It's quite a meandering essay, between the unnecessary guilt tripping, hamfisted correlations and inactionable observations. I completely disagree with the central thesis - computing is not an apartheid industry, the desire to automate work is not paramount to slavery. There are arguments to be made about the impact of computing on exploitative neocolonial attitudes, but the essay ignores them to bloviate about the virtues of individualism against conformity. How can we address the "specter of the plantation" while real-world Congolese children are being sent into cobalt mines to supply your next iPhone? We're putting the philosophical cart before the horse here. White collar workers can't be exonerated because "the boss made me do it", they're equally as complicit in oppressing minorities to exploit them for their material resource value and turn their legacy into a Macbook. White collar employees are the villain - we fill the seats, accept stupidly unfair compensation, and then blame other people when shit hits the fan. If nobody did the work, the bosses wouldn't get the pay. Moral flexibility is the ultimate currency for these privileged few.
Stallman's philosophy is not only simpler, but it's more actionable if you're a dissatisfied leftist. You want to make corporations hurt like hell? You want to be the boogeyman that fights for individual rights on the side of the law? Become their liability, write copyleft software. Complaining about learned helplessness is not a liberal attitude and it doesn't progress individual rights, correlating computing to the plantation is a backwards heuristic that prevents genuine liberal solutions from being considered.
I have heard counters to your arguments put forth by Jaron Lanier, and I can't say I find all of his arguments convincing, but his concept of "digital Maoism" (his words) is a powerful one. I believe he also mentions modern systems of organization and/or control as being akin to "digital sharecropping" (a formulation I've heard others use; not ascribing it to Lanier, but he does reference sharecropping and its shortcomings iirc, and may even use the phrase, I just don't know for sure if he does; in any case, he compares modern social media to historical sharecropping, and the conditions of slavery that gave rise to it as essentially a continuation of slavery with extra steps, which is my humble attempt at contextualizing his work, and is not meant to denigrate historical or modern slavery or poor working conditions; in any case he does have things to say worth reading, and his works should not be ignored simply because I don't know his works well enough to explore the issues further in this comment).
I don't mean to throw him or his ideas under the bus, or to put him on a pedestal either, but because it's been a while since I've read anything by him, and because he's written more since and besides, in addition to his foundational work in VR (which is called into question by others) I don't want to wade too deeply into a discussion which I'm poorly equipped to carry to its logical conclusion; instead, I would simply signpost his work and his ideas, while mentioning that he also takes issue with Wikipedia for well-meaning reasons, but I will link to his page on Wikipedia anyway, as it is the best source I can think of for this venue.
> Jaron Zepel Lanier (born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist.
Since you mentioned Stallman, I chose to include another quote from the above page:
> In his book You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Lanier criticizes what he perceives as the hive mind of Web 2.0 (wisdom of the crowd) and describes the open source and open content expropriation of intellectual production as a form of "Digital Maoism". Lanier accuses Web 2.0 developments of devaluing progress and innovation, as well as glorifying the collective at the expense of the individual. He criticizes Wikipedia and Linux as examples of this problem; Wikipedia for what he sees as: its "mob rule" by anonymous editors, the weakness of its non-scientific content, and its bullying of experts.
There is more on his Wikipedia entry under the heading for that particular book and in the entry linked below that dig more into these ideas; I wonder if his work at Microsoft might color his perceptions, and whether his own privilege and status as such an expert himself might blind him to actual contributions of open source to society, but that's neither here nor there.
> Lanier further argues that the open source approach has destroyed opportunities for the middle class to finance content creation, and results in the concentration of wealth in a few individuals—"the lords of the clouds"—people who, more by virtue of luck rather than true innovation, manage to insert themselves as content concentrators at strategic times and locations in the cloud.
> In his online essay, in Edge magazine in May 2006, Lanier criticized the sometimes-claimed omniscience of collective wisdom (including examples such as the Wikipedia article about himself), describing it as "digital Maoism". He writes "If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people [creating the content] and making ourselves into idiots."
> DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism [2006]
Also alongside this somewhat notable essay (notable in the oeuvre of Lanier, at least) are responses from the following public intellectuals; I quote the introduction to the responses in full because some of these names are definitely of interest to HN and its readers:
> Responses to Lanier's essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold
> Much of the time, the entire economy operates in periods of substantial hashtag#unemployment or hashtag#underemployment, affecting workers generally: even if they have a job, the cost of job loss is so high they have to put up with nearly any abuse just to hang on to an income. Meanwhile, employers use their power to design workplaces to create a fine-grained division of labor in which workers are deskilled and thus easily replaceable.
I try not to lean on economic theory as a means of driving society (as much as capitalistic governance wants us to - we don't have to accept it). Both of the layoffs I experienced were examples of that perceived health (both at Glitch and Code for America). Coupling that with the need for us to feel "grateful" for something that can be effectively guaranteed to make us a bit messed up in the head when talking about this.
