This is our industry now. Look at it in the face. We went from Steve Jobs, GNU, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, etc. to megalomaniacs, cults of personality, post-truth, frauds, and mass maniplation. Compare how the first iPhone was marketed to cryptocurrencies and Musk's products.
That's what many people think IT and our industry and our work is about, including the scammers, the cult-of-personality members, and much of the public.
Very interesting point. I think the difference is apparent, but how to define it?
First, while he was very confident, I don't know that I'd call him a megalomaniac. Second, he didn't encourage a cult of personality or manipulate it - he didn't spend his time inflaming it, encouraging it, toying with it; and he didn't use his power to troll and disrupt society.
No, those are just the most outspoken members of the tech community. You’re ignoring the CEOs of IBM, Garmin, Cisco, and a whole host of other tech company CEOs that keep quiet but get the job done.
And who’s to say keeping quiet even correlates with high performance? Intel’s CEO seems to stay out of the news but is otherwise a denthead. NVidia’s CEO is well-spoken and still beats predictions every year. It seems like we’re judging books by their covers here.
> No, those are just the most outspoken members of the tech community. You’re ignoring the CEOs of IBM, Garmin, Cisco, and a whole host of other tech company CEOs that keep quiet but get the job done.
Good point about the many who are not insane. I mean that the prevelance of the fraud is very high.
I was not at all talking about the financial performance of their companies.
Being a megalomaniac with a cult of personality can help you get a lot done. It's practically a leadership technique of its own. Of course, it also enables you to override concerns for safety and side effects ...
> post-truth, frauds, and mass manipulation
Some of this is new and some of it isn't. The internet wrecked traditional news and helped replace it with clickbait propaganda, but papers have always been happy to participate in propaganda they liked (Daily Mail "hurrah for the blackshirts" passim). It does feel that since about 2010 it's really escalated and everyone is joining some sort of cult now.
> We went from Steve Jobs.. to .. cults of personality
Didn't Jobs have a cult of personality? I remember that was talked about quite a lot back then.
I also don't see these scams as "our industry". I'm not in bitcoin and NFTs. This is old fashioned scammers moving to the new medium that we created.
It's not us. It doesn't look like us, and I doubt anyone would mistake it for us, but it might be something we enabled.
Internet was going to be the ultimate democratising tool. Everybody would have access to all information at any time. Anyone could publish anything. Gone are the gatekeepers of old. But it turns out "anyone" includes scammers, manipulators, propagandists, hate-mongers, conspiracy-spreaders and other liars, and now it's become really hard for a lot of people to distinguish lies from truth.
Turns out everybody has access to all misinformation.
That is survivor bias. I have worked with such people and they destroy companies and make employee life miserable. It is impossible to get anything done in the company that does not help the megalomaniac ego. And they usually sabotage efforts that benefit the company but not themselves. It looks cool in movies and from far away, up close it is a train wreck.
> Compare how the first iPhone was marketed to cryptocurrencies and Musk's products.
This does not get talked about enough, and it encapsulates much of what's gone wrong inn SV over the past 20 years.
More precisely, it's how products are announced rather than how they are marketed.
After developing it in secret and making the industry partnerships required to make it a success, Jobs came on stage with a prototype iPhone, ran it trough its paces, said "This will be on sale nationwide in six months." and he delivered. No one really doubted that Apple would deliver.
Compare that to Elon Musk's announcement of the Tesla Robot. He announced the specs and literally had some guy in spandex dance around dressed up like a robot. (I'm not hating on Musk here, just using him to illustrate a larger trend)
I think the media became so enthralled with Apple's big spectacle announcements that they (or perhaps all of us) forgot that the spectacle is supposed to be about something.
Whether we are talking about EVs, tech, ICOs, or DAOs, we've somehow reached a point where the attention is received and the money is made by announcing rather than delivering.
And if that's the case, why do all the hard work required to actually deliver?
No, this is human nature. There have always been liars, cheats, and a conman ready to take advantage of others. What gives hope is that this kind of deception can now be found out quicker and made known to all almost instantaneously. What gives dismay is that the same speed applies to disinformation as well.
> No, this is human nature. There have always been liars, cheats, and a conman ready to take advantage of others.
I think it's odd to try to normalize evil. There have always been been wars and starvation, so what? Do you mean that we have no power over our own society? That it's ok because it's happened before? Either seems bizarre to me - obviously false and why would someone want to normalize it?
Also, the IT industry wasn't like this 10 years ago.
