Things were build by passionate people, who had the skills and the means to do it.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
> I feel that modern tech first took away the passion
As soon as something becomes potentially profitable, the MBAs enter the room, and the fun goes away. The more profitable it gets, the more toxic it gets, too.
I object to your essentialism. Presuming monolithic psychological characteristics, motivations, or behaviors from someone’s academic degree is just as false as presuming them from someone’s skin color, race, sex, gender, occupation, age, or other observable characteristics.
I’m sure you meant no harm, but think you can do better than giving into simplistic base rate fallacy thinking, especially as you are also factually wrong: arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs. In fact, two of them were started by Harvard college dropouts and one of them by Stanford PhDs. The big tech companies I can think of that were started by MBAs (eBay, grubhub, intuit, Bloomberg) are arguably much less harmful, though two of them became quasi-monopolies.
The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming).
> arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs
The parent commenter didn't say anything about founders, that was your addition.
A reasonable interpretation of the parent comment is that these companies were in fact fun places to work until the MBAs arrived. Personally I don't take offense using MBA as a shorthand for "individuals more focused on profitability than purpose" even though I recognize that doesn't describe everyone with that degree, although admittedly, part of that is because I don't have a better term for it. It's a bit like my own handle; I don't in fact think every corporation is inherently evil, but when I say "anticorporate" there is a common understanding that I'm opposed to many of the shitty behavior of modern corporations, and not that I'm nitpicking that LLCs or sole proprietorships are somehow better forms of legal entity.
> The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming).
Oh there absolutely are cabals at work. The infamous "Paypal mafia" [1] where multiple members eventually infiltrated the US government comes to my mind, and Ivy League universities in general are even more infamous for very close knit alumni networks.
There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.
Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.
there's an entire community of people making simple websites on places like neocities. You don't find "web development" a drag, you find making a website for some company you don't give a shit about a drag (as you should).
That is the internet I want to see again: people making their own little websites with questionable design choices about whatever topics they're passionate about. I'm willing to tolerate blink tags and animated gifs for this.
It’s all still there but you’re going to have to find it just like the “good old days”. No algorithm is going to push it to you, you’re going to have to spend the effort.
The point is that it was fun to make it for yourself, about anything you're passionate about. There was never a pay calculation because you did it on your own, because you wanted to.
It depends how large your definition of "cabal" is. There are plenty of corporations who are misaligned with societal positives, consisting of people individually acting in the interest of the corporation as part of their day jobs. When your job's long term success requires helping your company get an edge over the competition and you're willing to be expedient with long term thinking, in aggregate bad things can happen.
It's something of a mix of both - the world is a web of cabals executing conspiracies but simultaneously most people are so bad at systems thinking that they can't identify the conspiracies from people acting individually in their own interests.
For example, in this instance the fall of the web to commercial interests is more or less inevitable if you look at the basics, regardless of conspiracies (people getting paid produce more & better quality stuff than people making a hobby of it). But if you look at the execution of that dynamic there are always going to be small highly motivated groups of people trying to achieve specific goals on the sly.
It is unusual for any individual cabal to be powerful enough to control a situation.
It's still not a conspiracy. Those are all local responses to incentives. The incentive structure, the system, is what determines the outcome, not the players.
In a basketball game who wins may vary but you know balls will go through hoops because that's what the rule set of the game incentivizes.
Investors want returns so number must go up. Eventually companies and their executives exhaust the basic honest core business so they have to start scraping for more revenue growth. Eventually this leads to the familiar process of enshittification where the company flips the script and sells the customers as the product and nickel and dimes people. This eventually ruins the product but number must still go up, so who else can pay? Criminals, scammers, government propagandists, political influence operations, intelligence agencies, militaries, etc.
We get what I just described for the same reason basketball makes balls go through hoops.
Why does number have to go up? Because you want to retire. Your pension funds and banks and such hire financial experts to invest. Those experts invest in things that make number go up because that's their job.
That's why this is hard. You are a player. We are all both hurt by the system and benefit by the system. It feeds us and protects us and enslaves us. Everything is paradoxes and feedback loops. When you get a job you want things like benefits and union wages, but when you go shopping you pick the cheapest product which means you want to break unions.
Conspiracism is a cop out from trying to understand this. It's easier to just pick a single scapegoat (often a make believe one) and blame them.
I'm not saying all the people in all the links you posted are great people, just that they're not the architect of this. There is no architect. The game was designed by the mad blind idiot gods of complexity and evolution.
I've had the thesis for a long time that humans are not actually intelligent. We are merely clever. A clever organism can deploy local intelligence to maximize its outcome in a game. A truly intelligent organism would understand the game and become the architect. We might not have the cognitive capacity for this. Maybe ASI can, or can help us.
Maybe that's why the aliens aren't talking to us. Anyone capable of star travel is the latter. They take a look and think "interesting fauna down there but nothing intelligent yet. They only try to win games."
the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere.
The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.
> the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere.
