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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
argumate

wirehead-wannabe asked:

Do you think we're headed toward an inevitable increase in authoritarianism with the advent of the panopticon + better data processing + better weapons for urban warfare and tracking and following individual people wherever they go?

femmenietzsche answered:

Yes.

The world is becoming ever more tractable to power and it’s hard to see that trend reversing. It’s possible that some unanticipated technological development – unbreakable encryption or something – will turn everything on its head, but I don’t think we have a shot at reversing current trends short of getting lucky like that.

I have no idea how much worse the world will actually be in this future though. Probably our current world isn’t as good as we might like to think, relative to some ideal, and probably our future won’t be as dire as some fear.

femmenietzsche

neoliberalism-nightly said: unbreakable encryption is already here but that’s not the issue when you literally leak information all the time

neoliberalism-nightly said: it may be possible for people to use machine learning and all that to make junk information trails against other data mining AIs and etc.

neoliberalism-nightly said: lol startup idea

neoliberalism-nightly said: omg AI arm race

Perhaps the real challenge is coming up with something that more than .5% of the population would actually use.

argumate

Humans shed uniquely identifiable cells wherever they go, leave behind a fine dust of their own DNA, form long-term attachments to other humans, blaze like a torch in infrared, are incapable of true randomness, have identifiable body language quirks they can’t even perceive let alone change; we fantasise about flying under the radar but that’s just wishful thinking.

mitigatedchaos

My intuition is that criminals will still commit crime, thinking of some way to get beyond this.

Source: femmenietzsche

More you might like

wirehead-wannabe
wirehead-wannabe

To the more hardcore libertarians in the audience ( @oktavia-von-gwwcendorff, @voximperatoris ):

How should doctors and hospitals act with regards to emergency care, assuming an inability to tell for sure whether or not someone has insurance at the time treatment is given and an inability to shop around for hospitals during an emergency? What should happen when I call 911 as a patient? What about as a bystander?

It seems to me that you essentially have to choose between (A) inventing a more-or-less foolproof system of verifying that people have insurance, then letting everyone else die in the gutter (B) refusing emergency treatment to a lot of people who do have insurance but can’t prove it because they’re having a stroke © some sort of class profiling being rampant, with all the negative effects and bad incentives that brings, or (D) treating everybody regardless of ability to pay. If we choose (D), then that seems to lead almost inevitably to state-subsidized or funded preventative care, unless we want to deal with hospitals and state budgets going bankrupt.

sadoeconomist

Until EMTALA in 1986 we got along without hospitals being forced to provide emergency care for everyone and somehow society was able to function, but that requirement is to a significant degree responsible for the massive rise in health care costs since then, and the failed attempt to force everyone onto insurance that was Obamacare was essentially a way of attempting to deal with the severe negative consequences of EMTALA, which has forced many hospitals to stop providing any emergency services whatsoever.

The libertarian thing to do would be to go back to how it was before Congress intervened in 1986, and let hospitals decide for themselves how to provide care and to whom, as is their right. Then if your top priority is making it so that poor people are treated regardless of ability to pay, organize a charity and pay for them yourself, don’t push it onto hospitals as an unfunded mandate that messes up the entire health care system.

wirehead-wannabe

So before EMALTA, how was it determined whether someone would be treated? Did hospitals turn people away if they didn’t have insurance cards? If they did, would the ambulance keep on going from hospital to hospital until they found someone who would treat the patient? How often were people with insurance accidentally turned down? If the passage of EMALTA caused prices to rise as much as you say it did. Then obviously there had to have been a lot of people who used to be turned away but now are not. What do the profiles of these marginal people look like?

sadoeconomist

Hospitals did turn people away if they thought they wouldn’t be able to get them to pay for care, yeah, but I think that’s rational and defensible. Insured people accidentally getting turned down didn’t seem to be a significant problem - if you have insurance you’ll probably always have your insurance card or at least an ID with you out in public, and if you’re having an emergency at home you’ll probably get brought in by someone who knows who you are. And I think hospitals were more focused on denying care to people they were already certain wouldn’t pay than unidentified unconscious people in urgent need.

