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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

> the only real response by the technology community was a handful of blog posts

Something that is rarely talked about anymore but true is that the original 'internet culture' from the early 90s is basically dead.

The ethos of that age was an active distrust of government and centralized authority. Further, there was a lack of trust in politics in general. That's basically gone now.

The new technologist are not just unprincipled, they are deeply political and will support whatever initiative their tribe is pursuing. Even more cynical, is how can they even be against 'spying' and 'privacy violations'? 90% of the jobs available involve doing just that.

There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry.

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>There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry.

Exactly correct. I said elsewhere in this thread that I gave them (plus ISPs etc) the benefit of the doubt when it came to Snowden and their compliance with government requests because I could understand they were scared by sept 11th, they wanted to be patriotic, maybe they didn't fully understand the risk or the future they were building etc. If they let EARN pass and comply with it, we all need to opt out.

My worry is how to get enough people to do the same. Being in the 1-10% of people not using these services is difficult (I have too many friends stuck using Whatsapp and Facebook messenger), it's uneconomic (who's buying a non-apple, non-android phone?) and it just makes it too easy for government to surveil you as your own special group.

That age died when the general public started coming online. That was the time when people self hosted their own email and web servers. Nobody has time for that anymore.

Sadly, centralization is simpler. And privacy was an illusion anyway.

It's hard to keep that mindset when you end up getting a lion's share of the world's wealth and power from your technology. How can you distrust yourself and your people, then?

I'd think (if I didn't know any better) that being well-off would result in people having more time and energy to consider things like ethics or politics. I think this is how it's supposed to work, historically. Evidently, it stopped working, both in the general populace and in people involved with tech.

It's not very surprising, though. The technology is mostly built by one-step-above (or outright-) autistic nerds, and marketed and sold by hyperactive pie-in-the-sky megalomaniacs. The nerds don't care that much about anything in particular (other than tabs vs. spaces), and the business types have flexible ethics. Both groups would be dangerous - for different reasons - if taken separately but taken together make for the most ethics-free industry ever.

The complete inability of both nerds and founders to act as a (larger) group might be the only reason why the industry is not under regulations stricter than surgeons and soldiers are. If it were possible for this industry to actually wield the power it has, the governments would be much more pressed for securing what became a vital infrastructure. My guess is that they know for a fact that shutting down Google for a week is not going to happen, ever - and that they are content with the kinds of people that self-select into IT.

>There is no way to have a world both against the EARN IT act and yet work for FB, Google, etc - they are basically all part of the same spyware industry.

Very well put

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