The /s is implied.
sips coffee aggressively
balls: USA, Geolibertarianism, Virginia, Bisexuality, Atheistic Satanism

  • 1 Post
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

    This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

    Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.


  • That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

    If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.






  • Only if being “entitled to the fruits of labor” does not preclude the state (or any state-like entity, don’t even start with me) from seizing and/or arbitrating the value of that fruit. If that’s the case, what is the value of the so-called entitlement?

    The reason private property is vital to a just society is that we do not know the ultimate purpose of society. We can not even estimate the size of the universe; claiming to understand the role of mankind without knowing its position in the cosmos is like claiming to understand a blood cell with no knowledge of the circulatory system. We all have exactly the same right and cause to determine the purposes of our own lives. Different life goals lead to different evaluations of goods and services. I do not eat flesh, listen to K-pop, or ski. To appropriate the value of my labor for the benefit of these systems for which I have no use is a violation of my natural right to determine the purpose of my own life