> This may at first glance sound sensible. But consider: If an impoverished family doesn’t accept the health NGO’s preferred interventions for its children, these children may not be provided any other opportunity to establish a “legal, broadly recognized identity” necessary to access things like primary school. In other words, you are literally nobody until you are vaccinated.
Author is making quite a leap that the _only_ way to receive a digital ID is to get vaccinated. If a program like this ever does take off you will see alternative methods of identification acquisition. Case in point: I don't need a driver's license to get a state issued ID. Functionally they are the same in terms of proving I am who I say I am, but one affords additional benefits of stating I can drive.
The way it works today is they you either get the school vaccinations or a sometimes limited exception, otherwise you don't get to attend. It seems like they're just putting a layer on top of this.
Since primary school is mandatory in my country, they have to accept all kids, with or without vaccination. Kindergarten aren't mandatory, so it is up to them if they accept unvaccinated kids or not.
There are exceptions for kids that cannot be vaccinated because of medical reasons which is argument for those parents who does not want to vaccine their kids and still want get them to kindergarten regardless their health condition.
Primary and secondary school is mandatory here too. They won't let you go without shots, or an exception (medical, or in some states a religious/belief one). The alternative is that you're home schooled (even private schools are required to mandate the shots).
Making things legible to the state is one of the ever going projects of any state. So while I think it’s important to make sure that refusal to participate in one of these projects doesn’t preclude you from still receiving the services of the state, it’s also isn’t surprising that the state wants to make its constituents more legible to itself. The balance falls in figuring out how to firewall these different functions to prevent certain kinds of identity from making it so you can’t receive the services that are the whole reason why you have a state.
Blanket refusal to get an ID card or passport will get you into trouble in some countries as a citizen (e.g., Germany). Possible fines etc. aside, establishing your ID in a lot of situations will get quite difficult.
The greater point, I think, is that everywhere else in American where I deal with the government I am required to present some form of ID. They even give you a list of a dozen or more valid IDs you can use.
However, arguably the most important interface with the government, voting is a place where I don't even have to validate I am who I say I am.
They don't really care who you are, they only care if you are allowed to vote. At least in theory, of course weird stuff probably goes on every year due to the size of the US.
Germany requires you to have an ID document from the age of 16. You do not need to carry it however (there are a few exceptions, e.g. if you work in construction or the like where tax evasion/cash in hand is not uncommon).
Inside the EU's Schengen area, the ID is only needed at borders.
Again, once inside another Schengen country, you do not need to carry it around.
I'm not sure if the same rules apply for foreigners though, once they are inside the EU.
From trial and error over the last five years I'd say three out of five airlines will let you board flights using your driver's license as ID. They always complain but they let you through anyway.
ID checks at Schengen to Schengen borders are absent anyway since many years so this isn't a big surprise.
That said: I'm a white man.
These rules apply to everyone by law.
Sadly, the less 'Caucasian' your phenotype is, the more likely your experience with EU security forces will be for them to expect you to carry ID -- despite the above rules.
And boarding a flight with your driver's license if you are not white -- forget it.
Racism is everywhere though. It is just especially painful to see in this context.
> it’s also isn’t surprising that the state wants to make its constituents more legible to itself
And not just the state, and it's enlisting the help of private companies.
From the article:
> The privacy risks, including the possibility for constant surveillance and data harvesting, will fade into the background when you are about to miss your flight if you can’t skip to the front of the line
Personally, when going to Mexico, I was asked to submit to a photo verification to board the plane. I asked to opt out. I was told it was impossible.
Later, after verification, I realized I was lied to and manipulated: data was obtained under false pretense, under threat of being unable to board, and to top it out, with a lie!
