Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns.
You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. Then you infiltrate their content consumption habits and you bombard them with propaganda. And then these people are asked to decide on the future of the nation. This of course only compounds on the natural divisions that are already present within the electorate.
I'm not immune from this, and neither are you.
I don't know what the solutions should be and how CS graduates in particular can help.
It just seems to me that we haven't developed enough on a social level to deal with these challenges.
IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed.
Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure. We have a severe housing shortage, barely improved public transport since the 80s, a lack of energy production (in Europe), lack of reservoirs, an aging population and increased international competition, etc.
And this all creates a huge pressure for ordinary people, just housing alone has a huge impact now - stunting the formation of families, and effectively taxing productive people to fund those who were lucky enough to buy the assets in the past.
This is one thing that I don't understand, take for example Germany, the population barely grew over the last 20 years [1], at the same time there has been a building boom that building costs have risen dramatically (more than doubled between 2010 and 2024). Compare that to the 60s and 70s where population was rising much faster in combination with the rebuilding effort. So is the growth of housing stock lower than the population growth? If yes how come that this was not the case when population growth was significantly faster (even 30 years ago). I don't recall there being more building going on when I was young than now, in fact if anything my impression is it's the other way around.
I suspect part of it is that the housing being built now is both bigger and better than that built in the 60s and 70s. Think of what cars were like then versus now. The other might be the availability of land. Another factor is how housing has changed from being more of a commodity item back then (its a place to live) to an investment vehicle (its a thing you own and make return from). These trends are not specific to Germany, but would apply to many developed countries worldwide.
IMHO the key problems is new building is not targeted to the affordable market and easier to build areas with access to jobs of good economic income are not really open any longer. The established land markets are more expensive because literal "green field" expansion of new cities is not very common, and no longer available in quantity. The cost to build are further increased because the higher end market demands more amenities and developers almost always target the highest market available.
Note: I have a personal theory that one way China was able to perform at this it's current stage of growth, was because it was expanding a lot of first generation real estate development to new areas. It will be very interesting to see if they are able to maintain low housing costs going forward into the next couple decades.
There are dubious claims that the lower end market will be served by aged-out high end market housing and that's simply not the case. It ignores that housing stock ages out of usability - and remodeling is often more expensive to work on than the initial builds. Once you remodel them, they occupied at the high end, then they never free up or go down in rent for other portions of the market.
Not German so I can only talk about how it is going in another country:
- Massive change in the average household size: way fewer people live together now (delayed couple & family formation, divorce, etc.). If you go from 4 people per household to 2 people per household, now you need twice as many homes.
- Massive internal migration: declining population in a lot of rural areas and increasing in cities & their suburbs. So lot of empty houses and super cheap houses in Dumbfuck, Nowhere but scarce & expensive homes where people want to live.
I will agree but rephrase, they were not incapable limiting supply of housing or chinese imports or international information channels is the model. Artificial barriers, ethical redefinitions, rag pulling, tollboothing have been the way to divide and conquer to channel the decaying international and domestic market share to political affiliates. Most political , maga, lgbt, policing, race etc issues are highlighted and disproportionately promoted to noise out discourse about money. If money and safety is considered as a key factor of historical actions and current events, then countries grievances are eastbti explain. When I hear for the other side the media to claim “they went crazy”, “they are barbarian subhumans” I know I am being manipulated.
Propaganda always builds on real greviences that the electorate has.
It's good that you bring up housing. There are, to my knowledge no political parties that have made housing their top agenda item. They only use housing as a talking point to serve their message. For example the extreme right will just say, immigrants are occupying all the housing supply. The extreme left will say it's just capitalism that is to blame.
The problem with the housing issue is that real solutions to it are extremely unpopular, even amount people who agree with the scale and intensity of the problem.
The regular voting public doesn't even agree that there's a connection between increasing the supply of housing and housing becoming more affordable.
Their position is, roughly, "there's plenty of housing already - it just needs to be more affordable for regular people". Sometimes this even manifests in support for self-defeating demand subsidies like help-to-buy schemes for new homeowners
This is a position that can never be satisfied because it is fundamentally disconnected from reality. It is equivalent to the meme of the dog with the stick in its mouth who wants you to throw the stick for them, but not take the stick from them.
So many people have much of their capital in housing which makes it extremely unpopular to try to lower the prices, so neither side is going to make this their top priority.
In much of the west we don't really have markets in any useful sense. Overregulation and financialization ruin markets, and we've allowed both to creep into effectively every market that matters.
That doesn't really make sense. The population in most of the west is vaguely around replacement. A given individual can only make use of so much housing at once. Sure if you're rolling in cash throw in a vacation home or two. There's a pretty quick falloff in terms of utility, status, desire, any metric that's coming to mind as I type this.
It seems to me that at least in the US the issue is location. There's cheap stock in places without jobs and ridiculously expensive stock where the good jobs are located. It doesn't have to be this way.
Millennia before Adam Smith was born, pretty much every human societies which built "houses" (be they crude tents, igloos, lean-tos, thatched huts, or whatever) made a point of building enough of those to house all their members.
Capitalism has financialized housing, and that seems to be a major cause of the "can't actually build housing" problem.
In general, in pre-industrial societies families built their own houses rather than "society" building them for them. Of course this was because 1) many tribal societies had no concept of land ownership so you could just build wherever someone else wasn't using, and often these were temporary for a season or two anyway 2) later feudal societies where there was land ownership had land mostly owned by a nobleman who allowed his serfs to build their cottages on his land.
I didn't realize there was a cut and dry "correct" answer. Has it occurred to you that perhaps you are subject to similar biases as other people without being aware of it?
The more extreme billionaire types see the world as a zero sum game. If they lose a third of their paper wealth, they are still billionaires. The more extreme ones want to gut the middle class, because political power is the only threat to their existence. They see a path where they become merchant princes, and another where they are stood up against the wall and meet their fate.
German and Italian fascism took a similar path. In Italy the state even took over some industry, but the big industrialists with power did great. It didn’t end well for them, but their pal Franco was smarter and hung in there for decades.
Business owners turn fascist over economic anxiety. Hitler's funders were afraid they would be irrelevant in an international context.
The people have real grievances but tend to follow any *hole who has been the visible problem all along but can say the problem is that they were blocked from creating the ultimate vision of a perfect **hole.
I don't know the answer to representational democracy but I think there is something in systems like the Scandinavian judiciary where the jury is professional and competent.
A place like the US is a failure because there is a fear of setting any professional requirements on political positions. This is not irrational because the US has not dealt with its history of Jim Crow laws such that it will never happen again. The US is actually organized to make sure it happens again.
Business owners turn fascist over economic anxiety.
The grandparent said billionaires though. Some of them may have economic anxiety (not being in the government's graces might damage your company), but it seems most see a possibility of operating in an environment where they are not constrained by 'pesky' rules. E.g. leveraging Trump's wrath to pressure the EU into dropping laws like the DMA/DSA that protects citizens against the power of large tech companies.
The boring but true answer is that the only thing people should be protesting for is a change of the electoral law. Everything else is downstream of that.
In the US, it's a de-facto duopoly on power, held up by a number of "winner-takes-all" rules. Politicians of either party will do everything in their power to keep "outsiders" (i.e. people/parties that are not entrenched in the two-party system and might actually drive positive change) from ever gaining a foothold.
In Germany it's the famous 5% rule that virtually ensures that every new party must maximize populism or perish.
I'm sure it's very similar in most other "democratic" countries.
Laws aren't perfect. In fact they often are buggy as hell. The electoral law is certainly no exception. However it is ultimately the law that matters most as it determines who can raise to power and who can't. Ensuring it fair and democratic should be the #1 civic duty.
