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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now that laws and rules and rent seeking and all the old power games are here and and will continue to increase in concentration.

At least we got to see something new.

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My goodness, you are right. Your comment is like a cold shower, I never thought of it in this way. *We are hippies.* I'll keep being a naive optimist as I am, but this way of thinking offers an important perspective to add some realism to my judgment. Thank you, I mean it.

You just need to be as disreputable to the current establishment as we were to the previous one.

Slap a swastika on it and you'll never have people trying to take over your project. Same way goatse kept the old forums from being overran by normies: https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse...

No. The technology is different this time. I argue software is a form of literacy, and literacy demands openness.

My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”.

In a git repo.

We can see your crimes now.

Wikipedia is this in microcosm - we can see the edits, we can use software to watch for us, everything is in the open and the feudalism and rent seeking exist best in the hidden darkness

What we do with that is up to us.

>My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”.

There's zero chance that the CTO at a company as big as VW is going to be personally committing to code repos.

I thought it was already established that's exactly what happened?

> My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”.

We know that VW did not write the code. It was the supplier Bosch that did it. VW simply activated a feature through configuration.

I understood that the VW CTO committed the config chnage ?

Do you remember where you read that information?

the statement of facts[0] essentially disagrees with that perspective.

"33. Supervisors B, C, and F, and others, however, realized that VW could not design a diesel engine that would both meet the stricter US NOx emissions standards that would become effective in 2007 and attract sufficient customer demand in the US market. Instead of bringing to market a diesel vehicle that could legitimately meet the new , more restrictive US NOx emissions standards, VW AG employees acting at the direct of Supervisors B, C, and F and others, including Company A employees, designed, created, and implemented a software function to detect, evade, and defeat US emissions standards.

tl;dr : Bosch (company A) along with VW employees created the evasion function at the behest of supervisors.

[0]: https://www.mass.gov/doc/vw-statement-of-factspdf/download

Is there anywhere new for us to go? Or must we wait for some new leap forward still?

For some reason it's unpopular here, but that "place to go" is the altweb of crypto and other networks like I2P, often dubbed "web3". Yes, all of the scams and beige this-or-that are there. But it's so vast and so granular right now that you can definitely find your dreamers and weirdos doing interesting things.

When I lived in a small European town a few years ago, upon hearing that I was a software developer, regular-ass business dudes would regularly want to talk about NFTs, inbetween a conversation about football and one about cars.

I'm sure there are weirdos in the web3 spaces, but I feel like they're very outnumbered. Projects like ENS or IPFS are probably much more interesting to weirdos than most "crypto stuff". I2P too, though I don't think this twenty-year-old project should be lumped in with "web3".

I think the Fediverse is a better place to go. Lots of little communities, almost all of run by regular nerds, each one with their own quirks and petty personal drama and constant UI tweaking? It's like forums all over again, except it's now safe to use one password for everything.

> It's like webrings all over again

Fixed that for you.

That's the polar opposite.

I have a lot of respect for you and am disheartened to hear such a blasé condemnation of a big umbrella. The signal to noise ratio is poor, but there are genuinely interesting things going on.

Deep space but not with rockets, rogue/advanced biology/medicine?

Alternative internet communities with higher (even if only slightly) barriers for entry and no financial incentives to ruin everything. Maybe mastodon/matrix communities or something? I honestly am not up to speed on what exists in geek online communities space nowadays.

No, the people who run those are the people who couldn't cut it as reddit mods.

If you want the old internet vibe the dark Web is the place to be. Tor, freenet, i2p.

I'm quite partial to freenet because it's completely segregated from the regular internet and refreshes as the speed of dial up. No interactive web2.0 here.

Outside

Be the change you want to see. Create quality content.

You should get into crypto! Seriously, all of them are still here.

If there's a space where the creative impulse is more thoroughly commidifed than crypto, I don't know what it is. I say that as an early, often, and continuing crypto enthusiast for the same naive reasons I am an internet technology enthusiast.

I do think, however, that the two movements share a common ancestor in the certain and nearly evangelical belief that technology holds the answers to messy people problems- early internet culture was largely about assuming the best in people, and crypto by it's design is about assuming the absolute worst and harnessing that to make tech.

Of the two, I think crypto is probably more sustainable!

I like to take the more optimistic viewpoint for crypto that it’s about creating resilient systems that will thrive regardless of external conditions.

Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of a lot of disappointing things that have happened and are happening.

There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, which would effectively mean a lot fewer jerks in the world, as far as people in the US knew.

I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before (at the same time that some positive memes are also propagated). I don't know what would be a good baseline for evaluating, nor whether there are good historical analogs for some of the recent sociopathy -- including that practiced by the tech industry, and that merely enabled by the tech.

> increasing normalization of sociopathy

I think this is the case and appears in many shapes.

* libertarians lift their individual freedom above societal needs but they fail to see their own dependence on them, like any public services funded by taxes.

* Crypto bros advertise new "currencies" but use them as volatile investments or foster such expectations. With this volatility it will never become a fully stable currency. There is a common wisdom in traditional trading that you dont do arbitrage / speculate on real currencies because of their _intended_ stability. Another failed realization (because of personal gain attached to it).

* Right leaning people argue against criminal migrants but discriminate not by commited crimes but simply foreignness. Their percieved superior cultural identity is their solution to internal cultural problems but they fail to realize how criminal sociotopes emerge and that its independent of ethnicity.

I could go on if i had time.

> I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before

I doubt it, bad behaviour is more likely to be called out and borderline cases probably pushed towards cooperation. Sociopathy is, I think, the condition where one can't be pushed towards cooperation by social pressure.

I think that the acts of calling people out (in addition to your point about tech empowering bad actors), just makes it seem like they are being normalised.

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