A lot of the people who would have been turned down before EMTALA are people with non-life-threatening conditions who go to the emergency room knowing they can’t be turned down for treatment and then disappear without paying. I used to date a girl whose job it was to try to bill those people for the care they received at her hospital - less than half of emergency care in the US now actually gets paid for, they wind up just having to write most of it off and the rest of us pay for it through higher insurance premiums, ultimately. It’s a significant component of why health insurance has become so unaffordable.

Her hospital at least worked with charities to try to make sure the true charity cases got paid for, and some people who had the means but refused to pay were sued or referred to collections agencies so ultimately the hospital would receive pennies on the dollar. Poor US citizens are covered by Medicaid. This was in California, so the real problem was illegal immigrants - they couldn’t get insurance but they couldn’t be made to pay for anything either, so hospitals are just forced to give them unlimited free care and they jam up emergency wards with non-urgent problems because they have no other place to go. It’s not their fault, really, but the inefficiency of this system is mind-boggling, the waste of medical resources is immense, and it generates a lot of animosity against illegal immigrants. California passed a ballot initiative in the 1990s that would have allowed hospitals to deny emergency care to anyone in the country illegally but it was struck down as going against federal law.

In Libertopia there’d be no such issues with citizenship status preventing people from getting insurance or simply paying for care on a fee-for-service basis, which would likely be much more common without the tax incentive for employer-provided health insurance, one of the other big problems ruining US health care. Costs would drop massively and I think it’d bring guaranteed life-saving emergency care (within reason) for almost everyone within the range of things that could easily be accomplished through voluntary charity in a developed country.

oktavia-von-gwwcendorff

It’s the discrimination problem once again; if you make decisions on the hospital level you can turn away the people who are obviously Not Going To Pay without causing more than a few highly-visible false positives (and even there making it possible to create better commitments like “I know my situation looks sketchy but if I skip paying you’ll just contact my Dia group and they’ll pay you okay” would make it easier to discriminate accurately), but if you’re trying to make sweeping policy-level decisions you inevitably have to discard massive amounts of information, rendering the bureaucracy necessarily stupid. Then economic incentives lead to people capitalizing on that enforced information asymmetry.

Additionally, you can use modern technologies to create robust reputational systems that reward hospitals that deliver care for true emergency cases (= actual unanticipated emergencies, not “this known but untreated condition has gotten worse over time and it was inevitable that it would cause an Expensive Crisis at some point”) regardless of immediate ability to pay. If customers prefer hospitals that do provide such care, that’s effectively an indirect subsidy for privately socialized emergency care.

As a patient I’d prefer to have some more specialized number than 911 for contacting my own emergency health provider. Additionally I’d probably be totally fine with an rfid chip linked to a blockchain identity smart-contracted to my insurance subscription (= subscription and payment status verifiable by anybody with internet access) assuming I had actual control over it and could wipe+reprogram it at will whenever I want to use a different identity for whatever purpose.

wirehead-wannabe

I mean, the advantage of 911 is that it’s a universally known “OH SHIT FUCK HELP” button that even a five year old can understand how to use. Complicated setups with rfid chips make that harder. Same problem with private solutions to policing, really. People need simple, universal, easy to understand panic buttons that will put them at least somewhere close to the right track. Like, police aren’t ideal, but I feel like there has to be SOME kind of publicly run organization that handles emergencies or things-that-vaguely-seem-like-they-might-turn-out-to-be emergencies, and unless that organization asks for upfront payment on a per-call basis it’s gonna be a public good. (Yes we need to make the cops not be the default responders, but I’m not convinced that this necessarily involves getting rid of 911).

mitigatedchaos

I don’t know what you were expecting. Privatizing everything based on assuming the rationality of economic actors is kinda the ‘thing’ of the ideological group you reached out to.

Some answer where some regulations are loosened while others are strengthened is not what you’re going to get. And if you’re going to have generic emergency responders in America that aren’t cops, then they’ll need guns.

But here, let me throw in an oddball solution. Have multiple competing police agencies - but under the government, contracted at the municipal level.

