How do we make it less scary?
We should also probably stop letting “shareholder value” drive our morals.
Where you draw the line isn't agreed upon by any means, so someone somewhere will end up doing it. In fact, there's no doubt that every nuclear-capable government is doing top-secret neuroscience research with the intent of figuring out how the brain works and utilizing that to extract information and manipulate POW or political rivals. The little public newsworthy neuroscience work that's out there[0] is the portion being paid for by corporate interests which actually don't have too much to gain from it in the near future, at least until the tech gets cheap enough to be implanted in either a phone or a car.
0: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/mind-reading-algorit...
But put simply, I think that we need to make it highly illegal to use information asymmetry to take advantage of people at a large scale.
People need legal protection against the natural "just make it work already" instinct that makes us blindly accept TOS terms and follow dark patterns. It would be laughable to argue that a significant portion of users actually understands what they are agreeing to.
You, as a hacker, have a responsibility to your community, family, friends, to build an alternative platform for them.
If you refuse this responsibility, you are failing your own family and community, and leaving them to suffer all the consequences.
You can't realistically tell your family to quit Service X, no matter how fucking bad it is, unless you're willing to provide them with an alternative, hardware and all, including either a replicated experience or on-demand support.
If you can't build an alternative to Service X, you must start teaching yourself immediately until you are able to do it.
I'm just a messenger, don't blame me for the current reality.
How are you going to teach yourself to acquire music licensing agreements that still allow you to run a profitable service at scale?
Given the money at stake and the number of people who could technically build such a service, what makes you believe that the problem is a lack of willpower or know-how?
profit not needed, only sustainability, is cheap
(The Luddites were also not blanket opposed to technology, just technology that for absolutely no good reason made their lives worse instead of better.)
Making textiles was a job that require a lot of investment (apprenticeship) in learning the necessary skills. Automated looms put a lot of skilled labor out of work, while concentrating wealth into the people that owned the automated looms, which only required much cheaper unskilled labor.
Luddites were not opposed to technology! They were opposed to businesses using new technologies to destroy their livelihood. If they had been included in sharing the benefits of the new technologies, the Luddite movement wouldn't exist.
> This does not strike me as a technology that made life worse in the long run.
The luddites would have agreed. From [1]:
>> As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
> Especially for women who were freed from The responsibilities of manufacturing clothing for their families and could later pursue careers.
WTF? Luddites were highly skilled artisans that were being forced to abandon their careers.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
> the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines" ... “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods [...] and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
They simply wanted to be included in reaping the benefits of technology. The popular belief that misrepresents Luddites as anti-technology instead of fighting against abusive labor practices is a good example of anti-labor propaganda.
And before we smash all the computers, maybe we can start with something less drastic, like smashing publicly traded companies? I rarely see privately held "lifestyle businesses" getting into hot water over customer abuses.
All these recent scary tech inventions? They are all driven by collecting data for targeting ads, fine-tuning marketing strategies, and manipulating people better. Let's go after the root cause.