[bilbo0s]

I guess to be fair, there always has been an authoritarian bent to Western democracies. It's just that most of us here on HN are not members of the groups against which those democracies employ authoritarian practices. It just kind of shows you why you have to stand up as soon as you see a practice or law that's F'ed up. It's pretty much a guarantee that on a time-scale long enough, that government will use that practice on you.

[jussaying2]

Even better, the folks who frequent HN could stop aiding authoritarianism by building the tech, but that would require turning down lucrative RSUs, so I'm not holding my breath.

[1827162]

I totally nuked my career in communications and networking as a result of Internet mass surveillance and the prosecution of Orwellian "thought crimes". It really is a modern day witch hunt. Had to do something else, and am so much happier now that it's gone.

Yes, I was so outraged and shocked from it, what the government was doing, specifically regarding Internet pornography, that I had "moral injury". A condition not dissimilar from PTSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury

We are living in the 21st Century and we are still behaving, on some level like it's 1692. The year when the Salem witch trials were carried out.

And few people speak up about what's going on. They consider it normal. Because of how the Overton window works. How the frog has boiled so slowly over the decades.

[barnabee]

We should not only stop building tech that aids authoritarianism but start building tech that fights it.

Time for a cypherpunk revival.

[brokenmachine]

Dystopia is where the real money's at.

[1827162]

And they'll just infiltrate your open source project, in the name of preventing petty "harassment" of developers. That way they will allow weaknesses in the protocol to arise, due to attrition of the best developers. And there you go, everything has been handed over to intelligence agencies, who can now easily break its security.