The problem is deeper than that. Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
> Software has completely eroded property rights. I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism". Corporations own the software and us serfs merely lease it.
I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
>from the point of view of the producers of those things.
Fundamentally that's the question. Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Not trying to put words in OP's mouth, but I think the general idea is that software has allowed "the producers" to shrink in number and grow in power, turning independent farmers into serfs if you will. Should that cause us to reevaluate the previous question?
Now there are tons of devices running Linux, for which you may be able to see the source code, but are unable to modify it, for ostensibly "security" reasons.
It's the producer of the software that has the property rights, not the user.
If I own a piece of land, I can charge people to visit it, but I don't give up my property rights to do so. We don't see that as an "erosion" of property rights but rather the opposite.
Not much software is really all that useful, let alone necessary, though. And only a little bit of that isn’t provided by one vendor or another as part of delivering whatever other actual service you were after (e.g. banking apps).
Property, that is, that didn’t exist prior to the wide use of software or SaaS platforms. Which begs the question, did the rights ever exist to be eroded in the first place?
Orthogonally related to the article, I think it gets to the deeper issue at hand with regulating technology:
The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.
We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.
It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.
What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
Reputation is the usual solution. You build a community and you know who to trust, like humans have always done.
The early internet was mostly that (BBS, Usenet, forums). But on the modern internet we mostly consume random google sites & TikTok accounts that are probably bots.
FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.
Since it's no longer political to mention Iraq: every major news organization lied about the war, they knew they lied about it and millions died. The only person to be held accountable for this was the one person to tell the truth: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/phil-donahue-iraq-war
We can't solve the issue of truth through our current institutions because those institutions are rotten to the core. The best we can do is keep them from destroying the channels from which we can hear how badly they are fucking up and allow us to organize.
The algorithm has replaced following out of necessity. The following paradigm made sense when social media was something where you mainly connected with people you were friends with IRL and where media came from a small number of channels that could be browsed by one person (even this was already overwheling by the time cable hit hundreds of channels). There is simply no way to navigate the billions of pieces of content generated daily without an algorithm. There could be the exact thing you want out there, but how would you ever discover it?
True trust is earned. "Default trust" is not the same thing. But the two are often confused.
When trust is lost, it takes 10x, sometimes 100x more effort to regain it.
Sometimes, even with 100x the effort trust does not return.
These are Life 101 basics. Pretending these laws don't exist doesn't make them disappear.
From my perspective, the root problem is that institutions that want to be trusted - and traditionally were - don't want to make the effort to regain the trust they lost. The media and the government come to mind. Instead they waste energy shamelessly demanding to be trusted, which only widens the gap. They blame the violated, which only widens the gap.
And into that void, the nefarious has rushed in. Until the institutions embrace "true trust is earned" the nefarious will thrive in the gap.
I think earning trust often requires significant personal sacrifice. Institutions are made up of people, and I think that one of the outcomes of the web era is that it seems that fewer high talented folks find the motivation to do unglamorous, lower-remuneration jobs.
I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?
I've thought about this a lot too and I think about a few things:
- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).
- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.
I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.
I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).
A key difference was the lack of democracy. There was plenty of misinformation, but it didn't channel quite so directly to the levers of power.
That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
The scarcity of printing presses and costs associated in running them by definition made distribution a calculated financial endeavor. Cultivating a positive reputation would therefore be a valuable asset in order to reliably recoup costs via sales and/or retain patrons.
This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."
In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."
Doesn't really undermine your point, but as a fun aside: Trusting Trust style attacks on compilers were (theoretically) solved by David Wheeler with "diverse double compiling".
Yes, good point. That's pretty similar to scientific falsifiability at least!
I think for topics that are not as easily provable as reproducible builds though, trust gets murky.
There was something else I read (can't find it now) that made a similar analogy for a web of trust.
A web of trust (e.g. PGP) will have de-facto authorities since there will be a tendency for more people to sign individuals presumed to be trustworthy based on their history. It follows that the system runs into issues if their key gets compromised or if a false individual is subject to a sybil attack, producing the illusion of trust. See also: github stars, cryptocurrency, social media follower counts.
I think of how I lost trust and it's more along the lines of: "Wow, with all of this new information, I can see how institutions/experts/officials have been lying to me all along."
In other words, I "lost trust" in institutions, experts, officials etc., when I found the information on the web that I consider to be "the truth" which overrides what established organizations previously proffered to the me.
The Web did cause me to lose trust, but only because it made the actual truth available to me and made me realize how dishonest most people are.
