

The quiet war in tech - pron
http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/june/theQuietWarInTech

======
amirmc
_" By now it should be obvious that the big tech companies are not our
friends. They're more like the government than they are like you and me."_

In Europe (at least the UK), it's usually the big companies that are viewed
with more suspicion than the governments. I don't think anyone felt that BigCo
was ever 'like you and me'.

~~~
pron
I'd say everywhere in the western world other than the US. People often forget
that the whole purpose of government is to protect us from that organization
of society that naturally arose in the West (and east Asia, too) before
central governments, namely feudalism. When no central authority regulates
power, power would always become concentrated in the hands of the few, who
would inevitably subjugate the many through economic bonds.

While, like many, I am appalled at the NSA's supposed massive-scale
surveillance, I fear surveillance by corporations like Google much more. The
fact that people share their most private information with Google
_voluntarily_ actually makes it worse. If you want to know where real power
lies, look for power that is not only feared, but loved (say, your mother :)).
Many people have referred to the book _1984_ in the past week, but they've all
missed one crucial point: Big Brother is not feared; he is loved. At the end
of the book, Winston _voluntarily_ subjugates himself to Big Brother. He loves
Big Brother.

As long as the NSA has _some_ form of oversight, however dysfunctional -- as
long as government is at least suspect -- we'll be fine. But the much bigger
danger is Google itself, the power that people love; that they voluntarily
subjugate themselves to. It seems that Americans, perhaps because their
government was formed not from feudalism, but as a rebellion against a foreign
central government -- are very much aware of the dangers of government, but
are blind to the much bigger threat of feudalism.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Feudal lords subjugated the many through threats of violence, not "economic
bonds". "Economic bonds" is just another term for "made the best offer" \-
that's very far from what feudal lords did.

~~~
pron
It was through economic bonds. Not to get into too much detail, but the lower
ranks of feudal nobility were "lords of manors" (with higher ranks being lords
of lords). The manor system (manorialism[1]) was the economic foundation of
feudal society. Back when I studied history (many years ago), I read one the
most fascinating history papers I've ever read: _The Rise of Dependent
Cultivation and Seignorial Institutions_ by Marc Bloch[2] (I couldn't find a
free version online). There was little, if any, violence directed at peasants
- certainly not one meant to get them to work. The entire system was founded
on the fact that peasants had little choice: they didn't own the land, and it
was hard for them to relocate to other manors.

Systems built around direct coercion, with the threat of violence, are rarely
stable. Successful exploitation is one whose targets either hardly feel or one
that's not bad enough to get them to rebel. The way these systems often
collapse is that over time, the exploiters feel more confident to exploit even
more, until they reach a breaking point at which a rebellion occurs.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manorialism)

[2]:
[http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ch...](http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9781139054423&cid=CBO9781139054423A009)

~~~
mjn
It does vary based on the region/era we're talking about. The Russian system
of serfdom was much more formalized, closer to a form of slavery, where serfs
were owned by their estates.

But you're right that in many other regions/periods, peasants were formally
free, and legally able to live anywhere they wanted, as long as they reached
an arrangement with the landowner (otherwise, of course, it would be
trespassing). Since the land was all owned by a smallish number of landowners,
the only way to make a living if you were not one of them was to work someone
else's land, on terms largely dictated by them, so economics effectively tied
peasants to the manorial lord.

I'll see if I can dig up the source, but I read an interesting analysis
specifically of the transition to feudalism in late-Roman Italy. As the _pax
Romana_ weakened, the city of Rome was increasingly unable to be kept supplied
with food imported through smoothly functioning trade routes (especially grain
from North Africa), so much of the population fled the city for the
countryside. There, they had little choice but to reach generally unfavorable
agreements with estate owners for permission to work on their land, since
Italy was already too densely populated for American-style frontier
homesteading in unclaimed land to be possible.

------
Pherdnut
Google doesn't set the standard for JavaScript. The ECMA does. Microsoft tried
their damnedest to run things their way on the DOM API for over a
decade(which, yes, is set by the w3c since it's not the core language) and it
seriously tarnished their image with client-side web devs and designers to the
point where people actually started doing something they hadn't done since the
browser wars which was put up "Sorry, we don't support IE" on their web pages
(no, not major corporations, but there was a bit of it going around spurred on
by regular anti-IE rants from the Opera guys).

Not long after it came to that we got IE9. The first !@#$ing IE browser in
over a decade to finally support the exact same DOM spec Navigator did in
2001.

So no, as long as there are multiple browsers and platforms no one entity
controls JS. Google did create V8 which we all like a lot because it kicks ass
and any time we want more performance we can bind to C but it's not the only
non-browser option for running JavaScript. We've got Rhino and whatever the
hell Gnome Shell runs and god knows how many other platforms I don't know
about (just learned Gnome Shell scripts via JS yesterday)

So no, Google has no leverage to force any major changes in JS. They have made
several attempts to introduce their own cheesy language paradigms that
look/act a lot more like Java (because they are Java whores) and yes the down-
compiled languages are all the rage (you are a fucking MORON if you use coffee
script professionally is all I'm going to say on that), but Google most
certainly does not and never will have more than a little bit of influence on
JavaScript's design nor incentive to because it has a vested interest in
preserving its core features so that we don't "break the web."

The argument that it needs to be smaller is hilarious. It is miniscule
compared to Java or C# and runs with a fraction of the syntax. And why did the
author link to an article on Dart in reference to this topic? Dart is nothing
more than a butthurt segment of Google devs trying to replace JS because their
largest endeavors with JS have demonstrated that they're completely
incompetent at it. Their spreadsheet app craps out when rows reach the 10
thousands and they have no clue how to architect. They just write procedural
JS when they're not trying to mimic Java with it.

------
toyg
Yes, let's compare RSS and Javascript to _international diplomacy_ and
_totalitarian government surveillance_ , they have a lot in common. Look at
all those people killed by ambiguous standard specifications! People are
starving! GIVE ME YOUR F*ING MONEY!

... why do people keep reading Dave Winer, again? Is it something about age,
some sort of rite of passage when you're 21 and naive? "Oh yeah, back then I
survived on ramen and read Dave Winer. I know, crazy, right?"

