Real Chilling Effects
130 comments
·March 10, 2025gmuslera
I think they are screaming too late. For more than 10 years was known enough that the US government was mass collecting information about everything they could on internet, the Snowden’s revelations was just a milestone on the current state of that back then, and as nothing happened, it continued.
Now we have over that AIs and probably a government openly willing to use that against you, but that was always a possibility all this time. The future is open, the records are forever. And what we did all this time? Just put in photos, videos and text what can be used against us under some future policy, and shared it with them.
There is a point where we deserve the consequences. And yes, even of this very message.
llamaimperative
None of this is necessary to have an authoritarian government. Just some lawsuits and government inquiries.
Inversely you can also have a government that collects everything and doesn’t wield it this way.
The two issues are not actually that intertwined.
potato3732842
>Inversely you can also have a government that collects everything and doesn’t wield it this way.
No you can't. It's only a matter of time.
llamaimperative
I’m not advocating for it, so don’t strawman me.
I’m saying it has approximately nothing to do with the actual issues we face today.
I.e. it’s just as relevant for me to say “this is why you don’t give governments firearms! An authoritarian one will turn around and shoot its own people!”
Like yeah, sure it seems likely. Relevant to today? Would today’s conditions have been averted if we had never armed the government? No.
Is it dangerous for the government to collect everything on the internet? Yes! Is there any evidence that capability and “habit” is actually contributing to the chilling effects described in the article? Nope!
As seen in GP’s comment, tech world’s fixation on high-tech super surveillance distracts from the how authoritarian regimes actually tend to exert control over their population. Like, in reality versus in science fiction (again, not that surveillance is good or neutral on this topic, but that it is not at all necessary).
intended
The creation of technology didn’t create the people who would misuse it.
I’ll give an example to illustrate how this defeats the point of the submission.
Submission “we’re seeing chilling effects because students dont want to take the risk of having a record of discussion about government.”
Comment: “We’ve known things are getting worse, and this technology in the wrong hands would be harmful, we should have done something 10 years ago”
Here we can substitute anything from the invention of letters to computers to AI, as the technology in question.
huijzer
> A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.
Words being weaponized is a problem that exists for multiple years now in the US. From the free press [1]:
"To give a sense of proportion, only three professors were fired or forced out of schools over something they said in the post-9/11 panic. The modern era of cancel culture (2014 to present), by contrast, has resulted in almost 200 professor terminations. That exceeds even the standard estimate of 100 professors terminated in the second Red Scare (1947 to 1957)."
[1]: https://www.thefp.com/p/american-colleges-gave-birth-to-canc...
acdha
The “cancel culture” scare was a marketing campaign designed to elect right-wing politicians, not a serious free speech movement. You can note how many of the people involved have been silent or even expressed enthusiasm for the speech of their political opponents being stifled now.
styxfrix
Where does Free Press source the claim that 200 professors were fired due to cancel culture? I looked on the site because I want to see the actual reasons the professors were fired (reasons can be justified) but could not find them. The linked The Fire website displays zero results for filtering by "Outcome is Termination"
gizzlon
Absolutely! But it was quite limited, to colleges etc. Now it's potentially all of US government employees. And, I assume, most of the private ones ?
So .. basically everyone in the US.
Maybe also people working for US companies abroad? Some of them did at least shut down DEI initiatives in Europe, so not so far fetched to think it is/will affect who they hire? "Oh, this candidate was outspoken against Trump on social media" . Of course, many places this will be seen as a good thing, so maybe it evens out, outside of the US.
null
slimebot80
I feel many of us in the IT world have stood along side this descent in real time, because technology has been an enabler (far from being an equaliser). We were mostly mute because of money and traction.
huijzer
Will Durant and his wife have spent multiple decades writing history books. One of their observations was that technology creates inequality, see the book Lessons of History.
Having said that, I still think technology has been a net positive. Just imagine living in 1900. It would take months to go from Europe to the US. Medicine was able to cure almost nothing. What we consider simple diseases now would be deadly back then. And you can forget about watching or listening your favorite musicians online. Also, imagine driving with a modern car into a 1900s village. People would be in shock.
JohnFen
> I still think technology has been a net positive.
I stopped thinking this a decade or so ago. I now think that technology has become a net negative.
Yes, it brings huge benefits as you note. The problem as I see it is that it now brings even larger drawbacks as well.
jajko
Look how elon was worshipped here, long after his mental issues, massive ego and racist south African nepo kid upbringing started coming out with force.
I find it very shortsighted to substract features from personalities of successful visible people that one likes and (selectively) ignore the rest. Why the heck, adult people don't like absolute truths and don't understand those are inseparable parts of a single whole?
elon is a fascist pos, gates is probably a pedophile/hebephile (epstein) pos, so is clinton and orange man, all good epstein's friends. Jobs was a horrible person. Yes they did or are doing some good, but above is still valid. And so on and on.