Next time in the airport, I will only unmask to TSA agents, and only those who require I do, never to the gate because as said in the article all it takes is one leak and then it's impossible to undo:
> But as Nick Corbishley, author of a recent book on digital IDs, points out, decisions made in the moment may carry long-term negative consequences: “If biometric data is hacked, there is no way of undoing the damage. You cannot change or cancel your iris, fingerprint, or DNA like you can change a password or cancel your credit card.” Unless we collectively decline to participate in this new social experiment, digital IDs—tied to private demographic, financial, location, movement, and biometric data—will become mechanisms for bulk data harvesting and tracking of populations around the globe. Welcome to the new abnormal.
yeah the nasty thing is the private company loophole works. like the TSA puts in these stupid ass measures everybody hates then is like "oh well you can get clear if you don't like it!"
it's supposed to be illegal for the feds to use private companies to do what they can't but for some reason this hasn't gotten killed in court. literally the agency shouldn't exist nor should airport security like it does now.
Is there any hope for those of us that used Facebook when it came out then deleted it? Seems like they already have all our data now. My DNA is everywhere and my fingerprints are technically everywhere too. Wouldn’t be hard to get it.
It always works this way, “Oh it’s completely voluntary.”…a few years later “we’ll you can’t keep your job if you don’t.”…a few years later “we’ll throw you in jail if you don’t.”.
It’s important to send the message now that these programs/services are not wanted and should be shut down immediately.
You can't get herd immunity from vaccination with a virus like corona. This was known from the beginning. It mutates too fast. You end up training your immune system for an extinct variant and it responds poorly when presented with the latest variant. Herd immunity works great for measles and polio, the binding mechanism really doesn't survive mutations well for these virus.
And ethically, you are proposing these walled societies where children risk their health with poorly tested treatments to save the older generation? I find that abhorrent.
> You can't get herd immunity from vaccination with a virus like corona. This was known from the beginning. It mutates too fast.
There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more.
Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies.
Agreed, though it would have been necessary to deploy the vaccines globally, especially in the least-wealthy parts of the world.
In the case of Omicron, there's a good chance that the vaccines would have needed to reach a community in Botswana ahead of the initiation of the chronic infection that may have produced BA.1, BA.2, etc.
First-world extensive deployments would have killed off the first-world propagation of variants through Delta in short order, but everything changed with Omicron.
What physical limit do you mean? There are lots of things that are deployed by the billions on short time scales. Seasonal foods or fresh flowers are an example of how feasible it can be to deliver billions of Xs around the world in weeks.
You are making numerous claims throughout this thread without a single citation.
Where can I find a study that supports this:
"There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more.
Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies."
lolol, "There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more."
This is a statement that has many claims:
1. 95% implementation (whatever that means) in a specified time window of initial vaccine could've produced herd immunity
2. This herd immunity would've made it "several orders of more difficult" for the virus to mutate
3 The estimate of a 50% reduction in death toll.
I certainly can't remember something that didn't happen, herd immunity that *would've made mutation more difficult" or a "50% reduction" that didn't happen.
Your memory must be better than mine, it remembers statistics and estimates from counterfactual events.
> A vaccination card could very well be the entrance fee to a kinder and healthier community where people actually care about each other,
A vaccination-connected universal ID card will cause people to care about each other and to want to keep each other safe? This is a very strange thought process.
Do steel bars make people want to stay in jail in order to protect the community? Are they the entrance fee to creating a loving population of inmates?
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.
We've had to ask you many times to stop breaking the site guidelines. We're going to have to ban you if you keep doing this, so please stop doing this.
You broke the site guidelines extremely badly in this thread by starting and perpetuating a flamewar. We ban accounts that do that. Please don't do it again, and please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments generally.
Other users broke the site guidelines in this thread too, but your account was by far the primary offender.
>Sounds like a community of absolute arrogance and security theater disconnected from the realities of natural life.
Sounds like a lot of communities around the world, like Japan, where people proactively mask up with even the slightest tickle in the throat in order to avoid passing whatever they’ve caught onto anyone else.
Community-first attitudes are a hallmark of societal stability over the long term, as people think of the community first, and themselves second. Everyone benefits because the community is put ahead of selfishness and solipsism.
Pathologically individualistic “me, me, me” attitudes lead to a very superficial community that cannot effectively meet threats to its health and survival. Everyone reaches for “why should I make the sacrifice when I don’t immediately benefit?”, which means no-one will make the sacrifice move.
