Big tech have always been dogs willing to play fetch for any master. The free market didn't offer big tech these quantity of rewards for brutalizing people 'guilty' of administrative infractions, our 'democratically' elected government did.
Elected in part by the useful idiots on HN and many other places. They were so ignorant of how government actually works they were happy to give it this power. They foresaw the jackboot being used to stomp petty criminals and fellow middle class types who don't "pay their fair share". But they had never cracked open a history book because if they had they would know that sort of stuff is never a top priority.
50,000 years may come to pass, and nothing will be funnier than HN defending Apple's App Store monopoly one year and then realizing what a catastrophic disaster it was 6 months later.
Are we sure that formalized populist regulation is the boogeyman? Like, really absolutely super duper double-checked certain?
I am both amazed and not surprised by the amount of people that will work at a company that is directly opposed to their own points of view. I am willing to bet many of the employees of Google, Meta, and Amazon are morally opposed to the very things they are supporting.
Nah. They aren't. If they were, they would leave. I went to school for aerospace but didn't work in the industry for the longest time because all the jobs available were military.
These people don't care, they might put on a fake persona that pretends to care, but you outright don't care if you work at these places. You get a job somewhere else when you care.
What you hear from them isn't caring, it's just a way for them to pretend they are someone they aren't. The person they pretend to be would not be working there.
We used to know this inherently and we spent half a century passing really well thought out and actionable laws designed to thwart the darker side of capitalism while still allowing it's benefits to accrue to the masses.
Since then we've forgotten how to enforce anti monopoly and media ownership rules. Similarly we've somehow completely turned campaign financing into an open competition for bribes.
So, in this situation when a large company cooperates with intrusive policing, you think the problem is that the company is too large and that enforcement of laws should have taken place? To prevent this collaboration with law enforcement?
It's a much bigger problem when a company with >50% market share connects all the cameras to law enforcement than if a company with 0.5% market share does that, but the first one can't happen if there are no companies with a double digit market share.
And when there are more companies it's easier to tell people to buy a different one because that one is doing something shady. When Amazon does it, you recommend that unsophisticated people do what, use a Chinese camera which is presumably shunting the feeds to that government?
I recommend that people don't install networked cameras unless they build a dedicated air-gapped network for them. If you want to know who is at your door ... look out a window.
Unpopular take, I know, because it demands that people actually understand the technology they're using and where their data flows, and almost nobody has the skill, time, attention, money, and mindspace for that... but that's the only way to be a responsible networked camera user.
It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what. This is why people support the 2A, and why it was the 2nd most important thing to those who founded the country.
The same 2nd amendment from 1791 when the most firepower a government could have were cannons shooting round cannonballs?
Surely in 2025 a ragtag group of people with some revolvers, pistols, hunting rifles, and a small minority owning assault rifles, with limited ammo will be able to fight against the most well-funded armed force with tanks, IFVs, assault helicopters, aircrafts, missiles, rockets, and military infantry armed to the gills wearing NVGs.
People who think 2A will do anything in case your government actually turns violent on you are just trying to maintain the illusion of control.
And weirdly, the staunch defenders of 2A, because how else do you fight tyranny are all, good with the tyrant and the tyrant party shitting all over the Constitution.
> It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what.
"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
> why it was the 2nd most important thing to those
I mean, not really? The 2nd amendment includes stuff that they didn't even think of originally when creating the constitution, so just because it was the second amendment that went through, doesn't mean it was "the 2nd most important thing", the most important things are the original articles in the constitution, so the amendments must start ranking at 8th place or something like that, 2nd amendment ends up being the 9th most important thing if we were to rank things like you did, but honestly.
>"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.
The main issue is that its power only grows. No one sane would propose to reduce his influence and/or make his job harder and everyone has ideas on how to make his job easier. It's not about capitalism, communism or anything else. The only thing that plays a role is how many somewhat independent influence blocks you have and whether you have a system to stop the power creep and 'we only have to vote it in once' problem.
And it's not even strictly about 'easier' from the perspective of the worker. I imagine if you deal with police work and such spying probably seems a lot more reasonable since you're very exposed to the bad part of society, which does skew your view of the world, no matter how rational you think you are.
If you look at the groups brutalized by the government, including blacks, Hispanics, leftists, and peasents in central America, they all have something in common. They have far lower gun ownership rates than the less victimized groups like whites and the right.
Now, maybe the guns didn't do anything either way, but the data correlates pretty strongly with the people with guns being brutalized less than the people without them. It certainly isn't leading to the conclusion you seem to be aiming at. Even the people in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising bought a few extra hours before getting gassed because of their (smuggled) guns.
