The entire world realized that now that the Internet has killed off all of the third places / IRL meetings, and social media killed off the decentralized Internet, it's quite easy to fully control the discourse around any topic, since only a few social media organizations effectively decide what everyone sees (even if you're independent, Social Media decides which ideas/content gets traffic).
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
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'.
What can a decentralized, democratic government do against foreign autocratic powers that can influence any election in WEEKS?
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.
Could Switzerland's prosperity instead be linked to its historical role in safeguarding gold taken from Jewish victims during World War II, its tradition of banking secrecy that enabled dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Sani Abacha to conceal their assets, or its longstanding willingness to accept money from oligarchs avoiding sanctions, tax evaders, arms dealers, corrupt officials, drug traffickers, and fraudsters?
I don’t think these are core reasons why Switzerland is a prosperous nation, no. I would guess what you are pointing out has only benefitted a few select bankers and the average citizen has had little to gain from this.
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.
I semi-agree, but the type of democracy you are referring to would involve much smaller groups with more power and would ruin the political "economy of scale" that we get from having the same laws apply to everyone over vast spaces.
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.
The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems". The cypherpunk scene is still alive and evolving, but it's fairly niche, and a tough environment for people driven by external validation while 'things are well'. But there are still people around making sure the necessary pieces are in place in case they become necessary.
The privacy-preserving systems have been built and are finally making it into the mainstream, only to be uprooted by politics. Not that we no longer need to build more of such systems, but the root of the issue lies elsewhere.
Yes but the mainstream systems are not decentralized enough. We need better systems.
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.
> Even the tech darling Signal is centralized as fuck.
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
Why wouldn't signal just move their company to some random other country? It's not like they make money from their users, and people can easily sideload the app.
I'd argue the actionable things are already happening: Hackers and cryptographers creating technical solutions that defy governmental control, people trying to sway public opinion (or trying to get people to realize that being surveilled isn't just about their secret it is about a fundamental balance of powers between companies/governments and individuals).
All of those things are pushed by people right now. Maybe the scale isn't right, maybe the effort needs you as well.
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.
The scale you're talking about is total societal collapse, shutting down "the system" as it exists today requires nothing short of a worldwide apocalyptic event. It's not something I'd be hopeful about, especially since by the time it gets this bad, most people will already be dead. Or we might not even be old enough to see that happen, if we're lucky.
Im not hopeful for it, I think it will happen probably but under no pretense it will make things better.
It does make losing the battle for internet freedom in specific feel a little less bad for me though because that particular issue feels temporary.
When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off?
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.
Anti vax is nutty, anti nuclear makes some sense if the goal is worldwide disarmament. I agree AI is an incredible boon for surveillance and censorship but I’m highly skeptical that it will solve climate change and currently seems to be making it worse by measurably increasing power usage. XAI is using diesel for theirs and the air quality in town is measurably worse now.
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.
Most politicians don't support explicitly such measures. This is a technocratic law, result of a weak consensus in the EU. You don't vote for your Homeland Secretary minister. EU PM don't usually campaign for such issues. This is a failure of representative democracy.
A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy, but they do like feeling safe and secure from crime and “bad things”.
It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.
> A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on 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.
Censorship and killing people who were too "out of line" were staples of human civilization ever since we started figuring out governance. What's unique about China is that it was a pioneer in capturing this new technology and using it to their state's advantage. Never before in human history could you monitor all the things people said to one another, all the money that got exchanged, all data that's uploaded and downloaded, and have automation that ensures that everyone's information is looked at. The internet had become a tool of centralized control, China just was successful at realizing it first.
They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.
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.
I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad.
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.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
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.
> I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
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.
I was saying their domestic mass surveillance is not directly tied to them becoming a preeminent world power. That their rise could've just as well happened without it.
Which is why you see eg UK making it illegal to demonstrate, want more backdoors in communication tech (so they can scan for wrongthink), going harder banning free speech etc
The entire world realized that now that the Internet has killed off all of the third places / IRL meetings, and social media killed off the decentralized Internet, it's quite easy to fully control the discourse around any topic, since only a few social media organizations effectively decide what everyone sees (even if you're independent, Social Media decides which ideas/content gets traffic).
Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
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'.
By increasing the level of democracy and decentralizing the government.
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.
What can a decentralized, democratic government do against foreign autocratic powers that can influence any election in WEEKS?
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.
It’s how the country I live in, Switzerland, is organised, one of the most prosperous places on earth.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland
Could Switzerland's prosperity instead be linked to its historical role in safeguarding gold taken from Jewish victims during World War II, its tradition of banking secrecy that enabled dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Sani Abacha to conceal their assets, or its longstanding willingness to accept money from oligarchs avoiding sanctions, tax evaders, arms dealers, corrupt officials, drug traffickers, and fraudsters?
