Sleepwalking into nazi germany with that attitude.

Good thing I switched to .dbzer0.

Unfortunately many of the people I work or have worked with are from all over the world, and many of them share these ideals. I took a big pay cut 5 years ago to move from the ad/ecommerce industry to work at an emergency management SaaS company.

The app I now work on is used to save lives, whereas the customers I was producing work for at my last job would do anything for the extra dollar. Knowing where my time is going towards the general good is very rewarding. Yet many people I spoke to in my industry were confused at my decision.

Late stage capitalism and fascism I think eventually are inseparable. Just the centralization of power and wealth consolidation that fails everyone involved in the system except those at the top

Same here fellow sailor. Reddit made me feel transparent. Never going back!

Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

You in turn are overestimating how much effort is required for an established bot farm to add a platform to their system.

I used to see that shit decades ago in the phpBB days, you'd get accounts signing up to a board with 20 active users to post climate change denialist articles, even though the website itself had nothing to do with climate change. (Looking back on it now, the oil lobby was probably the first big user of internet forum astroturfing, but somehow nothing ever came of it...)

I have never seen it but I remember the snake meme was a highlight of the time

But that's not what the public nor the voters were told

Sure he does, intellectually, just like I understand the ramifications of buying a smartphone, clothes "made in Bangladesh", or using a public AI model. Still the human conscience doesn't apply too much significance to something that abstract. It doesn't keep me up at night that my lithium is mined by Congolese children - but if I had to buy it personally from a one-armed indentured labourer I'm sure I'd stop immediately. "Out of sight out of mind" isn't an excuse for committing heinous acts, I'm just saying that it's not simply that he "doesn't care about other people"

Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

A good question to ask, is what would happen if Lemmy was the victim of astroturfing. It's decentralized for starters and groups might not even reside in the same place on the fediverse. Also I expect Reddit has monitoring, analytics and tools that could flag behaviour rather than somebody having to go through logs trying to find patterns.

I think Lemmy and other federated platforms have escaped having to deal with these issues simply because someone attempting to astroturf will do it on the biggest platform. So Lemmy escapes not by any technical or administrative virtue but by being smallfry.

Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar's number? The monkeysphere? It's hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they're more removed from us.

Like you probably don't really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you'd be more careful. Wouldn't want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.

That's fine. That's all of us.

But I think there's degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.

Somewhere between those two points I think is "I'm going to build software to spy on people". Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of "I don't want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don't know".

This post is getting long. I think you're right that it's not as simple as "doesn't care about other people" but I think that's a factor.

I mean, obviously Reddit is full of astroturfing and psyops, remember when all of sudden everyone on that bloody website was a die-hard zionist when the week before most americans could not have placed Israel on a map

Absolutely a nuanced area. But on top of not modelling random people as full individuals it's hard to determine what spying on people might actually mean. I don't really want to defend working for a company as nefarious as Palantir - even if I honestly hardly knew them before Trump #2 - but convincing yourself that gathering people's data isn't problematic is quite easy, and we all inherently accept a wide array of surveillance measures as - willing or unwilling - members of state entities, be it a video camera in a clothing store or governments logging our tax data. Then comes the fact that employees below the level of "board of directors" usually don't know everything going on in the company; I wouldn't fault a junior dev choosing to work for, say, 'cool' Google or Apple in 2017.

Of course it's relevant that humans are egocentrical animals; I wouldn't give my own life to save five people that I don't know in Moldova. Being too empathetic is a poor trait in a dog eat dog world. Of course we need standards and to hold others up to these standards; I don't know your friend, what he does at Palantir or when he started working there - maybe he's a lazy ass that holds them back haha - and I do think, especially with all that's transpired the past 5 months, that it's a problematic company to be part of - I just wanted to discuss that I don't think it's just lack of empathy