>>This is why people support the [1A], and why it was the [] most important thing to those who founded the country.
>Yet the government has continuously taken more and more power for decades on end, and the [1st] amendment hasn’t stopped it.
I’m not even unsympathetic to the guns rights people. I just can’t square the. “We need guns to fight tyranny” with the constant screaming of “we’re falling into communism/fascisim/etc.” screeching s been doing since they learned those worlds.
Your 2A line sounds like a big joke. What are the armed citizens supposed to do? Shoot ICE? That would end well, I'm sure. The guns are fucking useless when most gun owners support the authoritarian government currently taking roots.
Ah, yes, because those <checks notes> communists and <checks notes again> feudal lords, theocratic regimes, monarchs and all manner of other non-capitalist societies have such a stellar track record of treating people well.
This isn't a capitalist or any other "ist" problem. It is a problem with society and social norms.
The cameras are there because people want them to be. The cameras get used because it is not politically toxic to do so. The use continues because the people objecting to the current abuse don't object on a principal level, they love the jackboot. They'd just rather see it used to levy ruinous fines upon middle class scofflaws (got I hate that word and the people who use it unironically) than whisk brown people off the street. Sure, different people would screech if the powers that be pivoted in that direction but at no point does the screeching add up to change because only the people who hate a specific abuse screech at any one time.
yes, some people genuinely do, and some people don’t.
some people have absolutely no understanding of what surveillance tech is doing and where it is going.
in terms of the “ist” problem you refer to, at the end of the day, the real answer is to deny anyone that amount of power. whether it’s corporations, religions, governments, or billionaires. none of these should have enough power to sway the world to terrifying places. none of them, including govs, billionaires, or corporations.
somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
we should be incentivizing the power from all of those groups to be dispersed as much as possible.
>somehow we need to achieve separation of money and state with as much vigor as we used to separate church and state.
This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.
> This used to be called "equality under the law" and laws that could not be written equally or enforced equally were not written or overturned by the courts.
The US in particular had discrimination encoded in law for a long time. It took Rosa Parks in 1955 to end "white only" areas in public transport, and it took until 1965 until racial discrimination by law was finally outlawed.
"Equality under the law" always depends on who is considered to be part of the group that enjoys said equality. Even today, many countries still have laws on the books that discriminate between ethnicity and/or country of origin and/or citizenship. Just look at us in Europe - you usually have to be a citizen of an EU country to hold public office for example, residency is not enough. Or you got border patrol clearly profiling whom to control at a border checkpoint - whites get left alone and unbothered, non-whites get the full experience of what border control is allowed to do. That's not just discrimination, it's showing citizens that happen to have non-white skin that despite them being equal citizens by law, in practice there is no equality.
Don't forget women. They couldn't open bank accounts until when? In any case, I should have known better than to leave open the door to race baiting.
Focusing on race or any other distinction among the peasants is categorically missing the point. This isn't about peasants vs peasants. It's about peasants and small groups of peasants vs big moneyed interests. Some small time tire shop gets fined into oblivion for letting chemicals go down their drain meanwhile Jiffy Lube does that all day and doesn't get picked on because their lawyers can craft a story about why it's fine. In the old days everyone or nobody could dump it down the drain. Some homeowner can't put up an ADU because "hurr durr wetlands" but some megacorp can buy his land and put up a solar farm in the same damn wetlands because they can put fancy stuff on fancy letterhead and put it in front of the regulators. 100yr ago either everyone could build there or nobody could.
We've given our regulatory agencies massive, massive, discretionary power and insanely broad mandates. And what winds up happening is that they pick on the small and the weak because those targets are plentiful and easy. We created dragnet surveillance to "stop terrorists" (it was a crappy argument even then) and it gets used to round up brown people or chase down and bankrupt a random business because 1/20 of their trucks had a plate that was illegible to toll readers for years on end. We told the EPA to make the water clean and they go harass farmers for digging trenches. Don't get me started on the FDA and opium. NYPD couldn't get away with stop and frisk (well, they could and did for far too long but that's not the point) but law enforcement across the country can now stop damn near anyone for any BS pretext because a technological obfuscation layer gives them pretext (much like the fake bomb detectors we were selling to the Iraqis back in the day) and the scale and division of responsibility makes it hold up in court.
If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group.
If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.
> If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group. If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.
For what it's worth I fully agree with you!
The thing is, this just isn't achievable with modern politics. The big guns will always lobby for them to be exempted in some way, and even if only by funding the enforcement agencies only so limited that they have no way of enforcing the law againt the big fish.
And on top of that you got Conservatives (or whatever tries to sell themselves under that label these days) and Wilhoit's (misattributed) law [1]:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
