4 ms·

> People, not technology, reign in governments. Yes, and having the richest and most powerful companies, all their employees, and all their shareholders on the

> People, not technology, reign in governments. Yes, and having the richest and most powerful companies, all their employees, and all their shareholders on the opposite team with the systems required for opression and surveillance already built is a non starter. Your social solutions must be stable. And a solution with a giant centralised surveillance and social manipulation machine just waiting for someone even eviller to take control isn't a viable one. Technical solutions aren't stable with the wrong social and political conditions, but social and political solutions are not stable with the wrong material conditions. If I take you at your word, then we both want the same thing: a legal and social environment where google cannot exist and a technical and material environment where the type of tracking and censorship they do is impossible to implement unilaterally. But one of the major barriers to getting there is the existence of google so we have to fight on both fronts.

shadowgovt 4y ago
> on the opposite team How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses. > then we both want the same thing: a legal and social environment where google cannot exist Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities). Larry Brin's "The Transparent Society" makes the excellent case that with the surveillance genie out of the bottle, you don't fix the way it can be abused by trying to cram it back in. Rather, the solution may be more surveillance... The wives and mistresses of politicians seek abortions too...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses. The people in control of the companies are the ones steering the government towards being more oppressive. > Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities). With the exception of the last, those are all examples of surveillance capitalism that would be solved with the same legal and technological structures. The overwhelming majority of current commercial software would have been considered malware or a virus in the 90s. Real privacy laws (rather than half measures or controlled opposition like gdpr) that prevent gathering any data that isn't essential and pro-cash rather than anti-cash policies would solve these. Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms.
  - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    I don't think Google are anti birth control. We should blame the American voters for this mess.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms. I don't think you have fully grasped the position of the people who support the laws that ban abortion. From their point of view they're photographing murderers. Capitalism doesn't enter into it; they are volunteering their time to do this. It's not a failure of privacy law from their point of view, and they think that normalizing murder was a failure of social norms. So long as these laws stand, all of society's technological advancements (communications technologies, surveillance technologies, transportation technologies) are turned against women because the society is turned against women. The solution is to correct the laws.

shadowgovt 4y ago

> on the opposite team How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses. > then we both want the same thing: a legal and social environment where google cannot exist Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities). Larry Brin's "The Transparent Society" makes the excellent case that with the surveillance genie out of the bottle, you don't fix the way it can be abused by trying to cram it back in. Rather, the solution may be more surveillance... The wives and mistresses of politicians seek abortions too...

Schroedingersat 4y ago
> How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses. The people in control of the companies are the ones steering the government towards being more oppressive. > Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities). With the exception of the last, those are all examples of surveillance capitalism that would be solved with the same legal and technological structures. The overwhelming majority of current commercial software would have been considered malware or a virus in the 90s. Real privacy laws (rather than half measures or controlled opposition like gdpr) that prevent gathering any data that isn't essential and pro-cash rather than anti-cash policies would solve these. Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  I don't think Google are anti birth control. We should blame the American voters for this mess.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  > Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms. I don't think you have fully grasped the position of the people who support the laws that ban abortion. From their point of view they're photographing murderers. Capitalism doesn't enter into it; they are volunteering their time to do this. It's not a failure of privacy law from their point of view, and they think that normalizing murder was a failure of social norms. So long as these laws stand, all of society's technological advancements (communications technologies, surveillance technologies, transportation technologies) are turned against women because the society is turned against women. The solution is to correct the laws.