I find it very ironic that the military holds so many of the second group, when its ethos teaches the first. In a military unit, your first instinct is to jump on top of that grenade so that you protect your teammates at the cost of your own life. You put the team first, so that the team can survive with or without you. This only works if every single member of the team conforms to that same ideal. Yet the amount of antivax in the military - which is no different than refusing to protect your teammates because jumping on top of that grenade would hurt your own “personal freedoms” - is surprisingly prevalent.
> Community-first attitudes are a hallmark of societal stability over the long term, as people think of the community first, and themselves second. Everyone benefits because the community is put ahead of selfishness and solipsism.
Saudi Arabia is also a societally stable country with community-first attitudes. That doesn't mean it's a desirable place to live for every community. All communities rely on exclusion as much as they rely on inclusion. As a result, they have no concern for individual rights. Communities are more prone to solipsistic bandwagons than individuals (i.e. madness of the crowds) and often with more drastic consequences (e.g. internment, public executions, torture, genocide). Stability at the expense of personal liberty should not be sanctified at all whether by numbers or fiat.
> Pathologically individualistic “me, me, me” attitudes lead to a very superficial community that cannot effectively meet threats to its health and survival. Everyone reaches for “why should I make the sacrifice when I don’t immediately benefit?”, which means no-one will make the sacrifice move.
It's not a pathology. It's a question of integrity. Why should I be held to or punished for a standard that is contradictory to my values? While I agree health and survival are should be considerations on an individual level, I don't agree that the purpose of my health and survival is for society. If that were case I'd have no right no risk my health in the pursuit of liberty or exercise the ability to end my life as I fit.
> I find it very ironic that the military holds so many of the second group, when its ethos teaches the first. In a military unit, your first instinct is to jump on top of that grenade so that you protect your teammates at the cost of your own life. You put the team first, so that the team can survive with or without you. This only works if every single member of the team conforms to that same ideal. Yet the amount of antivax in the military - which is no different than refusing to protect your teammates because jumping on top of that grenade would hurt your own “personal freedoms” - is surprisingly prevalent
The military is a (with a few caveats) volunteer army. Joining the military is an exercise of choice rather than one of forced conscription. The military doesn't (at least officially) exist as the private gang to enforce the will of a monarch or warlord as many armies in 18th century Europe did. While there are different legal systems and cultural expectations for members of the army than there are for private citizens, every member is inculcated with understanding that, in addition to being protectors, they are members of the Land of Free – with most of the benefits and drawbacks that entails –and not the Land of the Societally Acceptable. In a free society, even scoundrel have rights.
If you have a sensible set of statistics that you believe justify surrender of personal sovereignty of identity to this degree, I would invite you to ponder a set of statistics that you would think completely monstrous, but still arguable, toward such a surrender. There is someone out there who believes the opposite to you, and if you think the creation of a power that benefits your opinions should take place, know that it could be used by this hypothetical person to benefit his opinions.
If you're ok with all that, then you have a justifiable position. If not, then you do not.
> If you have a sensible set of statistics that you believe justify surrender of personal sovereignty of identity to this degree, I would invite you to ponder a set of statistics that you would think completely monstrous, but still arguable, toward such a surrender. There is someone out there who believes the opposite to you, and if you think the creation of a power that benefits your opinions should take place, know that it could be used by this hypothetical person to benefit his opinions.
Your “personal sovereignty” argument is equally applicable to a sociopath who wants to maim and kill at will.
Because that’s what Plague Rats are: sociopaths that care only for their own “rights”, and are more than eager to let everyone around them die in order to avoid a trivial imposition that would significantly improve safety.
If you want to be a part of a community, you also have an obligation TO that community, to keep it safe from any pathogens you risk transmitting.
If you cannot do your duty of care to that community, find a different community to be in, then. Because you have demonstrated you don’t give a single shite about anyone but yourself.
Effectively, that is true; and the closer you get to absolute objectivity, the scarier it becomes to the average person (which was the crux of my point, so I appreciate your pointing out what you did). Fitting that the dude would have mentioned psychopaths, in that light.
What is this you're talking about? I talked about personal sovereignty OF IDENTITY. If you're going to strawman, at least strawman based on a correct reading of your target's point.
