[rbanffy]

Politicians always had that power, because it was always technically possible. To think we could have done anything to stop it once there was a will to do it is naive. If you doubt it, just look at Palantir. People like us built that - Thiel and his minions only paid their salaries.

[trumpdong]

And they got filthy rich. If I built Palantir instead, I'd be filthy rich. It's a pretty rational choice to build Palantir. Sadly.

[naishoya]

The sequence of this is reversed. First Thiel got filthy rich, and THEN he used that money to hire people who didn't whistle-blow to build Palantir.

If EVERYONE that got hired to build the enshittification of humanity would just speak up about what they were asked to build there is no 'next guy' - ar at least we all know that the 'next guy' is wilfully complicit in the evil done at the company and you can disinvite him to family reunions and refuse him membership in the golf club for humanitarian violations.

I.E. What good is a mortgage payment when the next guy cant hire a plumber because the whole town knows he's a vile POS?

But the line of people doing the work, and keeping their mouths shut about it is nearly an unbroken chain from start to end. And here we are because no one wants to be the only one speaking out against evil, when we all should be.

[trumpdong]

You could work at Palantir and leak details, and I don't think thats what this discussion is about. If you wanted to destroy a company from the inside by whatever means, you'd have to get hired there.

[naishoya]

Right, the discussion isn't about one employee trying to take down a known evil operations, rather I was positing a situation whereby these evils never got off the ground, where all of the employees tasked with building Palantir, or the like, en masse simply refused to do nefarious projects and refused the work. If they ALL or MOST then disclosed that "super rich dude wants to build a thing to erode/destroy the freedom of all but the super rich dude club" then the common knowledge would be that the full group of "next hires" is both aware of this going into the job interviews and when the nefarious project is deployed against us all, we know they are expressly complicit in the development of evils.

That's not my view of how things are, or how they would ever actually be, just one loose idea of how we might have avoided the current outcome, if all of the developers at "Nefarious, Inc." had not been trying as hard as possible to join the ranks of some subset of "rich dude club" as a gradient above poverty in any nation.

I get the need to make a living; and I have actually gone from working profitably in IT to subsistence goat farmer who's wardrobe was entirely found at the local waste transfer station's "community exchange table" for over ten years. So I do know the cost of 'declining to participate in building tools for evil' firsthand. It's not a game; and it has serious outcomes if you aren't located in, or relocate to, a place with significant natural resources for survival. Requirements include clean and plentiful rainfall, long growing seasons, volcanic or otherwise enriched||enrichable soil, healthy wild game populations and functional local systems for ensuring the durability of the same, intact social networks of mutual support among a community of people in similar conditions with the cultural traditions for shared resources, and the willing support of your spouse, partner, and dependent family members.

The learning curve from suburban North America is not so much steep, as it is a cliff. The lessons are immeasurable; and there is so much we would/will do different the next time going from "here" to "there."

Stay tuned.

[account42]

Boiling the frog is a thing. As is laying the groundwork. Governments are much less likely to pull off multi-decade plans than they are to make use of whatever technology is already out there.