drasticmeasures

Maybe Google's failure to not make the world worse is being spun into an argument on how all technology has its benefits and evils, but the social benefits from Google's tech appear to be outweighed by its social malefices.

You don't have to commit a crime to be targeted, spied on, harassed and have your life destroyed by the government.

When the government spies on innocent people en masse -- because they say they should have nothing to hide --, the government is the one doing harm to an innocent person, and it's the government who has something to hide.

Without accountability, and given the secret and anonymous nature of their interference, we can't trust that the government only spies on guilty people, because they will circularly claim that they are guilty because they are spied on.

And you shouldn't take solace that comparatively only a few innocent people get their lives destroyed, not just because it can happen to you, or because it shouldn't happen in the first place, but because not being accountable for their crimes gradually emboldens the government, and given advances in automation, to scale it up and encompass more of society until one day they come for you or your children.

Methinks it's time for an anti-trust investigation on Google like the one on Microsoft during the Internet Explorer heyday.

At the same time, I don't trust the US has institutions that haven't been sabotaged by successive US administrations (from both sides) in their capacities to pursue anti-trust investigations of this sort.

Europe to the rescue?

Every time I see one of those forms I feel like the hungry, desperate sex workers who "consent" to being degraded and humiliated so that they can feed their families for another day...

We say "yes," but the head shakes "no".

I'd rather if they didn't spy on me in the first place...

What's persistently disturbing is that in a free (black) market the price for that commodity has sunk so low. It means that there's a lot of offer available...

Maybe they have a difficult telling time telling them apart since they all act so similarly...

They're not equal in the eyes of the law...

It looks like a chicken, acts like a chicken, talks like a chicken, so it must secretly be a horse...

We should discover it first and use it against them before anyone else can. National security...

That's precisely what I expect any functioning and remotely competent secret service to do. Secret services are bound to look into anyone that is involved in anything that might represent a liability and a security threat.

I can see how Jacque's and Pierre's prolific fucking is a threat to their sense of security...

Better document it... It might come in handy...

We can't have the enemy using people's sex lives against them... That's our job...

Otherwise the terrorists will strike again... We repeatedly failed in our capacity to protect the nation, but please trust us... We just need more money and power... National security...

A hired thug who doesn't care who his master is.

Google management gave too much freedom and independence to its techies and now they think they run the company.

The stunts are the art.

I am an artist myself. I don't see Banksy as being an anti-capitalist or anti-consumer culture artist. I see that aspect of his performance as a persona, exactly like Mr. Brainwash is, and that he uses that persona as background for his real art, which are the stunts he pulls off to delight wealthy patrons.

I also don't believe he is trying (ineffectively) to rebel against the commodification of art; he's knowledgeable and complicit in it, much like Damien Hirst.

A case for my argument is that he (deliberately) delighted the art auction audience with his stunt (as opposed to insulted); the art work was only half-shredded, allowing it to still be hung; knowing action houses, they had thoroughly inspected the art work before putting it up for auctioning, and were complicit with Banksy's stunt, and this much is evident in their good-natured choice of words for the press; the art work's value has only increased, as has his reputation as a (complicit and well-wishing) prankster.

In short, Banksy has taken the post-modernist concept of an artist with a persona that superficially and ineffectively rebels against capitalism while the real artist is actively, knowingly and profitably complicit with capitalism... Banksy has taken it to a sublime level, and that's why we in the art world who are in on the joke (and know who is really being laughed at: the public who believe in his flimsy anti-capitalist persona) love him as one of us.

Art has meaning, and some intended meanings expressed through art are nullified when the art piece is turned into a commodity.

Artists rebelling against commodification of their art pieces in the past saw their own anti-commodification art works turned into commodities, thus nullifying their message.

The message that comes through becomes the ideas that you have expressed.

Modern artists like Banksy or Damien Hirst, or anyone who has read Naomi Klein's "No Logo", are knowledgeable of this.

You raise a good point.

People are free to do how they like with their money, but outrageously some spend it frivolously in cheaply-made art for status or tax evasion purposes.

Bill Gates late-life philanthropy raises a counterpoint to this, in my view. The wealthy don't owe anything to anyone, but that's how a person starves to death waiting for a little mercy. Mr. Gates now invests in saving people, not in art, and that's a worthier status giver.

From a moral point of view, they should be charitable since they have so much that giving away a little bit of their fortune would have a tremendous impact on a significant amount of people while themselves being none the worse for it.

What's your reading of it?

What good was that film if it made us "think", but not act?

I believe OP is putting the lessons in that film into action in his life, and those actions are present in the thoughts expressed in his words, and happily not the other way around like the people in and outside the art world giving lip service to Banksy.

