Ask HN: Why are we all pretending everything is normal?
5 months ago
I know we’re supposed to be tech focused but I see no posts regarding the situation at large. No tech, no innovation can really grow or come about if this keeps going. Those of us who have grown up with relative freedom and the room to innovate owe it to those coming up to do something? The system isn’t perfect, but what is happening will make it worse. What can be done? I won’t repost this if it gets removed.
>I know we’re supposed to be tech focused but I see no posts regarding the situation at large.
There have been plenty, but Hacker News has been very assiduous in flagging every one.
A lot of people support the current regime and have vested interests, political and financial, in normalizing what they want to be the new status quo.
A lot of people simply don't care unless it affects them personally, or they're simply in shock.
Either way, it's politics and Hacker News interprets politics as intellectual damage and tries to route around it. Not much one can do, this isn't a free speech platform, it's a curated speech platform.
This is the new normal. Welcome.
And honestly, if you looked at how weird politic was before the World Wars and the Cold War, we may be reverting to the mean. RIP Pax Americana
My brain thinks about three things when I read about what’s happening.
1. Can the next administration fix everything. Can they undo all of the crazy things happening.
2. Will we get into a civil war situation. Just watch the movie. It’s real possibility at any moment.
3. Some of the executive orders directly hurt the people in the fly over states and other southern areas. Will they finally see the person they elected cares nothing about them?
1. No, the next administration cannot fix everything. A lot of what's being destroyed took decades to create. The loss in international credibility is permanent; the administration after that could well be exactly like this one.
2. We probably won't get into a civil war. I'd say the probability is no more than 5%. That's a bit like saying "There's a 5% chance that I'll into a traffic accident today, and I like those odds".
3. No, they will not change their minds. They will see any negative outcomes as the fault of their political and international opponents, and evidence that they need to do the same things harder.
We've been pretending for a while, now. We pretended Facebook was acceptable for democracy even after the fallout of Cambridge Analytica. We pretended Google wasn't abusing us with AdSense because none of us users saw the harm. We pretended Microsoft and Apple wouldn't sell us out to politicians and sycophants at the nearest opportunity, and assumed TikTok wasn't a trojan horse despite American market access in China being curtailed for years.
Authoritarianism just seems like the next natural step. It's obvious that Americans don't intend to regulate or boycott harmful businesses, so now what? Money takes control.
> We pretended Facebook was acceptable for democracy even after the fallout of Cambridge Analytica.
Pulling one example, but it applies to all of them in different ways:
“We” decided the stock price and “our” equity was more important than, for instance, having a job that revolved around giving teen girls depression more efficiently let alone destroying the country.
The system was already authoritarian, if less blatant to most people. Any meaningful resistance to the power structure gets crushed, and everyone tacitly accepts that arrangement.
Indeed, just look at the perp walk of Luigi Mangione. I've never seen so many feds in one place for one guy. I guess the rulers didn't like that one bit.
It really helped me to listen to Eli Lake's Jan 22, 2025 podcast on Honestly having to do with American populism, especially that of our last populist president, Andrew Jackson.
The basic idea is that populism does not become the new norm (as per poster legitster) except for a period of maybe 8 - 10 years. Grassroots populism provides a corrective when the ruling elites have lost touch with the chief concerns of the people. Both the Democrats and the Republicans will tweak their platforms to incorporate some of these ideas, and having done their job, the populists will fade away. Before this wave of populism departs, there will probably be a bipartisan agreement that DEI programs have gotten out of control, that gender reassignment surgery for children is a bad idea, that the first amendment to the Constitution is a good thing and should be defended. (That last sentence, "Before this wave of populism departs..." reflects my speculation, not that of Eli Lake.)
Except this time around, the key players have a playbook and endless resources for codifying a monarchy of the executive: https://archive.is/iAtnM
Populism was just a way to get their foot in the door. The general public has been duped as to their intentions.
That is a credible counterview. We will definitely have to stay on our toes.
Are you referring to the climate and ecological crisis, or the many cascading problems resulting from overextraction of limited resources?
There won't be any tech on a dead planet.
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What can be done is participating in resistance when you can. Turn in work slower. Lose documents. Be the sand in the gears. Be the mosquito in the room.
It seems there are a lot of heightened emotions everywhere. But one thing to note is that Trump laid out this vision while he was campaigning, and he got the popular vote based on it. A lot of non-white, non-male, and non-European people voted for Trump.
There’s clearly an ideological tipping point for some people that’s essentially a point-of-no-return, whereafter they view anyone who differs from them, however slightly, as an existential threat and an enemy to be dominated. It doesn’t matter if your ideology is left or right, if you think that way, it’s very aggressive.