There may be examples of this... A mechanic who overcharges you can be "found out" now by a customer who does some online research. Previously, this work would be accepted as is, but it is now (rightfully) questioned. The dishonesty was always there, but it's more readily discovered now.
Unpopular opinion: It's exhausting to be under the illusion I can fact check the world. There's so much freedom in having the faith to say "I trust you that I need those brake pads". If I get screwed for $200 it just means I have $200 less to spend on some other junk I don't need. The scammer won't survive in the long run.
...you can make rules to stop this? The Dominion election fraud was more or less cast out of mainstream discourse with commercial damages law. If you expand this a bit (ONLY A BIT) farther, you'd expect a roughly linear scale of results.
It's not a very good paper, even though the author has reasonable credentials in Europe.
She writes: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information. Making tech expertise available to lawmakers would go a long way toward reducing lobbyists’ effectiveness and ensuring lawmakers understand how technology impacts issues like healthcare, education, justice, housing, and transportation."
This shows insufficient knowledge of the US situation. The U.S. Congress used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.[1] It was abolished in 1995. "House Republican legislators characterized the OTA as wasteful and hostile to GOP interests."
The generic problem is monopolies, not "tech". US banks and drug stores are down to 2-3 major players.
Tough enforcement of the Sherman Act might help. Although the experience with the AT&T breakup is not encouraging.
I don't see how you conclude from that quote that she doesn't know about the office of technology or lacks understanding of the US context. When I read making tech expertise available, I'm not picturing a government science department doing research, I'm picturing independent consultants translating algorithms into english.
If anything, your point shows the bipartisan us vs. them is the main problem if claiming bias against a party is enough to get rid of something disliked. Is that what you mean by monopolies?
And to be clear, I agree monopolies are an issue, but that doesn't negate other issues such the fact tech solutions can result in enforcing implicit rules that weren't decided through democratic process despite impacting populations at the same level a government decision would.
IMHO, it's the companies AND the government against the people.
The government twists the companies' arm to make it do things that the government is not allowed to do. Company refuses to play along? Threaten to break it up. There's a reason why AT&T has dedicated wiretap rooms for the NSA. DJI not selling drones to Ukraine? Threaten to ban it in one of its biggest markets.
This is not worth reading, because it was not generated as part of a deductive process, where you start with some facts and work your way to some entailments.
Instead, the causal process that let to the creation of this book and ad was that the political patronage relationship between American progressives and American tech companies fell apart. This leads to demand for post-hoc justifications for subsequent changes in cash allocation, lawfare budget allocation, etc.
The author started with the conclusion "... and that's why we have to disenfranchise tech companies" and worked backwards from there.
Therefore, this document cannot, on expectation, communicate to you any useful entailments, except insofar as that conclusion might incidentally be correct for reasons totally unrelated to the author's thought process.
"Let’s compare how the U.S. responded to the Ukraine war in the physical world versus in the cyber domain. As part of NATO, the U.S. is clear: It doesn’t want to see boots on the ground. But in the cyber domain, the U.S.’s offensive activities are ongoing?"
A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over.
Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.
Those countries exist? Last I checked there are few true democracies. Where there are free and fair elections the politicians seem bought out by unchecked corporate interests. If all your options are just corporate shills and power hungry spooks and goons is it even "free and fair" at that point?
First you can have democracy. Then separation of powers between the judiciary, the executive and the legislature along with property rights and the rule of law.
> And of course, the other real issue, especially in the U.S., is the capability of the power grids. In the Netherlands, which is an advanced economy, as in the U.S. and the U.K., we’ve already seen reports that the grids are functioning at near-emergency levels: code red. The grids are stretched to their limits. They break down and outages are more frequent. And yet there are many data centers in the pipeline that were agreed to years ago. When they come online in two or three years, we may face a wave of disaster.
I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these.
I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
Have you ever considered opening this up? Of course I can see it getting too big and but having multiple contributors could be useful, especially when hunting down sources. Or is anyone interested in starting an (at least partially) open version?
It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
I've added claims from a wide gamut of people (some just random Internet users), but here are a few:
2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406
2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912
2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/
I’ve seen users on Reddit use “remind me” bots for this kind of thing, so maybe you could use something similar? Future-dated blog posts with RSS/Atom notifications/feed subscriptions?
>I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.
I think you're battering round evidence to fit your own square hole. Batteries are coming on stream, and do not need to be TwH scale to provide incremental improvement and I don't personally think the outages are sheeted home to the rise of solar and wind alone. It's complicated.
Great idea, please consider publishing it. I've often wanted to do something similar, and in reverse (that is, now that the outcome has happened, check predictions). Not to get too far afield but online discourse really undervalues success. It's almost as if people speak not because they are correct, but because people like hearing them speak.