I'm not sure "keeping out outsiders" is a bug. The US is experiencing what it is like to be governed by an outsider with no previous political experience and who thinks things like "laws" don't apply to him, and who thinks experts can't be trusted and puts unqualified people in charge of the military, science and health. Politicians need to develop -- they should start with a local position, and "graduate" to a national-level position before they even attempt to rule a nation.
Notably, we could do that while still abolishing first past the post. Requirements for holding a previous position could be added while simultaneously reforming the federal (and hopefully also state) systems to be compatible with multiple parties. I imagine it would be sufficient for each level to require a single term served at the previous level - city or county, state, and federal.
The downside is encouraging career politicians, but the upside is that if you can't win increasingly high stakes elections over a period of 10 years or so then you probably have no business being the president of a country this size.
Otherwise we would have loonies like the Grey Panthers (old people party), the “Spiritual Party”, or the extreme right-wing “Republicans” (AFD is moderate compared to those) being able to vote on laws etc.
Of course that also cuts out some parties that I have supported in the past, but the system allows a lot of parties to participate that aren’t _that_ populist (e.g. the Greens, the Left, the Pirates (I think they managed to get a seat or two in the past))
Of course it’s not perfect, but I still think it’s one of the best flawed systems we came up with so far.
We should keep iterating on it but very slowly and carefully.
> and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change
In case you didn't mean this, do you agree that the propaganda you're referencing above is the "you" in this sentence?
I don't think anyone who is genuine expects the public to have expertise in these topics. The propaganda seems centred around a constant war against intellectualism and expertise, such that people think they should have an opinion on things they are woefully unqualified to have opinions on, and politicians just align themselves to what they think will get votes.
Even if everybody agreed on the basic facts (which is only possible if they're all drinking from the same well, eg impossible if the press is free) there would still be huge disagreement on what political course of action to take in response to those agreed upon facts, because different people have different values.
Take your global warming example, and suppose we have a magic wand to make everybody agree that it's happening, that humans were causing it, that its happening fast enough to cause massive extinctions, and that action now might still prevent this. With all of these given as universally held beliefs, it should be easy to resolve right? Well no, because in this scenario the magic wand aligned just about everything except values. Does somebody really care about the long term ecological impact of the thing more than they care about how environment austerity would impact them and their family personally? Some will, some won't, so the political debate remains standing. In fact, many of those selfish people will probably decide to stubbornly insist on a narrative that global warming isn't real, even though they know it is (thanks to the magic wand), so you'll be left wondering if your wand even worked at all.
Exactly. Most propaganda is about embellishment and fear mongering that completely destroys the ability of the individual to accurately access the topic at hand.
I don't discount that people have different values and interests. I said that propaganda compounds on those divisions. I think aligning values is also something that is actionable, but that's another topic altogether. My general feeling is that our democracies would be much healthier without embellished fake new narratives about what is happening around us, irrespective of how different our values might be.
For example, let's take global warming as an example. The embellished fake news narrative is that any action at all to reduce our carbon footprint will bring about complete economic collapse, and that global warming is fake news anyway and extreme weather has a completely intangible effect on the life of people living today.
Both of those are false embellished fake news narratives that build upon real concerns. It's true that we should keep the economic health of the nation in frame when we discuss measures. It's true that we might to some extent insure ourselves against natural distastes. But the fake news narrative is the embellishment of these concerns.
Is it selfish to take the attitude that humanity will deal with the consequences of its actions as they arise? That rather than expending vast amounts of capital reorganizing and regulating society to prevent disturbances before they happen we can instead accept the disturbances and deal with the consequences as necessary?
I don't personally think very highly of such a plan but neither do I think that it is reasonable to apply a blanket label of "selfish" to anyone who speaks in favor of it.
> You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask.
But it's more or less the premise of democracy.
A professor in our school jokingly said that the key of functional democracy is to distance average voters from decision making processes. Now I am not so sure whether he was joking at all.
In my opinion these types of problems always boil down to fear. When a person or people are afraid they act erratically. At a large scale it often leads to the wrong type of leader stepping up to use that fear for their own gain, in many cases they pull the majority together by pointing at a smaller group and claiming they're the cause of all the problems.
The only reliable solution I know to that is for people to be principled. People need to know what core fundamentals matter to them and they need to stick to those guns consistently.
Today it seems like we've lost that almost entirely. Most people hold strong views on certain topics or policies but they aren't driven by principles, that becomes clear when their strong opinions contradict themselves at a pretty fundamental level.
There are plenty of symptoms of the problem and I'm oversimplifying here, but if I could wave a magic wand and change one thing it would be to restore principles back in the average person. I honestly don't care what their principles are, I don't think that's the point, we simply can't move in a good direction without people knowing what matters to them.
You stopped too soon in your analysis. Why is there so much fear? Why is there more than, say, the 1980s? The 1970s? (Or was there this much fear then, too, and we just don't remember it that way?)
Is it basically economic? We had this amazing economic ride from 1945 through the early 1970s, and that gave a view of what life could be like that permeated society and gave hope, and the hope continued long past the growth. Now people are realizing that the hope is not likely to happen to them. Is the fear caused by realizing that the hope is in danger? (That hope is in danger in another way, too. People are realizing that, even if they get better economic circumstances, past a certain point prosperity is still kind of empty.)
Or is the fear manufactured? Is it part of the propaganda? Are we being made to feel afraid, so that we can have a crisis of democracy? So that more non-democratic leaders can take over?
The only reliable solution I know to that is for people to be principled.
...and educated.
Today it seems like we've lost that almost entirely.
We replaced it by egoism. Through decades of neoliberalism we are taught to only care about ourselves, not our communities. Making money and buying things became our main philosophy. It does not matter if you are actually well-off, everyone is in a race with everyone else.
As a result, we don't stand up against injustice as long as it does not affect us much. And the egoism makes everything seem like a zero-sum game, if an immigrant gets a house paid by taxes, then I must be losing something.
This is also what permeates current US policy - you can only win if someone else loses. In this mindset it is not possible to have cooperation that is mutually beneficial.
I hope we can heal as mankind and take care of each other again.
For sure, I agree education helps and could be considered a prerequisite to someone really be principled to begin with. It takes wisdom to learn what matters to you and to see patterns behind any particular topic of the day, and wisdom only comes about through education and experience.
I am always torn a bit on education as a goal though. I don't like centralized education, it makes it much to easy to lead to similar problems we have today when any small group of people can decide what and how every person is required to be taught.
We need people educated by their own choice, going down whatever paths they find interesting and learning from that journey. Its my belief that people are generally good, and given the time and space to find their own core principles, and a Democratic type of system where our voices can be heard, things will generally work out for the best in the end. I'll always take the collective opinion of principled individuals over the strongly held views of the small few in power at the time.
> You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. [...]
Personally, I don't think it's that hard of an ask. The problem was allowing the platforming of disinformation sponsored by adversary nation states that led to the mental pollution and radicalization of so many individuals.
Also, not protecting the neutral institutions and allowing that distrust be sown was a big mistake.
Finally, not taking the reports of infiltration of police and security agencies by extreme right organizations seriously has been proving to be a nation-ending level of an error.
> Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy.
Genuine question: what exactly is a "crisis of democracy"?
I see this term thrown around all the time now, but all I can conclude is it's just part of the hyperbolic rhetoric that dominates mainstream and social media.
I think you've described the problem (or one of them) very well.
We've seen how misinformation -- including ideas that were once fringe, believed only by a minority of cranks -- spreads and becomes acceptable, becomes a "legitimate alternative opinion".
We've seen, too, how hostile states, populists within, spread falsehoods to sew havoc and division.