> What gives hope is that this kind of deception can now be found out quicker and made known to all almost instantaneously. What gives dismay is that the same speed applies to disinformation as well.
The latter smees to be far ahead of the former. As people who study disinformation point out: You can post a lie much faster than someone can post the truth.
I think the rough difference is that the psychopaths understand the internet now. Don't get me wrong, there were always some techies with software skills that made fake pharmacies and such, but the giant pool of lower intelligence psychopaths are now able to grind out scamming people.
As for me, I write software that keeps people's data safe and software that fights human traffickers and terrorists. I'm feeling good about what I do for a living. Our industry may broadly be far more scummy, but there are points of light still and I try my best to work for people that make the world better.
This could have been cut short if Instagram had acted on the author's request, since they went through the effort of giving the passport pictures, and i wonder if Instagram should be partially liable when they just let these scares go for so long.
I wonder if the author could have sped up the process by issuing DMCA takedown request on the stolen posts and media.
Good luck if you are not living in the USA, there is no real legal entity you can contact. Everything is a shell, every response is automated. Facebook has zero liability.
Maybe Joe is doing some kind of gorilla marketing strategy for his novels and poems based off that Dostoevsky story.
I just have a hard to believing someone is putting in that much effort to pretend being this guy when the only thing that looks to have much attention on his twitter is this story.
The whole video chat and that interaction sounds like complete BS.
I think what's especially aggravating is the degree to which privacy and security are under assault to supposedly protect against something like this. Good people lose privacy and what not. Bad people just keep on doing terrible things and seemingly just getting away with it.
I guess, I kind of view this, and most modern developments, as the same tack-on that always happened with online games. You can no longer play according to the original/actual mechanics because even the avatars become treated as real by the socially invested, but you can't treat it as real because the game mechanics and lack of enforced security mean its "laws" are a social farce atop simple game mechanics.
Riveting and infuriating. I hate that the story just... ends when the hacker's had enough, hate that IG did nothing, and hate that people get away with crap like this.
The acceptance of garbage customer support in this country drives me nuts. Other countries have laws that say a human must at least respond to your support request. We have nothing like that.
Instagram is rubbish at dealing with fake / stolen accounts and they are at the centre of a huge number of crypto scams.
The way to get them down quickly seems to be with fake copyright take down notices, because they are also rubbish at validating those.
In this case it could be a genuine take down notices since the poems like are subject to copyright.
I once encountered a doppelgänger of my own when I was 19.
Dude showed up at a youth group I spent a lot of time with. He dressed and looked very much like me, it was totally unnerving. I was surprised how unsettled by it I was.
We never spoke. People asked us about it (well I assume they asked him too) and I would say indecisive stuff like “yeah it is weird” and change the subject.
I think we both understood that it was just too weird and if we were even more alike, or one was better than the other… better to not know.
Sometimes I wonder if he was me in the future, a time traveler.
When I was 22, I encountered my 17 year old self in the basement bar of a youth hostel in Athens. He dressed like I did (when I was 17), he talked about the same things in the same way, he looked broadly the same. I considered an intervention, since he was clearly booring those he was talking to (another confirmation that it was truly my 17 year old self), but decided that the question about time travel could become awkward.
What happened to that timeline, to that other just slightly younger me, I do not know. Perhaps things sped up and we joined together (I'd guess at about age 27 if I had to). Or perhaps the timelines have diverged, and there's another version of me somewhere both so close and so far, doing what I do and leaving me very glad that I cannot watch him do it.
At a bike shop that I frequently visited during my student days, I was often greeted warmly and told they saw me at Korsakoff (an alternative club in Amsterdam) that weekend. I did occasionally visit that club, but not that often, and certainly not every weekend before I'd visit that bike shops. And yet nearly always they claimed they'd seen me there.
Clearly I must have a doppelganger there. Or maybe I'm the doppelganger. Never met him, though. Maybe I should have visited Korsakoff more often.
The Schrödinger equation as we know it is linear, but I believe that we don't know that we have discovered all the terms of it.
If there are yet undiscovered terms and the full equation is not linear then it turns out that question of whether the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics versus the many-worlds interpretation is not just a philosophical question. With a nonlinear Schrödinger equation different "worlds" of the many-worlds interpretation can interact.
Maybe you ran into a you from a different reality.
I had a doppelganger of sorts when I was in high school. We were in the same classes, etc., looked a lot alike, except that he had blond hair and habitually wore a tan trench coat, while I had black hair and habitually wore a black trench coat. It was generally considered that I was the evil twin.
