Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

Sadly, I'm sure that the only reason that face to face meetings are not logged is technical capability more than anything else. The law just hasn't metaphorically noticed yet that those can all be recorded to. It's still on the pricy side at the moment. (Don't forget not every business is a tech business that still reasonably expects 20%+ profit margins.)

I often bang on the fact that laws made in the 20th century are often written against an implicit background of what is physically possible that people underestimate, like, the number of laws that people nominally break every day but are impossible to enforce because we don't all have an assigned police presence assigned to us. We should not casually assume that once we acquire the capability to enforce these things that we should. Another example of this is that while I understand the drive to document what a company is doing, we need a certain amount of ability to speak to each other off the record, even in a corporate environment. Yes, it is used to do bad things, but we are humans, we need that slack, and it is used to do good things too.

“Slack” under the law is quite an interesting concept. “Inherent logistic pseudo-discretion” might make me think less about a friendly guy smoking a pipe, but it has some disadvantages, too.

I’m interested by the fact that you and I could travel to Nebraska and whisper to each other in a cornfield in ways that violate the law left and right. Why is this not a huge problem? Because inherent in the logistics of getting there is a presumption that most law enforcement will use their discretion not to care.

Is cornfield-whispering becoming more powerful as other comms get weaker? Is it becoming less powerful as fewer of us choose to go to those lengths? Interesting stuff to consider in the golden age of surveillance.

The friendly guy smoking a pipe was merely ahead of his time. If we are flinging ourselves into an AI-driven total surveillance state we're all going to miss slack more than ever. Hopefully if anyone survives the AI-driven total surveillance state will eventually realize that with the degree of control it has it doesn't have to crack down on literally everything just because it can.

well, it depends on the country. in germany this kind of surveillance is illegal unless ordered by a judge, and there is a high bar to get that order. even at work recording of conversations is generally illegal to protect employees privacy. however i think logging of text chats and storing emails is legal. and i believe some people want to make it mandatory.

it is a constant back and forth between both sides.

earlier i have made the argument why written communication should be treated just like the spoken one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41913176

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912666

in the culture series iain banks paints an optimistic picture of an AI driven idealistic utopian post scarcity society where nothing is secret, from the AIs at least.

some of the ideas seem to be that in post scarcity many crimes become meaningless, and that the AIs keep your privacy.