Facebook / gov can import all your data from Solid, rendering your options of who to share info with a cruel illusion.

When you ask "why would they?" you can intuit a seemingly good case either way that they would or wouldn't (maybe they would because they're incompetent.)

Instead of relying on intuition, a more to-the-point question is "did they do it?" We have to wait for a definitive answer to this from the authorities.

Just commenting on this thread is enough.

The NSA / MI# / [Military Intel of Country X] know me. I know them. I don't do shit. They don't do shit beyond some pranks and exchanging banter. What are people so paranoid about?

When you get to meet the boogeymen, they have amazing tech developed by someone else, but the people who use it are stupid, incompetent, paranoid military average joes who more often than not shoot themselves on the foot or cause the problem they were trying to prevent because they never de-escalate.

Secrecy, violence and a carefully-built media reputation just hides how ineffective they are despite mass surveillance and infiltration of all public online communities.

Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away for the victims.

The women whose boyfriends posted private sex pictures as revenge, or the minorities who will be the victims of hate groups organizing on social media, the children who were filmed while being raped and have their video circulating online, the victims of bullying whose bullies are empowered by other people seeing it and not doing anything to stop them...

You can choose to ignore this when you see it, but the victims can't, and it's for their freedom that I'm concerned for.

This kind of decentralisation -- taking existing platforms controlled by megacorps and making them P2P...

...feels, to me, like a huge mistake.

How would one eliminate hate speech and toxic content from it? Or illegal content? Or anything you put there and need removed to keep living your life freely? The technologists developing this tech hand-wave these concerns away citing "freedom of speech" -- but one's freedom ends where another's begins, and hate speech, toxic content, illegal content, not being able to have what you said or did forgotten online, all these things curtail someone's freedom.

And by making it decentralised, they're just making it harder for people who are the victims of these problems to hold the people responsible accountable and to stop them. These technologists want freedom of speech at the expense of everyone else's freedom.

Format it and install Linux.

The article doesn't explain why it should be saved.

[It's] for historical context.

I read it the same way. "Oh great, more pseudoscience in psychology that will make things worse for the marginalized and get thrown out after 30 years of not working."

It's part of the push to treat crime as a mental illness and set the stage for medicating criminals, I suspect, and it comes with all the flaws that the traditional mental illness model has.

The possibilities sound very interesting, specially as an experiment to minimize the damage of social media's capability to be a very powerful, cheap and all-inclusive propaganda tool capable of causing society-wide disruption, and all the state, corporate and pretender political actors interference that come with that kind of threat; the combination of actors with state powers with anonymity making them unnoticed and unaccountable particularly terrify me; I will look into it.

In my inevitably biased view, I see democratic Internet voting-based comment filtering as a tool that will be exploited by state, corporate or other pretender political actors for censoring speech and promoting their own speech -- no matter the technical implementation, they have the resources to easily buy 30k votes to use on any thread and skew perception on topics vital to their agenda, and we have been doing so for years not just on Reddit with votes, but anywhere where there is an user-input box, and using a variety of textbook mass social engineering tactics.

Knowing the problem so personally, I'm partial to throwing out voting-based comment filtering altogether and replacing it with a mix of the Metafilter and the Slashdot models: make registration an one-time $5 fee; let there be a "firehose" that isn't filtered by votes, but organized by date posted; let there be professional editors that select and curate user-posted links; and let the comments be organized by date from older to newest by default (this prevents a lot of the manipulation, as the oldest comments are usually free from manipulation, since we can't get to the thread faster, and undermine later manipulation, since usually people follow the leader comment), or, even better, get rid of comments altogether because a reliable and open forum like you had in the 1990s is something good (and dangerous) that you will never have again, or at least not without state-level attempts at infiltration.

Decentralized Reddit sounds neat.

But!

I just upvoted myself to 200 points (making it the top post of all time on notabug), then saw someone else downvote me to -100 points (in 5 minutes), effectively censoring me.

While this was just me with one computer, how will you stop bad actors (specially state actors, corporate actors or other political actors) with immense technological resources from gaming the voting system to silence people?

It's a flaw inherent to democratic Internet voting-based comment filtering, no?

From the article:

But Asher says he’s not interested in sending any sort of message in his fiction. “I just wrote it as I saw it,” he says. “I’ve never thought that much about it. My aim is to tell a story and to entertain.”

That's what political writers using entertainment to push a political message always say in interviews.

He’s more outspoken on Twitter, where he regularly posts about politics. He says that social media has made him acutely aware of just how unwelcome his views are in the overwhelmingly liberal world of science fiction, to the extent that he simply avoids science fiction conventions altogether.