My only hope, really, is that I think some of the younger generation are slightly more alert than some Gen X and millennials (my own generation) as to the dangers of misinformation online.
I wish I knew the solution too. Like you, I feel quite helpless even in terms of what to WANT. Can the Twitters of the world be regulated? If so, are we as a society able to agree on how it should be regulated, or are we too divided to agree on anything?
Who is responsible for these sustained propaganda campaigns? Some of it is foreign interference looking to destabilize, but a lot of it is sponsored by wealthy individuals whose interests are a lot different than the average person, and whose opinions are sheltered from the realities of ordinary life.
It’s always been the case (people getting hi jacked with propaganda campaigns!)
The difference now is how targeted, specific, and external said campaigns can be - for cheap.
Previously, if you started to send the anti-every-other-group propaganda to each individual, you’d be clearly identifiable, it would be more visible (flyers, leaflets, etc.) and consequences could be aimed in your direction.
What is going on now appears to be more like most people have ‘your own little narcissist’ in their pocket, poking their buttons in a way designed to drive them and everyone else crazy while deflecting the blame on everyone else.
Also, as the peer comment noted - all of this distracts from people’s actual real needs being met, which makes them easier to manipulate. It’s a classic strategy for any Narcissist.
Thanks for making this point. I 100% agree. I think previously the way politics worked, there was an element of people keeping each other in check. Now everyone can become as radicalized as their individual limits allow them to become because they live in a personally crafted narrative.
Yes, and not just politics - also day to day life. People would naturally average out with others around them, emotionally.
Not that previously there weren’t real issues (including, quite literally Nazi’s), but it previously required a whole society to go through something like a wide scale traumatic event (like post-WW1 massive external payments, hyperinflation, and associated social problems!) to get the momentum going.
Of course, then it was super dangerous because you had most of a society on the same page and working together. :s
Here, it seems like it’s mostly chaos and navel gazing, with small scale specific targeting of high profile areas, for ratings. At least so far.
The Overton window is shifting, and I’m not looking forward to where it is going so far.
> Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy.
No America is pretty uniquely having one, but because of American exceptionalism instead it can never just be an American problem it simply must be a global one.
Helping, in Rogaway’s sense, means refusing both neutrality and despair. Collapse is not an excuse for nihilism; there are still objective ways to help, even if they’re costly and uncertain. That looks like rejecting work that accelerates surveillance, extraction, or environmental damage; pushing back inside institutions; redirecting skills toward public-interest, climate, or civic work; and engaging politically rather than hiding behind technical detachment.
The harder question Rogaway implicitly raises is not what should be done but how many of us actually have the disposition to accept the blood, toil, tears, and sweat required to fight, rather than retreating into comfort, irony, or resignation. Technical excellence is abundant; moral endurance is not.
I concur and want to add a realization I had some time ago: Considering the state of dysthymia and feeling depressed as one end of a spectrum and a fulfilling, content "happy life" as the other, the sole determining metric is the degree of experiencing self-efficacy.
The experience of self-efficacy is witnessing your willing satisfy your desires and needs through your own working. And self-efficacy is a basic, most important human need, completely independent of grand ideological or intellectual nesting. You may experience it when putting on your pants, going for a run, or building a house; a successful hunt and finding shelter; you may or may not experience it through work. Doing something you deeply don't care about, lacking intrinsic motivation, luck and wealth alone do not grant you the experience of self-efficacy. It's not abstract power, but concrete evidence of you qualitatively changing your world for the better.
Seeking to increase this metric is not a basis for ethics, but guidance for finding lasting satisfaction in life, even under adversarial circumstances. Nihilism, or defeatism is learned helplessness, or depression made religion.
What you're describing perfectly describes our modern medical system. We define disease only by symptoms and as symptoms arise we paper over them with some combination of pills and surgery. There's never time made to understand the underlying cause, only how to patch up symptoms and send the patient home.
I think its a pessimistic outlook and I agree with the sentiment, but then I switch back to objectively how humanity has been historically and how far we have come, I can't stop thinking, "wow".
Being in my 30s I remember Y2K, OZone layer diminishing and a rogue comet coming to wipe out humanity, but it didn't. This is survivor bias just like the examples in the lecture around wildfires and Covid are surely survivor bias too.
My wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem and say "that's a shame/sad/terrible", but I can't help it, we as engineers are wired to do solve problems, not just acknowledge them.
Think of the Dog poo dilemma - most people will just point and say, "terrible someone has let their dog poo there". Then proceed to carry on with their day. My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again.
So when a crises happens I know there are lots of smarter men and women in my field and other areas, who won't just get sad about an issue and instead will start working their brains on the problem.
Until it isn't. The Cuban Missile Crisis could have put a very permanent end to it all, hadn't cooler minds prevailed, but that was a binary moment. There's absolutely no guarantee the coin won't flip to tails the next toss.
The Cuban missile crises I would say was a lot less precarious than Able Archer or the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm alert - which was averted, by, ahem - an engineer!
There is an incredibly good minute-by-minute account of the Cuban crisis: "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" - it covers a lot of areas that aren't often mentioned such as the U2 flight at the North Pole going astray or the Soviet nuclear cruise missile teams targetting Guantanamo that taken together with the more well known events make it seem remarkable to me that we survived.
In first 20 minutes of the documentary The Fog of War Robert McNamara goes over the Cuban missile crisis in detail. Even he admits it came down to luck.
His meeting with Cuba in the 90s and the new information presented that McNamara didn’t have during the crisis was especially sobering. McNamara ended the meeting early because he was “unprepared” to learn there were missiles already operational and authorization was already granted to launch if the Cuban build sites were struck.
I think if someone came up with a liquid solution that could be easily carried and sprayed on dog poo, such that it harmlessly (to either the pavement or grass/soil it was deposited upon) dissolved in the space of a few minutes leaving nary a trace… that person would become very very rich.
> then I switch back to objectively
And that's one of the issues: there's no "objective" way to look at reality. What to you looks objective, to me seems optimistic, in the way that the author denounces as not helping.
> My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again.
The people that put up the “no pee or poo” signs in the yard have dead bushes from dog urine.
Dogs pee and poo, dogs are good companions, you shouldn’t get rid of dogs or their people, there will always be dogs, resistance to pee and poo are futile.
Wealth as we describe it today is effectively directly correlated with consumption of natural resources. Look up graphs of countries' GDP and oil consumption if you're ever curious.
If society does continue to be richer and more prosperous, and those concepts aren't somehow fundamentally redefined, continued worry about crisis or collapse seems reasonable as that wealth came at the expense of further increase the amount of resources we burn through.
Part of humanity will be sure. But what about the rest?
Climate change will not kill humanity off, but its likely to cause suffering we haven’t seen since WWII (or worse).
Unfortunately I've seen a glimpse of how the bottom 50% of people (not in a developed country but globally) get by today. If one doesnt care for their suffering and their lives, its easy to confirm that the society on average (not on median) will be more prosperous. But that will more likely manifest through a few hundred trillionaires living in space and a few ten thousand billionaires who serve them with their services.
The bottom billions will likely just starve, move around desperately due to war, famine, fire and flood, turned away at closed borders, and who knows what new type of cruelty that will bubble up in the future. What do we tell them?
I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech.
I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it.
These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs.
It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.
When it comes to global or environmental concerns, that isn't unique to software. Wealth is created by collecting and using natural resources.
You can always find companies sneaking through that system and turning a profit despite not directly consuming resources like that, but they are few and far between. I'd expect jobs like that to effectively be a rounding error, meaning anyone with a job is likely working on something that is detrimental to people and/or the planet in some way, even if those costs are externalized out of their field of view.
