(Trying To) Face Down The Evil At TechCrunch Disrupt
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I was born and grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. We lived close to Austria but obviously we could not go there until after the revolution. But after the Iron Curtain fell I went to Vienna with one of my brothers and my parents. To this day I remember the shock after we returned back from that short visit - everything just looked grey... grey buildings, grey people, everything looked dead and falling apart... one of the most depressing moments of my life.
The problem with authoritarian state is not that it is easy to personally get into trouble. The real problem is that the fear spreads and kills those fragile things needed to move the society forward - communication, cooperation, creativity. Incentives that drive people are perverted. In every society there are people who are pathological, cold, selfish, hypocritical, cowardly. Authoritarian states are wired in such way that it's favourable to those people - they get to the top and gain control over the society. Yes, it takes years, even decades. But so many lives are ruined in the process... and at the end the society is just broken beyond repair, you cannot trust even your closest relatives and everything starts to fall apart (and I mean that - at the end of the regime many buildings were not repaired for decades and they literally started to fall apart and sometimes you could not get hands on even the most basic stuff like toilet paper).
And don't forget... living in fear is going to cost you. Even when you are careful and you never do anything that would put you on their radar it still affects your life deeply... somehow it kills human spirit. You step back a little, start thinking about what you can or cannot say, you rationalize it... and pretty soon you don't even know who you really are any more. I remember Pavel Kohout (Czech writer and disident) talking about some of his colleagues, other writers, talented and promising... who compromised, changed their books out of fear... and never wrote anything decent again. Creativity needs freedom.
I also remember that after the revolution I went to some movie festival and there were some women - political prisoners talking about their experiences. Most of them were really old ladies and some of them spent more than twenty years in prison just for saying what they wanted to say. Some of them were tortured. But they were incredible, not bitter at all, without hate or vindictiveness, so strong, vital, they were even joking about it (really black humour) with charisma just squirting out of them. They decided to live their lives on their terms, not defeated by fear. They paid horrible price for that... and each of them said they feel it was worth it, they do not regret anything and that they are happy in life.
To be really happy, you need to be happy with yourself. And when you live in fear you kill that... each time you do something that's not really yours and is motivated by fear you kill little part or yourself. I am not judging. I totally understand that many people rather give up their freedom of expression or even collaborate with the regime so the regime would not ruin their or their children's future. I would probably give up under pressure. I am just talking about stuff that people from countries which have not experienced authoritarian regime yet might not realize.
One of the problems is that this is precisely what many people want. Many people are afraid of change. They'd prefer stasis. Totalitarianism sells itself partly by playing to that.
There are plenty of people along the way who can put their foot down and say "NO" but all they have to do is threaten them and many people say, "I'd rather not get involved," or, "It's not my problem." But every person who turns a blind eye, emboldens the despot, bully, or mob boss.
Not saying every little 4-man start up should take the nuclear option when facing the NSA. But there are certainly many companies with clout who could easily turn the tide in public opinion against the rapidly expanding surveillance state. If Google or Yahoo or another big player stook a stand I think it could start to turn the tide.
I just feeli like if Ladar Levison can take a stand, I'd like to think there are others who believe strongly enough in what America stands for to do the same. America is worth it.
It is possible to internationalize yourself and your assets in such a way that no one government can threaten you with taking everything away. I suggest taking a look at these internationalization resources:
http://www.internationalman.com/ http://www.sovereignman.com/ http://nomadcapitalist.com/
Once you internationalize yourself, your fear of government will be substantially reduced and you can be free to take a stand.
You think keeping Bitcoins prevents the government from seizing your assets? Well if you trade in dollars, then they don't HAVE to seize your Bitcoin assets. They can just stop you from converting to dollars, and effectively achieve the same result. All the Bitcoins in the world are worthless if you trade in dollars and can't convert Bitcoins to dollars. And if you think MtGox is going to stand up for you when the government comes knocking on their door and demands they stop honoring withdraw requests for your account, then you're wrong.
