The greatest moral failure of Silicon Valley and American tech was enabling human rights abuses on a massive scale by selling hardware and software to oppressive and ultimately illegitimate governments during the early days of the internet. The ship has sailed on that one now, perhaps, with the early assistance in building the Great Firewall of China for example.
There remains a moral obligation for American companies to build secure communication platforms for the internet. Instead they drift further, yielding to demands from governments to host data (which often never should have been stored) locally.
The most disturbing trend I have seen over the last decade on hacker news is the shift from support of an open and free internet to an internet of control and censorship. I can only conclude that all is lost if the core engineers and hackers who build and design these systems can no longer explain why this is important but rather argue why the internet shouldn’t be secure.
There are many unintended implications to this, one being American intelligence agents can no longer operate safely abroad. Others include the withering of development in the protocols and standards from which the internet was born, a redirection of talent and resources to private companies and private networks which are constructed in a way to build monopolies and then extract rent from its users. Facebook could be built on the web, but nothing lasting could be built on Facebook.
That’s my rant.