Tech is so depressing. Our physical world is open and based on good intent. There's bad actors but the cost of being a bad actor is high: it's risky and doesn't scale.
Even if you live in a bad neighborhood, and make your walk to a grocery store, you wouldn't expect 50 people to try and rob you on the way there. When you then see a familiar face in the store, you don't expect this to be an impersonator. And when you pay for your groceries, you don't expect it to be a phishing attack or scam. When you then return home, your home isn't a fortress with military grade security. We live with the assumption that for the most part, we're safe and sound and most interactions are based on the social contract of good intent.
This optimism is the basis for lots of tech, every single part turning to shit.
Email was supposed to be this open, anonymous, non-authenticated and distributed way for anybody to communicate. Now 99.99% of volume is spam, scams, phishing attacks.
DNS assumes genuine usage of whichever name you claim, how naïve we were.
A web server is the ultimate self publication tool, setting us free from centralized media and giving everyone a voice. Now it's under attack in less than a minute after launching and almost impossible to keep secure unless you put it behind military grade protection.
Self publication was supposed to produce the sum of human knowledge, which would then surface in search. Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only.
Social networks assume genuine usage of account names, not impersonation.
Social networks were to give a voice to the non-tech savvy and connect the world. Now all attention is seized by the unreasonable ones, the extremists, the grifters.
Crypto has interesting ideas, but is an unusable mine field of scams.
We've sunk so low that now even information itself cannot be trusted anymore, not even from mainstream media.
As somebody whom has experienced a non-tech world (80s) and the optimism and beauty of early tech (90s), it's been very sour to see everything turn into shit. Nothing of the original vision has materialized and rather than improve humanity, it's made it worse in so many ways.
The cost of being a bad actor is just too low and it scales too well. Solving that may be worse than the actual problem.
While this doesn't address your entire comment, keep in mind that a lot of the current safety we're experiencing is due to the government assuming a monopoly on violence (and what violence it is! Tanks, fighter jets, nuclear weapons even).
The web has no government, therefore nobody has the monopoly on violence or the ability to suppress others' capability for violence. It's no wonder that it's closer to a warzone than a neat, ordered Information Superhighway with cultured faux-50s-future cars powered by clean energy.
Interesting point but I can't say I agree that this is the most meaningful difference.
In a physical world where you claim the government has a monopoly of violence, still bad actors could easily do great harm to me in my day to day interactions. But they don't, it's exceptional.
The reason it's exceptional is first of all because people are generally good. Second of all because the risk/return play is very poor. When you rob people on the streets, there's a significant risk of it blowing up in your face. Or to be arrested. You can get away with it a few times, but it hardly ever ends well.
Being a bad actor is not very rewarding, regardless of the government's take on violence.
Being a bad actor is extremely rewarding in the digital space. The risk is near-zero (if competent) and the returns fantastic. You can easily "rob" thousands of victims in a way you could never pull off in the physical world.
It scales much better, at near zero risk. And to make it worse, digitally there's infinite creative ways to scam somebody, many methods would simply not work in the physical world. Have you ever tried to impersonate somebody physically?
>Our physical world is open and based on good intent
Is that really so? What you describe is a good neighborhood. I don't think the majority of the world can reflect what you describe.
>Email
Same as physical mail. Email's spam percentage is definitely higher, but there's a good bunch of fliers, marketing mail, propaganda and other unwanted material stuffed into people's mailboxes everywhere in the world.
>Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only.
This was a problem ever since I use the internet, which is for 20+ years. Hardly a modern problem. Google became a major player back then, because of the sort of good results it returned, but people always found a way to poison the results. Keyword stuffing worked for a long time and got ever more creative. Not to mention the myriad of popups, pop-unders and small iframes all designed to increase visitor metrics.
I'd like to say two things: I think the bad intent was always there and you can do nothing about it. This has not improved and never was it better than it is currently. If it was better, it was a period that's unsustainable for some reason, and the reason I suspect is that human nature in itself.
The second thing is that there are wonderful stuff that otherwise wasn't accessible. What you need to do is learn how to navigate among the bad stuff, to get to the good stuff. Wikipedia for one is a pinnacle of this. As much problems as it has, I think it's fantastic to have that resource.
Readit News
That's what many people think IT and our industry and our work is about, including the scammers, the cult-of-personality members, and much of the public.
First, while he was very confident, I don't know that I'd call him a megalomaniac. Second, he didn't encourage a cult of personality or manipulate it - he didn't spend his time inflaming it, encouraging it, toying with it; and he didn't use his power to troll and disrupt society.
