8 ms·

Anti-Personnel Computing (2023)

122 points by transpute 1y ago

keisborg 1y ago
I love term how it plays on the words and the negative association we have with anti-personell mines If we could have a ban on anti-personell computers…
Tepix 1y ago
It's all in the software. Avoiding systems that work against you is harder than ever. Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters. An unchecked drive for profit maximisation is often at the source of this evil. Cory Doctorow has expertly described the phenomenon in his essays¹ about enshittification, a term he coined. He has raised a lot of awareness, yet we're still in a timeline where non-profit, decentralised services have small market shares. Perhaps the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering, is not yet great enough? -- ¹ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters. I had this discussion with other people who deleted their account at some website that can be considered "social media" in a broader sense. They told me that the reason why they deleted their accounts was that they realized that these bursts of dopamine rush that they got from the respective site was not good for them. I, on the other hand, have never felt this kind of dopamine rush, even though I was a likely even more active user on the respective site. My reason for really wanting to delete my whole account was "purely logical" (I hated a lot of decisions that the respective company made). What I want to tell with this story is that I thus see strong evidence that the "sensitivity" of people for dopamine rushes from websites/games varies a lot between people (and I am very likely one who is at least "mostly" immune to them). Really: if I had to name one thing that gives me dopamine rushes that are so much more intense (I would say: "multiple magnitudes more intense") than any dopamine rush that I got from any social media site that I visited, then I would say "understanding deep mathematical proofs and strongly simplifying them" (but I agree that these dopamine rushes are earned much more toughly :-) ).
  - benzopaladine 1y ago
    Self-control is a factor too. Some people might get a big rush but have strong frontal lobes, other people might get a smaller rush but have low self-control and still end up consuming a lot / having their behavior reinforced. I think susceptibility to negative emotion is relevant too. Not all of the addictive content feels good. Lots of companies have figured out how to make negativity addictive.
- flobosg 1y ago
  > the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering A literal translation (the pressure of suffering) sounds more meaningful to me.
pjc50 1y ago
Eh. I think "user hostile" or "hostile architecture" (like unsleepable benches) is a better analogy, reserving anti-personnel for those cases where computers are used in genuinely dangerous ways. Like the Chinese ethnicity-recognizing security cameras.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  Or certain pagers.
vanschelven 1y ago
Keep Control of Your Computing, So It Doesn't Control You! from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computing.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computin...
- theK 1y ago
  Gold point! But, the real world is so far gone by now that fully GPLed computing isnt realistic right now. I would first try to push for more users of non corporate OSes for the beginning, let's say more /e/ more lineage more graphene OS users. And maybe cool alternatives to Maps applications like OSMand
- 0x445442 1y ago
  For all his idiosyncratic traits, Stallman was remarkably prescient about many things.
  - fipar 1y ago
    Absolutely, though I think sadly his idiosyncratic traits played against his message (and I say this as a big rms fan). I think it's similar with the original post. Regardless of how I feel about present-day computing, I think comparing it with war devices designed to maim and kill people, and that can (and do) keep maiming and killing people long after a war is over isn't going to be very effective.
  - thomastjeffery 1y ago
    It seems like most of those traits stem from an overall consistency in ethical perspective. I think Stallman figured out early on how much he valued collaboration over competition, and liberty over authority; and moved on naturally from there.
    - roughly 1y ago
      There’s enough stories about Stallman’s “eccentricities” that aren’t the result of ethical choices. The man’s hygiene is sort of legendary at this point. None of this is to say he’s wrong or argue against his ethical consistency or the admirable fidelity to which he holds to his ethics, but the dude is odd for reasons beyond his choice of email client.
fmajid 1y ago
Not a good term. Anti-personnel mines do exactly what they are intended to do. These devices/software do something against the interests of the user in the process of doing something the user actually wants (otherwise why would the user even get them?). Perhaps "Faustian computing"?
- Zambyte 1y ago
  Anti-personnel computers also do exactly what they're intended to do. The interests of the subject are not considered a priority, just like with mines. > otherwise why would the user even get them? Why does a moth fly into a flame?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Modified3019 1y ago
    Moths (and other insects) evolved to use transverse orientation to fly level at night by using distant bodies of light (stars, moon), essentially trying to fly perpendicular to light above. Sources of light which are physically close disrupt this instinct. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44785-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44785-3
    - jazzyjackson 1y ago
      An apt metaphor as humans evolved to orient themselves based on information (in the strict sense of novel data) and so all it takes to trap a human in a continuous cycle of hitting themselves against a wall is to create a wall of continuously novel information
- cess11 1y ago
  Where in this do you see the connection to worldly, scientific, knowledge?
  - fmajid 1y ago
casey2 1y ago
anti-personal computing: data collection, closed ecosystem, dark patterns, opaque programs, central control anti-personnel computing: the use of a computing system to target, harm, control or neutralize individuals
praptak 1y ago
I prefer "antifeatures" as more precise. https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/antifeatures/ https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/antifeatures/
- thomastjeffery 1y ago
  The word antifeature can describe a feature that the designer doesn't want. That's usually the scenario I experience it in, and it's a good fit for it. Anti-personnel describes more precisely, the perverse prioritization of a 3rd party's goals over the end user's goals.
JohnMakin 1y ago
I am just quite old enough to remember the late 90's/early aughts dotcom craze. The vibe in software feels very similar to me - back then I remember ad-riddled pages that'd spam you with popups and sometimes malware, all in the same fever pitch to eek out every possible penny so they could show revenue for their overpriced valuations. The web was seen as a gold mine that if you weren't pillaging, you were actively losing - until it all imploded. The look and feel of a lot of web pages today (invasive ads taking up disproportionate amount of the page) reminds me a lot of that time, even without going to the dotcom parallels we have with the current hype cycle.
- api 1y ago
  It did not take long after the Internet went mainstream for a borderline (or not borderline) malware industry to evolve around getting predatory crap onto peoples' computers. I remember uninstalling shit like "Bonzai buddy" and the various toolbars and other trash that would come with dodgy installers or sometimes on new installs if you bought a cheap machine. Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian" with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism. It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way, but that's where it went pretty fast. Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine. It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government conservative type ideas and toward every kind of authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa. I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both ways.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    > The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy Let’s not romanticize the old PC culture - most running Windows with some combination of viruses, bundled software when you were trying to install something else, many people had 10 tool bars on IE that were all tracking your browser history
DonHopkins 1y ago
The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system. Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode! And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!
6510 1y ago
I hear part of the Chinese miracle of central planning is that they have almost full knowledge of everything everyone is doing in the economy. In contrast, in the west, where we optimize for personal gain, you can get a lot done by throwing up barriers and creating friction. We also pretend/believe our governments use all data against us. My gut tells me that cryptography and clever use of time and location can be used to use public data for specific purposes alone. You could for example construct security cameras with sufficient encryption that only a judge can request access to a specific chunk of time and has to provide a specific case number. It might even be possible for the judge to request a specific thing from the footage like time stamps and licenseplate numbers not from people living there or even similar faces and devices seen around similar crimes. I don't want the specific time stamps and locations made available buy I don't see great value in keeping my annual toilet paper purchases secret or how many km I need to travel to purchase shoes. Maybe (when seeking) we should get proximity push notifications for job offers that fit our resume. I mean, we should explore the boundary between anti-personel computing and useful application. Maybe things are worse than we think, maybe they can be made mutually beneficial.

