Tag: surveillance

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Future Building

Embracing authoritarianism to keep power and quash change

Liked 44 thoughts about the future by Ben WerdmullerBen Werdmuller (werd.io)

Two. I think the (re-)rise of authoritarianism and the increasing importance of the climate crisis are linked. It’s not an accident that Bolsonaro was in favor of felling the Amazon or that Trump had such a strong fossil fuels agenda. If a wealthy industry feels like it might be politically under threat, it’s going to do everything it can to change the politics and create a context where it is protected.

Eleven. In a world based on profiling, probabilistic prediction models, corpus-based decision-making, and near-ubiquitous surveillance, only people who don’t conform to the models anticipated by the people who built and designed the systems and therefore aren’t tracked as closely can really be free.

Emphasis mine.

Categories
Society The Internet

Listened to Cory Doctorow interview

Listened Cory Doctorow on The Wondrous World of the Early Internet & How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism from currentaffairs.simplecast.com

43:3044:11

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Cory Doctorow on The Wondrous World of the Early Internet & How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
JULY 31ST, 2022 | 44:11 | E161

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EPISODE NOTES
Pioneering blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has been an activist for online freedom since the early days of the history of the internet. He has long been one of the major voices opposing restrictive copyright and corporate domination, and a visionary defending a pluralistic online world where eccentricity and individuality are allowed to flourish. In books like Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (which, like all of his books, is available in full for free), Doctorow has shown what an internet created by the people, unconstrained by intellectual property law, Digital Rights Management, and monopolistic corporate gatekeeping, could be like.

In this conversation, Doctorow joins to discuss the importance of a democratic internet, and his recent book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that many people misidentify the main problem with what is called “surveillance capitalism,” assuming that the problem is that corporations are amassing to manipulate us the power through intrusive collection of Big Data. In fact, Doctorow argues, the problem is less about a particular thing these corporations can do to us and more about the fact that monopolistic tech companies are in control in the first place. This has important implications, because it means that we cannot just regulate what companies do with our data, we have to fundamentally redistribute power over the internet. In this conversation, we talk about how Wikipedia provides an alternative vision for a participatory internet where the rules are set by users and there is oversight over governance. We do not need better and more benevolent Zuckerbergs. We need what Doctorow calls the pluralistic internet.

“Hegemonic internet” today versus pluralistic internet

Internet start aligned with cessation of antitrust enforcement – 1982 AT&T

(Cough, current news: Penguin – Simon & Schuster merger court case)

Today we keep talking about how to make “the lord of the manor” better rather than how to get rid of them

What is the failure mode? <– way to evaluate platforms and systems

Cultural flattening? (versus quirkiness of early internet)

Formalism of internet e.g. TikTok duet format = imposed by platform

Expansive opportunity of ebook format — can be 3 or 1000 pages — Wikipedia has built-in

Formal adventurism / playfulness e.g. “slow TV”

Used to have consentual formalism — community defined rather than platform/ corporate

–> more editorial freedom, less creative freedom

Can you give meaningful consent if you can’t leave a platform (because there’s nowhere else to be with other people)?

Control of platforms is more important issue than collecting our data because they can control our discourse, the information we receive (e.g. Google Answers) and what we can use (e.g. iOS app store)

Band together against monopoly across industries — tech not the only area, though a place to start

Categories
Science Fiction Society

Personable surveillance

Liked https://mobile.twitter.com/Quinnae_Moon/status/1536207029538197504 (mobile.twitter.com)

We’ve all heard the joke about how people let wiretaps into their homes with Alexa et. al. But what about a wiretap you could empathise with? What about a wiretap that seemed so very like your dead grandmother or spouse? Relatable surveillance.

Worldbuilding (or premise) for a dystopian / cyberpunk story…

Categories
Future Building Society

Three Types of Shaping Our Communities

Bookmarked

Coveillance

Increasingly powerful surveillance tools have shifted the power dynamics between people and institutions. To address this new dynamic, we’ve been creating a toolkit, in collaboration with the ACLU of Washington, that demystifies surveillance technologies in Seattle

Getting Political Past Voting

An inclusive Community Space dedicated to creating opportunities for Wilkinsburg – a space giving a home to community improving organizations

Categories
Future Building

A Surveillance Free Public

In another angle of how government should work differently than businesses, here’s one that should have occurred to me: government websites should be surveillance free.

I removed analytics from my personal blog a little over a year ago. But it didn’t occur to me that I could do anything about the local government where I work.

As a public servant, I need to try to push my city to think about what is best for our residents. The City is redoing its website right now and I’d bet we’re continuing to use Google Analytics on the new platform. I can plant a seed of thought at the least.

Does the value staff and Council get in knowing how many people visit a page or which pages see the most traffic outweigh the cost to our residents in providing that data to Google? I’d argue no. Analytics do help staff improve the usability of our website but probably not enough to justify the cost of being surveilled on a government website.

Would many people in my tech-sector town (which houses a Google office) bat an eye that their data were being collected on the city website? Probably not, but that doesn’t give us a pass. And those who don’t want to share their data shouldn’t have limited access to government services. We have an opportunity to do better by our residents, to be leaders in protecting our residents’ privacy.