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For this to change, more people who share an aversion to mass surveillance have to get involved in politics. There are lots of people like this, but they are e

For this to change, more people who share an aversion to mass surveillance have to get involved in politics. There are lots of people like this, but they are either apolitical, apathetic, hopeless, don't want to get their hands dirty, think politics is beneath them, that their resistance would be ineffectual, or they are too busy with other things. That has to change.

tw25585624 6y ago
> have to get involved in politics. Given the scope of human experience now encompassed by "politics", that's not sustainable. Or as someone else once put it: "130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform."
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  The choice is not between fixing everything and doing nothing. The choice is between doing nothing and doing what you can within your limited, fallible, human means. Even the giants of history have failed to fix everything, but even small people have managed to make a difference. The problem is that too many people capable of making a difference don't even try.
  - tw25585624 6y ago
    I wasn't suggesting doing nothing, nor was I suggesting fixing everything. I was critiquing your trite suggestion to "get involved in politics." What? Vote? Write letters? Bitch on the internet? All that does is make people feel better about the system as it rolls over them. The system has more power over our lives than at any other time in history because people act in the ways the system permits them to act. I don't have the answers, but for sure it isn't going to be more of the same.
v6zfzcbq9cur 6y ago
As one more thing to consider: there's some irony in that running for office isn't exactly privacy-friendly. I sometimes wonder if elected office, if not any and all kinds of public service, necessarily selects for people who don't care too much about their own personal privacy, and what the consequences of that are. There's no way to get there without essentially throwing away whatever dregs of anonymity you've managed to hold on to. So, while I don't think I'm any of those things you list, and I've often thought that I would love to run for office some day, just glancing at the paperwork required to show up to the race is typically enough to turn me off of the idea for a while.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  Not to disagree with what you said at all, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in politics without running for office. Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the organizations whose work they support.
  - v6zfzcbq9cur 6y ago
    This is true, though I question the point. As far as I can tell, few to none of those things can actually make things happen. Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public. On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too. The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead. (As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)

tw25585624 6y ago

> have to get involved in politics. Given the scope of human experience now encompassed by "politics", that's not sustainable. Or as someone else once put it: "130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform."

pmoriarty 6y ago
The choice is not between fixing everything and doing nothing. The choice is between doing nothing and doing what you can within your limited, fallible, human means. Even the giants of history have failed to fix everything, but even small people have managed to make a difference. The problem is that too many people capable of making a difference don't even try.
- tw25585624 6y ago
  I wasn't suggesting doing nothing, nor was I suggesting fixing everything. I was critiquing your trite suggestion to "get involved in politics." What? Vote? Write letters? Bitch on the internet? All that does is make people feel better about the system as it rolls over them. The system has more power over our lives than at any other time in history because people act in the ways the system permits them to act. I don't have the answers, but for sure it isn't going to be more of the same.

v6zfzcbq9cur 6y ago

As one more thing to consider: there's some irony in that running for office isn't exactly privacy-friendly. I sometimes wonder if elected office, if not any and all kinds of public service, necessarily selects for people who don't care too much about their own personal privacy, and what the consequences of that are. There's no way to get there without essentially throwing away whatever dregs of anonymity you've managed to hold on to. So, while I don't think I'm any of those things you list, and I've often thought that I would love to run for office some day, just glancing at the paperwork required to show up to the race is typically enough to turn me off of the idea for a while.

pmoriarty 6y ago
Not to disagree with what you said at all, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in politics without running for office. Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the organizations whose work they support.
- v6zfzcbq9cur 6y ago
  This is true, though I question the point. As far as I can tell, few to none of those things can actually make things happen. Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public. On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too. The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead. (As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)