In general, I think people should try to borrow their ideology from all parts of the political spectrum as what fits one situation, doesn’t work for another. The overall goal, I think, should be to optimize for both social stability and individual liberties, as both of those facets of society have historically shown to result in the most productive and effective societies and economies.
Trump’s margin was very slim, a bit more (2.3M) than the 55+ voters who age out in a year (~2M).
Do younger folks continue to tilt conservative? Maybe, but older Republican voters keep aging out. I see this like Brexit; squeaked by and then the old folks who tipped it died out over the next few years. How much damage there will be to repair is to be determined.
Trump has already walked back several of his campaign promises, such as reducing inflation on food. Does it count if you won if you lied to your base to do it? I think it's important people get what they vote for, otherwise, they may not make better decisions if they don't feel the consequences of their actions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/20/trump-ele... | https://archive.is/2025.01.23-145837/https://www.washingtonp...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/12/10-facts-...
https://apnews.com/article/trump-inflation-grocery-prices-en...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-walking-back-biggest-campai...
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-TRUMP/BUDGET/xmvjbqgmkv...
It’s historically the smallest popular vote win, but the fact stands that he’s the first republican to win a popular vote since Bush. Note also that he’s polling favorably on his anti-immigration work, but other antics, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, is probably distracting for Americans who are waiting for lower goods prices.
I am not sure if people will find these policies favorable in the future, but based on the recent election results the republicans vote house, senate and the presidency. While their margins are slim, which is fine, the fact remains that people voted a certain way because that’s what they wanted.
You’re absolutely right that the margins are too slim, and so the federal government should do its best not to alienate states that don’t think like it. State rights are still important, and should be maintained.
> Trump has already walked back several of his campaign promises, such as reducing inflation on food. Does it count if you won if you lied to your base to do it? I think it's important people get what they vote for, otherwise, they may not make better decisions if they don't feel the consequences of their actions.
Yes, it still counts. Show me a president who kept his campaign promises. We don't get to re-do the election when the president is proven to have lied.
Stronger: I like to be allowed the privilege to be smarter today than I was yesterday. We should extend politicians the same privilege, rather than requiring them to be stupid today because they were stupid yesterday.
(Do I think that Trump was lying? Either that, or speaking with reckless disregard for the truth. Of course he was. My money's on "reckless disregard", but I don't think it makes much difference.)
tech people are the ones running and driving "it" forward. almost all of them. the rest of the constituents is meek, irrelevant in terms of actual relevance - beyond hierarchies & chains of command.
indie/ low tech is rare.
people striving for symbiotic methods are even rarer.
the now got reduced to a ticktockish attention span and sphere. even among artists.
the buck counts more than the message. the message is no more than "compensation". "i blinded myself, mhwiwiwi"
fuFAANG/Fortune5000 are more vulnerable than todlers but even peeps with toddlers don't "transcend" ...
it's a full metal jacket kind of rationale ... "better u now and the rest of us later than me boss now" ...
it's just a couple of million years, don't worry.
the huge rock implicitly linked to the development of Earth doesn't know mercy.
life will evolve somewhere far away yet again. only a matter of time until your genes get combined again, ... if you are not among the reasons why that rock got on its way, that is ... like too many of 'dem dinosaurs, 'member?
Public administration should be "boring" and a utility that provides predictable quality services without the corrosive corruption of total regulatory capture. The problem right now is it has devolved into a spectacle of personalities and fanatical team sport that occupies disproportionate mindshare that reduces happiness, economic output, world standing, and more.
The most sensible way forward would be in the spirit of Aaron Swartz's realization that the political operating system was sick and now needs urgent care. And so no enduring reform can be realized from within because of vested interested benefit from the ever sliding status quo. This demands a broad base of ordinary people to overthrow the oligarchs using deliberate, peaceful means by the multitudes. The time still isn't ripe yet, but the time is coming for a necessary and essential reset back to sane adult competent leaders who listen to the people irrespective of money, and provide public administration for the benefit of the majority of folks. Small government is no panacea when the billionaires' rival the state in power and influence, smart government not influenced by big money is where the US needs to be to thrive and to continue. Perhaps America should do representative democracy differently with a variant of sortition rather than celebrity popularity contests sold by mass media.
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This has indeed been a sad revelation.
Genuinely makes me want to abandon commercial software entirely and go 100% open source. (With a GPL-derived license specifically denying far-right and NRx supporters permission to use.)
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