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Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

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Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#241

Post by Arainach »

aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #238
Arainach wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources. Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything. If you ask people "do you want A, B,…

Representative systems vest political power into concentrated points of influence. The reps are often as uninformed as the citizens. The US just had some infamous legislation pass that representatives didn't even read, and publicly stated so. The system also makes reps uniquely vulnerable to targeted lobbying, corruption, regulatory capture, and threats. I find much to be faulty with opaque dealings with a few key in…

>Direct democracy mitigates these issues. Influence must be exerted through broad, public persuasion. This forces special interests to operate in the open, creating a higher and more transparent barrier to subverting the public will.

Have you paid attention to any US or global election since 2016? The special interests stay hidden and their influence works wonders.

If direct democracy could have ever worked, that opportunity died the moment social media became popular.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#242

Post by chrischen »

afarah1 wrote: post #50
McDyver wrote: post #30

They make it really difficult to fight any of this. You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind. This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying. This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if t…

Same for any legislation piece. A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M. Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time. And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for. It's just the power structure of any representative legislature. "In vain do we fly to the many"...

Why not have one organization that collects $1 from everyone to fight on behalf?

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#243

Post by sheiyei »

deaddodo wrote: post #88
soulofmischief wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well-funded institution will always outlast an individual or smaller organization in a war of attrition. I think a modern Constitution needs to consider 19-20th-century concepts such as game theory if it has any hope of preventing eventual corruption.

Look at SOPA/PIPA. They simultaneously pushed the same bill through both chambers to try and guarantee it would pass. Grassroots efforts led to it being overwhelmingly blocked in both cases. And then they just slowly slipped most of it's provisions through other legislation over the years.

I think we should be at least several decades past looking at the USA as a particularly functional democratic system...

The US constitution, despite its biblical status in their culture, manages to be more of a distracting throw-word ("LOOK at how this bill helping provide healthcare OBSTRUCTS your CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to NOT CARE ABOUT THE POOR!" (Ok, not a great example)) than a functional constitution that limits institutional overreach.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#244

Post by yxhuvud »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #110
bee_rider wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I’m from the US as well. In our case, I think this stems from multiple problems—the popular understanding of the constitution and the letter of the thing have diverged, and also the Supreme Court has gone in a third totally unrelated direction. So it becomes a convenient rhetorical meme. (IMO, we should the thing once a generation and have the populace re-ratify it with a high consensus, so we’re all on the sam…

as the constitution doesn't have that high of a place in our identity it's more something for constitutional lawyers and higher courts. I think there's more tension between our constitutional law and that of the EU's law. for most people that's background noise I guess.

In this particular question there are also fundamental human rights that are part of the EU legislation where it is fully plausible that ECJ would render any law implementing the EU law. Like Ipred, where our politicians tried to pass laws following it but it got struck down again and again. No idea if they have given up yet.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#245

Post by yxhuvud »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #148
thrance wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's riding that right wing populism wave like everyone else. If the crazy brown authoritarians from the far right want this, then why not cave in? (I despise him).

The left is pushing for it. The commissioner in charge of the 2024 version of Chat control is/was a communist. I don't mind critizing the far right when it is necessary but this push is not coming from them at all.

No. That was Ylva Johansson, a Swedish social democrat. They are center left, with emphasis on the center part.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#246

Post by Timwi »

somenameforme wrote: post #236
Arainach wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources. Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything. If you ask people "do you want A, B,…

People don't bother looking into stuff because they know their opinion, and their vote, doesn't really matter. Treat people like children and they start acting like children. For some contrast Switzerland has a sort of defacto direct democracy in that citizens that obtain a relatively small number of votes can bring any issue they desire up for vote. And they have indeed brought issues like Basic Income with the sugg…

> That's something that would likely destroy any country that passed it

What makes you say that?

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#247

Post by rolandog »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #173
rolandog wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy — death by a thousand papercuts — will be lead to catastrophic tipping points. As a ChemEng, I can't help but compare the current coordinated attack on the democratic rule of governments worldwide to having multiple batches of emulsions undergoing phase-inversion [0]: only so much fascism can be added before things colla…

>I'm of the opinion that our failure (as a society) to prevent this type of attrition of democracy I'm not a fan of democracy. You wouldn't be either, if you thought about it for very long... you just can't help yourself, it was championed as some sort of virtue ever since you were old enough to realize that governments existed. From kindergarten or pre-k. The things you'd claim you like about democracy aren't even t…

> It does not scale. It scales pretty well; but we have let our guard down and naïvely thought the problems would sort themselves out by virtue of voting. We "live in a society", that means casting a vote on a paper ballot won't make the farmer understand the downstream effects of fertilizer runoff, nor the impact to communities of a CEO outsourcing away jobs. We can't go about living our lives without trying to meet each other halfway. And we won't survive without finding a way to make being nice to each other mandatory.

> You're aspiring to something that not only does not and cannot work, but you're trying to make it even bigger [...]

On the contrary, I'm trying to prevent it from getting smaller. And, even better, to improve on it (we're a community of hackers and tinkerers after all, right?)!

We are all much more vulnerable to autocratic regimes nowadays due to the erosion of privacy rights and deregulation (again, the threat of instrumental convergence — the paperclip problem — threatens the fabric of society: censorship in the name of advertising-friendly content, spying in the name of targeted advertisement, and the weaponization of targeted ads and "the algorithm" propping up foreign-state-funded populists/autocrats).

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#248

Post by thaumasiotes »

Arainach wrote: post #149
Der_Einzige wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is. Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war. Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands…

It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources. Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything. If you ask people "do you want A, B,…

> Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work.

We have those now.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#249

Post by hellojesus »

zarzavat wrote: post #235
prophesi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#250

Post by ost-ing »

mvieira38 wrote: post #132
RamblingCTO wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid Germany ('s government) is not opposed at the moment and there is enough internal pressure as well. We had our fair share of moments getting surveilance like that and fighting it. I bet my ass off, that Ursula von der Leyen, the c... who tried to make it German law had her hands in that as well.

If any other country should know better, you'd think it would be Germany. Ursula in particular married into a family which was both persecuted as Anabaptists and participated in persecution by being Holocaust enforcers, so how on Earth is she not aware of the slippery slope here?

Like most people on this planet in positions of power - corruption and cognitive dissonance
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