• he/him

guy who was too into deus ex


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
Tanuki-Computing
@Tanuki-Computing asked:

I think it’s funny, how you’re one of the few tech channels (at least that I’ve seen), that, when talking about corporate greed, and ways companies are fucking the consumer over, will acknowledged how these things are motivated by capitalism. It’s like, many people are complaining about people sneezing, without acknowledging the flu that’s going around.

The depressing truth that suddenly clicked with me about six? years ago is that every time I started complaining about something, I already knew the answer. And I wanted the answer to be a lot more interesting than it really was, I wanted there to be a new kind of malfeasance, something I could really hate. But there isn't. It's always the same.


Why is the McDonald's website bad? Any one of us could write 4,000 words on it. They'd all be bullshit, because we know the answer: it's a mix of "absolutely refuses to hire anyone for the right pay" and "letting you order burgers online isn't the product, the burgers aren't the product, your information is the product." At least for the people running the web department - they know that they are seen as a cost center, and thus something that the executives are continuously thinking of excising if it isn't turning a specific profit.

It's the same answer for every single website, from Microsoft to Whole Foods to fucking Facebook. It is always about marketing, it is always about advertising. It's never something else, it is always, one hundred percent of the time, that. If you can't order a pizza, it's because the people running the ordering form site are at war with the very company they work for, which doesn't care about Number Of Pizzas Ordered when it comes to deciding on the web department budget; that's a separate Business Unit, you see.

So there's nothing to discuss, nothing to rail against, nothing to get mad at because it's water under the bridge, old news. Once you acknowledge this truth, things get real boring - a friend goes "this website is terrible," and you go "yes, because it's not supposed to be functional, it's bait." And then the room goes quiet, and you all sit there sullenly. It makes you a real party pooper. It made me a real party pooper.

It reminds me of that absolutely gutwrenching series of tweets someone made a while back about how infosec isn't interesting anymore because there's now only one payload, exactly one. It's never a keylogger, it's never a thing that scrapes your email. The Adversaries keep coming up with brilliant new hacks, layer upon layer of incredibly clever exploits, and when you get it all unpeeled... it installs a bitcoin miner. Every time.

We live in the monoscam era. There is only one scam at any given moment, and we are surrounded by it, but it tends to follow a common pattern that has endured for decades at this point. We could give it a name like sidechannel theft - it is theft, but indirectly; theft of byproducts; theft of things people don't even realize they have. If you're a corporation, selling user data and ads is way more appealing than selling real products, and if you're a career criminal, it's way more appealing to steal CPU time than bank account info. We don't even need to go into why; it's obvious, we all know, we've known for years. There's nothing to discuss. We just sit around, bored, exhausted, sad.

So I don't make every one of my videos about this, even though they mostly could be. I don't want to deliver a gigantic bummer that's also preaching to the choir - we all know, already, what's going on. But sometimes it's necessary, sometimes I have to talk about it directly, because it's simply part of the narrative. If you look at it and try to think of any other explanation, the only thing you will come up with is that silly childish "they must have been on drugs!!!!" shit.

The explanation for the HP bullshit is that people were working jobs that were only tenuously useful, so they had to do something with their time even if it made no sense. An enormous amount of work being done at corporations is busywork, even if much of it is self-imposed. Perhaps the frontline programmers who made these hacks were doing it in earnest, but somewhere along the line, somebody told them to do something to look busy, because they were afraid of their department being recognized as the redundancy that they very likely were.

The story repeats everywhere, at all businesses, in some way. And the solution to all of this is to stop making people do work unless it fills some specific need. That process begins by saying "perhaps not everyone needs to work." And that, too, is a conversation-ender. It's very boring. It makes everyone in the room sigh and look at their phones and stop talking, because it is so big and so obvious that it makes all the other fun, appealing theories we had about Why Things Are Like This die in our throats.

We all know that this very simple statement - "Not Everyone Needs To Work" - is at the basis of all the problems, and is also anathema to every form of power on this planet. It is catastrophic to every power structure, to every orthodoxy, to everything in our recorded history. It is the most terrifying and dangerous statement that you can make, and it is also an utterly, completely obvious and unavoidable truth.

I try not to say it overtly in every one of my videos, but I don't need to. All my videos are about it anyway. You can reverse-engineer this sentiment out of most of them, if you step back and let your eyes defocus. But sometimes saying the loud part loud is just the logical next step, so I usually don't say no if it suggests itself.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

that party pooper line hit me in the gut. whenever someone brings up some current event with me i ask if they are ok with knowing the very depressing reason it is an issue. if they say no then i ask to change the subject because it drives me batty listening to people talk as if these issues were spontaneously formed and impossible to understand.

I hate hate hate that this is true, and that I'll have to deny it again to go get a "shit job" at a grocery store, one that ACTUALLY does more good than whatever the fuck "banking platform developer" job I'm Supposed to do, that would pay far better. Even now I'm bargaining hard for some job at a "good" company that's doing its best to solve the problems of the modern era, the problems caused by the very technologies and systems being used to create said solutions, and so on and so forth. I sound like a broken record and I feel insane because nobody wants to admit that meaningfully positive social progress just isn't profitable. (and I'm still deluded into thinking that I can Do Better if I just put my head down, practice and research the hell out of software dev, and make enough games that I can sell some of them to earn a living just above the poverty line)