Support Wikileaks, Boycott Amazon
Dec. 7th, 2010 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marjaerwinOf course, Amazon was responding to politicians' threats.
But someone has to stand firm here. Everything is on the line.
A free internet, a rigidly censored one, or a shutdown?
The political establishment is unwilling to tolerate a free internet, and unable to censor it. I suspect they will shut the internet down within the next 10 years.
A society of privacy or one of secrecy?
Privacy and secrecy are not the same thing. Privacy is a matter of individual/cooperative freedom, including freedom from surveillance, and including the freedom to organize for mutual aid. Of course, the state cannot legitimately claim anything, but in particular the state cannot claim the right to violate individual/cooperate freedom or claim those freedoms for itself.
The state has no privacy rights.
The state has secrecy.
That secrecy is the power of the state to conspire against the people, against the people across its borders, and against the people it considers undesirables, "illegals," defectives, "Untermenschen," and other classes it chooses to target. That secrecy is the power of the state to conceal its crimes: war, torture, prison rape, and the rest.
I don't believe that the technologies exist to create an impervious totalitarianism.
But the ruling class seems determined to try to maintain their place by any means possible, while they destroy the world around them. They may bring humanity into darkness. During the Cold War they developed second strike capabilities which had no purpose but to bring humanity into darkness. They may do this more slowly yet less deliberately, exhausting the oil supplies on which mass agriculture depends, shooting refugees at the border as the system collapses, and watching the ecosystem collapse and the people die off...
In hundreds or thousands of years, humanity might begin to rebuild. But the world will have been impoverished.
But someone has to stand firm here. Everything is on the line.
A free internet, a rigidly censored one, or a shutdown?
The political establishment is unwilling to tolerate a free internet, and unable to censor it. I suspect they will shut the internet down within the next 10 years.
A society of privacy or one of secrecy?
Privacy and secrecy are not the same thing. Privacy is a matter of individual/cooperative freedom, including freedom from surveillance, and including the freedom to organize for mutual aid. Of course, the state cannot legitimately claim anything, but in particular the state cannot claim the right to violate individual/cooperate freedom or claim those freedoms for itself.
The state has no privacy rights.
The state has secrecy.
That secrecy is the power of the state to conspire against the people, against the people across its borders, and against the people it considers undesirables, "illegals," defectives, "Untermenschen," and other classes it chooses to target. That secrecy is the power of the state to conceal its crimes: war, torture, prison rape, and the rest.
I don't believe that the technologies exist to create an impervious totalitarianism.
But the ruling class seems determined to try to maintain their place by any means possible, while they destroy the world around them. They may bring humanity into darkness. During the Cold War they developed second strike capabilities which had no purpose but to bring humanity into darkness. They may do this more slowly yet less deliberately, exhausting the oil supplies on which mass agriculture depends, shooting refugees at the border as the system collapses, and watching the ecosystem collapse and the people die off...
In hundreds or thousands of years, humanity might begin to rebuild. But the world will have been impoverished.
