8 ms·

The time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago. Every single person in the US's future, safety, rights and freedom is currently a

The time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago. Every single person in the US's future, safety, rights and freedom is currently at stake. There is no more time left to wait and see how things play out.

lotsofpulp 6mo ago
Enemy of the State came out in 1998, and the capabilities in that movie were not far fetched, just lacking in bandwidth.
an0malous 6mo ago
Flock is a YC company. I don’t think the resistance will be organized on HN in spite of its ostensibly hacker ethos
- michaelsshaw 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - estimator7292 6mo ago
    Lot of faux-intellectual buzzwords in there, bud
    - michaelsshaw 6mo ago
      Such as? Was it "shit" or "dickriders"? Or was it "anarcho-capitalist", a well-defined concept? Sorry if I'm not receptive to waxing poetic about mass surveillance and the fact that you can't skip a move in chess.
    - adi_kurian 6mo ago
      An aggressive polemic, but faux-intellectual is a tad unfair, perhaps even patronizing, I may say.
  - b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
    I can't speak to years past but HN is an off-shoot of a VC firm so it's not too surprising that the culture here is based in the California Ideology milieu.
    - michaelsshaw 6mo ago
      But it isn't the VC that brings the users here for the most part(I'm literally assuming this, but it seems reasonable), it's word of mouth. Did you join because you love YC, or was it because you thought it was an interesting website at some point?
      - junofan 6mo ago
        Joined because I loved yc, sv, and it’s my home. There’s a guy running around my neighborhood beating people with a pipe. I hope something like Flock can deal with it. I don’t know why people get on here and post agitprop.
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
        BLKNSLVR 6mo ago
        Genuinely not sure if serious.
  - spacechild1 6mo ago
    The HN community is not a monolithic entity. Yes, there are many libertarian SV folks, but there are also plenty of people (like myself) who despise that culture and push back on a regular basis.
    - loteck 6mo ago
      What is libertarian about funding, building and defending government mass surveillance for money?
      - spacechild1 6mo ago
        Just as much as voting for a narcissistic pathological liar and sex offender is Christian. Turns out people are not very consequent with their supposed values when it gets in the way of their personal interests.
      - vrganj 6mo ago
        Hypocrisy is the key libertarian value.
  - tomhow 6mo ago
    Just a few days ago: “Regardless, it's acceptable here to mock climate deniers, capitalists (landlords, CEOs, Billionaires), SUV or truck drivers, religious fundamentalists, various flavors of conservatives…” [1] Both these positions are examples of an effect that dang called the “notice dislike bias” [2]. From reading the discussions here every day for years, there’s more criticism of Flock, Musk and major tech figures/companies than there is support. Regardless of that, it’s not cool to sneer at things on HN, including the rest of the community. This is a site for curious conversation, not intellectual strutting and preening. Curiosity and humility are intrinsically linked. Not everyone plays chess but can still benefit from learning about its concepts, even if you feel it’s beneath you. I’ve been in tech for many years and had never heard that knowing all about chess was inherent to the “hacker ethos”. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932456 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike%20bias&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  There are enough normal people here it is still worth trying.
- gehwartzen 6mo ago
  When it comes to Flock in particular I’ve been seeing a lot more in terms of resistance and pushback in local Reddit communities. At least in my cities sub I see posts regarding anti-flock messaging or related activities at least once a week now.
  - davidw 6mo ago
    Yeah, where I live, one guy was like "You know what, I've had it". He then started organizing within the community and got a big crowd to show up at a city council meeting, and we ended up getting rid of the Flock cameras. Yay!
- notfromhere 6mo ago
  Well yeah, YC is a tech incubator plugged pretty deep into the SV hivemind, and the leading figures of it seemed to have decided that fascism is a better alternative to any kind of regulation on their activities.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago The time to resist the next crop of policies and technologies is today. And I disagree the ground was more fertile for action in Covid. The silver lining to the AI companies’ PR and political ineptitude is that there is widespread, bipartisan pushback against tech in all stripes.
gmuslera 6mo ago
More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised. And over the domestic surveillance, that had some complaints back in that time, there is the point of foreign surveillance and intervention, that had no slowdown back then, so you can figure out where that should be today. At least Americans have some saying on their government and policies, but for the rest of the world is just the new normal.
- znpy 6mo ago
  > More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised. Yeah, obama was president at the time. A lot of fanfare and then nothing happened. People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news. It’s always “weird” when the same action get different a connotation depending on who’s president…
  - wat10000 6mo ago
    Ever think that maybe it’s not the deportations that are the problem, but the murders and other human rights abuses? And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.
    - znpy 6mo ago
      I’m pretty sure that if people had tried to obstruct the law in a similar manner there would have been similar death. And unlike today, there was pretty much no bodycam at the time. Regarding the fanfare… yeah sure big deal… and yet, here we are, with ubiquitous surveillance whose ground work was laid out during the obama administration.
      - 6mo ago
Ekaros 6mo ago
The time was 30 years ago. Back then anyone responsible should have been properly dealt with.
pessimizer 6mo ago
It's been a lot longer than that. You may have forgotten to include the encroachments that you supported; you seem only to have started with the disaster under Biden. For example, I never hear about how hard librarians* fought against "National Security Letters" after 9/11. How quaint it is now to imagine that people thought that there should be a fundamental right to be able to read freely and without disclosing what you read to anyone, especially governments? Technology has only made this cheap to do at scale. For people who may not be familiar, the government insisted on the right to go into libraries and get a list of the books you've read. Hell, it's basically just a "pen register**," and the culture not only gave up on resisting that this data be considered private, but forgot why anyone would have ever thought that way. Now we're arguing about forced digital attestation, but we're barely arguing about digital ID anymore ("of course" we need that), or even remember that most people were against federal identification in the US. Federal identification failed at every point to gain any support; it was pushed hard and failed during the Clinton admin, finally passed with everything else of this nature after 9/11, and then it was resisted and ignored enough to force deadlines to be pushed farther and farther back - it's been 30 years of RealID at this point. There's no evidence that the population ever supported federal ID. The idea was forced upon them, and they just waited a generation for people to forget that the government once didn't even know or care that many people existed. 30 years from now, it will probably be weird trivia that the census was done anonymously: "You mean you didn't have to sign it under penalty of perjury? What would be the point of the data if you didn't know who it belonged to?" In 5 days, May 27, 2026, you'll have to pay a fee of $45 in order to get on a plane for not having Real ID. It's so obvious that these claims of necessity are always just excuses for a power grab. British Labour, who spent decades supporting huge amounts of immigration and then calling everyone racist who thought it was too much, now like Trump uses the prevention of illegal immigration as a reason to impose digital ID on everyone. They're xenophobes when it comes to tracking everyone's movements, but xenophiles when they needed to lower wages. Vote Tory, then! Nope, they supported and oversaw every element of all of this. None of this stuff ever sees a ballot. [*] https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2024/10/07/15-years-of-fear-ala-patriot-act/ https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2024/10/07/15-years-of-... [**] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland
coldtea 6mo ago
And yet people will wait, and things will play out in the worse scenario.

