6 ms·

Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable

by Smoosh 3y ago

Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.

Y_Y 3y ago
The commons needs more tragedy!
jfengel 3y ago
You should take some pride that you made it this far. The world is just chock full of assholes, and for the most part the best you can hope for is to not notice. A weird kind of solace but I hope it helps a little.
idiotsecant 3y ago
No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now that laws and rules and rent seeking and all the old power games are here and and will continue to increase in concentration. At least we got to see something new.
- alentred 3y ago
  My goodness, you are right. Your comment is like a cold shower, I never thought of it in this way. *We are hippies.* I'll keep being a naive optimist as I am, but this way of thinking offers an important perspective to add some realism to my judgment. Thank you, I mean it.
- ctrw 3y ago
  You just need to be as disreputable to the current establishment as we were to the previous one. Slap a swastika on it and you'll never have people trying to take over your project. Same way goatse kept the old forums from being overran by normies: https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse.cx/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse...
- lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  No. The technology is different this time. I argue software is a form of literacy, and literacy demands openness. My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”. In a git repo. We can see your crimes now. Wikipedia is this in microcosm - we can see the edits, we can use software to watch for us, everything is in the open and the feudalism and rent seeking exist best in the hidden darkness What we do with that is up to us.
  - quiet_cool 3y ago
    [dead]
  - gruez 3y ago
    >My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”. There's zero chance that the CTO at a company as big as VW is going to be personally committing to code repos.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
      I thought it was already established that's exactly what happened?
      - ctrw 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - almatabata 3y ago
    > My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”. We know that VW did not write the code. It was the supplier Bosch that did it. VW simply activated a feature through configuration.
    - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
- lawrenceyan 3y ago
  You should get into crypto! Seriously, all of them are still here.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    If there's a space where the creative impulse is more thoroughly commidifed than crypto, I don't know what it is. I say that as an early, often, and continuing crypto enthusiast for the same naive reasons I am an internet technology enthusiast. I do think, however, that the two movements share a common ancestor in the certain and nearly evangelical belief that technology holds the answers to messy people problems- early internet culture was largely about assuming the best in people, and crypto by it's design is about assuming the absolute worst and harnessing that to make tech. Of the two, I think crypto is probably more sustainable!
    - lawrenceyan 3y ago
      I like to take the more optimistic viewpoint for crypto that it’s about creating resilient systems that will thrive regardless of external conditions.
- quartesixte 3y ago
  Is there anywhere new for us to go? Or must we wait for some new leap forward still?
  - JPLeRouzic 3y ago
    Deep space but not with rockets, rogue/advanced biology/medicine?
  - vjk800 3y ago
    Alternative internet communities with higher (even if only slightly) barriers for entry and no financial incentives to ruin everything. Maybe mastodon/matrix communities or something? I honestly am not up to speed on what exists in geek online communities space nowadays.
    - ctrw 3y ago
      No, the people who run those are the people who couldn't cut it as reddit mods. If you want the old internet vibe the dark Web is the place to be. Tor, freenet, i2p. I'm quite partial to freenet because it's completely segregated from the regular internet and refreshes as the speed of dial up. No interactive web2.0 here.
  - mihalycsaba 3y ago
    Outside
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Be the change you want to see. Create quality content.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mike_hock 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - 3y ago
- neilv 3y ago
  Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of a lot of disappointing things that have happened and are happening. There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, which would effectively mean a lot fewer jerks in the world, as far as people in the US knew. I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before (at the same time that some positive memes are also propagated). I don't know what would be a good baseline for evaluating, nor whether there are good historical analogs for some of the recent sociopathy -- including that practiced by the tech industry, and that merely enabled by the tech.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before I doubt it, bad behaviour is more likely to be called out and borderline cases probably pushed towards cooperation. Sociopathy is, I think, the condition where one can't be pushed towards cooperation by social pressure. I think that the acts of calling people out (in addition to your point about tech empowering bad actors), just makes it seem like they are being normalised.
  - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
    > increasing normalization of sociopathy I think this is the case and appears in many shapes. * libertarians lift their individual freedom above societal needs but they fail to see their own dependence on them, like any public services funded by taxes. * Crypto bros advertise new "currencies" but use them as volatile investments or foster such expectations. With this volatility it will never become a fully stable currency. There is a common wisdom in traditional trading that you dont do arbitrage / speculate on real currencies because of their _intended_ stability. Another failed realization (because of personal gain attached to it). * Right leaning people argue against criminal migrants but discriminate not by commited crimes but simply foreignness. Their percieved superior cultural identity is their solution to internal cultural problems but they fail to realize how criminal sociotopes emerge and that its independent of ethnicity. I could go on if i had time.
