This rather heavily begs the question what do we mean by "freedom"?
We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom.
The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change.
If we are worried that digital freedom will be taken from us, without anyone noticing, we should be worried about all our freedoms - and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours.
To expand on your idea to compare with the "real offline life"... While anonymity should not need to be a top-priority goal in and of itself, you also don't see people running around with their id-cards taped to their foreheads for easy access.
I mean my face is of course my fortune, but it is also my username. A frankly it's a username I have been using a lot longer than 'lifeisstillgood'.
my analogy is that one upon a time we were all walking dow the street in Victoria London during one of Sherlock Holmes "peasoupers". Only people who got up close to you could see what you were doing and even reognise you. But technology has cleaned up the air. Now anyone can see from who knows how far away. The privacy we thought we had because of the peasouper is revealed to be a mirage, we were always walking around naked, it just was harder to see.
We can simply accept this, or far more likely find a cultural consensus. Privacy can be violated for the public good (hunting offenders, medical epidemiologists etc), but otherwise you are not allowed to use the knowledge you have to exploit or influence. No adverts based on prior activity, no Cambridge Analytica creating ads just for you.
We are heading there. That Facebook and amazon more or less publish every ad campaign is incredible - imagine trying to persuade parliaments in 50 countries to pass that sort of legislation.
We are a long way from that "cultural consensus". We will probably get halfway there in the grey areas - like facebook deciding to publish all ads. The British politician Nick Clegg is likely able to make more influence globally at Facebook than if he became PM.
But we are in the culture wars, and we need to fight. The law, the application of the law - these matter online and offline.
So vote. And vote in primaries too because that shapes so much.
(Weird idea - Oz has compulsory voting to ensure votes reflect "everyone". What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population ...)
> vote in primaries too because that shapes so much.
You are on the right track to influence who is on the ballot for a particular party. Last time in PA the Rs put up the Dr Oz with lukewarm conservative values. The R voters in PA were so underwhelmed that the D with literal brain damage was elected.
Also, States with a caucus process give people who show up to caucus enormous influence of which names the party will put on the ballot.
> What if we had compulsory political party membership so that parties and primaries reflected the population
We could allow for more representative government in the federal House of Representatives by allowing the House to expand with population, as was written in the Constitution. The census was to count the people to expand the House to track population growth.
> We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom.
So, if I openly state that I do not acquiesce to any government (all external force is immoral imo) - does that mean I am now free, and no longer subject to its laws, pay taxes, etc?
So, I don't think your definition of freedom cuts it. Any answer that assumes 'government' as part of the answer, and justifies acting with force against others, has to be wrong (immoral).
Far better to follow the golden rule:
Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated
I'm sorry but I maybe feeling "off" today, but we should all be beyond kindergarten political philosophy. Anarchy is what it sounds like - awful and not some middle class libertarian utopia.
Yes we need government. And these days we need government to roll up its sleeves and be government. We know you cannot arrange the bread delivery for London through one department but you can force privatised water companies to invest before dividends over periods of decades.
You're not feeling off. You simply don't understand that basic morality means that you cannot force others to do what you think is right for them to do. You want to find a way to get others to do what you want. This is immoral - you do not want others to have or exercise their freewill. And you want to use other people to force your opinions via police, legal system, etc on others.
Put simply you think anarchy is a political philosophy. Whereas anarchy is a moral position - it advocates for free association with others - ie no force.
The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do, if they are not harming you. You wouldn't force your neighbour/friends/family to do what you say, if they are not harming you. But you consent to government using immoral force to get others to do what you want (steal money, enforce certain behaviour, etc, etc). In fact you think we need something like a dictatorship to wield even more force even more overtly. I think you will get your desire, unfortunately, as most people agree with you.
> The fact is that it is not morally acceptable to force others to do what you would like them to do,
Plainly, most people disagree with you. They find it perfectly acceptable to force others to (not) do things.
> if they are not harming you.
The fact is that people do not agree what "harm" is.
To pick an obvious argument, many people oppose abortion under _all_ circumstances because they claim it harms the offspring and the mother, while many people support abortion under _all_ circumstances because they claim forcing a woman to carry to term harms the woman.