Bitcoins are cool, they're useful today, and they have potential. But until you can buy a sack of flour from the corner store with Bitcoins, they're not an effective way of evading government meddling. They're just a proxy currency for people who don't understand better.
That requires a vastly wider reach.
I'm currently living in the USA too.
One could create shell corporations and try arranging some kind of complex loophole-based scheme, but that's not only difficult, but also traceable in most cases. There's a reason druglords deal in warehouses full of cash--because if the government wants you bad enough, there's no scheme you can arrange to escape, and even moreso with the NSA watching and storing all of your past and future online activity.
1) Skip the vacation this year, give every spare dime you've got to the EFF and the ACLU. Push to have your company make charitable donations to those organizations too. Think of it as outsourcing the fix.
2) Talk about it as much as you can to as many people as you can - be unabashed and vocal in your support of people who do take the risks that come with fighting back.
The worst thing you can do is nothing.
1: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections...
The enemy of the good is the perfect.
but....
Any loosely organized group of people, be it the Tea Party or Occupy has a serious problem these days. Your opponents can define you by your edges and they will. The media loves attacking people that don't fit the politics of their network or newspaper. These media then search for the most misguided hanger-on at the edges and make them the face of your movement. Many incidents are misreported to fit their narrative. It minimizes the damage these groups can do and makes them feel bad when they get home and see totally different reporting than what occurred. My favorite is to show a tight shot of the counter-protest making it out to be the same size when it is only 10 to 20 people or show garbage left from another protest as if it came from the one they don't like.
Not to say they cannot be successful. A number of Tea Party folks got elected, and the fight at the 2012 Republican Convention showed who was actually scarred. In the long term movements do win, but we need short term solutions.
Now, you can demonize the NRA, but it has moneys and knows how to motivate its members. It scares officials during and election and can target races. The funny thing is the money in tech dwarfs the money in guns, but the 2nd is better defended than the 4th or 5th.
People frequently do the same thing when complaining about the government about the government of course - like the OP's article implying people are being herded into camps: 'At best our government considers us meaningless sheep to be herded/slaughtered at will,'
This is based on the shooting of an old man who shot his gun at police. Now, I'm not a fan of SWAT teams or the militarization of police, but I can't help noting that the police were called to the residence after he had threatened to shoot his roommate/host and his daughter, and that police spent time trying to negotiate with him after he had shot at officers. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/09/arkansa...
The Silicon Valley mythology is largely based around the idea of founders/early employees who do what they do because they have nothing to lose. I don't know whether that was ever actually true, but you're right: we all have a lot to lose now, and that affects how we act. Not just in terms of standing up to the government, but every time we face a risky decision.
Any thoughts on what we can do to make up for that?
You can ratchet it up even more. Move your 401k money into funds that invest in very specific companies, companies who align with your morals. Convince your friends and family to do the same. Get involved in your local community and government to raise awareness of what you consider evil.
It's really not terribly hard to get started, if you feel so strongly about these issues to call them "evil".
And many who read it (like myself), will likely find your concerns to be at least somewhat reasonable.
So, what does it say about how far we've come that we are so afraid of speaking out when we believe that our government is wrong? And it's not just wrong, it's among the worst wrongs a government can commit: violating the rights of the citizenry it is sworn to protect.
People don't want to speak against the government especially when they're working for it, and there are not many job alternatives around. In the end, the revolutions happened when the economy was doing very poorly, and people had nothing to eat, so they didn't have much to lose.
Hopefully, Americans are smarter than to wait until that happens, and should revolt, or at least protest before most of the damage has already been done, and you have "nothing to lose".
That's nonsense. In these countries whether or not you were employed by the government had exactly 0 influence on how dangerous it was for you to speak out against the government.