I have worked in software for much less than 20 years, yet I have quickly realized the same. There has been many occasions in many different settings that I have brought up a society-related problem and it simply got ignored in the conversation.
Yeah, after a period of general stability where power was more even distributed among different groups of people (pols, media, finance, labor, edu, etc), we've found ourselves at the mercy of this dangerous new concoction of naive software engineers and business sociopaths that has escaped the lab and run amok over the world. Sociopaths always find a way to harness the ignorant but powerful, and this time its the software engineers.
In time of despair, I like to remember what Albert Camus said about being a rebel What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.
Excellent paper. I didn't read through the whole thing, but I do wonder what kind of course this is - I can imagine depending on the venue I might be frustrated to sit through a lecture of this type even though i'm sympathetic to the view if it were say my professors last lecture before an exam I were stressed about.
But I think the idea that its good that time is made for reflection in such a place is positive. I also think it assumes a lot of views on behalf of the listener that maybe it doesnt do enough to establish (that we are indeed in such a crisis) - but I also see the apocalpytic imagery such as the annual wildfires that I haven't experienced so maybe where the talk is being given its easier to assume listeners share that view
Part of the role of college education is to expose students to the broader world and help them become informed members of society, raising unanswered/unanswerable questions, getting young people to think and grow and find their place to contribute in the great experiment of civilization. Cramming for exams is def part of the college experience but so is/should be these listen to the wisdom of your elders kinds of talks, even if some are kooky or you don't agree w aspects of them.
Discourse around college education has shifted a lot in the last 20 years toward a kind of optimization for job readiness, which itself is both a reflection of economic conditions and a misunderstanding of what elements are necessary for civilization to persist and thrive. College is supposed to be full of messy ideas among a menu of disciplines to challenge us and help us find our passions, and it's supposed to prepare us to become members of a society where all of these ideas and disciplines co-exist. In other words, college is under-optimized for the individual because its purpose is to optimize for society as a whole.
The kind of bigger picture discussion that this lecture is doing is especially important in engineering disciplines since they don't focus much on humanities and the stuff they get isn't tailored to their approach and mindset. We might live in a different world if a little more 'why' had been introduced into the 'what' and 'how' of eng education.
These are questions worth posing. Everyone working in tech right now plays a part in a lot of horrors haunting the world right now, and all of us are partly guilty.
If your answer to this is, "I don't care about the environment, everyone's right to privacy, psychological effects of social media use, or any of those other adverse effects as long as I get a good salary"—that's a valid answer for sure, if you aren't bothered by it. If that is not your answer, maybe it's time to change some things.
I mean “begging the question” in the traditional philosophical sense – assuming the conclusion (societal collapse) as part of the premises. Not the more common vernacular usage which has come to mean “asking questions”.
Plus the sky wasn’t falling in the last few times I checked.
Sorry but you can't critique the problem using the same mode of consciousness that creates it.
Computer science and university in general trains consciousness to see reality as decomposable into discrete, manipulable units. It's the systematic cultivation of a particular relationship to existence. Students graduate with powerful analytical tools and withered organs for perceiving meaning and life.
I enjoy a good whine about how it is all going wrong as much as the next person, but this is a piece of academic arrogance. He's way outside his area of specialisation and his advice seems to be either trivial or bad.
If we just go through the suggestions he makes (slide 35 of 34) - some things that jump out is that life has always been "fucked up" for all of history for pretty much everyone. It isn't a pretence that things are normal, for everyone outside a fairly well off privileged class of professionals that is what normal looks like. The anti-innovation points are not being intellectually honest about the vast improvements in quality and quantity of life that have been driven by innovation. And the "pretence of disinterested scholarship" is a just a too controversial. People are allowed - in a moral sense - to figure out what is true without having their motivations cross examined and having to preconceive every possible implication of their work. Truth is a worthy goal in and of itself.
And for heavens sake, getting arrested or heading to the mountains is just crazy advice. That isn't what he did, he got a good job and spent his time teaching people. I'd watch what he does, not what he says on that one.
Nihilistic garbage lecture, that is my first opinion.
On the other hand, he could have intended the exaggerated pessimistic outlook, to spur into action.
But my bias remains, I don’t like his defeatist attitude.
I was reading an interview with Peter Thiel and he put it pretty well even if you don't like Trump:
>The Trump administration is trying to pull off an extremely difficult thing, because the red pill is that America is no longer a great country. But you have to make sure it doesn’t become a gateway drug to a black pill, where you become nihilistic and give up and you’re destined to eat too many doughnuts in a trailer park.
>...we don’t want to just get blackpilled from that. And then the question is: where are the places that you have some agency to get out of this straitjacket?
I have been nihilistic in the past but took action where I could in life and accepted the reality that you aren't going to solve the world's problems but you have to look at the places where you can have agency and focus on that. Thinking more like this improved my life a lot but it can be easy to engage in doomerism online as it has become its own form of entertainment.
> I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers.
Except that wasn't the point? The point was to critically evaluate what value your work brings to the world and if it is positive. It emphasizes that having ethics as an engineer is maybe a better thing than being a apolitical robot who is only motivated by money.
If there was something similar to the Hippocratic Oath but for engineers, I would vouch for it.
Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns.
You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. Then you infiltrate their content consumption habits and you bombard them with propaganda. And then these people are asked to decide on the future of the nation. This of course only compounds on the natural divisions that are already present within the electorate.
I'm not immune from this, and neither are you. I don't know what the solutions should be and how CS graduates in particular can help. It just seems to me that we haven't developed enough on a social level to deal with these challenges.
IMO the issue is not propaganda at all, but real physical problems that are not being addressed.
Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure. We have a severe housing shortage, barely improved public transport since the 80s, a lack of energy production (in Europe), lack of reservoirs, an aging population and increased international competition, etc.
And this all creates a huge pressure for ordinary people, just housing alone has a huge impact now - stunting the formation of families, and effectively taxing productive people to fund those who were lucky enough to buy the assets in the past.
This is one thing that I don't understand, take for example Germany, the population barely grew over the last 20 years [1], at the same time there has been a building boom that building costs have risen dramatically (more than doubled between 2010 and 2024). Compare that to the 60s and 70s where population was rising much faster in combination with the rebuilding effort. So is the growth of housing stock lower than the population growth? If yes how come that this was not the case when population growth was significantly faster (even 30 years ago). I don't recall there being more building going on when I was young than now, in fact if anything my impression is it's the other way around.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/germany-popul...
I suspect part of it is that the housing being built now is both bigger and better than that built in the 60s and 70s. Think of what cars were like then versus now. The other might be the availability of land. Another factor is how housing has changed from being more of a commodity item back then (its a place to live) to an investment vehicle (its a thing you own and make return from). These trends are not specific to Germany, but would apply to many developed countries worldwide.
IMHO the key problems is new building is not targeted to the affordable market and easier to build areas with access to jobs of good economic income are not really open any longer. The established land markets are more expensive because literal "green field" expansion of new cities is not very common, and no longer available in quantity. The cost to build are further increased because the higher end market demands more amenities and developers almost always target the highest market available.
Note: I have a personal theory that one way China was able to perform at this it's current stage of growth, was because it was expanding a lot of first generation real estate development to new areas. It will be very interesting to see if they are able to maintain low housing costs going forward into the next couple decades.
There are dubious claims that the lower end market will be served by aged-out high end market housing and that's simply not the case. It ignores that housing stock ages out of usability - and remodeling is often more expensive to work on than the initial builds. Once you remodel them, they occupied at the high end, then they never free up or go down in rent for other portions of the market.
> So is the growth of housing stock lower than the population growth?
