Bonum Certa Men Certa

Keeping Control Out of Dictators' Hands

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 06, 2024

Putin and Jinping

When people are just "numbers"...

To most people, other people are not reducible to just "numbers" or "human resources" or disposable assets. To most people...

Well, most people do not become presidents.

It's rather obvious that living in peace in a world where the governing people do not want peace is hard. Some people seek to dominate, e.g. imperialism, monarchy, monopoly. Some try to impose their worldview (political, religious etc.) on everybody else. Malevolent or deeply selfish Utopia is catharsis of a sick mind.

In the context of law (e.g. copyrights, patents) and computing (e.g. coding, hardware), there is a similar problem, both from a commercial and from an ideological perspective. Worse yet, some of the aforementioned people (those who reject peace or co-existence) try to leverage law and computing to further their goals and, in the process, they ruin society's access to respectable technology. To them, science is just means to an end - that end being subjugation of other people.

Dictators in science and technology need to be identified and denied access to powerful roles. Otherwise, things that people use - or get forced to use - gravitate towards sociopathic tendencies. The world isn't made easier to navigate owing to technology (it's a lie); it gets different, not easier. In some ways, technology made services a lot worse and there's no human touch or human help anymore. People are seen as "costs", not customers, and citizens are just subjects to be spied on and scored, not citizens to be looked after.

Nihilism and technology can be perceived as a toxic mix.

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