Now we're dealing with Elizabeth Holmes et al, who just cargo cult off Jobs' legend.
And who’s to say keeping quiet even correlates with high performance? Intel’s CEO seems to stay out of the news but is otherwise a denthead. NVidia’s CEO is well-spoken and still beats predictions every year. It seems like we’re judging books by their covers here.
Good point about the many who are not insane. I mean that the prevelance of the fraud is very high.
I was not at all talking about the financial performance of their companies.
> post-truth, frauds, and mass manipulation
Some of this is new and some of it isn't. The internet wrecked traditional news and helped replace it with clickbait propaganda, but papers have always been happy to participate in propaganda they liked (Daily Mail "hurrah for the blackshirts" passim). It does feel that since about 2010 it's really escalated and everyone is joining some sort of cult now.
> We went from Steve Jobs.. to .. cults of personality
Didn't Jobs have a cult of personality? I remember that was talked about quite a lot back then.
I also don't see these scams as "our industry". I'm not in bitcoin and NFTs. This is old fashioned scammers moving to the new medium that we created.
It's not us. It doesn't look like us, and I doubt anyone would mistake it for us, but it might be something we enabled.
Internet was going to be the ultimate democratising tool. Everybody would have access to all information at any time. Anyone could publish anything. Gone are the gatekeepers of old. But it turns out "anyone" includes scammers, manipulators, propagandists, hate-mongers, conspiracy-spreaders and other liars, and now it's become really hard for a lot of people to distinguish lies from truth.
Turns out everybody has access to all misinformation.
That is survivor bias. I have worked with such people and they destroy companies and make employee life miserable. It is impossible to get anything done in the company that does not help the megalomaniac ego. And they usually sabotage efforts that benefit the company but not themselves. It looks cool in movies and from far away, up close it is a train wreck.
This does not get talked about enough, and it encapsulates much of what's gone wrong inn SV over the past 20 years.
More precisely, it's how products are announced rather than how they are marketed.
After developing it in secret and making the industry partnerships required to make it a success, Jobs came on stage with a prototype iPhone, ran it trough its paces, said "This will be on sale nationwide in six months." and he delivered. No one really doubted that Apple would deliver.
Compare that to Elon Musk's announcement of the Tesla Robot. He announced the specs and literally had some guy in spandex dance around dressed up like a robot. (I'm not hating on Musk here, just using him to illustrate a larger trend)
I think the media became so enthralled with Apple's big spectacle announcements that they (or perhaps all of us) forgot that the spectacle is supposed to be about something.
Whether we are talking about EVs, tech, ICOs, or DAOs, we've somehow reached a point where the attention is received and the money is made by announcing rather than delivering.
And if that's the case, why do all the hard work required to actually deliver?
No, this is human nature. There have always been liars, cheats, and a conman ready to take advantage of others. What gives hope is that this kind of deception can now be found out quicker and made known to all almost instantaneously. What gives dismay is that the same speed applies to disinformation as well.
I think it's odd to try to normalize evil. There have always been been wars and starvation, so what? Do you mean that we have no power over our own society? That it's ok because it's happened before? Either seems bizarre to me - obviously false and why would someone want to normalize it?
Also, the IT industry wasn't like this 10 years ago.
> What gives hope is that this kind of deception can now be found out quicker and made known to all almost instantaneously. What gives dismay is that the same speed applies to disinformation as well.
The latter smees to be far ahead of the former. As people who study disinformation point out: You can post a lie much faster than someone can post the truth.
As for me, I write software that keeps people's data safe and software that fights human traffickers and terrorists. I'm feeling good about what I do for a living. Our industry may broadly be far more scummy, but there are points of light still and I try my best to work for people that make the world better.
I wonder if the author could have sped up the process by issuing DMCA takedown request on the stolen posts and media.
Maybe Joe is doing some kind of gorilla marketing strategy for his novels and poems based off that Dostoevsky story.
I just have a hard to believing someone is putting in that much effort to pretend being this guy when the only thing that looks to have much attention on his twitter is this story.
The whole video chat and that interaction sounds like complete BS.
Dude showed up at a youth group I spent a lot of time with. He dressed and looked very much like me, it was totally unnerving. I was surprised how unsettled by it I was.
We never spoke. People asked us about it (well I assume they asked him too) and I would say indecisive stuff like “yeah it is weird” and change the subject.
I think we both understood that it was just too weird and if we were even more alike, or one was better than the other… better to not know.
Sometimes I wonder if he was me in the future, a time traveler.