bakugo 3y ago
It's not that their absolute number is increasing, these people have always been around, they just weren't able to do much damage to things that weren't physically near them before. The internet changed everything, it has given these people the power to effortlessly destroy things created by anyone, anywhere on earth, no matter where they are or how many resources they have. Making the internet so easily accessible was a massive mistake.
JimDabell 3y ago
It’s definitely gotten worse in politics over the last decade. It used to be the case I could look at politicians and hate their policies and values, but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. Now it seems to be overtaken by shameless grifters who will happily tear everything down if it profits them in some way.
- ckoerner 3y ago
  >but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. But _were_ they? (That's rhetorical, they were not.)
- riffraff 3y ago
  While I share the same feeling (and we likely are not thinking of the same politicians) it's worth noting every age has had people complaining about * The current government/politicians, which are worse then the ones we had * The youth, who have it easy and are not as good as the old generation We have actual texts from ancient civilizations saying this, so _maybe_ it's just a seesaw, or _maybe_ it's just getting old.
  - lukan 3y ago
    "The youth, who have it easy " Is this still currently a thing? I would think, with Covid lockdowns, social networks designed to manipulate them from early age and a future prognosed of climate change and war, not many people could think the new generation has it easy.
    - csydas 3y ago
      I think there's a lot of handwaving by older generations as to the issues younger generations are having, yes. Children who try to become interested in social/political issues who realize their future is bleak are often dismisses as immature or idealistic and have their (usually valid) concerns ignored, etc. From what I've seen the youth's complaints are usually "heard", but not recognized. There is definitely an arrogance to many positions from older generations and a tendency towards dismissiveness for too many reasons that do not address the concerns from the youth at all. I don't wish ill on anyone, but it does seem that many of these issues that the youth are aware of and even want to change will not go away until the ideas die along with the older generations that continue to do everything to maintain a status quo that the youth have openly said "nah we're not going to do that anymore" -- often just because the older generation's have it so ingrained that there is no other option besides the former status quo for whatever reason.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
Fight back if you can. I keep an eye pages for subjects I know well, especially if contentious in some areas.
treffer 3y ago
Well, the good news is that there aren't enough of these a*** to destroy it. When Wikipedia started and even like 10-15 years ago that wasn't a common belief. Especially in Germany. "There are some assholes on earth, how could you dare to believe something voluntary and open to everyone will succeed?!?" (others already posted that it's not unfounded given real world experience) Wikipedia though is my preferred counter example for that.
- RidiculousBeans 3y ago
  Except that everything regarding contemporary politics in English Wikipedia is biased beyond any belief. And they seem to be adamant about titling the article about Kalashnikov rifle "AK-47", which is simply wrong (there were only handful of actual units of model AK-47 produced, and the mass armament of Soviet army with AKs has started with AKM), and their justification for that is "but that's how AK called in the media" - I thought Wikipedia is there to debunk media myths, not amplify them. Other than that, yes, Wikipedia is a miracle.
  - defrost 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalashnikov_rifle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalashnikov_rifle links to the English page about the Kalashnikov rifle family. It's titled Kalashnikov Rifle. The first image is of an AK-74. There's a comparative table of about 20+ different members of the family. Each of the types has a seperate page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-108 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-108 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 etc. Perhaps you went directly to the AK-47 page and assumed that was all that was there?
    - RidiculousBeans 3y ago
      That's not the full story. If you read into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47, it's clearly written as an article about _both_ AK-47 and AKM. So, all sentences like "100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s" and "Việt Cộng soldier armed with an AK-47" - they are simply wrong. The funniest thing is, they openly admit it in the article (deep down the article! not in the lead): >Most licensed and unlicensed productions of the Kalashnikov assault rifle abroad were of the AKM variant, partially due to the much easier production of the stamped receiver. This model is the most commonly encountered, having been produced in much greater quantities. All rifles based on the Kalashnikov design are often colloquially referred to as "AK-47s" in the West and some parts of Asia, although this is only correct when applied to rifles based on the original three receiver types And sometimes by "AK-47" the article means the whole AK family - there's a list "manufacturing countries of AK-47", and then the list of countries follow that produce all kinds of AK-type rifles _but_ AK-47. So it's clearly a total mess. In fact, I'm not the only one that complained about it in the past, there's plenty of complaints on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:AK-47/Archive_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:AK-47/Archive_6 And the response always was like "we use the most common name, we're not interested in being correct here, get out".
baxtr 3y ago
You’re seeing the entire society now. In the early days it used to be a very selected bunch.

