61–70 of 82 posts
It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.
A common hope back then was that we would enter a new world by giving every child access to every book every written, with technology and knowledge being the gateway to a better future. The censorship of knowledge and culture would be forever be broken. In 2004 there was en excellent talk by Eben Moglen on the subject called "Die Gedanken Sind Frei". It focused heavily on the struggle for freedom of thought. The talk…
I remember that hope for a future where all knowledge would be available at the click of a button, where the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast. A future where all human knowledge is at one’s fingertips is still a possibility. The problem is that our society is based on the profit motive. This means corporations will subsume everything the…
The reality is that 99.99% of the people are interested in posting selfies or short videos to some data-harvesting app and do not mind the intrusion for their privacy. Humans in the Internet are like monkeys living in a first-world developed city.
"No we don't! What about Facebook and Google and and an..."
...listen: Freedom means the ability to choose NOT to be free.
(This is the challenge that faces anarchists: How do you enforce freedom? It's a contradiction in terms. I say this as someone who would desperately like to be wrong about this, but in all my years I've yet to see any resolution to that.)
We choose to use Google instead of Duck Duck Go. We choose to use Facebook instead of our own self-hosted blogs. We choose to reveal our identities online rather than use anonymous personas.
We choose all of this.
Yes, there's an amount of privacy violation that is happening at the ISP level that allows an unconscionable amount of tracking, and that's a fight worth fighting. But the vast majority of what we talk about when we discuss privacy is stuff that we chose.
We chose wrong, but we chose. We can still make better choices, but we don't.
The conglomerates of the world are winning not because of force (no one pointed a gun at my head to join Facebook or install it on my phone), but because they offered us a nicer playground.
We had Second Life, where we could do and be anything we wanted. We chose Minecraft and Fortnite. We had free email servers that we could run on our machines. We chose Gmail. We had absurdly cheap storage devices that we could use to create our own "cloud" services to store all of our data ourselves, outside the reach of prying eyes or hands. We chose iCloud and Drive and AWS and Dropbox and all the rest.
Cyberspace IS independent and free, or at least as independent and free as its ever been. The reason we don't feel that way is because we choose, every day, to participate in controlled wonder gardens. We prefer the convenience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yesterday I was in the village of Broadwell, just outside Stow on the Wold, UK. I sat on a bench which had a plaque on it. It was a memorial to Malcolm Jeffries who died on his birthday in 1974 aged 20 years. His birth day and month was not mentioned. I felt like this was an event, something notable and I wanted to know more about it. I searched the web but so far I haven't found anything. I'm not really challenging…
A slight aside, but are you aware of openbenches.org ? It is a user generated database of memorial benches. It doesn't seem to include the bench you're after. If you happened to take a photo of the inscription you could add it yourself.
In some ways, we got this future. We wanted total freedom. We got total freedom. "No we don't! What about Facebook and Google and and an..." ...listen: Freedom means the ability to choose NOT to be free. (This is the challenge that faces anarchists: How do you enforce freedom? It's a contradiction in terms. I say this as someone who would desperately like to be wrong about this, but in all my years I've yet to see an…
We use gmail (or fastmail) because of the spam problem and your own email server getting blacklisted. Also the complexity and know-how necessary to be a linux admin.
Many use FB (or other centralized social media) now because of network effects, but also because of how easy they are to use.
Things don't have to be this way - in theory you can have a system designed from the ground up to solve these kinds of problems in a way that's still easy to use and possible to maintain. It's just way harder than doing it the centralized way and it's harder to figure out a way to generate money to make it self-sustaining.
The only group I'm aware of trying to do this from first principles is Urbit - there's always a lot of knee-jerk responses when I mention them, but it's a really cool project even if it's tall odds that it'll work out in a serious large scale way. They're at least aware of why previous attempts always fail and they're not afraid to rebuild the entire stack to fix it.
Ethereum and DAOs are also similar in a way - a method to have applications and organizations built on decentralized state that can actually work with financial incentives to support it.
We're still in the middle of experiencing the shock of what the internet means for us: https://press.stripe.com/#the-revolt-of-the-public - it'll be a while before we understand how things will change, but they're already changing in strange ways - hopefully when the dust settles it'll be better and not worse.
In some ways, we got this future. We wanted total freedom. We got total freedom. "No we don't! What about Facebook and Google and and an..." ...listen: Freedom means the ability to choose NOT to be free. (This is the challenge that faces anarchists: How do you enforce freedom? It's a contradiction in terms. I say this as someone who would desperately like to be wrong about this, but in all my years I've yet to see an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember those days. There was a lot of optimism and a feeling of being powerful , especially things like watching the early days of Anonymous vs Scientology. The internet was supposed to be the great enabler of the masses, and instead assholes like Zuckerberg co-opted it to line their own pockets by selling us wholesale to advertisers. In any case, I also remember reading TFDeclaration a year or two after it came…
As I recalled it, he found himself with a bullet in the head, his life in ruins. My ass doesn't belong to anybody but me, but yeah there are people out there who wants it and quite a lot of people who want to tell me it belongs to them.
You can pretend to be a citizen of the internet but the police will still come after you in meat space.
It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.
I was never a cyber anarchist—I always thought the Internet should be more like the open road of the 1950s than the Wild West of the 1850s. More Democratic libertarian than anarchist. I never imagined it would devolve into basically the feudalism of the 1350s, with dueling warlords not answerable to either the serfs or to any government.
I've mentioned this a couple times recently. Tech workers union thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581962 Mnot's Next Layer of the Internet thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581040 I feel like we're very sadly entering an era where many sovereign entities of the world claim dominion & rule over cyberspace, where they assert that their sovereignty means they decide what the rest of the world m…
*Update:typos
A common hope back then was that we would enter a new world by giving every child access to every book every written, with technology and knowledge being the gateway to a better future. The censorship of knowledge and culture would be forever be broken. In 2004 there was en excellent talk by Eben Moglen on the subject called "Die Gedanken Sind Frei". It focused heavily on the struggle for freedom of thought. The talk…