[liberationtech] Techno-utopia -> techno-pessimism: Are we *too* glum now? Need your thoughts.

[Isaac M]

Great to see everyone is still here; we are not alone, and we haven't given
up. Cheers!

As time has shifted and technology has evolved, we've found ourselves
catapulted into a new AI age, seemingly overnight. Despite these, our
mission remains as crucial as ever, just more daunting.

This is why we can no longer afford to be techno-pessimists. We need to
proactively envision solutions to the challenges ahead and establish a
robust security fabric for all:

- Philosophical Preparation: We need the arts, ideas, and interdisciplinary
connections more than ever. Venues for debate, like this channel, are
essential for timely discussions and idea exchange.
- Governance Pressure: It's crucial to monitor and regulate the AI arms
race between major tech companies and governments to ensure accountability
and transparency. AI-powered-weapons? No, no, and no.
- **Personal Empowerment**: We must enhance civil technologies that expand
outreach and connect individuals, forming strong networks that dilute
centralized control by homogeneous algorithms. It's vital to protect and
preserve the best of humanity—our professionalism, journalism, and all the
beautiful aspects of our culture—before they are eroded by technological
advances.

AI has the potential to be immensely powerful and beneficial, but only if
we steer it correctly. The existential concerns we face are not between
algorithms and humans, but among humans themselves. We must keep the door
to the future wide open—not as a hidden passage, but as a gateway
accessible to all, empowering individuals to adapt and thrive.

Let's watch it and propel it, with the best breed of open techs.

On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 2:07 AM Michael H. Goldhaber <michael at goldhaber.org>
wrote:

