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I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source

I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians wouldn't want that same rule-setting, censoring power? Did they think their employers were going to prevent that transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-dollar companies?

wmf 4mo ago
Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents... Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.
thin_carapace 4mo ago
[flagged]
uniqueuid 4mo ago
That was nicely put. I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom. So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.
- vasco 4mo ago
  A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't. You're the next guy.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    But they're right. The next guy will do it if you don't. And you'll be fired meaning you won't have any power any more, and the person who thinks DRM is good will be hired and become powerful in your stead. How does that help?
    - vasco 4mo ago
      > You are the next guy If you don't understand this, then you just don't understand.
      - trumpdong 4mo ago
        Everyone can be the next guy. I can be him or the next next guy can. Do you know the prisoner's dilemma?
        vasco 4mo ago
        Yes, and I'm advocating for a specific quadrant.
        trumpdong 4mo ago
        You only get to choose a half. The previous guy chooses the quadrant.
        vasco 4mo ago
        I'll spell it out in case someone else truly doesn’t understand since you're just determined not to. Pro-social actions are taken more often if you believe others will also take pro-social actions. The best way to do it is to believe you're the same as other people and that other people are good, and that you're not the patsy when you take a pro-social decision and others don't. Because you're the next guy for someone.
gnerd00 4mo ago
Twitter people expressly started their company with the idea of crowd-friendly semi-anonymous msgs on demand. The game of GO delivers an idea where a very large construct can be built then in one move the entire thing flips to a different purpose... seems relevant somehow..
xeonmc 4mo ago
I often also wonders if ideological zealots ever thinks of this passage while pushing their agenda for control: ...and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.
- TimTheTinker 4mo ago
  Those who would think of such a passage (or any biblical passage) and those who push for a total-control agenda are disjoint sets. Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview. "Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein." (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.) - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry and it kept raining during harvest.
  - sophrosyne42 4mo ago
    The existence and polularity of Christian socialist movements in Europe contradicts this thesis strongly.
    - pezezin 4mo ago
      We also had Christian fascist governments, like my home country Spain. One of the official doctrines of Franco's government was deemed "National Catholicism" :/
  - autoexec 4mo ago
    Christian fascism exists. In the US it's how fascism came to the country. Christofascism doesn't seem to have any problem with the absence of atheism.
    - TimTheTinker 4mo ago
yason 4mo ago
My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is." This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it". People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.
- HiPhish 4mo ago
  > My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is." I like to call those people "ventablackpilled". Being blackpilled is all about gloom and doom, but being ventablackpilled is beyond being blackpilled. It is when you actively want the world to be a worse place because you believe that that is how the world works.
  - okanat 4mo ago
    You're giving too much thought into the issue or trying to construct something like a conspiracy out of it. I sometimes work with people who worked on or at least worked with DRM-like stuff (Trustzone etc.). The people who make those systems and the structures that allow it falls squarely on banality of evil. It is not a big evil org or people with their own evil agendas (unlike Palantir, i think they are the true "ventablackpilled" ones). They are thousands of developers who push JIRA tickets like everyone. Many of them live in the developing world and they just pray to keep their jobs. The reason that big tech attracts developers despite their obvious and much bigger (IMO) evils is the same reason that attracts developers who make systems that can be completely closed down. Many of the developers are not outright evil either. They sometimes voice their opinion. Their opinion doesn't matter in comparison to the business goals. Sometimes it is understandable to write blocking software. Not all equipment is sold. Many industrial equipment is leased. So the actual owners want guarantees that their devices cannot be modified by renters. The amount of info you can extract from an Apple phone or Graphene OS is limited due to same restrictions working in your favor too. Similarly phones can be locked down due to radio restrictions. Nobody wants infinitely exploitable SDNs in peoples hands. It makes such SDNs a juicy target for enemies like Russia to exploit and turn into scalable attack vector as spoofing and jamming devices. The reason those are attack vectors is also banal. We made our bed as engineers, voters, governments and business leaders one sloppy work at a time. We made shitty chips and shitty software with no care for security or safety. We sold millions of them and nobody wanted to pay to "do it right way". Worse is better. Silicon Valley style scaling up is the goal. Competition is for suckers. All those and every single one of us ate the fruits of shitty hardware and software that are protected by closed down systems. We engineers got the cushy jobs, our business leaders made 10x 100x gains from our work. We either had little voice (because making a big noise is guaranteeing that your cushy job no longer exists) or whatever we had is ignored in the hubris of shipping shit to billions of people.
bragh 4mo ago
Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and other such features know very well, but don't care. This is because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers, less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides for the society.
- JohnFen 4mo ago
  I think it's even worse than that. Our industry has a strong track record of only looking at potential upsides (and pretending they're certain) and not even seeing that there may be serious downsides. It's a kind of blindness. The kind that is, in my opinion, is one of the major reasons why we ended up building a world that's more than a bit dystopian.
- account42 4mo ago
  There is definitely a common type of computer security enthusiast for whom the need for security is absolute and costs don't even enter the equation.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    The difference is who controls it. If you want to set up secure boot with your own keys, good on you, go for it.
    - account42 4mo ago
      That's exactly the shortsighted view I'm talking about - you are ignoring the cost of building/adopting a system that you may not control in the future.
  - izacus 4mo ago