Edit: Actually, let me throw a more serious one out here. People are bloody irrational, so I don’t care if they want to spend it on something else: tax everyone and give them an $X,000 healthcare voucher which can either be spent on insurance, or a health savings account. Take money out of it for unpaid emergency care at some rate over time. Maybe allow the HSA to be inherited.

politics
wirehead-wannabe
wirehead-wannabe

I really wish we could just somehow make neighborhoods be more like college campuses, but unfortunately that whole model is built on people all working (or schooling or whatever) in the same place and more or less committing to not moving for four years. (It could also be relying on people not having kids, but if anything I would expect the college campus model to be better at having local daycare services and safe, stimulating places for kids to play, so I don’t think that’s it.

jadagul

Which aspects are you thinking about that college campuses have and dense urban environments don’t?

wirehead-wannabe

A lot more “third spaces” that function well as such, better sense of community/higher trust, green space that actually functions well as green space. Room and board + campus maintenance + activity fees combined seem to be far more modest than the cost of living in an urban area (maybe because it avoids the problems that come with having to pay for a safe neighborhood in a positional-goods type of way by being strongly selected for IQ + consciousnessness? Idk).

furioustimemachinebarbarian

A lot of this is just describing, like, suburbs and small towns.  Nothing stops you from continuing to live in a college town after you finish college, and there are lots of small towns with a similar “feel.” 

wirehead-wannabe

This, I think, is where @jadagul’s point about colleges being selected for people like me becomes relevant. Plus small towns tend to lack the classes and guest speakers and general traits of academia that make it stimulating. But yes, “small Minnesota town filled with rationalists that has good access to infrastructure, jobs, etc” would be more or less ideal.

mitigatedchaos

I sympathize with you and have considered urban planning from this angle, constructing medium-density communities-within-communities.  Just put me in charge of the country as Technocratic Dictator Central Director of the North American Union and I’ll get it sorted.

I’m a good person, and there is little reason to worry about how this might be involved in plans to build an unstoppable super-nation.  Plus, I assure you the prediction markets for the National Delegation will have my back on this matter.

north american union policy urban planning I am retrocausally responsible for Milton Keynes
bambamramfan
wirehead-wannabe

Like, seriously the only way that I can ever be okay with being recorded 24/7 every time I’m in public is if I can manage to never be obligated to go out in public for the rest of my life. People don’t get to record my weird stims, or my awkward pacing, or my no reason boners, or my subvocalized suicidal ideation. How the fuck do people not think of this as a problem.

@rosetintedkaleidoscope @the-real-seebs @vastderp
drethelin

Is being recorded that much worse than being seen?

meaninglessmonicker meaninglessmonicker

Being recorded creates hard physical evidence

drethelin

Which is a big deal if anyone needs to accuse you of a crime but kind of irrelevant if there’s terabytes of the stuff no one ever looks at.

wirehead-wannabe

Believe me, if I had the option of not being watched I would absolutely take it

jadagul

I feel like this is somewhat related to the Big Other conversation I’ve been having with bambamramfan.

I genuinely don’t understand why people don’t want to be observed. I don’t feel the threat of being observed. But there are a few different components to this:

  • I enjoy attention.  Attention is good, especially when you’re entertaining and/or confusing people.  
  • I’m substantially less threatened by the Big Other that most people are–I’m mostly not worried about strangers judging me, or evaluating me, and don’t experience the judgments of vague “others” as a threat.  So people having seen me is fine, and not a threat.
  • I’m actually in the real world less vulnerable to the sorts of consequences that the Other can probably deal out.
    • I’m a huge optimist so don’t even really believe those could happen.
  • Sometimes people actually are threatening you. I find being observed or recorded threatening, but if a specific person were to, say, follow me all around town recording me specifically, that would be creepy for entirely other reasons.
    • I am harder to threaten in a lot of ways, and thus this is both less likely to happen and less threatening when it does.
    • As I discussed a few days ago, people who are more vulnerable to actual threats, or have more history with them, are probably also more likely to process experiences as threats.
bambamramfan

Basically agreed with @jadagul. I did not want to intercede because I respected @wirehead-wannabe ‘s emotions on the matter, and it did not seem like a good time to contradict.

The people arguing for “why they need public recordings” were giving terrible explanations of course. It was basically the panopticon “but for our morality”. There’s so many reasons to mistrust that. And anyone would feel only further alienated under that.

