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How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy
- TwoNineA 1y agoCitizens United already killed democracy.
- xp84 1y agoAgreed. To me, it’s like the difference between semi-automatic weapons and automatic weapons. Yes, it’s easier to not have to wiggle your finger on the trigger, but semi-auto is more than enough to be very effective. It’s very easy to create deceptive imagery persuasion and to astroturf. With or without AI assistance. All you need is a modest amount of money. And with unlimited money and zero accountability thanks to the ‘responsibility laundering’ made possible through PACs… facts no longer matter. Just money, to buy virality, to influence vibes.
- hayst4ck 1y agoNo, this is low agency. It wasn't other people that killed democracy. It was our own lack of response to billionaires enshrining money as legitimate political power that killed democracy. Oligarchy and monarchy are the default. Citizens willing to pay the cost of challenging those in power are what is exceptional. It is citizens asserting their own power rather than submitting to unjust power that creates democracy. It is an insistence that law applies to the most rich that creates democracy. Democracy requires maintenance and responsibility. You can't expect nice things without paying the maintenance cost, and unfortunately, if you challenge power, power answers and it will hurt. If nobody is willing to die for freedom, then everyone will die a slave. Blaming others rather than looking within fundamentally accepts authoritarianism, it presumes and accepts that others have power over you and that you can do nothing but submit. Nobody is challenging power. We only have our own selves to blame for our cowardice.
- try_the_bass 1y agoI disagree about what we failed to respond to, but fully agree that this is the fault of the population at large: if you refrain from putting forth your opinion, your opinion by cannot be counted in the democratic process. The problem with democracy, more generally, appears to be that the population is wildly susceptible to apathy and complacency, meaning we've reduced the voting set to only this who care enough to vote. This turns politics into a game of disagreements between the most extreme voices. In my opinion, in order for a democracy to work, voting must be compulsory.
- WillPostForFood 1y agoAnd yet, in 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, we have highest percentage Voting Eligible Population turning out since WWII, and in two of the last three elections, the candidate who spent less won. So at least at presidential level, there is neither apathy, complacency, or the ability to buy elections.
- hayst4ck 1y ago> the candidate who spent less won. That is entirely unsubstantiated. There is no reasonable way to measure this and any measurements taken are inherently political. I am amenable to the idea of that being true for official spending, but unless the twitter purchase, for example, were tabulated, or spending on our American "pravda" (Truth social which was clearly influenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda), I would be extremely suspicious of those numbers. > so at least at presidential level, there is neither apathy, complacency, or the ability to buy elections. Again, I completely disagree, and so does Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, who argues that it is extremely hard to win a primary without fundraising, and fundraising is structurally an election where money counts as votes, and therefore nearly all candidates who make it to the primary have already been filtered through by those with money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g
- try_the_bass 1y agoI don't think it's quite this reductive. Turnout in 2020 is estimated at 65%, which is not quite two-thirds of the population. 2024 was slightly lower at 63%. That's still missing a significant fraction of the population. Sure, you could make the argument that 2/3s is probably pretty representative, but I'm not sure I'd agree. I think there's good reason to believe that a voter who shows up is inherently not representative of a voter who does not. When elections are decided by such small margins in many places, that unrepresented third can easily change the outcome. Maybe they truly don't care, and perhaps they should be given the option to vote as such, if they're required to vote. I also don't think presidential elections are actually very meaningful when it comes to national politics (or politics in general!), but I feel like my opinion on that is changing given the current administration's efforts to maximize presidential power and their success in doing so.
- andai 1y agoI think it's more "confirmed the patient had been dead for a little while."
- andrewla 1y agoI don't know what to tell you if you still believe that political contributions or spending are a determinative factor in politics rather than a trailing indicator (and a poor one at that). Even in terms of corruption, this is by far the smallest concern and barely worth noting in the scheme of things. Besides the obvious revolving door for lobbying and legal firms, there is so much money at play in the ex post facto bribery industry, between speaking fees and bulk book sales and low interest and forgiven loans that Citizens United might as well be dust in the wind.
- dsabanin 1y agoI think it's pretty clear we're at this stage already.
- lugu 1y agoIs it time to move away from directly elected representative toward topic-specific randomly pick representative? Would this help prevent operation to influenced opinion?
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoThat feels like it'd turn most non-hot-topic decisions into noise, might as well flip a coin to determine policy.
- Spooky23 1y agoWe did this already here in the United States.
