so I just started listening to A People's History of Computing, which I'm sure will be a good book, but which opens with some very irritating paragraphs
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
and at one point, some people were organizing a political rally on PLATO to support impeachment or something to this effect
Nixon heard about this, and because PLATO had federal funding, was able to threaten PLATO and get them to ban that conversation and all future ones like it
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this is not a hypothetical bogeyman of government censorship, this is one of the most corrupt presidents DOING censorship because the system was partially government funded and therefore could not be associated with partisan organizing, etc.
this is a textbook case of censorship
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and the thing is, this actually isn't all that unusual, when you think about it
those of us who are old enough to have grown up with computers in school prior to the widespread ownership of laptops and smart phones kids have today since birth have intimate knowledge of this
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millennials, and maybe some gen x folx, are VERY aware of the risks of government censorship of computer systems because some of the first actual computer censorship we encounter comes directly from governments in school
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schools, at the direction of the local school board, often install very conservative censorship programs onto school computers and networks, generally banning all sorts of things but importantly banning searches for queer issues, abortion, and so forth
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when the anti-cyberlibertarian crowd mocks these concerns, they treat it like people are worried about a fantasy world, as if we live in Orwell's 1984 or Stalinist russia, but that's a total fallacy
we live in a country with rampant christian whackos who routinely DO censorship
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
and this is a fundamental problem with time sharing systems, and why it's important to be precise about why they're NOT networked: they are inherently EASY to censor, so much so that we had literal government censorship of time shared systems LONG before they got to networks
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and historically, in the US at least, networks like the phone and postal networks, have been subject to extreme anti-censorship laws that made it quite difficult to censor, hence why networked sociality on the internet was such a major thing for cyberlibertarians
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there was political precedent for saying that centralized computerized communications systems were VALID targets for political repression, but networked communication systems were NOT
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but I also think that the technical distinction is of continued importance today still partially because of government oppression, because those same christian whackos are now starting to build actual lists of people who get abortions using the access they have to computer data
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
they never went away in the last 20 years, they've only gotten more powerful, and the cyberlibertarian concerns are only more relevant
but there's another reason why the technical distinction between timesharing and actually networked computers matters
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and thats because the world we live in is one in which the problem of centralization of software into corporate "platforms" precisely mirrors the risks of of timeshared systems
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when you use a tool that is on your personal computer and doesn't have to connect to the internet to use, or doesn't have to connect to some central server to use, it is MUCH harder for corporations to abuse you
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when you use some corporation's web app, instead of an app on your personal computer that you control, you are, practically speaking, signing away all your rights to what you're doing, allowing them to control and censor you and possibly even report you to the cops
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and it is BECAUSE we've abandoned, or been forced to abandon, the PERSONAL computers, and the NETWORKED computers, substituting instead the modern equivalent of a time-shared centralized system, that this kind of abuse can happen
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and we might want to respond to this by saying yes well that's why we need stronger regulations and ok that's fair
but i want leftists who hate on cyberlibertarianism to remember that just four years ago we were saying we dont trust the cops and we routinely call Trump a fascist
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and so do you REALLY want to have those cops, or a fascist Trump government, to have those powers?
I'm not saying we should hand the world to corporations, but I think we REALLY should not be handing fascists the computer reigns on a silver platter b/c we fear corporations too
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now, networked personal computers won't solve these problems, I'm not saying they will, i'm merely saying that the RISKS that exist from centralized systems, which the time-shared systems were, are different and more obvious than the ones from actually networked systems
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and if we want to think clearly about the political implications of our computer systems, we need to have an actually correct understanding of those systems so we can explore the real causal dimensions of actual political and corporate malice
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a purely fantasy version of the past that falsely analyzes computers and then also simultaneously falsely imagines a socialist utopia, can only lead us into a dangerous situation where governments AND corporations are given terrifying powers they should never have