Why The Left Should Care About Privacy
Why The Left Should Care About Privacy
The surveillance state always hurts dissidents most of all. We shouldn't neglect the importance of constraining its power.
If you didn't realize the importance of privacy after the patriot act and seeing the continuation of right wing authoritarianism, it's definitely time to get on board asap. Get yourself and your community on signal instead of texts and tuta or proton instead of regular email, use a vpn (mullvad or proton are solid), and depending on what kinds of actions you may or may not be interested in, learn how to use tails os and tor (try to find a copy of the darknetmarket bible for a good intro)
Edit: simplex is a good alternative to signal too, and if you have a google pixel, grapheneos is solid. Next time you're getting a new phone, get a used pixel and install it. On your computer, there's a lot of telemetry and sketchy stuff windows does, either research and disable that or switch to linux if you can
67Everyone should care
35Declarations of an intent to reimagine social media are all well and good, but joining the actually existing Fediverse is probably a more effective place to start.
It may not be precisely what you would've designed, not the People's Democratic Social Media of your dreams, not exactly like whatever Tarnoff imagined, but it is what we've got and as it continues to evolve it has considerable potential for new kinds of Internet-based social organization.
Organizing a boycott of Twitter is beside the point. All we need is for more people to join us in building up the better alternatives we already have. How is it even possible to put so much thought into the subject and not mention this?
26In an ideal (post-scarcity communist) society, we should be able to be completely libertine without judgement from society or from government systems (so long as we're not causing harm). But as with the rest of this ideal we don't know if we can actually get there.
I have an ancient (2016) paper about potential joys of full disclosure (on Wordpress, if you're interested) that portends the enshittification of Google. But it points out Google's original business model, which was to have an enormous body of data that no human being got to look at directly (except their proper owners), and in the meantime the computers would report on observable trends and correlations.
In the end, it got messed up by the usual suspects: Advertising interests pressured Google to reveal more and more. Technicians abused their positions of power to stalk. The police state forced Google to fulfill reverse warrants and list all people near the scene of a crime, making them all suspects. Or to completely reveal all the data of a given suspect, which poisoned the whole idea of your own safe private place to track contacts, dates, travel, etc.
As it is, we need privacy specifically because of all those interests that would want to link our data to us. All the reasons for commercial or state interests to have our data are causes for them to not have our data.
18God damn this is a beautiful fucking website
16the left is/will suffer more of the consequences
15Great article actually. Thanks for sharing.
13I thought the left was the ones who cared, and the right was all like "If you dont have anything to hide you shouldnt be worried" bootlickers.
9I know my name will be on future lists when fascist purges start. Not because I'm some great though leader or anything. Just because they hate people with my beliefs.
6Nice username
5Title gore
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