- int_19h 1y agoNot really. Our representatives are still self-selecting for sociopathy before they even get on the ballot.
- navane 1y agoWhat democracy lol, didn't need AI for that.
- sgarrity 1y agoAre there benevolent AI swarms?
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoI'd argue the only new development is that now it's cheaper / easier to do. But the same concept has been used previously with human-augmented bot farms.
- happytoexplain 1y agoI'm often a little bewildered at why we so consistently label "cheaper/easier" as less significant than "new". "Cheaper/easier" is what creates consequences, not "new".
- o_____________o 1y ago> "Cheaper/easier" is what creates consequences, not "new". Nuclear bomb?
- TypingOutBugs 1y agoImagine if they were cheaper and easier to manufacture
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- spongebobstoes 1y agoI think it remains a useful distinction. framing this as an evolution ("cheaper") helps understand the problem space. for example, the motivations, capabilities and effectiveness of existing players
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- uniqueuid 1y agoThis paper builds on a series of pathways towards harm. Those are plausible in principle, but we still have frustratingly little evidence of the magnitude of such harms in the field. To solve the question of whether or not these harms can/will actually materialize, we would need causal attribution, something that is really hard to do — in particular with all involved actors actively monitoring society and reacting to new research. Personally, I think that transparency measures and tools that help civic society (and researchers) better understand what's going on are the most promising tool here.
- alganet 1y agoThere's plenty we can do before any attribution is made. LLMs hallucinate. They're weak and we can induce that behavior. We don't do it because of peer pressure. Anyone doing it would sound insane. It's like a depth charge, to make them surface as non-human. I think it's doable, specially if they constantly monitor specific groups or people. There are probably many other methods to draw out evidence without necessarily going all the way into attribution (which we definitely should!).
- hayst4ck 1y agoAI execs push the message of how dangerous and powerful AI is because who doesn't want to invest in the next most powerful thing? But AI is not dangerous because of the potential for sentience, but because it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. It gives those with resources more advantage. It's dangerous because it gives individuals the power to provide answers when people ask questions out of curioity they don't know the answer to, which is when they are most able to be influenced.
- ivape 1y agoIt's dangerous for psychological reasons. We already saw how the internet was able to organically form into bubbles that escaped into the real world and fully influenced how people identify and conduct themselves. AI now lets people sub divide into further groups based on entirely arbitrary criteria which they feed into AI and AI feeds back their bubble. Think Manson, think cults, suicide pacts, tidepod eating cult, and of course, political parties. The kids will at some point worship a prompt-engineered God (not the developer, the actual AI agent), and there will be nothing society will be able to do about it. Nobody verbalizes that Gen Z moves entirely like a cult, trend after trend is entirely cult-like behavior. The generation that is going to get raised by AI (Gen Zs kids) are going to be batshit crazy.
- hansvm 1y ago> The kids will at some point worship a prompt-engineered God The way some people talk about LLM coding I don't know that we're far off.
- frollogaston 1y agoI'm on the older side of Gen Z, I think the older people move more like cults. And the younger ones are addicted to phones from a young age since their Millennial parents thought it'd be a great idea, though that's finally starting to change.
- guywithahat 1y ago> because it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer This is a terrible take. Whenever there is a massive technical shift it's the incumbents who struggle to adapt. We've already seen companies go from nothing to being worth tens of billions.
- bigyabai 1y agoYou know what concerns me? Venture capital has started a ball rolling, which HN plays no small part in. VCs exist as an apparatus of America's massive financialized economy, and therefore understands that the system is overleveraged again. We have so much more debt than we're capable of working off, and therefore the people with money want to spend it on moonshots. Cryptocurrency scams, viral marketing schemes, AI shenanigans among the latest. What is the sum of all this? What work is really being done, besides the financier economics we've seen since the 1980s and the dev outsourcing we've seen since the 90s? Maybe AI swarms do pose some weird contrived threat to democracy. Pieces like this will inevitably be laundered by the American intelligentsia like Karpathy or Hinton, and turned into some polemic hype-piece on social media proving that "safe AI" must be prioritized in a row for regulation. It's borderline ineffable to admit on HN, but America's obsession over speculative economics has pretty much ruined our chance at seizing a technological future that can benefit anyone. Now AI, like crypto before it and the dotcom bubble too, is overleveraged. "Where's the money, Lebowski?"
