playing detective from their keyboards is almost always a bad idea. As is everything that Vigilante/Citizen is doing. Having the CEO put out a cash bounty, even if it was for the right person (it wasn’t) is gross. Putting out “patrol cars” on the streets of LA when you have no authority is disgusting. Creating a rent-a-cop as a service model, especially when buoyed by bad data, is quite literally going to get people killed. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside-the-investigation-of-the-boston-marathon-bombing/2013/04/20/19d8c322-a8ff-11e2-b029-8fb7e977ef71_print.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/insid...

jchw 5y ago

This is an absolute disaster. A startup where you give people scraps of allegations and sicing them to go perform acts of vigilantism in exchange for bounties has to be one of the most reckless and idiotic things I have ever heard of. Even if this eventually results in a solved crime, how many other times will it result in innocent people getting piled on for no reason, potentially hurt or killed, or cases against actual criminals being muddied due to interference from vigilantes? There is already countless cases of failures like this from the Internet. Random people are just not qualified to do this kind of thing. I vehemently oppose this. In fact, I am genuinely pissed off.

challenger-derp 5y ago
Agreed. if something bad and irreversible happens, who gets held responsible, the mob who participated in the hunt? the board of directors?
- ronsor 5y ago
  I'll take all of the above for a $5 million lawsuit.
babelfish 5y ago
This. I’m surprised the incorrect suspect isn’t suing for libel/defamation.
adrr 5y ago
It won’t launch once the lawyers realize they will be liable for damages. No way section 230 will shield them.
- curryst 5y ago
  I'm genuinely curious how they plan to handle that. Not a lawyer, but this can't possibly be legal, can it? It seems like negligent libel at the very least, and maybe reckless endangerment? I also can't imagine that the lawyers are unaware, so what's their angle?
5y ago

alpha_squared 5y ago

What happens, for example, if (or when?) this company gets acquired by a malicious actor? It would've built a user base that bought into its mission statement, actively believes they're making society safer, as well as conditioned to get rewarded for following instructions to do so. What happens if this is weaponized for economic or political gain? This is a recipe for even worse and prolonged events than what's happened on Jan. 6.

elliekelly 5y ago
I think an app like this is depicted in Westworld. It’s basically Uber for “crime” fighting vigilantes/mercenaries.
- sithadmin 5y ago
  Yes, and no. The app depicted in Season 3 is a gig economy app for hired muscle in general, for jobs both legal and illegal. The implication is that the latter is the norm.
abvdasker 5y ago
Honestly it sounds like Citizen is already being run by a malicious actor.
user-the-name 5y ago
Don't think any acquisition is needed for that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

alex_young 5y ago

This plot seems ripped straight from Nightcrawler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)

y-c-o-m-b 5y ago

I get safety alerts from Nextdoor for my neighborhood. Even then over half of the alerts are misleading/inaccurate interpretations of people's paranoid biases. For example the other day somebody posted a Ring video of a "dangerous man" knocking on neighbor's doors. I recognized the person right away as a pest control representative that was at my house just the day before. Turns out the person posting the alert never answered the door and apparently didn't see the pest control logo on the man's shirt and hat. How they came to the conclusion that someone was "dangerous" based on zero interaction is not only negligent but interestingly is in itself dangerous. Taking that up a notch to vigilantism is a horrible idea and will lead to Ahmaud Arbery types of situations on a much wider scale.

Balgair 5y ago
The twitter account BestOfNextDoor is a pretty good and funny highlight of the paranoid lunacy that you get there: https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor Personally, I prefer to think of my neighbors as a bit kinder than their reality. I've since deleted the app and my head is firmly buried in the sand.

throwitaway1235 5y ago

Citizen is another example of the trend towards private security systems over public. Not good. (Your neighbor, while a member of the public, does not constitute public law enforcement)

umeshunni 5y ago
Part of the reason is the utter failure of public security systems in much of the US over the last year - whether it's the riots and occupation of public buildings in Portland or the takeover of city blocks in Seattle (and no one needs a reminder of how bad things are in SF).
- cycrutchfield 5y ago
  Any reason why you neglected to mention one particular incident in Washington DC?
courtf 5y ago
Tech-enabled feudalism is considered very innovative by the wealthy sociopath club.

aml702 5y ago

What a complete moron this CEO is.