However privacy itself is not a solution to feeling afraid of the judgment of the Big Other. What would help is actual acceptance.

Let us use “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” as an example. LGBTQ were not allowed to serve in the military. So they requested privacy laws to protect them, a stop gap solution. But even with that, you’d always be afraid that somehow your privacy was being violated. This just breeds paranoia. No one can ever really trust that others will follow the liberal right (privacy in this case), so everyone is looking over their shoulder.

The actual solution was to… accept gay people, and not expect them to hide behind a shield they can’t fully count on. So eventually we repealed DADT and just made being gay in the military fine.

Basically every other concern about privacy seems like that? The actual solution is for you to not be judged for your stimming and other actions, and for you to not be afraid of the judgment of Big Other. Until then privacy is a stop gap, but it’s a stop gap that will cause significant emotional distress (because you can’t deep down really believe people will respect the privacy.)

I respect WW’s desire for it of course, but like, it’s not a coincidence that the people most relying on respect for privacy are miserable.

mitigatedchaos

They’re never going to accept everything.  Everyone will always fight for social status, and recording enables many-to-one bullying on a scale not previously feasible.  The slim majority doing the bullying will support it right up until the moment they’re in the crosshairs, because they think they have nothing to fear, because many of them are pretty vanilla, so MAD won’t work.

That’s why privacy is so important.

Edit: Privacy allows people to shrink their social attack surfaces.  I need it.  Plus, legal system issues - legal systems don’t always secure people enough.  The lists go on and on.

Source: wirehead-wannabe
sinesalvatorem
wirehead-wannabe

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

ozymandias271 ozymandias271

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

jack-rustier

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

wirehead-wannabe

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

sinesalvatorem

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

mitigatedchaos

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

sinesalvatorem

Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.

mitigatedchaos

Note: Continued discussion of this topic.

The entire point was to avoid shooting, starving, or forcibly sterilizing people. And, if it turns out to be unnecessary, it decays to “everyone who asks gets more baby tickets than they can even use.”

It seemed a better choice than allocating a set pool of resources which is based on one’s ancestors from the time that life extension hits. (ie, each person gets X resources which are split by their descendants, recursively) Maybe you would prefer that instead, but I felt it punished the descendants unfairly.

Source: wirehead-wannabe politics policy
thathopeyetlives
wirehead-wannabe

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

ozymandias271 ozymandias271

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

jack-rustier

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

wirehead-wannabe

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

sinesalvatorem

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

mitigatedchaos

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

sinesalvatorem

Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

Seen here: The single most horrify thing I have ever seen a transhumanist unironically recommend, out of a vast number of horrifying futury things.

thathopeyetlives

[Catholic screaming]

mitigatedchaos

If $Deity prohibits the use of birth control under Catholicism, then surely altering one’s genome to live past the normal maximum age of 120 years would be an even greater violation of the divine will?

I would expect the Catholic church to come out against human genetic augmentation, and thus life extension, even though I don’t expect them to come out against, for example, curing blindness.

Source: wirehead-wannabe politics religion
sinesalvatorem
wirehead-wannabe

> Although the method’s success rate was about 3.5%, experts in the field are calling the study a “stunning achievement” that could potentially “eradicate infertility” if it can be applied in humans. The ability to make artificial eggs from any cell in the body could allow women who lack viable eggs or male-male couples to have genetic children of their own. “Reproductive age” may become obsolete.

Oh great, let’s just take the breaks off of the Quiverfull problem completely.

ozymandias271 ozymandias271

I am not sure why you think this is a big issue?

In the short run: the set “has ten kids” selects really hard for smart, highly religious, nonconformist people who take ideas seriously. With the exception of the second thing, I’m not sure why anyone in this community would object. It doesn’t seem like desire-to-be-Quiverfull is genetic: the religions in which people have ten kids don’t seem to have particularly high retention rates, particularly given that they’re willing to e.g. not educate their children to get them to stay.

