[nonrandomstring]

> I managed to cure myself of this addiction by... cheating. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those silly tasks were now getting done automatically, my progression was assured and the game's hold over me was destroyed.

This is absolutely fascinating. It's something I kinda missed from Digital Vegan, thinking that extrication would be a matter only of self-mastery and access to good information rather than fighting back. Most people do not have that capability.

But fighting back is exactly what you've done, and it's worked for you. I wrote earlier that the relationship between users and developers is increasingly an adversarial one [1]. Things like "right to repair" have become an open battle between ecological common-sense and pure greed. Where your health, wealth and environment is under attack from rampant greed a legitimate (moral/ethical) response to hostile technology is obviously hacking back.

But it's not a universalisable moral principle, unless we want a descent into chaos and digital "civil war". Therefore the proper solution is to start recognising what some of these companies are doing as crimes. You need the law on your side when you act in self-defence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31626063

[matheusmoreira]

EFF calls this adversarial interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

A digital civil war is preferable to surrendering to the designs of exploitative corporations. We should fight back on principle. We should block ads and tracking, scrape websites, reverse engineer private APIs, violate DRM technology, replace their proprietary apps with our own free software that we control, feed them false data to poison their data sets... We should do everything we possibly can to defeat any attempt to exploit us. We don't need their permission to do it either.

Turning things into crimes is the corporation's game. They're the ones with billions of dollars and expensive lobbyists. We shouldn't be trying to beat them in this space. We need ubiquitous subversive technology that neutralizes their exploitation whether the laws allow it or not. It shouldn't matter whether it's legal or illegal. We need technology that makes it impossible for them to exploit us in any way, and we define what is and isn't acceptable or exploitative.

[geysersam]

That sounds like an arms race that's both wasteful and difficult to win. Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society? These corporations are not out to get us. They maximize profit constrained by the regulatory environment. We have to guide them, and channel their capacity for good.

[matheusmoreira]

> That sounds like an arms race that's both wasteful and difficult to win.

It is.

> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?

We should, if we can. I'm just not holding my breath.

I think copyright should be abolished but the trillion dollar companies that depend on it will never allow that to happen. So we're better off de facto abolishing it by making copyright unenforceable and eliminating consequences for copyright infringement.

I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.

[sbarre]

>I think advertising should be illegal but companies like Google will never let that happen. So I use software like uBlock Origin to block ads whenever I can.

Honest question (and I am not fan of advertising here and not trying to be an apologist)..

What business model replaces it, in your mind?

In the world that exists today, how do companies who provide free services online (including the creation of information) pay their staff and their operational costs, if not through being paid to display ads or sponsorships?

Do all websites become subscriptions?

[wahnfrieden]

The replacement is not another business model

[sbarre]

Sure that's a nice thought.. Then reality comes knocking.

[_jal]

> Why should we not use the tools democracy provides to shape society?

Turns out that's also a Red Queen's race. And if you look at the lobbying costs vs. potential rewards, there's a lot of room for escalation in US politics.

[q-big]

> Therefore the proper solution is to start recognising what some of these companies are doing as crimes. You need the law on your side when you act in self-defence.

The only difference is who does the concrete fighting: you by yourself, or let the police and criminal prosecution do the fighting.

[nonrandomstring]

Good question. I'm not sure which would be faster and fairer. Police and courts have enough to do dealing with reality, without getting involved in our messy hacker games. So long as the law is clear, we should want people to help themselves first and foremost. The key is really dismantling protectionist laws that enable powerful aggressors, not arming the people with more protectors. On what the law cannot speak it should remain silent, and I do believe that vast tracts of so-called "cyber-law" are absolute rubbish - utterly unfair, bought by lobbyists and written by incompetents to defend the barons' castles. Take this down and let nature run its course to restore the proper balance.

[skohan]

I agree regulation is needed. I think these situations are also partially due to a failure of anti-trust. In many of these cases, there is insufficient competition for these companies to be forced to act in the user’s best interest.

Addictive products are another case where the user is unable to choose in favor of their own self-interest, because the product is exploiting weak points in human psychology.

[sandworm101]

It is an alcoholic leaping over the bar to start drinking directly from the tap. It is a violation of the rules and will get you banned, but it will not cure a true addiction. Some gamblers are addicted to the game, but some are actually addicted to the money they want to win from gambling. Gaining access to free ingame stuff by cheating might mitigate some harmful economic effects but it wont necessarily allow an addict to stop. Making the beer free might stop kids from thinking it cool. It wont stop someone actually addicted to beer.

[matheusmoreira]

> Gaining access to free ingame stuff by cheating might mitigate some harmful economic effects but it wont necessarily allow an addict to stop.

The free stuff exists to instill an habit in players. People literally force themselves to log into the game and do daily tasks because otherwise they're missing out on daily rewards.

My bot completely nullified their little scheduled rewards design. I was now free to play the game whenever I actually felt like playing. Then I discovered I didn't actually feel like it, I was just going through the motions due to negative reinforcement.

Don't underestimate the power of software. It can literally liberate us.

> It is a violation of the rules and will get you banned

Whatever. No big loss.