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Even if his criticisms of coveillance are correct, I still think the world is headed that way. Simply put, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. We passe

Even if his criticisms of coveillance are correct, I still think the world is headed that way. Simply put, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. We passed a similar threshold with industrialization, and the consequent removal of autonomy for workers on several levels (is the 1800's factory of exacting time cards and constant repetitive movements that far behind the warehouse the author describes?). It was a tumultuous transition (strikes, revolution, communism, etc.) but we made it through. The transformation in state and corporate power that tools like surveillance bring will be similar, but just like in the industrial revolution we can't turn back the clock and have to instead ride out whatever happens.

c1sc0 12y ago
Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this? We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights. I'm at a total loss for where to start. (Edit: grammar)
- krenoten 12y ago
  By decoupling function from identity. Fake faces, portable faraday cages, blockchained trust, onion routed transport, free hardware and software.
  - EGreg 12y ago
    Identity is pretty easy to reconstruct though. The big question one has to ask is what do you do in a world where you are more and more living in a zoo with robots making sure you do the right thing to more and more exacting standards? I think the answer is that expectations will get so high that robots will do everything. And humans will be free to do anything, as long as they don't involve anyone else. Want to ask a question to your dad? Why bother, google will answer better and your dad won't be pissed at you for asking while he's glued to his facebook
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  Like with many other causes, you start with yourself -- and that might be enough. These days, not participating in the latest electronics and social sites and whatnot is enough to make people ask you questions. If you think carefully enough about why you're making the choices you make, then you can give pretty reasonable answers. I don't own a smart phone, or have a Facebook or LinkedIn account. I still buy paper books. I don't blog (much). And I don't really evangelize these choices; I don't do any of this for attention or to try to change other people's minds. But, when someone notices their tech guy is carrying an old-school flip phone, they ask questions. Usually the first thing I say is, "they're really convenient, really good tools," immediately followed by, "but, I've noticed that people seem to have a lot of trouble ignoring them, and I don't need another distraction in my life. I don't really want an internet connection to follow me everywhere." As far as I know, I haven't made anyone else give up their smart phone or Facebook account or whatever. But a surprising number of people take a moment to think about that. They often kinda look at their phone and go, "...huh, I wonder what that would be like..." And, y'know, just the fact that I get by and live pretty well without these things I think speaks more about how valuable they really are than any sermon I could think of.
  - zzalpha 12y ago
    Eh, by that reasoning, you could equally live without electricity or running water. Technology is leveraged, not because it's strictly necessary, but because it's useful. After all, the very website we're having this conversation on isn't necessary. You could get by just fine without it. But it's useful, isn't it? Frankly, I don't think quietly opting out solves anything. Would it have helped if some folks opted out of the industrial revolution, content to sit on their farms eking out a living? No. It was those folks participating in the system, but determined to change it, who ultimately lead the charge and catalyzed change. This technology is here, and it's enormously powerful and useful. But that necessarily means it's also enormously dangerous. The solution isn't to attempt to convince people to abandon that technology and somehow roll back the clock. The solution is for folks to understand the good and the evil these technologies can enable so that we can have intelligent conversations about their use and abuse; conversations that can ultimately inform a new generation of law makers, business owners, and citizens, so that we can realize the advantages of these technologies while minimizing the downsides. Fortunately, things like the NSA leaks may be just the thing necessary to start those conversations.
- EGreg 12y ago
  We start by decentralizing power. Web instead of cable channels Git instead of subversion Bitcoin decentralizes money Social networking will be next to decentralize Energy production - decentralized Cellphone mesh networks Open source government programs to run cities Etc
- scotty79 12y ago
