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*> "As users see their smartphones weaponized against them, and find few real alternatives, some are expressing fears that Tech Giants are plotting an oblique c

*> "As users see their smartphones weaponized against them, and find few real alternatives, some are expressing fears that Tech Giants are plotting an oblique coup in all but name, and positioning to usurp national governments with their own brands of cybernetic governance. They are building in control and exclusion, disinformation, private digital money and surveillance capitalism into gadgets we seem unable to step away from. I believe this threatens Western liberal democracy, fought for at such cost 80 years ago." And with this hyperbole I stopped reading.

dane-pgp 5y ago
You don't think that giving the government (or entities even less accountable) complete control over online information, discussion, and commerce, plus an almost perfect 24/7 surveillance system, might weaken liberal democracy?
- taylodl 5y ago
  * > You don't think that giving the government (or entities even less accountable) complete control over online information, discussion, and commerce, plus an almost perfect 24/7 surveillance system, might weaken liberal democracy? * The government doesn't have this control, nor do any of the FAANG companies. I know quite a lot of people who are online without the use of any of FAANG equipment or resources. If you granted these entities this power then you did so of your own choosing. Whether that was wise or not is an entirely different question. Whether it might weaken liberal democracy, I argue no. Liberal democracy is being attacked by our long-term enemies. They're using new tools and our ignorance to have us rot from within but it's a mistake to blame technology for what was done by the hands of our enemy. Lenin turned out to be correct, the capitalists really did sell them the rope they would hang us with. Perhaps I see this in a different perspective due to my being a cold war kid.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > The government doesn't have this control, nor do any of the FAANG companies. That's correct, they don't have complete control yet, and I agree that right now liberal democracy is being attacked by illiberal authoritarian regimes, as it has been for a long time. However, I think the point of this article is that we are also in the middle of a war for general-purpose computing, and that war might end with governments and/or corporations in a much stronger position than they are now in terms of censorship and surveillance. Already we are seeing isolated incidents of people being rendered less free because of the control that modern platforms grant to authorities, and I don't think it is helpful to blame the victims for choosing to use mainstream operating systems or social media sites that end up destroying their livelihoods, for example.
AgentME 5y ago
If you stopped there then you missed the parts where the author moved on to ranting about the Soviet and Maoist ideology of Big Tech! I'm a big supporter of free and open source software but this article is way over the top. The article misses how much of a golden age we're in. There's tons of devices available where the operating system and full app suites are open source! Desktop Linux and even an un-Googled Android smartphones are the best they've ever been. Good dev software stacks are FOSS and competitive! The web is built on open interoperable vendor-agnostic CPU-agnostic OS-agnostic standards! We no longer face the threat of a closed-source OS (Windows) eating all computing with no alternatives, open or not, as we used to. Programming becoming a very lucrative career path has insured that there's a strong "computing culture" and no shortage of resources available to get started. Newer programming languages that are much more beginner-friendly than C yet still powerful have taken off shortening the on-ramp for people to competently contribute to software they use. The computing world has changed in the last few decades, and some people have failed to notice the many huge positives. Almost every sentence in this paragraph represents a predicted doomsday we avoided.

dane-pgp 5y ago

You don't think that giving the government (or entities even less accountable) complete control over online information, discussion, and commerce, plus an almost perfect 24/7 surveillance system, might weaken liberal democracy?

taylodl 5y ago
* > You don't think that giving the government (or entities even less accountable) complete control over online information, discussion, and commerce, plus an almost perfect 24/7 surveillance system, might weaken liberal democracy? * The government doesn't have this control, nor do any of the FAANG companies. I know quite a lot of people who are online without the use of any of FAANG equipment or resources. If you granted these entities this power then you did so of your own choosing. Whether that was wise or not is an entirely different question. Whether it might weaken liberal democracy, I argue no. Liberal democracy is being attacked by our long-term enemies. They're using new tools and our ignorance to have us rot from within but it's a mistake to blame technology for what was done by the hands of our enemy. Lenin turned out to be correct, the capitalists really did sell them the rope they would hang us with. Perhaps I see this in a different perspective due to my being a cold war kid.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > The government doesn't have this control, nor do any of the FAANG companies. That's correct, they don't have complete control yet, and I agree that right now liberal democracy is being attacked by illiberal authoritarian regimes, as it has been for a long time. However, I think the point of this article is that we are also in the middle of a war for general-purpose computing, and that war might end with governments and/or corporations in a much stronger position than they are now in terms of censorship and surveillance. Already we are seeing isolated incidents of people being rendered less free because of the control that modern platforms grant to authorities, and I don't think it is helpful to blame the victims for choosing to use mainstream operating systems or social media sites that end up destroying their livelihoods, for example.

AgentME 5y ago

If you stopped there then you missed the parts where the author moved on to ranting about the Soviet and Maoist ideology of Big Tech! I'm a big supporter of free and open source software but this article is way over the top. The article misses how much of a golden age we're in. There's tons of devices available where the operating system and full app suites are open source! Desktop Linux and even an un-Googled Android smartphones are the best they've ever been. Good dev software stacks are FOSS and competitive! The web is built on open interoperable vendor-agnostic CPU-agnostic OS-agnostic standards! We no longer face the threat of a closed-source OS (Windows) eating all computing with no alternatives, open or not, as we used to. Programming becoming a very lucrative career path has insured that there's a strong "computing culture" and no shortage of resources available to get started. Newer programming languages that are much more beginner-friendly than C yet still powerful have taken off shortening the on-ramp for people to competently contribute to software they use. The computing world has changed in the last few decades, and some people have failed to notice the many huge positives. Almost every sentence in this paragraph represents a predicted doomsday we avoided.