9 ms·

Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are

Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.

mrtksn 9mo ago
What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself. I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world. People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within. Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate. Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it. The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order. I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed. Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted. Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it. The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  A focus on preserving order is a far liberal/far centrist thing, not fascist. Fascists would ban to achieve political goals and not to maintain order. Major political groups: Liberals/centrists - maintain order/decorum at all costs Fascists - gain power at all costs, in groups of decreasing size Libertarians - reduce taxes at all costs Leftists - argue for an equal society but never get there Conservatives - return to monke
  - mrtksn 8mo ago
    Yeah, no. In centrist governments you don’t have a a secret police type law enforcement that go around and “enforce laws”(in quotes because only the laws they like, i.e. laws that say you can't be here without permission but not the laws that say you have certain rights rights) without trials etc by intimidation and executions, that is a fascist thing. In centrist governments the order isn't preserved at all costs, it is preserved within the framework with well defined procedures and that's why its often imperfect and slow and when it becomes too inefficient(i.e. too expensive and too slow to prosecuted a perceived criminal activity) the population may demand fascism as a solution. Gaining power is at all cost as a fascist trait is a good point, Tech companies do that all the time too so techies are often accustomed with that.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      Centrists find Gestapo disorderly, and prefer not to have them, but don't confuse this with supporting minority rights.
tokyobreakfast 9mo ago
But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.
- badbird3 9mo ago
  Quite the high horse you got there
  - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
    It’s worth pointing out that a non-insignificant subset of tech workers know the impacts and still don’t give a fuck though.
    - anonym29 9mo ago
      A lot of them are even proud of being the loyal partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
      @anoym - There isn’t something inherently bad about working for law enforcement or national security agencies as long as what you’re doing cannot be used now or in the future unethically. But too be honest I think this is a ‘don’t hate the player’ type things, if palantir didn’t exist, another company would take its place - privacy legislation is the only thing that prevents it, not relying on ethics of the masses.
      - IhateAI 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        fauchletenerum 9mo ago
        This is a childishly simplistic view of the world
hikkerl 9mo ago
[flagged]
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  You seem to be a bit scared of doing this all under your own name, comrade. But don't worry, we know exactly who you are.
  - maldev 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jacquesm 9mo ago
      > Not only that, but your profile clearly says you aren't even American. Maybe you should focus on your own politics, or things you understand, and not try to threaten people. I'm not threatening anybody, I'm just pointing out that in the aggregate anonymity does not exist as told by TFA whereas the GP seems to believe it holds some weight. The only reason you are able to write your comment is simply because I'm not hiding. You on the other hand are. > I personally, am glad we have this, so I don't experience what I do when I go to Europe, and get a bunch of illegal Africans terrorizing people in front of police. Or let alone the no go zones. Funny, that hasn't happened to me yet. What also hasn't happened to me yet is that I got shot in the face at a protest. But: you are part of the problem, you believe you are part of the solution. The fact that you believe that you are part of the solution but you're not proud enough of it to do so under your own name tells the whole story. It's the equivalent of the mask of those ICE goons. https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/trackers/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/trackers/ > I'm glad, to have spend most of my career in the government to stop these people coming in and terrorists. Which is why I can report, the US has a very low terror rate, especially when you look at foreign extremists, unlike other parts of the world. That has something to do with two oceans and nothing at all with your efforts.
      - 9mo ago
niek_pas 9mo ago
NARRATOR: It wasn’t.
riazrizvi 9mo ago
[flagged]
- blurbleblurble 9mo ago
  "It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of [hackernews readers]: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi." https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/ https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
  - account42 9mo ago
    Resorting to goodwin is an admission that you have no better argument.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - blurbleblurble 8mo ago
      I'm not resorting to Goodwin. I'm watching the same exact thing play out worldwide.
- intermerda 9mo ago
  What an incredibly shitty comment which is wrong on so many levels. You are the type of person who believes that Oskar Schindler should have been shot to death for breaking the "law" rather than being celebrated.
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    I'll be happy to bet he has no idea who that is and why supporting the Nazi's as long as they're doing your bidding is a bad idea.
- prophesi 9mo ago
  Not OP, but I think the way ICE enforces immigration in the USA has a lot of issues. The bar is too low for people granted the right to utilize lethal force to join, they aren't revoked of the same civilian rights to privacy we give to public enforcers of the law, aren't required to wear bodycams because of their reliance in hiring more people before they can abide by what the law requires, and so on.
testfrequency 9mo ago
If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening. Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine. The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.
- andsoitis 9mo ago
  > you support what’s happening. I don’t know that things are that black and white. Do you feel the same about the billions of consumers who buy and use the products these companies make?
  - testfrequency 9mo ago
    Consumers less so. They are the victims, not the source.
    - amelius 9mo ago
      Fully agree. If you want to put the blame on consumers, at least show them on your adverts, product packaging, etc. all the morally abject methods used in the production of the product. If you hide it from them, all the blame is on you.
  - dns_snek 9mo ago
    No because employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause. That's why ad-tech is so effective in the first place. Consumer pays $1.10 for a can of coke, $0.10 of that goes to ad-tech, the consumer watches some coke ads, ad-tech pays $0.05 to the publisher and the consumer receives $0.05 in benefits in the form of "free ad-supported content" (which they already paid $0.10 for). The only way for consumers to avoid this is to just stop spending money with any brand that advertises online, which is completely unrealistic and a much taller ask than asking employees to give up their deal with the devil (and work for just about anyone else except big tech).
salawat 9mo ago
It wasn't a hypothetical future back in the time of DoubleClick. In the words of the XO from the Alfa class submarine to his CO in The Hunt for Red October: "You've killed us, you ass."
cucumber3732842 9mo ago
>Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies No, it won't be. Except perhaps to too few to make a difference. The money is too good.
account42 9mo ago
If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.
direwolf20 9mo ago
It's a wakeup call: there's a lot of money in the mass surveillance industry
- casey2 8mo ago
  Not really. Surveillance might create an arbitrage opportunity, but insurers hate data they can't trust. The more data the more noise.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Powerful people are paying a lot of money to locate their dispersed enemies. Think of the system in Palestine that tracks wanted terrorists back to their homes at night, so their whole families can be exploded.

Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.

mrtksn 9mo ago

What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself. I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world. People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within. Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate. Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it. The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order. I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed. Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted. Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it. The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.

direwolf20 8mo ago
A focus on preserving order is a far liberal/far centrist thing, not fascist. Fascists would ban to achieve political goals and not to maintain order. Major political groups: Liberals/centrists - maintain order/decorum at all costs Fascists - gain power at all costs, in groups of decreasing size Libertarians - reduce taxes at all costs Leftists - argue for an equal society but never get there Conservatives - return to monke
- mrtksn 8mo ago
  Yeah, no. In centrist governments you don’t have a a secret police type law enforcement that go around and “enforce laws”(in quotes because only the laws they like, i.e. laws that say you can't be here without permission but not the laws that say you have certain rights rights) without trials etc by intimidation and executions, that is a fascist thing. In centrist governments the order isn't preserved at all costs, it is preserved within the framework with well defined procedures and that's why its often imperfect and slow and when it becomes too inefficient(i.e. too expensive and too slow to prosecuted a perceived criminal activity) the population may demand fascism as a solution. Gaining power is at all cost as a fascist trait is a good point, Tech companies do that all the time too so techies are often accustomed with that.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Centrists find Gestapo disorderly, and prefer not to have them, but don't confuse this with supporting minority rights.

tokyobreakfast 9mo ago

But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.

badbird3 9mo ago
Quite the high horse you got there
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
  It’s worth pointing out that a non-insignificant subset of tech workers know the impacts and still don’t give a fuck though.
  - anonym29 9mo ago
    A lot of them are even proud of being the loyal partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
    @anoym - There isn’t something inherently bad about working for law enforcement or national security agencies as long as what you’re doing cannot be used now or in the future unethically. But too be honest I think this is a ‘don’t hate the player’ type things, if palantir didn’t exist, another company would take its place - privacy legislation is the only thing that prevents it, not relying on ethics of the masses.
    - IhateAI 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - fauchletenerum 9mo ago
        This is a childishly simplistic view of the world

hikkerl 9mo ago

[flagged]