Meanwhile, in many European countries, 1/3 or more of the population works directly or indirectly for the government, yet you won't find many that are the slightest afraid of speaking out against the government - in fact in many of them you have a steady stream of government employed people who are actively involved in political opposition to whichever party is currently in power.
It's a huge conspiracy! So huge that everyone is in on it... except for you!!!
I never said the word conspiracy, did I? Labeling any criticism of power "conspiracy theory" is a straw man tactic for discouraging real discussion.
As much as MA rubs me the wrong way, I applaud him here. What an incredibly non-trivial and important use of his public platform with those guests.
If PG and a few others joined with him, there would be momentum, just like that.
There is no quick tech-fix for this issue, nor do SV companies really have any power to pressure the government with threats of civil disobedience. The real work of changing the laws will require traditional politics, getting new representatives elected who have a commitment to stop NSA abuses. Recognize that most of the existing legislators have already bought into the system save a few, so any moves they make are really just to placate the news cycle.
SV companies could use their tremendous financial reserves to fund candidates who promise to fix the laws, they could pull on the purse strings of the existing legislators, but really, with the 2014 elections, and politicians fixed over Syria, Obamacare, and other issues, I doubt any of the campaigns see this as a winning wedge issue.
I guess what I'm saying is, change will be slow, the NSA didn't evolve this capability overnight, it's been building it secretly since WW2, and they are not likely to relinquish it just because some protests from techies in the valley.
Some people in the SV 'bubble' like to imagine our SV entrepreneurs as some kind of Atlas Shrugged super-men, and you know, if Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and everyone else just went all "John Galt", the government and everyone else would have to cave.
No! This is so, so wrong. I totally get the sentiment, but the reaction is misdirected and might do more harm than good. A (centralized) government is a major power base in society, but it is not the only one. What democracy has done is try and take power away from disparate parties, and concentrate much of it in the hands of an elected body. This doesn't always work well, but this main idea is a good one. Government, like any large human undertaking, is an ongoing endeavor that has to be constantly maintained and reformed. But fighting it rather than fixing it is a terrible notion.
I know Americans are inherently distrustful of government – this has to do with America's peculiar history – and in itself, a healthy skepticism towards government is healthy for a democracy. But a general "anti-government" stand will take us back to a much less free, less just, form of organization: feudalism. In feudalism, power is held by private individuals (lords) or organizations (noble families, the church, and I guess in modern times - corporations) that accrue it by amassing money and/or other forms of influence. These power bases form alliances that suit them, with the implicit goal of maintaining their power and withholding it from others. And one thing is certain: these powers are hardly accountable to the public; not even like the most sinister of democratic governments.
The author's particular grievance is mass aggregation of personal information; (almost) everyone agrees that's really bad. But is government the only guilty party? Is it even the biggest offender? I'm pretty sure Google collects and analyzes more personal information than the US government, and it's far less accountable. It doesn't even have secret courts. It's also far more dangerous as a power because of something I've mentioned before: Power is far more dangerous when it manipulates people into surrendering it voluntarily; a truly dangerous power inspires love, not suspicion (as is the case of Big Brother: he is loved, not feared and hated).
To fight things like personal data gathering we should work with the government to fix it rather than fight it, because the universe hates a vacuum, and by trying to fight the government and take away its monopoly on some forms of power, we may find that we've simply put it in far worse hands.
The fact that Google cannot force Microsoft into handing over your data is insignificant. Either Microsoft will eventually become a non-power, or both Google and Microsoft (and Facebook and others) will share power as it suits them – just like feudalism.
The fact that Google cannot currently directly use violence or incarceration against you is circumstantial. When the federal government was week, the robber barons commonly used violence against people (the Pinkertons, for example), and the robber barons never had as much power as Google does now (knowledge is power). Weaken government enough, and this, too, may come to pass. But the worst part is that it doesn't have to: in modern Western society, information alone can often be used almost as effectively as physical violence, at a much greater scale and at a lower cost.
