@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.)

@Mattstamatic That's likely to be a centralised rather than generalised capability though. By which I mean that it's something that could be used by some social platform (or perhaps a bot on such a platform, which would require visibility of the propaganda to the bot itself), rather than something put into the hands of individuals.

A common failing of "tools for the everyman" is that everyone must individually assess, access, and utilise those tools. We've already got the anti-Fediverse "Math is Hard" tope that people need to sort out which specific instance to join. (Not ... entirely unwarranted, but also not as great a barrier as all that.) Look at the excessively polluted app space for, say, a basic text editor / notetaking app on Android or iOS, and now consider what the landscape would look like where white, black, and grey hats (moral, immoral, and amoral actors) are all competing for mindshare and there are highly preverse incentives to provide other-than-socially-beneficial tools.

There's a roughly comparable environment with hboth adblockers and phone spam blockers, where malware competes with legit software, and even good actors can turn bad, as with uBlock (the original, not uBlock Origin), and various phone-spam / robocall blockers which harvest contact information.

There's a general principle that increased technological complexity tends to reduce overall trust in communications systems, and I think we're seeing that at play here. Yes, someone can lie to your face, but you have all kinds of tells of that, and, well, they can lie only to one, or a small number of faces, at a time. Print, broadcast, recorded, digital, and streaming media all increase the scale at which the Big Lie can occur, or with which targeted manipulation (another inherent aspect of media) can occur. See: https://archive.ph/8ceqI

@ianbetteridge

#media #monopoly #ai #llm #censorship #propaganda #surveillance #TargetedManipulation #advertising #SurveillanceCapitalism

@Dianora There's been a lot said on education, and I don't think that well's spent yet.

There's also the distinction between liberal and servile education --- the classical Seven Liberal Arts of the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric --- or input, processing, and output as I like to consider them), and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, or quantity, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space-time). C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" is a more contemporary take on that, or present STEM/STEAM initiatives.

On propaganda, I twigged a few years ago that censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and targeted manipulation are all inherent elements of a media monopoly (both terms used in a broad sense), and emerge from them.

See: https://archive.is/8ceqI (Original site is now offline.)

I'd also long since recognised that privacy is an emergent concept as well, and a response to ever-more-intrusive communications, observation, and recording technologies. There's a reason why there was little discussion of the topic prior to Warren & Brandeis's treatment.

I'm something of a fan of articles from the cusp of the Internet age which discussed possible directions and implications, some prescient, some misguided. Jeffrey Rosen's The Unwanted Gaze (2000) still bears up as a good guide here, I think:

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL506586W/The_unwanted_gaze

Any pointers to your work at Centre for Inquiry?

#propaganda #censorship #surveillance #TargetedManipulation #monopoly #MediaMonopoly #TheUnwantedGaze #JeffreyRosen #privacy #LiberalArts #Trivium #Quadrivium