National averages can hide a lot of local issues. I'm in Berlin right now, I'm told by locals that it's lost the reputation it used to have for "cheap" housing. Meanwhile, if you're willing to look at 115 year old places in the arse end of nowhere: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/165084645?referrer=H... or https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/164269182?referrer=H...
Not German so I can only talk about how it is going in another country:
- Massive change in the average household size: way fewer people live together now (delayed couple & family formation, divorce, etc.). If you go from 4 people per household to 2 people per household, now you need twice as many homes.
- Massive internal migration: declining population in a lot of rural areas and increasing in cities & their suburbs. So lot of empty houses and super cheap houses in Dumbfuck, Nowhere but scarce & expensive homes where people want to live.
I will agree but rephrase, they were not incapable limiting supply of housing or chinese imports or international information channels is the model. Artificial barriers, ethical redefinitions, rag pulling, tollboothing have been the way to divide and conquer to channel the decaying international and domestic market share to political affiliates. Most political , maga, lgbt, policing, race etc issues are highlighted and disproportionately promoted to noise out discourse about money. If money and safety is considered as a key factor of historical actions and current events, then countries grievances are eastbti explain. When I hear for the other side the media to claim “they went crazy”, “they are barbarian subhumans” I know I am being manipulated.
> When I hear for the other side the media to claim “they went crazy”, “they are barbarian subhumans” I know I am being manipulated.
You need to learn to recognize that when it comes from your side of the media, too.
Propaganda always builds on real greviences that the electorate has.
It's good that you bring up housing. There are, to my knowledge no political parties that have made housing their top agenda item. They only use housing as a talking point to serve their message. For example the extreme right will just say, immigrants are occupying all the housing supply. The extreme left will say it's just capitalism that is to blame.
The problem with the housing issue is that real solutions to it are extremely unpopular, even amount people who agree with the scale and intensity of the problem.
The regular voting public doesn't even agree that there's a connection between increasing the supply of housing and housing becoming more affordable.
Their position is, roughly, "there's plenty of housing already - it just needs to be more affordable for regular people". Sometimes this even manifests in support for self-defeating demand subsidies like help-to-buy schemes for new homeowners
This is a position that can never be satisfied because it is fundamentally disconnected from reality. It is equivalent to the meme of the dog with the stick in its mouth who wants you to throw the stick for them, but not take the stick from them.
So many people have much of their capital in housing which makes it extremely unpopular to try to lower the prices, so neither side is going to make this their top priority.
Failure of the markets, and capitalism in general. Surely if the markets worked properly there would be ample housing due to demand?
In much of the west we don't really have markets in any useful sense. Overregulation and financialization ruin markets, and we've allowed both to creep into effectively every market that matters.
> Western governments have been mostly incapable of building housing and infrastructure.
The reason we need non stop housing construction is because the underlying issue is capitalism's demand for infinite growth.
That doesn't really make sense. The population in most of the west is vaguely around replacement. A given individual can only make use of so much housing at once. Sure if you're rolling in cash throw in a vacation home or two. There's a pretty quick falloff in terms of utility, status, desire, any metric that's coming to mind as I type this.
It seems to me that at least in the US the issue is location. There's cheap stock in places without jobs and ridiculously expensive stock where the good jobs are located. It doesn't have to be this way.
It's not capitalism that requires infinite growth, it's our current monetary system.
New money is created by lending it into existence, with interest.
That last bit is key. In order to pay off the interest, you need money, which was also loaned into existence with interest.
The only way to maintain this is through constant economic growth. Without it there's a deflationary collapse.
Millennia before Adam Smith was born, pretty much every human societies which built "houses" (be they crude tents, igloos, lean-tos, thatched huts, or whatever) made a point of building enough of those to house all their members.
Capitalism has financialized housing, and that seems to be a major cause of the "can't actually build housing" problem.
In general, in pre-industrial societies families built their own houses rather than "society" building them for them. Of course this was because 1) many tribal societies had no concept of land ownership so you could just build wherever someone else wasn't using, and often these were temporary for a season or two anyway 2) later feudal societies where there was land ownership had land mostly owned by a nobleman who allowed his serfs to build their cottages on his land.
Maybe true "In general"? But a very good fit for my poorly-chosen set of examples. Vs. -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longhouse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabono
(And quite a few others.)
That does not explain radicalization and anti-democratic turn of billionaires.
Ordinary people who are turning fascists are not turning fascists because of economic anxiety. They reject party that make economy better.
> They reject party that make economy better.
I didn't realize there was a cut and dry "correct" answer. Has it occurred to you that perhaps you are subject to similar biases as other people without being aware of it?
The more extreme billionaire types see the world as a zero sum game. If they lose a third of their paper wealth, they are still billionaires. The more extreme ones want to gut the middle class, because political power is the only threat to their existence. They see a path where they become merchant princes, and another where they are stood up against the wall and meet their fate.
German and Italian fascism took a similar path. In Italy the state even took over some industry, but the big industrialists with power did great. It didn’t end well for them, but their pal Franco was smarter and hung in there for decades.
Business owners turn fascist over economic anxiety. Hitler's funders were afraid they would be irrelevant in an international context.
The people have real grievances but tend to follow any *hole who has been the visible problem all along but can say the problem is that they were blocked from creating the ultimate vision of a perfect **hole.
I don't know the answer to representational democracy but I think there is something in systems like the Scandinavian judiciary where the jury is professional and competent.
A place like the US is a failure because there is a fear of setting any professional requirements on political positions. This is not irrational because the US has not dealt with its history of Jim Crow laws such that it will never happen again. The US is actually organized to make sure it happens again.
Business owners turn fascist over economic anxiety.
The grandparent said billionaires though. Some of them may have economic anxiety (not being in the government's graces might damage your company), but it seems most see a possibility of operating in an environment where they are not constrained by 'pesky' rules. E.g. leveraging Trump's wrath to pressure the EU into dropping laws like the DMA/DSA that protects citizens against the power of large tech companies.
They have alot of anxiety. More money, more problems as they say.
The boring but true answer is that the only thing people should be protesting for is a change of the electoral law. Everything else is downstream of that.
In the US, it's a de-facto duopoly on power, held up by a number of "winner-takes-all" rules. Politicians of either party will do everything in their power to keep "outsiders" (i.e. people/parties that are not entrenched in the two-party system and might actually drive positive change) from ever gaining a foothold.
In Germany it's the famous 5% rule that virtually ensures that every new party must maximize populism or perish.
I'm sure it's very similar in most other "democratic" countries.
Laws aren't perfect. In fact they often are buggy as hell. The electoral law is certainly no exception. However it is ultimately the law that matters most as it determines who can raise to power and who can't. Ensuring it fair and democratic should be the #1 civic duty.
I'm not sure "keeping out outsiders" is a bug. The US is experiencing what it is like to be governed by an outsider with no previous political experience and who thinks things like "laws" don't apply to him, and who thinks experts can't be trusted and puts unqualified people in charge of the military, science and health. Politicians need to develop -- they should start with a local position, and "graduate" to a national-level position before they even attempt to rule a nation.
Notably, we could do that while still abolishing first past the post. Requirements for holding a previous position could be added while simultaneously reforming the federal (and hopefully also state) systems to be compatible with multiple parties. I imagine it would be sufficient for each level to require a single term served at the previous level - city or county, state, and federal.
The downside is encouraging career politicians, but the upside is that if you can't win increasingly high stakes elections over a period of 10 years or so then you probably have no business being the president of a country this size.
IMO the 5% rule is pretty good.
Otherwise we would have loonies like the Grey Panthers (old people party), the “Spiritual Party”, or the extreme right-wing “Republicans” (AFD is moderate compared to those) being able to vote on laws etc.
