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Small Steps Towards Ending Surveillance Capitalism

posted by takyon on Monday December 10 2018, @04:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the giant-leap dept.

canopic jug writes:

Aral Balkan has a blog post about taking small steps to end surveillance capitalism. In particular he focuses on the need for federated services. He points out that the move to re-decentralize the WWW is difficult and needs to start at the beginning, using a comparison of Apple's original computers to their latest generation of tablets as an illustration.

Five years ago, when I decided to devote myself to tackling the problem of surveillance capitalism, it was clear what we needed: convenient and beautiful ethical everyday things that provide seamless experiences1 on fully free-as-in-freedom stacks.

This is as true today as it was then and it will remain so. The only way to compete with unethical products built by organisations that have control over hardware + software + services is to create ethical organisations that have control over hardware + software + services and thus have at least the possibility to craft competitive experiences. We remove our eyes from this goal at our peril.

Related: Tim Berners-Lee Launches Inrupt, Aims to Create a Decentralized Web

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 13 2018, @01:40PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 13 2018, @01:40PM (#773948)
    • Straw Man. What I describe doesn't require perfection; it doesn't require being "foolproof". Quite the opposite in fact: As an iterative process, it assumes that foolproofery is at best an asymptotic ideal.
    • No True Scotsman. No matter how close to that ideal one could get, you'd still cry out "But that's not TRUE foolproofery! That's not TRUE freedom!"

    The point remains: Your system is the failure mode of my system; that makes my system inherently better than your system, which is why history has Civilization slipping, though kicking and screaming in defiance, towards evermore Capitalism.

  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday December 13 2018, @05:27PM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday December 13 2018, @05:27PM (#774033) Journal

    Again: until you can provide us a foolproof contract-enforcement system, government of some form is necessary. Until you do, you're blowing bullshit bubbles.

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...