    Ironically, Signal folks have shown those leanings a lot when they forbade people from backing up their messages.
shiandow 4mo ago
The phrase 'banality of evil' comes to mind.
- account42 4mo ago
  Does that really still apply when the people in question make six or seven figures for it? At some point we should expect some kind of individual responsibility.
  - shiandow 4mo ago
    That's precisely what the phrase means. People are capable of evil acts just to earn more money or advance their career. There is no real malice involved, just wilful ignorance. Though that raises the question whether there even is a meaningful difference between the two.
like_any_other 4mo ago
> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Corporations are already hostile enough that it doesn't really matter: The report says that between 30 and 40 Rockstar employees working in multiple offices in the UK and Canada were fired on October 30, all of them part of a private trade union chat group on Discord. - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/rockstar-accused-of-the-most-ruthless-act-of-union-busting-in-the-history-of-the-uk-games-industry-after-firing-dozens-of-employees-who-were-allegedly-attempting-to-form-a-union/ https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/rockstar-accused-of-... Leaked Amazon Whole Foods Docs: Workforce Diversity Helps Prevent Unions - https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403 https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403 (summarizing https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...) Microsoft Are Fixated on “Hate Speech” With Lopsided XBOX Live Enforcement Strike System - https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-are-fixated-on-hate-speech-with-lopsided-xbox-live-enforcement-strike-system/ https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-are-fixated-on-hate-speec...
HiPhish 4mo ago
I guess they think "someone is going to do it anyway, so it might as well be me so I can be the one who gets paid for it". But yeah, I'm sure there is also a good chunk of tech workers who are indeed useful idiots who think they are the last link in the chain.
Swizec 4mo ago
> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Makes me think of the most sobering line I ever saw in a museum (Berlin): The biggest atrocities were committed by people with a spreadsheet and a performance goal.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  It should be present tense. Especially in Berlin.
itishappy 4mo ago
What defines a bad tech vs a good tech? Similar arguments can be made for most research including nuclear fusion, AI, vaccines, space, polymers, combustion engines, electric motors, semiconductors...
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago
  > What defines a bad tech vs a good tech? Good tech empowers individuals and subverts authorities, corporations, oligarchs and governments. Bad tech subverts individuals and empowers authorities, corporations, oligarchs and governments.
SidewaysView 4mo ago
Online is terrible for kids. Online is terrible for adults! Too many people don't have the agency or social skills to manage themselves. Conspiracy theories, anarchists and libertarians, misinformation and disinformation, weirdos and beardos and creeps of all description. People end up believing all kinds of things that just aren't real. It'll be best for society if things are a little more regulated, a little safer. And I'm happy to help where I can. Listening to the terminally online about it would be counterproductive.
GZGavinZhao 4mo ago
They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs to defend their viewpoint.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  The practical alternative is sabotage. Write the code poorly, with obvious bugs. Don't sign the full URL so the user can just delete the drm=true parameter.
  - account42 4mo ago
    A weak alternative since the remaining work to build an oppressive system is still reduced compared to before your contribution.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
Meanwhile Signal Corporation keeps trying to connect to updates2.signal.org even when the app is not being used. "Automatic updates", remote code execution by default with no option to disable Silicon Valley has its own ideas of what "privacy" and "surveillance" mean To those folks, it does not mean privacy from Silicon Valley companies The Signal app will keep on trying to connect to the mothership Because to the people who work on Silicon Valley software, that is not a privacy violation The battle is over _control_ over software not privacy or surveillance. The later is not possible without the former Silicon Valley does not want the user to have control any more than they want the government to have control
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  use simplex then. Signal is what it is and it's not trying to be something it's not. E.g. use of phone numbers.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  I don't use Signal I test mobile apps on a throwaway phone to see what connections they try to make, if any
briandear 4mo ago
Why do people vote for large, strong governments that are able to take the power you suggest Tech is enabling them to take?
- komali2 4mo ago
  It's starting to feel like ethno-nationalism is the answer. See: the PRC. Support for surveillance is allegedly high. Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances where they don't need to worry about said surveillance (e.g., when they're vacationing in Japan and I want to pester someone and practice my mandarin), they generally like it. Makes them feel safe. The CPC has sold them on a vision of them as members of the state-race "Chinese" (which is not really an ethnicity any more than "American" is) and the surveillance as a thing that keeps them and their "Chinese" lifestyle safe from non-Chinese. Uighurs have to be extra surveilled until they're also Chinese, which, many are now according to the CPC. So PRC citizens feel safe and cozy among in the country for "their people," not realizing this whole ethnonationalist concept is at best 100 years old, maybe even younger. During the Qing dynasty, there's a whole hell of a lot of people that think of themselves as "Chinese" that definitely weren't by the dynastic government. I smell similar happening in Russia, the USA, and Israel, with State support. It looks like right wing groups are trying to pull it off in the UK and Germany as well.
  - Levitz 4mo ago
    >Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances where they don't need to worry about said surveillance (e.g., when they're vacationing in Japan and I want to pester someone and practice my mandarin) I'm not sure you are aware that China has monitoring operations for its citizens outside China.
    - komali2 4mo ago
      > I'm not sure you are aware that China has monitoring operations for its citizens outside China. Sure, you and I know that, but most PRC people don't really believe in that or are aware. At least nobody I've met.
  - 4mo ago
wolvoleo 4mo ago
I remember piping up about all those things. But the excuses were everywhere. - Oh but you can turn it off so it's no issue (secure boot). Well yeah but more and more stuff just won't run then (eg iOS apps on Mac). It will become the norm to stay inside the fuzzy walled garden just like it already is on phones. And if you stray you will just be blocked from any app that does something useful. - But companies need to be sure you are who you say you are (attestation). Yes but they will abuse that power if they can profit from it.
