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I think a good start would be to develop useful technology that doesn't have any choke points for the authoritarians to capitalize on. If the internet were gos

I think a good start would be to develop useful technology that doesn't have any choke points for the authoritarians to capitalize on. If the internet were gossipped device-to-device at stoplights and in elevators and wherever people congregate, it would be very hard to control the flow of information. The hard part (besides the engineering) is that those are the same choke points that the capitalists capitalize on. How do you attract investors to back something that cannot be made to respect the investor's stake in it? We'd have to do it because we want it done, not because it'll make us rich later when wet turn it against its users, and that's not something we're well practiced at.

gtirloni 3y ago
The conference is in person, right? What technology will solve the police showing up with guns to arrest the participants?
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  > The conference is in person, right? What technology will solve the police showing up with guns to arrest the participants? I don't know, but it sounds like a great idea for a SF story!
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    That's good to hear. I am writing that SF story.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    I see what you did there and I approve ;)
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I was responding to: > But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other? We're hackers, we solve things with hacks. But to answer your question, you'd let it be known that whatever happened on stage was a sham, and that the actual award goes to whoever was indicated by whatever consensus process was happening between the devices carried by the people at the event. But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests, but the signal would propagate widely enough that the state couldn't use disinformation to confuse the situation. A decisive winner, against the state's wishes. The message would be: > we can make aggregate decisions without your interference Which should sound like a bit of a threat coming from people living under the CCP. If you can coordinate an award against the wishes of your oppressor, you can coordinate less innocent things too.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests ... That seems like a hole in the concept. For the situation where the authorities are turning up to arrest people, it's most likely they're not being arrested for winning. It's more likely they're being arrested for other things that happened before. So, the award situation is more being used as a useful honeypot to get them physically there. Those people would be arrested anyway, regardless of whether they win.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    I like acts of civil disobedience against an authoritarian regime but this will accomplish nothing other than put the lives of these people at risk. If you want to use technology and asymmetric warfare for that, do so online from a safe place. Or be prepared to buy and operate physical weaponry in enough quantity.
safety1st 3y ago
This take seems disconnected from the facts of the matter at hand - it wasn't a technology problem, it was a human problem. The Hugo organizers voluntarily chose to censor the awards because a Chinese city had been selected by the venue. Technology was not at issue, nor was capitalism. They chose to support authoritarianism and diminished the integrity of the awards in the process.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Yes but we are makers of technology, not organizers of awards, and the question was: (paraphrasing) what can we do about it? Resistance needs to come from the people, or not. All we can do from afar is give them capabilities they can download and hope that it helps. We might want those capabilities too (I do). I believe Tor was created due to similar logic.
  - safety1st 3y ago
    Actually a great point and I'd much rather be building something that solves the problem than just complaining about it. But what information technology could possibly solve the problem here? The nature of the awards ceremony is that it's public and the issue was with it needing to physically take place in China...
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Setting the transport layer aside (which would be tricky, since you have to avoid relying on anything thar can be used to interfere), you'd want all the same things you'd need to pull off an illegal election, or contribute remotely to organizing a protest: A web of trust, a userbase that's practiced in maintaining it, and the ability to vote and agree on some outcome without revealing which real identities correspond with the voters, but while still providing proof that this was indeed an outcome chosen by a majority (or you know, customizable logic here), among people you've explicitly trusted, pseudonymously or otherwise. It would need to be embedded in some kind of larger system whose use was widespread, a platform for p2p apps. Perhaps there are games like pokemon go, but serverless, which involve going out running into other players at places you've never been before. It would not be hidden, but rather a coordination module used by apps for all sorts of groupwise coordination. Imagine games which involve forming coalitions and infiltrating other coalitions and communicating in secret, learning which of the other players you can trust, etc. People would create games on this platform which involve conspiracy towards unimportant goals embedded in the game universe: Place an augmented reality hat on these four statues, all of the same color, or interfere with your enemy's attempts to do so by getting there first and placing the wrong color hat, that sort of thing. But once users were practiced at such things, and had large enough webs of trust which they actually trusted, and had trusted that the software wasn't up to anything shady... Well there would be nothing stopping them from using it to organize around non-AR outcomes like keeping your government in check. ---- I'm working with an urban exploration group--they travel to explore abandoned missile silos and such--and also a guy who puts on IOT murder mysteries at his house. We want to put on murder mysteries in abandoned missile silos, but there's no wifi out there so the dream is to do it peer-to-peer over bluetooth. Sort of a test bed for this kind of thing. I'm the only coder, and it's an audacious goal, almost certainly doomed to fail, but it's got me in the mindset. I'm simultaneously writing some SF about such a scenario, so even if my software fails I'll have a place to encode my lessons learned that's a bit more digestible than code. Dreaming this thing up and attempting to build it is my hobby. Larping for democracy.

gtirloni 3y ago

The conference is in person, right? What technology will solve the police showing up with guns to arrest the participants?

