Negative thoughts flooded my mind. The EU is constantly trying to push Chat Control. They’re blocking bootloaders on phones, introducing ID and face scanning everywhere, in the US they’re trying to push system-level verification, corporations are spitting in our faces and don’t even hide it. I know we have to fight. My personal rebellion was joining Fediverse and Lemmy and quitting Reddit. But seriously, boss—I’m tired. Are our attempts to preserve internet freedom futile? Can we win against corporations and politicians who we pay but don’t listen to us?
Find what and where you can fight best, and throw your weight behind it. Don’t fall into dispair, that’s what they are counting on.
Some fight for better laws, some fight for better politicians, some hack, some donate, some build, some propagandize, some host and archive, some preach and philosophize.
The best often do several of these things. Find what you’re inclined towards and do it. We need every last drop of effort to defeat the corpos and their corrupt political allies.
You can’t stop the signal.
Yes.
We have to keep fighting, and it isn’t easy but we have been building great things! Look at the growth of the fediverse with projects like mastodon, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc. More and more, people want alternatives to surveillance-capitalist social media platforms. They see the value in privacy as the stakes get higher for activists. Keep fighting, keep sharing.
Now, I also believe that ultimately we cannot solve political problems with technical solutions. We need to organize online and offline to effect real change. This organization must be multifaceted (“diversity of tactics”). A recent success of this type has been rolling back flock surveillance in municipalities around the US. Go to city council meetings with your neighbors. If the council won’t listen, then go out later with a comrade and smash those fucking things.
We will always be able to keep our own provacy. Linux phones are getting better, motorola is working with grapheneos. Even if all new phones suddenly become locked down we will still have our own phones. They cant stop us from building and using our own private services. The main issue I see is friends and damily not willing to use private messages.
Had similar thoughts this morning. I think it’s clear that many countries are going to head down the Great Firewall route; which is now very effective. It’s so hard to bypass and risky that most people don’t attempt to. As more countries implement these measures, and the list of countries/datacenters where people can set up XRay proxies (for example) shrinks, it will be easier to detect and block. I imagine if ad-hoc meshes became popular, then they’d be shutdown too. The problem is more political than technological.
I think moving away to decentealised means of connecting is the way. We already have things like Reticulum. If we invent a powerful and robust decentralised way of physical connection (like LoRa or HaLow but better) then we won’t need any corps - neither ISPe nor those that create web services for the ISP based network
You are definitely right, but I will caution that people are going to have to get used to a lot slower connectivity speeds and higher latency than we’ve been used to.
Max reticulum link is 40mbps, tor to onion services is like 5mbps, wifi halo is like 1-16mbps and MeshCore and Meshtastic are like ~20kbps max.
Centralized internet has gotten us used to speeds of hundreds of megabits per second and latency of 10s of ms, and that’s just not possible when decentralizing systems, at least not right now.
Nope. They have no power over decentralized services outside their jurisdiction.
We will always have the option of privacy, even if we loose every court battle in 99% of countries
They aren’t blocking bootloaders, they’re blocking the firmware. It is an issue, but it isn’t as problematic. The only ones blocking the bootloader unlocks are capitalists, who want to profit from your data and break your phone when they need more money.
One action can serve multiple purposes
The EU isnt trying to push chat control. If it was then the EU wouldn’t have shot it down multiple times like it has been.
Lobbyists are the ones trying to push chat control on the EU.
lobbyists need time; the more they have, the more they can do.
In Poland we call it “gotowanie żaby” (eng. boiling a frog). This is a nice idiom for slow action towards a specific goal despite the resistance of reality.
It’s a mess when the right wing control freaks are in the gov. The only thing a user can currently do is avoiding as much as possible these platforms, using instead eg. P2P for communications (https://otr.to/, https://github.com/michal-wrzosek/p2p-chat, https://mesh.im/, etc.). Because of this and big corps the internet is dying, I see the future only in decentralized networks, I2P or something like this for an communication without a big brother in the middle.
Yes and honestly we better learn to enjoy the struggle because it’s never going away. We will always have to push back.
Just do your part and don’t get discouraged. You don’t have to do everything. Walk the walk, talk the talk. If things don’t work out, at least you tried; that’s more than the majority did.
Do what you do no because of some expected local or global outcome, but because it’s right.
i wish i had spent more time on the “pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will” part before i started to learn about leftism; i’m in a funk rn because there’s a seemingly impenetrable gulf between where we are as a society and where we think we are and it’s making me want to give up.
Do you believe “left-wing” ideologies are more negative?
Citizens of the world must rebel against their governments
There’s always a way. It’ll just get maybe harder to do at most
Agree, it will get harder to show those the middle finger, but until now there are always nice people which release alternatives to do it.
All things that go up must come down. Icarus’ wings will melt from the sun’s heat. The web will crumble under the weight of llm bots. Markets will crash due to llm’s not living up to their hype. Big tech will be broken up. Billionaires and the trillionaire will be taxed to death. Regulators will lose interest. Let’s have hope.
all long after you die; i wish i could take pleasure from knowing that people that i have zero relation to will get to enjoy this reality.
It has been written! Now we wait
This made me so hot. Pure smut.
he is no longer a trillionair. Don’t forget that.
Billionaire or trillionaire is irrelevant. He’s still a dumbass