>
>
> A few thoughts in relation to recent posts:
>
>
> Things related to the Internet seem much more complex than surveillance
> issues, privacy issues, and the effects of profit making. As I as I wrote
> years ago, the mere facts that attention is both scare and desirable for
> individuals that will lead to all sorts of societal problems and ill. Thus,
> shortened attention spans, and with that simplified thinking desires to be
> part of the larger group, the value of producing lies, of sounding angry,
> feeling disrespected, and seeking autocracy to correct that would all have
> been problems even without corporate or government surveillance desires.
>
>
> No doubt, the Internet also has led to beneficial social movements, such
> as opposing climate change, protecting nature, opposing racism, and sexism
> and advancing LGBTQ rights, even these are often taken up
> over-simplistically.
>
>
> The question has also been raised here about whether autocracies can
> innovate. obviously they can, but there may be limits to their ability to
> do it because of the lack of free speech between for example, scientists
> who are trying out new ideas.
>
>
> A perhaps perverse example that supposedly has shown this was the failure
> of autocracies to invent the atomic bomb, even though Germany was the
> center of nuclear physics before Hitler, but in both NaziGermany and Japan,
> scientists decided the bomb was impossible. The Soviet Union also fell
> behind in many kinds of innovation, despite their huge scientific and
> technical communities.
>
>
> Of course, autocracies are excellent at copying and perhaps going a couple
> of steps ahead. Meanwhile, it’s true that the huge tech monopolies in the
> US now do their best to stifle outside innovation. And do we really need
> AI? If we do, it’s interesting to ask why China appears to have fallen
> behind in this area, as well as in aspects of chip design.  Is it possible
> that one reason is the heavy censorship of the Chinese internet, so that
> “scraping” it is less productive?
>
>
> Best,
>
> Michael via iPhone, so please ecuse misteaks.
>
> On Apr 29, 2024, at 7:33 AM, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 
> Kaiser
> (thanks Kate for reposting)
>
> the statement in your post that most resonates with me  is
> *Several things can be true at once*.
>
>
> Several seemingly discordant facts can often be true all at once and may
> be referred to as paradoxes
>
> I discuss how surveillance from multiple unknown agency can be used
> subtly to manipulate and drive
> individuals behaviours through psychological abuse , Very common,
> virtually undetectable
>
> https://sites.google.com/view/psyabu/home
>
>
> personal information can be found everywhere, not only on social media,
>
> Is surveillance legal or illegal? Who are these people asking question
> to family and friends, maybe disguised as friendly media who want to
> publish a feature or offer you a nice
> job, instead gathering, distorting and selling your personal information
> to unknown buyers?
>
>
> There are hidden networks of people operating legally (say law enforcement
> agencies or family and friends)
> gathering information about us for legitimate purpose (as they may say,
> they care about you and take an interest)
> and among them there are individuals who can access and sell private
> information to unknown sources for unknown reasons
> (the deviated agency)
>
> Multiple unknown agencies can gather intelligence about specific
> individuals by tapping into every possible source of information
> including friends and family for different reasons. Some may even do so
> for benevolent reasons. Some may blatantly sell information for money or
> other benefit.
>
>
> P
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2024 at 4:34 AM Kate Krauss <katiephr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Are we too techno-pessimistic?
>>
>> I pulled out this message from the introductions thread because it didn't
>> get a lot of attention when first posted, but it's fascinating --thanks,
>> Kaiser!
>>
>> I feel ill-equipped to discuss this but I'll get the ball rolling.
>> *Folks on this list? I'd love to hear what you think about Kaiser's post
>> (which is pasted below mine). *
>> By 2013 and the Snowden revelations, tech activists were realizing how
>> much both the US government, and as we already knew, platforms like
>> Facebook were surveilling our lives. (Snowden also revealed how hard the
>> NSA and GCHQ were going after Tor.  And they didn't get it, ha.)
>>
>> I had also seen, previously, pervasive, all-encompassing surveillance in
>> China of my activist friends. (They've stopped monitoring your phone calls
>> and they're sitting in your kitchen--not good). So for me it was all of a
>> piece, and I didn't have to imagine what could go wrong if governments
>> conducted unchecked surveillance. And it motivated me to work on these
>> issues.
>>
>> Meanwhile, in the wider US, in late 2015 Trump launched his presidential
>> campaign by demonizing immigrants, then loudly criticized and sanctioned
>> China's trade practices, and later he blamed COVID on China. And by the
>> middle of the pandemic, Asian people in Philly were afraid to walk down the
>> street. So a lot of racist Americans who didn't know much about technology,
>> IP, or China, were mad at China. And there are always China hawks that
>> sincerely or exploitatively go after China in DC. But those are different
>> groups, obviously, than are on this list.
>>
>> The people I know who care about online privacy and digital rights
>> believe (and feel free to speak for yourselves) that if you want privacy
>> and human rights, you have to defend them, whether by building online
>> privacy tools, censorship circumvention tools, or decentralized
>> communications platforms, or educating people in avoiding surveillance, or
>> blurring out your house on Google maps. You have to take action.
>>
>> I myself also think it's important to change laws and regulations, but
>> you still need the technology. I remember that Griffin Boyce and others
>> developed tools
>> <http://I%20remember%20reading%20an%20essay%20by%20an%20internet%20pioneer%20that%20talked%20about%20the%20implications%20of%20online%20surveillance;%20that%20was%20the%20first%20time%20I%20saw%20that%20things%20could%20go%20bad%20on%20the%20internet.>
>> that made the Stop Online Privacy Act impossible to enforce. Another lesson
>> from SOPA: Collective action can get the goods. (Thank you, Aaron Swartz.)
>>
>> So maybe we are techno-optimists and techno-realists at the same time?
>>
>> Mainstream Americans are still inured to a lack of privacy, and that is
>> very dangerous. However, they are now suspicious of Facebook--and maybe
>> that's a good thing.
>>
>> This doesn't mean that Chinese companies are always  A+ and never
>> steal IP. I went to a lecture in 2018 or 2019 where a Chinese scholar
>> presented her research studying Chinese companies--and some of them lacked
>> research departments because they were "borrowing" IP. Several things can
>> be true at once.
>>
>> Other people on the list: What do you think?
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: kaiser kuo <kaiser.kuo at gmail.com>
>> LT <lt at lists.liberationtech.org>
>>
>> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:20:43 -0400
>> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Liberation Tech would like a word.
>> Thanks, Kate, for stepping up to revive this effort — and for the low-key
>> shout-out!
>>
>> I've written and spoken quite a bit on the seemingly sudden swing from
>> the politically techno-utopian idea still present in this listserv's name
>> to the techno-pessimism that seems so pervasive in discourse on the
>> relationship between technology and authoritarian politics. We've gone, as
>> I've often said, from believing that the spread of digital technology
>> sounded the death knell for authoritarian governments to believing instead
>> that tech is the loyal handmaiden of authoritarians, who've become adept at
>> using them to suppress dissent and other nefarious ends. To an extent, I
>> get why this has happened — the failure of the later color revolutions and
>> the Arab Spring, when we too-eagerly appended the names of various American
>> social media products to these revolutions (the "Twitter Revolution," the
>> "YouTube Revolution," the "Facebook Revolution"); the Snowden revelations
>> about Prism; Russian meddling and Macedonian troll farms; Cambridge
>> Analytica, etc). I suppose some humility about it was needed, but have we
>> (i.e. the national or "Western" conversation) overcorrected? I'd be curious
>> to hear from list members with experience in different geographies to get
>> their sense of how things have played out in the last decade. I put the
>> inflection point at roughly 2016: that's when I started sensing the
>> dramatic narrative shift.
>>
>> And I'm curious whether people think that's related to, or completely
>> independent from, another narrative shift that seems to have been
>> simultaneous when it comes, specifically, to China: At about that same
>> moment, the narrative went from this disparagement of China's ability to
>> innovate (blaming, in most cases, the lack of free information flows and
>> academic freedom, and positing a relationship between innovation and
>> political freedom) to a pervasive sense that China was out-innovating the
>> U.S. and was an unstoppable juggernaut ready to eat our lunch. Obviously
>> this latter narrative continues and has been made worse in recent years.
>>
>> Thanks! Once again, Kate, thanks for your efforts!!
>>
>> - Kaiser
>> --
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