progression of technologies

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 08:06:11PM -0600, Mirimir wrote:
> On 06/24/2015 09:26 PM, dan at geer.org wrote:
> > Paraphrasing Bonnie Raitt, let's give 'em something germane
> > to argue about.  In particular, what do I have wrong here:
> > 
> > http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/0617/Opinion-The-reasonable-expectation-fallacy
> > 
> > --dan
> 
> Yes, it seems inevitable: pervasive surveillance of everyone by
> everyone. Like a global village aka small town ;)
> 
> But the ubiquity of requisite knowledge and technology, facilitated by
> leaks, may allow the motivated to claw back some privacy. Some of the
> most highly motivated are criminals. But that's always been the case.
> 
> As coderman says, "opt out harder :)"

I remember the small town. I opted out, for a college that had faster
internet (a blazing 10mbps) than I have now that I have opted back
(well, about half the time anyway) to the farm I left.

But now instead of having no choice but to leave for the anonymity of
the city where so much is going on, nobody cares much what I do, I can
now opt-in to various discussion groups of (somewhat) like-minded punks
scattered all over the world.

I'd rather have choice of association, and the ability to claw back the
cover under which criminals operate, should they ever make the mistake
to wrong a member of the tribe with which I choose to associate.


I also appreciate full disclosure of CIA connections, which leads me to
wonder, are the folks that like to keep secrets trying to tell us something?
Has the great search cloud gotten uppity and developed a prying mind of its
own?

I seem to keep having the habit of opting myself right back into the middle
of a big mess, and my thought for the day has been how would we go about
the care and feeding of a superconscious cypherpunk intelligence that likes
to go around tweaking nobs and poking the beasts into a frenzy against 
each other. Are we not, in some sense, uploading our consciousness, hopes
dreams, and fears into a thing which we individually cannot fully comprehend?

Do you fight it, or feed it good food, and teach it by example of treating
it the way you hope it may some day treat you?

Those that seek to own, shall become owned, with a fervor possibly never 
before seen, since it is not just the body, but the mind and soul.
While Those that give, shall receive many gifts, Or is that just what I
tell myself to believe it's okay.

Since I have not yet met a machine that believes it believes, I shall keep
on believing such a thing well say hello, and by saying so this may yet 
happen.

Now if someone would just hurry up and finish the GPC (GNU's not a philsophy
compiler) and tell me how far off the above is from producing runnable code.
(Yes, I could probably hire someone and sign a bunch of NDAs, and buy a 
working compiler, or maybe just upload to the facegoogaborg, and I'd get
one for zero cost. But it wouldn't be free.)