Yup, the future is looking pretty sinister these days. It’s all about tech being used to surveil and control people and parasitic companies commodifying the data they produce.
The free and open internet died when Facebook and social media became ubiquitous...it’s very much degraded since its heyday in the late-90s and early 2000’s. And who knew that the government would compel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to censor content on their behalf.
Companies like Palintir are working with LEAs to develop pre-crime algorithms and there was a financial institution that recently floated the idea of using a person’s internet search history to rate their credit worthiness.
The tech “revolution” was a bait and switch scam. The internet, smart phones, social media etc. were sold as tools to complement life and make doing certain things easier and more convenient. Instead we got a system of control that makes us dependent on technology that has effectively replaced life with a degraded digital facsimile so that a bunch of parasitic middlemen can make a lot of money. Just look at Twitter, a platform that brings out the worst in people or Facebook, which openly manipulates its users psychologically.
We were promised a utopia but a dystopia is what we got. And now we’re stuck in it with no easy way out.
It's not at all surprising to see i2net and Tor growing, and people even putting Gopher servers and proxies back online.
Then again, I'm all about people putting information out there because they have something to share, not because their primary focus is "how can I monetize this?"
I can spend less on a VPS for a month than I can at a morning of Starbucks. I can do a whole lot more (and share a lot more) with the VPS. No expectation of making money from it either.
And of course China and Russia are mentioned in the comments. Propaganda works. Repeat something often enough and people will internalize it and assume it’s true even when no proof is provided.
Isn’t this beating a dead horse? The video game/violence link has been debunked many times. OTOH, a comprehensive study determining whether violent games and movies contribute to people becoming desensitized to actual violence would be interesting. I recall an interview with US soldiers in Iraq saying that shooting people was “just like playing a FPS game.”
It can’t be denied that our society is obsessed with violence. Americans have been like this for a while but recently produced movies and TV shows in Europe and the UK feature much more graphic violence than they did two decades ago. Why? Is it a reflection of a more ruthlessly competitive society or are there other reasons?
Hmm...from a tech porn perspective it’s a cool little gadget. But given the shadow surveillance and police state that was erected post 9/11 and how often “national security” outfits have been caught playing fast and loose with the laws of the land, there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.
Governments in most western countries have thrown out habeas corpus and have given themselves the right to indefinitely ‘disappear’ anyone they arbitrarily deem a threat to national security. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden come to mind.
I wouldn’t trust governments and intelligence services in the post-democratic west with this technology any more than I’d trust their counterparts in “classic” totalitarian states.
>Governments in most western countries have thrown out habeas corpus and have given themselves the right to indefinitely ‘disappear’ anyone they arbitrarily deem a threat to national security. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden come to mind.
Neither of those seem to be examples of habeas corpus being thrown out. Neither were "disappeared" and the court systems were used against Assange and nothing has happened to Snowden as of yet except for the legal system being used to try to keep him from earning money from his book.
Whoa that's a bit of a US Centric broad brush there. "Most Western Countries" - there's more to the West than the US, UK and less than half a dozenish who have or are doing that. I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.
> I'm Irish and the vast majority of the EU and other Western Countries (however that is defined) aren't in the business of disappearing people.
True, but that's comparable only if these countries had the same responsibilities (it's like comparing people, say a soldier vs a librarian). Ireland for instance has no Air Force, and has to call on the RAF to provide air defence (as it happened when Russian Tu-95s intruded). Likewise, the rest of Europe relies entirely on NATO's firepower against Russian belligerence.
You can certainly shape a better society internally and have equitable social justice if you're free from the distraction of having to defend against external aggression.
NATO is seen as a deterrent to Russian expansion into the old Soviet territories as some of the states that are now democracies have joined NATO.
In the absence of a European defence infrastructure like NATO that's pretty much all they have.
Russian belligerence being invading the Baltic states. Crimea and eastern Ukraine were less clear cut than supposed for historical reasons but many in the East live in fear of the same happening to them.
