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Take Back the Internet
- seiji 13y agoWe definitely can "take back the internet," [1] but it will take time, concerted distributed efforts, and focus. I wrote a rant about how we've been caught with our collective pants down recently: http://matt.sh/introducing-dx http://matt.sh/introducing-dx My approach is more "get funding so a few dozen smart people can live and focus 100% on fixing things" rather than letting people just play around on nights and weekends. Ubuntu got people to pay a total of $12 million for a fantasy phone. A phone. People's lives are so empty they will pay for things that don't exist in the hopes it makes them happier at some unspecified date in the future. Can we focus that faith and optimism into funding real problems and get a paltry five million to fix the entire world? [1]: The world is a lot bigger than the Internet — there's much we need to set back on track in addition to Internet stewardship.
- hga 13y agoThwarting the security state's ambitions has much greater risks than plunking down some money for a "fantasy phone"....
- seiji 13y ago"Technology is hard, let's go shopping?"
- hga 13y agoHeh. More like "Shopping is fun, and that NSA squirrel isn't really shiny enough ... yet." But taken the way you put it, you need to pick your battles, which includes specifically what and when you fight. Right now I think the odds in the political arena are good, given the stunning results of the Amash Amendment vote ... but if that proves to be wrong then perhaps that sometime later, and in the meanwhile other battles should be a focus, and perhaps none right now ("let's go shopping"). And then there's my bottom line: none of this is risk free. Including doing nothing, although way too many underestimate the risk of that.
- Mithrandir 13y agoPrevious discussion (when this essay was published in The Guardian): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336373