jmyeet 4mo ago
People forget how we got here. Whatever your philosophical stance, history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving most people complete control over their device has been an unmitigiated disaster. Scams, stealing credentials, stealing money, botnets, viruses, losses of data, ransomware, etc etc etc. What is better for most people is a locked down device like an iPad where each app has to be approved and they're incredibly sandboxed. 20 years ago we had people installing malware because a strange email promised them smiley face emojis. When we transitioned from the single-user ODS-based Windows model (ie Win98/SE were the last of that line) to a multi-user restricted privilege model based on NT 3.0/3.5/4.0 (first as WinXP) it was meant to be better but privilege escalation was still too easy because of what users had become accustomed to doing and of what was needed to install software you downloaded. Things like an App Store (on Mac and eventually on Windows) are actually a good thing. Signed apps are a good thing. Having to go out of your way to install unsigned apps is a good thing. I really abhor "technical libertarians" because they never address these issues. It's all principle-based while ignoring reality, human nature and whether or not unfettered access gives users something they even need. Also, other people pay the price. Where do you think these DDoS attacks come from? Compromised Windows PCs (primarily).
- autoexec 4mo ago
  > Whatever your philosophical stance, history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving most people complete control over their device has been an unmitigiated disaster. I'd argue that giving governments and corporations control over our devices has also been an unmitigiated disaster. You could say the same thing about any kind of freedom though couldn't you? Freedom is so dangerous after all. Look at all the problems it's caused. Giving up all of our freedoms would surely make the world better right?
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago
  People often misuse freedom. The answer to that is not to take freedom away, but to educate people on how to use their freedom, and only restrict those who have proven to be unable to handle it. Let's say your argument, that clueless users getting infected are an externality upon everyone else and thus they need to be locked down for everyone's good, is accurate (though I don't think it is). In that case, why should the majority of intelligent people be made to suffer because a minority can't handle the freedom? No, in that case the correct thing to do is to have a mechanism by which we identify people who are hurting others, and restrict them. Nobody would countenance the idea that because some people are irresponsible drivers, cars must therefore be unavailable and everyone pushed into using public transit. But that is the exact same logic people try to use to crack down on freedom of use for computers, even though they are nowhere near as dangerous as a car. > I really abhor "technical libertarians"... Well, I abhor those who try to take freedom away from people. So the feeling is mutual I guess.
cortesoft 4mo ago
I am guessing they thought "My kids are depending on me to pay our mortgage and buy food"
- autoexec 4mo ago
  Yet they stopped thinking as soon as their wallet got involved and never considered that their kids also need freedom and the ability to use technology that works for them and not against them. Selfishness and greed are the problem. The kids are just a convenient but shallow way to deflect from that.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    Idk, sounds better than being dead, just in my opinion.
    - autoexec 4mo ago
      Nobody implemented DRM with a gun pointed at their heads, and anyone capable of implementing harmful technology has the skills to work on something else for lots of money implementing other things. It was always a choice.
      - fluoridation 4mo ago
        That you could work someplace else doesn't mean someplace else is hiring someone with your skills, or that you could afford a pay cut if necessary.
        pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
        This is true for fruit pickers or uber drivers or whatever but it is ridiculously out of place statement for software engineers.
        fluoridation 4mo ago
bigstrat2003 4mo ago
> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means... Your argument is flawed here. The truth is that measures such as secure boot do have real security benefits. They can be misused, like any technology can be, but that is not an inherent feature of the tech, but rather how it is implemented. And as the developers of such measures are not a monolith, it is unfair to paint them as merely trying to exert control. I'm not going to argue that some involved parties were trying to exert control. But lots of others were trying to implement a genuine security benefit for the users, and they don't deserve to be reprimanded as if they were some kind of apologists for authoritarianism.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  There is no difference between the tech and how it is implemented.
- michaelt 4mo ago
  > They can be misused, like any technology can be, but that is not an inherent feature of the tech, but rather how it is implemented. And as the developers of such measures are not a monolith, it is unfair to paint them as merely trying to exert control. You can argue that exerting control is a good thing - a clever scam artist convinces a vulnerable user to paste an attack at the command line, and the benevolent OS vendor uses their control makes the attack impossible, no matter what the scam artist tells the user to do. A greedy software maker produces a spyware-laden, cookie-stealing update and asks the user to enter the admin password to install the update. The benevolent OS vendor uses their control to make such malicious updates impossible, even with the administrator password entered. But even if the control is being used exclusively for good, it is, ultimately, control.
trumpdong 4mo ago
There's a selection effect. Some people thought these were bad and didn't implement them. Other people thought they weren't bad and implemented them. We use implementations from the latter group of people. Obviously. Same thing is happening with age verification. We had the chance to just ask if the user is over 18 when setting the computer up, but we didn't do that so they're using a solution from a mass surveillance company instead.
stodor89 4mo ago
> Did they think Pretty sure they didn't do a lot of thinking.
cryptonector 4mo ago
It isn't TPMs nor attestation nor DRM making this possible. It isn't secure boot either. It's walled gardens with secure boot -yes, secure boot- that the consumer can't bypass. Secure booting isn't the problem in an enterprise setting -- of course we _want secure booting_ in the enterprise. It's consumer devices that can't be jail-broken that are the problem. Although even then, the silly age verification laws and the people pushing them don't even care if the OSes run on walled garden devices.
- MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
  Corporate devices that can't be jailbroken are also a problem. It's a right-to-repair and e-waste issue.
  - cryptonector 4mo ago
    But they are not walled gardens.
    - MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
      I would posit that any device that can't be jailbroken is a walled garden. Whether the wall is made of an app store or an operating system, it's not yours if you can't do what you want with it.
      - cryptonector 4mo ago
        But corporate devices can boot any OS you might like. Sure, they have MEs that maybe you can't disable, but you can firewall them. Server kit is just not like consumer kit. Even laptops are [still, for now] a lot better than smartphones in this regard.
- raverbashing 4mo ago
  And yet you can secure boot Linux
  - 4mo ago
photios 4mo ago
These people have names and addresses. Getting them out in the open will help a lot. I'm not saying we should lynch them, but a good deal of public shaming is in order. Who knows, their kids might pick a different vocation.
- account42 4mo ago
  While I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea I'm not convinced its going to be effective. A lot of the leaders that ultimately approved these developments are already public figures and that doesn't seem to affect their motivations.
verisimi 4mo ago
They (developers) did what they did for money. Just like everyone else. And they would do it all again. At a corporate level, no one cares about lots of freedoms, except if it is a selling point. If 'keeping freedoms' is a selling point then the ideal position is to gain the kudos of appearing to support this whilst also getting the benefits of the loss of freedoms. Why not get both?
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  That's the Android way.
  - verisimi 4mo ago
    Its the Apple way too. Its the corporate way.
jjav 4mo ago
> Did they think Having argued these topics for decades, I think that a lot of people just truly can't foresee the inevitable consequences. I don't know why, the consequences seem obvious but because they are not spelled out, many people say it won't happen.
- account42 4mo ago
  The problem is that even when you do spell out the consequences many of them will wave them away.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  It's difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary relies on him not understanding it.
Nursie 4mo ago
> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Why does that matter? If it's bad for politicians to usurp that power, it's already bad for corporates to have it in the first place. I'd rather politicians use power in a way that includes democratic oversight than, say, Peter Thiel doing whatever the hell he likes.
KaiserPro 4mo ago
The people in the industry that I know were/are trying to stop fraudsters, script kiddies, nasty people, and governments from trying to exploit weaknesses and take unauthorised control of devices and services. The problem with that is it generally requires a central point of trust. Sure you can allow multiple points of trust, but for the unskilled user, that means that the little lock symbol becomes unreliable (or whatever) Without commenting on the UK governments stuff (It is probably full of shit, but then thats what lobbying does) We as technologists need to engage with wider society and understand on their terms, the worries they have. For this particular "proposal" it strikes at the core worry of today's kids. They are sadder, more insular, more dependent on mobile comms and exposed to much nastier stuff than millennials were at the same age. AT my school in the very late 90s, a group of 14 year old girls went to the beach and took a disposable camera. Standard photos apart from one, which was a group of them topless. One of them brought them back from the developers into school. Somehow the topless photo was stolen and passed around various classes. It ruined her month, even though she got the photo back. I suspect it left scars longer than that. Now imagine not being able to get that photo back. Thats the problem for todays kids. One moment of stupidity and a lifetime of consequences. (under a certain age, if they took photos or videos of other kids, that makes them liable to be on a list, for life.) You could say "oh education" but did you listen at that age? Whats worse now is that there are no gates on what photos can be developed by the normal person. If you took any photo that was explicit, it almost certainly wouldn't be printed (hence why there were very little dick pics from that era). Is what the UK government proposing workable? well looking at the OSA, almost certainly not. However unless we, as a tech community engage with society, with useable answers that are understandable to the normal person, then we are going to be crushed by the weight of "something must be done". Absolutism is not our friend here. We need to engage and choose compromises, or lose wider freedom for ever.
- jpfromlondon 4mo ago
  >We as technologists need to engage with wider society and understand on their terms, the worries they have. We were the vanguard blocking this to the public's benefit, now they've voted for it our only duty is to ourselves; to make sure the rules don't apply to us.
rbanffy 4mo ago
Politicians always had that power, because it was always technically possible. To think we could have done anything to stop it once there was a will to do it is naive. If you doubt it, just look at Palantir. People like us built that - Thiel and his minions only paid their salaries.
- account42 4mo ago
  Boiling the frog is a thing. As is laying the groundwork. Governments are much less likely to pull off multi-decade plans than they are to make use of whatever technology is already out there.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  And they got filthy rich. If I built Palantir instead, I'd be filthy rich. It's a pretty rational choice to build Palantir. Sadly.
  - naishoya 4mo ago
    The sequence of this is reversed. First Thiel got filthy rich, and THEN he used that money to hire people who didn't whistle-blow to build Palantir. If EVERYONE that got hired to build the enshittification of humanity would just speak up about what they were asked to build there is no 'next guy' - ar at least we all know that the 'next guy' is wilfully complicit in the evil done at the company and you can disinvite him to family reunions and refuse him membership in the golf club for humanitarian violations. I.E. What good is a mortgage payment when the next guy cant hire a plumber because the whole town knows he's a vile POS? But the line of people doing the work, and keeping their mouths shut about it is nearly an unbroken chain from start to end. And here we are because no one wants to be the only one speaking out against evil, when we all should be.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      You could work at Palantir and leak details, and I don't think thats what this discussion is about. If you wanted to destroy a company from the inside by whatever means, you'd have to get hired there.
6510 4mo ago
I always think of the lumberjack tasked with cutting down the last redwood giant. He hesitated a bit and was somewhat reluctant to start. Several of his coworkers understood that it was slightly emotional and said they would do it if he couldn't.
mc32 4mo ago
There were many reasons to deploy these solutions. Much of it from the perennial reason “we can’t have nice things”. Che was a murderous psychopath so I’m not sure what he was to do with freedom other than some college kids though he was edgy in the same way Manson’s followed though he was edgy.