Unfortunately, FOSS maintainers pretty much everywhere have been drowning for years. First it was "security researchers" meat-proxying dependabot or people looking to gamify their Github stats by filing spam merge requests for typos in readmes, and now it's "security researchers" running one of the usual AI agent suspects and flooding projects with reports of varying kinds of quality.
For me, the passion is pretty much gone. It's slop everywhere.
> The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.
Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet.
> Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet.
You can avoid most of that with a simple static website. Even if you manage the web server and OS yourself. KISS is a lifesaver.
Personally, I think it's good that volunteers build the internet and do things like that, but fundamentally, the barrier to the web has become too high. In the past, making a website was easier than you'd think, and the legal side was a bit more lenient, but these days, as laws accumulate precedents, there are many things to pay attention to, and starting with security, the number of things you need to worry about has increased.
The problem is that in the early days of the internet, people needed time to grow together. But these days, the barrier to entry is fundamentally higher than before. And even when making one site, you have to worry about various things...
In my view, there is also the point that people forget the fact that as business becomes more sophisticated and technology develops, the basic skills of the people involved need to increase accordingly. The reasons the internet has gotten worse are complex. For example, there is definitely the problem of people trying to make money through advertising and such, but fundamentally, the technical barrier to attracting people's attention has also risen a lot.
The amount of technology a single individual developer has to handle has also increased a lot.
Modern tech did not make anything a product, people using the tech did. But not all, many of us do things for fun and passion still, just don’t expect money for it.
Not everything is cloud, I still use mostly things that are not cloud based. And I have lots of libraries and little utilities I maintain, none of which are related to cloud, anyone can keep doing that forever, there are lots of other developers and even normal people who still want to use those tools and apps.
And come on, AI doesn’t do anything to you, it’s you who chooses when and whether to use AI for whatever purpose, and as a helper for when things get tough, AI is amazing, like a private, infinitely patient and knowledgeable personal assistant. You don’t need to let it do everything for you , keep doing things the way you enjoy it, ai can be just an infinitely superior version of StackOverflow. Or a tutor. It doesn’t need to replace you.
I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible
- If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts.
- If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..."
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Don't you believe it.
You don't need a "evil cabal" in the image of a movie caricature. It is enough to discuss with a wink-and-a-nod, shared incentives, product roadmaps, sharing profits from a global pie, circular deals etc. for a concerted group to form and start gaming the system behind the scenes.
The Computer Revolution was first and foremost a "People and Individual Freedoms" revolution. Cheap open PC hardware married to free open software made it happen. Networking and Data-Sharing were supposed to be neutral. Device control was taken away, specifically with Apple's iPhone showing the way, and then Network/Data control by Cloud companies showing the way.
The propaganda is always the same viz. "for the ultimate benefit of the end-user". Don't think/learn too much and just pay us the money to do it for you; You are nothing but just the source of revenue/profits for us.
The same thing is happening with AI where it is impossible for an individual to play due to scale and money involved.
Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Walter Lippmann, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky would all feel deeply vindicated and proud.
>> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this
There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS.
(lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.)
I agree to some extent; however had I still contribute to Wikipedia and Wikipedia, while it has problems, is still fairly good (quality-wise could be better, a lot of content from discussions should be added to main articles but I usually confine myself to just suggest things on discussions and let others make a decision then).
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
> Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
I think that's right, but I also think the OP had a point as well: in some ways, the negative effects of technology, in addition to being pushed by fat corporations, are also an emergent effect of the technology itself that goes beyond intention. Examples:
* Google probably didn't have a master plan to push SEO slop, but it came about anyway because it's in human nature to game the system.
* If someone creates one product to become more efficient, it's likely that another person will also do so, even if the net result is negative due to the prisoner's dilemma. (Bug finding vs Bug exploitation).
Etc. You can think of many examples, but how much in tech creates arms race scenarios that we MUST play out to stay afloat? How many people use LLMs just to keep up with their peers who use them?
That creates an emergent phenomena of creating problems not necessarily planned, even though a lot of the impetus to create the arms-race scenarios WERE intented by the rich.
I love these two projects for how they are, and continue to be, built. They say something hopeful and deep about humanity.
Before Linux and Wikipedia, we assumed that if you gave everyone a sharpie, that we would graffiti and deface the world.
Instead, we learned that humans will stop and sit and write the most thorough history ever seen for the sake of free knowledge and create the tools for us to do so.
While a lot of this involved volunteers and people taking initiative, a lot of this is also people working and being paid to do so. Linus Torvalds was getting paid to work on the Linux kernel from pretty early on, for example. And a lot of contributions made to Linux are done by software engineers working for a very wide range of companies that each have their own commercial interest in moving the Linux kernel forward or getting their drivers or whatever.
Decentralization does not imply charity. You see the same around openstreetmap. There are a lot of organizations that benefit from their data that actively contribute to it or make donations to keep development funded. Same with Wikipedia.
