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It's kind of funny to think that decentralised apps, built by idealistic Silicon Valley hackers, now have a potential core audience among extreme MAGA types.
by dash2 6y ago
It's kind of funny to think that decentralised apps, built by idealistic Silicon Valley hackers, now have a potential core audience among extreme MAGA types.
- vmh1928 6y agoIn Germany the government used census data tabulated on IBM punchcard equipment to find who to round up. Later, during the liquidation phase of the effort each camp had punch card equipment to help with maintaining the inventory of slave labor skills. That's what the number on the arm was for - the primary key. Copies of punched cards were sent to the central administrative HQ of the camp organization for additional processing and were used to identify specific skilled people who needed to be moved to other camps. Authoritarians rely on the stupid for the grunt work but they're not stupid themselves and can exploit technology to achieve their goals.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y agoGiven their past, I found it just a little rich, that IBM so publicly decried the recent "insurrection." [0] [0] https://twitter.com/ArvindKrishna/status/1346932293991079936 https://twitter.com/ArvindKrishna/status/1346932293991079936
- spockz 6y agoWell the IBM of today has little to do with the IBM of 80 years ago. Just like the Germany of today has little to do with what happened 80 years ago and people living now are not and should not be held responsible for the misdeeds of previous generations.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y ago> people living now are not and should not be held responsible for the misdeeds of previous generations. I'm sure we could all agree on this point. However, the aspects of IBM that led to their assisting the Third Reich are still very much alive at IBM today. It remains in the form of their core business model of assisting the world's most powerful regimes in automating oppression, autocracy, and authoritarianism at a global scale.
- spockz 6y agoOkay fair point. But sadly that holds for most companies. There are remarkably few of them that do not sell or provide support on FOSS to big governments that in turn do all kinds of nasty things. How can we change this, if at all? Isn’t it part of capitalism?
- dash2 6y agoHow is this relevant to my point or the article?
- vmh1928 6y agoit was in response to the comment about decentralized apps built by idealistic silicon valley types being used by MAGA types. The point being that it might be funny to him but authoritarians do have a track record of exploiting technology.
- dash2 6y agoBut these apps are explicitly designed to be decentralised and avoid state control! I'm no fan of e.g. the capitol rioters, but the analogy with IBM and the Nazis seems to get things backwards. The rioters don't control the government apparatus, they are trying to subvert it. And the use of this technology is to aid that by preventing centralised censorship and snooping. If you really want to power past Godwin's law, then you could compare them to Hitler in the 1920s, subverting the Weimar constitution.
- shp0ngle 6y agoGab (the basically Nazi version of Twitter) is the biggest Mastodon instance, for example.
- andai 6y agoWhy'd this guy get downvoted? Are either of these assertions incorrect?
- olah_1 6y ago“Nazi” is a racial slur for a white person that doesn’t hate themselves or their ancestors.
- notassigned 6y agoTwitter is the nazi version of twitter, gab is the freedom version.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoIt's asserted upthread that gab isn't part of the wider network anymore, so that's objectively untrue, and "Nazi Twitter" is subjective, but a reasonable person could question it.
- shp0ngle 6y agoIt’s not part of the largest network, as no big Mastodon server federates with it, but it is a Mastodon instance
- ImprobableTruth 6y agoI think it's actually rather sad. I think there is a good chance that these in my opinion very important technologies will get a bad reputation because of this.
- hobofan 6y agoYou mean like the bad reputation that has been established for ages that decentralized technologies are "only good for" piracy, CP, etc.?
- andai 6y agoSame with encryption, no? Also, you forgot to mention terrorism.
- hobofan 6y agoOf course this is highly subject, but I think that the view of the general public is generally favorable towards encryption (as it also provides privacy), and governments/law enforcement agencies have again more recently tried to paint it in a bad light. I think the jury is still out whether that is successful, and the public will adapt that opinion too.
- gfodor 6y agoI think a lot of the dweb people first got interested in this area because they were on BBSes and so on sharing stuff like the anarchist's cookbook at risk of getting a visit by the FBI and used to think information wanted to be free. Now they're adults, and have kept their interest in dweb technologies, but have come to see "dangerous speech" as a huge problem, and are waking up to the realization that their technical interests and goals would enable these kinds of things. And they're not happy about it, or at the very least are experiencing cognitive dissonance. But that was always the case, and for many, they were the unsavory people in their youth that the older folks were saying were participating in dangerous rhetoric and ought to be silenced or investigated, just like they are saying now about people who are saying things adjacent to things which are illegal. At the very least we should seek consistency. If you support decentralized technology for speech, you should be happy with the net benefits and net harms. The alternative is the status quo. Arguably the spirit of the internet was not to have what we have now.
- konjin 6y agoYou will find that the people who were on the unsavoury bbs are the people who are against censorship today. Out of the half dozen people I know from that period in my life (2000-2006) not one has had a kind thing to say about facebook, google or twitter since 2010. Those firms are the lame dinosaur stuck in a tar pit that we made fun of Microsoft for being in the 00s. It's the people who called us nerds and made high school hell for us that somehow ended up in hr at tech co and are now setting policy there.
- gfodor 6y agoThat may be a more valid perspective, but I don't think these are homogeneous groups. I will say it's been surprising and disappointing to see people who have been railing against tech company centralized power for years, it turns out their big issue is more when that power is not directed in a direction they like.
- konjin 6y ago> I will say it's been surprising and disappointing to see people who have been railing against tech company centralized power for years, it turns out their big issue is more when that power is not directed in a direction they like. What else can you do? Saying that tech co is wrong today is as much career suicide as saying that the US deserved 9/11 was in 2002. I even had one guy tell me he is going full accelerationist on his main twitter because the http based internet is a dead end and the more unusable it becomes the sooner we will get something better.
