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De rigeur despairing comment, which will be downvoted into obscurity: That such efforts are necessary, and as the commentary shows, an active area of interest

De rigeur despairing comment, which will be downvoted into obscurity: That such efforts are necessary, and as the commentary shows, an active area of interest and hacking and development by so many very smart people, is an absolute condemnation on the dystopian state of the surveillance capitalism that so many of us here have helped build. It's not malicious actors that are the sole or even primary vector being blocked. It's the now-systemic misbehavior of so many of our own products and services.

selfhoster11 5y ago
I'm not sure what you're even trying to say here.
- aaroninsf 5y ago
  I'm saying that it's well worth taking a step back from the tree-level view, e.g. celebrating and being inspired by the intellectual and technical details of a smart industrious individual attempt to reasonable degree insulate themselves from the abuses of surveillance capital, and consider the forest-level view, that while few were paying much attention, our society in general, and the industry most HN readers contribute to in specific–in some cases, very very directly–is now profoundly, all but irredeemably broken, wrong, amoral, and bad, pick a word. Articles of this type and fandom and advocacy of this or that open source solution to a tiny piece of the surveillance capitalism nightmare, are in small way part of the problem; they normalize the experience well sketched here: https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/ https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/ But that article only approaches some sides of the problem. The political and philosophical ones, which are implicit but not blown out, are deep, real, and corrosive. The subtext, which is not so subterranean, is that readers here who are cashing a pay check accelerating total information awareness, dark patterns, and the abuse of users in exchange for calculatedly seductive or addictive services whose fine print all know no one ever reads, are culpable, and that damage is real, and the costs real. And they should do better.

selfhoster11 5y ago

I'm not sure what you're even trying to say here.

aaroninsf 5y ago
I'm saying that it's well worth taking a step back from the tree-level view, e.g. celebrating and being inspired by the intellectual and technical details of a smart industrious individual attempt to reasonable degree insulate themselves from the abuses of surveillance capital, and consider the forest-level view, that while few were paying much attention, our society in general, and the industry most HN readers contribute to in specific–in some cases, very very directly–is now profoundly, all but irredeemably broken, wrong, amoral, and bad, pick a word. Articles of this type and fandom and advocacy of this or that open source solution to a tiny piece of the surveillance capitalism nightmare, are in small way part of the problem; they normalize the experience well sketched here: https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/ https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/ But that article only approaches some sides of the problem. The political and philosophical ones, which are implicit but not blown out, are deep, real, and corrosive. The subtext, which is not so subterranean, is that readers here who are cashing a pay check accelerating total information awareness, dark patterns, and the abuse of users in exchange for calculatedly seductive or addictive services whose fine print all know no one ever reads, are culpable, and that damage is real, and the costs real. And they should do better.