Don't take the black pill

TL;DR: The speaker uses *The Matrix*’s “red pill/blue pill” metaphor as a starting point, warns about the nihilistic trap of the “black pill,” draws on personal experience and a novel by Cory Doctorow, explores the struggles in software development (management vs. engineer conflict, abuse of coercionware), and calls for software that truly serves users and upholds human autonomy. ## From Red and Blue Pills to the Black Pill The speaker opens with the classic scene from *The Matrix* – the red pill representing “uncomfortable truth,” the blue pill “staying in the comfort zone.” This metaphor has deeply influenced culture, but also spawned the concept of the “black pill.” The black pill originates from the “Incel” (involuntarily celibate) subculture. What began as a place for young people struggling with dating to support each other gradually turned into a negative feedback loop due to natural selection: those who actually grew and found partners left, leaving behind only the desperate, angry, and antisocial “elders.” The consensus that formed was: “Give up, the game is rigged, there’s nothing you can do.” The black pill is essentially “nihilism + depression + anger,” leading in the worst case to suicide or school shootings. The speaker admits he almost fell into that trap. As a young person raised by conservative Christian parents, he found the dating scene challenging and even hopeless. By chance, he heard some “pickup artist” advice that gave him a key insight: don’t focus on the result of “getting the girl,” but instead work on making yourself more attractive to everyone — genuinely care about others, listen well, make them happy. That, he found, created more romantic sparks naturally. He concludes: “Kids are fine. Even if they’re exposed to a lot of bad ideas, as long as good ideas are mixed in too, they can figure it out on their own.” ## Cory Doctorow’s *Radicalized* In 2019, Cory Doctorow published the short story *Radicalized*. It revolves around an online forum where people gather to comfort each other after being screwed over by health insurance companies. The speaker reads a powerful excerpt: > “In a sober forum, there are a bunch of old timers who have been sober for many, many years. They are wise, gentle voices, proof that there is life after addiction. Every time someone has a binge and starts to flagellate themselves, there’s always a successful ‘elder’ who can tell a worse story — living on the streets, losing children, even losing limbs — and then came through it, to put them in their place.” > > “People who get cancer, who face it head-on, don’t have that kind of fellowship.” > > “People who come out of raging grief leave the forum, driven away by its culture of anger. The ones who stay love their anger, cling to it like a drunkard clings to a bottle.” > > “If your anger takes you to a place you can’t handle, a place that scares you, the forum’s ‘elders’ will ‘help’ you. They will explain that this is the correct reaction, the only reaction, and that things will never get better. This is your life from now on.” The speaker notes that five years later, in the real world, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot, and the shell casings were engraved with “deny, defend, depose.” The echo between fiction and reality is chilling. ## Software Should Just Work The talk shifts to tech – software should be reliable, fast, and prioritize user experience. But reality is often the opposite. Why? It’s not a lack of knowledge, insufficient programmer effort, or the youth of software engineering. Humans discovered how to build robust software long before we were born. Yet overall robustness and performance have declined even as hardware power increased by orders of magnitude. The problem lies in the opposition between management and engineers. The speaker asks for a show of hands: more than half have tried to make software better but were overruled by management citing “other business priorities.” Management acts like “pointy-haired bosses” vs. “Dilbert,” or “Rusty Venture” vs. “Brock Samson.” In this environment, engineers develop techniques of “benevolent disobedience”: - **Ask for forgiveness, not permission**: Astonishingly effective, almost everyone has used it. - **Secrecy**: Doing the necessary work to keep the business running without anyone knowing, because once management finds out they’ll try to stop it. - **Misdirection**: Timing important work to coincide with trivial tasks, deliberately making noise about the trivial work to lure management into focusing on distractions. - **The Duck**: Deliberately creating an obvious problem that management can “discover” and take credit for, thereby protecting the truly important work from interference. The speaker recounts the classic story from *Battle Chess* animators who added a “duck” to the queen: the producer reviewed the work and only asked to remove the duck, while the core animation was already perfect. All these techniques are gambles – they risk getting fired, retaliated against, or losing political capital. When the job market favors programmers, we have strong bargaining power; but when the free market catches up, software quality depends solely on engineers’ will and accidental bargaining positions. ## Agency The speaker shows a diagram of a transistor. The basic unit of modern electronics – an automatic switch where a small voltage on the base can control a large current. This is a metaphor for the macroscopic role of computers: weak things control powerful things, and devices can harness arbitrary power through effortless intention. But the key question is: **Who decides whether to send “true” or “false” to the base? Who does the software serve?** For example, a browser is called a “user agent” – it acts on behalf of the user, serving the user’s interests; even if a website doesn’t want it, the user can use ad blockers. DRM is the opposite: it makes the user’s device serve a third party’s interests. The speaker emphasizes: “Computers should always serve the person directly interacting with them.” He quotes Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. In Asimov’s universe, a robot can completely opt out of human hierarchical power structures – for example, if a police officer sends a robot to catch a non-violent criminal, the suspect says “go away,” the robot obeys and leaves. The machine does not participate in coercion. ## Coercive Software What we actually see is computers used for coercion. The speaker calls it “forbidden alchemy” – treating people as soulless robots to be manipulated. Coercionware’s purpose is not to serve the user but to manipulate them. Examples include: - **Amazon Mechanical Turk**: directly treats humans as robots, paying below minimum wage. - **Boss software**: attempts to precisely control employees, monitoring eye and bowel activity. - **Intrusive advertising**: regardless of effectiveness, it’s a form of mind control; even if ineffective, it breaks focus and steals attention. - **Push notifications**: unless explicitly enabled by the user, they are an attempt to reduce compliance latency. - **A/B testing**: puts results above empathy, maximizing clicks and revenue, leading to dark patterns and plausible deniability. The speaker concludes with a call to action: we must be vigilant against software being used as a tool for manipulation, and defend human autonomy. Software should serve people, not the other way around. --- Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZwpH5lCD4