This has happened with most of the fields - volunteers do a lot of work, make their fields/areas good, raise interest, bring ppl into it which usually brings money then which usually brings money chasers who then usually "optimize" the hell out of every metric for maximum gains.
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
Is there a law that says "whenever something is profitable, people attracted to money will come for the money". And obviously, the best way to make money is not to build good tech.
Missed some mentions like crowdfunding, crowd-sourced journalism / investigative efforts & the like. But a good read.
Imho people (and even animals!) instinctively understand that most actions are not zero-sum. That other people's gain (whether individual or community) often exceeds the 'loss' of the person who puts in the effort. Doubly so if the latter enjoys doing it.
Classical economics ignores that. It assumes that parties nearly-always act rational (untrue), generally don't like 'work' so require compensation (YMMV), participants in a market are well-informed (untrue), transactions are zero-sum (rarely), money is THE only relevant 'currency' (it's just one of many), people are selfish (debatable, imho this is learned rather than intrinsic behaviour), markets are free (untrue), or that 'free' markets are the only way to efficiently allocate resources (again: debatable). That's a lot of questionable assumptions to base crucial socio-economic (and policing / military) systems on.
More likely it's mostly historic reasons. During some period, some approach worked better for some groups of people (probably helped by a lot of violence). And this carried forward to the present day in complex, poorly-understood ways. Never mind propaganda (include social networks' algorithms there), disinformation, or that status quo can be incredibly hard to disrupt.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating to turn what exists upside down! But it's good to question underlying assumptions considered 'common knowledge'. Re-organise things, have a look at alternatives. And things change. What was valid yesteryear may not hold water today.
It's a minority of toxic behaviours that has ruined it. Most corporations cargo cult what successful corporations do.
I don't get your point about governments, though. I could see an argument about US lobbies pushing the US government to enforce anti-circumvention all over the world, maybe?
> We, the people, built the internet, and as usual it has been ruined by governments (censorship)
Unfortunately, we the people also failed to keep the worst elements of society contained until pressure all but exploded.
The various censorship advocates would have had a far harder game, had Pornhub been more responsive to victims of involuntarily filmed material, Facebook/Meta been more responsive to Russian propaganda, Islamist terrorism, lynch mobs and god knows how much other shit ran rampant on their platform, had Reddit been more responsible in containing hate speech...
And it's no wonder that the EU eventually was fed up. Our attitude generally is, okay, we notice there is a problem, and we offer sometimes years to large actors to clean up shop or else, and only when there still is no action, then we bring down the hammer.
Frankly, I can't even count how many explicit warnings our authorities gave to Big Tech.
"I wish the corporations did censorship instead of the government" isn't the anti-censorship take you think it is. I agree there's a ton of vile shit that people don't want to see, but client-side filtering is the way to handle that, not "please, zuck, don't show me stuff you don't think i'll like, and I completely trust you to decide what that is"
> I agree there's a ton of vile shit that people don't want to see
It's not about what "people don't want to see".
(Way too) many people want to see CSAM and yet we ban it simply because of how corrosive it is to society. And that's true for a ton of the other stuff. The lynch mobs that have taken place on Whatsapp for example - you can't just put a feature like global groups or unlimited forwarding of messages on the Internet without taking into account that people can and will abuse it, and then not even have some sort of report system where people can say "hey. have a look at this". That's basic ethics review that should have caught this abuse potential and suggested mitigations before people lost their lives.
And the lack of moderation around hate speech of all kind is similarly corrosive. Sure, in the US it might be legal to go on the street and call for a "peaceful ethnic cleansing". But if you do so, you will likely eventually get insta-sanctioned by someone just like Richard Spencer [1]. On the Internet however? Nothing, other than maybe getting a shitstorm. There is no feedback mechanism in the libertarian/ultra-free-speech internet to signal to people that what they are peddling is not the mainstream view, no way of triggering some self reflection.
Interesting especially since this is written by the MIT press and BSD is obviously associated with Berkeley the histories in the BSD's of making source public.
"Together, Cranor and de Raadt set up the first public, anonymous revision control system server."
BSD is a technologists lead. This story is a populist lead and uninformed in that same manner as populist news agencies telling us about hackers without knowing what a cracker is.
I enjoyed this article - it gives a definition of "peer production", and explains our sense of unease when voluntary collaborative efforts get mixed with financial gains.
> Motivate participants to contribute using diverse incentives that are frequently, if not exclusively, nonmonetary.
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.
Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
And I speak as someone who has been contributing to open source for decades.
No, I am not going to mow someone else's lawn for free, unless they are a friend. And nobody is going to fix the blown head gasket on my car for free. Nor would I want them to.
Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
> Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
> Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
I actually know a guy whose job it is to empty septic tanks, and he LOVES telling people super gross stories and leaning into his capabilities as someone to not be bothered by what he deals with on a daily basis. Watch that old show "Dirty Jobs" for lots of other people that think similarly.