> If you hate your community and everyone in it so much that you want to hurt and possibly even kill them with the pathogens you carry, maybe you should find a different community to be in.
Interesting how you default to thinking about this as a binary: it's either you love your community or hate and want to kill your community. There's no indication of any sort of nuance, no indication of acknowledging that maybe there are other people in your community who might feel differently. And even if they did, their feelings are irrelevant because you're already dead set on insisting that you "know what's best for them"
If you hate your community so much that you'd insist on shoving your own beliefs down everyone else's throat and demonizing anyone who disagrees as killing the community, maybe you should find a different community to be in?
>If you hate your community so much that you'd insist on shoving your own beliefs down everyone else's throat
Like the antivaxxers protesting at and trying to block vaccination sites? Like the antivaxxers screaming obscenities at people wearing masks? Like the antivaxxers hunting down nurses and doctors who work in vaccination centres, in an attempt to intimidate them? Like those antivaxxers telling others to “shoot to kill” doctors and nurses?
Yeah, just like those antivaxxers.
Get out of here, you sociopathic Plague Rat. You hate everyone around you, and wish them to die. I don’t. I want to _protect_ the people around me, and am very willing to take a tiny jab in the arm to do so.
> Get out of here, you sociopathic Plague Rat. You hate everyone around you, and wish them to die. I don’t. I want to _protect_ the people around me, and am very willing to take a tiny jab in the arm to do so.
Please stay out of the USA. That's all I have to say
You can't post like this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. We ban accounts that do it. Please don't do it, or anything remotely like it, on HN again.
Yeah, I get it, even my bishops have said that vaccination is an act of mercy.
But how many acts of mercy do we owe our brothers and sisters?
Five? A dozen? Per year? Per month?
It was inevitable that the COVID-19 vaccines should require a followup and a booster and there were variants that mutated and then we just had a neverending cycle of vaccine opportunities.
In the '60s when polio was a spectre, it just began to be civic duty to get your round of shots. You got the polio and you got the pertussis and you got x y and z. Then people were taking in their babies so they could load up on vaccines before they were even threatened and then stuff was eradicated.
But what's the endgame for that? How many is enough? Who's gonna recommend fewer vaccines? Not the manufacturers. Not the pharmacies or physicians. Are insurance companies gonna put a rate limiter on vaccines? I don't know. It's hard to tell what is truly Medically Necessary and what is just putting on a show.
>Yeah, I get it, even my bishops have said that vaccination is an act of mercy.
>
>But how many acts of mercy do we owe our brothers and sisters?
>
>Five? A dozen? Per year? Per month?
Except all it is, is a little prick in the arm. Quite literally. Nothing more than that. Unless you are lucky, at which point your arm gets sore, and you have a bit of a temperature and feel under the weather for a day or so, which is evidence that the vaccine is producing an extra-robust immune response from your body, ensuring you are getting the full benefit of the vaccine.
Would I take it monthly, if a formulation was designed for that purpose? Yeah, I would. Why? Because I’m not a sociopath. I CARE about the people in my community. I don’t want to be that Typhoid Mary that causes ANY deaths at all, much less a superspreader event that kills multiple people.
It’s _all about_ putting the community first, and my trivial inconveniences (of getting the vaccine, and its effects) second. Because those inconveniences of the vaccine are truly trivial. It’s a few minutes out of my day, and a little bit of crankiness for a day or two if the immune response was robust.
Against the loss of someone else’s life, or that someone getting hit with Long COVID that cripples them for months or years, I CALL THAT A BARGAIN.
>It was inevitable that the COVID-19 vaccines should require a followup and a booster and there were variants that mutated and then we just had a neverending cycle of vaccine opportunities.
The precedent has already been there for decades. The point being, people who are at risk (the elderly) and those who take care of at-risk people are ALREADY taking yearly shots for the flu. Why? BECAUSE IT WORKS at strongly limiting transmission. They themselves get much less likely to be hit with the current strain, and even if they do get hit, it ends up being less severe and less transmissible. These people protect themselves and those vulnerable people around them by getting the yearly flu booster shots.
