("Replace AI with 'company' and you realize that we're living in that world already." I 100% agree with this, though!)

I don't know, if we didn't have "anti-abortion pregnancy crisis centers", the firebombs would be kind of irrelevant

Except they did. Votes for Grump in 2016 were completely understandable, sympathizable even. Responsibility for the train wreck of a first term didn't fall at the feet of the voters - it's explainable by one politician being an utter shitbag once in office. And for the most part our institutions did function to contain most of the (direct) damage.

But Grump 2024 was a known quantity. The votes in 2024 demonstrate that the average American is either proudly ignorant of the actual policies they're choosing (ie fully steeped in propaganda that hides/downplays the destruction), or actively malicious towards the rest of the world (while benefiting from a privileged international position). Neither one bodes well for future decisions, even if there is some political will to pull up from the current autocratic destruction.

And no, the "we didn't know how bad he was going to be" of a 33% approval rating doesn't make up for that. Grump was a known quantity for this election, and the only way someone could have "not known" is by actively rejecting listening to their fellow citizens. Which goes right back to willful ignorance.

That's a simplistic take.

Trump had less than 50% of the popular vote even though his opponent was clearly showing signs of dementia. The last-minute replacement had spent too much time being the "defund the police/eat the rich" sidekick to Biden and was clearly not representative of the views of the average American. She still got almost as many votes as Trump, from Americans who wanted to vote "Not Trump".

Seems to me the average American had little choice. All the Democrats had to do was field a candidate that could finish a coherent sentence mirroring the average American sentiment and they'd have landslide victory. But they didn't.

It seems like you're merely demonstrating one dynamic by which people are able to maintain that proud ignorance - buying into simplistic feel good narratives about the "other side" which swamp their reasoning capabilities, absolving them of responsibility for their decision. This is a large part of being "fully steeped in propaganda".

For the actual reality, Harris was a public prosecutor - essentially a police officer's best friend. Neither Biden nor Harris were looking to destroy the federal government. More than anything, they represented the status quo rather than this nonsense you're repeating about "defund the police/eat the rich".

I'm a libertarian who hadn't voted for a major party in a national election until 2020. I had to come to terms with getting older, more conservative, and having to holding my nose and voting for the corpo status quo. But it was the reasonable, responsible choice. I can most certainly understand people who stayed home or voted third party. But voting for the known quantity destructionist and rationalizing it with nonsense propaganda is exactly what I was talking about.

There might be an argument to be made that your argument could be used to placate the rest of the world if we manage to turn the ship around but without Constitutional reforms that would keep the destructionists from gaining power again - "we were tricked" may work yet again. But as far as the actual question, no, people who voted for Grump in 2024 should not be allowed to look away or disown the horrible mistake they chose to make. It is in fact a necessary part of any reconciliation process.

That's not helpful though, as she also made multiple public expressions of support for the defund movement, the protests-turned-riots after the Floyd murder, and the BLM movement.

I can't help thinking that made her a weak choice for both sides of that divide. Is she the tough on crime option or the anti-police one? Where does she actually stand?

I think if she had gone all-in on the tough-on-crime track she'd still have gotten all the protestor votes, and perhaps also the "can we stop police brutality without burning cars" votes. Which I think is a sizable chunk, perhaps even the most common opinion on the matter.

Anyway, all this to say that the explanation for the current situation is not as simple as "half of all Americans are crazy and evil". Current approval ratings clearly say most Americans know they effed up.

My first response was to a German who clearly felt the US as a whole is a lost cause, without acknowledging that Germany is in the process of making the same mistake. I wonder if the Germans will realize they effed up as quickly as the Americans have?

Both sides of the atlantic are throwing stones from glass houses, when we should be cooperating. The dictators are rejoicing...

Because on its own as often presented, it still has the glaring shortcoming that anybody can proxy an ID verification for anybody else without any form of accountability for having done so. Which means that the only way for it to actually be secure is for the implementation to also required locked down computing devices. Hence why the EU scheme insists on proprietary Apple/Google devices, and why Google research has written nerd sniping blog posts to market it.

There, now you know!

As do physical IDs, as somebody who's bought his younger brother beers growing up.

Proxying the credential means something like letting your brother use your ID. But note there are still avenues of accountability here - for your brother if he would have gotten caught, and possibly for you for loaning him your ID.

These dynamics don't translate to Internet scale, where all it takes is literally one person to go "I disagree with this age check scheme on principle, and I will proxy my credential to anyone who asks".

At any rate, you had started off saying you didn't understand why there was criticism and now you know why, regardless of whether you accept that criticism.

While I agree with where you're coming from in spirit, if you want to push this then you've got to do the work of actually coming up with workable concrete approaches rather than hand waving against a whole general category of action. The problem is that digital communications lend themselves to centralized power, and power vacuums inevitably get filed by something, right?

I too would love to see the power of surveillance companies get magically reduced by something that isn't centralized government action. But that hasn't happened so far, right? If anything, they've grown stronger - sucked in ever more of our lives, sucked in technical communities who were culturally predisposed to and capable of resisting, and even taken over control of parts of the de jure government!

