The Net interprets privacy as damage and routes around it
This is my summary of Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. It's funny, you can replace censorship with anything really and still argue the statement is true.
Privacy is Alice doesn't want Eve to read her messages to Bob, so she encrypts them. Then Eve can't read them. How is Eve supposed to route around this? Read Carol's messages instead? Not the same thing. Alice and Bob still have privacy.
When Eve has the message, privacy is already lost. Preventing Eve from spreading it around is technologically equivalent to censorship at that point so then you're just proving the original formulation.
It doesn't mean you can insert just anything. "The net interprets beef as damage and routes around it." If you're an animal activist you might like for that to be true, but that's not really how it works.
Nothing about the internet requires there to be an intermediary with the plaintext. Compare e.g. Signal.
And if the internet is free-as-in-beer then Comcast owes me a big refund.
Bob wants to post on Eve's site because the list of possibly malevolent actors are paying him.
Importantly, this does not apply to the application layer. The actual Internet services regular people use. The top of the stack of the Internet is very strongly centralized. There's no routing around anything there, because you're not broadcasting packets - you're asking a service provider to kindly do an action on your behalf. And the service provider can just refuse it.
>Gilmore famously stated of Internet censorship that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".
>"First Nation in Cyberspace". Time. December 6, 1993.
http://kirste.userpage.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/internet-arti...
>People who uses these new entry points into the Net may be in for a shock. Unlike the family-oriented commercial services, which censor messages they find offensive, the Internet imposes no restrictions. Anybody can start a discussion on any topic and say anything. There have been sporadic attempts by local network managers to crack down on the raunchier discussion groups, but as Internet pioneer John Gilmore puts it, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
>"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
>This was quoted in Time Magazine's December 6, 1993 article "First Nation in Cyberspace", by Philip Elmer-DeWitt. It's been reprinted hundreds or thousands of times since then, including the NY Times on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October 2000, and CACM 39(7):13.
>In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
>The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
>"We make free software affordable."
>This is the slogan on the back of the first Cygnus Support T-shirt.
Have you been on social media or any political thread on HN lately? No one is afraid to speak their mind about anything.
I liked the old web, but not because it was uncensored, rather because the psychos stayed in their cages. Now they're flinging their excrement everywhere.
One could view the "Net" mostly as an organism that wants to grow. In this case saying privacy does make a lot of sense.
One could view the "Net" mostly as people: as it's hardware/software commanded by people who are sometimes commanded by companies. So depending on your point of view the Net can mean a lot of things, hence you could replace “censorship” with what has meaning for different types of people. I find going down this route to be insightful or just silly fun because you can start thinking in so many different ways. Correctly or not...
owning the means of production seems like a rising moral imperative, as polticial/governmental forces increasingly bend more and entities to make more unprivate systems.
It's a long,layered, and sometimes difficult read, but The Age of Surveillance Capitalism thoroughly lines up the stones and turns them over. After hearing this, I was obligated to buy it , and read it.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
However, that assumption is not necessarily true. As one measure, we can make it illegal to store information about everybody in the first place (GDPR, etc.). As a second measure, we can design new (or resurrect old) networking protocols and systems which by design, and provably, can’t know too much about everyone; decentralization is the usual term for these.
The thought is: Given that they will get my information from someone else, why should I not get the benefits offered for giving up my PII.