  > We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights. I wouldn't say we made it through. We are living it now. We are just getting automated away from it gradually over last hundred years despite all the kicking and screaming and few revolutions (the other, bloody kind). What we sort of succeeded at is getting decent share of the profits. > Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this? I think you can't fight the process. You can just demand your share. You need to fight for your right to information. Right to surveil others. Privacy will die, you just need to ensure everybody gets a piece of its corpse and all that grows on it. Demand right to acquire and publicize surveillance footage no matter who acquired it. No matter who was surveiled. Demand transparency from your government to the point mandatory of livefeeding of all public officers. Don't just accept that some things should be secret. Make all the people, who claim that, prove why. Enforce transparency as default and secrecy an incredibly well argued exception.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I don't think we should want to fight this. The way I see it, things increasingly tend to look like "privacy or the progress of mankind, pick one". There are tons and tons of potential benefits to society stemming from all that data being available for constant real-time processing, and I haven't seen any kind of analysis that would properly weight the costs and benefits. What we get is constant surveillence state fear mongering.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    This is a good, but probably unpopular, point. Even Stallman's info leaks everywhere. If his great lengths aren't enough where does that leave typical people? The article states satellites can recognize your face. At some point you throw up your hands and say I give up. On Star Trek no one seems to care that the Federation always knows where they are because they trust that their rights are respected uniformly. Attacking the problem from the standpoint of hiding all info about your doings is a castle made of sand.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Yes. I won't pretend I'm not scared of the bad consequences of the tech we have, be it oppressive governments or evil private companies. Though to be honest, it's something we had to deal with since the dawn of mankind, I don't think surveillance tech is anywhere close to the root of the problem. Since you mentioned it, I grew up watching Star Trek and I guess it might have formed some of my views on society and technology. The technology present in that universe can - and sometimes is - abused, but like you said, they generally trust each other a lot, both on personal and on societal level. It's a way of life I try to follow and a future I hope we'll one day reach. Pretty much everything again hinges not on the technology itself, but on how it can be used. There's a lot of good we can leverage even current level of "antiprivacy" technologies - optimizing agriculture, traffic and public health, learning more about ourselves and how societies evolve, improving the general well-being of everyone. The last two or three generations seem to have grown up with irrational hate of centralized systems. Yes, distributed and democratized is great, but those systems also have their failure modes - many of which we see every day not only in technology, but in economy, politics. There are some things that are better done centralized, like any kind of optimizations. With the levels of computing power we have nowdays, I think we should embrace centralization some more. Another thing - that I do need to check up with history books, but I feel that the current notion of "privacy" is an artificial construct, an artefact of growing urbanization. I can't imagine villages having any level of privacy similar to what people in cities nowdays consider a minimum standard.
ZenoArrow 12y ago
> "Simply put, you can't put the genie back in the bottle." I dislike quoting films to make a point, but "the future is not set". Instead of thinking about reversing change, think about creating an alternate path, a 'fork' in version control terms. Think about what we'd want to inherit in this fork, and what we'd like to replace. The easier you make the choice to switch to something better, the more people will do it. There are certain parts of our current society that we do not want to live without, any compelling alternative will need to provide them. I see the greatest hope for a viable alternative in the world of self-sufficiency, but it has to be a more complete form of self-sufficiency than we currently have access to. Healthcare is a great example, what tools would we need to have in our homes to ensure we could treat illnesses without relying on the current healthcare industry? These are the sorts of questions to ask. For what it's worth, I've already started making steps towards the foundations of a new society. I know it can be done. So that you can understand these ideas better, can you describe to me what holds humans back from making better choices?
adolph 12y ago
Sure you can "put the genie back in the bottle." There are plenty of social norms that inhibit possible but obnoxious behavior. Some even have laws that reënforce the social norms.

