<story><title>Chelsea Manning: The Dystopia We Signed Up For</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/chelsea-manning-big-data-dystopia.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncr100</author><text>One point seems to be about trust. She&amp;#x27;s noting how society depends upon digital, not analog, trust.&lt;p&gt;She thinks of that as dystopian because of the foreignness and inconvenience.&lt;p&gt;We, as technologists, can improve upon this by talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology, to help steer the product towards incorporating more human-focused designs. This could help avoid this Stranger in a Strange Land phenomenon becoming more  prevalent, and avoid the negative psychological behaviors which disconnected individuals typically exhibit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drawkbox</author><text>&lt;i&gt;We, as technologists, can improve upon this by...&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;We can do some of it but most of the &amp;#x27;do no evil&amp;#x27; goes away in favor of what &lt;i&gt;the money&lt;/i&gt; wants to do.  Even well intentioned designers, developers&amp;#x2F;engineers, entrepreneurs, etc get pushed&amp;#x2F;pulled in directions of &lt;i&gt;the money&lt;/i&gt; and usually understandably. The money machine always gets what it wants.&lt;p&gt;A big problem with our society today is, the people with all the power (lever on the money) are the same ones selling us out to dystopian lack of control of privacy, rights etc. We are a system setup where the only good that can really come is if wealth, or someone wealthy, wants to see it happen. We are basing all our opportunities, hopes, rights on very few people that are actively getting paid to cut them down.&lt;p&gt;Inequality does us in more than we realize because it is easy to throw &lt;i&gt;the people&lt;/i&gt; under the bus for &lt;i&gt;the money&lt;/i&gt;, once you are in &lt;i&gt;the money&lt;/i&gt; you aren&amp;#x27;t in &lt;i&gt;the people&lt;/i&gt; by design. We live in a &amp;#x27;free&amp;#x27; country, but combine that with the feudal&amp;#x2F;sharecropper setup at our dictator-like controlled companies we work for where corporate rights overpower individual rights on the regular, and well you end up with a recipe for dystopia.</text></comment>
<story><title>Chelsea Manning: The Dystopia We Signed Up For</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/chelsea-manning-big-data-dystopia.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncr100</author><text>One point seems to be about trust. She&amp;#x27;s noting how society depends upon digital, not analog, trust.&lt;p&gt;She thinks of that as dystopian because of the foreignness and inconvenience.&lt;p&gt;We, as technologists, can improve upon this by talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology, to help steer the product towards incorporating more human-focused designs. This could help avoid this Stranger in a Strange Land phenomenon becoming more  prevalent, and avoid the negative psychological behaviors which disconnected individuals typically exhibit.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dqpb</author><text>&lt;i&gt;talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been hearing this a lot lately but I don&amp;#x27;t really know what it means.&lt;p&gt;I think most (all?) developers&amp;#x2F;designers try to imagine the experience of an average or &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; user while developing features. This is a natural way to try creating a product with decent usability. You can take this a step further with UX studies, focus groups, etc.&lt;p&gt;However, since &amp;quot;UX design&amp;quot; has existed in one form or another since before PC&amp;#x27;s were a thing, I take it that&amp;#x27;s not what&amp;#x27;s meant by &amp;quot;having more empathy for our users&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I suspect this means somehow tailoring&amp;#x2F;adapting our products to the wide variety of cultural, geographic, socio-economic backgrounds of users, or even their states-of-mind&amp;#x2F;existential experience. In that case, I think a UX designer would face a combinatorial explosion of constraints and&amp;#x2F;or features requests, which is not practical.&lt;p&gt;However, we do have a free&amp;#x27;ish market, which seems well positioned to address this wide variety of needs. Moreover, the long tail of users is getting fatter as our population scales, so it is increasingly rewarding to target niche groups.</text></comment>