What percentage of web traffic today would you say is composed of bits that the user--if they bothered to inspect it--would prefer to not have anything to do with? I'd say it's more than half.

Computers treat people like garbage all the time.

its not computers who treat people like garbage. they do as they are instructed by humans, in all cases.

you're right, but I have a hard time picturing the computer as having emotions to be able to treat me like garbage in the first place. you won't rm the file? sudo rm file! the computer could fight back and say access denied still because of extended attributes, but for some reason I don't equate poorly written software as being treated like garbage. I always imagine some hapless programmer is doing the best they could with the resources they have in the system they're under, it's just not very good but that's not their fault.

I'm similarly sympathetic when I come across a buggy implementation. It's malicious design that I'm objecting to. But I suppose it's a bit silly to say that it's the computer that's treating me like garbage. It's just that someone else is in control of my computer, and they're treating me like garbage.

sadly these days, it seems a keen mind is only a machine's mind. People spend far to little time to understand what they are telling their poor computers to do. And look what happens, people start turning against them. Blaming them for their misdoing. It's like Blaming god, the government, a nation, family or a tribe. These are all made of humans. Human bad behavior is at the core of our suffering. Nothing else.

I don't disagree substantively, but I do think there are uniquely modern aspects to the question of "am I enabling bad behavior right now?". It's not just ethics, it's education.

Consider for instance the remote support features that Intel is so keen on advertising these days. Microcode level remote access is a small help for IT departments and a huge help for authoritarian regimes looking to spy on their people. But I don't think that most people are prepared to consider what they're enabling by paying Intel to continue to grow into a telescreen vendor.

Sure, we shouldn't blame the computer's soul for bad behavior. But if it's being used as a weapon, it's not helpful to remove the computer from the conversation and say "well it's actually bad people." Mitigating bad behavior via computer means hacking that computer, and that starts with blaming it for the bad behavior to some degree.

Did you not use Windows 95?