If you’re like “eventually the world will be full of people who have evolved to want lots of kids because the others don’t reproduce, and then overpopulation”, yes, but an allele reaching fixation takes long enough that I’d be surprised if we were still meat by the time it happened, and if we’re not meat this is irrelevant. And I’m honestly uncertain which way the sign of this particular technology goes: sure, very enthusiastic people could use it to have a twentieth kid, but women who don’t want kids that strongly and thus didn’t have a kid until they were fifty could also use it. 

jack-rustier

Worst case scenario: what will probably end up happening, if anything happens, is that you get a world where a million mutually exclusive cults try to outbreed each other. Which is to say, the world isn’t going to look very much different from this current version of it. The only difference is that everyone is able to have more kids without their own age becoming a factor.

Today’s meme magic phenomena will continue apace regardless of this technology being freely available or not.

wirehead-wannabe

I was focusing more on the genetic aspect of this + overpopulation in general rather than the memetic part, though I can see why people didn’t interpret it that way. Basically, I don’t want to live in a world crammed full of as many humans as possible. I want everyone to be able to have their own huge tract of land and live densely only when they prefer to.

sinesalvatorem

Solution here, it seems to me, is to buy your track of land while it’s plentiful and not let new people move in. Then you only have to fear eminent domain, but I think that getting the government to stop stealing people’s land is probably actually less of a hard problem than getting people to stop undoing infertility.

I find it just as likely that we’ll manage to convince everyone to accept forced-infertility-by-default after forty as that we’ll get everyone to accept forced-death-by-default after 80 once anti-aging is a thing. Besides, in both case, the worlds in which people actually manage to be banned from editing themselves are dystopian hellscapes anyway.

mitigatedchaos

That’s not a real solution.  The political will under such conditions would shift, and democracy means you’ll be eminent domain’d for sure, even if it were realistic for most non-millionaires to attempt this in the first place.

Life extension would actually help here, however, since it keeps non-baby-obsessed people around and politically relevant longer.  Make it a choice - live for a long time and have few children, or live the previous lifespan and make more babies.

Source: wirehead-wannabe politics policy
discoursedrome
wirehead-wannabe

Like, seriously the only way that I can ever be okay with being recorded 24/7 every time I’m in public is if I can manage to never be obligated to go out in public for the rest of my life. People don’t get to record my weird stims, or my awkward pacing, or my no reason boners, or my subvocalized suicidal ideation. How the fuck do people not think of this as a problem.

@rosetintedkaleidoscope @the-real-seebs @vastderp
drethelin

Is being recorded that much worse than being seen?

meaninglessmonicker meaninglessmonicker

Being recorded creates hard physical evidence

drethelin

Which is a big deal if anyone needs to accuse you of a crime but kind of irrelevant if there’s terabytes of the stuff no one ever looks at.

wirehead-wannabe

Believe me, if I had the option of not being watched I would absolutely take it

jadagul

I feel like this is somewhat related to the Big Other conversation I’ve been having with bambamramfan.

I genuinely don’t understand why people don’t want to be observed. I don’t feel the threat of being observed. But there are a few different components to this:

  • I enjoy attention.  Attention is good, especially when you’re entertaining and/or confusing people.  
  • I’m substantially less threatened by the Big Other that most people are–I’m mostly not worried about strangers judging me, or evaluating me, and don’t experience the judgments of vague “others” as a threat.  So people having seen me is fine, and not a threat.
  • I’m actually in the real world less vulnerable to the sorts of consequences that the Other can probably deal out.
    • I’m a huge optimist so don’t even really believe those could happen.
  • Sometimes people actually are threatening you. I find being observed or recorded threatening, but if a specific person were to, say, follow me all around town recording me specifically, that would be creepy for entirely other reasons.
    • I am harder to threaten in a lot of ways, and thus this is both less likely to happen and less threatening when it does.
    • As I discussed a few days ago, people who are more vulnerable to actual threats, or have more history with them, are probably also more likely to process experiences as threats.
bambamramfan

Basically agreed with @jadagul. I did not want to intercede because I respected @wirehead-wannabe ‘s emotions on the matter, and it did not seem like a good time to contradict.

The people arguing for “why they need public recordings” were giving terrible explanations of course. It was basically the panopticon “but for our morality”. There’s so many reasons to mistrust that. And anyone would feel only further alienated under that.

