Comment by 21723

We (the software industry) have royally screwed up computers. Users used to be in control and now they are the ones being controlled or at least “influenced.”

I think we naively believed that an increase of human technical capability would lead to such abundance that we'd achieve post-scarcity (at which point, whether we call it socialism or pretend it is liberalized capitalism, it doesn't matter) and permanent democracy... not the corporatized nightmare we actually got. The capitalists are right about very little, but they got this right: human nature can be shit. Most people are decent or want to be, but the ones who gain power in human organizations, especially organizations without purpose such as private corporations, are cancerous. We thought that problem would magically solve itself if we just made the world (in aggregate terms) richer, and we were wrong.

It's like a martial arts instructor who earnestly but unaccountably believes he's teaching good kids how to fight back against bullies. He may be. Or, he may be teaching the bullies. In our case, though, we weren't training... we were arming... and we didn't always know we were building weapons, but that's absolutely what we were doing... all of our "data science" got turned into decisions that hurt workers and enriched executives.

I'm speaking in past tense because we, as technologists, are no longer relevant. We've sold our souls. Capitalist hogs and their managerial thugs have won. Our moral credibility is deep in the negative territory. Power will either stay with those who currently have it, who have evil intentions, or move toward the set of people who work up the courage to overthrow the current system, who may or may not--it's impossible to know, as it hasn't happened yet--have ugly intentions.