What happened to that timeline, to that other just slightly younger me, I do not know. Perhaps things sped up and we joined together (I'd guess at about age 27 if I had to). Or perhaps the timelines have diverged, and there's another version of me somewhere both so close and so far, doing what I do and leaving me very glad that I cannot watch him do it.
Clearly I must have a doppelganger there. Or maybe I'm the doppelganger. Never met him, though. Maybe I should have visited Korsakoff more often.
Dead Comment
If there are yet undiscovered terms and the full equation is not linear then it turns out that question of whether the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics versus the many-worlds interpretation is not just a philosophical question. With a nonlinear Schrödinger equation different "worlds" of the many-worlds interpretation can interact.
Maybe you ran into a you from a different reality.
Even if you live in a bad neighborhood, and make your walk to a grocery store, you wouldn't expect 50 people to try and rob you on the way there. When you then see a familiar face in the store, you don't expect this to be an impersonator. And when you pay for your groceries, you don't expect it to be a phishing attack or scam. When you then return home, your home isn't a fortress with military grade security. We live with the assumption that for the most part, we're safe and sound and most interactions are based on the social contract of good intent.
This optimism is the basis for lots of tech, every single part turning to shit.
Email was supposed to be this open, anonymous, non-authenticated and distributed way for anybody to communicate. Now 99.99% of volume is spam, scams, phishing attacks.
DNS assumes genuine usage of whichever name you claim, how naïve we were.
A web server is the ultimate self publication tool, setting us free from centralized media and giving everyone a voice. Now it's under attack in less than a minute after launching and almost impossible to keep secure unless you put it behind military grade protection.
Self publication was supposed to produce the sum of human knowledge, which would then surface in search. Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only.
Social networks assume genuine usage of account names, not impersonation.
Social networks were to give a voice to the non-tech savvy and connect the world. Now all attention is seized by the unreasonable ones, the extremists, the grifters.
Crypto has interesting ideas, but is an unusable mine field of scams.
We've sunk so low that now even information itself cannot be trusted anymore, not even from mainstream media.
As somebody whom has experienced a non-tech world (80s) and the optimism and beauty of early tech (90s), it's been very sour to see everything turn into shit. Nothing of the original vision has materialized and rather than improve humanity, it's made it worse in so many ways.
The cost of being a bad actor is just too low and it scales too well. Solving that may be worse than the actual problem.
The web has no government, therefore nobody has the monopoly on violence or the ability to suppress others' capability for violence. It's no wonder that it's closer to a warzone than a neat, ordered Information Superhighway with cultured faux-50s-future cars powered by clean energy.
In a physical world where you claim the government has a monopoly of violence, still bad actors could easily do great harm to me in my day to day interactions. But they don't, it's exceptional.
The reason it's exceptional is first of all because people are generally good. Second of all because the risk/return play is very poor. When you rob people on the streets, there's a significant risk of it blowing up in your face. Or to be arrested. You can get away with it a few times, but it hardly ever ends well.
Being a bad actor is not very rewarding, regardless of the government's take on violence.
Being a bad actor is extremely rewarding in the digital space. The risk is near-zero (if competent) and the returns fantastic. You can easily "rob" thousands of victims in a way you could never pull off in the physical world.
It scales much better, at near zero risk. And to make it worse, digitally there's infinite creative ways to scam somebody, many methods would simply not work in the physical world. Have you ever tried to impersonate somebody physically?
Is that really so? What you describe is a good neighborhood. I don't think the majority of the world can reflect what you describe.
>Email
Same as physical mail. Email's spam percentage is definitely higher, but there's a good bunch of fliers, marketing mail, propaganda and other unwanted material stuffed into people's mailboxes everywhere in the world.
>Now search surfaces SEO gamers and commercial interests only.
This was a problem ever since I use the internet, which is for 20+ years. Hardly a modern problem. Google became a major player back then, because of the sort of good results it returned, but people always found a way to poison the results. Keyword stuffing worked for a long time and got ever more creative. Not to mention the myriad of popups, pop-unders and small iframes all designed to increase visitor metrics.
I'd like to say two things: I think the bad intent was always there and you can do nothing about it. This has not improved and never was it better than it is currently. If it was better, it was a period that's unsustainable for some reason, and the reason I suspect is that human nature in itself.
The second thing is that there are wonderful stuff that otherwise wasn't accessible. What you need to do is learn how to navigate among the bad stuff, to get to the good stuff. Wikipedia for one is a pinnacle of this. As much problems as it has, I think it's fantastic to have that resource.