Of course that also cuts out some parties that I have supported in the past, but the system allows a lot of parties to participate that aren’t _that_ populist (e.g. the Greens, the Left, the Pirates (I think they managed to get a seat or two in the past))
Of course it’s not perfect, but I still think it’s one of the best flawed systems we came up with so far. We should keep iterating on it but very slowly and carefully.
> and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change
In case you didn't mean this, do you agree that the propaganda you're referencing above is the "you" in this sentence?
I don't think anyone who is genuine expects the public to have expertise in these topics. The propaganda seems centred around a constant war against intellectualism and expertise, such that people think they should have an opinion on things they are woefully unqualified to have opinions on, and politicians just align themselves to what they think will get votes.
> “…do you agree that the propaganda you're referencing above is the "you" in this sentence?”
?? The op is making “propaganda” by some assertions in their comment?
Even if everybody agreed on the basic facts (which is only possible if they're all drinking from the same well, eg impossible if the press is free) there would still be huge disagreement on what political course of action to take in response to those agreed upon facts, because different people have different values.
Take your global warming example, and suppose we have a magic wand to make everybody agree that it's happening, that humans were causing it, that its happening fast enough to cause massive extinctions, and that action now might still prevent this. With all of these given as universally held beliefs, it should be easy to resolve right? Well no, because in this scenario the magic wand aligned just about everything except values. Does somebody really care about the long term ecological impact of the thing more than they care about how environment austerity would impact them and their family personally? Some will, some won't, so the political debate remains standing. In fact, many of those selfish people will probably decide to stubbornly insist on a narrative that global warming isn't real, even though they know it is (thanks to the magic wand), so you'll be left wondering if your wand even worked at all.
Apart from facts and values, people differ in their ability to predict the outcome of policy choices.
Exactly. Most propaganda is about embellishment and fear mongering that completely destroys the ability of the individual to accurately access the topic at hand.
You're assuming they had (or would have had) the ability in the first place.
(s/access/assess)
I don't discount that people have different values and interests. I said that propaganda compounds on those divisions. I think aligning values is also something that is actionable, but that's another topic altogether. My general feeling is that our democracies would be much healthier without embellished fake new narratives about what is happening around us, irrespective of how different our values might be.
For example, let's take global warming as an example. The embellished fake news narrative is that any action at all to reduce our carbon footprint will bring about complete economic collapse, and that global warming is fake news anyway and extreme weather has a completely intangible effect on the life of people living today.
Both of those are false embellished fake news narratives that build upon real concerns. It's true that we should keep the economic health of the nation in frame when we discuss measures. It's true that we might to some extent insure ourselves against natural distastes. But the fake news narrative is the embellishment of these concerns.
> In fact, many of those selfish people
Is it selfish to take the attitude that humanity will deal with the consequences of its actions as they arise? That rather than expending vast amounts of capital reorganizing and regulating society to prevent disturbances before they happen we can instead accept the disturbances and deal with the consequences as necessary?
I don't personally think very highly of such a plan but neither do I think that it is reasonable to apply a blanket label of "selfish" to anyone who speaks in favor of it.
> You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask.
But it's more or less the premise of democracy.
A professor in our school jokingly said that the key of functional democracy is to distance average voters from decision making processes. Now I am not so sure whether he was joking at all.
In my opinion these types of problems always boil down to fear. When a person or people are afraid they act erratically. At a large scale it often leads to the wrong type of leader stepping up to use that fear for their own gain, in many cases they pull the majority together by pointing at a smaller group and claiming they're the cause of all the problems.
The only reliable solution I know to that is for people to be principled. People need to know what core fundamentals matter to them and they need to stick to those guns consistently.
Today it seems like we've lost that almost entirely. Most people hold strong views on certain topics or policies but they aren't driven by principles, that becomes clear when their strong opinions contradict themselves at a pretty fundamental level.
There are plenty of symptoms of the problem and I'm oversimplifying here, but if I could wave a magic wand and change one thing it would be to restore principles back in the average person. I honestly don't care what their principles are, I don't think that's the point, we simply can't move in a good direction without people knowing what matters to them.
You stopped too soon in your analysis. Why is there so much fear? Why is there more than, say, the 1980s? The 1970s? (Or was there this much fear then, too, and we just don't remember it that way?)
Is it basically economic? We had this amazing economic ride from 1945 through the early 1970s, and that gave a view of what life could be like that permeated society and gave hope, and the hope continued long past the growth. Now people are realizing that the hope is not likely to happen to them. Is the fear caused by realizing that the hope is in danger? (That hope is in danger in another way, too. People are realizing that, even if they get better economic circumstances, past a certain point prosperity is still kind of empty.)
Or is the fear manufactured? Is it part of the propaganda? Are we being made to feel afraid, so that we can have a crisis of democracy? So that more non-democratic leaders can take over?
Or is it something else?
The only reliable solution I know to that is for people to be principled.
...and educated.
Today it seems like we've lost that almost entirely.
We replaced it by egoism. Through decades of neoliberalism we are taught to only care about ourselves, not our communities. Making money and buying things became our main philosophy. It does not matter if you are actually well-off, everyone is in a race with everyone else.
As a result, we don't stand up against injustice as long as it does not affect us much. And the egoism makes everything seem like a zero-sum game, if an immigrant gets a house paid by taxes, then I must be losing something.
This is also what permeates current US policy - you can only win if someone else loses. In this mindset it is not possible to have cooperation that is mutually beneficial.
I hope we can heal as mankind and take care of each other again.
For sure, I agree education helps and could be considered a prerequisite to someone really be principled to begin with. It takes wisdom to learn what matters to you and to see patterns behind any particular topic of the day, and wisdom only comes about through education and experience.
I am always torn a bit on education as a goal though. I don't like centralized education, it makes it much to easy to lead to similar problems we have today when any small group of people can decide what and how every person is required to be taught.
We need people educated by their own choice, going down whatever paths they find interesting and learning from that journey. Its my belief that people are generally good, and given the time and space to find their own core principles, and a Democratic type of system where our voices can be heard, things will generally work out for the best in the end. I'll always take the collective opinion of principled individuals over the strongly held views of the small few in power at the time.
> You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. [...]
Personally, I don't think it's that hard of an ask. The problem was allowing the platforming of disinformation sponsored by adversary nation states that led to the mental pollution and radicalization of so many individuals.
Also, not protecting the neutral institutions and allowing that distrust be sown was a big mistake.
Finally, not taking the reports of infiltration of police and security agencies by extreme right organizations seriously has been proving to be a nation-ending level of an error.
> Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy.
Genuine question: what exactly is a "crisis of democracy"?
I see this term thrown around all the time now, but all I can conclude is it's just part of the hyperbolic rhetoric that dominates mainstream and social media.
I dunno monied interests leveraging newfound scale of propaganda through internet monopolies might also bear some of the blame.
I think you've described the problem (or one of them) very well.
We've seen how misinformation -- including ideas that were once fringe, believed only by a minority of cranks -- spreads and becomes acceptable, becomes a "legitimate alternative opinion".
We've seen, too, how hostile states, populists within, spread falsehoods to sew havoc and division.
My only hope, really, is that I think some of the younger generation are slightly more alert than some Gen X and millennials (my own generation) as to the dangers of misinformation online.
I wish I knew the solution too. Like you, I feel quite helpless even in terms of what to WANT. Can the Twitters of the world be regulated? If so, are we as a society able to agree on how it should be regulated, or are we too divided to agree on anything?
It's a mess. I don't know how we get out of it.