>But what's the endgame for that? How many is enough?
Now that - thanks to politics and anti-vaxx paranoia - we have missed the opportunity for broadly-similar herd immunity (there was only a tiny 3-4 month window when the vaccines first came out), it will never end. COVID has gone endemic because we couldn’t vaccinate quickly enough, and completely enough. We can place that outcome squarely at the feet of the anti-vaxxers who refused to get vaccinated, and the politics that made roll-out issues and vaccine wastage such a big problem.
>Who's gonna recommend fewer vaccines? Not the manufacturers. Not the pharmacies
They have no input into the process, nor should they.
>physicians.
If these are the same people who collect and publish data on in-the-wild vaccine effectiveness, then yes. They CAN be the people who show when enough is enough. And all that information is collected and collated through orgs like America’s Center for Disease Control, who then provide that data to people like immunologist (this being his career specialty) Dr. Fauci, who can then craft public policy that aligns with whatever real-world peer-reviewed data they have on hand.
By this narrow definition, we should be happy to contribute to welfare, but never to accept it. Pretty useful for an authoritarian.
If you hate your community and everyone in it so much that you want to hurt and possibly even kill them with the guns you carry, maybe you should find a different community to be in.
If you hate your community and everyone in it so much that you want to hurt and possibly even kill them with the knife you carry, maybe you should find a different community to be in.
If you hate your community and everyone in it so much that you want to hurt and possibly even kill them with the sharps you carry, maybe you should find a different community to be in.
Now all the citizens are submissive, cannot think for themselves, because they refused to stand up for their rights. Who knows what could have happened if a country stood up for their citizens.
Guns, knives, and sharps don’t go leaping out of your hands to kill anyone simply because these people are in your presence. You need to intentionally use or mishandle these items for them to be lethal.
Viruses, on the other hand, can make you a lethal object to anyone who comes close to you simply by you breathing without a mask.
And that’s why we have laws on the safe storage, handling, and public carrying of these items. We have RESTRICTIONS on their usage, in the same way a person can be restricted from being a Typhoid Mary who only has to be in the physical vicinity of someone else in order to kill them.
You intentionally ignored the first section of authoritarians. If this is a slippery slope, how do authoritarians get their power of not through a slippery slope?
If you actually cared about people and a zero covid policy would you would move there or isolate yourself forever so you can’t infect anyone even if you really vaccinated? I got my vaccine but I don’t pretend it prevents corona, the only zero covid policy is what China is doing. Do you support them?
What are you even talking about? Do you have any models that so far have been consistent with reality to support the idea that current ideas of vaccination and surgical mask wearing would actually meaningfully protect octogenarians from getting a SARS-CoV-2 (virus that causes COVID-19) infection before they die? What people like Vincent Racaniello, Daniel Griffin, and Paul Offit say is that immune memory pretty much can't be formed to any protective extent in people that old, so the correct strategy is for immune compromised, old, and otherwise high-risk people to make plans with their doctors to immediately take Paxlovid after infection is first detected, or otherwise to be infused with Remdesivir (Veklury) if that's not possible. For people like this, repeated boosting is just one step forward, and (a couple months later) one step back. The immune memory and anamnestic response never becomes enough. As far as anyone can tell, current vaccination strategies can't halt transmission anywhere in the world in real-life conditions, and it's highly unethical to give someone a biologic when the risk of that biologic outweighs the risk of not getting that biologic, or getting a less risky alternative.
EU is issuing biometric passports where are loaded your fingerprints and some EU states started to issue biometric citizen IDs, where are fingerprints stored too. So it is kind of already going on?
Additionally citizen IDs are nothing new, at least in Eastern Europe, where you will get one when you reach 15 years of age.
Aren't those stored on the card/passport, not in any central database? They already have your photo printed on them (as well as stored digitally in some cases). I don't really see a difference between a fingerprint reader comparing against the print stored in the ID card and a camera comparing your face to the photo printed on it.
Of course there is the case of a rogue terminal surreptitiously saving your fingerprint or photo, but even before we had automated facial recognition at border crossings, you'd still have to hand in your passport to be scanned (to read the MRZ) and stamped, so a rogue terminal could have been saving photos all along.
