[HN Gopher] Anti-Personnel Computing (2023)
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Anti-Personnel Computing (2023)
Author : transpute
Score : 111 points
Date : 2025-05-13 08:06 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (erratique.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (erratique.ch)
| Tepix wrote:
| It's all in the software. Avoiding systems that work against you
| is harder than ever. Even our brains betray us, falling for the
| dopamine rushes expertly assembled by the exploiters.
|
| An unchecked drive for profit maximisation is often at the source
| of this evil. Cory Doctorow has expertly described the phenomenon
| in his essays1 about _enshittification_ , a term he coined. He
| has raised a lot of awareness, yet we're still in a timeline
| where non-profit, decentralised services have small market
| shares. Perhaps the _Leidensdruck_ , i.e. the degree of
| suffering, is not yet great enough?
|
| --
|
| 1 https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Even our brains betray us, falling for the dopamine rushes
| expertly assembled by the exploiters.
|
| I had this discussion with other people who deleted their
| account at some website that can be considered "social media"
| in a broader sense. They told me that the reason why they
| deleted their accounts was that they realized that these bursts
| of dopamine rush that they got from the respective site was not
| good for them.
|
| I, on the other hand, have _never_ felt this kind of dopamine
| rush, even though I was a likely even more active user on the
| respective site. My reason for really wanting to delete my
| whole account was "purely logical" (I hated a lot of decisions
| that the respective company made).
|
| What I want to tell with this story is that I thus see strong
| evidence that the "sensitivity" of people for dopamine rushes
| from websites/games varies _a lot_ between people (and I am
| very likely one who is at least "mostly" immune to them).
|
| Really: if I had to name one thing that gives me dopamine
| rushes that are so much more intense (I would say: "multiple
| magnitudes more intense") than _any_ dopamine rush that I got
| from _any_ social media site that I visited, then I would say
| "understanding deep mathematical proofs and strongly
| simplifying them" (but I agree that these dopamine rushes are
| earned much more toughly :-) ).
| benzopaladine wrote:
| Self-control is a factor too. Some people might get a big
| rush but have strong frontal lobes, other people might get a
| smaller rush but have low self-control and still end up
| consuming a lot / having their behavior reinforced.
|
| I think susceptibility to _negative_ emotion is relevant too.
| Not all of the addictive content feels good. Lots of
| companies have figured out how to make negativity addictive.
| flobosg wrote:
| > the Leidensdruck, i.e. the degree of suffering
|
| A literal translation (the _pressure_ of suffering) sounds more
| meaningful to me.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Eh. I think "user hostile" or "hostile architecture" (like
| unsleepable benches) is a better analogy, reserving anti-
| personnel for those cases where computers are used in genuinely
| dangerous ways. Like the Chinese ethnicity-recognizing security
| cameras.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Or certain pagers.
| vanschelven wrote:
| Keep Control of Your Computing, So It Doesn't Control You!
|
| from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/keep-control-of-your-
| computin...
| theK wrote:
| Gold point! But, the real world is so far gone by now that
| fully GPLed computing isnt realistic right now. I would first
| try to push for more users of non corporate OSes for the
| beginning, let's say more /e/ more lineage more graphene OS
| users. And maybe cool alternatives to Maps applications like
| OSMand
| 0x445442 wrote:
| For all his idiosyncratic traits, Stallman was remarkably
| prescient about many things.
| fipar wrote:
| Absolutely, though I think sadly his idiosyncratic traits
| played against his message (and I say this as a big rms fan).
|
| I think it's similar with the original post. Regardless of
| how I feel about present-day computing, I think comparing it
| with war devices designed to maim and kill people, and that
| can (and do) keep maiming and killing people long after a war
| is over isn't going to be very effective.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| It seems like most of those traits stem from an overall
| consistency in ethical perspective.
|
| I think Stallman figured out early on how much he valued
| collaboration over competition, and liberty over authority;
| and moved on naturally from there.
| roughly wrote:
| There's enough stories about Stallman's "eccentricities"
| that aren't the result of ethical choices. The man's
| hygiene is sort of legendary at this point. None of this is
| to say he's wrong or argue against his ethical consistency
| or the admirable fidelity to which he holds to his ethics,
| but the dude is odd for reasons beyond his choice of email
| client.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Choosing not to manage hygiene is a pretty common anti-
| authoritarian move.
