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What is going on is that reality is slapping some techno-utopians in the face and they are shocked, shocked, that governments are more powerful that businesses.

by rsj_hn 5y ago

What is going on is that reality is slapping some techno-utopians in the face and they are shocked, shocked, that governments are more powerful that businesses. That's not at all what the lefty geeks learned by reading Chomsky or what the righty geeks learned by reading Heinlein. All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it! Well, that was all very foolish, because they mistook government uninterest in something for the equivalent of government being powerless to control it, and when governments did start taking an interest in something, it turns out that protocols and algorithms are no defense against the realities of political power. It is to the field of politics, and not the field of technology, that one must turn in order to increase collective freedoms. Individual freedom can be increased by obtaining money or making lots of friends, but collective freedom cannot be increased this way, it can only be increased by organizing and influencing government.

JunkDNA 5y ago
Bingo. I wish I could upvote this comment more. All the geeks get distracted by words like “cloud” or “virtual” and forget that all this stuff we depend on has a physical presence at some point in the real world. That physical presence necessitates humans interacting with other humans. Humans interacting with humans falls squarely in the “things governments poke their noses into” bucket. It’s like the early days of Napster when people were all hot for “peer to peer”, as if that tech was some magic that was going to make record labels and governments throw up their hands over copyrights.
- hnechochamber 5y ago
  Dont worry, ill fix all this by creating a unique javascript framework that will change the world.
  - danudey 5y ago
    Maybe we could make this framework future-proof by using blockchains? Somehow? Maybe it can use blockchains, or it can be stored on a blockchain, or maybe both at the same time. Surely that will help society in some nonspecific, ambiguous manner.
    - delaaxe 5y ago
      Remember the people who, decades after the invention of the Internet, kept on insisting that it was useless and only for porn addicts? Remember the people who, after the invention of the phone, insisted that it was a nice trick but probably only useful for a few businessmen with dictation needs? Yeah, they all had to change their tone at some point, under the shame of having been wrong for so long.
  - zymhan 5y ago
    No, we just need another anonymous distributed networking/storage/socialmedia/coffeemaker protocol to save us
dweekly 5y ago
(Gestures at the community of people who smugly use the word "fiat" as commensurate with obsolete) Not sure everyone has gotten the memo yet.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it! But that's the underlying problem here. Apple isn't a standardized protocol or a distributed system. It's a monolithic chokepoint. You can't do this with a PC. Dell and HP don't retain the ability to push software to hardware they don't own after they've already sold it and against the will of the person who does own it. People pointed out that this would happen. Now it's happening. Qué sorpresa.
- danudey 5y ago
  Dell ships laptops with tons of Dell software, as well as tons of third-party software. Do you really think that, if they wanted to, they couldn't just update one of those pieces of software to enable remote installs? Hell, Dell has shipped more than one bug that allowed attackers administrator-level access or worse, I wouldn't put it past them to come up with some kind of asinine feature that not only lets them push new software/drivers/whatever to the machine, but lets attackers do so as well.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > Do you really think that, if they wanted to, they couldn't just update one of those pieces of software to enable remote installs? If they did that, people would wipe their device and not reinstall the Dell software. Many people do this already as soon as they buy the device.
danudey 5y ago
> All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it! The internet and its design and associated protocols were designed to work around external forces - a nuclear attack or natural disaster. It was never designed to be government-proof. People who thought that would be the case were being idealistic and naive. If you want real change in the world, as you said, you have to affect the political world, which is an option available to any citizen or corporation who can spend millions on lobbyists.

by rsj_hn 5y ago

JunkDNA 5y ago

Bingo. I wish I could upvote this comment more. All the geeks get distracted by words like “cloud” or “virtual” and forget that all this stuff we depend on has a physical presence at some point in the real world. That physical presence necessitates humans interacting with other humans. Humans interacting with humans falls squarely in the “things governments poke their noses into” bucket. It’s like the early days of Napster when people were all hot for “peer to peer”, as if that tech was some magic that was going to make record labels and governments throw up their hands over copyrights.

hnechochamber 5y ago
Dont worry, ill fix all this by creating a unique javascript framework that will change the world.
- danudey 5y ago
  Maybe we could make this framework future-proof by using blockchains? Somehow? Maybe it can use blockchains, or it can be stored on a blockchain, or maybe both at the same time. Surely that will help society in some nonspecific, ambiguous manner.
  - delaaxe 5y ago
    Remember the people who, decades after the invention of the Internet, kept on insisting that it was useless and only for porn addicts? Remember the people who, after the invention of the phone, insisted that it was a nice trick but probably only useful for a few businessmen with dictation needs? Yeah, they all had to change their tone at some point, under the shame of having been wrong for so long.
- zymhan 5y ago
  No, we just need another anonymous distributed networking/storage/socialmedia/coffeemaker protocol to save us

dweekly 5y ago

(Gestures at the community of people who smugly use the word "fiat" as commensurate with obsolete) Not sure everyone has gotten the memo yet.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it! But that's the underlying problem here. Apple isn't a standardized protocol or a distributed system. It's a monolithic chokepoint. You can't do this with a PC. Dell and HP don't retain the ability to push software to hardware they don't own after they've already sold it and against the will of the person who does own it. People pointed out that this would happen. Now it's happening. Qué sorpresa.

danudey 5y ago
Dell ships laptops with tons of Dell software, as well as tons of third-party software. Do you really think that, if they wanted to, they couldn't just update one of those pieces of software to enable remote installs? Hell, Dell has shipped more than one bug that allowed attackers administrator-level access or worse, I wouldn't put it past them to come up with some kind of asinine feature that not only lets them push new software/drivers/whatever to the machine, but lets attackers do so as well.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Do you really think that, if they wanted to, they couldn't just update one of those pieces of software to enable remote installs? If they did that, people would wipe their device and not reinstall the Dell software. Many people do this already as soon as they buy the device.

danudey 5y ago

> All along these people thought algorithms and protocols (e.g. bitcoin and TCP/IP) would somehow be a powerful force that would cause governments to fall on their knees and let people evade government control. After all, it's distributed! You can't stop it! The internet and its design and associated protocols were designed to work around external forces - a nuclear attack or natural disaster. It was never designed to be government-proof. People who thought that would be the case were being idealistic and naive. If you want real change in the world, as you said, you have to affect the political world, which is an option available to any citizen or corporation who can spend millions on lobbyists.