How do we handle situations where people disagree on the definition of "harm"?
Nah. I want to rule the world of course. But I would far rather setup a system of democracy to rule the world with everyone else than let some other bugger be king instead of me.
And I believe in actual government - government that builds roads to deliver food on, government that agrees ways to make researchers to discover medicines and hospitals and nurses to inject them, and governments that force companies to label their food with their ingredients (or their ISP adverts with their fees). I call this real government. not the arguing fools on TV. We can argue how much much of it is too much. We are. But I refuse utterly that "doing real government" is immoral, that any attempt to agree common standards is tyranny.
I believe that the real moral failing is to chip away at real government so
much that services collapse and harm is done to real people. We can look at failed states like Niger or Haiti in horror, but we can also look at the mismatched life expectancy across our own rich countries and ask why?
I reject the idea that we can roll back government so much we can lose driving licenses and just be more careful out there, that we can ignore food safety standards and just look at the restaurant kitchen carefully. I reject libertarianism because it knows as much about the real world as central command economics.
I want government run on empirical data with justice and equality at its heart.
I am happy to accept the grey areas, will stand up for democracy will argue we can always do better. But buggered if it's because I secretly yearn to control your life.
> I want government run on empirical data with justice and equality at its heart.
You're asking for technocracy, and this is what is lined up already - you might wonder whether you are being engineered. All those cameras, smart phones, smart meters, legislation, facial recognition, etc - this is to allow micro-management at the most granular level. It's all quite far from freedom indeed, which is where this conversation started. The global governance structure is already fascistic (corporation and the state work together). I'm not a fan of the forced tyranny that's in store for us - once we've got it, I suspect you'll change your mind too.
I am asking for science. That before we decide if we want to teach phonics at school we guinea pig a few thousand to see if it meets some p-value.
Is that technocracy? Maybe. Is it something easy to explain - yes. Is it something for some reason is not explained fully and at length? Yes oddly it's not.
Oh for heavens sake. There are 192 different governments (at least) on this globe and they lie along a spectrum. what we have now (I kinda assume USA) is up and to the right on this spectrum (ie some definition of good, free, whatever is up and right). my utopian government is further up and right but anyone living in any of those 192 places will benefit from their government going more up and right, freer, better, more open whatever.
So yeah i think there are things a real government does and does not do. That is not utopian, it's not naive. it's here and now and rooted in practical real world examples.
Whatever you or I dislike about the governments we live under, we are incredibly fortunate to live in democracies- where we can force the buggers up and to the right. Make them more utopian more free more open.
> Whatever you or I dislike about the governments we live under, we are incredibly fortunate to live in democracies
We don't live in democracies. At best we live in a 'representative democracy'. These are not the same thing, at all.
Representative democracy is where (if we vote) we choose 1 person every 5 years to represent tens or hundreds of thousands of people, for thousands of votes. If the person you vote for does get in, but doesn't do what he said in their campaign, there is no negative outcome for them. The worst is that they will receive less votes next time, but even that unlikely to be based on their voting record, but on whether more people prefer blue or red this time.
But all that is itself moot, imo. I think we live in a not very covert fascist (corporate and state) regime - voting is simply a pressure release valve, when both red and blue are merely wings of the same bird.
No, we most certainly do mean anonymity is a basic part of digital freedom. The only way you could consistently argue that it's not necessary is to advocate prohibiting anyone, including individuals, treating you differently for anything you've said. Which is clearly impossible.
Your framing is really just right in line with the bog standard authoritarian pattern of redefining "true" freedom as something that can be comfortably tolerated and/or further chipped away at down the line.
Of course what you say (and do) affects how others perceive you. Just as Uncle Jim drunkenly announcing over Xmas dinner how that Hitler guy had a good plan will affect how everyone sees him in the morning, your twitter feed will have an effect on how your neighbours talk to you.
That's a good thing 99% of the time. Social strictures have been how humans managed society for thousands of years. It can lead to terrible things of course - but we like to think we have built systems of justice and governance to overcome them.
