25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within," that's anti-American.

When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent and instead plays "heads I win tails you cheated," that's anti-American.

When Trump sends the FCC chair to suppress speech "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," or yucks it up with the president of El Salvador over suspending Habeas Corpus, that's anti-American.

The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.

While the exact point at which it becomes "anti-american" isn't clear there's certainly a category of rhetoric in which people peddle subservience to the state (usually dressed up in obfuscating words, like they'll use "society" instead of "the government") that is undeniably "anti-american" except perhaps by some obtuse technical interpretation of all the words. And I will die on the hill that those who peddle such ideals are bad people and ought to be looked down upon the same way we'd look down upon someone peddling phrenology as a basis for racism.

As a fellow trans woman, we've been the scapegoat for reactionaries, at least documented, since the rise of the Third Reich. And if we're honest, probably before that.

Fixing society-scale problems is really hard. Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside is easy. People reliably choose easy.

but... but the bathrooms! and the children's sports! /s

it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.

Can you be more specific?

Well said, I have exactly the same thoughts.

However, overcoming these forces is something people did successfully in the past. I think right now we are just in a cycle of mass confusion caused by the technological revolutions, which prevents us to see clearly (as it happened in the past as well).

Without alignment we just drift by natural forces of a system in place in whatever direction. When we adapt and if the world survives, this should not be an issue.

The problem of billionaires is that they are one level below from the top in abstraction of a society. They are required to play by the rules of the state designed by someone else, and they lack the knowledge and experience to go one level higher and think about the policies and rules for society itself - and this is much harder than doing business, and requires completely different skills.

Because of these factors, we see them being able to hoard wealth but unable to influence the system in any positive way, except for the ones which the system was already designed for (create jobs, innovate, etc.)

I mostly agree with your take. The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.

I just don't think it's gotten to the point that anyone is interested. I wonder if we did do a better job that the aggressive filtering and monitoring wouldn't naturally move down the stack.

for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.

in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.

having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.

Third Amendment is about not quartering troops. Fourth Amendment is protection against warrantless seizures.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/

I'm pretty sure 1st and 4th are the ones GP meant.

The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.

Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.