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by clickety_clack5 hours ago |
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upvoteby kltlp5 hours ago|
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This is the best retort to the bag-escaping cat ever:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...

"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."

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upvoteby GolfPopper4 hours ago|
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A great quote, thank you for sharing. It captures much of the five stages of denial (summarized below) in a much pithier form.

There's nothing in the bag.

The cat will never get out of the bag.

It wouldn't be a problem if the cat was out of the bag.

We cannot possibly keep the cat in the bag.

Putting the cat back in the bag is not worth trying.

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upvoteby anonymous9082134 hours ago|
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Motion to start a political platform for cats in bags. Our message is simple: Put the cat in the bag. Keep the cat in the bag.
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upvoteby TeMPOraL4 hours ago|
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Don't force it out of the bag if it doesn't want to leave.
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upvoteby rapind3 hours ago|
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> if it doesn't want to leave.

This is where the lawyers find the loophole to get the cat out of the bag.

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upvoteby wingworks2 hours ago|
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Turns out, there was a hole in the bag.
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upvoteby TeMPOraL2 hours ago|
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That was originally meant for a carry loop, but alas.
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upvoteby godelski1 hours ago|
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That's how bags work
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upvoteby ok1234563 hours ago|
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No, the greatest is from the Sweet Smell of Success: "The cat's in the bag. And the bag's in the river."
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upvoteby mitxela2 hours ago|
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And the river's in the canyon and the canyon's in the plateau and the plateau's in the volcanic shield and the green grass grows all around, all around, and the green grass grows all around.
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upvoteby mat_b4 hours ago|
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> It’s a real tragedy of the commons

Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.

We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.

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upvoteby sssilver4 hours ago|
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Turns out the entities you control / regulate less, tend to do things that are less in your interest and more in their own.
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upvoteby TeMPOraL4 hours ago|
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The government has few uses for total surveillance, and almost all are obviously bad. Private enterprise has a million uses, most of them various degree of bad, but as a society we've been blind to this kind of badness for many decades now - for at least as long as lying in the face of your fellow humans and trying to hurt them materially has been considered a respectable profession.
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upvoteby mitxela2 hours ago|
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Well, currently the free market is the government, while the nominal government is something less powerful than that.
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upvoteby mitxela2 hours ago|
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Well, some people care and some don't. The people who care don't get to work on the technology.
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upvoteby brookst4 hours ago|
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I'm pretty unhappy with this, but are ChatGPT or Facebook really "the commons"?
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upvoteby ben_w4 hours ago|
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They're each in different grey areas that were previously the commons.

Facebook didn't invent "talking to friends" or "showing adverts", but made itself "the place" hard enough most of the advertisers and most of the people intermediate through it.

OpenAI didn't invent "asking questions and recieving answers", not even "from an agent who knows which sites to search on your behalf"; but it is competent enough that I might have it read 50 times as many pages in a day as I myself would have read, and the sites' owners don't get real eyeballs looking at ads during this. (In my case, adblock even if I did it manually; but apply this massive increase in page hits to everyone who has their LLM research stuff).

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upvoteby clickety_clack3 hours ago|
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I think the internet in general is a commons and I should be able to browse it without being spied on.

There should be general standards for what individual apps and websites should be allowed to do. There should be an expectation that the purpose of an app is what it does, i.e. a social connection app shouldn’t be an ad platform that suffers users insofar as they provide useful data to sell to advertisers.

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upvoteby nilamo4 hours ago|
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Common people work there and built the tools. At any point, they could have chosen not to. Or told the boss guy it wasn't plausible. At the end of the day, we're choosing and building the world we're in, while also loudly complaining about what we choose to do.

Blaming a corporation takes away all the agency the workforce has.

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upvoteby applfanboysbgon4 hours ago|
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I think any free platform with a billion people on it is, de facto, a commons. It would be great if we as a society acknowledged this and had come up with some better means of stewardship because the status quo is obviously heinous, but we've been happy to hand over absolute control of public discourse to a few trillion dollar tech companies.
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upvoteby bluefirebrand3 hours ago|
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> It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons.

When I ask people about things like this, I hear a lot of "If I don't build it, someone else will"

My goal isn't just to refuse to build this stuff, it is actively to resist the people who are.

I don't have much influence though

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upvoteby charcircuit4 hours ago|
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Your issue is you are defining spyware too broadly. This is not spying on users, but rather 2 companies partnering and sharing data to result in either a better ads system or better understanding on how ads are performing. This is a positive value to society and the commons. Wasting space in a site or app with an ad that won't convert is the true tragedy of the commons. It's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.
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upvoteby infinitezest3 hours ago|
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Can't you see? We're just trying to build a better cigarette! Flavored to your specific tastes! You'll thank us, you'll see!
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upvoteby c223 hours ago|
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No ad has ever converted me yet the ad networks keep showing me ads.
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