Gregory's Server
The End of the Road to Serfdom https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9
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30 posts total
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How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms (without ditching your friends)
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 @pluralistic I enjoyed this article, but I don't think we need to use govt force to force social media companies to be interoperable. @pluralistic ...and now I've learned about the fediverse, which is like finding a thing I didn't realize I'd like to find. Cheers! Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't have to pay a cent. 1/ The Cuecat was a good idea and a terrible idea. The good idea was to widely distribute barcode scanners to computer owners, along with software that could read and decode barcodes; the company's marketing plan called for magazines and newspapers to print barcodes alongside ads and articles, so readers could scan them and be taken to the digital edition. 2/ Computer security is really, really important. It was important decades ago, when computers were merely how we ran our financial system, aviation, and the power grid. Today, as more and more of us have our bodies inside of computers (cars, houses, etc) and computers in our body (implants), computer security is *urgent*. 1/ Decades ago, security practitioners began a long argument about how best to address that looming urgency. The most vexing aspect of this argument was a modern, cybernetic variant on a debate that was as old as the ancient philosophers - a debate that Rene Descartes immortalized in the 17th Century. 2/ In the mail today: my fulfilled first-batch #Precursor open/secure mobile device from the amazing bunnie Huang. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/crowdfunding-begins
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 This week on my podcast, I read the first part of "The Internet Heist," a three-part series I wrote for Medium on the #BroadcastFlag, which was invented 20 years ago, on my first day on the job at EFF. It's basically my origin-story. https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-i-3395769891b0 1/ The Broadcast Flag was an incredibly gnarly, high-stakes digital technology issue. It combined no fewer than three esoteric fields - spectrum allocation, computer science, and copyright - and threatened to ban all free/open source software, while making it illegal to produce *any* digital technology unless the Hollywood studios approved it. 2/ The world is experiencing a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," but the largest pool unvaccinated people isn't to be found among vaccine deniers of the rich world. Rather, these vulnerable people - whose infections might spawn new, vaccine-bypassing, more-lethal variants - are the 2.5b people in the world's 125 poorest countries, where vaccines are not widely available and the vaccination rate is 2.6%. https://doctorow.medium.com/pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated-5844d6c37c9b 1/ The pharma lobbyists who have blocked a WTO waiver are the true vaccine deniers. They are literally denying vaccines to billions of people, but also implicitly denying that constitutes an existential risk to all of us, as unvaccinated nations offer fertile breeding grounds for new, scarier variants. 2/ The politicization of covid started early, with the "noble lie" that masks wouldn't prevent the spread of the disease, a lie told in a bid to prevent panic-shoppers buying up all the N95s that health workers needed. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html Safety talk is often a pretext: sometimes paternalistic, sometimes authoritarian and sometimes (ironically) anti-regulatory. 1/ The British "health and safety gone mad" panic of the 1990s is a perfect microcosm of how this works. After a revolution in evidence-based public safety measures improved the daily lives of millions of people, puny authoritarians and grifters of every stripe realized that safety talk was a powerful weapon for bossing people around while lining their pockets. 2/ When we talk about the internet's problems and solutions, we tend to focus on Big Tech, the monopolizers who dominate our digital lives. That's only natural. But there's another internet, one that deserves our attention: The Public Interest Internet. https://www.eff.org/issues/public-interest-internet 1/ 12
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@pluralistic good god, that's terrifying.
I've been having anxiety over my 401k for the past decade. Now I'm unemployed, can't finda job, about to lose my COBRA benefits, can't afford ACA, and now terrified that Social Security won't be there when I talk my need it.
And I don't imagine things are going to be any better for my 6 year old daughter when she's in my shoes.
How long will we need to wait until the next reckoning?
@pluralistic For the last 20 years or so, one of my catchphrases has been: 2 World Wars and The Great Depression took the wind out of the sails of the rich and powerful. And now they have come to take it back.
@pluralistic One thing I took away from the article were how tangled all the different policies are and how politicizing them has led to just hypocrisies and blame games which in turn has led to more downward spiral.