I don’t think these are core reasons why Switzerland is a prosperous nation, no. I would guess what you are pointing out has only benefitted a few select bankers and the average citizen has had little to gain from this.
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.
I semi-agree, but the type of democracy you are referring to would involve much smaller groups with more power and would ruin the political "economy of scale" that we get from having the same laws apply to everyone over vast spaces.
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.
It’s how the country I live in, Switzerland, is organised, one of the most prosperous places on earth.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/switzerland
> Question is, how do we get ourselves out of this tar pit?
Simple:
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
by Eric Hughes
written 9 March 1993
https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
I don't think there are actionable items in that manifesto, and was written during the RSA munitions debate.
The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems". The cypherpunk scene is still alive and evolving, but it's fairly niche, and a tough environment for people driven by external validation while 'things are well'. But there are still people around making sure the necessary pieces are in place in case they become necessary.
The privacy-preserving systems have been built and are finally making it into the mainstream, only to be uprooted by politics. Not that we no longer need to build more of such systems, but the root of the issue lies elsewhere.
Yes but the mainstream systems are not decentralized enough. We need better systems.
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.
> Even the tech darling Signal is centralized as fuck.
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
Why wouldn't signal just move their company to some random other country? It's not like they make money from their users, and people can easily sideload the app.
It is suspected that Signal was originally financed by the CIA:
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/signal-faci...
> The actionable items are "write code" and "build systems".
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.
I'd argue the actionable things are already happening: Hackers and cryptographers creating technical solutions that defy governmental control, people trying to sway public opinion (or trying to get people to realize that being surveilled isn't just about their secret it is about a fundamental balance of powers between companies/governments and individuals).
All of those things are pushed by people right now. Maybe the scale isn't right, maybe the effort needs you as well.
Was it really the internet that killed third places?
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.)
Say more?
You mean what other candidates are there?
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.
My solice is that it’s all temporary, as climate catastrophe will bring down whatever system they’re building before too long
The scale you're talking about is total societal collapse, shutting down "the system" as it exists today requires nothing short of a worldwide apocalyptic event. It's not something I'd be hopeful about, especially since by the time it gets this bad, most people will already be dead. Or we might not even be old enough to see that happen, if we're lucky.
Im not hopeful for it, I think it will happen probably but under no pretense it will make things better. It does make losing the battle for internet freedom in specific feel a little less bad for me though because that particular issue feels temporary.
When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off?
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.
[1] https://youtu.be/mKwL5G5HbGA?t=148
Anti vax is nutty, anti nuclear makes some sense if the goal is worldwide disarmament. I agree AI is an incredible boon for surveillance and censorship but I’m highly skeptical that it will solve climate change and currently seems to be making it worse by measurably increasing power usage. XAI is using diesel for theirs and the air quality in town is measurably worse now.
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.
China has shown the world the way and most countries likes it.
No, people don't like this.
Most ordinary people don't but they still vote for authoritarian politicians who like it.
Most politicians don't support explicitly such measures. This is a technocratic law, result of a weak consensus in the EU. You don't vote for your Homeland Secretary minister. EU PM don't usually campaign for such issues. This is a failure of representative democracy.
A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy, but they do like feeling safe and secure from crime and “bad things”.
It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.
> A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on 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.
People don't but those with power (i.e. the people who matter) do.
Chinese ppl don't like this either.
It's teleco vendors, ISPs and govn't agencies are advocating this.
lmao, like every other major power has been a bastion of free speech until China came up. McCarthyism, what? Politkovskaya, who?
Censorship and killing people who were too "out of line" were staples of human civilization ever since we started figuring out governance. What's unique about China is that it was a pioneer in capturing this new technology and using it to their state's advantage. Never before in human history could you monitor all the things people said to one another, all the money that got exchanged, all data that's uploaded and downloaded, and have automation that ensures that everyone's information is looked at. The internet had become a tool of centralized control, China just was successful at realizing it first.
They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty.
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.
Becoming a preeminent world power was orthogonal to them instituting mass domestic surveillance, public humiliation, and selective ethnic cleansing.
I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad.
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.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
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.
> I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
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.
I was saying their domestic mass surveillance is not directly tied to them becoming a preeminent world power. That their rise could've just as well happened without it.
You and I are in complete agreement on that front.
> pulled millions out of poverty
but firstly the policies of the very same party put millions into poverty and famine
And there is no non-violent solution
Which is why you see eg UK making it illegal to demonstrate, want more backdoors in communication tech (so they can scan for wrongthink), going harder banning free speech etc