> The torment nexus was built by engineers. Not management.
Before the more recent wave of successful tech startups (say, from 2010 on), a very large amount of programmers were incredibly sensitive to anything related to topics like (posisbility of) surveillance, privacy, authorities (including government), centralized infrastructures, DRM etc.
In my feeling, the only reason why this mindset shifted is because from this wave on, in the USA, programmers were showered in money.
The interesting question rather is: now that tech companies want to become more frugal with respect to paying programmers, will the mindset among programmers shift back or not?
The interesting thing is despite all that money the basic functionality of tech except for llms has hardly changed for at least a decade if not more. The reason llms are showered with money is everything else is stagnant.
Workers are necessary but not sufficient for most businesses. You also need capital. This can be provided by the workers and is for many worker owners businesses, but when the business is very capital intensive that's just not feasible.
Are workers going to be able to fund Apple's factories or ExxonMobil's oil exploration? No, so they're not in charge.
You absolutely can start a worker owned business right now, or go work for one.
Of course. That is why state guided worker coops are a good idea. Or state incentives to provide loans at good interest rates to worker coops.
The state provides capital, the workers operate the business, make management decisions, and have democratic input like the public does.
You might say, that kind of system isn't a perfect solution, but currently we have a dictatorship of wealthy individuals and businesses who are wholly unaccountable.
That's fine, just know that you permanently forfeit any right to complain about others doing things for personal gain that indirectly harm yourself.
> I want to live a good life, and provide for my family.
This is a lie you're telling yourself, you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus. Billions of people do so indeed.
> I want to get rich too.
You should've stopped here, but then it became too much so you had to resort to appending that nonsense. It's pure greed at the cost of everyone else, that's all. Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
> you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus
Doubt. You don't become truly wealthy without doing what sociopathic CEOs do on a daily basis. Society actively rewards that stuff, and it's only getting worse with time.
> Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.
Sounds like a winning strategy to me. That's the exact sort of person this world rewards.
Things are not looking good out there. Billions of people get by without compromising? Billions of people live in poverty too. Not something I'm looking forward to dealing with, should the great AI replacement ever come knocking on my door.
And your reasoning is exactly what makes it a winning strategy. "If other people do it, then why not me?" That makes it that they are no longer other people, you yourself are a part of that group now. One could argue that it is an even worse position. It literally makes you an enabler of the problem you see in the world, while at the same time you acknowledge it as an even existential problem.
When we are with billions, we cannot all be 'truly' wealthy in a material sense and by definition your wealth will come at the expense of others. Your reasoning makes me sad as instead of questioning what constitutes true wealth, it seems you are guided by an exclusively materialistic view of it and join the destructive behaviour you see around you out of fear of not having enough.
> Your reasoning makes me sad as instead of questioning what constitutes true wealth, it seems you are guided by an exclusively materialistic view of it and join the destructive behaviour you see around you out of fear of not having enough.
unfortunately that is the state of our society right now and it is hard to see this changing.
Yeah. At some point you get tired of paying the costs that others sociopathically push onto you and start trying to take at least some of the value for yourself instead.
If society has a problem with that, then maybe it should start demonstrating it by making examples out of all those sociopaths instead of turning the other way and quietly profiting from it while the nobodies seethe impotently about things they have no power to change.
> Your reasoning makes me sad as instead of questioning what constitutes true wealth, it seems you are guided by an exclusively materialistic view of it and join the destructive behaviour you see around you out of fear of not having enough.
I'm a free software developer. I quite literally give it all away. I'm also a doctor in a 3rd world country. I work hard to help people for wages that would make 300k+/year 1st world doctors cry themselves to sleep.
I was actually fine taking the moral high road... Until a couple years ago. What changed? I got married. Got people depending on me now. So my patience and empathy for people who are not literally paying my bills is indeed starting to wear a bit thin.
Sad? No one's sadder about it than me. This existential realization gave me actual diagnosed depression. I literally go to therapy because of this shit. That sort of cold sociopathy is simply not the way I was raised.
The problem is my mind cannot deal with this corrupt world by idealizing it. For my own psychological and financial well being, I cannot continue to entertain ideas of what the world could be, if only people were good. I must interpret the world based on what's real.
> If society has a problem with that, then maybe it should start demonstrating it by making examples out of all those sociopaths instead of turning the other way and quietly profiting from it while the nobodies seethe impotently about things they have no power to change.
You are the society.
> I was actually fine taking the moral high road... Until a couple years ago. What changed? I got married. Got people depending on me now. So my patience and empathy for people who are not literally paying my bills is indeed starting to wear a bit thin.
This is just an awful excuse. People depending on you is the norm, has been for all of history of humankind and remains so to this day. That's literally human life, people depending on each other. Out of all the good people in this world even at this moment who happen to be adult men, I'd wager 80% of them has had a dependent. Historically, it will have been 99.9%.
I'm happy to talk as someone who also has dependents - again, as is the global societal norm for adult men in particular (prime HN demographic) and has been since forever - and who clearly shares your view on many things about modern society, yet doesn't turn it into an excuse to help build the torment nexus.
> Doubt. You don't become truly wealthy without doing what sociopathic CEOs do on a daily basis. Society actively rewards that stuff, and it's only getting worse with time.
I'm sorry but this is really basic reading skills. I quoted "have a good life and provide for family", then "both" refers to "have a good life" and "provide for family".
> Sounds like a winning strategy to me. That's the exact sort of person this world rewards.
Winning in what? Winning in becoming a disgusting person? Definitely. That tends to be the direct opposite of what people want to become though, for good reason. It's also what causes the most deathbed regret.
Yeah, maybe you won't "starve"... But will you live? Or will you merely survive? If that?
It's not looking too good out there. We've got trillionaires bragging to people's faces about how they're all going to be replaced by their AIs. It got to the point someone threw a molotov into one CEO's home.
Source of income? The promise of AI is to literally make all humans economically redundant. In a capitalist world, what is the point of keeping economically useless people alive? People who do nothing but cost society money? Why not turn them all into soylent instead?
If we don't create a post-scarcity society now, I'm not sure we ever will. Choices aren't looking too good out there.
Their point, however, is perfectly clear - it’s practically obvious. No one forced them at gunpoint (unlike those scientists, figuratively speaking). Why are you pretending not to understand?
Of course not. Modern weapons are far more sophisticated. Society does not need to point guns at people to drive behavior anymore, it is sufficient to deploy simple economics. People feel the sting of the economic lash just the same as the literal instrument.
Yeah sure :) People working in one of the most privileged professions on Earth are bound hand and foot with golden shackles and are forced - literally forced - to continue spreading evil throughout the world in order to keep their salaries of several hundred thousand dollars. The horror!
Yes? Refuse, and you lose all of those privileges. The golden shackles go away and are replaced with the rusty shackles of poverty. Feeling the pressure yet?
The richer you are, the more you've got to lose. Easy to be a radical when you've got nothing. Nowhere you can go but up. If you're privileged, there's a long way to fall.
It couldn't exist without engineers.