Who is responsible for these sustained propaganda campaigns? Some of it is foreign interference looking to destabilize, but a lot of it is sponsored by wealthy individuals whose interests are a lot different than the average person, and whose opinions are sheltered from the realities of ordinary life.
"There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."
Warren Buffet
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26ever...
THIS
The core are reactionary people who control resource extraction businesses. The Koch’s, Waltons, etc.
Now there are many players. The useful idiots have enriched themselves enough that they are a force unto themselves,
Then why are you propagating class divide in your very comment? Like what the actual fuck?
It’s always been the case (people getting hi jacked with propaganda campaigns!)
The difference now is how targeted, specific, and external said campaigns can be - for cheap.
Previously, if you started to send the anti-every-other-group propaganda to each individual, you’d be clearly identifiable, it would be more visible (flyers, leaflets, etc.) and consequences could be aimed in your direction.
What is going on now appears to be more like most people have ‘your own little narcissist’ in their pocket, poking their buttons in a way designed to drive them and everyone else crazy while deflecting the blame on everyone else.
Also, as the peer comment noted - all of this distracts from people’s actual real needs being met, which makes them easier to manipulate. It’s a classic strategy for any Narcissist.
Thanks for making this point. I 100% agree. I think previously the way politics worked, there was an element of people keeping each other in check. Now everyone can become as radicalized as their individual limits allow them to become because they live in a personally crafted narrative.
Yes, and not just politics - also day to day life. People would naturally average out with others around them, emotionally.
Not that previously there weren’t real issues (including, quite literally Nazi’s), but it previously required a whole society to go through something like a wide scale traumatic event (like post-WW1 massive external payments, hyperinflation, and associated social problems!) to get the momentum going.
Of course, then it was super dangerous because you had most of a society on the same page and working together. :s
Here, it seems like it’s mostly chaos and navel gazing, with small scale specific targeting of high profile areas, for ratings. At least so far.
The Overton window is shifting, and I’m not looking forward to where it is going so far.
> Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy.
No America is pretty uniquely having one, but because of American exceptionalism instead it can never just be an American problem it simply must be a global one.
Helping, in Rogaway’s sense, means refusing both neutrality and despair. Collapse is not an excuse for nihilism; there are still objective ways to help, even if they’re costly and uncertain. That looks like rejecting work that accelerates surveillance, extraction, or environmental damage; pushing back inside institutions; redirecting skills toward public-interest, climate, or civic work; and engaging politically rather than hiding behind technical detachment.
The harder question Rogaway implicitly raises is not what should be done but how many of us actually have the disposition to accept the blood, toil, tears, and sweat required to fight, rather than retreating into comfort, irony, or resignation. Technical excellence is abundant; moral endurance is not.
I concur and want to add a realization I had some time ago: Considering the state of dysthymia and feeling depressed as one end of a spectrum and a fulfilling, content "happy life" as the other, the sole determining metric is the degree of experiencing self-efficacy.
The experience of self-efficacy is witnessing your willing satisfy your desires and needs through your own working. And self-efficacy is a basic, most important human need, completely independent of grand ideological or intellectual nesting. You may experience it when putting on your pants, going for a run, or building a house; a successful hunt and finding shelter; you may or may not experience it through work. Doing something you deeply don't care about, lacking intrinsic motivation, luck and wealth alone do not grant you the experience of self-efficacy. It's not abstract power, but concrete evidence of you qualitatively changing your world for the better.
Seeking to increase this metric is not a basis for ethics, but guidance for finding lasting satisfaction in life, even under adversarial circumstances. Nihilism, or defeatism is learned helplessness, or depression made religion.
The issue is how much of the helping is a trap.
Helping someone who refuses to deal with the underlying behaviors causing the real problem is just wasting energy better spent on other things.
Taken to an extreme, it’s being a martyr.
What you're describing perfectly describes our modern medical system. We define disease only by symptoms and as symptoms arise we paper over them with some combination of pills and surgery. There's never time made to understand the underlying cause, only how to patch up symptoms and send the patient home.
I think its a pessimistic outlook and I agree with the sentiment, but then I switch back to objectively how humanity has been historically and how far we have come, I can't stop thinking, "wow".
Being in my 30s I remember Y2K, OZone layer diminishing and a rogue comet coming to wipe out humanity, but it didn't. This is survivor bias just like the examples in the lecture around wildfires and Covid are surely survivor bias too.
My wife does not like when I solve problems instead of just acknowledge the problem and say "that's a shame/sad/terrible", but I can't help it, we as engineers are wired to do solve problems, not just acknowledge them.
Think of the Dog poo dilemma - most people will just point and say, "terrible someone has let their dog poo there". Then proceed to carry on with their day. My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again.
So when a crises happens I know there are lots of smarter men and women in my field and other areas, who won't just get sad about an issue and instead will start working their brains on the problem.
The apocalypse is delayed, permanently.
> The apocalypse is delayed, permanently.
Until it isn't. The Cuban Missile Crisis could have put a very permanent end to it all, hadn't cooler minds prevailed, but that was a binary moment. There's absolutely no guarantee the coin won't flip to tails the next toss.
The Cuban missile crises I would say was a lot less precarious than Able Archer or the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm alert - which was averted, by, ahem - an engineer!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
There is an incredibly good minute-by-minute account of the Cuban crisis: "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" - it covers a lot of areas that aren't often mentioned such as the U2 flight at the North Pole going astray or the Soviet nuclear cruise missile teams targetting Guantanamo that taken together with the more well known events make it seem remarkable to me that we survived.
In first 20 minutes of the documentary The Fog of War Robert McNamara goes over the Cuban missile crisis in detail. Even he admits it came down to luck.
His meeting with Cuba in the 90s and the new information presented that McNamara didn’t have during the crisis was especially sobering. McNamara ended the meeting early because he was “unprepared” to learn there were missiles already operational and authorization was already granted to launch if the Cuban build sites were struck.
It must be quite depressing to live life always wondering what could have been.
Not as depressing as life in a world where nobody ever stops to reflect.
Or a life where everyone operates in absolutes, with no shades of grey allowed.
Zero reflection and total constant analysis paralysis are both non viable.
I think if someone came up with a liquid solution that could be easily carried and sprayed on dog poo, such that it harmlessly (to either the pavement or grass/soil it was deposited upon) dissolved in the space of a few minutes leaving nary a trace… that person would become very very rich.
You want a spray that converts dog poo into dog diarrhea, and you think thats better?
Dog poo is detrimental to the environment and us, so that would only make things worse actually.
> then I switch back to objectively And that's one of the issues: there's no "objective" way to look at reality. What to you looks objective, to me seems optimistic, in the way that the author denounces as not helping.
> My engineer brain says lets pick up the poo and then look at solutions to stop it happening again.
The people that put up the “no pee or poo” signs in the yard have dead bushes from dog urine.
Dogs pee and poo, dogs are good companions, you shouldn’t get rid of dogs or their people, there will always be dogs, resistance to pee and poo are futile.
I predict that in 25 years (or 50 or 100):
- human society will be even richer, more prosperous and more technologically advanced
- people will still be desperately worrying that this is a time of crisis and collapse
Let's see.
Wealth as we describe it today is effectively directly correlated with consumption of natural resources. Look up graphs of countries' GDP and oil consumption if you're ever curious.
If society does continue to be richer and more prosperous, and those concepts aren't somehow fundamentally redefined, continued worry about crisis or collapse seems reasonable as that wealth came at the expense of further increase the amount of resources we burn through.
How does the climate crisis fold into that, or do you not think that's a problem, or do you think it's a problem with no ramifications?
Part of humanity will be sure. But what about the rest?
Climate change will not kill humanity off, but its likely to cause suffering we haven’t seen since WWII (or worse).