c1sc0 12y ago

Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this? We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights. I'm at a total loss for where to start. (Edit: grammar)

krenoten 12y ago
By decoupling function from identity. Fake faces, portable faraday cages, blockchained trust, onion routed transport, free hardware and software.
- EGreg 12y ago
  Identity is pretty easy to reconstruct though. The big question one has to ask is what do you do in a world where you are more and more living in a zoo with robots making sure you do the right thing to more and more exacting standards? I think the answer is that expectations will get so high that robots will do everything. And humans will be free to do anything, as long as they don't involve anyone else. Want to ask a question to your dad? Why bother, google will answer better and your dad won't be pissed at you for asking while he's glued to his facebook
thaumaturgy 12y ago
Like with many other causes, you start with yourself -- and that might be enough. These days, not participating in the latest electronics and social sites and whatnot is enough to make people ask you questions. If you think carefully enough about why you're making the choices you make, then you can give pretty reasonable answers. I don't own a smart phone, or have a Facebook or LinkedIn account. I still buy paper books. I don't blog (much). And I don't really evangelize these choices; I don't do any of this for attention or to try to change other people's minds. But, when someone notices their tech guy is carrying an old-school flip phone, they ask questions. Usually the first thing I say is, "they're really convenient, really good tools," immediately followed by, "but, I've noticed that people seem to have a lot of trouble ignoring them, and I don't need another distraction in my life. I don't really want an internet connection to follow me everywhere." As far as I know, I haven't made anyone else give up their smart phone or Facebook account or whatever. But a surprising number of people take a moment to think about that. They often kinda look at their phone and go, "...huh, I wonder what that would be like..." And, y'know, just the fact that I get by and live pretty well without these things I think speaks more about how valuable they really are than any sermon I could think of.
- zzalpha 12y ago
  Eh, by that reasoning, you could equally live without electricity or running water. Technology is leveraged, not because it's strictly necessary, but because it's useful. After all, the very website we're having this conversation on isn't necessary. You could get by just fine without it. But it's useful, isn't it? Frankly, I don't think quietly opting out solves anything. Would it have helped if some folks opted out of the industrial revolution, content to sit on their farms eking out a living? No. It was those folks participating in the system, but determined to change it, who ultimately lead the charge and catalyzed change. This technology is here, and it's enormously powerful and useful. But that necessarily means it's also enormously dangerous. The solution isn't to attempt to convince people to abandon that technology and somehow roll back the clock. The solution is for folks to understand the good and the evil these technologies can enable so that we can have intelligent conversations about their use and abuse; conversations that can ultimately inform a new generation of law makers, business owners, and citizens, so that we can realize the advantages of these technologies while minimizing the downsides. Fortunately, things like the NSA leaks may be just the thing necessary to start those conversations.
EGreg 12y ago
We start by decentralizing power. Web instead of cable channels Git instead of subversion Bitcoin decentralizes money Social networking will be next to decentralize Energy production - decentralized Cellphone mesh networks Open source government programs to run cities Etc
scotty79 12y ago
> We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights. I wouldn't say we made it through. We are living it now. We are just getting automated away from it gradually over last hundred years despite all the kicking and screaming and few revolutions (the other, bloody kind). What we sort of succeeded at is getting decent share of the profits. > Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this? I think you can't fight the process. You can just demand your share. You need to fight for your right to information. Right to surveil others. Privacy will die, you just need to ensure everybody gets a piece of its corpse and all that grows on it. Demand right to acquire and publicize surveillance footage no matter who acquired it. No matter who was surveiled. Demand transparency from your government to the point mandatory of livefeeding of all public officers. Don't just accept that some things should be secret. Make all the people, who claim that, prove why. Enforce transparency as default and secrecy an incredibly well argued exception.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I don't think we should want to fight this. The way I see it, things increasingly tend to look like "privacy or the progress of mankind, pick one". There are tons and tons of potential benefits to society stemming from all that data being available for constant real-time processing, and I haven't seen any kind of analysis that would properly weight the costs and benefits. What we get is constant surveillence state fear mongering.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  This is a good, but probably unpopular, point. Even Stallman's info leaks everywhere. If his great lengths aren't enough where does that leave typical people? The article states satellites can recognize your face. At some point you throw up your hands and say I give up. On Star Trek no one seems to care that the Federation always knows where they are because they trust that their rights are respected uniformly. Attacking the problem from the standpoint of hiding all info about your doings is a castle made of sand.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Yes. I won't pretend I'm not scared of the bad consequences of the tech we have, be it oppressive governments or evil private companies. Though to be honest, it's something we had to deal with since the dawn of mankind, I don't think surveillance tech is anywhere close to the root of the problem. Since you mentioned it, I grew up watching Star Trek and I guess it might have formed some of my views on society and technology. The technology present in that universe can - and sometimes is - abused, but like you said, they generally trust each other a lot, both on personal and on societal level. It's a way of life I try to follow and a future I hope we'll one day reach. Pretty much everything again hinges not on the technology itself, but on how it can be used. There's a lot of good we can leverage even current level of "antiprivacy" technologies - optimizing agriculture, traffic and public health, learning more about ourselves and how societies evolve, improving the general well-being of everyone. The last two or three generations seem to have grown up with irrational hate of centralized systems. Yes, distributed and democratized is great, but those systems also have their failure modes - many of which we see every day not only in technology, but in economy, politics. There are some things that are better done centralized, like any kind of optimizations. With the levels of computing power we have nowdays, I think we should embrace centralization some more. Another thing - that I do need to check up with history books, but I feel that the current notion of "privacy" is an artificial construct, an artefact of growing urbanization. I can't imagine villages having any level of privacy similar to what people in cities nowdays consider a minimum standard.

ZenoArrow 12y ago

> "Simply put, you can't put the genie back in the bottle." I dislike quoting films to make a point, but "the future is not set". Instead of thinking about reversing change, think about creating an alternate path, a 'fork' in version control terms. Think about what we'd want to inherit in this fork, and what we'd like to replace. The easier you make the choice to switch to something better, the more people will do it. There are certain parts of our current society that we do not want to live without, any compelling alternative will need to provide them. I see the greatest hope for a viable alternative in the world of self-sufficiency, but it has to be a more complete form of self-sufficiency than we currently have access to. Healthcare is a great example, what tools would we need to have in our homes to ensure we could treat illnesses without relying on the current healthcare industry? These are the sorts of questions to ask. For what it's worth, I've already started making steps towards the foundations of a new society. I know it can be done. So that you can understand these ideas better, can you describe to me what holds humans back from making better choices?

adolph 12y ago

Sure you can "put the genie back in the bottle." There are plenty of social norms that inhibit possible but obnoxious behavior. Some even have laws that reënforce the social norms.