YeBanKo 5y ago

> “We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again,” the company said in a statement after the release. “This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.” How about a hefty fine and payment to the person in the order of 30 million paid by CEO personally.

avs733 5y ago
this seems like the perfect use of the corporate death penalty...this is an attitude and philosophy problem that cannot be solved with tools of behavior modification. It is also one of the least believable statements ever made by a corporate spokesperson ever.

Gunax 5y ago

Obviously getting it wrong is a problem--but i think you folks are conflating two issues. If the FBI had wanted to detain this man, would that have made it okay? What if this app had just broadcast the FBIs own reward? You're reading into it too much, and acting like people want mob justice. People have been offering rewards for apprehension or 'information about' for my whole life, and no one thought it was weird. But as soon as a tech company does it, the media goes bonkers. This is another example of the ridiculous axe the nedia wants to grind against anything tech.

mplewis 5y ago
The CEO does want mob justice. The original name of the app was Vigilante!
- Gunax 5y ago
  I think to take the name of an app and extrapolate that it means mob justice (and not just community watch style activities) is another example of reading into it too much. It sounds like they wanted a catchy name (and its a much better name than the bland 'citizen'). I suppose you can argue that it reveals a true motive that they have since wisened up to. Although I agree it looks bad.
  - mplewis 5y ago
    Yes, the CEO has certainly "wisened up to" vigilante justice, and that's why he offered to fund a manhunt of an innocent person less than a week ago. Are we living in the same reality?
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      I think it is relevant that Manhunt =/= vigilante justice and people are widely conflating the two. When the police, family, or NGO post rewards for info, this isn’t vigilantism.
      - 5y ago

abvdasker 5y ago

If you boil this story down to its simplest form it has pretty dystopian implications. A rich tech CEO used his wealth and lynch-mob-as-a-service platform to personally issue a $30,000 bounty on a complete stranger based on nothing more than a picture. It sounds like something an ill-tempered feudal lord might have done 600 years ago. Imagine being on the receiving end of something like this.

soheil 5y ago

For people who find this terrifying and asking how can anything like this exist in a civil society, maybe start with their list of VC investors [0]? Sequoia Capital is ranked very prominently among them. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/citizen-d7ce/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/citizen-d7ce/company...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tyleo 5y ago

It's always good to remember that we are not so different from our ancestors. For example, we are very close in time to the people who held the Salem witch trials. What would those same people have done with a high-powered tool that let them find and witch hunt anyone, anywhere on the planet with many more people involved?

laurent92 5y ago
I’m always surprised to see that scriptures from 2000 years ago are intelligible for us and do not sound dumb or ultra-simplistic. Similarly, the relationships described in those books are very similar to today’s times. On another topic, when studying historic documents of feminism, I’ve noticed there were the same opposition (and arguments) one century ago and today. Despite having to recognize the immense _scientific_ progress, the _social_ progress is always touted as immense but I rather have the impression that humans remain as flawed as they were 2000 years ago.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  It turns out that the timescales to develop civilization and then to evolve to fit in it work on different orders of magnitude.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

dang 5y ago

Ongoing related thread: Leaked emails show crime app Citizen is testing on-demand security force - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520

ArlenBales 5y ago

I'm surprised Twitter allowed this company to use its platform to advertise vigilantism, with strong provocation orders such as "hunt down" and "bring to justice", which with vigilante types essentially encourages violence.

johnorourke 5y ago

Art becomes life.. in "The Circle" a randomer gets chased down and accidentally killed as a "product demo", and in Westworld series 3, Caleb gets assigned vigilante tasks via the RICO app.

asdff 5y ago
Imagine you just got hit by a car. You are lying on the ground. You see a stranger pull up their phone. Are they calling 911 for you? No, they are there to record you being hauled off in a stretcher on perhaps the worst day of your life to be the first to post it online. The Black Mirror writers must have invented this app.

Axsuul 5y ago

It’s amazing how quick people can jump to conclusions with no evidence. Highly recommend the Danish film “The Hunt”