Entire world seems to be making a pivot to surveillance state :(
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
Simple:
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
by Eric Hughes
written 9 March 1993
All of those things are pushed by people right now. Maybe the scale isn't right, maybe the effort needs you as well.
We, the technological community, have failed the wider public by not creating decentralized alternatives that are as good as centralized ones.
Chat Control shouldn't even be an issue, we should just be able to laugh it away.
Is anyone concerned about Mastodon being banned? No right because it would be almost impossible to implement. Yet it is possible for WhatsApp/Telegram(yuck)/Signal. Even the tech darling Signal is centralized as fuck.
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/signal-faci...
This. Signal is actively fighting against decentralization, which makes me suspicious. Their arguments were debunked by the Matrix team, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936929
Indeed. At the parent page of https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html (https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/), you can read:
"if you want to write code, go to OpenPrivacy.org":
> https://www.openprivacy.org/
This website perhaps gives you some inspirations.
Boom-bust cycles, including environmental ones don't do anything to harm capitalism. Rather, they just make it stronger. AI systems have locked in existing power structures forever and guarantee that we will technologically advance fast enough to solve for or at least adapt to climate change.
I'd argue that the whole climate movement for the last 20 years stymed and significantly harmed the left as a result. The anti-nuclear and some anti-vax positions taken by parts of the green left in particular were anti-scientific and have cost that portion of the party the support of many scientist types.
Scare porn about what will happen if you don't de-develop society and reduce your CO2 footprint just makes folks want to eat even more burgers. Same reason why the majority of non cyclists hate cyclists.
It's the same thing when you show a ton of kids how a chicken nugget is made. They all go "eww" for a moment, then you ask them "who wants chicken nuggets?" and literally every hand goes up[1] . We want our slop. We don't care that it's slop, and these days, emotions of cruelty, subjugation, and schadenfreude are political dominant and in the zeitgeist.
I’m with you that cruelty and domination is winning right now, and that a sizable fraction of people are fundamentally evil and an even more sizable fraction basically don’t care. I still eat meat and acknowledge that it’s immoral to do so.
Just think that whatever happens after climate catastrophe / the water wars will likely be worse but it feels natural that it will at least be a different type of worse. I don’t see the global internet as being extremely relevant then.
Idk, as an individual there’s nothing much I can do and arguing here won’t help anything so I guess agree to disagree.
Among all candidates, it seems the least likely here. It didn't even happen at the same speed the internet grew.
(The issues with monopolized editorial powers are still valid, it's just this one that I think is wrong.)
Overwork, lack of space, lack of transportation.
I imagine people blames the internet for lack of interest (as in "social networks are a dopamine machine"). But IMO it's absurd to jump into a lack of interest when the physical means for people to get together are destroyed.
I feel like it might be impossible. The people agree with the tar pit makers.
Pass a mass surveillance law, 10% will be outraged, 80% will say "Well I don't have anything to hide. Oh well."
Pass a censorship law targeting legal but unpopular/controversial material. 10% outraged, 80% say "Good, I never liked it anyway."
Pass a preemptive policing law, 10% outraged, 80% claim "If it makes me safer, I like it. I'm not a criminal after all, I don't have anything to fear."
Pass a law that codifies your nation's most popular religion as something to be promoted and enforced. 10% outraged, 80% cheer it on, because it agrees with their views.
The 80% is illustrative here, but it seems like the people who agree with the above statements are a very solid and overwhelming majority. So why it did take us so much time to creep up to deliberate censorship and surveillance? As someone who was born in the 21st century, the freedom to access and do things on the internet had only ever been on the downhill, any small wins are overwritten by inevitable losses that make things more controlled, more 'safe'.
Generally the more democratic a country is, the less hostile the government is against the people, from my observations.
If you decentralise, any damage will be localised and would affect fewer people.
I think having a mostly crippled central government is probably the most realistic alternative but you can see how that is taken advantage of in the US and how it fosters unnecessary discord between people whose interests are generally aligned.
A part of the problem today is that there are massive autocratic powers that have the resources, means and channels to influence any democratic powers. Decentralization in this case means less unity in opinion, and more opportunity for foreign influence.
I dont see a way out of this, because essentially as a decentralized democracy, you are playing with your hands open to the whole world, and trusting that your decentralized people will filter out the noise/influence and make rational choices when they are open to any foreign influence.
This is why we are seeing EU go more authoritarian. There is (rightfully so given the average technological literacy), no trust in that the individual will be able to see through foreign influence. Control of the individual is the only short-term solution.
I believe Switzerland is prospering because the citizens are in charge of their nation, not a select few belonging to the political class and well connected wealthy individuals.
It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.
People think that, but once you tell them they will lose their drivers license since they chatted to their spouse about bad eyesight they bark differently. Or shrug it off with "that will never happen to me" and you can start the "and then they came for the [next group], but I did nothing" line of talk.
Everyone has something to hide, they might just not know yet what it is but they will when the option to hide it has gone away. There is a reason my country stopped recording religion since 1946 in the citizen records, it was fine to do so decades before.
It's teleco vendors, ISPs and govn't agencies are advocating this.
What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious.
Maybe they're not paying attention to the part of that cycle where they start falling out of windows.
but firstly the policies of the very same party put millions into poverty and famine
I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership.
I don't think it was always that way, and it's too soon to tell if its current leadership is similarly wise or just coasting off of past successes.
If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?
The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.
Were you and I reading the same thing? The post I was replying to was a pithy one sentence sentiment, which was a reply to another pithy one-sentence sentiment.
If anything, I wanted to elevate the conversation thread beyond that, and based on the size of the replies I got, I succeeded.