wmf 4mo ago

Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents... Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.

thin_carapace 4mo ago

[flagged]

uniqueuid 4mo ago

That was nicely put. I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom. So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.

vasco 4mo ago
A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't. You're the next guy.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  But they're right. The next guy will do it if you don't. And you'll be fired meaning you won't have any power any more, and the person who thinks DRM is good will be hired and become powerful in your stead. How does that help?
  - vasco 4mo ago
    > You are the next guy If you don't understand this, then you just don't understand.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      Everyone can be the next guy. I can be him or the next next guy can. Do you know the prisoner's dilemma?
      - vasco 4mo ago
        Yes, and I'm advocating for a specific quadrant.
        trumpdong 4mo ago
        You only get to choose a half. The previous guy chooses the quadrant.
        vasco 4mo ago
        I'll spell it out in case someone else truly doesn’t understand since you're just determined not to. Pro-social actions are taken more often if you believe others will also take pro-social actions. The best way to do it is to believe you're the same as other people and that other people are good, and that you're not the patsy when you take a pro-social decision and others don't. Because you're the next guy for someone.

gnerd00 4mo ago

Twitter people expressly started their company with the idea of crowd-friendly semi-anonymous msgs on demand. The game of GO delivers an idea where a very large construct can be built then in one move the entire thing flips to a different purpose... seems relevant somehow..

xeonmc 4mo ago

I often also wonders if ideological zealots ever thinks of this passage while pushing their agenda for control: ...and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

TimTheTinker 4mo ago
Those who would think of such a passage (or any biblical passage) and those who push for a total-control agenda are disjoint sets. Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview. "Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein." (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.) - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry and it kept raining during harvest.
- sophrosyne42 4mo ago
  The existence and polularity of Christian socialist movements in Europe contradicts this thesis strongly.
  - pezezin 4mo ago
    We also had Christian fascist governments, like my home country Spain. One of the official doctrines of Franco's government was deemed "National Catholicism" :/
- autoexec 4mo ago
  Christian fascism exists. In the US it's how fascism came to the country. Christofascism doesn't seem to have any problem with the absence of atheism.
  - TimTheTinker 4mo ago

yason 4mo ago

My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is." This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it". People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.

HiPhish 4mo ago
> My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is." I like to call those people "ventablackpilled". Being blackpilled is all about gloom and doom, but being ventablackpilled is beyond being blackpilled. It is when you actively want the world to be a worse place because you believe that that is how the world works.
- okanat 4mo ago
  You're giving too much thought into the issue or trying to construct something like a conspiracy out of it. I sometimes work with people who worked on or at least worked with DRM-like stuff (Trustzone etc.). The people who make those systems and the structures that allow it falls squarely on banality of evil. It is not a big evil org or people with their own evil agendas (unlike Palantir, i think they are the true "ventablackpilled" ones). They are thousands of developers who push JIRA tickets like everyone. Many of them live in the developing world and they just pray to keep their jobs. The reason that big tech attracts developers despite their obvious and much bigger (IMO) evils is the same reason that attracts developers who make systems that can be completely closed down. Many of the developers are not outright evil either. They sometimes voice their opinion. Their opinion doesn't matter in comparison to the business goals. Sometimes it is understandable to write blocking software. Not all equipment is sold. Many industrial equipment is leased. So the actual owners want guarantees that their devices cannot be modified by renters. The amount of info you can extract from an Apple phone or Graphene OS is limited due to same restrictions working in your favor too. Similarly phones can be locked down due to radio restrictions. Nobody wants infinitely exploitable SDNs in peoples hands. It makes such SDNs a juicy target for enemies like Russia to exploit and turn into scalable attack vector as spoofing and jamming devices. The reason those are attack vectors is also banal. We made our bed as engineers, voters, governments and business leaders one sloppy work at a time. We made shitty chips and shitty software with no care for security or safety. We sold millions of them and nobody wanted to pay to "do it right way". Worse is better. Silicon Valley style scaling up is the goal. Competition is for suckers. All those and every single one of us ate the fruits of shitty hardware and software that are protected by closed down systems. We engineers got the cushy jobs, our business leaders made 10x 100x gains from our work. We either had little voice (because making a big noise is guaranteeing that your cushy job no longer exists) or whatever we had is ignored in the hubris of shipping shit to billions of people.

bragh 4mo ago

Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and other such features know very well, but don't care. This is because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers, less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides for the society.

JohnFen 4mo ago
I think it's even worse than that. Our industry has a strong track record of only looking at potential upsides (and pretending they're certain) and not even seeing that there may be serious downsides. It's a kind of blindness. The kind that is, in my opinion, is one of the major reasons why we ended up building a world that's more than a bit dystopian.
account42 4mo ago
There is definitely a common type of computer security enthusiast for whom the need for security is absolute and costs don't even enter the equation.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  The difference is who controls it. If you want to set up secure boot with your own keys, good on you, go for it.
  - account42 4mo ago
    That's exactly the shortsighted view I'm talking about - you are ignoring the cost of building/adopting a system that you may not control in the future.
- izacus 4mo ago
  Ironically, Signal folks have shown those leanings a lot when they forbade people from backing up their messages.

shiandow 4mo ago

The phrase 'banality of evil' comes to mind.

account42 4mo ago
Does that really still apply when the people in question make six or seven figures for it? At some point we should expect some kind of individual responsibility.
- shiandow 4mo ago
  That's precisely what the phrase means. People are capable of evil acts just to earn more money or advance their career. There is no real malice involved, just wilful ignorance. Though that raises the question whether there even is a meaningful difference between the two.

