6 ms·
I mean, they're kinda wrong. You can care plenty about these issues but not see an actual way to have impact such that your concerns are addressed. If society
by ABCLAW 9y ago
I mean, they're kinda wrong.
You can care plenty about these issues but not see an actual way to have impact such that your concerns are addressed. If society isn't caring, then either society doesn't see why there's a concern, or society recognizes that atomically it does not have agency to address the issue, and the people who do have that agency are the ones that don't give a shit.
- gameswithgo 9y agoThey mean that the majority of society needs to care more collectively. If that were to happen then there would be impact.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoSaying "society needs to care more" is the last stop before the final destination of "this can't be done". Getting great many people to coordinate on something that's beneficial to them long-term, but carries an (even insignificant) short-term cost is one of the hardest (if not the hardest) things to do, out of all the things humans ever tried.
- ABCLAW 9y agoI don't think calling out 'society needs to care more' as bullshit means we collectively throw up our hands and walk away. It means we recognize that 'getting many people to coordinate on something' just plain isn't going to happen as the primary mode of addressing these issues and instead work on solutions that do work. For a subset, sure, maybe a good PR push gets people sufficiently inflamed about a particular topic, but does that mean that key problems that aren't 'viral' enough aren't deserving of a proper solution? If "society needs to care more" is the answer, then that's the implication. But that's obviously wrong.
- dj-wonk 9y agoI interpret "society needs to care more" as a challenge: what can we do to make society care more? Put another way, I view this as a collective action problem.
- CWuestefeld 9y agoThe classic solution to collective action problems is to have the government take care of it. But here, the government is probably the biggest offender. You'll pry their databases and TSA inspections from their cold, dead hands.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dcow 9y agoI meant it more as: you need both. (At least I'm not suggesting people shouldn't care--can't speak for the GP, RMS and JPB, but I suspect they also still care[d]--and you always can care.) When you've spent large portions of your life advocating for digital liberty and software freedom only to see it decimated in both the public and private sectors in favor of convenience & control, it probably makes you a bit jaded. And you wonder if you missed something. Where the battle stands today, at least in my opinion, is with convincing people that their life is better with these freedoms, not as much that these issues exist. My point was simply that we can't skip the stable society part and sit in an ivory tower of activism.