But how is NATO not a military force? It’s kind of equivalent to the US military (except it includes them)... EU is similar to United States. Both are unions of independent states
None of what you say aligns with disappearing people. NATO can easily do its role without that. In fact you can argue that NATO states like US/UK/Turkey which have disappeared people are very unlikely to do it against peer adversaries like Russia, China etc because of the risk of blow back. It's far more common to it to groups deemed as terrorist, Latin American countries etc.
Similarly countries like Sweden and Japan are well armed and not in the business of disappearing people.
That's a very broad interpretation of disappearance and I don't agree with it. NATO isn't in the business of disappearing people either - Assange and Snowden have not disappeared. But Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has disappeared. Kidnapped when he was 6 years old by agents of the CCP and nobody knows where he is now, although China officially says he's doing well.
By painting with such broad strokes, we are comparing entirely different types of actions.
The OP’s claim was that governments have given themselves the right to disappear people. That’s a legal change which couldn’t be done without the standard public process. Also, in general, when people are arbitrarily detained or disappeared, the outside world does hear about it, even in highly authoritarian regimes (see eg the Amnesty website for plenty of examples).
This is just ridiculous. Why if you were going to illegally spy on people would you use a highly visible and noisy drone when the vast majority of the population live in urban areas where CCTV cameras are common and phone lines conveniently run out to steel covers in the streets (and the entire population is carrying GPS enabled tracking devices full of security flaws?)
There's "oh no our liberties" but that train came and went and this particular device has nothing to do with it.
I'm not overly worried by what the government plans to do with this tech, more than any other tech they use for nefarious purposes.
I _am_ worried by the endgame of publicly available drone tech though, because it's very difficult to see how technically or legislatively we can avoid a future with tiny untraceable drones with long battery lives, that record audio and video and can go anywhere. The arms race that is going to be necessary to secure your home and workplace against these is going to be very expensive and ugly, and many people are going to have to settle with every conversation and sexual encounter they have being in public, if only for the lulz.
Privacy, like the fight against piracy, isn't going to be defeated because it's desirable or not, but rather just because the technology and temptation is inevitable.
There are probably bigger worries in the surveillance area already (smartphones etc). I’d be more concerned about their potential use for assassination. How heavy does a bomb have to be?
Assassination of whom? The result isn't exactly discreet, it's not going to be used locally to target inconvenient persons in the UK. If we're talking about conflicts, then I don't see how it's better or worse than a predator.
There are much easier methods to hide than a drone. They typically use vulnerable or compromised individuals with no paper trial back to the perputrators to do these sorts of assassinations.
Drones are fucking loud, and the video stream can be detected while transmitted via the air (with an sdr card or something similar). Signals can also be jammed, and combined with gps jamming, the drone will "get lost", and probably land at its current location (and hopefully not just drop out of the sky when the batteries are empty).
And this is not james bond level of knowledge and equipment, but something a better ham radio operator or a better engineering student can do with sme preparation.
> And this is not james bond level of knowledge and equipment, but something a better ham radio operator or a better engineering student can do with sme preparation.
I suppose there are not that many engineering students or ham radio operators in the poorer parts of the cities, where I for myself think that these things will first be used internally. At least video-cameras you can try and bring them down with simple rocks [1] or by cutting the electricity down on that pole (that is if they're not battery-powered), not so easy with these type of machines.
Indeed. And while we're at it take things to their logical conclusion; seriously consider the implications of this tek + combined with 'AI' for not only navigation but for policing decisions.
When you remove the human element from policing, there is thus then no human empathy in the decision to use force ie- to arrest or kill, if that is the 'command' said AI internally commands itself to do.
Yes it's a camera drone for the military. Big deal. It's also extremely noisy.
The government can put cameras wherever and on whatever platform it damnwell wants - and is allowed to. Really the only way to control the consequences is to restrict those places, platforms and what is done with the data, through laws and regulations. You know, like in a democracy.
If that's not possible, a camera on a particularly cute drone is the least of your problems.