With the power and influence Google holds, I'm not entirely sure they will always be so readily prosecuted for their transgressions. I assume that even now they're trying to remove whatever regulations apply to them, and are certainly fighting any future regulation that may inhibit their aggregation of power.
So we've built a system where large and powerful lobbies represented by small groups of people fight against each other for their cut of the nation's resources at the expense of other small groups and individuals. It doesn't sound like that great an idea to me...
Government is the best tool they've found to help them do this.
> Who knew in 1984 ... the zombies would be paying customers
I feel that this misses an important point in the book. I am reminded of this dialog with the prole who rents Winston an apartment (no spoilers about what happens):
> ‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help murmuring.
> ‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. ...’
Any time there is some technology facing broad adoption, you can imagine some holdouts saying this. Televisions. Cell phones. Smart phones. "Too expensive. I don't see a need for it." The implication is there was one point in time where the people willingly adopted the means of surveillance. One would expect that it offered them something in return.
Or to put it another way, a small fraction of the amount of money the tech community spent to elect the guy who could end any of these programs and/or fire those responsible with a phone call.
For a minute I thought Arrington was referring to his previous employer, one of the players in the domain name racket, specifically the people who run Pool.com. If ever there was a "service" who viewed users as "zombies", they are it.
Then there's all the herding that TC does, funnelling its readers toward "preferred" money raisers. TC has taken the conflicts of interest inherent in the typical tech media "puff piece" to a new level altogether. If anything needs to be disrupted, it is TC's manipulation of "news".
It's really difficult to take this guy seriously if you know anything about his background. But I guess that excludes most of us "zombies". TC is a pillar of herdlike "thinking". Operations like TC/UC and the ones Arrington criticizes in the "article" share more in common than he may want to admit. Both rely on brainless, herdlike behavior in order to carry out their business plan. If anyone is going to effect a change upon the status quo, it must be users. But the SV that Arrington feeds on has no incentive to educate users to become independent thinkers. Herds are easier to manipulate and, you guessed it, easier to monitor. And Arrington himself is the furthest from an independent thinker I can imagine. He is a parrot.
What is your specific complaint against Pool.com ?
However, the problem is that as soon as such a campaign becomes strong, and that is assuming all parties agree on a policy or two, the government, especially a US one, will hit the media with fear mongering attack ads that slander such people as terrorist sympathizing, non patriotic, traitors. Witness Snowden's treatment. So, it would take only the strongest and bravest rich people, who are happy to risk all to get involved with such a venture. And such people are in it because the love start-ups and tech, they never signed up for politics. Perhaps circumstances will drag them in?
The other way of course is for such business leaders to fund and lobby existing parties to, well frankly, bribe them in to policies that promote freedom over fear and risk. That for me is playing the existing game. Now, I don't know about others here, but then the likes of the media, oil or industrial military complex do that, I call it corruption.
Frankly, while I sit here aghast at how government now treats people in general, I cannot see a reasonable clam way to solve this satisfactorily. I think, sadly, that it will carry on until there is a snapping point in the population, and some sort of revolution happens. I don't see that happening any time soon, Im not sure it ever will. As others have said, they have their job, mortgage, kids at colleges, and so on. Much easier to just accept it and let government continue to persecute the minority (not necessarily in a racial sense) it chooses to.
In the end, the vast majority of us a comfortable cowards. Who cares if a few people get screwed over. "We" have too much to lose. Yes, me included.
Really what we need is something like GnuPG, but easier to audit, easier to use, and with a standard that is not constrained by a need for backward compatibility (and which clearly follows constructions given by researchers, rather than using ad-hoc techniques).
a) The legal route - donate to EFF and friend https://www.eff.org/ - and hope that in 8-10 years it takes this thing to get through the courts, all this will be found illegal.
b) The legislative route - stage protests, pour money into congressional and presidential candidates who believe privacy is a right, fund lobbyists, find candidates that believe in privacy and push them to run, punish officials with expensive reelection campaigns for those who don't.
c) The encryption route - make encryption easier to use, push forward stronger minimum encryption standards, push for IPv6 (mandatory IPsec support), push for an end-to-end encryption standard for HTML with encryption/decryption done by the browser for elements on a page/posted content (for things like webmail), constant vigilance against vendor-introduced security weaknesses, etc.
d) The disinformation route - flood the internet with enough noise that it becomes cost prohibitive and technically unfeasible to have any confidence in the results coming out of any big data analytics system monitoring internet communications.