by Smoosh 3y ago

Y_Y 3y ago

The commons needs more tragedy!

jfengel 3y ago

You should take some pride that you made it this far. The world is just chock full of assholes, and for the most part the best you can hope for is to not notice. A weird kind of solace but I hope it helps a little.

idiotsecant 3y ago

No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now that laws and rules and rent seeking and all the old power games are here and and will continue to increase in concentration. At least we got to see something new.

alentred 3y ago
My goodness, you are right. Your comment is like a cold shower, I never thought of it in this way. *We are hippies.* I'll keep being a naive optimist as I am, but this way of thinking offers an important perspective to add some realism to my judgment. Thank you, I mean it.
ctrw 3y ago
You just need to be as disreputable to the current establishment as we were to the previous one. Slap a swastika on it and you'll never have people trying to take over your project. Same way goatse kept the old forums from being overran by normies: https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse.cx/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse...
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
No. The technology is different this time. I argue software is a form of literacy, and literacy demands openness. My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”. In a git repo. We can see your crimes now. Wikipedia is this in microcosm - we can see the edits, we can use software to watch for us, everything is in the open and the feudalism and rent seeking exist best in the hidden darkness What we do with that is up to us.
- quiet_cool 3y ago
  [dead]
- gruez 3y ago
  >My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”. There's zero chance that the CTO at a company as big as VW is going to be personally committing to code repos.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
    I thought it was already established that's exactly what happened?
    - ctrw 3y ago
      [flagged]
- almatabata 3y ago
  > My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”. We know that VW did not write the code. It was the supplier Bosch that did it. VW simply activated a feature through configuration.
  - lifeisstillgood 3y ago
lawrenceyan 3y ago
You should get into crypto! Seriously, all of them are still here.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  If there's a space where the creative impulse is more thoroughly commidifed than crypto, I don't know what it is. I say that as an early, often, and continuing crypto enthusiast for the same naive reasons I am an internet technology enthusiast. I do think, however, that the two movements share a common ancestor in the certain and nearly evangelical belief that technology holds the answers to messy people problems- early internet culture was largely about assuming the best in people, and crypto by it's design is about assuming the absolute worst and harnessing that to make tech. Of the two, I think crypto is probably more sustainable!
  - lawrenceyan 3y ago
    I like to take the more optimistic viewpoint for crypto that it’s about creating resilient systems that will thrive regardless of external conditions.
quartesixte 3y ago
Is there anywhere new for us to go? Or must we wait for some new leap forward still?
- JPLeRouzic 3y ago
  Deep space but not with rockets, rogue/advanced biology/medicine?
- vjk800 3y ago
  Alternative internet communities with higher (even if only slightly) barriers for entry and no financial incentives to ruin everything. Maybe mastodon/matrix communities or something? I honestly am not up to speed on what exists in geek online communities space nowadays.
  - ctrw 3y ago
    No, the people who run those are the people who couldn't cut it as reddit mods. If you want the old internet vibe the dark Web is the place to be. Tor, freenet, i2p. I'm quite partial to freenet because it's completely segregated from the regular internet and refreshes as the speed of dial up. No interactive web2.0 here.
- mihalycsaba 3y ago
  Outside
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Be the change you want to see. Create quality content.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mike_hock 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - 3y ago
neilv 3y ago
Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of a lot of disappointing things that have happened and are happening. There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, which would effectively mean a lot fewer jerks in the world, as far as people in the US knew. I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before (at the same time that some positive memes are also propagated). I don't know what would be a good baseline for evaluating, nor whether there are good historical analogs for some of the recent sociopathy -- including that practiced by the tech industry, and that merely enabled by the tech.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before I doubt it, bad behaviour is more likely to be called out and borderline cases probably pushed towards cooperation. Sociopathy is, I think, the condition where one can't be pushed towards cooperation by social pressure. I think that the acts of calling people out (in addition to your point about tech empowering bad actors), just makes it seem like they are being normalised.
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago
  > increasing normalization of sociopathy I think this is the case and appears in many shapes. * libertarians lift their individual freedom above societal needs but they fail to see their own dependence on them, like any public services funded by taxes. * Crypto bros advertise new "currencies" but use them as volatile investments or foster such expectations. With this volatility it will never become a fully stable currency. There is a common wisdom in traditional trading that you dont do arbitrage / speculate on real currencies because of their _intended_ stability. Another failed realization (because of personal gain attached to it). * Right leaning people argue against criminal migrants but discriminate not by commited crimes but simply foreignness. Their percieved superior cultural identity is their solution to internal cultural problems but they fail to realize how criminal sociotopes emerge and that its independent of ethnicity. I could go on if i had time.

bakugo 3y ago

It's not that their absolute number is increasing, these people have always been around, they just weren't able to do much damage to things that weren't physically near them before. The internet changed everything, it has given these people the power to effortlessly destroy things created by anyone, anywhere on earth, no matter where they are or how many resources they have. Making the internet so easily accessible was a massive mistake.