122 points by transpute 1y ago

I love term how it plays on the words and the negative association we have with anti-personell mines If we could have a ban on anti-personell computers…

Tepix 1y ago

It's all in the software. Avoiding systems that work against you is harder than ever. Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters. An unchecked drive for profit maximisation is often at the source of this evil. Cory Doctorow has expertly described the phenomenon in his essays¹ about enshittification, a term he coined. He has raised a lot of awareness, yet we're still in a timeline where non-profit, decentralised services have small market shares. Perhaps the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering, is not yet great enough? -- ¹ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters. I had this discussion with other people who deleted their account at some website that can be considered "social media" in a broader sense. They told me that the reason why they deleted their accounts was that they realized that these bursts of dopamine rush that they got from the respective site was not good for them. I, on the other hand, have never felt this kind of dopamine rush, even though I was a likely even more active user on the respective site. My reason for really wanting to delete my whole account was "purely logical" (I hated a lot of decisions that the respective company made). What I want to tell with this story is that I thus see strong evidence that the "sensitivity" of people for dopamine rushes from websites/games varies a lot between people (and I am very likely one who is at least "mostly" immune to them). Really: if I had to name one thing that gives me dopamine rushes that are so much more intense (I would say: "multiple magnitudes more intense") than any dopamine rush that I got from any social media site that I visited, then I would say "understanding deep mathematical proofs and strongly simplifying them" (but I agree that these dopamine rushes are earned much more toughly :-) ).
- benzopaladine 1y ago
  Self-control is a factor too. Some people might get a big rush but have strong frontal lobes, other people might get a smaller rush but have low self-control and still end up consuming a lot / having their behavior reinforced. I think susceptibility to negative emotion is relevant too. Not all of the addictive content feels good. Lots of companies have figured out how to make negativity addictive.
flobosg 1y ago
> the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering A literal translation (the pressure of suffering) sounds more meaningful to me.

pjc50 1y ago

Eh. I think "user hostile" or "hostile architecture" (like unsleepable benches) is a better analogy, reserving anti-personnel for those cases where computers are used in genuinely dangerous ways. Like the Chinese ethnicity-recognizing security cameras.

alabastervlog 1y ago
Or certain pagers.

vanschelven 1y ago

Keep Control of Your Computing, So It Doesn't Control You! from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computing.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-computin...