.
The disinformation route is also a technical solution, but it can be carried out by a much smaller group of people though some of us might have issue with effectively spamming the internet and in order to create the right kind of disinformation, you have to know what they're looking for in the first place and the resources to fake interactions that looks similar.
The legal route is something we can all do. It is slow, but donating money to lawyers is relatively painless for most of us.
The legislative route requires organization and mass participation. So far, people aren't angry really enough about it to do anything. There is no charismatic leader leading the charge. As far as I know, there isn't even a PAC we could donate to that would fight the good fight.
It might just be me, but it seems as though this comment could easily be taken out of context. It's a metaphor. And the speaker wasn't saying that the government was Big Brother either.
[1]http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-...
As much as I don't like the recent news that's come out about the NSA, I also don't like to falsely manipulate people's words to give them a negative connotation. I don't like when it's done to me, so I try not to do it to others.
As an organization the NSA seems to have some issues, but I still hold that individuals are mostly good. I don't believe the person who wrote that had a mindset that most people are zombies.
The cost of living there is so high -- a million dollars for a starter house -- that operating there is unthinkable without big money and big success. And guess who has the biggest money of all? The government. They don't even have to earn it. They can tax it (or print it) to their hearts' content. With a cost of living so high, only big money talks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs
Last time I was in SV, I was driving around and thinking "wow, this place might well be the world's only six-figure slum." It's a place where earning what would be a fantastic wage in most places will get you something that people in other places would call a "crack shack." With a set-up like that, the golden handcuffs look mighty shiny and appealing. If SV gets too "uppity," they just have to come in and spread some more money around. The price of real estate hyperinflates a little more, and the handcuffs get tightened a couple clicks.
Real estate hyperinflation and debt indenture are such effective traps for controlling a population, it's hard for me to believe they weren't explicitly designed. The real genius of golden handcuffs is that they look like wealth and they make you feel rich. Wow! I'm making so much money! My house is worth so much! But in reality you're an absolute slave to whomever is writing you those big checks. You don't dare deviate even a little, or even say anything out of line, for fear of losing it all. The truly rich and powerful have the freedom to act. If you don't have that, you are poor.
But Silicon Valley is also an idea. You can go there even if you're in Podunkistan, Arkansas. The only way Silicon Valley -- the idea -- can win is if it "goes airborne."
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/06/fbi-lawyer-surv...
It starts at 12'34". Nothing much comes of it though.
I was using a Microsoft surface the other day and thinking "wow, this really doesn't suck once you get used to it." I'm starting to come off my initial hatred of Metro.
What does this have to do with the OP?
If MS wanted to pull an outrageous coup d'etat vs. Apple and Google, especially in the Mobile space, they could pivot the company thusly: "Here at Microsoft, we empower you. We are the company that gives you control over your platform and your privacy."
Yeah, that's totally not what they do now. Just saying. If they were really genuine about it, they'd gain a shitload of mindshare real fast.
Actually, it is: see http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/new-microsof... and http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-google-breached-your-privacy-..., for instance.
However, I don't think it is enough - and the revelation I suspect that might kick it off, if Snowden has proof, is an attack on the Visa network. I saw earlier the NSA had got into SWIFT, which really stunned me. But NSA watching VISA traffic would be front page across the world. And may well be a good explanation for why they are really trying to find out what snowden has.
Just a thought. But please carry on asking questions Mr Arrington.