- matus-pikuliak 1y agoI have done some research about AI-disinformation. This is a really complex topic, as disinformation or influence operations are complex phenomena that can have many different forms. What I would argue is that disinformation in general do not have a supply problem (how to generate as much of them as possible) but a demand problem (how to get what is generated in front of some eyes). You don't really need a botnet of fake users pushing something, you need a few popular accounts/politicians to spread your message. There is no significant advantage in using AI there. But, there are still situations where botnets would be useful. For example, spreading propaganda on social media during hot phases of various conflicts (R-U war, Israeli wars, Indo-Pakistani war) or doing short term influence operations before the elections. These cases need to be handled by social media platforms detecting nefarious activity by either humans or AI. So far they could half-ass it as it was pretty expensive to run human-based campaigns, but they will probably have to step up their game to handle relatively cheap AI campaigns that people will attempt to run.
- IAmGraydon 1y ago>Fusing LLM reasoning with multi-agent architectures [1], these systems are capable of coordinating autonomously, infiltrating communities, and fabricating consensus at minimal cost. Where legacy botnets acted like megaphones, repeating one script, AI swarms behave like adaptive conversationalists with thousands of distinct personas that learn from feedback, pivot narratives, and blend seamlessly into real discourse. By mirroring human social dynamics using adaptive tactics, they threaten democratic discourse. A trip to Reddit will show you just how real this already is. Humans are far more likely to adopt a belief if they think that everyone else also believes it. The moment GPT became available, bad actors have exploited this to spread disinformation and convince everyone to believe it.
- try_the_bass 1y agoDiscourse on Reddit has definitely become orders of magnitude more stupid over the past year or so. While I attribute a good portion of this to these kinds of influence operations, it's pretty clear that the opinion of the average Redditor (bot or not!) has just gotten increasingly shallow over time.
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- agentultra 1y agoReal AI safety is enforced regulation and smart policies, period. Don't let the government's FOMO on new weapons enable these companies to add new coal and methane power to the grid and build data centres in water-stressed regions. Make them pay for the externalities they cause. If it weren't subsidized these companies wouldn't be operating at the scale they are, AI would be in a lab, where it belongs doing cool stuff for science. Heck, don't let government let alone private corporations weaponize this technology, full stop. Economic policy that protects businesses and individuals online. Peoples' hosting bills are going through the roof from AI scrapers. The harm is nuts. These companies aren't respecting any of the informal rules and are doing everything they can to form monopolies and shut down competition. We need social policies that prevent AI use cases from harming the economy. Policies that prevent displacing skilled workers without redistributing the accrued wealth to the labour class. If it's really improving productivity by such a huge factor then we should all be working less and living comfortably. But I dunno how you prevent the disinformation, fraud, and scams. They've been around for years and it's always a cat-and-mouse game. Social media has just made it worse and AI is just more fuel for the tire fire.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoEnforced regulation has become impossible for at least the last 25 years or so. Anyone can just build a datacenter in some foreign country, and that software still affects the people in your country. Back when they were complaining that Russia was interfering with our elections (2016ish?) I wondered what it would take to completely cut Russia off from the Internet. Granted, the Soviets still pulled stunts with less technology, but it was still a manageable problem then. Now? Well, we couldn't cut them off if we wanted to, could we? Even if we bullied Europe into severing all the fiber backbones there and elsewhere, China and North Korea and a dozen other countries would still keep them connected. And we'd still face the problems we face now. Not that we would try that. Though it might be a sane and even a reasonably good policy, you'd have jackasses here and elsewhere (and not just Russian shills either) talking about how we can't possibly disconnect the friendly Russianerinos, they're good people even if some of their oligarchs aren't. So we'll get some performative regulation theater that changes nothing. And everyone will just wonder what went wrong, quietly.
- 21eleven 1y agoI suspect this is what a node in an AI swarm looks like looks like https://www.reddit.com/u/Low-Ocelot-992/s/95ORJu8j9U https://www.reddit.com/u/Low-Ocelot-992/s/95ORJu8j9U
- pessimist 1y agoKillian civilians in war has been completely normalized. Even in highly visible conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. People just shrug and move on. Political discourse has lost all sense of decency. Senators, the VP and POTUS all routinely mock and demean their opponents and laugh even at murder. Arrests are made by unknown masked men with assault rifles. AI is simply irrelevant to this - humans are selfish, tribal and ugly.
- lupusreal 1y ago> Killing civilians in war has been completely normalized. Relative to which period in human history?