Nobody wants to serve someone else's profits for nothing in return. That wrinkle kills a lot of FOSS motivation, when Micro$oft snaps up your project and starts raking in millions without a cent going to you. That's obviously unfair, and one things humans are very good at is telling when something isn't fair.
My overall point is, when controlling for baseline maslow, and ensuring there's no unfair labor exploitation, in a situation where we need plumbers, someone will be attracted to the vacuum of need, because humans love being needed, and love doing useful work.
It’s interesting how we feel unfairly treated when we publish software for free, with a license that clearly states that others can do anything with it, and others go and do whatever they want, like you said they could, but only when it involves monetary benefit to them. Thinking about it, it really makes no sense. Why do we feel upset about that? It feels like we’re lying to ourselves. We didn’t really mean you can do anything! Come on, read between the lines! Hm, sorry but I cannot condone this attitude. There is a license that says what you more likely meant, that’s called GPL. But people seem to rarely use that. Humans are intrinsically contradictory in their behavior.
Don't leave out the common pattern of licenses being completely ignored by for profit, closed source competitors - where the only recourse is through the courts (costing the open source team money and resources) or even worse, the competitor being a different nationality so there's no legal options for you.
I'm sure there are people who love working in the sewer, like Norton.
But I doubt there are enough to fill the need for them.
I contribute to open source. I made my peace long ago with someone using what I wrote to make money. (In fact, it pleases me if they make money off of it!)
If you contribute to open source, but get mad that someone is using it without paying you, then you did not contribute in good faith. It's like those religious cults who will press a "free" book on you, and then demand a "donation".
This was only ever true in the form of a "take a penny, leave a penny" jar.
You don't necessarily mind people profiting off of your contributions because you have been profiting from other peoples' contributions at your job. Take away the jobs and suddenly there isn't enough grant money to go around to keep the lights on.
It is truly a wonder, building the complex technical framework of modern computing was achieved a community project. It shown even with out market incentives we can go a long way, to solve the current challenges like AI and misinformation.
> user: cowlevel
> created: 31 days ago
> ^^
> karma: 1515
None of the comments you posted here added any value either so by your logic your also brand new account is an LLM bot. Not to mention posting dozens of comments nonstop all day, at a rate most humans would not. Projection much?
I like how you can post 75 bullshit comments a day here and it won't set off any troll detector but if you dare to challenge hivemind opinions, your account is irreparably mass-flagged.
From the paranoia, It is unreal we thought Turing test to be a major hurdle for ai in past.
Sadly the community aspect which was the idea of the post is threatened, as internet becomes a phantom world filled with bots, agents and clueless humans.
Things were build by passionate people, who had the skills and the means to do it.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
> I feel that modern tech first took away the passion
As soon as something becomes potentially profitable, the MBAs enter the room, and the fun goes away. The more profitable it gets, the more toxic it gets, too.
As a corollary, I think if something is utterly useless but cool, it's usually worth giving it a second look.
Who, for example, would create a demoscene program or anything like that but for the coolness and the desire to show off?
These spaces are increasingly being overrun by AI generated slop and pushing out the cool.
I object to your essentialism. Presuming monolithic psychological characteristics, motivations, or behaviors from someone’s academic degree is just as false as presuming them from someone’s skin color, race, sex, gender, occupation, age, or other observable characteristics.
I’m sure you meant no harm, but think you can do better than giving into simplistic base rate fallacy thinking, especially as you are also factually wrong: arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs. In fact, two of them were started by Harvard college dropouts and one of them by Stanford PhDs. The big tech companies I can think of that were started by MBAs (eBay, grubhub, intuit, Bloomberg) are arguably much less harmful, though two of them became quasi-monopolies.
The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming).
> arguably there isn’t a single big, bad wolf tech company that was started by MBAs
The parent commenter didn't say anything about founders, that was your addition.
A reasonable interpretation of the parent comment is that these companies were in fact fun places to work until the MBAs arrived. Personally I don't take offense using MBA as a shorthand for "individuals more focused on profitability than purpose" even though I recognize that doesn't describe everyone with that degree, although admittedly, part of that is because I don't have a better term for it. It's a bit like my own handle; I don't in fact think every corporation is inherently evil, but when I say "anticorporate" there is a common understanding that I'm opposed to many of the shitty behavior of modern corporations, and not that I'm nitpicking that LLCs or sole proprietorships are somehow better forms of legal entity.
> The problems articulated by the commenter are much more likely the result of institutional failures and skewed cultural incentives than the result of a class of people or a “cabal” (the word implies conspiratorial coordination and scheming).
Oh there absolutely are cabals at work. The infamous "Paypal mafia" [1] where multiple members eventually infiltrated the US government comes to my mind, and Ivy League universities in general are even more infamous for very close knit alumni networks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
MBAs are like mold. They appear when the conditions are right.
+1
There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.
Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.
there's an entire community of people making simple websites on places like neocities. You don't find "web development" a drag, you find making a website for some company you don't give a shit about a drag (as you should).
