7 ms·

In 1984 they don't have laws, only crimes, so whatever you do, you have to guess if it is illegal and will be punished or not. It is on purpose to keep the popu

In 1984 they don't have laws, only crimes, so whatever you do, you have to guess if it is illegal and will be punished or not. It is on purpose to keep the population in constant fear

pjmlp 3y ago
Don't need for book references, that is how it is today in many countries, and it has been always in less democratic societies.
- btparker 3y ago
  Yeah! How dare they, referencing literature.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    That wasn't the point, no need for literature references when you can enjoy that kind of life today when living in less fortunate regions.
    - absrec 3y ago
      Draconian IT laws mean that in many countries you could be persecuted for threatening national security as a blanket rule with indefinitely the long harassment called investigation.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        They are already in place in such countries, plenty of people suffer through them daily.
    - K0balt 3y ago
      Or, just dealing with FAANG
  - steve1977 3y ago
    Your sarcasm has been noted and recorded.
    - mysterydip 3y ago
      Everything you do has been noted and recorded. We'll determine later if it's something we don't like in the future.
      - doubled112 3y ago
        This concept scares me more than most.
        vertis 3y ago
        The fact that is scares you has been noted. Someone will contact you shortly.
        brookst 3y ago
        The fact you noted that has been noted.
        doubled112 3y ago
        It's not that somebody might contact me shortly. It is that somebody might contact me in 10 years, and at that point I'll have no idea about the context or how to "defend myself" because I won't know what they're talking about. Maybe it's far fetched, I don't know, but it's a possibility. An interesting thought exercise if nothing else.
  - krapp 3y ago
    Referencing 1984, Brave New World and that quote about freedom of speech that Voltaire never actually said make up the holy trinity of pseudo-intellectual posturing on the internet.
    - account-5 3y ago
      Yeah it was Voltaire's biographer who was describing what she thought was Voltaire's thinking at the time. Still a good quote though regardless of source.
    - brookst 3y ago
      “1984 was dystopian, and anything I don’t like is dystopian, therefore anything I don’t like is straight out of 1984”
- kukkeliskuu 3y ago
  When you see a phenomena described in literature, you have some emotional distance to it. It may be more easy for you to accept the possibility that such a phenomena can exist. Sometimes people cannot bear to see the phenomena in real life even if it is very clear for many people. Life is complex, so there are always many opportunities for weave a narrative to explain away phenomena that you cannot bear to see.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Having been born as the first free generation on a post ditactorship Portugal, I definitly have another relationship growing up to stories from PIDE/DGS and colonial war survivors. And I should note, compared to some countries, things were relatively soft on our case.
    - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
      Yes, I believe you. However, other people may react differently from you, and they may react even more strongly if they have been living in the dictatorship themselves. I have spent some time in dictatorships, and it is not uncommon for some people to admire the strength of the dictator. Living in a situation changes how you think, and the more stressful the situation, the more you become emotionally committed to how you think, making it difficult to change it.
hackerlight 3y ago
Fear isn't the point here. It's just normal corporate ass covering. If you don't know, you can't complain coherently.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Having been part of conversations with a corporate legal team about making clear policies available to explain these types of decisions, I’m sad to say it’s this and they sort of have a point. One of the problems is if you make a specific policy available and for whatever reason you can be shown not to follow that policy (like say you’re being an intelligent human being and exercising discretion) and someone is harmed they can potentially have a cause of action. So lawyers will often bias towards making the process as opaque as possible as a defence against litigation. Someone can’t claim to have been harmed by relying on a policy that says you will take a particular action if you never commit to doing that. It’s one of the ways a culture of civil litigation makes things worse for people by creating perverse incentives. Secondly you can see from the whole SEO industry that people will actively try to game and evade any system you put in place and by making things crystal clear you are giving much clearer guidelines to people who are trying to do that. None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs.
  - philipov 3y ago
    > None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs. The conclusion people should draw from this is that companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist. They can get away with this because they have too much leverage in the vendor-client power balance.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      > companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist how would you solve that? A big problem is that the primary product isn't in and of itself that profitable. So it's hard to encourage competition there. And if you can't ask for money from the consumer you resort to ads.
roydivision 3y ago
Em, this is a private company. I see what you mean, but this hardly points to some dystopia.
- LightHugger 3y ago
  That's cute. With sufficient size and influence over your life, a private company is a form of government.
  - malka 3y ago
    sounds like an argument for nationalization.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Meta only has as much influence over our lives as we give it. I don't use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or any Meta product. What influence does the company have over me that even remotely rises to the level of "government?"
  - philpem 3y ago
    Bingo. Even a relatively tiny company can have a huge impact on your life. Say you're interested in a niche hobby, so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. The best friend of the chairman runs the main online forum for that hobby. If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. And people will repeat the lies, assuming that the chairman of the major event of the niche hobby wouldn't lie... and on and on. The people who seek these roles absolutely love this, though homeowners' associations are probably the more familiar example of the same power structures.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. If it's that niche that no one else forms groups around it, that sounds like an issue in and of itself. >If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. sounds like your average small town experience. People can be cruel, they don't need a company to enable that.
weinzierl 3y ago
Franz (not Apache) Kafka's The Trial also fits the situation: "[..] the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
- kmlx 3y ago
  every time someone mentions Kafka here i get reminded of his works and every time the comment is about Apache Kafka :)
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    In the 90s I had heard about this software you needed to publish web pages called 'Apache' so I googled it on Altavista expecting it to be hard to find amongst all the content about the Native American tribes. To my big surprise it was the web server that was at the very top of the search results. Today I searched[1] for 'Kafka' on Google before I made the comment above and I got 'Apache Kafka' first and I'm still surprised. I never learn;-) [1] I was tempted to write 'altavistad', but it's such a clunky word, no wonder Altavista lost.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      > googled it on Altavista I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe I can bing it in Hotbot.
      - ivanmontillam 3y ago
        I sometimes find myself saying "maybe do the math in Google's Excel"
    - miki123211 3y ago
      The fact that it's at the top now is not surprising, Google probably knows you're a programmer and is likely to show you programming-related results. Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, not in funny cute cat videos, Polish politics and sports." The Youtube home feed is a testament to this. If I change my location to the UK (with a VPN), that feed suddenly becomes a lot more generic.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 3y ago
Big Tech went in so hard on right-libertarianism that they reinvented Maoism.
- lainga 3y ago
  True Marxism is called that by / the extreme left. / Occasionally the true left calls / a spade a spade and tells the left it’s right. https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/nixon-in-china/libretto/ https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/nixon-in-china/libretto/