- anigbrowl 1y agoMany of them. While historically the life of the peasantry (and pastoralists and hunter-gatherers) was stereotypically 'nasty, brutish, and short,' war activities were often carefully circumscribed and oriented around set piece battles. The disregard for such conventions was part of why figures like Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Tamuslane were so reviled. The anthropology of war is a lot more complicated than most people appreciate, because much of our mental imagery on historical warfare comes from movies and other fictional narratives. John Keegan's War in Human History is an accessible starter book on the topic.
- lupusreal 1y agoI think you'll be hard pressed to find an era in which civilian populations weren't subjected to brutalities during and immediately after conquest of population centers. Battles between armies not touching civilians didn't make war a clean and moral thing.
- bastawhiz 1y ago> system-level oversight—a UN-backed AI Influence Observatory > The Observatory should maintain and continually update an open, searchable database of verified influence-operation incidents, allowing researchers, journalists, and election authorities to track patterns and compare response effectiveness across countries in real time. To guarantee both legitimacy and skill, its governing board would mix rotating member-state delegates, independent technologists, data engineers, and civil society watchdogs. We've really found ourselves in a pickle when the only way to keep Grandma from being psychologically manipulated is to have the UN keep a spreadsheet of Facebook groups she's not allowed to join. Honestly what a time to be alive.
- tyleo 1y agoI would actually love if what comes out of this is that people stop trusting social media entirely and put a lot more weight into face-to-face interactions.
- frollogaston 1y agoThat and low-effort journalism or ads. Without AI, writing tons of bs is already a well-established skill, now it doesn't even take skill.
- alganet 1y agoThat doesn't solve the problem. The person you are talking to face-to-face could have been targeted with disinformation as well. This is suggested in the paper: manufacture of narrative across communities. Those communities are not exclusively online.
- Loughla 1y agoLegitimately though, when did we shift from 'don't believe anything on the Internet' to 'believe everything on the Internet'? When and why did that happen?
- const_cast 1y agoWhen people discovered that telling people what they want to hear makes them money. My favorite example of this is the entire sphere of anti-science "health" stuff on TikTok. Seeds oils bad, steak good, raw milk good, chemo bad. I noticed something. Every single time, without fail, this person is trying to sell me something. Sometimes it's outright linked in the TikTok, sometimes it's in their bio. But they're always salespeople. Salespeople lie guys. They want you to buy their stuff, of course they're going to tell you their stuff works.
- nradov 1y agoAre malicious AI swarms a greater threat to democracy than British soldiers armed with muskets and cannons?
- lurk2 1y agoI’ve been hearing about the dangers of influence campaigns like Russian bot farms, deep fakes, and LLMs for the last ten years now. While these sorts of papers go out of their way to use the word “democratic,” it always seems to be motivated by a (not-very-compelling) idea that right wing populism is an essentially artificial creation rather than an organic backlash to the excesses of the Obama era. The scale of these influence campaigns may have increased in the last five years, but the (common, in these circles) idea that Russia stole the election with a few million posts on Twitter is silly and itself begins to look like an attempt to implement anti-democratic measures that would allow established authorities to pull the ladder up behind them. The authors of this paper have at acknowledged that there are (practical, more so than moral) limitations to strict identification systems (“Please insert your social security number to submit this post”) and cite a few (non-US) examples of instances where these kinds of influence campaigns have ostensibly occurred. The countermeasures similarly appear to be reasonable, being focused on providing trust scores and counter-narratives. What they are describing, though, might end up looking a lot like a Reddit-style social credit system which has the impact of shutting out dissenting opinions. One of my favorite things about Hacker News over Reddit is that I can view and vouch for posts that have been flagged dead by other users. 95% of the time the flags were warranted (low-effort comments, vulgarity, or spam), but every once in a while I come across an intriguing comment that others preferred to be censored.
- alephnerd 1y agoThese disinformation tactics via bots are used to vocalize BOTH the fringe left ("kill the rich") and the fringe right ("great replacement"). Most organizations and teams who have been investigating automated disinfo at scale have highlighted how fringes on both sides of the spectrum are being manipulated via automated engagement - often with state backing. Power and Politics is completely orthogonal to ideology.
- lurk2 1y agoPolarization seems more like an organic reaction to post-nationalism. There is no pre-political identity in any of these countries anymore, so the idea that you could be satisfied with dissatisfaction in exchange for being a member of a general public united in some kind of underlying belief system is nonsensical now.