CoastalCoder 3y ago
> The conference is in person, right? What technology will solve the police showing up with guns to arrest the participants? I don't know, but it sounds like a great idea for a SF story!
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  That's good to hear. I am writing that SF story.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  I see what you did there and I approve ;)
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I was responding to: > But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other? We're hackers, we solve things with hacks. But to answer your question, you'd let it be known that whatever happened on stage was a sham, and that the actual award goes to whoever was indicated by whatever consensus process was happening between the devices carried by the people at the event. But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests, but the signal would propagate widely enough that the state couldn't use disinformation to confuse the situation. A decisive winner, against the state's wishes. The message would be: > we can make aggregate decisions without your interference Which should sound like a bit of a threat coming from people living under the CCP. If you can coordinate an award against the wishes of your oppressor, you can coordinate less innocent things too.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests ... That seems like a hole in the concept. For the situation where the authorities are turning up to arrest people, it's most likely they're not being arrested for winning. It's more likely they're being arrested for other things that happened before. So, the award situation is more being used as a useful honeypot to get them physically there. Those people would be arrested anyway, regardless of whether they win.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  I like acts of civil disobedience against an authoritarian regime but this will accomplish nothing other than put the lives of these people at risk. If you want to use technology and asymmetric warfare for that, do so online from a safe place. Or be prepared to buy and operate physical weaponry in enough quantity.

safety1st 3y ago

This take seems disconnected from the facts of the matter at hand - it wasn't a technology problem, it was a human problem. The Hugo organizers voluntarily chose to censor the awards because a Chinese city had been selected by the venue. Technology was not at issue, nor was capitalism. They chose to support authoritarianism and diminished the integrity of the awards in the process.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Yes but we are makers of technology, not organizers of awards, and the question was: (paraphrasing) what can we do about it? Resistance needs to come from the people, or not. All we can do from afar is give them capabilities they can download and hope that it helps. We might want those capabilities too (I do). I believe Tor was created due to similar logic.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Actually a great point and I'd much rather be building something that solves the problem than just complaining about it. But what information technology could possibly solve the problem here? The nature of the awards ceremony is that it's public and the issue was with it needing to physically take place in China...
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Setting the transport layer aside (which would be tricky, since you have to avoid relying on anything thar can be used to interfere), you'd want all the same things you'd need to pull off an illegal election, or contribute remotely to organizing a protest: A web of trust, a userbase that's practiced in maintaining it, and the ability to vote and agree on some outcome without revealing which real identities correspond with the voters, but while still providing proof that this was indeed an outcome chosen by a majority (or you know, customizable logic here), among people you've explicitly trusted, pseudonymously or otherwise. It would need to be embedded in some kind of larger system whose use was widespread, a platform for p2p apps. Perhaps there are games like pokemon go, but serverless, which involve going out running into other players at places you've never been before. It would not be hidden, but rather a coordination module used by apps for all sorts of groupwise coordination. Imagine games which involve forming coalitions and infiltrating other coalitions and communicating in secret, learning which of the other players you can trust, etc. People would create games on this platform which involve conspiracy towards unimportant goals embedded in the game universe: Place an augmented reality hat on these four statues, all of the same color, or interfere with your enemy's attempts to do so by getting there first and placing the wrong color hat, that sort of thing. But once users were practiced at such things, and had large enough webs of trust which they actually trusted, and had trusted that the software wasn't up to anything shady... Well there would be nothing stopping them from using it to organize around non-AR outcomes like keeping your government in check. ---- I'm working with an urban exploration group--they travel to explore abandoned missile silos and such--and also a guy who puts on IOT murder mysteries at his house. We want to put on murder mysteries in abandoned missile silos, but there's no wifi out there so the dream is to do it peer-to-peer over bluetooth. Sort of a test bed for this kind of thing. I'm the only coder, and it's an audacious goal, almost certainly doomed to fail, but it's got me in the mindset. I'm simultaneously writing some SF about such a scenario, so even if my software fails I'll have a place to encode my lessons learned that's a bit more digestible than code. Dreaming this thing up and attempting to build it is my hobby. Larping for democracy.