In 1984 they don't have laws, only crimes, so whatever you do, you have to guess if it is illegal and will be punished or not. It is on purpose to keep the population in constant fear

pjmlp 3y ago

Don't need for book references, that is how it is today in many countries, and it has been always in less democratic societies.

btparker 3y ago
Yeah! How dare they, referencing literature.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  That wasn't the point, no need for literature references when you can enjoy that kind of life today when living in less fortunate regions.
  - absrec 3y ago
    Draconian IT laws mean that in many countries you could be persecuted for threatening national security as a blanket rule with indefinitely the long harassment called investigation.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      They are already in place in such countries, plenty of people suffer through them daily.
  - K0balt 3y ago
    Or, just dealing with FAANG
- steve1977 3y ago
  Your sarcasm has been noted and recorded.
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    Everything you do has been noted and recorded. We'll determine later if it's something we don't like in the future.
    - doubled112 3y ago
      This concept scares me more than most.
      - vertis 3y ago
        The fact that is scares you has been noted. Someone will contact you shortly.
        brookst 3y ago
        The fact you noted that has been noted.
        doubled112 3y ago
        It's not that somebody might contact me shortly. It is that somebody might contact me in 10 years, and at that point I'll have no idea about the context or how to "defend myself" because I won't know what they're talking about. Maybe it's far fetched, I don't know, but it's a possibility. An interesting thought exercise if nothing else.
- krapp 3y ago
  Referencing 1984, Brave New World and that quote about freedom of speech that Voltaire never actually said make up the holy trinity of pseudo-intellectual posturing on the internet.
  - account-5 3y ago
    Yeah it was Voltaire's biographer who was describing what she thought was Voltaire's thinking at the time. Still a good quote though regardless of source.
  - brookst 3y ago
    “1984 was dystopian, and anything I don’t like is dystopian, therefore anything I don’t like is straight out of 1984”
kukkeliskuu 3y ago
When you see a phenomena described in literature, you have some emotional distance to it. It may be more easy for you to accept the possibility that such a phenomena can exist. Sometimes people cannot bear to see the phenomena in real life even if it is very clear for many people. Life is complex, so there are always many opportunities for weave a narrative to explain away phenomena that you cannot bear to see.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Having been born as the first free generation on a post ditactorship Portugal, I definitly have another relationship growing up to stories from PIDE/DGS and colonial war survivors. And I should note, compared to some countries, things were relatively soft on our case.
  - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
    Yes, I believe you. However, other people may react differently from you, and they may react even more strongly if they have been living in the dictatorship themselves. I have spent some time in dictatorships, and it is not uncommon for some people to admire the strength of the dictator. Living in a situation changes how you think, and the more stressful the situation, the more you become emotionally committed to how you think, making it difficult to change it.