On passport, but also in the database of the department. Thing is that my country government administration sucks and those databases are not shared, so when you will get citizen ID with your fingerprints and photo, then you will go to get your driving license, you will need to get them photo again, because internal affairs department and traffic department does not talk to each other despite the fact, that they have offices in same building.
Ok yeah, that horrible. In Slovenia, your fingerprints (for biometric passports) are sent along with the print order to the manufacturing facility and then deleted. For all photo IDs (passport, ID card, driver's license, weapon permit), your photo is either scanned and sent along with the order or uploaded to a database that deletes it after 2 weeks. Nothing is ever stored permanently or accessible by anyone other than the people and systems directly involved in getting your document made. *
* That is, of course, what the law says. I have no reason to believe "the government" is breaking that law, but no way to verify either. It would probably be discovered and leaked very quickly if they were though.
Wait, what are the other options? How do they do identification without IDs in other countries? I heard that you can use driver’s license as an ID in the US, but isn’t it issued based on an actual ID? And not everyone can drive, no matter how auto-centric the US might be.
My only government-issued ID in the UK is my passport and my driving license. In theory if I didn't drive or leave the country I wouldn't need an ID at all.
Although the crackdown on illegal immigration means that I now need to prove my right to work in the UK whenever I take a new job. I'm not sure how I'd do this if I didn't have a passport.
"China is using all the means available to an authoritarian state to reach its 5-year R&D plan to make the biotechnology sector 5% of its GDP by 2020." - Tara O'Toole statement to Senate subcommittee 2019
Social Credit Systems are just lakes of aggregated data accessible by a government. From your health to how you choose you will end up a model in a prediction system.
One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles. At the same time, they have an enduring interest in adblocking, freedom, liberal or libertarian values and so on. This creates a situation where their economic wellbeing and working life is directly aimed towards enforcing surveillance capitalism and authoriarian tools, while at the same time they receive enough resources to avoid the brunt of the consequences, and their mental landscape deals with the cognitive dissonance to maintain an identity of progressiveness.
It directly mirrors the feudal system with a tiny portion of the population living in unimaginable luxury and employing another much larger but still small portion overall to keep the hierarchy running. In other words, billionaires supported by well-compensated SWE vassals who devise ever more sophisticated tools to extract value and data-powered obedience through surveillance from regular workers.
Do "most" posters at HN work at FAANG or in adtech? There's a lot of those people here for sure, but I can't believe they're anything close to the majority.
I don't have actual stats of course but intuitively if you tally:
- All the FAANG/FAANG suppliers
- All startups or established projects that involve data gathering, advertising, SEO, skinner boxes, dopamine response, parasocial relationship manipulation, optimizing time spent on controlled platforms and products
- All projects that facilitate the above as suppliers or second-order businesses
- All gig economy/surveilled/taylorized work facilitators
- All coding work that involves ranking and surveilling people for life altering services such as loans, insurance, healthcare
- All coding work done to optimize the wealth of the noble class (themselves the main beneficiaries of surveillance)
...there's probably not much left. Even if you maintain a strict definition and include only direct adtech shenanigans I wouldn't be surprised if that were a huge number in and of itself.
One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles.
That seems quite a strong statement. Has there been some sort of survey that motivated it?
(Full disclosure: I've been here a long time. I make my living from building tech. I have no interest in doing that kind of work for any employer at any price, nor in running my own business interests that way. I'm well aware that this probably leaves lots of money on the table in both cases and I have absolutely no problem with that. And my cognitive dissonance can look at itself in the mirror just fine when it wakes up in the morning before browsing an adblocked version of the web over breakfast.)
> One aspect I find interesting about HN is that most of the posters there are involved in adtech, data-gathering, FAANGs, or adjacent businesses, whilst reaping very high rewards for their troubles. At the same time, they have an enduring interest in adblocking, freedom, liberal or libertarian values and so on.
I think attributing features of the community as a whole to individuals within that community like this leads to incorrect assumptions. The HN community is varied. I suspect if you were to put an HN reader who strongly values user freedom and privacy and an HN reader working on adtech in the same room, we would not agree on many of these topics.