OgsyedIE
Elon's track record with effective management in the first decade of SpaceX was genuinely impressive and led to bullish misunderstandings about the rest of his career (and is still impressive today even after accounting for every other part of his character and contemporary drug use). The guy running the country today doesn't have the impulse control or intellectual curiosity to accomplish the stuff he used to accomplish.
The best generic explanation I've read on this phenomenon is the article "Shallow Feedback Hollows You Out" by Midjourney's Ivan Vendrov:
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/shallow-feedback-hollows...
acdha
I also wonder how much of that was his working relationship with Shotwell. Nationally it looks like he doesn’t have anyone he trusts who can tell him when he’s making a mistake or redirect him towards a more useful use of his time. I’d believe that much of the credit for SpaceX is really a team of people he met early enough that there’s no way to replicate that relationship.
It’s a different context but I’m reminded of how George Lucas’ work got a lot worse after his divorce from Marcia Lucas, who was not only a very talented film editor in her own right but also apparently unique for having the ability to get him to actually listen to constructive criticism.
ajd555
very good itemization of what's happening, thank you for doing this. Unfortunately, one very important bullet point was missing: the world's richest man and arguably most influential in the white house controls a large internet satellite constellation and has acquired tremendous geopolitical power, even before having the president's ear. This is the single biggest threat out there I believe, as he has already had an impact on the Ukrainian front, and world leaders continue to placate him in fear of Starlink service being cut off in their country. I still don't understand how a private american company was allowed to obtain such geopolitical power, but this is by the far the most worrying point that needs to be brought up a lot more
kragen
Basically, countries where private people are allowed to build things like Falcon and Starlink progress technologically and economically, and countries where they aren't progress, if at all, much more slowly. Instead, they suffer a brain drain of those people and then have to rely on the freer countries for things like communications services and weapons.
This article is about the US changing which group of countries it belongs to, much as China did 40 years ago. So you are likely to get your wish in the sense that US companies will probably not be allowed to build such things anymore, because they might pose a threat to King JD's power.
OgsyedIE
There's a multi-decadal controversy in sociology and political science over whether some countries are forced to adopt the regressive approach because of structural geographic factors they can't control (such as low population density or aggressive neighbours) or whether every country has a choice. The US definitely has a choice, FWIW.
[edit] Of course the anthropomorphization I've used here isn't a completely serious representation of states, they are a mass of interconnected people and not individual agents, but the metaphor is a valuable shortcut.
kragen
The US isn't a consciousness, so I think it's not meaningful to ascribe choices to it. Admittedly, I kind of did in my comment! But the reality is that these changes in course are the emergent outcomes of interactions between factions with different interests influenced by individuals with different interests and the memes that are most fecund, not the choices of a shadowy puppetmaster pulling the strings from behind the scenes like a Civ 5 player. That's why it's so common for societies to take obviously self-destructive courses of action.
ajd555
> I still don't understand how a private american company was allowed to obtain such geopolitical power
Interesting way to see this, as you immediately went to a zero-sum approach of winner takes all, and the other countries must be brain dead. What I meant in this case was, how did the EU not foresee this and dramatically ramp up their internet satellite capabilities. Arguably, the answer is simple, as this was a rhetorical question: the EU approached this topic as they did a lot of things recently - no action, lots of regulation and facing the consequences or said inaction right now
jajko
No worries various groups will create or increase their own space investments. Nothing spacex did was a miracle just well executed engineering, despite an whimsical idiot steering it from far enough.
Correction globally will take some time, but it will be a permanent one. You don't develop your own space program to scrape it in few years. Europe is there with pretty healthy space program, China may become more open to others, India is way beyond initial successful steps. Reusable rockets are great when they work, but again thats just (at this point well tested) engineering.
China just needs to sit and smile how US is handling them global leadership one big chunk a day. Maybe in 4 years we can send elon permanently on mars with 8 billion middle fingers raised as a 'salute', to start future setup that The expanse showed us or to die there miserably.
lotsofpulp
> I still don't understand how a private american company was allowed to obtain such geopolitical power,
No one else wanted to spend the money to sustain the organization needed to put those satellites in service.
It’s that simple. GPS is there because someone spent sufficient money developing it.
samiv
It's worth to keep in mind that it took only about 2 years for this one guy from Austria to remove the final backstops the society had in place before until he was able to become the supreme leader in the 1930's.
2 years.
What has been hard won and fought over can easily be lost very fast and the only way to regain it will be through blood and violence.