like_any_other 4mo ago

> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Corporations are already hostile enough that it doesn't really matter: The report says that between 30 and 40 Rockstar employees working in multiple offices in the UK and Canada were fired on October 30, all of them part of a private trade union chat group on Discord. - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/rockstar-accused-of-the-most-ruthless-act-of-union-busting-in-the-history-of-the-uk-games-industry-after-firing-dozens-of-employees-who-were-allegedly-attempting-to-form-a-union/ https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/rockstar-accused-of-... Leaked Amazon Whole Foods Docs: Workforce Diversity Helps Prevent Unions - https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403 https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403 (summarizing https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...) Microsoft Are Fixated on “Hate Speech” With Lopsided XBOX Live Enforcement Strike System - https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-are-fixated-on-hate-speech-with-lopsided-xbox-live-enforcement-strike-system/ https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-are-fixated-on-hate-speec...

HiPhish 4mo ago

I guess they think "someone is going to do it anyway, so it might as well be me so I can be the one who gets paid for it". But yeah, I'm sure there is also a good chunk of tech workers who are indeed useful idiots who think they are the last link in the chain.

Swizec 4mo ago

> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Makes me think of the most sobering line I ever saw in a museum (Berlin): The biggest atrocities were committed by people with a spreadsheet and a performance goal.

trumpdong 4mo ago
It should be present tense. Especially in Berlin.

itishappy 4mo ago

What defines a bad tech vs a good tech? Similar arguments can be made for most research including nuclear fusion, AI, vaccines, space, polymers, combustion engines, electric motors, semiconductors...

matheusmoreira 4mo ago
> What defines a bad tech vs a good tech? Good tech empowers individuals and subverts authorities, corporations, oligarchs and governments. Bad tech subverts individuals and empowers authorities, corporations, oligarchs and governments.

SidewaysView 4mo ago

Online is terrible for kids. Online is terrible for adults! Too many people don't have the agency or social skills to manage themselves. Conspiracy theories, anarchists and libertarians, misinformation and disinformation, weirdos and beardos and creeps of all description. People end up believing all kinds of things that just aren't real. It'll be best for society if things are a little more regulated, a little safer. And I'm happy to help where I can. Listening to the terminally online about it would be counterproductive.

GZGavinZhao 4mo ago

They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs to defend their viewpoint.

trumpdong 4mo ago
The practical alternative is sabotage. Write the code poorly, with obvious bugs. Don't sign the full URL so the user can just delete the drm=true parameter.
- account42 4mo ago
  A weak alternative since the remaining work to build an oppressive system is still reduced compared to before your contribution.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago

Meanwhile Signal Corporation keeps trying to connect to updates2.signal.org even when the app is not being used. "Automatic updates", remote code execution by default with no option to disable Silicon Valley has its own ideas of what "privacy" and "surveillance" mean To those folks, it does not mean privacy from Silicon Valley companies The Signal app will keep on trying to connect to the mothership Because to the people who work on Silicon Valley software, that is not a privacy violation The battle is over _control_ over software not privacy or surveillance. The later is not possible without the former Silicon Valley does not want the user to have control any more than they want the government to have control

trumpdong 4mo ago
use simplex then. Signal is what it is and it's not trying to be something it's not. E.g. use of phone numbers.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
I don't use Signal I test mobile apps on a throwaway phone to see what connections they try to make, if any

briandear 4mo ago

Why do people vote for large, strong governments that are able to take the power you suggest Tech is enabling them to take?

komali2 4mo ago
It's starting to feel like ethno-nationalism is the answer. See: the PRC. Support for surveillance is allegedly high. Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances where they don't need to worry about said surveillance (e.g., when they're vacationing in Japan and I want to pester someone and practice my mandarin), they generally like it. Makes them feel safe. The CPC has sold them on a vision of them as members of the state-race "Chinese" (which is not really an ethnicity any more than "American" is) and the surveillance as a thing that keeps them and their "Chinese" lifestyle safe from non-Chinese. Uighurs have to be extra surveilled until they're also Chinese, which, many are now according to the CPC. So PRC citizens feel safe and cozy among in the country for "their people," not realizing this whole ethnonationalist concept is at best 100 years old, maybe even younger. During the Qing dynasty, there's a whole hell of a lot of people that think of themselves as "Chinese" that definitely weren't by the dynastic government. I smell similar happening in Russia, the USA, and Israel, with State support. It looks like right wing groups are trying to pull it off in the UK and Germany as well.
- Levitz 4mo ago
  >Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances where they don't need to worry about said surveillance (e.g., when they're vacationing in Japan and I want to pester someone and practice my mandarin) I'm not sure you are aware that China has monitoring operations for its citizens outside China.
  - komali2 4mo ago
    > I'm not sure you are aware that China has monitoring operations for its citizens outside China. Sure, you and I know that, but most PRC people don't really believe in that or are aware. At least nobody I've met.
- 4mo ago

wolvoleo 4mo ago

I remember piping up about all those things. But the excuses were everywhere. - Oh but you can turn it off so it's no issue (secure boot). Well yeah but more and more stuff just won't run then (eg iOS apps on Mac). It will become the norm to stay inside the fuzzy walled garden just like it already is on phones. And if you stray you will just be blocked from any app that does something useful. - But companies need to be sure you are who you say you are (attestation). Yes but they will abuse that power if they can profit from it.

