On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 02:32:43AM -0800, coderman wrote: > the combination of mass spying for mass media control (including propaganda) > is abhorrent, and as yet unrestrained.
yes, but when you talk to bystanders who aren't getting it, please explain the difference of a surgical invasive action on the minds of each individual, algorithmically automated to scale to at least the most influential people if not the entire facebook/whatsapp populace. > > for as long as we do not produce a surveillance-resistant social > > networking and communication platform, we are not in a state of > > democracy. anywhere in the world. i cannot imagine any higher > > political priority than to fix the internet and create a distributed > > social network to replace facebook and the like. > > decentralization is a moral imperative for many reasons! but it is important to learn from the mistakes made in 2010 and once before in 2003: there is decentralization that has a chance of working and decentralization that is a dead-end street yet it keeps getting propagandized into our heads: federation. it hasn't worked with the semantic social web in 2003, it hasn't worked with diaspora in 2010, it's not going to work on the next attempt either. a social networking tool which is decentralized and actually functional to scale to humanity-wide use MUST not put all its data onto some servers but MUST operate from the devices directly. not purely P2P, but using the paradigms of distributed computing as informatics has developed in the past decades. > and a fully decentralized IT infrastructure might thwart centralized > power most effectively. yes, which unfortunately implies to forbid scalable remote control technologies such as microsoft windows, google and apple os's. it might take political awakening, a political will to save democracy and an intervention on legislative level in response to the uprising. so we have a bit of a chicken/egg problem here. we might have a window of democratic opportunity if we get people to switch to a distributed social network (there isn't any currently in existance that fulfils all requirements so it is somewhat hypothetical) until all the os-based remote controls are in place for the same kind of mind control that we now experience on facebook. and even that requires to get entire populations off of facebook. > fully decentralizing these types of services, along with > decentralizing the production of computing systems which support them, > some of the most challenging problems in technology. good luck! :) technologically we are actually in a pretty good situation, we're almost there.. what's missing is political support which would also boost the finalization of the technology for end-user applicability. > P.S. these are also my favorite problems to explore. don't get discouraged! thanks, i don't know where i get all my positivity from considering the mess we are in. maybe because i see a way out which is a rare privilege. -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