OgsyedIE
53 days, surely? The gleischaltung had finishing disbarring every non-NSDAP lawyer, firing every non-NSDAP judge, firing every state governor and seizing a voting majority in every state legislature in less than two months after the Enabling Act was passed.
mentalgear
> Peter Baker, the New York Times White House correspondent, compared the current moment to his time at Russia at the beginning of the Putin era:
> By the time we left in late 2004, Moscow had been transformed. People who had happily talked with us at the start were now afraid to return our calls. “Now I have this fear all the time,” one told us at the time. There is a similar chill now in Washington. Every day someone who used to feel free to speak publicly against Mr. Trump says they will no longer let journalists quote them by name for fear of repercussions, both Democrats and Republicans
suraci
I'm very curious about why americans always use examples from China and Russia to describe something shit happening in the USA
> Some compared the atmosphere to Maoist China, so great were the chilling effects.
i mean, americans have their own history - it's short but it's remarkable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
In China, when something like this happens, some people shout, "Are we going back to the Cultural Revolution?!"
Why Americans don't talk about McCarthyism?
"Are we going back to the McCarthyism???"
Nobody ever said this
potato3732842
Every old forum and facebook group full of right ringers talking about fishing or whatever has been feeling for close to a decade exactly what the author is feeling now.
I'd say I'm hopeful that things will change now that the shoe is on both feet but I don't have that much faith.
Edit: Since apparently this needs to be explained to some people, nobody is feeling like they can't talk about random boring advertiser friendly interests. People are feeling like they can't talk freely about the kinds of political and social issues that tend to get talked about when you get a bunch of people of a particular bent in one place.
rco8786
I'm not sure both sides-ism is helpful here. I appreciate the perspective that right-wingers have been feeling this fear, and I think that's real and something that should be taken seriously.
And also, as with so many things trump, he's taking the rhetoric and threats to another planet. There was not a huge list of banned words and books, or keyword-based government purges of content previously. There was no threat of punishment for attorneys representing the "wrong" side in a case. There were no blanket threats of imprisonment or deportation for "illegal protests".
The rhetoric and actions being taken by trump/musk in this regard are FAR, FAR beyond anything we've seen here before at least going back to the red scare.
potato3732842
You're missing my point. My point is that the ability to chill speech, put is on lists, make examples out of the tall nails, etc. is something the government has had and has used. The author is just now complaining because he's only now seeing it applied in his general direction (because academia is establishment adjacent) though not directly at him.
This executive power was built up over decades by the establishment on both sides of the isle in bits and pieces (to be clear, I'm not alleging some conspiracy here, just that this is the result of natural incentives in an expanding government) and now it's being wielded by an outsider populist and this is what happens. Nobody should be surprised by this. When we elected a Lite(TM) populist on a platform of change in '08 and nothing changed this outcome was basically destined.
The fact that the populists we ultimately elected are "simple" billionares who have grand delusions of making the country wealthy through deregulation, short sighted geopolitics and fiscal conservatism is just good luck. We could have done, way, way, way worse. And if these guys don't cause some sort of change in the country's course (for better or worse, probably doesn't matter) we probably will elect another even more extreme one.
rco8786
> The author is just now complaining because he's only now seeing it applied in his general direction (because academia is establishment adjacent).
This is the only thing I'm really trying to correct here. The author is complaining because of the extreme extent to which it is being applied. Not just that it's coming more generally in his direction now. His initial example happens to be a personal one, but the long bulleted list of other examples he supplies does not appear to be personal to him.
It's not a "wow now that this is happening to me I'm going to start caring" it's a "wow this is happening to huge swaths of people in ways that are much more extreme than I've seen in the past"
throwaway11112
What in the absolute hell are you talking about?
People on fishing BBs getting attacked and punished for posting about fishing?
Dude, get a brain scan now. You might have a RFKJr brain worm.
bananapub
Yet to see any of the Free Speech Absolutists come out in defence of actual free speech and against the tyranny of far right lunatics running the federal government, weirdly enough.
pixelpoet
I'm wondering when the well-armed militia (that's been the excuse for countless shootings) designed to revolt against tyrannical government is going to even say anything. Or is it perhaps, that those guns and gun-culture are for something else...
nobodywillobsrv
People forget what free speech really is though. The most important point is a contract with the government: that they hold a monopoly on the ability to censor and control speech. That any other group who threatens anyone for their speech must be dealth with using even hand of the force of law by the government/legal regime.
Mobs suppressing your free speech is never ok. It is a sign of a government that is no longer in power.
It is unclear exactly what these students are worried about ... the details should be provided. Are they discussing the organization of violent resistance for example? Or are they merely worried that simple discussion of government policy will somehow land them in jail. The latter seems ridiculous but it is worth hearing them out in detail.
