> Hey front-end folks, just a quick note. Never ever ever ever ever mess with my browser. It's not yours, it's mine. I'm letting you use it for free to render your bloated sites.

This edge is a greatly under-acknowledged and under-represented boundary of propriety, and is routinely flagrantly and hypocritically overrun by organizations with legions of attorneys who fight tooth and nail to stake their claims in the providence of others.

The close cousin is the "click-wrap" agreement, which should be the very first point of engagement for access to any resource that employs it, but is perennially represented as an afterthought which a priori deprives the visitor of recourse from his later exploitation using the form of a "contract" which is fully understood by everyone to not be read, is written in gibberish, and placed at the very end of a primrose path of necessity for access to one's own labors.

A huge warning sign of the intrinsic rentier dynamic of the high technology industry has been built into every PC since the dawn of the era and on prominent display: the "Welcome" screen. You think you are being warmly greeted upon arrival to the cusp of a vibrant commons, but you are actually being told in no uncertain terme that the PC you just bought was pre-appropriated by its software. The purchase price is rent. The device is your property only in the sense that you own the direct costs of its failure and disposal. You are given an account with limited access to its capabilities and being permitted to access it under the auspices of your hosts. Your work is without value to your hosts. The device is a conduit of your continuing consumption, controlled as tightly as possible, which with every step into its labyrinth further reduces, limits and degrades the value of your work to you, and shifts its value to the device purveyors.

This hazard is conventional to the structure of every web service today, including this one: your data (work) goes in and never comes out. It's trapped in the dynamic and context maintained by the host.

No social media architecture today respects your work in context, including this one.

Your comments should belong to you, be hosted by you, and maintained in a mutually shared and beneficial context. But instead your comments go into a black box which you are permitted to review, in exchange for locally issued currency called (tragically) "karma" which is a simply a mechanism for limiting your visibility within a hopelessly regressive and passé format of a reverse-chronologically ordered list of the popular. Everyone on the social web is a serf, tilling a text box, and sharecropping status.

My making an example of HN not to call it out for being egregious. HN is completely ordinary. I'm merely offering an example for how totally indoctrinated the technogentsia is to these dark patterns of social networking architecture and how blind everyone is to them.

It's pretty weird that these dark patterns are so pervasive when you consider that the ideological bent of most computer technologists is "libertarian".

But I should note that California ideology is inherently Randite, and Ayn Rand was a deeply disturbed person.

With transformer AI we have now seen that every human input on the web has specific economic value which is being aggregated and harvested towards the creation and consolidation of enormous kingdoms of social wealth and privilege. This is being done completely without regard for the principles of propriety that software and MSM content publishers have represented through law as being essential to the construction of a commonwealth.

Every output of a transformer is a derivative work without even attribution, much less royalties.

And the AI technologists seem poised to have transformers run interference at every level of "customer" interaction with new architectures.

The more you look into it, the more you will see that high technology has been an epic swindle to transfer control of a commons to narrow silos of exceptional privilege, in which not only does the commonwealth shrivel in exchange for the tech's very limited public advantages, but the vehicle you use for your contributions endlessly deprives you of the just fruits of your own labors, encircles you with infrastructure beyond your reckoning, and enforces your conformance to alien protocols via dark patterns.

Much as automobiles make every destination into a parking lot, so the web browser has made every avenue to knowledge end in a gate which is ever further obfuscated into an opportunity to withhold something of value from the visitor, including the value of your own work in context.

"Welcome."