|
| Sure, I would argue that good hygiene is a useful tool
| for liberal collaboration, but that doesn't make his
| behavior ideologically inconsistent.
| roughly wrote:
| Prophets are often more than a bit idiosyncratic. It's a lot
| easier to really see society from the outside.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And this is why geeks don't understand why the "Year of the
| Linux desktop" doesn't happen - most people don't care (and
| neither do I on my phone).
|
| I want the least friction possible when using my computer. As a
| user, the biggest complaints I have about the App Store were
| not being able to buy an ebook directly from the Kindle app and
| other restrictions on buying digital content from the app
| because of Apple's rules. That's a least temporarily been fixed
| in the US because of the judge contempt order.
|
| As far as the 30%? It came out in the trial that 90% of in app
| revenue is coming from pay to win games. Why should I care
| about them?
|
| The small Indy developers are paying 15% - the very few who
| exist and are successful
| antod wrote:
| I think the difference with geeks is that they're/we're
| willing to put up with up front one-off friction to avoid
| ongoing friction.
| fmajid wrote:
| Not a good term. Anti-personnel mines do exactly what they are
| intended to do. These devices/software do something against the
| interests of the user in the process of doing something the user
| actually wants (otherwise why would the user even get them?).
|
| Perhaps "Faustian computing"?
| Zambyte wrote:
| Anti-personnel computers also do exactly what they're intended
| to do. The interests of the subject are not considered a
| priority, just like with mines.
|
| > otherwise why would the user even get them?
|
| Why does a moth fly into a flame?
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Moths (and other insects) evolved to use transverse
| orientation to fly level at night by using distant bodies of
| light (stars, moon), essentially trying to fly perpendicular
| to light above.
|
| Sources of light which are physically close disrupt this
| instinct.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44785-3
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| An apt metaphor as humans evolved to orient themselves
| based on information (in the strict sense of novel data)
| and so all it takes to trap a human in a continuous cycle
| of hitting themselves against a wall is to create a wall of
| continuously novel information
| cess11 wrote:
| Where in this do you see the connection to worldly, scientific,
| knowledge?
| fmajid wrote:
| As in "Faustian bargain"
| rixed wrote:
| At the contrary, to me the term evoked exactly what the author
| meant. And after the series of detonations of the communication
| devices in Lebanon some time ago, the analogy with anti-
| personnel mines takes an even more concrete and sinister
| meaning.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > Anti-personnel mines do exactly what they are intended to do.
| These devices/software do something against the interests of
| the user in the process of doing something the user actually
| wants
|
| Actually, I think you got it backwards: Anti-personnel mines
| are highly problematic especially when they are not needed
| anymore. They often linger in the ground for extended times
| after a conflict and are a cause of death and injuries in
| civilians, who just want to live their lives. Contrary to this,
| anti-personnel computing is problematic in the times when
| civilians are incentivized to use it.
| liotier wrote:
| > Anti-personnel mines are highly problematic especially when
| they are not needed anymore
|
| When immediate survival is at stake, the future is heavily
| discounted. Slow and channel the attacker now, and consider
| the demining cost later - if you survived the war.
| bestouff wrote:
| This is because you got the "user" part slightly wrong. The
| real users of your smartphone are countless ads companies,
| media giants or even some government services.
| webdoodle wrote:
| Yep. Big tech is the user, you are the product. The
| smartphone is just the interface.
| patcon wrote:
| Thinking of the complex systems terms of "coarse-graining"
| (moving up into higher level systems/astronomical/above scale)
| and "fine-graining" (moving down into human/biological/below
| levels).
|
| Utility of anti-personnel mines is at system level of state war
| (no human-level participant meaningfully "wants" its effect on
| another human).
|
| Utility of anti-personnel computing is the same -- compute
| resources used to benefit of system, but to detriment of human
| actor below.
|
| The difference is we don't equally understand the battle damage
| we take to our minds the way we understand battle damage to our
| biology. This might change though
|
| EDIT: but yes, there are some differences thru this lens that
| make the metaphor a bit strained
| sifar wrote:
| I was discussing this with my son the other day. We have a
| Faustian bargain with technology in general, not just
| computing.
| ygjb wrote:
| Well, anti-personnel mines should function as expected for the
| primary user. The classic "Front Toward Enemy" is the basic UI
| that illustrates who the primary user is. The secondary users
| may want to file a ticket about the user experience.