But suddenly making everyone invisible and able to speak and act without consequences seems a bad idea in the real world - i am not sure why it's a good idea online.
Well yes of course, your first paragraph was exactly my subpoint - declaring otherwise would be impossible.
From there it follows that it is indeed a proper freedom to be able to communicate while limiting the scope of who is privy to that communication, including limiting what can be attributed to some singular inescapable "identity". Saying that preventing this is "a good thing 99% of the time" is a baseless assertion. While this may appear similar to how social strictures have been managed for thousands of years - that's thousands of years of oppression of individuality and persecution for deviating from the herd. The West has overtly bucked that vein of collectivism, which I'd call progress.
Furthermore what you're invoking as some open-and-shut traditional state of affairs was anything but. Witness the concept of hearsay - where party B claims that party A has said something, ostensibly so that others will judge party A for it, but modulo B's reputation. Digital communications render hearsay moot - the default result of party B being able to prove to themselves that party A said something, is that party B can also prove to anyone that party A said that thing. Hence the need for the cryptographic property of repudiation, as the physics of digital information leaves no ambiguous middle ground.
There's a huge burden on individuals to prove that another organization is using data to persecute them and the definitions or persecution. Before GDPR did you know how vast the network of 3rd parties handling your data was? I didn't!
Without this, the next best thing is anonymity which is simpler to enforce and covers future eventualities.
>The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change.
The real offline life where people can be punished in the US for aiding abortions? Or where homosexuality is illegal in many countries? Or where people conflate a mental disorder (paedophilia) with a criminal act (child sex abuse) (intentionally edgy example to highlight the edge of what's acceptable).
>and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours.
This is good advice for the Belarusians with bloodied faces and no change. Or the million people who marched against the Invasion of Iraq.
We have many offline problems - yes abortion is now more or less illegal in the US. You know what chnaged that? voting. You know what can change it back. Democracy. A VPN won't. Democracy will.
Double down on democracy. It's hard complicated and messy. But there are no silver bullets.
Look Brexit was shit. But it was democratic shit. 20 million people did not get tricked by their Facebook feeds. Hell 20 million people did not get mind controlled by Nigel Farage's "I'm just sayin" approach.
20 million people were asked "the country is run by thousands of highly educated,
slightly patronising, articulate, over-achieving technocrats who want the best for everyone and frequently find the laws of unintended consequences bite and have not yet worked out that not everyone lives in leafy surrey. Do these people annoy you? vote now"
Oh hell I don't know why 20 million people voted for economic and cultural self harm. Because we aren't sharing out the wealth properly I guess. But it was not because "we were tricked". It's because "we refuse to accept the model of how the world works thet you are operating on and want to use ours. The democratic version of Adam Savages "I reject your reality and substitute my own"
The problem is without an agreed reality to substitute everyone put in their favourite untested political world view.
Yes you are immune to the efforts of a trillion dollar industry that has spent the best pet of a century working out exactly how to manipulate you without you even knowing.
It’s an important question because “digital freedom” tends to be code for “I want the Internet like how it was when I was younger”, and then throw in some stuff about jailbreaking iPhones or whatever for good measure.
I want to not have to worry about a government 30 years from now being able to quickly and quietly make unmonitored person-to-person communication illegal. There should be a whole bunch of difficult and complicated steps involved if they don't want to just shut down half their IT.
I want to be able to use the Os I want on the computer I want, with the browser I want to be able to connect to my bank and my government websites.
As banks and governments move critical parts of their working online, it becomes harder to not use their online tools. If I'm not free to use the tools I want to do so, my freedoms were infringed.
We don't mean anonymity. Acting in secret is not freedom - acting openly and not being persecuted or prosecuted is freedom.
The solution is what it is in real offline life. A regulated legal framework that allows most and limits little, a open dynamic culture that accepts diversity and constant change.
If we are worried that digital freedom will be taken from us, without anyone noticing, we should be worried about all our freedoms - and the solutions are still the same - democracy, voting, making a noise, agitating our neighbours.
" Let governments be governments"