[Bakary]

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.

[Eleison23]

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.

[Bakary]

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.

[ryukafalz]

> 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.

[Bakary]

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.

[Silhouette]

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.)

[whoooooo123]

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.

[Bakary]

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.

[sosborn]

I think your assumptions are incorrect, but it would be really fun/interesting to test our thoughts out with a user survey.

[muaytimbo]

A lot of positions even within FAANGs have nothing to do with Surveillance.

[Bakary]

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.

[muaytimbo]

Not really, I don't blame a mechanical engineer working on flying cars at Alphabet for Google's surveillance. Doesn't make sense.

[Bakary]

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"?

[muaytimbo]

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.

[Bakary]

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

[cr4nberry]

> 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

[franga2000]

"adtech" implies targeting and/or personalization, otherwise it wouldn't have the "tech" part - just "advertising".

[cr4nberry]

Whenever I've heard it used it's referring to general ads infra, which includes personalization. But there's also a lot more to it

[Bakary]

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.