- loopback_device 6y agoScuttlebutt wasn't built by "Silicon Valley hackers", but people from New Zealand, Sweden etc. Unrelated to who builds it, decentralized or self-hosted platforms have been the go-to place for lots of extremist groups, even before MAGA, so not sure what this comment is supposed to bring to light?
- woah 6y agoA lot of Silicon Valley hackers worked on it
- jhardy54 6y agoWho? I can't think of a single core contributor who lives in California. The vast majority don't even live in the US. I think I'm the closest to SV and I'm in Portland.
- dash2 6y agoI'm not sure that your living in Portland entirely disproves my underlying point :-)
- jhardy54 6y ago> built by Silicon Valley hackers No, it's not. > a lot of Silicon Valley hackers have worked on it No, they haven't. > well Portland is basically SV No, it isn't. Just do your research and nobody will correct you. EDIT: If you'd like, maybe you could clarify your "underlying point" or which "idealistic Silicon Valley hacker" traits you mean to highlight. Nazis have been trying to weaponize Scuttlebutt for years, so I don't get why it's "funny" that MAGA chuds are trying to join now. They aren't welcome.
- dash2 6y agoI had no underlying point. I just thought it was funny. That my response poking gentle fun at Portland has made you so furious is funnier still.
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- VectorLock 6y agoRemove "decentralized" and you largely described Twitter's trajectory.
- mhd 6y agoKind of funny? The US branch of libertarianism ain't exactly left wing.
- shrimpx 6y agoTech libertarianism (not just US) has always leaned right, toward anarcho-capitalism.
- toyg 6y agoIn some ways we’ve come full circle: SV was enabled by defence types, I bet a lot of the early work in advanced electronics and decentralized communications was carried out by “square” types who used “socialist” as an insult. There are still plenty of traditionalist right-wingers in STEM.
- exo762 6y agoSegregation is what you get when you permanently remove people from platforms. Sounds almost like a truism.
- loceng 6y agoThe goal of decentralization isn't to give a voice to people inciting violence, however that is a consequence of such systems when you share technology with everyone - though we shouldn't fear this, we do need to actively and proactively counter it at a higher layer, educating people and helping them heal their closed heart and mind. The goal of decentralization is to take power away from companies who govern poorly or in a way we don't agree with, so our data and network is mobile, so we can "vote" by leaving their platform - and not buy their products or services or give them our attention to monetize with ads. And then once this fluid system exists with a hierarchy of good, good hearted, well meaning governors - we must then focus on educating and healing the population - where we won't reach them easily in the digital world due to self-perpetuating filter bubbles, anyone who tries to reason with them are ignored or simply ban/blocked to reenforce their echo chamber.
- neogodless 6y agoYou mention educating and healing twice. Could you elaborate on who "we" is, and also, how we can go from where we are to a place where education and healing is taking place? What are the steps we should take?
- loceng 6y agoI'm writing a slowly book on this, so there's a lot to share to answer such a question; I'm also slowly planning out a network of health-wellness differentiated online platforms to provide practical tools for people to develop their self-awareness, to gain and maintain their health. We is everyone who is conscious enough and on the path of good (practice of non-violence to other and self, whether specifically acknowledged or not) or of healing, those who are more self-aware than not, who have developed their critical thinking more and less indoctrinated. There's of course a huge spectrum of where people are in this evolution or growth stage. Part of the challenge is rallying good hearted people, rallying, organizing and directing them and resources in the most efficient way possible. The book will be a story of my healing journey including the incompetence I've encountered throughout our health systems, along with sharing my proposed solutions, explaining my own project plans to try to solve for those problems by providing practical tools to people. I will also be explaining a protocol I'm developing to help guide people to develop their self-awareness, to gain and maintain health, including everything from food sensitivities, fasting, yoga, acupuncture, entheogens like Ayahuasca, MDMA-assisted therapy, inner child regression therapy, stem cell treatments/regenerative medicine, etc. In short, it's all about organizing and directing resources efficiently, while eliminating the waste. There are deep flaws to the health systems: indoctrination, a lack of multidisciplinary approach, industrial complexes who've influenced the knowledge and current practices, and more. The how of getting to a place where education and healing is taking place is - every possible way, any entrance point to direct people onto the path that they're willing to open the door to. For many people they only begin to care about their health after an impetus occurs. The reality is most people on average aren't very awake, conscious yet, and so indoctrination is easy - and then those indoctrinated are "sheep" following the status quo - and so what has to happen is the culture needs to shift, so then by default you're following a path that's healthy and supporting critical thinking and self-awareness development - which will lead to gaining and maintaining health - individually, community wide and globally.
- weavie 6y agoI know very little about Scuttlebutt, but supposing, say an ex-president decided to start using it. Would it be able to handle the level of traffic this might generate? I realise it's decentralised, but would that, for example, at some point require every one who were to get on Scuttlebutt to download on 80gb file in order to get started?
- russdpale 6y agohis followers can barely figure out how to get on parler, many of them thought parler groups on facebook was parler itself. They will NEVER, ever, figure out scuttlebutt, DJT couldn't even figure out scuttlebutt. People want to sign up and login easily. This doesn't seem to do any of that. Convenience is king and necessity it's history maker.
- MayeulC 6y agoWell, I guess it would. Firstly, only the followers (and maybe their friends) would need to download 80GB of videos posted by that supposed ex-prez. Then, it's peer-to-peer. I don't know the details, though. It could be torrent (very effective, scalable), or direct connections (poorly scalable). Some pubs (servers) can retain your data, IIRC, though they could pick who they accept. Syncing would be pretty easy on local networks and sneakernets, provided you have the storage capacity.