Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this? We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights. I'm at a total loss for where to start. (Edit: grammar)
These days, not participating in the latest electronics and social sites and whatnot is enough to make people ask you questions. If you think carefully enough about why you're making the choices you make, then you can give pretty reasonable answers.
I don't own a smart phone, or have a Facebook or LinkedIn account. I still buy paper books. I don't blog (much). And I don't really evangelize these choices; I don't do any of this for attention or to try to change other people's minds. But, when someone notices their tech guy is carrying an old-school flip phone, they ask questions.
Usually the first thing I say is, "they're really convenient, really good tools," immediately followed by, "but, I've noticed that people seem to have a lot of trouble ignoring them, and I don't need another distraction in my life. I don't really want an internet connection to follow me everywhere."
As far as I know, I haven't made anyone else give up their smart phone or Facebook account or whatever. But a surprising number of people take a moment to think about that. They often kinda look at their phone and go, "...huh, I wonder what that would be like..."
And, y'know, just the fact that I get by and live pretty well without these things I think speaks more about how valuable they really are than any sermon I could think of.
Technology is leveraged, not because it's strictly necessary, but because it's useful. After all, the very website we're having this conversation on isn't necessary. You could get by just fine without it.
But it's useful, isn't it?
Frankly, I don't think quietly opting out solves anything. Would it have helped if some folks opted out of the industrial revolution, content to sit on their farms eking out a living? No. It was those folks participating in the system, but determined to change it, who ultimately lead the charge and catalyzed change.
This technology is here, and it's enormously powerful and useful. But that necessarily means it's also enormously dangerous. The solution isn't to attempt to convince people to abandon that technology and somehow roll back the clock. The solution is for folks to understand the good and the evil these technologies can enable so that we can have intelligent conversations about their use and abuse; conversations that can ultimately inform a new generation of law makers, business owners, and citizens, so that we can realize the advantages of these technologies while minimizing the downsides.
Fortunately, things like the NSA leaks may be just the thing necessary to start those conversations.
You're more than welcome to fight the good fight -- good luck to you -- but I'm not convinced that I'm so right that it should be my mission to change others' minds, and regardless the advice I gave is a good first step for anyone that is interested in changing others' minds.
Who could be trusted to safeguard privacy? The government? The services that depend on advertising revenue, which these days is most of them?
Downgrading and opting-out has been the only option that has made sense to me. (But I'm probably weird.)
I find that having no TV, no smart phone and no facebook reduces the noise. I don't miss them.
Not owning a smart phone also has downsides and benefits. Many people however aren't really aware that downsides exist, so the benefits, however small they may be seem like a justification to buy one. I think it makes sense to be critical of the things you use and spend some time thinking about whether you really think that they benefits are worth the costs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-gr...
By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even
when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this “The Find,”What I often see is that most individuals see that the benefits outweigh the negatives (all the people that say "I have nothing to hide." over and over) of safety over privacy, and specters can be brought up to increase this fear of the unknown until you are going to have to fight against your friends and neighbors instead of the government to get any change in place.
The cops won't care about my porn browsing, but I might not want my spouse to know about all of it. I wouldn't want the cops knowing if I was buying drugs, but I trust that my spouse wouldn't go walking down to the station to turn me in. Similarly, I trust that Facebook wouldn't hand over my info to the feds without a court order, but I don't trust them to hand all of my info over to marketing firm without my permission for a small fee.
As a side note, the leak you're referring to stated that several jihadis' devotion to their cause would be called into question and their authority undermined if it was shown that their public and private lives were inconsistent, with several examples[1]. There were no indications that any threats were made, and, in fact, Greenwald later stated in an interview[2] that he had no evidence that there was any intention to threaten them. I like to point out whenever that article comes up that one of the sources for that article later complained that Greenwald selectively quoted him so as not to undermine the article's core argument[3] and that Greenwald had himself written a book back in 2008 which tried to discredit Republicans by publishing information about their private lives[4]. Sorry, I just can't stand Greenwald...
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_...
[2] http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
[3] http://volokh.com/2013/11/27/understanding-enemy/
[4] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307408663/thevolocon...
* give me more time for side-projects & a clearer frame of mind (good) * actually made me think & write MORE. not everything you think should be thrown on social media immediately. I appreciate having learned to shut up when you don't have anything to say (good) * made a bunch of people angry at first (good I guess if you want to provoke a mind-change) ... but that seemed to last only until the next cute cat picture came along. * I'm sure I made no one reconsider. Zero effect. So that's why I was asking.
"Changing the world by beginning with yourself" is not a valid strategy here. So what do we do instead?
Web instead of cable channels Git instead of subversion Bitcoin decentralizes money Social networking will be next to decentralize Energy production - decentralized Cellphone mesh networks Open source government programs to run cities Etc
The big question one has to ask is what do you do in a world where you are more and more living in a zoo with robots making sure you do the right thing to more and more exacting standards?
I think the answer is that expectations will get so high that robots will do everything. And humans will be free to do anything, as long as they don't involve anyone else.
Want to ask a question to your dad? Why bother, google will answer better and your dad won't be pissed at you for asking while he's glued to his facebook
I wouldn't say we made it through. We are living it now. We are just getting automated away from it gradually over last hundred years despite all the kicking and screaming and few revolutions (the other, bloody kind). What we sort of succeeded at is getting decent share of the profits.
> Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this?
I think you can't fight the process. You can just demand your share.
You need to fight for your right to information. Right to surveil others. Privacy will die, you just need to ensure everybody gets a piece of its corpse and all that grows on it.
Demand right to acquire and publicize surveillance footage no matter who acquired it. No matter who was surveiled. Demand transparency from your government to the point mandatory of livefeeding of all public officers.
Don't just accept that some things should be secret. Make all the people, who claim that, prove why. Enforce transparency as default and secrecy an incredibly well argued exception.
Since you mentioned it, I grew up watching Star Trek and I guess it might have formed some of my views on society and technology. The technology present in that universe can - and sometimes is - abused, but like you said, they generally trust each other a lot, both on personal and on societal level. It's a way of life I try to follow and a future I hope we'll one day reach.
Pretty much everything again hinges not on the technology itself, but on how it can be used. There's a lot of good we can leverage even current level of "antiprivacy" technologies - optimizing agriculture, traffic and public health, learning more about ourselves and how societies evolve, improving the general well-being of everyone.
The last two or three generations seem to have grown up with irrational hate of centralized systems. Yes, distributed and democratized is great, but those systems also have their failure modes - many of which we see every day not only in technology, but in economy, politics. There are some things that are better done centralized, like any kind of optimizations. With the levels of computing power we have nowdays, I think we should embrace centralization some more.
Another thing - that I do need to check up with history books, but I feel that the current notion of "privacy" is an artificial construct, an artefact of growing urbanization. I can't imagine villages having any level of privacy similar to what people in cities nowdays consider a minimum standard.