Unrelated to who builds it, decentralized or self-hosted platforms have been the go-to place for lots of extremist groups, even before MAGA, so not sure what this comment is supposed to bring to light?
The vast majority don't even live in the US. I think I'm the closest to SV and I'm in Portland.
No, it's not.
> a lot of Silicon Valley hackers have worked on it
No, they haven't.
> well Portland is basically SV
No, it isn't. Just do your research and nobody will correct you.
EDIT: If you'd like, maybe you could clarify your "underlying point" or which "idealistic Silicon Valley hacker" traits you mean to highlight. Nazis have been trying to weaponize Scuttlebutt for years, so I don't get why it's "funny" that MAGA chuds are trying to join now. They aren't welcome.
Now they're adults, and have kept their interest in dweb technologies, but have come to see "dangerous speech" as a huge problem, and are waking up to the realization that their technical interests and goals would enable these kinds of things. And they're not happy about it, or at the very least are experiencing cognitive dissonance. But that was always the case, and for many, they were the unsavory people in their youth that the older folks were saying were participating in dangerous rhetoric and ought to be silenced or investigated, just like they are saying now about people who are saying things adjacent to things which are illegal.
At the very least we should seek consistency. If you support decentralized technology for speech, you should be happy with the net benefits and net harms. The alternative is the status quo. Arguably the spirit of the internet was not to have what we have now.
Out of the half dozen people I know from that period in my life (2000-2006) not one has had a kind thing to say about facebook, google or twitter since 2010. Those firms are the lame dinosaur stuck in a tar pit that we made fun of Microsoft for being in the 00s.
It's the people who called us nerds and made high school hell for us that somehow ended up in hr at tech co and are now setting policy there.
What else can you do?
Saying that tech co is wrong today is as much career suicide as saying that the US deserved 9/11 was in 2002. I even had one guy tell me he is going full accelerationist on his main twitter because the http based internet is a dead end and the more unusable it becomes the sooner we will get something better.
And then on Wednesday they made the attempt.
Comments like yours are predicated on this idea that speech itself can only ever be merely "irresponsible". But... the world isn't like that. If you spend years making "jokes" about insurrection, you eventually find someone attacking congress.
[1] Edit to answer the question below: you are falsely equating harmless anarchic geeks of the 80's and 90's with violent terrorists. It's not appropriate to manage these communities using the same tools.
1) The capitol building has all along been an easy soft target that could have been infiltrated by a small contingent of terrorist.
2) The police purposefully stood down and allowed this to happen while doing the minimum to make it seem like they tried.
Neither option is a good look for our country.
Now compound that with using this event as a popular excuse to restrict free speech, when the correct reaction should be to improve security at the capitol for any enemy.
If you think this goes away becuse big tech takes even moderate voices down, you don't understand what's going on.
seems likely that the trumpers gave that order so their mob could get in
Can you cite some "moderate voices" that have been taken down by big tech? They're all still up as far as I can see. Trump incited an attack on congress. He got banned. Parler deliberately cultivated an extreme community of violent rhetoric (they really did, have you looked at that site?). They got banned. Who else? Seems like only people reasonably identifiable as extremists are affected.
I remain horrified at the right wing community's ability to rationalize violence. The President directed an attack on Congress last Wednesday to prevent his opponent's certification. And... what people really want to talk about is Parler losing their hosting?
(Edit to note that you refused to answer the question and jumped off on a WHATABOUTBLM?! tangent instead. In fact, contra your hyperbole, no moderate right wing voices have been censored or silenced.)
Evidence of Trump telling people to storm the capitol?
"I remain horrified at the right wing community's ability to rationalize violence"
We'll, I'm right of center and I condemn it. Just like I'm sure there is a history of you condemning this entire year of BML and Antifa burning and looting cities across the US.
I remember what Como said on CNN. "who said protests need to be peaceful". Of course CNN is the bastion of right wing extremists... Oh wait....
We have to condemn all political violence.
It's actually been reported that a covid-positive individual was clustered with members of congress during the evacuation. I don't know why you think that isn't correct to report.
Either the authorities were capable of repulsing an hundred unarmed civilians or they were not.
I'm unclear how both can be true, but I'm open to ideas.
Here is my theory: the "coup" was such an utter non-threat that those in charge did not want to give an ounce of evidence regarding how they could respond in order to prevent legitimately threatening bad actors from understanding the possibilities.
The side effect of being able to move towards more restricted speech is just icing on the cake.
Six people died! How is that an "utter non-threat"? The mental revisionism is out of control. How is it that people are so unwilling to condemn the most obvious kind of political violence imaginable?