Nothing to stop you doing simple little websites.
That is the internet I want to see again: people making their own little websites with questionable design choices about whatever topics they're passionate about. I'm willing to tolerate blink tags and animated gifs for this.
It’s all still there but you’re going to have to find it just like the “good old days”. No algorithm is going to push it to you, you’re going to have to spend the effort.
It’s just much harder getting paid for that…
The point is that it was fun to make it for yourself, about anything you're passionate about. There was never a pay calculation because you did it on your own, because you wanted to.
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
I used to think this, I would repeat that old quote "It's not a conspiracy, the truth is more frightening, nobody is in control"
Then comes stuff like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#:~:text=th...
and
https://www.economist.com/1843/2016/10/20/the-scientists-who...
and
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-plots...
and
https://cybernews.com/cybercrime/meta-fortune-fraudulent-ads...
and
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+inauguration+zuckerburg+musk+trum...
and
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/dem-orders-congressional-probe-eps...
and I'm left thinking well, if none of that covers the definition of evil cabal, then what does? How far can we move these goal posts?
It depends how large your definition of "cabal" is. There are plenty of corporations who are misaligned with societal positives, consisting of people individually acting in the interest of the corporation as part of their day jobs. When your job's long term success requires helping your company get an edge over the competition and you're willing to be expedient with long term thinking, in aggregate bad things can happen.
It's something of a mix of both - the world is a web of cabals executing conspiracies but simultaneously most people are so bad at systems thinking that they can't identify the conspiracies from people acting individually in their own interests.
For example, in this instance the fall of the web to commercial interests is more or less inevitable if you look at the basics, regardless of conspiracies (people getting paid produce more & better quality stuff than people making a hobby of it). But if you look at the execution of that dynamic there are always going to be small highly motivated groups of people trying to achieve specific goals on the sly.
It is unusual for any individual cabal to be powerful enough to control a situation.
It's still not a conspiracy. Those are all local responses to incentives. The incentive structure, the system, is what determines the outcome, not the players.
In a basketball game who wins may vary but you know balls will go through hoops because that's what the rule set of the game incentivizes.
Investors want returns so number must go up. Eventually companies and their executives exhaust the basic honest core business so they have to start scraping for more revenue growth. Eventually this leads to the familiar process of enshittification where the company flips the script and sells the customers as the product and nickel and dimes people. This eventually ruins the product but number must still go up, so who else can pay? Criminals, scammers, government propagandists, political influence operations, intelligence agencies, militaries, etc.
We get what I just described for the same reason basketball makes balls go through hoops.
Why does number have to go up? Because you want to retire. Your pension funds and banks and such hire financial experts to invest. Those experts invest in things that make number go up because that's their job.
That's why this is hard. You are a player. We are all both hurt by the system and benefit by the system. It feeds us and protects us and enslaves us. Everything is paradoxes and feedback loops. When you get a job you want things like benefits and union wages, but when you go shopping you pick the cheapest product which means you want to break unions.
Conspiracism is a cop out from trying to understand this. It's easier to just pick a single scapegoat (often a make believe one) and blame them.
I'm not saying all the people in all the links you posted are great people, just that they're not the architect of this. There is no architect. The game was designed by the mad blind idiot gods of complexity and evolution.
I've had the thesis for a long time that humans are not actually intelligent. We are merely clever. A clever organism can deploy local intelligence to maximize its outcome in a game. A truly intelligent organism would understand the game and become the architect. We might not have the cognitive capacity for this. Maybe ASI can, or can help us.
Maybe that's why the aliens aren't talking to us. Anyone capable of star travel is the latter. They take a look and think "interesting fauna down there but nothing intelligent yet. They only try to win games."
the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere. The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.
> the passion is only gone for the people who are working for a corporation, there's still active development on FOSS software everywhere by hobbyists everywhere.
Unfortunately, FOSS maintainers pretty much everywhere have been drowning for years. First it was "security researchers" meat-proxying dependabot or people looking to gamify their Github stats by filing spam merge requests for typos in readmes, and now it's "security researchers" running one of the usual AI agent suspects and flooding projects with reports of varying kinds of quality.
For me, the passion is pretty much gone. It's slop everywhere.
> The means are still there too, you can host your own web-server or release apps, as many still do.
Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet.
> Technically you still can. Practically? Without relying on big tech for protection, your small server will be shaken down by DDoS gangs operating from North Korea, and AI-assisted skiddies will exploit any vulnerability in a matter of hours like it happened with log4j, wp2shell, php2shell and a host of other memeable security incidents. Maintaining a server these days is nasty busywork if you don't want to end up with your user data exfil'd to the darknet.
You can avoid most of that with a simple static website. Even if you manage the web server and OS yourself. KISS is a lifesaver.
Eutrophy is good! Atrophy is not.