hackerlight 3y ago

Fear isn't the point here. It's just normal corporate ass covering. If you don't know, you can't complain coherently.

seanhunter 3y ago
Having been part of conversations with a corporate legal team about making clear policies available to explain these types of decisions, I’m sad to say it’s this and they sort of have a point. One of the problems is if you make a specific policy available and for whatever reason you can be shown not to follow that policy (like say you’re being an intelligent human being and exercising discretion) and someone is harmed they can potentially have a cause of action. So lawyers will often bias towards making the process as opaque as possible as a defence against litigation. Someone can’t claim to have been harmed by relying on a policy that says you will take a particular action if you never commit to doing that. It’s one of the ways a culture of civil litigation makes things worse for people by creating perverse incentives. Secondly you can see from the whole SEO industry that people will actively try to game and evade any system you put in place and by making things crystal clear you are giving much clearer guidelines to people who are trying to do that. None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs.
- philipov 3y ago
  > None of which is intended to let Facebook off the hook. There are better ways of doing this that don’t involve banning people for life without explaining (clearly) but I at least do understand how we got to this ridiculous state of affairs. The conclusion people should draw from this is that companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist. They can get away with this because they have too much leverage in the vendor-client power balance.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    > companies as big as Facebook should not be allowed to exist how would you solve that? A big problem is that the primary product isn't in and of itself that profitable. So it's hard to encourage competition there. And if you can't ask for money from the consumer you resort to ads.

roydivision 3y ago

Em, this is a private company. I see what you mean, but this hardly points to some dystopia.

LightHugger 3y ago
That's cute. With sufficient size and influence over your life, a private company is a form of government.
- malka 3y ago
  sounds like an argument for nationalization.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Meta only has as much influence over our lives as we give it. I don't use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or any Meta product. What influence does the company have over me that even remotely rises to the level of "government?"
- philpem 3y ago
  Bingo. Even a relatively tiny company can have a huge impact on your life. Say you're interested in a niche hobby, so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. The best friend of the chairman runs the main online forum for that hobby. If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. And people will repeat the lies, assuming that the chairman of the major event of the niche hobby wouldn't lie... and on and on. The people who seek these roles absolutely love this, though homeowners' associations are probably the more familiar example of the same power structures.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >so niche there's only one company who organises meet-ups and events around that hobby. If it's that niche that no one else forms groups around it, that sounds like an issue in and of itself. >If you have a falling-out with either of those people, or their friends - you're going to lose all the social aspects of your hobby, and they're probably going to slander you to everyone they know. sounds like your average small town experience. People can be cruel, they don't need a company to enable that.

weinzierl 3y ago

Franz (not Apache) Kafka's The Trial also fits the situation: "[..] the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

kmlx 3y ago
every time someone mentions Kafka here i get reminded of his works and every time the comment is about Apache Kafka :)
- weinzierl 3y ago
  In the 90s I had heard about this software you needed to publish web pages called 'Apache' so I googled it on Altavista expecting it to be hard to find amongst all the content about the Native American tribes. To my big surprise it was the web server that was at the very top of the search results. Today I searched[1] for 'Kafka' on Google before I made the comment above and I got 'Apache Kafka' first and I'm still surprised. I never learn;-) [1] I was tempted to write 'altavistad', but it's such a clunky word, no wonder Altavista lost.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    > googled it on Altavista I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe I can bing it in Hotbot.
    - ivanmontillam 3y ago
      I sometimes find myself saying "maybe do the math in Google's Excel"
  - miki123211 3y ago
    The fact that it's at the top now is not surprising, Google probably knows you're a programmer and is likely to show you programming-related results. Even if you turn off all tracking and use a private window, there are ways. In my case, the combination of a Polish IP address, Safari on Mac OS and English as the browser language is enough to profile me as "tech-savvy, probably interested in science and edutainment, not in funny cute cat videos, Polish politics and sports." The Youtube home feed is a testament to this. If I change my location to the UK (with a VPN), that feed suddenly becomes a lot more generic.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kmeisthax 3y ago

Big Tech went in so hard on right-libertarianism that they reinvented Maoism.

lainga 3y ago
True Marxism is called that by / the extreme left. / Occasionally the true left calls / a spade a spade and tells the left it’s right. https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/nixon-in-china/libretto/ https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/nixon-in-china/libretto/