|
| That said, I think more lovecraftian horrors that have taken on
| their own life, aided by the human creation of corporations...
|
| I don't recall where I first saw it, but this is fairly apt :P
|
| ---
|
| Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a
| Lovecraftian horror scenario?
|
| Like we've got this dimension right next to ours, that extends
| across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with
| nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless
| legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for
| weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.
|
| Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who've
| abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people,
| jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill
| something you can't touch or see or smell. They'll corrupt
| anything they think could be a vessel for their message and
| they'll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering
| haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the
| spambots in some ways.
|
| Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever
| working at the cracks between our world and the world we made.
| Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth,
| others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust
| them. There are mages who work to defend against this
| particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is
| almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That one's from asterCrash (via Tumblr). Canonical URL:
| https://astercrash.tumblr.com/post/157419046864/did-
| anyone-n.... Full text below.
|
| ---
|
| Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a
| Lovecraftian horror scenario?
|
| Like we've got this dimension right next to ours, that
| extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming
| with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this
| endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly
| probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to
| thieve, to destroy.
|
| Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who've
| abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people,
| jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill
| something you can't touch or see or smell. They'll corrupt
| anything they think could be a vessel for their message and
| they'll jabber madly at any who question them. Their
| chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not
| unlike the spambots in some ways.
|
| Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever
| working at the cracks between our world and the world we
| made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for
| wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough
| to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against
| this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their
| advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as
| protection.
|
| All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook
| asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email,
| so does your twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a
| gesture with the hand, some use the colour of your eyes, or
| the shape of your finger. Our chief of security joked about
| requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log
| in. Many do not understand the humour of mages.
|
| The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled
| our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open
| almost all of them. We all carry magic slabs of glass that if
| you hold it up to your ear can sing to you with a loved one's
| voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show you a
| corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane
| with a thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a
| moving vehicle. At one point they made it stop. At another
| they made it so it couldn't stop. Some of our best and
| brightest are going to create an army of four winged bats
| hovering throughout every city and we are going to connect
| them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.
|
| I'm not saying it's all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies
| deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking
| up.
| SilasX wrote:
| I'm just ... dumbfounded at why it isn't "anti-personal
| computing". Like, as a riff on "personal computer/computing".
|
| Related: the scene in Bojack Horseman:
|
| "And this time, it's personnel!"
|
| 'Uh, shouldn't the line be, "It's personal"?'
|
| "No, because it's like, he's saying it's an inside job, so,
| personnel."
| keisborg wrote:
| I love term how it plays on the words and the negative
| association we have with anti-personell mines
|
| If we could have a ban on anti-personell computers...
| casey2 wrote:
| anti-personal computing: data collection, closed ecosystem, dark
| patterns, opaque programs, central control
|
| anti-personnel computing: the use of a computing system to
| target, harm, control or neutralize individuals
| praptak wrote:
| I prefer "antifeatures" as more precise.
|
| https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/antifeatures/
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The word antifeature can describe a feature that the designer
| doesn't want. That's usually the scenario I experience it in,
| and it's a good fit for it.
|
| Anti-personnel describes more precisely, the perverse
| prioritization of a 3rd party's goals over the end user's
| goals.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I am just quite old enough to remember the late 90's/early aughts
| dotcom craze. The vibe in software feels very similar to me -
| back then I remember ad-riddled pages that'd spam you with popups
| and sometimes malware, all in the same fever pitch to eek out
| every possible penny so they could show revenue for their
| overpriced valuations. The web was seen as a gold mine that if
| you weren't pillaging, you were actively losing - until it all
| imploded.
|
| The look and feel of a lot of web pages today (invasive ads
| taking up disproportionate amount of the page) reminds me a lot
| of that time, even without going to the dotcom parallels we have
| with the current hype cycle.
| api wrote:
| It did not take long after the Internet went mainstream for a
| borderline (or not borderline) malware industry to evolve
| around getting predatory crap onto peoples' computers. I
| remember uninstalling shit like "Bonzai buddy" and the various
| toolbars and other trash that would come with dodgy installers
| or sometimes on new installs if you bought a cheap machine.
|
| Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still
| holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for
| their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very
| anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old
| cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political
| zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian"
| with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism.
|
| It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer
| as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system
| and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way,
| but that's where it went pretty fast.
|
| Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to
| stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum
| feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine.