Sometimes I wonder, and serious question here, when the reporter on TV stands in front of a burning building and exclaims the protest is mostly peaceful, do you see the building in background on fire?
I mean, I see the capitol building being broken into and think "that needs to stop, bring in the military if necessary".
Also, in videos you see organized trained equipped men in uniforms. That is absolutely something agencies are expected to follow.
However, I don't think providing adequate police presence for a planned protest would have been showing your hand.
Some things went very wrong. It should not have been possible for a loosely organized mob to breach the perimeter, let alone get inside. There must have been some complicity or even permission. On the other hand, some things went exactly as they should have. Lawmakers were rapidly taken to safety. No VIPs were injured. Bloodshed was kept to a minimum through careful deescalation.
Overall I think we came to within inches of a major tragedy. It was avoided through a mix of competence and incompetence. We were lucky and we should consider ourselves warned.
Republicans have mostly posted online, rallied with Trump etc while BLM and friends has been torching cities, looting etc.
Basically the police weren't expecting anything near this from this crowd and it took them by surprise.
Disgusting anyways.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/trump-ri...
Likewise known Proud Boys and 3%'ers were present, etc... This was the Place to Be for all militant right wingers, and those who couldn't be in DC were staging protests elsewhere. IIRC there were violent actions on the same day at both the Oregon and Kansas state houses.
Everyone Knew they were going to be there. Everyone Knew they had the potential to be violent. And Everyone Knew that Trump's rhetoric was inciteful. None of this was a surprise. And it finally boiled over into real violence. There's no excusing or downplaying that. We could absolutely have seen this coming, and lots of people did.
Source video? Larping in camo and a helmet doesn't make you militarized or an oath keeper.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/several-well-know...
You keep dodging. First it was "these groups aren't there" now they're just LARPers in camo and don't matter. People keep shooting down your arguments and you keep moving the goalposts.
You even provided a "quote" of something I never said. Good on you.
You made a statement "Oath Keepers in particular seem to have had a large and heavily militarized detachment". I asked for source video, which you now can't find and instead offer a video that doesn't corroborate your statement. So, who is moving goal posts?
What I am saying is the people causing the violence (including in the video you provided) are crazy larpers and MAGA fanatics, not oath keepers. Oath keepers are typically former military, open carry weapons, and don't look like they just broke out of mom's basement.
I am also saying I haven't seen a video of anyone who looks militarized in either organization, coordinated assault tactics, or armament. Can you cite a source video that demonstrates your statement is even close to true?
Edit: OK, I'm not making that equivalence. My use of the word "adjacent" was deliberate and intentional. That's the point of this whole debate.
I still think that there is a positive place for DWeb technologies, but that place is specifically to enable more truly free speech. A lot of what got us into this mess is that speech on social media is not truly free. The only speech that is allowed/promoted on those platforms is that which appeals to base instincts, because it is that speech that drives revenue for the platforms. What we're allowed to say, and have heard, should not depend on what is most profitable for a few companies.
[0] https://twitter.com/ArvindKrishna/status/1346932293991079936
I'm sure we could all agree on this point.
However, the aspects of IBM that led to their assisting the Third Reich are still very much alive at IBM today. It remains in the form of their core business model of assisting the world's most powerful regimes in automating oppression, autocracy, and authoritarianism at a global scale.
If you really want to power past Godwin's law, then you could compare them to Hitler in the 1920s, subverting the Weimar constitution.
The goal of decentralization is to take power away from companies who govern poorly or in a way we don't agree with, so our data and network is mobile, so we can "vote" by leaving their platform - and not buy their products or services or give them our attention to monetize with ads. And then once this fluid system exists with a hierarchy of good, good hearted, well meaning governors - we must then focus on educating and healing the population - where we won't reach them easily in the digital world due to self-perpetuating filter bubbles, anyone who tries to reason with them are ignored or simply ban/blocked to reenforce their echo chamber.
We is everyone who is conscious enough and on the path of good (practice of non-violence to other and self, whether specifically acknowledged or not) or of healing, those who are more self-aware than not, who have developed their critical thinking more and less indoctrinated. There's of course a huge spectrum of where people are in this evolution or growth stage. Part of the challenge is rallying good hearted people, rallying, organizing and directing them and resources in the most efficient way possible.
The book will be a story of my healing journey including the incompetence I've encountered throughout our health systems, along with sharing my proposed solutions, explaining my own project plans to try to solve for those problems by providing practical tools to people. I will also be explaining a protocol I'm developing to help guide people to develop their self-awareness, to gain and maintain health, including everything from food sensitivities, fasting, yoga, acupuncture, entheogens like Ayahuasca, MDMA-assisted therapy, inner child regression therapy, stem cell treatments/regenerative medicine, etc.
