Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this? We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights. I'm at a total loss for where to start. (Edit: grammar)
Like with many other causes, you start with yourself -- and that might be enough.
These days, not participating in the latest electronics and social sites and whatnot is enough to make people ask you questions. If you think carefully enough about why you're making the choices you make, then you can give pretty reasonable answers.
I don't own a smart phone, or have a Facebook or LinkedIn account. I still buy paper books. I don't blog (much). And I don't really evangelize these choices; I don't do any of this for attention or to try to change other people's minds. But, when someone notices their tech guy is carrying an old-school flip phone, they ask questions.
Usually the first thing I say is, "they're really convenient, really good tools," immediately followed by, "but, I've noticed that people seem to have a lot of trouble ignoring them, and I don't need another distraction in my life. I don't really want an internet connection to follow me everywhere."
As far as I know, I haven't made anyone else give up their smart phone or Facebook account or whatever. But a surprising number of people take a moment to think about that. They often kinda look at their phone and go, "...huh, I wonder what that would be like..."
And, y'know, just the fact that I get by and live pretty well without these things I think speaks more about how valuable they really are than any sermon I could think of.
Eh, by that reasoning, you could equally live without electricity or running water.
Technology is leveraged, not because it's strictly necessary, but because it's useful. After all, the very website we're having this conversation on isn't necessary. You could get by just fine without it.
But it's useful, isn't it?
Frankly, I don't think quietly opting out solves anything. Would it have helped if some folks opted out of the industrial revolution, content to sit on their farms eking out a living? No. It was those folks participating in the system, but determined to change it, who ultimately lead the charge and catalyzed change.
This technology is here, and it's enormously powerful and useful. But that necessarily means it's also enormously dangerous. The solution isn't to attempt to convince people to abandon that technology and somehow roll back the clock. The solution is for folks to understand the good and the evil these technologies can enable so that we can have intelligent conversations about their use and abuse; conversations that can ultimately inform a new generation of law makers, business owners, and citizens, so that we can realize the advantages of these technologies while minimizing the downsides.
Fortunately, things like the NSA leaks may be just the thing necessary to start those conversations.
I disagree that living with a flip phone instead of a smart phone is in any way equivalent to living without electricity or running water.
You're more than welcome to fight the good fight -- good luck to you -- but I'm not convinced that I'm so right that it should be my mission to change others' minds, and regardless the advice I gave is a good first step for anyone that is interested in changing others' minds.
I don't think the parent comment wants you to get people to downgrade. I think the intent is to get people to demand better protections from abuses of technology.
I think it's a poor comparison. You need water to stay alive and to not stink. Electricity is easier to avoid, but why do that? Electricity and running water don't disturb me with notifications, are not as addictive as social networks, don't make me waste time, don't track me (as much as a smartphone).
I find that having no TV, no smart phone and no facebook reduces the noise. I don't miss them.
There are always trade offs. Sure, you can live without electricity or running water and I'm certain some people argue that this has many benefits. For the average person however, the downsides outweigh the benefits by a huge margin.
Not owning a smart phone also has downsides and benefits. Many people however aren't really aware that downsides exist, so the benefits, however small they may be seem like a justification to buy one. I think it makes sense to be critical of the things you use and spend some time thinking about whether you really think that they benefits are worth the costs.
personally i like the amish approach, before you make decisions on some technology, watch how others use it and take time to understand it before adopting it yourself.
I was asking because that's exactly what I did last year on January 1st. I quit Facebook (500+ "friends"), Twitter (3Ksomething followers) & all social networks cold-turkey. Deleted my accounts, no recovery possible. My motivation was personal & not political/ideological (social media burnout) ... All it did for me was:
* give me more time for side-projects & a clearer frame of mind (good)
* actually made me think & write MORE. not everything you think should be thrown on social media immediately. I appreciate having learned to shut up when you don't have anything to say (good)
* made a bunch of people angry at first (good I guess if you want to provoke a mind-change) ... but that seemed to last only until the next cute cat picture came along.
* I'm sure I made no one reconsider. Zero effect. So that's why I was asking.
"Changing the world by beginning with yourself" is not a valid strategy here. So what do we do instead?
A flip phone doesn't really stop surveillance. They still track where you are, who you call. Sure, maybe no app data, but since you don't use Facebook and such that data wouldn't be there anyway.
While I am doing some of these things, the Luddites didn't have much of an influence over the industrial revolution, they were discarded in the dustbin of history along with anyone who stood in the way of increased profits and globalization.
What I often see is that most individuals see that the benefits outweigh the negatives (all the people that say "I have nothing to hide." over and over) of safety over privacy, and specters can be brought up to increase this fear of the unknown until you are going to have to fight against your friends and neighbors instead of the government to get any change in place.
