The tech workers of today are building the future that we will all live in. None of this stuff is appearing out of thin air. Someone, an individual human with morals and values needs to sit down and say 'today I will program something that will benefit a corporation/government at the expense of a person' and then carry on.
How many people here work for companies that threaten democracy in this way? How many people have a google or facebook tracker on their personal site? This kind of change is the sum of small individual responsibilities.
The early dream of the internet was one of free expression, but people -not corporations or governments- have worked very hard to undermine that.
It's a coordination problem. You're right, in a sense; at the end of the day it's people doing this, and if they all stopped then it wouldn't happen. Unfortunately, that's what it would take: They'd all need to stop, simultaneously.
In the meantime our world is such that any company or person who refuses on ethical grounds will be outcompeted, and go out of business.
It isn't something anyone decided to do. It's just implicit in the system, which itself wasn't really deliberately built. We'll break our backs lifting Moloch to heaven, and then...
Well, there is no "and then". Humanity will have achieved its final purpose. Maybe it won't go that far, but I'm skeptical.
"multipolar trap"! I'm do glad to finally have a proper word for it. I've been describing this as "prisoner dilemma with a huge number of prisoners" which didn't feel 100% accurate and not terse enough. I wish our political debate would acknowledge this type of situation which seems to occur quite frequently. Being able to categorize the problem like this would help us elevate the discussion and come up with proper solutions. Thank you!
Everyone doesn't need to stop simultaneously. Some people need to stop and convince others that it's worthwhile to do so. People who refuse to stop should be shown the consequences of what they're doing and be forced to make a decision that they otherwise might not have been aware of. Some people will still make that decision and will be able to justify it completely, some people will change.
Your part in all of this, even though you don't believe change is possible, could be to be less dismissive and condescending when it's brought up.
As the parent says, if you stop doing this and somebody else does not, you are out of business. You might not have time to convince people after the fact if you care about your business. You also are very unlikely to convince all the powers in your organization to put all your eggs in the social good basket given the very likely outcome that you won't be able to convince everyone outside your organization in time to put common, social good over company profits. Sometimes we need to make decisions as a society. That's why we don't have anarchy.
Horrendous abuses at companies like Uber and the lackadaisical approach to protecting user data demonstrated in the seemingly weekly security breaches show that there is plenty of low-hanging fruit.
That's if you care about those things, seems like most people don't. Most people seem to just want an affordable service that solves their immediate problem.
PHP has like a 70% market share for web backends, Haskell/Rust/etc. basically none.
> Sometimes we need to make decisions as a society. That's why we don't have anarchy.
I'd say that's individuals outsourcing their decisions to the perceived or real pressures and expectations of others. Also, while you can surely describe individuals making decisions as groups in aggregate, as a simplification, groups don't actually decide anything. They don't even do anything. And where those external expectations are also based on outsourced decision making, you can sometimes ignore the whole chain.
Interestingly, when individual people are powerless but no single person is responsible, and also nobody is responsible for doing what they "have" to do, that's kind of even more anarchic and desolate than even the anarchy of everyone against everyone. I mean, in the latter case there are even still "ones" there, not just one blob, one river of people flowing where they can't help but go.
Interestingly, the old Greeks' kind of self-servingly considered slaves as obviously born to be slaves, because if they weren't, they'd simply kill themselves rather than be slaves. The Spartans certainly were big on that, at least if the writers are to be believed. Not that I want to glorify their outlook, but I find it fascinating how people constantly pretend anyone has to do anything other than die at some point. As in "I can't do that, or I would get fired" -- fine, but own your decision, don't call it anything but a decision. I would rather argue with someone who says they decided to be a selfish or cowardly person, than tolerate someone who is "good" just because that's more convenient or others expect it.
Anyways, here's someone who did pay orders of magnitude more attention than we are today for the most part:
> Private interests which by their very nature are temporary, limited by man's natural span of life, can now escape into the sphere of public affairs and borrow from them that infinite length of time which is needed for continuous accumulation. This seems to create a society very similar to that of the ants and bees where "the Common good differeth not from the Private; and being by nature enclined to their private, they procure thereby the common benefit."
> Since, however, men are neither ants nor bees, the whole thing is a delusion. Public life takes on the deceptive aspect of a total of private interests as though these interests could create a new quality through sheer addition. All the so-called liberal concepts of politics (that is, all the pre-imperialist political notions of the bourgeoisie)-such as unlimited competition regulated by a secret balance which comes mysteriously from the sum total of competing activities, the pursuit of "enlightened self-interest" as an adequate political virtue, unlimited progress inherent in the mere succession of events -have this in common: they simply add up private lives and personal behavior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or politics. Liberal concepts, however, while they express the bourgeoisie's instinctive distrust of and its innate hostility to public affairs, are only a temporary compromise between the old standards of Western culture and the new class's faith in property as a dynamic, self-moving principle. The old standards give way to the extent that automatically growing wealth actually replaces political action.
> Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.
> For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumnulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.
> The ultimate destructive purpose of this Commonwealth is at least indicated in the philosophical interpretation of human equality as an "equality of ability" to kill. Living with all other nations "in the condition of a perpetual war, and upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed. and canons planted against their neighbours round about," it has no other law of conduct but the "most conducing to [its] benefit" and will gradually devour weaker structures until it comes to a last war "which provideth for every man, by Victory, or Death.
> By "Victory or Death," the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
Leaves each person powerless? Check. Everybody is a slave to warfare, those who don't wage war perish, and there isn't even a tyrant you could assassinate. Planned obsolescence so we can hustle harder? Check. And oh boy, we can't wait to do this other planets. And we'll be driven by corporate, brainless greed even before we set foot on any on them, it's going to be so much more efficient than the destruction of this environment.
But the real kicker to me is
> It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumnulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine
that is, the fact that many today don't consider this degradation, but elation. That's all we have, our "communities", our hopes and dreams for this utopia like world with constant new things to consume, and other abstractions. Reflecting one oneself as an individual in the naked here and now? Not so keen on that.
It's indeed very sad, but it's not just a view. Russian paid internet trolls are probably another prominent example of multipolar trap. Each individual don't even care about politics, probably just earning some money for living, but together they are an army doing enormous harm to democracy, starting in Russia and then spread to the US and Europe. How would you convince them to stop?
I work at a huge advertising company that's using machine learning and personal information from cookies, etc. All I do is manage devops work flows. What am I supposed to do, quit? Where am I supposed to get a job with no ethical concerns?
You chose to do this. You are accepting money in exchange for a service that potentially harms other people and democratic society. Nobody is under the gun to provide you with another job in order for you to make more ethical choices.
Show concern about the data that is collected, how it is collected, how it benefits others, how it is safeguarded.
Offer operational alternatives that have a lesser negative impact with comparable benefit.
Challenge people to show how that their algorithms treat people equitably and don't exacerbate existing disparities.
Get a job somewhere else in an industry that helps people or positively impacts society in some way.
Quit and quietly wage cyber-war against your former employer from an abandoned missile silo? Just spitballing here.
The people who refuse to stop, will stop at nothing to elevate themselves to a better position than others regardless of the harm that comes.
That's the origin of the dissonance, the lies, the blame, and the general negativity of the blamers in power today. I won't grace them with the term "far right", given having right leaning views is fair enough in some circumstances. So is leaning left, however, but then left leaners don't blame and right leaners do, so you get the natural polarization occurring we see today between the groups.
This group of outright liars is another thing entirely, however.
There is a solution; it's treaties, regulations, and so on. The problem is caused by defection being a worthwhile strategy, so the solution is to change the landscape so that it isn't. That won't happen if we don't try it, though.
To a major degree, the story of western civilization is the story of building our way out of such traps. It isn't hopeless.
Plenty of people stop all the time, plenty never started.
> In the meantime our world is such that any company or person who refuses on ethical grounds will be outcompeted, and go out of business.
Again, no. Plenty of individuals and corporations refuse to cut plenty of corners that would give them 0.N% more profit on purely ethical grounds. If the world was actually like you described, nobody would even survive the first day after their birth, they'd just get eaten.
Heavy. Reminds me of this performance piece I saw in Kiev. It was about 30 men in a large cage in the middle of the room, sitting at a long table. Each was blindfolded and holding a semiautomatic rifle. The man at the end of the table would slap the table for the next step, and in lockstep, they disassembled and reassembled their weapons in a matter of seconds.
This seems like the same issue faced by someone who is assembling a warhead; I think all they really need to say is "Today I will [do] something that will benefit myself, at the expense of someone else." Specifically, in the sense that they retain their employment and means of income, and (optionally) justify their exclusion from the subset of affected persons.
I think the best we can hope for is to design systems that are difficult to undermine or subvert. Distributed/mesh systems, encryption, and so on - things which at least delay the onset of corruption, centralization, and control. This is obviously a big ask, but it's also something that can be worked on by a few, instead of requiring that the many don't work towards the reverse.
If a throwaway really needed to say this? I bet there's enough people on HN who have already come to this conclusion.
The obvious courses of actions have also been discussed here - governing and ethics bodies for code/coders as a start.
It's even likely that in the future unions may be required as the industry grows older as well. This is probably the least popular opinion to state on HN.
But That idea isn't an issue. We're relatively far off from that happening or it becoming a political/collective necessity.
How many people here work for companies that threaten democracy in this way? How many people have a google or facebook tracker on their personal site? This kind of change is the sum of small individual responsibilities.
The early dream of the internet was one of free expression, but people -not corporations or governments- have worked very hard to undermine that.