Personally, I think it's good that volunteers build the internet and do things like that, but fundamentally, the barrier to the web has become too high. In the past, making a website was easier than you'd think, and the legal side was a bit more lenient, but these days, as laws accumulate precedents, there are many things to pay attention to, and starting with security, the number of things you need to worry about has increased.
The problem is that in the early days of the internet, people needed time to grow together. But these days, the barrier to entry is fundamentally higher than before. And even when making one site, you have to worry about various things...
In my view, there is also the point that people forget the fact that as business becomes more sophisticated and technology develops, the basic skills of the people involved need to increase accordingly. The reasons the internet has gotten worse are complex. For example, there is definitely the problem of people trying to make money through advertising and such, but fundamentally, the technical barrier to attracting people's attention has also risen a lot.
The amount of technology a single individual developer has to handle has also increased a lot.
Modern tech did not make anything a product, people using the tech did. But not all, many of us do things for fun and passion still, just don’t expect money for it. Not everything is cloud, I still use mostly things that are not cloud based. And I have lots of libraries and little utilities I maintain, none of which are related to cloud, anyone can keep doing that forever, there are lots of other developers and even normal people who still want to use those tools and apps. And come on, AI doesn’t do anything to you, it’s you who chooses when and whether to use AI for whatever purpose, and as a helper for when things get tough, AI is amazing, like a private, infinitely patient and knowledgeable personal assistant. You don’t need to let it do everything for you , keep doing things the way you enjoy it, ai can be just an infinitely superior version of StackOverflow. Or a tutor. It doesn’t need to replace you.
I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this
Very bold statement
There is the incentive too which LLMs destroy:
- If you embrace agentic development and prompt/produce something, a rando with spare money and a better clanker supersedes your efforts.
- If you ignore LLMs and write and design the product yourself, the LLM corpo says "All the better for me! Moar free untainted datasets for me! I'll make you buy tokens from me in the next 6 months anyway..."
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Don't you believe it.
You don't need a "evil cabal" in the image of a movie caricature. It is enough to discuss with a wink-and-a-nod, shared incentives, product roadmaps, sharing profits from a global pie, circular deals etc. for a concerted group to form and start gaming the system behind the scenes.
The Computer Revolution was first and foremost a "People and Individual Freedoms" revolution. Cheap open PC hardware married to free open software made it happen. Networking and Data-Sharing were supposed to be neutral. Device control was taken away, specifically with Apple's iPhone showing the way, and then Network/Data control by Cloud companies showing the way.
The propaganda is always the same viz. "for the ultimate benefit of the end-user". Don't think/learn too much and just pay us the money to do it for you; You are nothing but just the source of revenue/profits for us.
The same thing is happening with AI where it is impossible for an individual to play due to scale and money involved.
Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Walter Lippmann, Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky would all feel deeply vindicated and proud.
>> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this
There is. It is called Microsoft. The recent dustup over VLC being the latest battleground between the darkness and the light. My experience of the front: work wants me to install MSTeams on my personal phone... which runs GrapheneOS.
(lol, windows wants to spellcheck MSTeams into "MS Teams" but refuses to acknowledge GrapheneOS. Another MS microaggression.)
> who had the skills and the means to do it.
emphasis on means. The means to spend ~8 hours a day contributing instead of dedicating that time to a full time job or a second job.
But the gravy train is ending...
I agree to some extent; however had I still contribute to Wikipedia and Wikipedia, while it has problems, is still fairly good (quality-wise could be better, a lot of content from discussions should be added to main articles but I usually confine myself to just suggest things on discussions and let others make a decision then).
> There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
> Here I disagree. The fatso corporations 100% pursue evilness. I mean, Google removing its old motto "don't do evil" says it all.
I think that's right, but I also think the OP had a point as well: in some ways, the negative effects of technology, in addition to being pushed by fat corporations, are also an emergent effect of the technology itself that goes beyond intention. Examples:
* Google probably didn't have a master plan to push SEO slop, but it came about anyway because it's in human nature to game the system.
* If someone creates one product to become more efficient, it's likely that another person will also do so, even if the net result is negative due to the prisoner's dilemma. (Bug finding vs Bug exploitation).
Etc. You can think of many examples, but how much in tech creates arms race scenarios that we MUST play out to stay afloat? How many people use LLMs just to keep up with their peers who use them?
That creates an emergent phenomena of creating problems not necessarily planned, even though a lot of the impetus to create the arms-race scenarios WERE intented by the rich.
I love these two projects for how they are, and continue to be, built. They say something hopeful and deep about humanity.
Before Linux and Wikipedia, we assumed that if you gave everyone a sharpie, that we would graffiti and deface the world.
Instead, we learned that humans will stop and sit and write the most thorough history ever seen for the sake of free knowledge and create the tools for us to do so.
While a lot of this involved volunteers and people taking initiative, a lot of this is also people working and being paid to do so. Linus Torvalds was getting paid to work on the Linux kernel from pretty early on, for example. And a lot of contributions made to Linux are done by software engineers working for a very wide range of companies that each have their own commercial interest in moving the Linux kernel forward or getting their drivers or whatever.
