14 ms·

>Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. >All user data from Google stays on Goog

>Sure Google stores a lot of data about me, but why should I be worried? They haven't done anything malicious with it. >All user data from Google stays on Google No, there is no company who cannot be hacked, whether from an insider or an outsider. Big data is what enabled the operational efficiency of the Holocaust[1]. Imagine the mass scale, micro targeted cyber attacks a bad person could do with a little programming/algorithms knowledge and a data dump of the most detailed psychological/demographical profiles in history on billions of people. Google and FB are building dual-use tools of mass destruction/manipulation. While they may only use it for advertising, there are plenty of worse things it could be used for. Plain old censorship is just getting your toes wet. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

knockingat3am 8y ago
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again: > The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed. And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better. It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.
- atlantic 8y ago
  Thanks for the passages from Arendt - very well selected. But we could do without the histrionics in your final paragraphs. I'm not sure there is anything that could have been done to prevent the world wars and totalitarianism of the 20th century. IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. Not a very popular stance, I'm sure, but at least as plausible as your position.
  - knockingat3am 8y ago
    At a very basic level, looking away enables the situations and power structures to come about which then are used to excuse that looking away. Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands, > IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak". But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.
    - atlantic 8y ago
      > These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. That's obviously false. Trivial example: a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history. You can look at Mount Vesuvius all you want, it won't stop it from erupting. Modern democracies are in fact the exact opposite of what you are describing. They are not made up of countless individual acts. Politicians ignore most people's opinions, and turn their backs on their own electoral promises once in power. Democracies are gamed so that the lobbies who finance political campaigns wield the real power, and these lobbies represent a tiny sliver of the population composed of very wealthy individuals. They launch their own "grassroots" campaigns to create an illusion of numbers behind them, but they are extremely elitist. Face it: democracy is a sham. As for saving people: it's human, it's compassionate, it is valuable in itself. Congratulations to those who do it. But historically it changes nothing. History rolls on.

knockingat3am 8y ago

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again: > The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed. And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better. It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.

atlantic 8y ago
Thanks for the passages from Arendt - very well selected. But we could do without the histrionics in your final paragraphs. I'm not sure there is anything that could have been done to prevent the world wars and totalitarianism of the 20th century. IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. Not a very popular stance, I'm sure, but at least as plausible as your position.
- knockingat3am 8y ago
  At a very basic level, looking away enables the situations and power structures to come about which then are used to excuse that looking away. Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands, > IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak". But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.
  - atlantic 8y ago
    > These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. That's obviously false. Trivial example: a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history. You can look at Mount Vesuvius all you want, it won't stop it from erupting. Modern democracies are in fact the exact opposite of what you are describing. They are not made up of countless individual acts. Politicians ignore most people's opinions, and turn their backs on their own electoral promises once in power. Democracies are gamed so that the lobbies who finance political campaigns wield the real power, and these lobbies represent a tiny sliver of the population composed of very wealthy individuals. They launch their own "grassroots" campaigns to create an illusion of numbers behind them, but they are extremely elitist. Face it: democracy is a sham. As for saving people: it's human, it's compassionate, it is valuable in itself. Congratulations to those who do it. But historically it changes nothing. History rolls on.