Its at least heartening to see a broad recognition across many circles and communities of how insane wealth/power concentration, corruption and insane laws like Citizens United are dismantling democracy today. But a16z and others are still pushing their own techno-utopia anti-doomer message that a lot of useful idiots buy into, even though it serves to detract from the political and social root causes of our problems today and instead says even more technology will fix it all.

The attitude towards Iran is also just arrogant. The US believes they have the unilateral authority to dictate who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't, and is morally in the right for bombing their cities and killing their citizens if they don't comply. Sovereignty be damned, we are gods, fuck you. Same thing with literally kidnapping the president of another country. Not to mention, the Iraq war was started on the exact same WMD excuse and it turned out they never had any real evidence of WMDs back then, they just said they did and it was really about oil. And the government now is 10x more corrupt and cruel and xenophobic than it was back then, and back to a huge focus on fossil fuels - don't you have to be a little naive to just trust them at face value now?

I can tell you the prevalence of sports gambling and betting is exploding in Canada now that Kalshi is directly tying up with banks to put gambling inside fucking banking apps. I'm sure it was prevalent in many countries, I'm also sure it will scale up to huge levels and enter new countries with the amount of marketing and money and influence these US companies will bring, who also happen to have DJT's son on their board. Making them markets also frees them to manipulate and trade against their users covertly in ways that cannot be detected and that a traditional sportsbook could not do.

People who actually visit China or talk to Chinese citizens are all quite optimistic about it. The tropes people keep throwing around about autocracy are very inaccurate to anyone who actually reads anything about day to day life there. I can't explain all of it here but you can try reading something from Arnaud Bertrand if you're interested [1]. There’s a comical level of propaganda against China since the west recognized them as rivals that does not match reality at all. Anyways, I always see incredible whataboutism these days when talking about the US' problems now. This is what I think your original post that I replied to does too - the parent was criticizing Meta, and you said but what about China? And the thing is, we're talking about Meta because we live in the West and the horrible shit they do impacts us much more directly than whatever China does! It's not really productive to say China Bad!! in that scenario, it's really just saying "yes we suck, but they suck more!" and that doesn't solve anything.. it channels what should be a focus about huge corruption and threats to democracy in western countries into a pissing match on some other country, and its very sad to see how many people are falling for that.

[1] https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/archive?sort=new

Americans seem to take the US’ geeat reputation for granted and don’t realize how it has slipped and what that means. They also take for granted that China BAD is truth when this sentiment basically just sprang out of nowhere when the west realized it was their geopolitical rival. But to the rest of the worlds citizens, China is not starting any wars and is the source of cheap goods and innovation to other countries. EV batteries recently. The US is now directly causing high oil prices with their war and exports their rapacious companies like “prediction markets” which are 90% sports gambling now to the rest of the world. Meanwhile the classic American move to these kinds of comments is to claim that negative sentiment MUST be part of some bot campaign because surely no one could actually dislike the great America??

Those factors are all rightly part of the sentiment.

There is some horrible problem that was created by the government or needs government intervention to fundamentally solve. The idea of the government being effective or useful in any way is so distant that it doesn't even register as a possibility. The government doesn't even register as a valid target to blame or locus of change anymore, so it never even enters the conversation. Instead, the next proximate cause is blamed and the anger is directed to them.

Recently - a teacher made a private joke on Snapchat expressing frustration about her workday. Snapchat automatically sent the message to the police and the police pulled up an hour later to the school and arrested her. She wasn't charged thankfully. The response on reddit is "FUCK SNAPCHAT" even though we know all communication platforms are being monitored by the government and are no doubt strong-armed into doing this by the government. Even the potential solutions being discussed are only finding and using E2EE communication platforms not policy change, because that's not in the window of possibility.

COVID and AI are great examples of what's wrong today. We created an incredible global communication network that lets us all collaborate across the world, used it to work through a pandemic, found a better work-life balance and saved hours of commuting and pollution daily. Now everyone is being forced back to the office. Like we all lived through this period right, we remember how much more pleasant it was to be able to work remotely, and its now been snatched away for no good reason? We made technology that can save us 2 hours of commute a day and then throw it away because office buildings go empty?

AI made many of us 2x more productive (conservatively), but where is the increased salary or bonus or reduced working hours for this productivity? All the gains are outcompeted or flow to companies balance sheets. We created this incredible technology and are rewarded with crushing expectations and FASTER FASTER FASTER as usual. Like we've made this miraculous technology that can do so much work for us, but it has made our work harder not easier? Why?

Most potential workers would have to be insane to be invested in a system like this. All the gains flow to the top, everyone else gets crushed. I feel like a hamster in a wheel that keeps spinning faster and faster. All the technology and productivity should be making our lives better, should be making us happier, but everyone is poorer and more depressed now. It's clear that corporate power, inequality, politics is the reason that's happening.

China hasn't started any wars, invaded any countries or kidnapped any heads of state recently. By any measure of recent history, there is no absolutely no question at all on which country has killed the most people outside its borders, its the US. Again, as someone who lives outside US & China, I don't care what goes on inside their borders I care about what they do to the rest of the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni... [2] https://en.everybodywiki.com/List_of_dictators_supported_by_...

When is this insanity going to stop? I really think the IT security industry ought to be ashamed of itself. Security has become a totalizing value that trumps every other value - convenience, user-friendliness, privacy, hackability, openness, just anything at all in the name of MORE SECURITY.