~~~
pron
Dave Winer writes about what he knows. Everyone has a rather narrow
perspective. You _could_ ridicule him for his narrow perspective, or, you can
read the sentiment he's trying to convey and respond to that.

Is being unable to discern between a text's major point and its inessential
detail a sign of maturity?

~~~
toyg
No, Dave Winer writes in order to get attention to what he does. Now he's
dabbling in javascript, so he drops javascript in everything he can; if the
topic of the day were the cup size of Miss Universe, he'd write that
javascript was invented to measure breasts. And of course, since RSS is his
main claim to fame, that also must make it in the conversation at some point.

~~~
davewiner
No that's not why I write. You don't have any clue about it.

~~~
toyg
I guess nobody has, to be honest. Maybe the WinerWatcher would have helped, in
that regard.

------
ilaksh
Power is shaped by technology. So the technology used describes the power
structure.

Right now we have a lot of centralization in technology. As more and more
people realize what that means in terms of centralization of power, we will
see an explosion of distributed democratizing technologies. Of course there
will be competition between different schemes for controlling that distributed
information, but it will be harder to completely centralize since the
information will be distributed in the leaves of the network rather than
master hubs.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking)

[https://www.ccnx.org/wiki/CCNx/CCNxProtocolDescription](https://www.ccnx.org/wiki/CCNx/CCNxProtocolDescription)

------
norswap
I don't see what RSS has to do with anything, really.

~~~
andor
It's a technology for exchanging information in a decentralized fashion, in
contrast to corporate services like Facebook or Twitter. By centralizing most
online communication, these corporations gain control over information flow,
which means that everybody else loses this control.

------
kalms
Wait, what? What did I just read? I think the conspiracy theories has started
to run a little wild in here.

------
Oculus
This article reads like the author is just crying about the shutdown of Google
Reader.

~~~
toyg
Winer has an axe to grind (actually several of them, tbh): he sees RSS as "his
invention", and will never forgive Google for destroying the market for paid
feed aggregators with Reader.

Now that Google are shutting down Reader, on one side he's complaining ("they
stole it from me and for what?!"), on the other he's hamfistedly trying to
revive interest for the technology.

Of course, none of this has anything to fo with the NSA etc, but that's Winer
for you, forever clutching at straws.

------
calinet6
I couldn't help but laugh at this:

"Our tools have been getting more precarious, thanks to bugs introduced by the
browser vendors"

 _Bugs introduced by the browser vendors?_ What? What?? Wait just second
there, you think the global economy and power structure of the world is being
affected by _bugs in browsers?_

This reads like a thinly veiled conspiracy theory. Actually, I'll just be
blunt: it reads like crazy talk.

These things are not conspiracies against the stability of human society, they
are the random results of a stochastic process of creation. If you want to say
something valuable about the impact of tech on society, there are a whole
bunch of directions you could go, but this ain't one of 'em.

~~~
pron
You really should read this text, or any text, more carefully.

Obviously, bugs in Chrome don't affect the power structure of the world. But
that is just a trivial example (perhaps not a very good one), experienced by
the author, and one that makes him feel a unhealthy concentration of power.

And with regard to conspiracies, a dangerously unbalanced power structure is
rarely the result of conspiracy, and is often, just like bugs, the random
result of a stochastic process, only one that invariably leads to
concentration of power, unless some energy is expended in order to curtail
this "natural" phenomenon.

~~~
davewiner
Actually if they interfere with our ability to get information on our own,
without having it fed to us by Facebook and Google Now, then the bugs are
political, not just technical.

The browser is our gateway, all our information passes through it.

Thanks for encouraging the OP to read the text, btw.