I find people that say "I have nothing to hide" often haven't thought it through. Easiest example is porn habits, it's not necessarily something people keep private, but many people want to, yet it can skip their mind when they say "I have nothing to hide". IIRC the Snowden leaks included stories of political dissidents being kept in their place by threatening to expose their porn habits (not necessarily anything illegal, just potentially embarrassing).
When someone says they have nothing to hide, I've found there's usually an implied "from the specific person or group that I'm thinking about right now." It's not that I have nothing, but the set information that'd I don't want the cops to know about is different from the set that I don't want my spouse to know about, which is further different from the set I don't want Google or Facebook to know about.
The cops won't care about my porn browsing, but I might not want my spouse to know about all of it. I wouldn't want the cops knowing if I was buying drugs, but I trust that my spouse wouldn't go walking down to the station to turn me in. Similarly, I trust that Facebook wouldn't hand over my info to the feds without a court order, but I don't trust them to hand all of my info over to marketing firm without my permission for a small fee.
As a side note, the leak you're referring to stated that several jihadis' devotion to their cause would be called into question and their authority undermined if it was shown that their public and private lives were inconsistent, with several examples[1]. There were no indications that any threats were made, and, in fact, Greenwald later stated in an interview[2] that he had no evidence that there was any intention to threaten them. I like to point out whenever that article comes up that one of the sources for that article later complained that Greenwald selectively quoted him so as not to undermine the article's core argument[3] and that Greenwald had himself written a book back in 2008 which tried to discredit Republicans by publishing information about their private lives[4]. Sorry, I just can't stand Greenwald...
Web instead of cable channels
Git instead of subversion
Bitcoin decentralizes money
Social networking will be next to decentralize
Energy production - decentralized
Cellphone mesh networks
Open source government programs to run cities
Etc
The big question one has to ask is what do you do in a world where you are more and more living in a zoo with robots making sure you do the right thing to more and more exacting standards?
I think the answer is that expectations will get so high that robots will do everything. And humans will be free to do anything, as long as they don't involve anyone else.
Want to ask a question to your dad? Why bother, google will answer better and your dad won't be pissed at you for asking while he's glued to his facebook
> We made it through the industrial revolution because people stood up for their rights.
I wouldn't say we made it through. We are living it now. We are just getting automated away from it gradually over last hundred years despite all the kicking and screaming and few revolutions (the other, bloody kind). What we sort of succeeded at is getting decent share of the profits.
> Serious question: where do we start when we want to fight this?
I think you can't fight the process. You can just demand your share.
You need to fight for your right to information. Right to surveil others. Privacy will die, you just need to ensure everybody gets a piece of its corpse and all that grows on it.
Demand right to acquire and publicize surveillance footage no matter who acquired it. No matter who was surveiled. Demand transparency from your government to the point mandatory of livefeeding of all public officers.
Don't just accept that some things should be secret. Make all the people, who claim that, prove why. Enforce transparency as default and secrecy an incredibly well argued exception.
I don't think we should want to fight this. The way I see it, things increasingly tend to look like "privacy or the progress of mankind, pick one". There are tons and tons of potential benefits to society stemming from all that data being available for constant real-time processing, and I haven't seen any kind of analysis that would properly weight the costs and benefits. What we get is constant surveillence state fear mongering.
This is a good, but probably unpopular, point. Even Stallman's info leaks everywhere. If his great lengths aren't enough where does that leave typical people? The article states satellites can recognize your face. At some point you throw up your hands and say I give up. On Star Trek no one seems to care that the Federation always knows where they are because they trust that their rights are respected uniformly. Attacking the problem from the standpoint of hiding all info about your doings is a castle made of sand.
Yes. I won't pretend I'm not scared of the bad consequences of the tech we have, be it oppressive governments or evil private companies. Though to be honest, it's something we had to deal with since the dawn of mankind, I don't think surveillance tech is anywhere close to the root of the problem.
Since you mentioned it, I grew up watching Star Trek and I guess it might have formed some of my views on society and technology. The technology present in that universe can - and sometimes is - abused, but like you said, they generally trust each other a lot, both on personal and on societal level. It's a way of life I try to follow and a future I hope we'll one day reach.
Pretty much everything again hinges not on the technology itself, but on how it can be used. There's a lot of good we can leverage even current level of "antiprivacy" technologies - optimizing agriculture, traffic and public health, learning more about ourselves and how societies evolve, improving the general well-being of everyone.
The last two or three generations seem to have grown up with irrational hate of centralized systems. Yes, distributed and democratized is great, but those systems also have their failure modes - many of which we see every day not only in technology, but in economy, politics. There are some things that are better done centralized, like any kind of optimizations. With the levels of computing power we have nowdays, I think we should embrace centralization some more.
Another thing - that I do need to check up with history books, but I feel that the current notion of "privacy" is an artificial construct, an artefact of growing urbanization. I can't imagine villages having any level of privacy similar to what people in cities nowdays consider a minimum standard.