There are a ton of profiles I've seen over the years. A few seemed to have lifestyles so independent and idiosyncratic that they'd put the Unabomber to shame. Many were involved in fascinating and helpful projects. But I find the assumption that the overall tone is of venture capital, digital nomadism, gentrification and so on to be fairly sensible as well as the idea that as whole the community greatly contributes to increasing authoritarianism.
> This creates a situation where their economic wellbeing and working life is directly aimed towards enforcing surveillance capitalism and authoriarian tools
Adtech doesn't have to be surveillance capitalism
If we're talking about personalized adtech, sure. But if we're talking about just adtech in general, not necessarily
If you provide infrastructure or support for something, and that something is almost exclusively surveillance and data-gathering based, that's not so great either.
I'm grateful to have served a career that has mostly kept my conscience clear.
I began life as a NOC operator at a regional ISP, when ISPs were merely an on-ramp to Al Gore's Paradise in the Cloud.
I helped many employers and clients connect to the Internet somewhat securely. If the Internet is evil then so am I. I've never worked for FAANGs or adtech or data-gatherers.
Late in my career I came around to academia. Worked for a NASA-JPL project at a university. Now I work for an online program manager.
The data we collect from students is protected by FERPA, and I'd say we make an effort to collect as little as possible, and the students offer it all voluntarily. Win/win.
One thing I notice from the community is that for previous generations (let's say pre-2005) it was significantly easier to make a great living as a programmer without engaging in shady nonsense. My post was very critical, but to some extent it's hard to escape the logic of the times when you have to navigate them.
If someone works for a surveillance company in a non-trivial role, they are furthering the progress of surveillance. They can't wash their hands of it.
The end result of their work is to increase the power and success of a surveillance company, one of the most successful and powerful surveillance companies in the world if not the most, so how could they possibly not be involved or morally responsible? They don't exist in a vaccuum where their work is magically independent of their employer. This is typically the sort of cognitive dissonance I'm trying to highlight.
Can you imagine someone saying "Nah I'm not responsible for what the Russian army does, I'm just paid by them to help with logistics"?
Logistics is in direct support of, and enables, Russian military action in your example. Designing a propeller for a flying vehicle does not further surveillance.
If I lay out the reasoning more precisely and in the simplest terms, maybe it would then be easier to identify which part might be the stumbling block here.
1. An employee of Google makes propellers for Google.
2. The sum of their work benefits Google, either in profit, new assets or some other way, because Google isn't employing them just for fun
3. As an adtech company, surveillance and datagathering are at the core of Google's activities and modus operandi.
4. The growth in power and reach of Google thus directly implies increased surveillance
5. As per 2., The employee currently dedicates their working life to making Google more successful and powerful
6. Therefore the employee furthers surveillance and datagathering, even if their contribution might be small
Perhaps the product this engineer works on does not pan out, maybe he unwittingly makes the company weaker by siphoning capital on a project that eventually fails. This seems to be a common case at Alphabet.
It could also be the case that reinvestment of capital from the engineer's efforts is in a line of business orthogonal to surveillance. Indeed a company making flying cars and engaging in surveillance is clearly already not contributing 100% of their working capital to expand their surveillance capabilities.
SSNs are incredibly insecure (and also used in a way they were never intended). I don't think we need biometrics to replace them, but if there's a push to replace them, people will likely push for biometrics as hard as possible
The 4th Amendment right to privacy has been so badly violated by the US Federal Government and TSA that the Constitution is no longer valid - the contract is beyond broken, the US government has descended into absolute dictatorship and it is the duty of all Americans to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
We have a Constitutional Convention, enact a new Constitution and a new Capital, then release all the dirty secrets from the old (current) government similar to how documents were released in the early 1990’s when the Soviet Union fell apart.
The armed services, being part of the old government would lose their authority along with the rest.
This assumes a peaceful transition of power, if violence is used instead all bets are off.
Civil disobedience is a serious threat to the power of the US government. 19 states out of 34 states have already committed to the convention of states. The US Federal government knows all too well how to deal with violence but they don’t know how to handle peaceful mass non-compliance.