|
| It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a
| shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government
| conservative type ideas and toward every kind of
| authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission
| and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa.
| I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both
| ways.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy_
|
| Let's not romanticize the old PC culture - most running
| Windows with some combination of viruses, bundled software
| when you were trying to install something else, many people
| had 10 tool bars on IE that were all tracking your browser
| history
| api wrote:
| I'm not talking about the maturity or quality of the
| software but the zeitgeist of the ecosystem. Vendors mostly
| made software for the user, who was the customer, not for
| themselves or advertisers to sell the user as a product.
| nartho wrote:
| I forgot about that. I feel like everybody had an uncle or
| parent that would have so many toolbars that there was
| barely any space left for the page. That was mainly the
| results of using software that had those installers where
| you had to actively refuse the toolbars (and of course they
| just accepted everything)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Why are you even seeing ads on web pages? Don't you use an ad
| blocker?
| caulkboots wrote:
| Not GP, but some of us have family members who refuse to even
| consider using uBlock Origin, for reasons they're never quite
| able to articulate.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I usually avoid meta-commentary like this, but this comment
| has been re-iterated 500,000 times on this site any time this
| topic comes up. The reason I'm replying is that it's become
| offensive at this point the idea that anyone needs to install
| 3rd party software to (sometimes) avoid being barraged by
| advertisements and data miners. It also doesn't work as well
| or at all for mobile applications with ads built into them,
| like facebook, or even sometimes my OS these days. This type
| of comment is often used to dismiss complaints about ads in
| general, and is a really weak soft-defense of it in my
| opinion. Ad blockers existed in the 90's/00's too. This is a
| critique of the entire ecosystem, not one person being like
| "aw i hate seeing all these ads and don't know how to fix
| it." That's an overly simplistic view of my comment.
|
| Regardless, this is a commentary on the state of the web, not
| my personal usage of it. The vast majority of people do not
| block ads, otherwise they would not make money. If everyone
| did this, these sites wouldn't even work in the first place
| at least in the way the web is currently designed, which is
| part of the entire problem.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's not useless. It's like complaining about why am I
| having trouble breathing while I'm holding my head
| underwater. The commercial web has always been a cesspool
| of ads since the "punch the monkey" banner ads and the X11
| pop under ads.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| I usually avoid meta-commentary like this, but this comment
| has been re-iterated 500,000 times on this site any time
| this topic comes up. The reason I'm replying is that it's
| become offensive at this point the idea that anyone needs
| to wear a cup while playing baseball to (sometimes) avoid
| being barraged by baseballs and people kicking me in the
| dick.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I don't go on the web to have ads lobbed at my head;
| whereas high-speed baseballs are very much a part of the
| game _Baseball_.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| The only way to make this analogy work is if the entire
| premise of the game of baseball was predicated on the
| fact that not only do 99% of players not wear cups, but
| them getting hit in the nuts is required for the game to
| even continue at all.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of
| a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)
|
| >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was
| displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic"
| Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the
| system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box
| in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal
| operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS
| offered little memory protection, an application crash would
| often take down the entire system.
|
| Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to
| jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in
| terror, because they though it was going to explode!
|
| And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and
| will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause
| naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally
| doing something illegal!
| 6510 wrote:
| I hear part of the Chinese miracle of central planning is that
| they have almost full knowledge of everything everyone is doing
| in the economy. In contrast, in the west, where we optimize for
| personal gain, you can get a lot done by throwing up barriers and
| creating friction. We also pretend/believe our governments use
| all data against us.
|
| My gut tells me that cryptography and clever use of time and
| location can be used to use public data for specific purposes
| alone.
|
| You could for example construct security cameras with sufficient
| encryption that only a judge can request access to a specific
| chunk of time and has to provide a specific case number.
|
| It might even be possible for the judge to request a specific
| thing from the footage like time stamps and licenseplate numbers
| not from people living there or even similar faces and devices
| seen around similar crimes.
|
| I don't want the specific time stamps and locations made
| available buy I don't see great value in keeping my annual toilet
| paper purchases secret or how many km I need to travel to
| purchase shoes.
|
| Maybe (when seeking) we should get proximity push notifications
| for job offers that fit our resume.
|
| I mean, we should explore the boundary between anti-personel
| computing and useful application. Maybe things are worse than we
| think, maybe they can be made mutually beneficial.
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(page generated 2025-05-13 23:01 UTC)