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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   18454 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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I was really hoping there would be more of an argument here than "umm yikes, smells like Qanon" but you just completely ignored the whole issue. There's also some impressive irony in flipping between "qanon conspiracy theory" accusations and insinuations of "people worried about privacy look a lot like they have child sex slave dungeons, isn't that suspicious?"

I am not saying this. I think the grand majority of people who use (e.g.) Signal are unremarkable and having completely mundane conversations. The reason more people aren't burned by Signal is that it's not too inconvenient. If your phone dies you lose all of your chat history with everyone (since no cloud backups). People survive that okay, it turns out. But the flip-side of the normalization of Signal is that there also bad people using it for crime and law enforcement is 100% powerless to do anything about it.

The Qanon-adjacent part is believing your mundane unremarkable life is so important that you must use Signal and that this meaningfully protects you from The Powers Whom are Unspecified, which is Important.

This is exact sort of dismissive "if you have nothing hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude people in the 00s were worried would become common once universal surveillance was normalized.

What additional argument is needed here? The no privacy status quo has existed for decades for billions of people and the only people that are for the worse for it are stupid criminals who send CSAM over Facebook in the clear and have been busted for it, and also a few freak headlines where normies are also swept up in abuses?

I'm a Signal user, and definitely one of those people who are too mundane to be noticed most of the time. While I do use regular SMS for most convos, there are particularly spicy chats with trusted friends and family that I use Signal for because I don't trust the alternatives. Perhaps this is paranoid of me, but a few things triggered its adoption:

  1. A blast from my edgy teenage past (about 15 years old at the time of the incident) popped up out of the blue with potential professional consequences for not only me, but an old friend as well. I was shocked that a JPG uploaded to the middle of nowhere on a webzone stuck in early 00s design and infrastructure managed to turn up in a company's background check for him. I was lucky to get a response and takedown from the current owner after spamming his email for a week.

  2. There's this phenomenon where people caught in freak, chaotic situations who make a bad move have their text histories pored over. This is to be expected, I imagine. But... Did you express violent displeasure at the 2019 protestors to a confidant? Maybe use some colorful language? Were you so bold and colorful to suggest that maybe a certain kind of protestor should have the ambulances they're obstructing drive right through them? Hope you didn't write that down. If you end up in a situation where somebody gets hurt or killed, you're a premeditated murderer! Let's say that I would be fucked beyond measure if one of MY antisocial morning-before-coffee shitposts got dug up after a protestor died after attacking my dad, for instance.

And during these moments, I'm noticing that the open, mind-your-own-business, permissive tech culture of old has been largely inverted by men and women who sound like you. I don't trust that change, and I don't trust you or your fellow travelers to never take it too far. Sure, I'm too boring today - unless an aggrieved party forces my publicity. But I can certainly imagine an evolved, V2 future wokescold developing the interest once they've exhausted every other one of Al Capone's vaults in their quest to find racism and intolerance as an explanation for why the world sucks. When you can no longer find any mechanism for systemic racism in the processes or the data, but you don't yet have mindeaders, why not go for the next best thing like their lifelong chat history? And who wouldn't be tempted to ctrl-f the word 'nigger' to see what comes up in a paper trail of that size?

Part of the concern is that today's mundane can quickly become tomorrow's problematic. That transgressing popular orthodoxies is not as ruinous or catastrophic as it could be by historical standards doesn't assuage my fears, because I honestly don't know if and when such curiosity regarding wrongthink and badspeak will be sated. I think I need to cement here that I did not have 'privacy concerns' as a foremost thing in my mind until I felt like the culture and people I'm surrounded by got bizarrely tilted and bloodthirsty.

I recognize that my small, amateurish attempts to guard against this are probably futile and incomplete, and possibly laughable by your vantage. But the impulse to escape your sight lines will continue to be very real. Dangling a hypothetical pedo bunker over the scale doesn't move me. A world without privacy and encryption looks more like the Trump investigations stretching into infinite than a parade of young girls rescued from Joseph Fritzl. Even the latter would require real work and resources, so I expect more resume-padding and activity among DEI hires in the Department of Bad Texts than anything else.

If I have to submit to your preferred apparatus, it would only be in the 'nice until meanness is coordinated' sense. Secretly I'll keep hoping it's destroyed by implosion or external force.

Let me present you an alternate vision of dystopia.

https://www.themotte.org/post/479/calling-all-lurkers-share-your-dreams/94878?context=8#context

We've been pretty fortunate that everyone that has built darknet markets (DNMs) so far are not competent or visionary enough to produce something high quality. The potential black market has not come anywhere close to being fully actualized.

The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.

Yes, I am very familiar with the usual cypherpunk arguments for why crypto is an important tool for protecting people's security/privacy from criminals, and that also you can't trust police to protect backdoors in crypto systems and to also not abuse them. I'm not convinced the endgame world of maximally "useful" DNMs that could be produced wouldn't be a net worse world overall.

Seems like cryptocurrency is waning a bit so this future may be delayed for now.

Perhaps my view on this is informed by being very close to the production of the tools that could create this dystopia, but the creation of a completely lawless criminal state that law enforcement is permanently locked out of meeting technocapitalist incentives is a possibility that is too casually dismissed.

There's still a lot of room for an underworld Jeff Bezos to pick up a trillion dollars.

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