> Civil disobedience is a serious threat to the power of the US government.
Potentially if it could be organized.
> 19 states out of 34 states have already committed to the convention of states.
This is a non-sequitur and has nothing to do with civil disobedience nor the dissolution of the federal govt.
> The US Federal government knows all too well how to deal with violence but they don’t know how to handle peaceful mass non-compliance.
I think a lot of people would dispute this. The standard ways to deal with peaceful mass non-compliance have been known by western governments forever:
1. Split the population into factions with extremes who won't remain peaceful.
if that fails the:
2. Insert agents-provocateur into the peaceful group to spur violence.
Either way the formula is the same - turn an non-violent protest into a violent one and then deal with it as such.
I suppose that there are some good examples of Government inserting agitators recently like the Canadian truckers protest in Ottawa and the Jan 6th protest in Washington DC. However, the government was not entirely successful at destroying these resistance movements and they occurred during a time of relative economic prosperity. Economic forces will have a major impact on the willingness for the population to resist en masse so it may simply be a matter of timing.
> Economic forces will have a major impact on the willingness for the population to resist en masse so it may simply be a matter of timing.
If that happens, there is no reason at all to imagine there will be unified non-violent protest leading to the peaceful stepping down of the US government in favor of something less oppressive.
You only have to look at what has happened in other countries where the populous has been impoverished.
While I wholeheartedly agree with where you're coming from (most rights listed in the Bill of Rights are being violated in some blatant manner), the problem is that vein of thought has now been claimed by an authoritarian movement idolizing an empty huckster who wears a diaper. Something similar happens to every good political critique - when it finally starts getting traction in the wider sphere, it's taken over by opportunists leading morons, and the whole thing just goes sideways.
I've reacted by becoming much more conservative, voting for deep state supporting candidates because at least they're the devil we know. I guess I'll just keep my head down politically and keep working on communications technology that might extricate us from the state gradually. Because replacing the state top-down with fascist madmen certainly isn't going to lead anywhere good.
There is nothing friendly or helpful or optimistic about digital identity schemes, they are domestic passports for movement, and a pervasive, specific and ongoing threat against you as an individual for giving the appearance of non-compliance, or even a lack of enthusiasm for compliance. It's dominion. Honestly, a digital ID scheme is what the next global, multi year or even decade long land war will be fought over. I know we have a convention about avoiding discussions of violence, but digital ID, just like the ID schemes of early 20th c Europe and Russia, is the thing that you either nip in the bud in the present, or the number of lives that will be lost over it just grows every single day as the cancer of these systems establishes itself in our societies.
There is zero hyperbole in this. I've worked on digital identity solutions, and fundamentally, they are not a consumer product anybody actually wants because their use cases are all about enforcing rules against the identity subject. The only way the tech survives is it must be mandated, and then it's a question of whose problem does it solve?
The only people that a global digital identity solves a problem for are the people administering it, literally against the whole world. The survivors will ask, "how did it all happen so fast, what were the warnings?" and this obscure comment will be the hunger stone and harbinger. I'm literally saying millions of people will die, partially because of my inability to be persuasive, but mostly because of your misunderstanding of what this technology does and of what it is the effect.
Arguably, the caste system maintains social order in India, and so digital ID for castes who are educated to be treated poorly isn't a change. The change would be for westernized countries where everyone used to be taught they have freedom and human dignity.
> they are not a consumer product anybody actually wants because their use cases are all about enforcing rules against the identity subject. The only way the tech survives is it must be mandated, and then it's a question of whose problem does it solve?
Doesn't the CLEAR example in the article's opening paragraph contradict your claim?
One could argue that the problem CLEAR solves for regular consumers is a problem manufactured by those administering it. Depends on how one feels about the TSA…
I'm in tears. So blissful to have understanding people among tech enthusiasts! Usually such topics as surveillance, biometry, privacy, control of people, digital currencies, dangers of wireless, etc. rise immediate skepticism and hate. I'm glad more and more people around are shifting from indifference.
I'm guessing the stated mission has been changed once or twice since it was founded.
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