Hacker News Reader

Comment by pharos92 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like at every technological step, we're sold the dream and delivered the meme. We always end up with the worst possible combination of players, ideas and outcomes; with the promise of what the said technology delivers in terms of additional freedom or free time never realised. How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?

View on HN

It's "socializing the losses and privatizing the gains"… but now alarmingly supercharged well beyond purely financial realms, and into really basic and fundamental matters of individual physical autonomy and liberty.

> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?

Having any kind of agency in those things would be a start.

If <FAANG bigcorp of your choice> announces with great fanfare "We're building this totally awesome new technology that will make everything better! And the best thing? You won't have to do anything, we will auto-update all your devices/accounts/etc with it for free! Trust us!", then whether you personally believe their enthusiastic predictions or not doesn't really matter a lot - you will get it anyway, unless you spend a lot of energy to deliberately avoid the new technology.

I felt compelled to write this email to 1password today:

Dear 1password,

Please stop trying to "innovate". I really like your password manager. That's all I want. I don't want "automatic watchtower AI phishing prevention" I just want a password manager that works across my devices. Make it simple, make it secure, and don't change it. You have a great product. Adding more features will only make it worse. If you keep this bullshit up I will churn.

Ever read 1984?

Who wins at the end?

Winston, obviously. He left behind his free-thinking and became unwavering to Big Brother. Truly a winner

Why, oh why, didn't I take the blue pill?

All these memes are burning through our natural reserves at an ever increasing rate so it will crumble when the bread baskets fail anyway.

From my understanding, we are pretty close to a Dystopian world where all elites of a certain group collaborate to run a Super Leviathan. We still gotta choose our flavors, which may not be feasible in maybe 5-10 years when those leviathans clash into each other.

Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp covers it pretty well I think.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Likewise, thank you for the recommendation. I obviously haven't read Goliath's Curse yet, but it seems like Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) might also be interesting for the same readers.

It's not like this is surprising, there have been plenty of sci-fi books/movies that have predicted this very thing. How many movies have the haves lived above ground/off planet, while the have nots have lived underground or stuck on a apocalyptic planet.

This is just furthering the previous history. Currently, the lords have just been able to keep the serfs appeased to a longer extent. Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.

This time is different. The global system is not going to fall apart like isolated kingdoms in the past.

You seem very confident. This seems to imply you feel the haves will know when to leave enough on the table for the have nots to still feel like they are a part of the haves. I'm not so confident in that.

People in technologically advanced societies have more than enough & the people who are not as advanced can not do anything that will have any effect on the people who own the fighter jets, missiles, robot factories, & "internet" satellites. The current system has no historical precedent. It is very close to an almost perfect panopticon w/ an associated media & police apparatus to keep everyone docile & complacent. Like I said, this time is different.

Far more likely is that we head back to a feudal era where data mining tech is used to identify and eliminate potential rabble-rousers. Once enough production is automated, all remaining have-nots are exterminated.

The weak link is that for “the haves” to have, the “have -nots” are needed. To have or to not is just a comparison, a millionaire needs the poor to be rich and to feel special otherwise when everyone is special nobody is.

“ Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting – Haruki Murakami”

yep. There is too much infrastructure now. Its going to take a lot for this to end.

It will instead eventually fall apart in more thoroughly destructive ways. But not until it does a possibly-unrecoverably (at least in the medium term) amount of damage to civilization, humanity, and life on Earth first.

I agree but my point was that it will not be like any previous collapse.

I don't think they are going to rise up this time. Maybe laying down flat is more realistic.

> Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.

this is a completely "WEIRD" outlook.. more than half of humanity has no illusions about "proletarians" they do not even discuss it that way

source: born and raised WEIRD

It's already crumbling. That's why we have AI-powered fascism in the first place. Society destabilizes and a significant fraction of the population says "perhaps authoritarianism is a good thing." It's never worth it, though.

The story here is that a FedRAMP-authorized system had 53MB of Vite dev source maps exposed on a production government endpoint. That's not "sold the dream, delivered the meme," that's a specific auditable compliance failure. Meanwhile a fintech engineer explaining that this is all standard legally-mandated KYC infrastructure got flagged to death. The interesting question isn't whether technology betrays us, it's why US law requires this surveillance apparatus in the first place and why the security assessment apparently missed checking for /vite-dev/ on a government system.

Also every technological step? Ever? Really? This wouldn't happen to be typed on a computer from a climate-controlled room on a nice global network or anything?

Except it wasn't a production endpoint and there's no actual security risk in having source maps available. It's more annoying to read source code that has been minified, but if a security professional tells you that minifying source code is something that increases security, you should be wondering what other bullshit they've pedaled you.

I'm not a fan of persona and have gone out of my way to not provide my details to them even before this, and I really dislike Thiel, but... let's be honest about the stuff we're complaining about.

I think that's a natural outcome of a model where sociopaths climb to the top, with a layer of sycophants beneath them that shield normal workers from perceiving the amount of depravity going on at the top which would make them unable to continue and tank the business. AI might remove the reliance on regular folks and give sociopaths direct execution of all ideas they have without any moral opposition, and that would explain a lot of the rush for AI everywhere we see nowadays.

I would be careful with this kind of reasoning, because it suggests corruption within a corporate model is inevitable, giving it implicit permission to continue existing. It's not inevitable.

I would suggest it is inevitable when the goal is to grow without end. The sociopaths buy the shares and push the businesses to ether become "evil" or get pushed out and taken over. Its what the current models leads to when there are no checks and balances.

Pursuing growth at all costs is inevitable though. If you don't continue to grow, you get superseded by entities that do. Goes for both countries and companies.

Communist countries like the Soviet Union and China have even had the explicit goal of outgrowing the US.

Birds of a flock crap on everybody together.

> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?

I wouldn't call this much of a society if people's eyes are open.

What's that song name, they don't care about us?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com