lotsofpulp 6mo ago

Enemy of the State came out in 1998, and the capabilities in that movie were not far fetched, just lacking in bandwidth.

an0malous 6mo ago

Flock is a YC company. I don’t think the resistance will be organized on HN in spite of its ostensibly hacker ethos

michaelsshaw 6mo ago
[flagged]
- estimator7292 6mo ago
  Lot of faux-intellectual buzzwords in there, bud
  - michaelsshaw 6mo ago
    Such as? Was it "shit" or "dickriders"? Or was it "anarcho-capitalist", a well-defined concept? Sorry if I'm not receptive to waxing poetic about mass surveillance and the fact that you can't skip a move in chess.
  - adi_kurian 6mo ago
    An aggressive polemic, but faux-intellectual is a tad unfair, perhaps even patronizing, I may say.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
  I can't speak to years past but HN is an off-shoot of a VC firm so it's not too surprising that the culture here is based in the California Ideology milieu.
  - michaelsshaw 6mo ago
    But it isn't the VC that brings the users here for the most part(I'm literally assuming this, but it seems reasonable), it's word of mouth. Did you join because you love YC, or was it because you thought it was an interesting website at some point?
    - junofan 6mo ago
      Joined because I loved yc, sv, and it’s my home. There’s a guy running around my neighborhood beating people with a pipe. I hope something like Flock can deal with it. I don’t know why people get on here and post agitprop.
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      - BLKNSLVR 6mo ago
        Genuinely not sure if serious.
- spacechild1 6mo ago
  The HN community is not a monolithic entity. Yes, there are many libertarian SV folks, but there are also plenty of people (like myself) who despise that culture and push back on a regular basis.
  - loteck 6mo ago
    What is libertarian about funding, building and defending government mass surveillance for money?
    - spacechild1 6mo ago
      Just as much as voting for a narcissistic pathological liar and sex offender is Christian. Turns out people are not very consequent with their supposed values when it gets in the way of their personal interests.
    - vrganj 6mo ago
      Hypocrisy is the key libertarian value.
- tomhow 6mo ago
  Just a few days ago: “Regardless, it's acceptable here to mock climate deniers, capitalists (landlords, CEOs, Billionaires), SUV or truck drivers, religious fundamentalists, various flavors of conservatives…” [1] Both these positions are examples of an effect that dang called the “notice dislike bias” [2]. From reading the discussions here every day for years, there’s more criticism of Flock, Musk and major tech figures/companies than there is support. Regardless of that, it’s not cool to sneer at things on HN, including the rest of the community. This is a site for curious conversation, not intellectual strutting and preening. Curiosity and humility are intrinsically linked. Not everyone plays chess but can still benefit from learning about its concepts, even if you feel it’s beneath you. I’ve been in tech for many years and had never heard that knowing all about chess was inherent to the “hacker ethos”. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932456 [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike%20bias&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
2ndorderthought 6mo ago
There are enough normal people here it is still worth trying.
gehwartzen 6mo ago
When it comes to Flock in particular I’ve been seeing a lot more in terms of resistance and pushback in local Reddit communities. At least in my cities sub I see posts regarding anti-flock messaging or related activities at least once a week now.
- davidw 6mo ago
  Yeah, where I live, one guy was like "You know what, I've had it". He then started organizing within the community and got a big crowd to show up at a city council meeting, and we ended up getting rid of the Flock cameras. Yay!
notfromhere 6mo ago
Well yeah, YC is a tech incubator plugged pretty deep into the SV hivemind, and the leading figures of it seemed to have decided that fascism is a better alternative to any kind of regulation on their activities.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

