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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

It really seems to come down to individual freedom vs. reduced freedom for the collective good.

Individual freedom seems like generally the right path, it attracts the best talent, fosters creativity and invention. Growing the economic pie has proven to increase overall well-being faster than careful central-planning and attempts to distribute resources equally.

However the pandemic also showed the risks of individual freedom. It's not hard to imagine a disease that spreads quickly and but is 100x to 1000x more deadly. Would the west have been able to stop it without the willingness to put in place the strict quarantines and authoritarian measures that China used? I'd like to think so but it is unclear.

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>It really seems to come down to individual freedom vs. reduced freedom for the collective good.

That's one way to frame it, if you want to use the word "freedom" a lot. Another way is "cooperation vs anarchy". Our ability to pull ourselves out of the mud and position ourselves as the Rising Hope of Earth, is predicated entirely on our ability to cooperate. The philosophy of "individual freedom" is the quasi-religious conviction that we can simply sit back and let everyone do as they will, pushing and shoving and vying for money and status and power and all the rest of it, and without having to make any difficult choices, somehow it will all Just Work Out. It would be so convenient, wouldn't it? To have the moral and the pragmatic highground? But alas it's incompatible with having any opinions about what the future should look like. We need to be able to collectively decide on goals, and then collectively pursue those goals, and unfortunately that means Rules. And as surely as Newton's Laws, no matter how reasonable the rule, always there will be someone to publicly decry it, and someone else to even attack the very concept of having rules.

This could very well be The Great Filter. Like yeast in a carboy of wine we will consume all available resources or poison ourselves with our own excrement, unless find a way to act as more than a collection of cells.

Excellent point, one issue is that most society haven't seemed to figure out how to efficiently remove rules that are outdated or more critically: the rules that amplify the power of those in power.

So far it seems that democracy might be most successful just because it spreads around power so much that it takes many generations to successfully re-concentrate it.

Honestly it’s just 2 different versions of reduced freedom. Public vs private reduced freedom. On one side freedom is reduced directly via government on get other indirectly via corporations

Maybe, but if so, the versions are very different. Corporations cannot imprison you or tax you with the threat of imprisonment If you don’t comply.

The personal computing revolution hasn't happened yet (2002) & is only just starting to grapple with how we might connect & network with each other. Projects like the fediverse are so new, & so so so much under-funded/under-worked on compared to everything else. But still so promising for leading us out of the corporate computer control tarpit.

At least unlike the sick Thatcher "There Is No Alternative" world, it's clear that there are elements of light & good & caring. There's undercurrents of caring & nothing really emerging but there's a lot of tendrils out searching, there's vision & reason for hope. Open source is doing great things, runs the world- but yes is mostly industrialized at this point. Still, there's such great hope embodied by Fediverse/p2p/sovereign aspirations.

I do fret that we're kind of entering a dangerous territory where computers themselves might become unaffordable, where the only computers that make sense to run are hyperscaler computers. Connectivity seems pretty good- plenty of folks with 100Mbps or more both ways that they can use- but it feels like there's so much intense cost optimization happening in the industry & so so little trickling down. The enterprise market is still filled with fat margins and support contracts, or vast margin multi-$1k chassis+motherboard barebones systems. We see price volatility like crazy: ram in 2017, hard drives in 2021, gpus in ~2018 & again now-ish. It feels like the cloud folk have enough volume to just build chips & slap them onto very low component/simpler motherboards, and there's no mainstream marketization of this obvious/logical/superior path.

People can do great harm or completely eliminate a corporation via many methods:

- Investors/banks can refuse to finance a bad corp

- Legislatures can regulate it into oblivion

- Justice departments can break it up

- Employees can refuse to work there

- Consumers/Advertisers can refuse to purchase/use its products

Overthrowing a government in contrast typically has a single method: a bloody revolution.

In order to evaluate these two approaches to controlling spread we would have to have accurate infection, hospitalization and death data from China. I could be wrong on this. I don't think that data exists or was made public. I don't think we know how many people died in China. Do we? To a reasonable degree of accuracy?

I wonder if China had any choice in its Covid strategy. They used the only tool they had, e.g. their control of the population.

When they had a vaccine, it proved of mediocre effectiveness. So they could not rely on it as the main strategy. And they still can't, obviously.

The (still called) Communist Party is very aware of its citizens' opinion. When pollution became a constant muttering, they acted vigorously, so that no "green movement" arise.

The Party has a huge power - but it is expected to deliver, otherwise social unrest ensue. Not being able to control a pandemy is unacceptable, since the dominance is justified by the common good.

The control of the Party on the Chinese population is ambivalent: very real and quite fragile altogether. The Party knows that very clearly.

The CCP currently does seem to want to keep the population happy but I don't agree that it has to nor that the control is fragile.

The bar for revolution is quite high, during Mao and Stalin, people were starving to death and there was massive unrest but still the parties generally kept power. The CCP clearly doesn't want anything close to that, but this demonstrates that no social unrest is a nice-to-have rather than a requirement for an authoritarian government.

Russia is another example. Given the sanctions, economic turmoil, protests about the war it's pretty clear that this special military operation has been a huge net negative for most of the population. In an authoritarian government however there's little need to consider the populace as long as you're above the 'good enough not to revolt' bar. Most focus should be put on the politics of maintaining power.

Not that I'm trying to take a side in either direction but you could just as easily say that the pandemic showcased the risks of an overempowered collective given that millions of people were forced into lockdown for individuals they had no material or emotional ties to. I'd also argue that in a 100x-1000x scenario like you conclude with is a poor comparison to the pandemic response for covid because a lot of the debate throughout the pandemic was ultimately a byproduct of it not being that severe for the majority of people.

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