Decentralization does not imply charity. You see the same around openstreetmap. There are a lot of organizations that benefit from their data that actively contribute to it or make donations to keep development funded. Same with Wikipedia.
This has happened with most of the fields - volunteers do a lot of work, make their fields/areas good, raise interest, bring ppl into it which usually brings money then which usually brings money chasers who then usually "optimize" the hell out of every metric for maximum gains.
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
Goodhart's law: whatever you measure will improve. And the measurement is money extraction.
any measurement that becomes a target ceases to be a useful measurement*
That's not the definition of Goodhart's law. That's the opposite of Goodhart's law, in fact.
Is there a law that says "whenever something is profitable, people attracted to money will come for the money". And obviously, the best way to make money is not to build good tech.
Excellent reminder. It very often feels like this place forgets where most of the good stuff comes from.
And that it's dying and needs high-quality contributors (not high-quantity)
Passionate and knowledgeable people will always do stuff, and if it's valuable others will pick up on it.
But you have to keep going with that; there's a lot of space under "will pick up on it."
This can mean both "contribute and be an awesome part of a community" and also "steal, exploit and use for disgusting evil."
Open access link to the full book the article is based on (since it's slightly hidden on the book page):
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/6212/Peer-Production
Saw MIT Press and hoped it would be open access. Thank you for the direct link!
Missed some mentions like crowdfunding, crowd-sourced journalism / investigative efforts & the like. But a good read.
Imho people (and even animals!) instinctively understand that most actions are not zero-sum. That other people's gain (whether individual or community) often exceeds the 'loss' of the person who puts in the effort. Doubly so if the latter enjoys doing it.
Classical economics ignores that. It assumes that parties nearly-always act rational (untrue), generally don't like 'work' so require compensation (YMMV), participants in a market are well-informed (untrue), transactions are zero-sum (rarely), money is THE only relevant 'currency' (it's just one of many), people are selfish (debatable, imho this is learned rather than intrinsic behaviour), markets are free (untrue), or that 'free' markets are the only way to efficiently allocate resources (again: debatable). That's a lot of questionable assumptions to base crucial socio-economic (and policing / military) systems on.
More likely it's mostly historic reasons. During some period, some approach worked better for some groups of people (probably helped by a lot of violence). And this carried forward to the present day in complex, poorly-understood ways. Never mind propaganda (include social networks' algorithms there), disinformation, or that status quo can be incredibly hard to disrupt.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating to turn what exists upside down! But it's good to question underlying assumptions considered 'common knowledge'. Re-organise things, have a look at alternatives. And things change. What was valid yesteryear may not hold water today.
We, the people, built the internet, and as usual it has been ruined by governments (censorship) and corporations (ads, tracking, monetization).
It has been ruined by profit.
It's a minority of toxic behaviours that has ruined it. Most corporations cargo cult what successful corporations do.
I don't get your point about governments, though. I could see an argument about US lobbies pushing the US government to enforce anti-circumvention all over the world, maybe?
> We, the people, built the internet, and as usual it has been ruined by governments (censorship)
Unfortunately, we the people also failed to keep the worst elements of society contained until pressure all but exploded.
The various censorship advocates would have had a far harder game, had Pornhub been more responsive to victims of involuntarily filmed material, Facebook/Meta been more responsive to Russian propaganda, Islamist terrorism, lynch mobs and god knows how much other shit ran rampant on their platform, had Reddit been more responsible in containing hate speech...
And it's no wonder that the EU eventually was fed up. Our attitude generally is, okay, we notice there is a problem, and we offer sometimes years to large actors to clean up shop or else, and only when there still is no action, then we bring down the hammer.
Frankly, I can't even count how many explicit warnings our authorities gave to Big Tech.
"I wish the corporations did censorship instead of the government" isn't the anti-censorship take you think it is. I agree there's a ton of vile shit that people don't want to see, but client-side filtering is the way to handle that, not "please, zuck, don't show me stuff you don't think i'll like, and I completely trust you to decide what that is"
> I agree there's a ton of vile shit that people don't want to see
It's not about what "people don't want to see".
(Way too) many people want to see CSAM and yet we ban it simply because of how corrosive it is to society. And that's true for a ton of the other stuff. The lynch mobs that have taken place on Whatsapp for example - you can't just put a feature like global groups or unlimited forwarding of messages on the Internet without taking into account that people can and will abuse it, and then not even have some sort of report system where people can say "hey. have a look at this". That's basic ethics review that should have caught this abuse potential and suggested mitigations before people lost their lives.
And the lack of moderation around hate speech of all kind is similarly corrosive. Sure, in the US it might be legal to go on the street and call for a "peaceful ethnic cleansing". But if you do so, you will likely eventually get insta-sanctioned by someone just like Richard Spencer [1]. On the Internet however? Nothing, other than maybe getting a shitstorm. There is no feedback mechanism in the libertarian/ultra-free-speech internet to signal to people that what they are peddling is not the mainstream view, no way of triggering some self reflection.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFh08JEKDYk
It says something about the inherent poverty of simulated reality.
