[liberationtech] data manipulation

[carlo von lynX]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 02:32:43AM -0800, coderman wrote:
> the combination of mass spying for mass media control (including propaganda)
>  is abhorrent, and as yet unrestrained.

yes, but when you talk to bystanders who aren't getting it, please
explain the difference of a surgical invasive action on the minds
of each individual, algorithmically automated to scale to at least
the most influential people if not the entire facebook/whatsapp
populace.

> > for as long as we do not produce a surveillance-resistant social
> > networking and communication platform, we are not in a state of
> > democracy. anywhere in the world. i cannot imagine any higher
> > political priority than to fix the internet and create a distributed
> > social network to replace facebook and the like.
> 
> decentralization is a moral imperative for many reasons!

but it is important to learn from the mistakes made in 2010 and
once before in 2003: there is decentralization that has a chance
of working and decentralization that is a dead-end street yet
it keeps getting propagandized into our heads: federation. it
hasn't worked with the semantic social web in 2003, it hasn't
worked with diaspora in 2010, it's not going to work on the
next attempt either. a social networking tool which is decentralized
and actually functional to scale to humanity-wide use MUST not put
all its data onto some servers but MUST operate from the devices
directly. not purely P2P, but using the paradigms of distributed
computing as informatics has developed in the past decades.

> and a fully decentralized IT infrastructure might thwart centralized
> power most effectively.

yes, which unfortunately implies to forbid scalable remote control
technologies such as microsoft windows, google and apple os's.
it might take political awakening, a political will to save democracy
and an intervention on legislative level in response to the uprising.
so we have a bit of a chicken/egg problem here.

we might have a window of democratic opportunity if we get people to
switch to a distributed social network (there isn't any currently in
existance that fulfils all requirements so it is somewhat hypothetical)
until all the os-based remote controls are in place for the same kind
of mind control that we now experience on facebook. and even that
requires to get entire populations off of facebook.

> fully decentralizing these types of services, along with
> decentralizing the production of computing systems which support them,
> some of the most challenging problems in technology. good luck! :)

technologically we are actually in a pretty good situation, we're
almost there.. what's missing is political support which would also
boost the finalization of the technology for end-user applicability.

> P.S. these are also my favorite problems to explore. don't get discouraged!

thanks, i don't know where i get all my positivity from considering
the mess we are in. maybe because i see a way out which is a rare
privilege.