Unfortunately I've seen a glimpse of how the bottom 50% of people (not in a developed country but globally) get by today. If one doesnt care for their suffering and their lives, its easy to confirm that the society on average (not on median) will be more prosperous. But that will more likely manifest through a few hundred trillionaires living in space and a few ten thousand billionaires who serve them with their services.
The bottom billions will likely just starve, move around desperately due to war, famine, fire and flood, turned away at closed borders, and who knows what new type of cruelty that will bubble up in the future. What do we tell them?
I think most Americans agree with you. And that itself will answer where we go from here.
Let's see indeed. I'll reach out to you again each year on this date and we'll see how your prediction is holding up.
if not in 25, in 26.
I studied computer science and worked in and around software for a good 20+ years. Then I slowly started realizing how apolitical almost everyone around me in software was. I was fortunate to have had other influences and interests beyond CS, but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech. I started gravitating out of the software bubble. First, I decided not to work for any company that is directly responsible for things like fossil fuel or finances. Then, away from anything that had to do with incentivizing irresponsible consumption. After a while I realized that it was extremely hard to find any job doing software that was not detrimental in general to the people or the planet. It's sad, but most people don't think about the global consequences of their jobs, or don't want to think much about it. These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs. It is ethically almost impossible for me to work again for 99% of software companies.
When it comes to global or environmental concerns, that isn't unique to software. Wealth is created by collecting and using natural resources.
You can always find companies sneaking through that system and turning a profit despite not directly consuming resources like that, but they are few and far between. I'd expect jobs like that to effectively be a rounding error, meaning anyone with a job is likely working on something that is detrimental to people and/or the planet in some way, even if those costs are externalized out of their field of view.
I have worked in software for much less than 20 years, yet I have quickly realized the same. There has been many occasions in many different settings that I have brought up a society-related problem and it simply got ignored in the conversation.
Yeah, after a period of general stability where power was more even distributed among different groups of people (pols, media, finance, labor, edu, etc), we've found ourselves at the mercy of this dangerous new concoction of naive software engineers and business sociopaths that has escaped the lab and run amok over the world. Sociopaths always find a way to harness the ignorant but powerful, and this time its the software engineers.
In time of despair, I like to remember what Albert Camus said about being a rebel What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.
Excellent paper. I didn't read through the whole thing, but I do wonder what kind of course this is - I can imagine depending on the venue I might be frustrated to sit through a lecture of this type even though i'm sympathetic to the view if it were say my professors last lecture before an exam I were stressed about.
But I think the idea that its good that time is made for reflection in such a place is positive. I also think it assumes a lot of views on behalf of the listener that maybe it doesnt do enough to establish (that we are indeed in such a crisis) - but I also see the apocalpytic imagery such as the annual wildfires that I haven't experienced so maybe where the talk is being given its easier to assume listeners share that view
Part of the role of college education is to expose students to the broader world and help them become informed members of society, raising unanswered/unanswerable questions, getting young people to think and grow and find their place to contribute in the great experiment of civilization. Cramming for exams is def part of the college experience but so is/should be these listen to the wisdom of your elders kinds of talks, even if some are kooky or you don't agree w aspects of them.
Discourse around college education has shifted a lot in the last 20 years toward a kind of optimization for job readiness, which itself is both a reflection of economic conditions and a misunderstanding of what elements are necessary for civilization to persist and thrive. College is supposed to be full of messy ideas among a menu of disciplines to challenge us and help us find our passions, and it's supposed to prepare us to become members of a society where all of these ideas and disciplines co-exist. In other words, college is under-optimized for the individual because its purpose is to optimize for society as a whole.
The kind of bigger picture discussion that this lecture is doing is especially important in engineering disciplines since they don't focus much on humanities and the stuff they get isn't tailored to their approach and mindset. We might live in a different world if a little more 'why' had been introduced into the 'what' and 'how' of eng education.
> We stand today at the brink of civilizational and environmental collapse.
Could I have that in a smaller size, please?
yeah but meta pays me an OBSCENE AMOUNT of money to literally farm the minds of the vulnerable, so I la-la-la can't hearrrr youuuuu
On switching from being a computer scientist to a question begging philosopher.
These are questions worth posing. Everyone working in tech right now plays a part in a lot of horrors haunting the world right now, and all of us are partly guilty.
If your answer to this is, "I don't care about the environment, everyone's right to privacy, psychological effects of social media use, or any of those other adverse effects as long as I get a good salary"—that's a valid answer for sure, if you aren't bothered by it. If that is not your answer, maybe it's time to change some things.
I mean “begging the question” in the traditional philosophical sense – assuming the conclusion (societal collapse) as part of the premises. Not the more common vernacular usage which has come to mean “asking questions”.
Plus the sky wasn’t falling in the last few times I checked.
"We stand today at the brink of civilizational and envi- ronmental collapse."
No we don't.
End of me reading this paper.
Sorry but you can't critique the problem using the same mode of consciousness that creates it.
Computer science and university in general trains consciousness to see reality as decomposable into discrete, manipulable units. It's the systematic cultivation of a particular relationship to existence. Students graduate with powerful analytical tools and withered organs for perceiving meaning and life.
I enjoy a good whine about how it is all going wrong as much as the next person, but this is a piece of academic arrogance. He's way outside his area of specialisation and his advice seems to be either trivial or bad.
If we just go through the suggestions he makes (slide 35 of 34) - some things that jump out is that life has always been "fucked up" for all of history for pretty much everyone. It isn't a pretence that things are normal, for everyone outside a fairly well off privileged class of professionals that is what normal looks like. The anti-innovation points are not being intellectually honest about the vast improvements in quality and quantity of life that have been driven by innovation. And the "pretence of disinterested scholarship" is a just a too controversial. People are allowed - in a moral sense - to figure out what is true without having their motivations cross examined and having to preconceive every possible implication of their work. Truth is a worthy goal in and of itself.
And for heavens sake, getting arrested or heading to the mountains is just crazy advice. That isn't what he did, he got a good job and spent his time teaching people. I'd watch what he does, not what he says on that one.
Nihilistic garbage lecture, that is my first opinion. On the other hand, he could have intended the exaggerated pessimistic outlook, to spur into action.
But my bias remains, I don’t like his defeatist attitude.
I was reading an interview with Peter Thiel and he put it pretty well even if you don't like Trump:
>The Trump administration is trying to pull off an extremely difficult thing, because the red pill is that America is no longer a great country. But you have to make sure it doesn’t become a gateway drug to a black pill, where you become nihilistic and give up and you’re destined to eat too many doughnuts in a trailer park.
>...we don’t want to just get blackpilled from that. And then the question is: where are the places that you have some agency to get out of this straitjacket?
I have been nihilistic in the past but took action where I could in life and accepted the reality that you aren't going to solve the world's problems but you have to look at the places where you can have agency and focus on that. Thinking more like this improved my life a lot but it can be easy to engage in doomerism online as it has become its own form of entertainment.
Indeed, it makes you wonder how prevalent this psychological malaise is in the world of teaching and academia.
I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers.
Self reflection yes, abstract and critical thinking yes, expressing feelings yes.
No - "sorry the world is burning, I think you should be sad about this and maybe reconsider being an Engineer".
> I don't want any future children of mine, to have self loathing/pessimism or "woe is me" feelings taught by teachers or lecturers.
Except that wasn't the point? The point was to critically evaluate what value your work brings to the world and if it is positive. It emphasizes that having ethics as an engineer is maybe a better thing than being a apolitical robot who is only motivated by money.
If there was something similar to the Hippocratic Oath but for engineers, I would vouch for it.
Woe is you