A man who does a thing for fun is drinking from something real and it nourishes him and gets him high.
A man who's working within the corporate reality And pursuing boss defined goals. He's faking it and he starves.
"How volunteers build the Internet", yet not a single mention of BSD that ran and runs the Internet.
Interesting especially since this is written by the MIT press and BSD is obviously associated with Berkeley the histories in the BSD's of making source public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSDBSD is a technologists lead. This story is a populist lead and uninformed in that same manner as populist news agencies telling us about hackers without knowing what a cracker is.
I enjoyed this article - it gives a definition of "peer production", and explains our sense of unease when voluntary collaborative efforts get mixed with financial gains.
I thought about suggesting that AI slop will replace humans here, but then I remembered how awful Grokipedia is, so we are safe for the time being.
> Motivate participants to contribute using diverse incentives that are frequently, if not exclusively, nonmonetary.
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.
Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
And I speak as someone who has been contributing to open source for decades.
No, I am not going to mow someone else's lawn for free, unless they are a friend. And nobody is going to fix the blown head gasket on my car for free. Nor would I want them to.
Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
> Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
That's not exactly how it was. I recommend reading "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years
> Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
I actually know a guy whose job it is to empty septic tanks, and he LOVES telling people super gross stories and leaning into his capabilities as someone to not be bothered by what he deals with on a daily basis. Watch that old show "Dirty Jobs" for lots of other people that think similarly.
Nobody wants to serve someone else's profits for nothing in return. That wrinkle kills a lot of FOSS motivation, when Micro$oft snaps up your project and starts raking in millions without a cent going to you. That's obviously unfair, and one things humans are very good at is telling when something isn't fair.
My overall point is, when controlling for baseline maslow, and ensuring there's no unfair labor exploitation, in a situation where we need plumbers, someone will be attracted to the vacuum of need, because humans love being needed, and love doing useful work.
It’s interesting how we feel unfairly treated when we publish software for free, with a license that clearly states that others can do anything with it, and others go and do whatever they want, like you said they could, but only when it involves monetary benefit to them. Thinking about it, it really makes no sense. Why do we feel upset about that? It feels like we’re lying to ourselves. We didn’t really mean you can do anything! Come on, read between the lines! Hm, sorry but I cannot condone this attitude. There is a license that says what you more likely meant, that’s called GPL. But people seem to rarely use that. Humans are intrinsically contradictory in their behavior.
Don't leave out the common pattern of licenses being completely ignored by for profit, closed source competitors - where the only recourse is through the courts (costing the open source team money and resources) or even worse, the competitor being a different nationality so there's no legal options for you.
I'm sure there are people who love working in the sewer, like Norton.
But I doubt there are enough to fill the need for them.
I contribute to open source. I made my peace long ago with someone using what I wrote to make money. (In fact, it pleases me if they make money off of it!)
If you contribute to open source, but get mad that someone is using it without paying you, then you did not contribute in good faith. It's like those religious cults who will press a "free" book on you, and then demand a "donation".
This was only ever true in the form of a "take a penny, leave a penny" jar.
You don't necessarily mind people profiting off of your contributions because you have been profiting from other peoples' contributions at your job. Take away the jobs and suddenly there isn't enough grant money to go around to keep the lights on.
It is truly a wonder, building the complex technical framework of modern computing was achieved a community project. It shown even with out market incentives we can go a long way, to solve the current challenges like AI and misinformation.
This account is an AI karmabot
How do you figure? The account has karma 0, and the message has a good number of spelling mistakes.
It's a brand new one, and the spelling mistakes are to avoid tripping HN's shiny new LLM detector that deads LLM comments.
How did you conclude that from a single comment and no posts?
Genuinely curious.
Fits the pattern. Brand new account, posts a summary of the article with no new value.
> Fits the pattern. Brand new account
None of the comments you posted here added any value either so by your logic your also brand new account is an LLM bot. Not to mention posting dozens of comments nonstop all day, at a rate most humans would not. Projection much?if you don't have showdead turned on, you'd miss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50389079 which is that but worse
I like how you can post 75 bullshit comments a day here and it won't set off any troll detector but if you dare to challenge hivemind opinions, your account is irreparably mass-flagged.
Hm? I'm just pointing out that the problem cowlevel is pointing out is real and not imagined.
Why are you so desperate to defend bots? Are you their operator?
No sir, I have just created an account. I just shared my honest response after reading this post. you have to buy yourself a new AI-dar!
> This account is an AI karmabot
Considering you have posted > 75 comments to HN in the last 24 hours, I would agree you are a karmabot!
From the paranoia, It is unreal we thought Turing test to be a major hurdle for ai in past.
Sadly the community aspect which was the idea of the post is threatened, as internet becomes a phantom world filled with bots, agents and clueless humans.