Readit News
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
I think that's reversed - that's property rights being stronger than ever. "Own things forever and just rent them out" is NOT a weak formulation of property rights from the point of view of the producers of those things.
Fundamentally that's the question. Do we want a society from the perspective of "the producers" or the greater population?
Not trying to put words in OP's mouth, but I think the general idea is that software has allowed "the producers" to shrink in number and grow in power, turning independent farmers into serfs if you will. Should that cause us to reevaluate the previous question?
Bruce Schneier, for one, not sure if anyone else had applied the feudal analogy before him. His remarks stand up quite well, I think:
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/11/when_it_com...
Deleted Comment
We were way more worried about that before GNU/Linux became a thing.
What piece of software do you need for your life, but you're forced to lease?
If I own a piece of land, I can charge people to visit it, but I don't give up my property rights to do so. We don't see that as an "erosion" of property rights but rather the opposite.
This is a great topic to discuss right after you accept the End-User License Agreement and Terms of Service.
Dead Comment
The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.
We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.
It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.
What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
The early internet was mostly that (BBS, Usenet, forums). But on the modern internet we mostly consume random google sites & TikTok accounts that are probably bots.
FAANG has actively replaced following with algorithmic feeds because they're more profitable.
Since it's no longer political to mention Iraq: every major news organization lied about the war, they knew they lied about it and millions died. The only person to be held accountable for this was the one person to tell the truth: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/phil-donahue-iraq-war
We can't solve the issue of truth through our current institutions because those institutions are rotten to the core. The best we can do is keep them from destroying the channels from which we can hear how badly they are fucking up and allow us to organize.
Alternatively: it's what users want.
When trust is lost, it takes 10x, sometimes 100x more effort to regain it.
Sometimes, even with 100x the effort trust does not return.
These are Life 101 basics. Pretending these laws don't exist doesn't make them disappear.
From my perspective, the root problem is that institutions that want to be trusted - and traditionally were - don't want to make the effort to regain the trust they lost. The media and the government come to mind. Instead they waste energy shamelessly demanding to be trusted, which only widens the gap. They blame the violated, which only widens the gap.
And into that void, the nefarious has rushed in. Until the institutions embrace "true trust is earned" the nefarious will thrive in the gap.
[1] https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540sept09/2009/10/31/unintended-con...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War
- The barrier to creating and distributing content was higher (it still had to capture people's attention).
- We didn't have all the tools to artificially create content, just our imaginations.
I'm no doomer by any means, and I think it's useful to look back at history for clues as to how to manage it but it's hard to find clues when the situation is so different.
I still believe education and critical thinking are the best antidote for disinformation, but higher education in the US has continued to come under attack (and perhaps rightfully so with the costs rising extremely out of proportion to inflation).
That wasn't necessarily better. We put democracy in place for a reason. But there has been a shift in the societal basis that underlies democracy, and we'll be forced to come up with another set of solutions.
This form of gatekeeping has been eliminated with the zero cost of any person being able to publish their thoughts digitally and without review. Furthermore, misinformation and disinformation now has a financial incentive by way of "driving the clicks."
In short, not everyone's voice needs to be heard by all, especially when extremism is required in order to "stand out."
I think for topics that are not as easily provable as reproducible builds though, trust gets murky.
There was something else I read (can't find it now) that made a similar analogy for a web of trust.
A web of trust (e.g. PGP) will have de-facto authorities since there will be a tendency for more people to sign individuals presumed to be trustworthy based on their history. It follows that the system runs into issues if their key gets compromised or if a false individual is subject to a sybil attack, producing the illusion of trust. See also: github stars, cryptocurrency, social media follower counts.
In other words, I "lost trust" in institutions, experts, officials etc., when I found the information on the web that I consider to be "the truth" which overrides what established organizations previously proffered to the me.
The Web did cause me to lose trust, but only because it made the actual truth available to me and made me realize how dishonest most people are.
There may be examples of this... A mechanic who overcharges you can be "found out" now by a customer who does some online research. Previously, this work would be accepted as is, but it is now (rightfully) questioned. The dishonesty was always there, but it's more readily discovered now.
Hope I'm making sense...
They do.
> You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Would you be pissed if you got penalized for this comment?
She writes: "For example, just as legislatures rely on independent legal teams to help draft legislation that will survive court challenges, they also need independent technology experts they can turn to for reliable information. Making tech expertise available to lawmakers would go a long way toward reducing lobbyists’ effectiveness and ensuring lawmakers understand how technology impacts issues like healthcare, education, justice, housing, and transportation."