jmyeet 4mo ago

People forget how we got here. Whatever your philosophical stance, history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving most people complete control over their device has been an unmitigiated disaster. Scams, stealing credentials, stealing money, botnets, viruses, losses of data, ransomware, etc etc etc. What is better for most people is a locked down device like an iPad where each app has to be approved and they're incredibly sandboxed. 20 years ago we had people installing malware because a strange email promised them smiley face emojis. When we transitioned from the single-user ODS-based Windows model (ie Win98/SE were the last of that line) to a multi-user restricted privilege model based on NT 3.0/3.5/4.0 (first as WinXP) it was meant to be better but privilege escalation was still too easy because of what users had become accustomed to doing and of what was needed to install software you downloaded. Things like an App Store (on Mac and eventually on Windows) are actually a good thing. Signed apps are a good thing. Having to go out of your way to install unsigned apps is a good thing. I really abhor "technical libertarians" because they never address these issues. It's all principle-based while ignoring reality, human nature and whether or not unfettered access gives users something they even need. Also, other people pay the price. Where do you think these DDoS attacks come from? Compromised Windows PCs (primarily).

autoexec 4mo ago
> Whatever your philosophical stance, history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving most people complete control over their device has been an unmitigiated disaster. I'd argue that giving governments and corporations control over our devices has also been an unmitigiated disaster. You could say the same thing about any kind of freedom though couldn't you? Freedom is so dangerous after all. Look at all the problems it's caused. Giving up all of our freedoms would surely make the world better right?
bigstrat2003 4mo ago
People often misuse freedom. The answer to that is not to take freedom away, but to educate people on how to use their freedom, and only restrict those who have proven to be unable to handle it. Let's say your argument, that clueless users getting infected are an externality upon everyone else and thus they need to be locked down for everyone's good, is accurate (though I don't think it is). In that case, why should the majority of intelligent people be made to suffer because a minority can't handle the freedom? No, in that case the correct thing to do is to have a mechanism by which we identify people who are hurting others, and restrict them. Nobody would countenance the idea that because some people are irresponsible drivers, cars must therefore be unavailable and everyone pushed into using public transit. But that is the exact same logic people try to use to crack down on freedom of use for computers, even though they are nowhere near as dangerous as a car. > I really abhor "technical libertarians"... Well, I abhor those who try to take freedom away from people. So the feeling is mutual I guess.

cortesoft 4mo ago

I am guessing they thought "My kids are depending on me to pay our mortgage and buy food"

autoexec 4mo ago
Yet they stopped thinking as soon as their wallet got involved and never considered that their kids also need freedom and the ability to use technology that works for them and not against them. Selfishness and greed are the problem. The kids are just a convenient but shallow way to deflect from that.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  Idk, sounds better than being dead, just in my opinion.
  - autoexec 4mo ago
    Nobody implemented DRM with a gun pointed at their heads, and anyone capable of implementing harmful technology has the skills to work on something else for lots of money implementing other things. It was always a choice.
    - fluoridation 4mo ago
      That you could work someplace else doesn't mean someplace else is hiring someone with your skills, or that you could afford a pay cut if necessary.
      - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
        This is true for fruit pickers or uber drivers or whatever but it is ridiculously out of place statement for software engineers.
        fluoridation 4mo ago

bigstrat2003 4mo ago

> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means... Your argument is flawed here. The truth is that measures such as secure boot do have real security benefits. They can be misused, like any technology can be, but that is not an inherent feature of the tech, but rather how it is implemented. And as the developers of such measures are not a monolith, it is unfair to paint them as merely trying to exert control. I'm not going to argue that some involved parties were trying to exert control. But lots of others were trying to implement a genuine security benefit for the users, and they don't deserve to be reprimanded as if they were some kind of apologists for authoritarianism.

trumpdong 4mo ago
There is no difference between the tech and how it is implemented.
michaelt 4mo ago
> They can be misused, like any technology can be, but that is not an inherent feature of the tech, but rather how it is implemented. And as the developers of such measures are not a monolith, it is unfair to paint them as merely trying to exert control. You can argue that exerting control is a good thing - a clever scam artist convinces a vulnerable user to paste an attack at the command line, and the benevolent OS vendor uses their control makes the attack impossible, no matter what the scam artist tells the user to do. A greedy software maker produces a spyware-laden, cookie-stealing update and asks the user to enter the admin password to install the update. The benevolent OS vendor uses their control to make such malicious updates impossible, even with the administrator password entered. But even if the control is being used exclusively for good, it is, ultimately, control.

trumpdong 4mo ago

There's a selection effect. Some people thought these were bad and didn't implement them. Other people thought they weren't bad and implemented them. We use implementations from the latter group of people. Obviously. Same thing is happening with age verification. We had the chance to just ask if the user is over 18 when setting the computer up, but we didn't do that so they're using a solution from a mass surveillance company instead.

stodor89 4mo ago

> Did they think Pretty sure they didn't do a lot of thinking.

cryptonector 4mo ago

It isn't TPMs nor attestation nor DRM making this possible. It isn't secure boot either. It's walled gardens with secure boot -yes, secure boot- that the consumer can't bypass. Secure booting isn't the problem in an enterprise setting -- of course we _want secure booting_ in the enterprise. It's consumer devices that can't be jail-broken that are the problem. Although even then, the silly age verification laws and the people pushing them don't even care if the OSes run on walled garden devices.

MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
Corporate devices that can't be jailbroken are also a problem. It's a right-to-repair and e-waste issue.
- cryptonector 4mo ago
  But they are not walled gardens.
  - MrDrMcCoy 4mo ago
    I would posit that any device that can't be jailbroken is a walled garden. Whether the wall is made of an app store or an operating system, it's not yours if you can't do what you want with it.
    - cryptonector 4mo ago
      But corporate devices can boot any OS you might like. Sure, they have MEs that maybe you can't disable, but you can firewall them. Server kit is just not like consumer kit. Even laptops are [still, for now] a lot better than smartphones in this regard.
raverbashing 4mo ago
And yet you can secure boot Linux
- 4mo ago

photios 4mo ago

These people have names and addresses. Getting them out in the open will help a lot. I'm not saying we should lynch them, but a good deal of public shaming is in order. Who knows, their kids might pick a different vocation.

account42 4mo ago
While I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea I'm not convinced its going to be effective. A lot of the leaders that ultimately approved these developments are already public figures and that doesn't seem to affect their motivations.

verisimi 4mo ago

They (developers) did what they did for money. Just like everyone else. And they would do it all again. At a corporate level, no one cares about lots of freedoms, except if it is a selling point. If 'keeping freedoms' is a selling point then the ideal position is to gain the kudos of appearing to support this whilst also getting the benefits of the loss of freedoms. Why not get both?

trumpdong 4mo ago
That's the Android way.
- verisimi 4mo ago
  Its the Apple way too. Its the corporate way.

jjav 4mo ago

> Did they think Having argued these topics for decades, I think that a lot of people just truly can't foresee the inevitable consequences. I don't know why, the consequences seem obvious but because they are not spelled out, many people say it won't happen.

account42 4mo ago
The problem is that even when you do spell out the consequences many of them will wave them away.
trumpdong 4mo ago
It's difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary relies on him not understanding it.

Nursie 4mo ago

> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Why does that matter? If it's bad for politicians to usurp that power, it's already bad for corporates to have it in the first place. I'd rather politicians use power in a way that includes democratic oversight than, say, Peter Thiel doing whatever the hell he likes.

KaiserPro 4mo ago

The people in the industry that I know were/are trying to stop fraudsters, script kiddies, nasty people, and governments from trying to exploit weaknesses and take unauthorised control of devices and services. The problem with that is it generally requires a central point of trust. Sure you can allow multiple points of trust, but for the unskilled user, that means that the little lock symbol becomes unreliable (or whatever) Without commenting on the UK governments stuff (It is probably full of shit, but then thats what lobbying does) We as technologists need to engage with wider society and understand on their terms, the worries they have. For this particular "proposal" it strikes at the core worry of today's kids. They are sadder, more insular, more dependent on mobile comms and exposed to much nastier stuff than millennials were at the same age. AT my school in the very late 90s, a group of 14 year old girls went to the beach and took a disposable camera. Standard photos apart from one, which was a group of them topless. One of them brought them back from the developers into school. Somehow the topless photo was stolen and passed around various classes. It ruined her month, even though she got the photo back. I suspect it left scars longer than that. Now imagine not being able to get that photo back. Thats the problem for todays kids. One moment of stupidity and a lifetime of consequences. (under a certain age, if they took photos or videos of other kids, that makes them liable to be on a list, for life.) You could say "oh education" but did you listen at that age? Whats worse now is that there are no gates on what photos can be developed by the normal person. If you took any photo that was explicit, it almost certainly wouldn't be printed (hence why there were very little dick pics from that era). Is what the UK government proposing workable? well looking at the OSA, almost certainly not. However unless we, as a tech community engage with society, with useable answers that are understandable to the normal person, then we are going to be crushed by the weight of "something must be done". Absolutism is not our friend here. We need to engage and choose compromises, or lose wider freedom for ever.

jpfromlondon 4mo ago
>We as technologists need to engage with wider society and understand on their terms, the worries they have. We were the vanguard blocking this to the public's benefit, now they've voted for it our only duty is to ourselves; to make sure the rules don't apply to us.

rbanffy 4mo ago

Politicians always had that power, because it was always technically possible. To think we could have done anything to stop it once there was a will to do it is naive. If you doubt it, just look at Palantir. People like us built that - Thiel and his minions only paid their salaries.

account42 4mo ago
Boiling the frog is a thing. As is laying the groundwork. Governments are much less likely to pull off multi-decade plans than they are to make use of whatever technology is already out there.
trumpdong 4mo ago
And they got filthy rich. If I built Palantir instead, I'd be filthy rich. It's a pretty rational choice to build Palantir. Sadly.
- naishoya 4mo ago
  The sequence of this is reversed. First Thiel got filthy rich, and THEN he used that money to hire people who didn't whistle-blow to build Palantir. If EVERYONE that got hired to build the enshittification of humanity would just speak up about what they were asked to build there is no 'next guy' - ar at least we all know that the 'next guy' is wilfully complicit in the evil done at the company and you can disinvite him to family reunions and refuse him membership in the golf club for humanitarian violations. I.E. What good is a mortgage payment when the next guy cant hire a plumber because the whole town knows he's a vile POS? But the line of people doing the work, and keeping their mouths shut about it is nearly an unbroken chain from start to end. And here we are because no one wants to be the only one speaking out against evil, when we all should be.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    You could work at Palantir and leak details, and I don't think thats what this discussion is about. If you wanted to destroy a company from the inside by whatever means, you'd have to get hired there.

6510 4mo ago

I always think of the lumberjack tasked with cutting down the last redwood giant. He hesitated a bit and was somewhat reluctant to start. Several of his coworkers understood that it was slightly emotional and said they would do it if he couldn't.

mc32 4mo ago

There were many reasons to deploy these solutions. Much of it from the perennial reason “we can’t have nice things”. Che was a murderous psychopath so I’m not sure what he was to do with freedom other than some college kids though he was edgy in the same way Manson’s followed though he was edgy.