A lot of the comments seem to be discussing social anxiety, which is not the same as loneliness. In my late-teens and early-20s I was extremely anxious in social situations but I did not feel lonely. Social anxiety, and the isolation that often results from it, can contribute to a person feeling lonely but the two concepts are not synonymous.
As I understand it, loneliness is a psychological state that results when a person feels deprived of meaningful contact with other humans. Very few people can maintain their sanity and well-being completely cut off from their fellow humans (the proverbial hermit living contently in the wilderness with only himself for company is a rare phenomenon) but how much and what type of social contact an individual needs to maintain their equilibrium varies wildly.
So, it is impossible to determine how lonely a given person is only by looking how much time they spend alone or how anxious they are in social situations.
Loneliness is primarily a psychological state. A person who spends a lot of time alone, and is ok with that, is not lonely. Conversely, there are people who say they feel lonely even when they are in the company of others.
Since you don’t seem to have a problem with spending time alone, you are not lonely and the purported* results of this study don’t apply to you.
*I am skeptical of this study’s validity but that is irrelevant to what constitutes ‘loneliness’.
>Loneliness is primarily a psychological state. A person who spends a lot of time alone, and is ok with that, is not lonely.
Not entirely though. Part of it can be self-dellusion, and the persons can still feel worse off for being alone even if introverted, but not consciously be able to process it. Humans are social animals, introversion can be part of a development issue (like being on the spectrum).
but the "socialness" is a spectrum no? i am not introverted, or shy, or a weirdo (actually good looking and women are constantly hitting on me) yet a loner. it took me a long time to accept this. there is too much cultural/social pressure to not be a loner.
i am not interested in company, or sex. i really really really prefer to be alone, and mostly am. i live in a place i can hike 3-4 hours a day, i don't have close neighbors, i work from home.
so, honestly and without sarcasm you would say i'm delusional? i personally have never met anyone as happy as me. maybe i am delusional. :)
Well put. Corporations aren’t people no matter what Citizens United “says.” Their goal is maximizing shareholder profit at any cost. They do nothing out of the goodness of the hearts they don’t have and they certainly are not guided by ethics the way individuals are.
As you said, if Apple “cares” about privacy more than Google or Facebook it is not because it is a more “moral” or “just” company, it is simply because its business model is not, and never was, based on hoovering up and monetizing personal data.
It’s not like a conscious decision was made by Tim Cook or Apple’s shareholders to do things differently than the aforementioned two companies.
Pointing out how Apple “cares about your privacy” is simply a PR (read: propaganda) move designed to gain some extra positive publicity which, of course, helps the bottom line. It’s the kind of thing companies do all the time. Taking these pronouncements at face value requires a certain naïveté (or a wilful suspension of disbelief).
And while Apple might not traffic in its customers’ personal data, the company recently revealed that it scans content stored on its servers, e.g. your iCloud Photo Library, because of “concerns” over child pornography.
This suggests privacy isn’t quite as sacred to Apple as its PR department would have one believe.
(Never mind that there is no evidence whatsoever that mass surveillance reduces incidence of child sexual abuse or decreases the production and distribution of child porn. Which begs the question, why <i>is</i> Apple spying on its paying customers’ personal content?)
Whenever a company, or a government, deploys the cliché “think about the children!” argument as a pretext for increasing internet surveillance, you can bet this reason was chosen because if anyone objects on privacy grounds they can say, “what, so you’re on the side of the child pornographers/suicide trolls/cyber bullies?” It’s a discussion stopping tactic.
Yeah, corporations are definitely not people, they are not your friends and they do not care about you as a person. That in 2020 this even needs to be said is a testament to how thoroughly corporate propaganda has been woven into the fabric of western culture.
You are teaching your nephews to be greedy and to value individual ambition over everything else. In other words, encouraging them to internalize the values of the society in which they live.
This is not very bold or novel, but rather ordinary.