JimDabell 3y ago

It’s definitely gotten worse in politics over the last decade. It used to be the case I could look at politicians and hate their policies and values, but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. Now it seems to be overtaken by shameless grifters who will happily tear everything down if it profits them in some way.

ckoerner 3y ago
>but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. But _were_ they? (That's rhetorical, they were not.)
riffraff 3y ago
While I share the same feeling (and we likely are not thinking of the same politicians) it's worth noting every age has had people complaining about * The current government/politicians, which are worse then the ones we had * The youth, who have it easy and are not as good as the old generation We have actual texts from ancient civilizations saying this, so _maybe_ it's just a seesaw, or _maybe_ it's just getting old.
- lukan 3y ago
  "The youth, who have it easy " Is this still currently a thing? I would think, with Covid lockdowns, social networks designed to manipulate them from early age and a future prognosed of climate change and war, not many people could think the new generation has it easy.
  - csydas 3y ago
    I think there's a lot of handwaving by older generations as to the issues younger generations are having, yes. Children who try to become interested in social/political issues who realize their future is bleak are often dismisses as immature or idealistic and have their (usually valid) concerns ignored, etc. From what I've seen the youth's complaints are usually "heard", but not recognized. There is definitely an arrogance to many positions from older generations and a tendency towards dismissiveness for too many reasons that do not address the concerns from the youth at all. I don't wish ill on anyone, but it does seem that many of these issues that the youth are aware of and even want to change will not go away until the ideas die along with the older generations that continue to do everything to maintain a status quo that the youth have openly said "nah we're not going to do that anymore" -- often just because the older generation's have it so ingrained that there is no other option besides the former status quo for whatever reason.

EdwardDiego 3y ago

Fight back if you can. I keep an eye pages for subjects I know well, especially if contentious in some areas.

treffer 3y ago

Well, the good news is that there aren't enough of these a*** to destroy it. When Wikipedia started and even like 10-15 years ago that wasn't a common belief. Especially in Germany. "There are some assholes on earth, how could you dare to believe something voluntary and open to everyone will succeed?!?" (others already posted that it's not unfounded given real world experience) Wikipedia though is my preferred counter example for that.

RidiculousBeans 3y ago
Except that everything regarding contemporary politics in English Wikipedia is biased beyond any belief. And they seem to be adamant about titling the article about Kalashnikov rifle "AK-47", which is simply wrong (there were only handful of actual units of model AK-47 produced, and the mass armament of Soviet army with AKs has started with AKM), and their justification for that is "but that's how AK called in the media" - I thought Wikipedia is there to debunk media myths, not amplify them. Other than that, yes, Wikipedia is a miracle.
- defrost 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalashnikov_rifle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalashnikov_rifle links to the English page about the Kalashnikov rifle family. It's titled Kalashnikov Rifle. The first image is of an AK-74. There's a comparative table of about 20+ different members of the family. Each of the types has a seperate page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-108 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-108 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 etc. Perhaps you went directly to the AK-47 page and assumed that was all that was there?
  - RidiculousBeans 3y ago
    That's not the full story. If you read into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47, it's clearly written as an article about _both_ AK-47 and AKM. So, all sentences like "100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s" and "Việt Cộng soldier armed with an AK-47" - they are simply wrong. The funniest thing is, they openly admit it in the article (deep down the article! not in the lead): >Most licensed and unlicensed productions of the Kalashnikov assault rifle abroad were of the AKM variant, partially due to the much easier production of the stamped receiver. This model is the most commonly encountered, having been produced in much greater quantities. All rifles based on the Kalashnikov design are often colloquially referred to as "AK-47s" in the West and some parts of Asia, although this is only correct when applied to rifles based on the original three receiver types And sometimes by "AK-47" the article means the whole AK family - there's a list "manufacturing countries of AK-47", and then the list of countries follow that produce all kinds of AK-type rifles _but_ AK-47. So it's clearly a total mess. In fact, I'm not the only one that complained about it in the past, there's plenty of complaints on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:AK-47/Archive_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:AK-47/Archive_6 And the response always was like "we use the most common name, we're not interested in being correct here, get out".

baxtr 3y ago

You’re seeing the entire society now. In the early days it used to be a very selected bunch.