The NSA has been trying - successfully, it seems - to put backdoors inside encryption since the mid-90s.
He also has a YouTube video on the same subject.
steveblank.com
And if that's the case how would a less powerful government resist the power of big tech as you seem to be implying?
How are you envisioning people protecting themselves against corportations?
If it’s not obvious to you, you have been extremely privileged to be part of the a few percentage who haven’t had to live under horrible governments and their worst experience is having to deal with Comcast.
There is a big difference still. For a corporation to become rich and powerful in an anarchical environment as you describe, they have to provide good and services that people voluntarily choose to pay for, so they have to appease the people, or at least a large subset of them, directly to retain the power. For a big evil government that is not the case at all. Look at all the Communist/Socialist/Islamist disasters. They are impossible to vote out.
> so they have to appease the people, or at least a large subset of them, directly to retain the power.
The biggest corporations would not operate in an industry with a lot of competition, the biggest companies are the ones that can get a near monopoly on some good. Without a strong government to break up monopolies, it wouldn't matter what people think about the companies, they'd still have to buy. Even if that doesn't work, a simple rebranding and a purchase of a propaganda campaign from the biggest media corps will do the trick. Even if the corps in control change occasionally, the people behind them probably don't change as much. The same group of the wealthiest people would likely own many of the corps, so it wouldn't matter to them which one is in control, as they all serve their interests.
It doesn't matter what size government we have, we need one that's just slightly larger than the corporations and is geared towards preventing the corporations becoming to powerful. We _need_ regulations and antitrust, but I don't know how we maintain that. An educated populace would help, but how to prevent the corporations from propagandizing that populace into weakening the government in the corporations interests? This is the situation we've been in the last 50 years.
I would instead optimize for properties that are not conceptually tied to 'weak' or 'strong'.
Have effective state capacity. Have independent corruption bodies. Enshrine the separation of powers and rule of law. Have a monopoly on force. Have an independent bureaucracy. Prioritize both efficiency and effectiveness without seeing them as trade-offs. Create more good regulations and repeal or reform more bad regulations. Separate military from civilian police.
Getting it right is about lots and lots of small details, quality institutions and cultural norms that we need to build over centuries of effort. It's less about a simple patch.
When political bs starts into enginerring institutions my suspects are:
- companies have too much money to burn
- company organizational maturity has cratered focusing too much on outside noise
- boards have become lost / distracted ... line engineers, tls, middle level engineers who actually get things done don't have the luxury of being pretty boys on tv talking ** or meeting lobbyists and expensive steak places on the company dime
- eventual customer dissatisfaction and financial stress to come
- corporate boards if they had any brains would keep moat between them and Washington
- getting / controlling business on the cheap through gov hook ups ... is what? Were we supposed to applaud the flex there?
Almost nothing is filmed in LA county anymore.
bigyabai•3mo ago
All the seed funding in the world won't disrupt the monopoly on violence. We're here because some dolts actually believed the lie that Silicon Valley was on "our side" of the fight.
paxys•3mo ago
heroprotagonist•3mo ago
It's not always simple to be precise..
watwut•3mo ago
SpicyLemonZest•3mo ago
convolvatron•3mo ago
harimau777•3mo ago
hippo22•3mo ago
pessimizer•3mo ago
If you hear that the government is coming down on somebody in silicon valley, it's because everybody else in silicon valley wanted him gone.
"The Feds" are people with no interests, no money and no power. They are where they are to execute for American business (and as we've sold off America, that just means any rich guy), and it's literally all they've been doing since WWII.
chaps•3mo ago
One of the clearer modes of how this all looks can be seen when using public records laws to request information that was created through a government contract. On one side, trade secrecy is a legit thing. On the other hand, it's abused to the Nth degree such that just about anything is "trade secret". Government agencies will literally just ask the company's counsel if records in a records request can be released and they'll copy/paste the answer.
For example: I took an uber from an East Chicago, IN restaurant to a Chicago, IL planned parenthood and then FOIA'd for the GPS records that the city legally requires Uber to provide for every trip [1]. In the request I included the trip identifier that I found on the city's open data portal [2]. For months and months they denied, denied, denied, even after a request for emails gave me the exact SQL query they wrote to identify my trip.
Eventually when I narrowed the request down to the exact fields, they finally agreed that they have the records, but argued that the data (edit: just lat/lng of the start/end locations) showing me going to a planned parenthood was a trade secret. It would be trivial for Chicago's counsel to push back on that, but they seemed to have zero interest in reflecting on the risks of holding this category of data.
[1] https://chicago.github.io/tnp-reporting-manual/trip/ [2] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Transportation/Transportation...
cyanydeez•3mo ago
mindslight•3mo ago
nomdep•3mo ago
The idea is that, like rods are fragile by themselves but strong as a bundle, an individual is either with the group (making it stronger) or an enemy of it. No room for discussion or disagreement
cyanydeez•3mo ago
_phnd_•3mo ago