> time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago The time to resist the next crop of policies and technologies is today. And I disagree the ground was more fertile for action in Covid. The silver lining to the AI companies’ PR and political ineptitude is that there is widespread, bipartisan pushback against tech in all stripes.

gmuslera 6mo ago

More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised. And over the domestic surveillance, that had some complaints back in that time, there is the point of foreign surveillance and intervention, that had no slowdown back then, so you can figure out where that should be today. At least Americans have some saying on their government and policies, but for the rest of the world is just the new normal.

znpy 6mo ago
> More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised. Yeah, obama was president at the time. A lot of fanfare and then nothing happened. People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news. It’s always “weird” when the same action get different a connotation depending on who’s president…
- wat10000 6mo ago
  Ever think that maybe it’s not the deportations that are the problem, but the murders and other human rights abuses? And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.
  - znpy 6mo ago
    I’m pretty sure that if people had tried to obstruct the law in a similar manner there would have been similar death. And unlike today, there was pretty much no bodycam at the time. Regarding the fanfare… yeah sure big deal… and yet, here we are, with ubiquitous surveillance whose ground work was laid out during the obama administration.
    - 6mo ago

Ekaros 6mo ago

The time was 30 years ago. Back then anyone responsible should have been properly dealt with.

pessimizer 6mo ago

It's been a lot longer than that. You may have forgotten to include the encroachments that you supported; you seem only to have started with the disaster under Biden. For example, I never hear about how hard librarians* fought against "National Security Letters" after 9/11. How quaint it is now to imagine that people thought that there should be a fundamental right to be able to read freely and without disclosing what you read to anyone, especially governments? Technology has only made this cheap to do at scale. For people who may not be familiar, the government insisted on the right to go into libraries and get a list of the books you've read. Hell, it's basically just a "pen register**," and the culture not only gave up on resisting that this data be considered private, but forgot why anyone would have ever thought that way. Now we're arguing about forced digital attestation, but we're barely arguing about digital ID anymore ("of course" we need that), or even remember that most people were against federal identification in the US. Federal identification failed at every point to gain any support; it was pushed hard and failed during the Clinton admin, finally passed with everything else of this nature after 9/11, and then it was resisted and ignored enough to force deadlines to be pushed farther and farther back - it's been 30 years of RealID at this point. There's no evidence that the population ever supported federal ID. The idea was forced upon them, and they just waited a generation for people to forget that the government once didn't even know or care that many people existed. 30 years from now, it will probably be weird trivia that the census was done anonymously: "You mean you didn't have to sign it under penalty of perjury? What would be the point of the data if you didn't know who it belonged to?" In 5 days, May 27, 2026, you'll have to pay a fee of $45 in order to get on a plane for not having Real ID. It's so obvious that these claims of necessity are always just excuses for a power grab. British Labour, who spent decades supporting huge amounts of immigration and then calling everyone racist who thought it was too much, now like Trump uses the prevention of illegal immigration as a reason to impose digital ID on everyone. They're xenophobes when it comes to tracking everyone's movements, but xenophiles when they needed to lower wages. Vote Tory, then! Nope, they supported and oversaw every element of all of this. None of this stuff ever sees a ballot. [*] https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2024/10/07/15-years-of-fear-ala-patriot-act/ https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2024/10/07/15-years-of-... [**] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland

coldtea 6mo ago

And yet people will wait, and things will play out in the worse scenario.