So barring that, government regulation (ie democratic accountability) seems like a necessary approach. This fails too of course (eg how all the natural rights referenced in the Bill of Rights are being infringed in one way or another). But once again what is the alternative to attempting to codify lofty ideals, writing them down, and then pushing to implement them wherever they're being infringed? Regulation like the GDPR and other EU directives at least attempt to draft rights-based paradigms, as imperfect as their implementation and enforcement may be.

The real problem would seem to be that we're soured on the idea of having reasonable laws in the US from every attempt at meaningful regulation ending up with a multitude of holes in it due to corporate lobbying. It seems like that is what needs to be focused on and addressed - thinking one can let the corpos run wild and then somehow outrun or individualistically push back on them is a pipe dream.

1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.

Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.

The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.

2. From what I can tell, pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.

The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.

That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.

There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.

It is the pessimism that kills all of that ultimately leading to autocrats that live to hold on to power at the very high cost of the rest of the country. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit is what causes this cycle of abuse. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.

Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.

I completely agree about the feedback loops. They're mutual feedback loops though, and causality can go both ways. We're currently stuck with a strong attractor of surveillance-based software. It's certainly possible to escape from the local minimum, but requires a lot of activation energy to escape it (compelling functionality, features, ease of use, etc, to prime its own network effects).

I don't think it was ads per se, but rather the centralizing software architecture of AJAX (et al). Everyone wanted to build things that were "easy" for "everyone" to use, how to make money came later. Or going back even earlier, if "the web" had been designed around something like content centric networking rather than HTTP.

On "tech moment right now is ripe for it" - for me, it has felt this way for the past twenty five years! I generally agree about pessimism as well, so let's just say at this point I'm tired. I certainly don't want to dissuade you from pouring new energy into software that is going to change the world [for the better]. But I'm also cautioning you to not reject other angles of reform!

Further on the pessimism point, isn't shying away from government (ie collective) action itself a form of pessimism? I'm pretty pessimistic about groups (herds) of people in general (things always end up going "sideways" due to opportunists). But looking at the structure of US politics it seems there is a large contingent of "government can never work" that ends up running interference whenever de jure government tries to reign in the corpos (which tend to act as de facto government), creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or putting my general point another way, in terms of the culture point you made elsewhere - our mass culture is currently strongly steeped in centralized political action/narratives. If you want our mass culture to change to value technical decentralization and privacy, then one of the main things you'd expect to manifest itself is a call for centralized/government action, ala privacy regulation, right? We can certainly lament the centralized political culture, but unless you're talking about changing two aspects of our culture simultaneously, then that basically is what it is.

I don't think shying away from governing hierarchies are pessimistic but maybe you see it that way because I didn't explain myself well.

It's important to separate something. Hierarchy and cooperation are not the same thing. Though I guess in instantiation at the human level, they seem to mostly be.

But multi-cellular creatures are made up of cooperating cells wherein there is no centralized power. It seems like nature has borne out that this configuration is robust.

And, if you squint, markets are a similar thing. I love markets. They're a way that people can make individual choices about what they can offer their neighbor and so be rewarded by their neighbor in this positive sum way. It is, by nature, decentralized (though regulation exists in modern markets and sometimes work well for a time as a patchwork kludge over a janky system).

Anyway, there's trust networks there and lots of interesting stuff we could tangent about. But the point is that markets are a decentralized thing have been around longer than governments. We don't need monopolies on violence to cooperate if social norms forbid violence. Of course, the violent ones hacked the system and so we needed to defend against that, so we picked the violent winner, and governance is born.

This is also an interesting path turning point that, given our current technology and understanding, if we started from zero, you could wonder if we could develop in a way without a single entity with a monopoly on violence because we handle this sort of threat somehow else.

There's that whole debt and reciprocity thing that is even older than markets - hell, animals do it. But I wonder about the scalability of that. I don't believe david graeber's idea that the abstraction of reciprocity was the root of all evil but that's like one take and maybe we could make better reciprocity networks.

This is all rambly. I hope my point comes across though. We lack imagination for configurations that can be that are cooperative without the cancer of centralization.

It would be nice if someone starts imagining this for us. It's very hard to imagine a world so different from our own. But we know, by nature, that it is possible. There are a lot of cells in my body - it's not a scale issue.

My take is that cultural values/social norms are the real thing that makes society. We think it's all these things like laws, money, and borders. But those things are secondary fiction memes to the primary fiction meme of values.

The thing about values are that they are very resistant to centralized control by nature.

1. Assignment of addresses is centralized. Even though it's federated (ie distributed), authority still flows logically from one single authoritative view. And even though individual networks can choose to go against that central view, diverging too much prevents them from talking to one another (ie most of the bargaining is on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, rather than something more nimble or adaptive)

2. It's a protocol for communication between nodes. Reusing node addresses as service/contents addresses leads to services being inherently centralized on those (logical) nodes. Not a problem with IP itself, but definitely an attractive nuisance that made problems for things naively layered on top of IP like HTTP(S) and DNS.