jacquesm 9mo ago
You seem to be a bit scared of doing this all under your own name, comrade. But don't worry, we know exactly who you are.
- maldev 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    > Not only that, but your profile clearly says you aren't even American. Maybe you should focus on your own politics, or things you understand, and not try to threaten people. I'm not threatening anybody, I'm just pointing out that in the aggregate anonymity does not exist as told by TFA whereas the GP seems to believe it holds some weight. The only reason you are able to write your comment is simply because I'm not hiding. You on the other hand are. > I personally, am glad we have this, so I don't experience what I do when I go to Europe, and get a bunch of illegal Africans terrorizing people in front of police. Or let alone the no go zones. Funny, that hasn't happened to me yet. What also hasn't happened to me yet is that I got shot in the face at a protest. But: you are part of the problem, you believe you are part of the solution. The fact that you believe that you are part of the solution but you're not proud enough of it to do so under your own name tells the whole story. It's the equivalent of the mask of those ICE goons. https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/trackers/ https://jacquesmattheij.com/trackers/ > I'm glad, to have spend most of my career in the government to stop these people coming in and terrorists. Which is why I can report, the US has a very low terror rate, especially when you look at foreign extremists, unlike other parts of the world. That has something to do with two oceans and nothing at all with your efforts.
    - 9mo ago

niek_pas 9mo ago

NARRATOR: It wasn’t.

riazrizvi 9mo ago

[flagged]

blurbleblurble 9mo ago
"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of [hackernews readers]: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi." https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/ https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
- account42 9mo ago
  Resorting to goodwin is an admission that you have no better argument.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - blurbleblurble 8mo ago
    I'm not resorting to Goodwin. I'm watching the same exact thing play out worldwide.
intermerda 9mo ago
What an incredibly shitty comment which is wrong on so many levels. You are the type of person who believes that Oskar Schindler should have been shot to death for breaking the "law" rather than being celebrated.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  I'll be happy to bet he has no idea who that is and why supporting the Nazi's as long as they're doing your bidding is a bad idea.
prophesi 9mo ago
Not OP, but I think the way ICE enforces immigration in the USA has a lot of issues. The bar is too low for people granted the right to utilize lethal force to join, they aren't revoked of the same civilian rights to privacy we give to public enforcers of the law, aren't required to wear bodycams because of their reliance in hiring more people before they can abide by what the law requires, and so on.

testfrequency 9mo ago

If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening. Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine. The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.

andsoitis 9mo ago
> you support what’s happening. I don’t know that things are that black and white. Do you feel the same about the billions of consumers who buy and use the products these companies make?
- testfrequency 9mo ago
  Consumers less so. They are the victims, not the source.
  - amelius 9mo ago
    Fully agree. If you want to put the blame on consumers, at least show them on your adverts, product packaging, etc. all the morally abject methods used in the production of the product. If you hide it from them, all the blame is on you.
- dns_snek 9mo ago
  No because employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause. That's why ad-tech is so effective in the first place. Consumer pays $1.10 for a can of coke, $0.10 of that goes to ad-tech, the consumer watches some coke ads, ad-tech pays $0.05 to the publisher and the consumer receives $0.05 in benefits in the form of "free ad-supported content" (which they already paid $0.10 for). The only way for consumers to avoid this is to just stop spending money with any brand that advertises online, which is completely unrealistic and a much taller ask than asking employees to give up their deal with the devil (and work for just about anyone else except big tech).

salawat 9mo ago

It wasn't a hypothetical future back in the time of DoubleClick. In the words of the XO from the Alfa class submarine to his CO in The Hunt for Red October: "You've killed us, you ass."

cucumber3732842 9mo ago

>Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies No, it won't be. Except perhaps to too few to make a difference. The money is too good.

account42 9mo ago

If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.

direwolf20 9mo ago

It's a wakeup call: there's a lot of money in the mass surveillance industry

casey2 8mo ago
Not really. Surveillance might create an arbitrage opportunity, but insurers hate data they can't trust. The more data the more noise.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Powerful people are paying a lot of money to locate their dispersed enemies. Think of the system in Palestine that tracks wanted terrorists back to their homes at night, so their whole families can be exploded.