And somehow in all of this, people on one side are forgetting the numerous attempts at assasination. And the successful assasination of a CEO. Regardless of your political angles, the risk is severaly one sided by any empirical measure right now. To dismiss this is to remove yourself from serious discussion.
kolektiv
"Give me the man and I will give you the case against him" [0]
It isn't that they're discussing anything which would traditionally be considered risky or out of bounds - that's the whole point. It's that they're discussing anything to do with an organisation which has made it quite clear that if it disagrees with you, it will find some way to make your life miserable. Even if it doesn't disagree with you today, who knows what it will disagree with tomorrow? This is the absolute classic way of instilling fear in a population, the original chilling effect - when you don't know what will be forbidden tomorrow, better to say nothing today.
Your latter point on assassination attempts is also very odd. It conflates some broadly disconnected things (an actual attempt on a presidential candidate) with an apparent murder based on political views, two unrelated but very direct consequences which you could perhaps correlate through the types of people targeted. On the other hand you completely ignore the wider systemic violence inherent in stripping people of jobs, healthcare, social security, etc. Do you think those actions will have no consequences? That no deaths will result? Just because a chain of action might have more than one link, doesn't mean the consequences can be dismissed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...
throw0101b
> "Give me the man and I will give you the case against him" [0]
And in the opposite direction as well, where someone is probably guilty of something and prosecution is held back if they're on the 'right side', e.g.:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_U.S._Department_of_Justic...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_Eric_A...
People think of authoritarianism as going after someone, which was prevalent in the 20th century; but it can also be protecting (and enriching) your friends, which has become popular in 21st century regimes.
flir
> It is unclear exactly what these students are worried about
> They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.
hth.
paulryanrogers
> And somehow in all of this, people on one side are forgetting the numerous attempts at assasination. And the successful assasination of a CEO.
Has the side you're thinking of pardoned the (would be/alleged) assassins? Or perhaps mounted a coup attempt, blamed others for failing to suppress it sooner, then called it a "day of love"?
the_gipsy
> Mobs suppressing your free speech is never ok
Of course it is sometimes ok. There is no absolute here. It's neither always nor never. If it's never okay, then it is "tyranny of the majority". If it is always ok, then it is "minority rule".
XorNot
This is literally not what free speech is as defined in the US Constitution.
Constitutionally protected speech is speech criticising or commenting on the government, and defines the right of citizens to do so.
The government has never had a reaponsibility to ensure all speech is heard, it certainly is not granted a monopoly on power of censorship (again, literally the opposite - no one else has to grant you a platform, but the government cannot take it away), and if you're worried about the power of "the mob" then you really should've worried more when the Supreme Court ruled the police had no duty to protect citizens.
llamaimperative
> People forget what free speech really is though. The most important point is a contract with the government: that they hold a monopoly on the ability to censor and control speech. That any other group who threatens anyone for their speech must be dealth with using even hand of the force of law by the government/legal regime
WHAT?
This is literally the EXACT OPPOSITE of free speech, at least as it is defined in America. The 1st Amendment SPECIFICALLY AND SOLELY prevents the government from putting its thumb on the scales.
Private parties are necessarily allowed to respond to speech with whatever other speech they wish to use, including utilizing their rights to free association (or non-association) in response to what you say.
This is absolutely 100% backwards. I highly suggest reading some basic American civics material or something.
alabastervlog
1) Are we pretending the two assassination attempts were by left-wingers now, in addition to all the rest of the pretending? Trump gave them permission, anyway. I mean he had a different candidate in mind, but still.
2) The CEO thing was popular across the board, not just with democrats. Health insurance companies are that bad. Everyone who’s not taking their bribes hates them, and I mean hares. Also: again, not a left winger, so yes, I agree with you that right wingers should be regarded as dangerous.
tlogan
I have one question about one:
> Public employees are illegally
> purged if they are viewed as
> disloyal to the new regime.
My understanding of how the U.S. government works is that the President functions as the CEO of all federal employees.
Is this all about Schedule F executive order which was rescinded by President Joe Biden on January 22, 2021?
I want to have an intellectually honest discussion about this:
- Why are these firings considered illegal? What is the legal argument?
- Why do we believe the President cannot hire or fire federal workers at will? What legal precedent or framework governs this?
If our system is designed in a way that allows the above and we dont like it, shouldn’t we work to fix it? After all, Congress—specifically the House—is the only branch with the power to write laws.
So if you don’t agree with Executive Order XYZ, let’s propose a law to address and fix it.
Would love to hear thoughtful perspectives on this.
> A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.
Kudos to the students who were not only aware of this general risk (not just under the current regime, but in many societies), and acted to improve their situation.
Next, they should look at how they're under almost ubiquitous technological surveillance, with little-to-no protections. And now there's emerging "AI" methods to automate harvesting insights from the ubiquitous surveillance fire hoses, and also to automate actions to suppress enemies of the regime. And if you look around, at the pace we're going, it's very easy to believe this will start happening within a year. Maybe they'll decide that one of the best defenses for national security that could happen right now is to cut off the surveillance data wherever possible.