Nixed that, thanks! I've been open to anything and the golden handcuffs have been released, so it's been fun. Right now, I'm focusing on helping other tech folks get organized (and folks outside of industry). I've spent not too much time helping folks with tech, but I'm eager to get "closer to the metal" of that process.
People tend to be selective in order to make their point. It makes it easier to not have to defend their stance (not saying that's the case here, but it's something I've routinely seen).
> i think this is expecting to much from corporate america.
I'll push back on this by adding something from the book, Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176512/pr.... She makes the case, with evidence and history, how no one in America can get by without using corporations to survive. Until we have free housing and healthcare (instead of bombs falling on the rest of the world), we have no choice but to demand better from corporate America.
> As far as separating your self from tech and being technologist. I think its like music, the pop stuff sucks and is mass produced. tech that used to be cool is mass produced, im sure there is cool stuff out there if you put the work into finding it. like underground music. i think trying to label your self is a mistake in general.
I'll quote what I mentioned at the end: "And to play on an idea of separation of the "art from the artwork" while actively defending their organizations (failing that, their outputs and indirectly their contributions) works to be a free agent of marketing for them. It's similar to a private company opening up a non-profit to launder the notion of doing good to build a moat of social capital. How does one comfortably reconcile that?" In the case of Haiti, a musician decided to run for president. Similar to what happened in America when an actor did, both invoked violent wars on the citizens (one was selling blood and killing people, another dropped bombs around the world and blamed a set of people for a viral disease that they refused to do any research on).
It's nigh impossible to separate something that _can't_ exist without the other. We can try to believe that (hence the use of money to create a bubble).
I mean expecting to much by thinking tech is any different then the rest. Leaving the career won't really lead to anything different, if your goal is to work. Which we all need to do. If you're lucky enough to not have the play the game and can leave software and work in general, that's good, but not typical.
I think you missed my point. Tech is bigger then Google Facebook w/e. Is writing drivers for obscure hardware ruining the world? Or raspberry pi? Using computer vision to solve your problems at home. That's still tech imo and healthy to participate in.
> I remember early 2000s and if you asked anyone who was a good hacker if they want to join IBM they would laugh in your face. That culture needs to return. Where is the Napster of this era? That would give people the fulfillment they want and make them feel useful. A simple way of doing this is to take any popular piece of software and think what the "out there" version will look like and start building it. Maybe punk rock and the hacker culture both need to make a comeback into the mainstream, otherwise FAANG and Leetcode will eat the soul of tech.
I'm glad you mentioned this. I was reading https://diversionbooks.com/books/the-spotify-play/ and the way that hacker culture has become effectively commercial (from anarchist ideals in finance being perverted into cryptocurrency, file sharing into cloud hosting, etc), we have to keep fighting to make control of it hard _while also_ protecting people's safety (bad actors - government or people - will always exist).
You should click through some of the links I've included, like https://dyingforaniphone.com/ and see how much money Apple pushes to hide how each of its innovations leads to corruption and straight-up sweat shop behavior (among other companies like Samsung, LG, Microsoft, HP and the like).
It's not even really about you or how you feel but what this industry is doing. And with the recent Supreme Court rulings, we're going to be lucky if we know if _more_ things go down.
Yeah. I only hesitate when we see people more eager to use things to exacerbate the harms of the world using technology. It sucks because we, as an industry, seem to only focus on the history of business gains and not on the sociological impact of said gains (the introduction of the smartphone and how that played into how people connect - or even what _was_ the first smartphone).
I think of worthwhile software projects as stools with three legs: The business opportunity, the interesting technical problem, and the social/ethical issues. They all need to be good in order to have an acceptable product, IMO.
Unfortunately, whenever you read an article about a new technology or read an interview of a founder or something, they spend all their time talking about the first two, and either ignore or give passing lip service to the third one. Even look at HN discussions. Few engineers here really care about the ethics of what they are working on. It's just "is it cool technology?" and (sometimes) "does it make money?" You ask someone if they are working on something good for the world and they look at you like you have an antler growing out of your head. "Yes, I'm making the Torment Nexus, but it uses blockchain and LLMs and it's written in Rust. It's written in RUST!"
Nature of the system. The incentives are in place that you can either wallow in the torment nexus with everyone else, or try to invent it and get rich and escape to some little imagined slice of paradise. The world, and especially the USA, is no longer about trying to make things better and solve real actual problems - it's about trying to accumulate enough capital such you can personally opt out of the problems entirely.
The early days of Facebook still seem great. I could connect with friends and family and that was it. Now it's all business and politics. Perhaps this was inevitable and it should never have been developed in the first place I don't know. Is it moral to build something for the $$$ because if you don't someone else will? Probably not.
Instagram is going the same way honestly, it took a bit longer, but I'm at the stage where I just have to unfollow nut jobs. People who used to use it in quite a lighthearted fun way too.
1. Releasing a solo product. 2. Writing more about code and the intersections of the field in history and world events. 3. Trying to do more talks.
Not-tech:
1. PR like there's no tomorrow. 2. Run two half marathons. 3. Move out of Florida.