Doc Edward Morbius ⭕@cishumanorg Taking just one point from your essay: even if we get away from the various issues of self-hosting email, which are considerable of themselves, self-hosting email buys you very little by way of privacy for the reasons Benjamin Mako Hill spelled out a decade ago in "Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours":
https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours
On the individual-initiative vs. collective action side: Yes, there absolutely have been people who've done much to change the course of history, but in virtually all cases they've done so by harnessing the efforts of others. The most notable 20th century examples are probably the home-rule and civil rights efforts of Mahatma Gandhi (I've just read his collected essays) and of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Libertarian wing of the free software / open source movement has been business-friendly, but not especially effective in advocacy. RMS has been crusading since the mid-1980s, and accomplished much. But nearly three decades after I first installed Linux myself, it remains a single-digit (though growing) share of the desktop market (largely because the latter is shrinking compared to mobile, if not absolutely), and where Linux is at the core of mobile operating systems, it is as part of what is very much the problem and not the solution (Android).
Again:
- The interrelatedness of data flows means that your own personal actions have little impact on the degree of your surveillance. Cf. BMH again.
- Things That Do Not Work (for $500, Alex) tend to still not work when by working them harder.
- Collective action through legislation, lawsuits, consumer pressure, and the like --- none of which are either "market forces" or "individual initiative" --- are the rare spot of successes to date (some privacy and anti-surveillance initiatives, though very piecemeal).
I've stood where you stand and said what you've said. I learned from that mistake.
I'm not saying "don't use Free Software", anything but. DO make maximal use of it wherever possible and feasible. But be under no illusions that this is itself sufficient, or even necessary, for the changes which are ultimately required.
(There's a lot more on #privacy, #surveillance, #TargetedManipulation, #censorship, #propaganda, and #DataAutonomy / #InformationAutonomy elsewhere in my writings here, you're welcome to search my profile under those hashtags.)
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Oskar J. Gstrein