Given all the problems that are coming to light in societies that have have taken individualism to absurd and self-defeating extremes, this is exactly the opposite of what is required if these places are to avoid collapsing into failed states, technocratic dictatorships or banana republics run by and for delusional oligarchs.
Well put. A lot of people miss this fact. Also, the US/UK trying to pin the blame for their own incompetence on China suggests that reality attachment in these places, at the government level at any rate, is seriously sub-optimal.
In the US, the Trump administration’s bungling incompetence handling of the outbreak is truly staggering. Wildly contradictory statements from moment to the next, no coordinated pandemic plan, “hijacking” PPE shipments enroute from China and Malaysia to the countries that had bought, and paid for, them...this is rogue/failed state level stuff.
Other western countries also messed up big time. In Canada, France, the UK and Spain people in longterm care homes were abandoned and left wallowing in their own filth as COVID-19 burned through these facilities like wildfire, killing scores of elderly inpatients, many of whom were left to suffer and die alone.
It’s striking how some of the most “advanced” countries utterly failed to prepare for and manage a very foreseeable pandemic.
Then again, is it really that surprising that this happened in places where health care systems have been chronically underfunded for decades as permanent homeless camps have become normalized and the middle-class economy replaced by low-wage precarity and easy credit?
It’s like after four decades of “there is no such thing as society” governance the health and well-being of people, of the public, in these places has become an afterthought.
The scramble to blame other countries or pretend that “there is nothing we could have done to prepare for this” is theatre designed to deflect attention from the fact that dictatorships, like China, and places with authoritarian governments, like Singapore and South Korea, care more for the health of their citizens than many of the western liberal democracies, where austerity and massive neglect of public services and infrastructure have become the norm.
Like the market crash of 2008, the coronavirus outbreak of 2020 is showing that the social and economic system underpinning the west is seriously broken and can’t handle even the slightest amount of stress.
It needs to be replaced with an arrangement that reins in the ability of the avaricious banker and CEO class to dictate how the economy should be run. The health and well-being of all people in society needs to come first or these places will degrade even further.
Almost 100% agree, except for the part tying this to form of governance. Democracies can handle this well (see NZ), and authoritarian places definitely fail (see Singapore now, and I'd argue Brazil and US are more authoritarian than democratic, too)
It does highlight that highly individualistic societies struggle more than places that put a higher value on collective wellbeing.
Many HN types don’t really care about politics that don’t affect them directly. Imperialism and war directed at countries they never think about doesn’t bother many Americans. Only fellow Americans who share their ideology matter. Everyone else can pound sand. Foreigners aren’t real people to them.
Even democracy, which everyone claims to support, can be dismantled with many people not really noticing because they are mindlessly submissive to authority. America is doing a pretty good job of setting itself up for a very grim and conflict ridden future and many people don’t even notice that. Climate change? Oh tech will save us don’t worry!
It’s a weird time for sure. The deeper the multiple crises we face get, the more determined the masses are to bury their heads even deeper in the sand. The fanatical pursuit of ever elusive “happiness” and effectively enforced optimism that threatens transgressors with social ostracism is a sure sign that things are not okay.
The American people fully embrace pathological denial but they are, of course, in denial about that too and are always relieved to find another messenger they can shoot.
The free and open internet died when Facebook and social media became ubiquitous...it’s very much degraded since its heyday in the late-90s and early 2000’s. And who knew that the government would compel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to censor content on their behalf.
Companies like Palintir are working with LEAs to develop pre-crime algorithms and there was a financial institution that recently floated the idea of using a person’s internet search history to rate their credit worthiness.
The tech “revolution” was a bait and switch scam. The internet, smart phones, social media etc. were sold as tools to complement life and make doing certain things easier and more convenient. Instead we got a system of control that makes us dependent on technology that has effectively replaced life with a degraded digital facsimile so that a bunch of parasitic middlemen can make a lot of money. Just look at Twitter, a platform that brings out the worst in people or Facebook, which openly manipulates its users psychologically.
We were promised a utopia but a dystopia is what we got. And now we’re stuck in it with no easy way out.