However privacy itself is not a solution to feeling afraid of the judgment of the Big Other. What would help is actual acceptance.

Let us use “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” as an example. LGBTQ were not allowed to serve in the military. So they requested privacy laws to protect them, a stop gap solution. But even with that, you’d always be afraid that somehow your privacy was being violated. This just breeds paranoia. No one can ever really trust that others will follow the liberal right (privacy in this case), so everyone is looking over their shoulder.

The actual solution was to… accept gay people, and not expect them to hide behind a shield they can’t fully count on. So eventually we repealed DADT and just made being gay in the military fine.

Basically every other concern about privacy seems like that? The actual solution is for you to not be judged for your stimming and other actions, and for you to not be afraid of the judgment of Big Other. Until then privacy is a stop gap, but it’s a stop gap that will cause significant emotional distress (because you can’t deep down really believe people will respect the privacy.)

I respect WW’s desire for it of course, but like, it’s not a coincidence that the people most relying on respect for privacy are miserable.

mitigatedchaos

They’re never going to accept everything.  Everyone will always fight for social status, and recording enables many-to-one bullying on a scale not previously feasible.  The slim majority doing the bullying will support it right up until the moment they’re in the crosshairs, because they think they have nothing to fear, because many of them are pretty vanilla, so MAD won’t work.

That’s why privacy is so important.

Edit: Privacy allows people to shrink their social attack surfaces.  I need it.  Plus, legal system issues - legal systems don’t always secure people enough.  The lists go on and on.

bambamramfan

I accept everything.

tumblr shows me these two posts of yours in a row.

If you believe one, then it follows you would believe the other.

I disagree with both, by the same logic.

I want to escape Hell.

I’d be more convinced by the people who want social technology that makes Hell more tolerable, if they did not seem so incredibly miserable trying to hang onto it.

Privacy is dying. Almost every pretense we have at liberal atomism is failing. I’m not saying it’s a good thing but you can’t turn back the clock. There are other, better solutions instead. Support the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

discoursedrome

I’m going to have to go with @mitigatedchaos on both the above points, I think. I don’t seriously think escape is possible, so I’m not inclined to take long bets on utopia.

Practically speaking, though, privacy is eroding very rapidly without any specific effort, that much is also true. Given that, an all-directions radical panopticon might be the best option just because it would make the problem visible and costly to the largest possible number of people. which would be more equitable and would spur a strong interest in countermeasures. But since that’s the “burn your town to deny it to the enemy” option, it seems like a bad idea to sacrifice existing privacy measures (even those that rely on obscurity alone) in the interests of accelerationism. One day those measures will be gone anyway, but there’s no sense in rushing it.

mitigatedchaos

@discoursedrome

There is privacy, however, in buildings and online.

Privacy will still exist in VR, where we can create and cast off identities and be free.

But I agree, accelerationism will just cause more damage for no net gain.  In this case, I believe that we’re actually going to have to make laws to protect people from many-to-one attacks like some sort of Harassment RICO.  I don’t particularly like it because I’m worried about side effects, but this problem didn’t exist at this level before.

If there were actually a state I trusted to do it (and there isn’t), I’d use a Great Firewall to yank entire harassment-source videos off the Internet and throw the violating posters in jail.

Believe me, I’m really glad overall acceptance of harmless things is increasing.

@bambamramfan

Oh yes, by all means let us blow up all of society for a utopia that has never come in the past and may well never exist in the future.

Sorry, that was too uncharitable.  

Not everyone has the same degree of Openness as you, and installing that into everyone would require some kind of massive violation - I’m not sure which yet, but I legitimately don’t believe it’s all the result of cultural brainwashing, so the measures that I expect to be required are terrifying.

Which is ironic, since I support removing DADT literally even though I very much don’t support removing it metaphorically.

The point is your planned utopia will not happen, so all that will result is that the shields of people such as myself and @wirehead-wannabe will be removed, and we will be made even more targets for social status gain than we are now.  It might be through the existing framework, or it might be through some new inverted exotic alien SJ framework, but we will be targets.  There will still be selfish people, there will still be liars, there will still be politics that gives liars reasons to not only lie to others but to themselves.  No ideology has ever entirely defeated this.