In short, it's all about organizing and directing resources efficiently, while eliminating the waste. There are deep flaws to the health systems: indoctrination, a lack of multidisciplinary approach, industrial complexes who've influenced the knowledge and current practices, and more. The how of getting to a place where education and healing is taking place is - every possible way, any entrance point to direct people onto the path that they're willing to open the door to. For many people they only begin to care about their health after an impetus occurs. The reality is most people on average aren't very awake, conscious yet, and so indoctrination is easy - and then those indoctrinated are "sheep" following the status quo - and so what has to happen is the culture needs to shift, so then by default you're following a path that's healthy and supporting critical thinking and self-awareness development - which will lead to gaining and maintaining health - individually, community wide and globally.
You might not be able to remove their speech but it would still have consequences (again in most countries).
This could even be worse for people who engage in such activities since you can't remove your words in hindsight! I've seen a lot of back-pedalling and removing of tweets from people.
I still juggle in my head as to what kinds of behaviour would be acceptable or not - things like racism, calls for violence would be obvious and go through a review and moderation protocol and start with temporary suspensions (a time out in the corner), and after X offences, then a block or limiting of function until some other remedy is met. Where I wonder how much of a caring hand to impose when necessary are things surrounding say bullying or perhaps someone being non-critical or arguably abusive by simply saying "you're stupid" or other name calling. Arguably I'd want people on the platforms I engage on to be trying to improve themselves, to grow, to improve their emotional regulation and manage that impulse or energy that leads them to calling someone stupid instead into developing a deeper understanding - responding instead of reacting; or realizing engaging with certain people is futile, and to put their energy and passion more into the physical world instead of their keyboard. I wonder how many people are ready for such an environment, for that level of a safe space.
> we must then focus on educating and healing the population
Do you not see how wrong this sounds? Who gets to create this “healing” education curriculum which will “open hearts and minds”?
Another assumption you've made is there would be a singular curriculum, which I never argued for either. Learning and healing will be decentralized and fluid to some degree, the effort must be in providing the resources for people to access the healing and education, while skillfully directing people through the nuances and also providing whatever tools they may need to succeed at the practices they will benefit from taking on, and access to diagnostics that can give insight and help guide someone to help them orient through problem solving.
We're all at different points on our path, of our understanding, some further along in one area than another and then you can learn from them - or teach them something they're less familiar if they're interested in that moment of interaction with you or what you've put out in the world. In fact you want a huge amount of diversity - people who explain things differently, people who have different personalities - we need the diversity to be attractive to diverse people. There does need to be a core protocol that gets developed, evolves, and should be referenced and a research methodology followed for conflicts that may appear, where disagreement occurs say of one practitioner calling bullshit on some claim someone else is making. One of my previous family physicians, middle aged man - not very healthy himself, was skeptical and didn't believe stem cell treatments I had - the healing that had already occurred - he was skeptical, didn't believe that it actually helped and that any benefit I may be experience wouldn't last; stem cell treatments 100% work for regenerating/healing many tissues of the body if the doctor knows what they're doing, however this is an example of a disconnect between current knowledge (stem cells have been being used for treatment for 25-30 years now) vs. mainstream understanding; this also points to a broken, stagnant system of how most doctors aren't knowledgable in the latest (not talking about within the last year of knowledge but it seems to take decades in some cases for the knowledge to propagate to the front line).
One of my goals is to create a system where community thrives, community which means relationship building and learning through communicating, and a system where the brightest stars are able to shine so more people are attracted to what they have to share - and hopefully learn from it - and then those students become teachers and so the process continues.
I can see how someone can easily interpret what I said, fear being invoked that this "must educate" people could be akin to the CCP's "re-education camps" - however no, I'm solely talking about voluntary participation - but there are ways to lead people towards healing practices, ways to incentivizes it, ways to make it more available, more accessible.
I realise it's decentralised, but would that, for example, at some point require every one who were to get on Scuttlebutt to download on 80gb file in order to get started?
People want to sign up and login easily. This doesn't seem to do any of that. Convenience is king and necessity it's history maker.
Firstly, only the followers (and maybe their friends) would need to download 80GB of videos posted by that supposed ex-prez.
Then, it's peer-to-peer. I don't know the details, though. It could be torrent (very effective, scalable), or direct connections (poorly scalable).
Some pubs (servers) can retain your data, IIRC, though they could pick who they accept.
Syncing would be pretty easy on local networks and sneakernets, provided you have the storage capacity.