- edwardbernays 1y agoMalicious AI seams are merely the tool wielded by the actual danger, which is the threat actors directing them towards a particular goal. I'm spreading the message because I want more socially conscious people to engage in this. Look into Curtis Yarvin and The Dark Enlightenment. Look into Peter Thiel's (the CEO of Palantir aka America's biggest surveillance contractor) explicitly technofascist musings on using technology to bulldoze democracy.
- ilaksh 1y agoStop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it. AI, like any technology, is a lever. Like a big metal rod. You could use that to move stones for building a structure, or to dislodge a boulder to roll down a hill and destroy someone else's building. The pre-AI situation is actually incredibly bad for most people in the world who are relatively unprivileged. "Democracy" alternates between ideological extremes. Even without media, the structure of the system is obviously wholly inadequate. Advanced technologies can be used to make things worse. But they are also the best hope for improving things. And especially the best hope for empowering those with less privilege. The real problems are the humans, their belief systems and social structures. The status quo may seem okay to you on most days, but it is truly awful in general. We need as many new tools as possible. Don't blame the tools. This is the worst kind of ignorance.
- mclau157 1y agoIts a bit more of a question of which can we change more easily; tools, or human nature
- 1659447091 1y agoHuman nature. The tools will always follow that.
- alephnerd 1y ago> Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it > Don't blame the tools. This is the worst kind of ignorance "Stop blaming [guns // religion // drugs // cars // <insert_innovation_here>] for the way humans misuse it" There is a reason regulations exist. Too much regulation is detrimental to innovation, but some amount of standards is needed.
- ilaksh 1y agoGuns, drugs and religion are not equivalent to AI. I did not say there should not be regulation or standards. The point is that the whole diagnosis is wrong. People point at AI as creating a new problem as if everything was okay. But everything is already fucked and it's not because of technology it's because of people, their social structures and beliefs. That is what we need to fix. There are lots of ways that AI could help democracy and government in general.
- mmsc 1y ago.. AI ... swarms! Like bees! Scary! We should be scared! Anyways, I'm not sure AI is relevant here. Misinformation is just a form of propaganda which other than allowing the creation of falsehoods quicker, doesn't seem to be any more "threatening" than any other lie.
- dr-detroit 1y ago[dead]
- zzzeek 1y agoSure but who needs democracy anyway? Monarchy is the way of the future for famous tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel (and aren't we all just aspiring tech oligarchs on HN?). AI monarchs are the way of the future.
- downboots 1y agoWe get to choose our dystopia? :D
- devrandoom 1y agoSections of Reddit and Twitter have been taken over by incredibly toxic cesspit of bots. They fuel polarization and hate like nothing I've ever seen before. It's catered for the algorithm which pumps it out to users.
- SoftTalker 1y agoI wonder if AI is going to track like nuclear power. In the 1950s it was the greatest thing. Electricity would be plentiful and cheap. "Too cheap to meter." All kinds of new conveniences would be possible. The future was bright. Then we had growing environmental concerns. And the costs were much higher than initially promoted. Then we had Three Mile Island. Then Chernobyl. Then Fukushima. New reactor construction came to a standstill. There was no trust anymore that humans could handle the technology. Now, there's some interest again. Different designs, different approaches. Will AI follow the same path? A few disasters, a retreat, and then perhaps a renewal with lessons learned?
- gneuron 1y agoYes
- alganet 1y agoMaybe AI is not nuclear power, or the printing press, but the optical mirror. A simple, unordinary, boring, mirror. Seemingly fantastical to those unfamiliar with it, it would have startled many who never saw one, with its apparent capacity to reproduce human likeness and nature. Once you look behind it, there's nothing. No nature within, no magic, just a polished surface. A cute trick, destined to become a trivial object. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_and_Narcissus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_and_Narcissus > Juno curses Echo by making her unable to initiate a spoken sentence on her own and instead only being able to finish a sentence started by someone else. "Yet a chatterbox, had no other use of speech than she has now, that she could repeat only the last words out of many."