This shows insufficient knowledge of the US situation. The U.S. Congress used to have an Office of Technology Assessment.[1] It was abolished in 1995. "House Republican legislators characterized the OTA as wasteful and hostile to GOP interests."
The generic problem is monopolies, not "tech". US banks and drug stores are down to 2-3 major players. Tough enforcement of the Sherman Act might help. Although the experience with the AT&T breakup is not encouraging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
If anything, your point shows the bipartisan us vs. them is the main problem if claiming bias against a party is enough to get rid of something disliked. Is that what you mean by monopolies?
And to be clear, I agree monopolies are an issue, but that doesn't negate other issues such the fact tech solutions can result in enforcing implicit rules that weren't decided through democratic process despite impacting populations at the same level a government decision would.
The government twists the companies' arm to make it do things that the government is not allowed to do. Company refuses to play along? Threaten to break it up. There's a reason why AT&T has dedicated wiretap rooms for the NSA. DJI not selling drones to Ukraine? Threaten to ban it in one of its biggest markets.
Instead, the causal process that let to the creation of this book and ad was that the political patronage relationship between American progressives and American tech companies fell apart. This leads to demand for post-hoc justifications for subsequent changes in cash allocation, lawfare budget allocation, etc.
The author started with the conclusion "... and that's why we have to disenfranchise tech companies" and worked backwards from there.
Therefore, this document cannot, on expectation, communicate to you any useful entailments, except insofar as that conclusion might incidentally be correct for reasons totally unrelated to the author's thought process.
A few weeks ago I saw Zero Days, which is a good documentary on Stuxnet and it's pretty wild just to what extent tools in that domain are out of the purview of the public. Offensive capabilities that amount to acts of war seemingly have no democratic oversight, and even an ex-director of the NSA thought the amount of classification of materials went too far. Very few people were willing to speak at all to the filmmakers even years after it had already blown over.
Whether its some sort of dystopian privatized policing by Palantir or tools used by three letter agencies, what the article warns of has arguably already arrived a decade ago.
If you are fortunate enough to live in a country which has free and fair elections, then vote.
Remember how the US came to be in the first place.
Society is shaped by those who just simply show up, so show up if you want a say.
Deleted Comment
It seems to work reasonably well.
I keep a document called "Timed Predictions," so I can check back on bold predictions such as these.
I'm adding an entry for this. In a few years, I'll evaluate whether we experience "a wave of disaster" due to overtaxed energy grids in 2026-2027.
It's a little different in that it only publishes bets made directly on the site, but that also helps remove some of the ambiguity that otherwise would be inherent in trying to judge predictions made elsewhere.
https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#public-figure
But apparently removed it recently:
https://github.com/Metaculus/metaculus/issues/1095
2021-10-02 (did not come true): "I would not be surprised if Apple completely closes off the Mac ARM64 platform for “security” in the next few years. The option to boot third-party OSes seems like a short-term gimme to keep the pitchforks and torches at bay." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731406
2022-01-12 (did not come true as a "crisis"): "Long COVID / PASC [...] will easily be our next great public health crisis sooner than anyone can imagine." -- https://twitter.com/JamesPhipps/status/1481442131751456770
2022-04-04 (we will soon see): "Unless we see big structural changes in the Democratic party's coalition, then the modal outcome for 2024 is Donald Trump winning a filibuster-proof trifecta with a minority of the vote." -- https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1511028728381734912
2022-11-18 (did not come true): "I do not think Twitter will die, but it will go down in the next few days due to the World Cup and its overwhelming traffic. When it does, Musk will dedicate himself to bringing it back up, and boldly claim that his mission is to “keep Twitter standing.” In the background, he will realise that nobody wants to work for him, and that there is no path that involves him running (or even keeping) this website that resembles any kind of success." -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-fraudulent-king/
2024-01-29 (by the end of 2024): Brigida v. @SecretaryPete will be settled by the start of year 2025 -- https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752118772960514234
We have been experiencing overtaxed grids for decades now. Rolling black and brown outs happen every summer on a hot, cloudy, still day. The issue isn't big-tech, the issue is that we're living in a fantasy where we can keep the grid running with renewables and no sign of terawatt hour batteries.
Perhaps it's different in the US, but here in Toronto I've noticed the frequency and especially the severity of such events decrease over time. It's been 21 years since "the big one" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003). This year's biggest event was much less impressive (https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/07/16/power-outages-toronto...), and that was caused by exceptional storms (https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/a-parade-of-storms-how-toro...).