theK 1y ago
Gold point! But, the real world is so far gone by now that fully GPLed computing isnt realistic right now. I would first try to push for more users of non corporate OSes for the beginning, let's say more /e/ more lineage more graphene OS users. And maybe cool alternatives to Maps applications like OSMand
0x445442 1y ago
For all his idiosyncratic traits, Stallman was remarkably prescient about many things.
- fipar 1y ago
  Absolutely, though I think sadly his idiosyncratic traits played against his message (and I say this as a big rms fan). I think it's similar with the original post. Regardless of how I feel about present-day computing, I think comparing it with war devices designed to maim and kill people, and that can (and do) keep maiming and killing people long after a war is over isn't going to be very effective.
- thomastjeffery 1y ago
  It seems like most of those traits stem from an overall consistency in ethical perspective. I think Stallman figured out early on how much he valued collaboration over competition, and liberty over authority; and moved on naturally from there.
  - roughly 1y ago
    There’s enough stories about Stallman’s “eccentricities” that aren’t the result of ethical choices. The man’s hygiene is sort of legendary at this point. None of this is to say he’s wrong or argue against his ethical consistency or the admirable fidelity to which he holds to his ethics, but the dude is odd for reasons beyond his choice of email client.

fmajid 1y ago

Not a good term. Anti-personnel mines do exactly what they are intended to do. These devices/software do something against the interests of the user in the process of doing something the user actually wants (otherwise why would the user even get them?). Perhaps "Faustian computing"?

Zambyte 1y ago
Anti-personnel computers also do exactly what they're intended to do. The interests of the subject are not considered a priority, just like with mines. > otherwise why would the user even get them? Why does a moth fly into a flame?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Modified3019 1y ago
  Moths (and other insects) evolved to use transverse orientation to fly level at night by using distant bodies of light (stars, moon), essentially trying to fly perpendicular to light above. Sources of light which are physically close disrupt this instinct. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44785-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44785-3
  - jazzyjackson 1y ago
    An apt metaphor as humans evolved to orient themselves based on information (in the strict sense of novel data) and so all it takes to trap a human in a continuous cycle of hitting themselves against a wall is to create a wall of continuously novel information
cess11 1y ago
Where in this do you see the connection to worldly, scientific, knowledge?
- fmajid 1y ago

casey2 1y ago

anti-personal computing: data collection, closed ecosystem, dark patterns, opaque programs, central control anti-personnel computing: the use of a computing system to target, harm, control or neutralize individuals

praptak 1y ago

I prefer "antifeatures" as more precise. https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/antifeatures/ https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/antifeatures/

thomastjeffery 1y ago
The word antifeature can describe a feature that the designer doesn't want. That's usually the scenario I experience it in, and it's a good fit for it. Anti-personnel describes more precisely, the perverse prioritization of a 3rd party's goals over the end user's goals.

JohnMakin 1y ago

I am just quite old enough to remember the late 90's/early aughts dotcom craze. The vibe in software feels very similar to me - back then I remember ad-riddled pages that'd spam you with popups and sometimes malware, all in the same fever pitch to eek out every possible penny so they could show revenue for their overpriced valuations. The web was seen as a gold mine that if you weren't pillaging, you were actively losing - until it all imploded. The look and feel of a lot of web pages today (invasive ads taking up disproportionate amount of the page) reminds me a lot of that time, even without going to the dotcom parallels we have with the current hype cycle.

api 1y ago
It did not take long after the Internet went mainstream for a borderline (or not borderline) malware industry to evolve around getting predatory crap onto peoples' computers. I remember uninstalling shit like "Bonzai buddy" and the various toolbars and other trash that would come with dodgy installers or sometimes on new installs if you bought a cheap machine. Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian" with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism. It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way, but that's where it went pretty fast. Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine. It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government conservative type ideas and toward every kind of authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa. I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both ways.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  > The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy Let’s not romanticize the old PC culture - most running Windows with some combination of viruses, bundled software when you were trying to install something else, many people had 10 tool bars on IE that were all tracking your browser history

DonHopkins 1y ago

The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system. Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode! And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!

6510 1y ago

I hear part of the Chinese miracle of central planning is that they have almost full knowledge of everything everyone is doing in the economy. In contrast, in the west, where we optimize for personal gain, you can get a lot done by throwing up barriers and creating friction. We also pretend/believe our governments use all data against us. My gut tells me that cryptography and clever use of time and location can be used to use public data for specific purposes alone. You could for example construct security cameras with sufficient encryption that only a judge can request access to a specific chunk of time and has to provide a specific case number. It might even be possible for the judge to request a specific thing from the footage like time stamps and licenseplate numbers not from people living there or even similar faces and devices seen around similar crimes. I don't want the specific time stamps and locations made available buy I don't see great value in keeping my annual toilet paper purchases secret or how many km I need to travel to purchase shoes. Maybe (when seeking) we should get proximity push notifications for job offers that fit our resume. I mean, we should explore the boundary between anti-personel computing and useful application. Maybe things are worse than we think, maybe they can be made mutually beneficial.