And to even get that far, you’re going to have to kill religion.  And that’s going to require murdering lots and lots of people.

You say I seem miserable, but I have people I love, and people that love me, and I’m safe, and I can think all sorts of strange things and discuss them with people I care about, I just have to control who has access to which facets of my life.  Like, if you think I actually want a revolution, then you are massively over-estimating just how miserable I am.

Source: wirehead-wannabe
wirehead-wannabe
newsweek.com

Michelle Knight's life after 11 years of captivity

Michelle Knight is one of the world’s most famous survivors. But that doesn’t pay the rent or buy back the life that was ripped from her.
wirehead-wannabe

I don’t understand how people can read all the way through articles like this and think that the human experience is somehow overall worth it, hedonically speaking. When you’re being tortured and abused, what’s the point in ever hoping for escape if all you have to look forward to is a lifetime of mental health issues and never getting your life back, all while knowing that the world is always filled with people who have it even worse than you and abusers who live long, happy lives filled with praise and without a shred of guilt because of, not in spite of, what they do to their victims?

wirehead-wannabe

Like, we spend our whole lives being unhappy over minor things and happy over similarly minor things. And maybe most people manage to stay in the black, but then there are so many Sufferring Georg’s in the world with no positive counterpart.

mitigatedchaos

The road to paradise lies through Hell, WW, and our armored convoy must continue to press on until victory is achieved, scavenging what we can as we go.

wirehead-wannabe

I have no idea what the fuck this is supposed to mean but this is a fully general argument in favor of doing almost anything unpleasant that looks vaguely helpful.

mitigatedchaos

Early agriculture sucked, the bronze age sucked for most people, the iron age sucked for most people, and so on and so forth.  

In global terms, absolute poverty is actually down even now, despite population growth.  Violent crime is still down in this country, relative to previous decades.

We’ve developed democracy, and air conditioning, and justice systems, and so on.

We’ve been chipping away at crippling-for-life issues much faster now than we did before.

Eventually we’ll be able to repair mental health issues at a level that we can’t right now, much like we can repair hernias at a level that we couldn’t many years ago.  Maybe with stimulated neurogenesis, maybe with epigenetic changes.  We’ll be able to, in much larger part, undo what these people have done.  (“But you can’t undo time-” so what?  If we extend the lifespan, even the cost of lost time is significantly diminished.)

It’s a crime that damage done to bodies can be permanent, now.  But that won’t hold in the future.

And the flipside to your fears of surveillance is that when everyone has cameras for eyes, this sort of thing becomes far more difficult.

Also, if we play our cards right, we’ll have so much economic production that we can just pay people to take six or ten years just recovering from trauma.

But, to get there, as a species, we must endure.  As our ancestors endured, and their ancestors endured.

wirehead-wannabe

The “people won’t be able to get a way with violent crime when everyone has cameras” thing is a lot less significant when video evidence of crimes can be easily, reliably, and convincingly forged, which I feel is likely to happen soon.

mitigatedchaos

It’s in real time.  Not only recording, but transmission and tracking, allowing deployment of LEOs in response, or simply locating the exact position where someone went missing.  

A price to pay, to be sure, but it does create these capabilities.

wirehead-wannabe
wirehead-wannabe

Honestly, most of the people on the other side of the net neutrality debate are probably living in a completely different world from me. They have over a half dozen different options for ISPs, all of whom actually have to compete with one another to keep the customer happy.

Meanwhile I’m over here my little corner of Iowa, which in a duopoly in part because it’s LITERALLY ILLEGAL TO HAVE SATELLITE INTERNET.

wirehead-wannabe

@oliwhail said “Wait why in the world is it illegal” I mean I’m pretty sure it’s because Mediacom and Centurylink want it to be. I have no idea what the justification is though.

mitigatedchaos

Probably building out the lines (and then not spending money on upgrading them).

In some countries, the government builds the lines and then rents them out.  Those countries have cheaper internet access.

What really gets me is that they won’t even let local power cooperatives compete on this, when they’re demonstrably better.  (In fact, local utility cooperatives seem pretty good generally.)

Never forget that the Market actively pays people to sabotage itself.

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