- EGreg 1y agoI've been saying this for years. It's curious that 90% of the top-level comments here are all dismissing it outright. And we have the usual themes: 1) "This has always been possible before. AI brings nothing new." 2) "We haven't seen anything really bad yet, so it is a non-issue 3) "AI execs are pushing this narrative to make AI sound important and get more money" Nevermind the fact that many famous people behind the invention of AI, including Jeffrey Hinton (the "godfather of AI") and others quit their jobs and are spending their time loudly warning people, or signing major letters where they warn about human extinction or job loss... it's all a grift according to the vocal HN denizens. This is like the opposite of web3 where everyone piles on the other way. Well... swarms of AI agents take time to amass karma, pagerank, and other metrics, but when with the coming years, they will indeed be able to churn out content 24/7, create normal-looking influencer accounts and dominate the online discussion on every platform. Very likely, the percentage of human-generated content will trend to 0-1% of content on the internet, and it will become a dark forest, and this will be true on "siloed" ecosystems like HN as well: https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest/ https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest/ Certainly, saying "this was always possible before" misses the forest for the trees. No, it wasn't. List of attacks made possible by swarms of agents: 1) Edits to Wikipedia and publishing articles to push a certain narrative, as an Advanced Persistent Threat 2) Popular accounts on social media, videos on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok pushing AI-generated narratives, biased "news" and entertainment across many accounts growing in popularity (already happening) 3) Comments under articles, videos and shared posts that are either for or against the thing, and coordinated upvoting that bypasses voting ring detection (most social networks don't care about it as much as HN). Tactical piling on. 4) Sleeper accounts that appear normal for months or years and amass karma / points until they gradually start coordinating, either subtly or overtly. AI can play the long strategic game and outmaneuver groups people as well, including experts (see #7 for discrediting them). 5) Astroturfing attacks on people who disagree with the narrative. Maybe coordinating posts on HN that make it seem like it is an unpopular position. 6) Infiltrating and distracting opponents of a position, by getting them mired in constant defenses or explanations, where the interlocutors are either AI or friends / allies that have been "turned" or "flipped" by AI to question them 7) Reputational destruction, along the lines of NSA PRISM powerpoint slides (https://archive.org/details/NSA-PRISM-Slides https://archive.org/details/NSA-PRISM-Slides) but at scale and implacable. 8) Astroturfing support for wars, unrest, or whatever else, but at scale, along the lines of Mahachkala Protests in Russia, etc. These are just some of the early low-hanging fruit for 2026 and 2027.
- hayst4ck 1y agoWe are in an age where the technology of oppression gives the rich the feeling that they are above consequences. That people can be controlled in a way they will not be able to break free from. Malicious AI swarms are only one manifestation of technology which gives incredible leverage to a handful of people. Incredible amounts of information are collected, and an individual AI agent per person watching for disobedience is becoming more and more possible. Companies like Clearview already scour the internet for any public pictures and associated public opinions and offer a facial recognition database with political opinions to border patrol and police agencies. If you go to a protest, border patrol knows. Our government intelligence has outsourced functions to private companies like Palantir. Privatizing intelligence means intelligence capabilities in private hands, that might sound tautological, but if this does not make you fearful, then you did not fully understand. We have license plate tracking everywhere, cameras everywhere, mapped out "social graphs," and we carry around devices in our pockets that betray every facet of our personal lives. The vast majority of transactions are electronic, itemized, and tracked. When every location you visit is logged, interaction you have is logged, every associate you communicate with known, every transaction itemized and logged for query, and there is a database designed to join that data seamlessly to look for disobedience and the resources available to fully utilize that data, then how do you mount a resistance if those people assert their own power? We are becoming dangerously close to not being able to resist those who own or operate the technology of oppression and it is very much outpacing the technology of resistance.
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- anigbrowl 1y agoI'd love to hear why this was flagged, as it's very squarely within HN guidelines. Curiously, although it's not [dead] and was only posted a few hours ago, this story is totally missing from the HN topic list. I can only speculate as to why.
- vincentpants 1y agoAlso curious. Any mods or @dang: is there a reason why this was flagged?
- SanjayMehta 1y agoI guess none except some prejudice on the username. I’ve experimented with different usernames and if you have an obviously Chinese or Indian username, you WILL get downvoted or censored or chastised by dang. Hypocrisy.
- dang 1y ago"I can only speculate as to why." You can always ask us, as you know. Moreover, the answer is almost always that users flagged it (as you surely also know after all these years), so I'm not sure I follow the sudden spike of speculation. Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I'd guess it's connected to how terrible and tedious the thread is. Even by the low-quality standards of a flamewar this is way below the line. Edit: I've turned off the flags now because I don't want the paper to get judged by these comments. The thread also set off the flamewar detector and I'm not going to turn that off.