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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2747 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 6, 2023

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Does anyone have a good guide on OPSEC for running a pseudonymous online profile? And what do you think about Anatoly Karlin’s contention that AI will make the whole exercise futile?

We're all going to get doxxed in the next 5 years, sure. It's going to be completely trivial - as Karlin says - to fingerprint writing style and have AI seamlessly connect all of your online writing. The only people who won't be so easily discovered are those who have zero lengthy writing that is scrape-able (ie. no significant writing under their real name on LinkedIn or Facebook, no documentation under their name, no research papers or dissertations, no articles of any kind under their byline, no PDF of internal feedback or commentary mistakenly uploaded to the corporate website, no high school essay that won third place in a public competition etc...). That's before we consider AI fingerprinting methods that automate a lot of current doxxing methods, eg. trawling countless forum pages for obscure details, username mentions, matching leaked email/password lists, location data and so on.

My guess is that if you're the relatively high verbal IQ kind of person who writes longform political content online, you probably have at least one of the above, or some other writing under your real name that has been or will be scraped at some point.

I’ve always questioned, for an average normal person who’s not working in some sort of opinion shaping job, how much would it matter? I have a tumblr, I left posts on hubski, Saidit and Reddit. But given that my job isn’t high powered or focused on shaping opinions, I can’t imagine any practical value in outing me.

But if you are using these websites to share your views, then you are engaged in shaping the opinions of others. Maybe you’re not being paid for it, but you’re still doing it—and if your opinions are racist or hateful, then you are thus contributing to a more inequitable society. Beyond this, even if you weren’t participating in public discourse, simply harboring toxic and harmful views cannot help but leak into your everyday interactions with others. That’s how implicit bias works.

This is why your average Joe ought understand that it is not the case that he is safe to spew toxicity and bigotry simply because he doesn’t have a five-figure-follower Twitter account. Hence the cancelling of the OK-sign truck driver, or that of Justine Sacco. I predict that once AI gets powerful enough to scan through petabytes of Amazon Alexa data or conversations surreptitiously recorded by TikTok for bigotry, it is precisely “average normal people” who will face a wave of cancellations. Once the current barriers of inconvenience that prevent general members of the public from being cancelled en masse crumble, all that pent-up energy will be released.

ETA: Actually, a potential counterargument against this vision of the future is that we don’t see people getting cancelled en masse currently based on voting records. Of course, counters against that counterargument include the arguments that many people are listed as unaffiliated, that being a registered Republican is still within the Overton Window, etc….

I’m not sure how well this would work, at least without considerable cunning on the part of the cancellers. Cancellation (political persecution let’s be honest) relies on the vast majority of people believing they’ll be okay if they just stay quiet. With the invention and deployment of a sufficiently powerful heresy detector, this no longer holds true. You can still make it work by going in waves - either randomly or increasing in severity - but do cancellation mobs have the coordination and self control to make that viable?

Cancellation (political persecution let’s be honest) relies on the vast majority of people believing they’ll be okay if they just stay quiet. With the invention and deployment of a sufficiently powerful heresy detector, this no longer holds true.

I might just be missing something obvious here, but I’m having trouble seeing why that would be the case. Even in a world with an anti-heresy detector in every smartphone, as long as you don’t do anything too egregious—say, make racial jokes with your buddies, or talk about how you think feminism is harmful, etc—then you have nothing to fear. This would especially be the case if there end up developing clear answers to what would get you cancelled, in contrast to today’s situation where cancellation thrives on ambiguous boundaries.

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