facebook is killing our children
44 2011-11-20 by [deleted]
I am generally talking about an issue larger than censorship. I am trying to sketch out for myself and others what I see the "plan" to be. Where is facebook going? Where is the internet going? And more importantly, who is driving the bus?
I got online in 1996. I have had my own url/website since 1998, although it has changed a dozen times. I have been here a while. At first it was a maze with no map - you had to know where to go, like the old dial-in BBS systems. Then came the search engines, ultimately dominated by google. It was never a perfect map, but it was good enough. It gets better all the time...
However.
The map is becoming the internet. The search engine (google) and webportal (facebook) want to be the internet. They are AOL II. The difference between the two is the difference between a search engine and a webportal. Facebook wants you to do everything through it, and it keeps making strategic moves to make this happen. Google wants to find everything and serve it up to you, and offer you all kinds of other web products to keep you logged in and subjected to more ads. Google is however still imperfect, and does not reflect the darknets or TOR. The hidden wiki is hidden for a reason, right?
The larger issue is that because of tighter, closer corporate control and interest in the net, the map has built major thoroughfares where most traffic settles - amazon, ebay, cnn.com, and so on. Before social media, before even myspace, each netizen had to build their own place - now with facebook it is not personal, it has a default look everyone has to follow. This pattern extends even into google+ etc. I miss the old days where you coughed up the dough and got a god damned url.
Meanwhile, government and business have noticed that anything that can be digitized is no longer scarce. And scarcity is good for business. Used to be you bought a CD of music (or record lol) and there was just the one you had. You could loan it to a friend, but you can't hear it when he or she has it. The scarcity is really in the plastic - the music is just a recording. A copy. A reproduction of a "live" event - albeit in a studio...
So to answer the sudden drop in scarcity and the drop in value of products, instead of trying to adapt to a new model of digital product sales, we have introduced an artificial scarcity. For instance: libraries can only loan certain publisher's e-books out X number of times (about 20) before they must purchase a new copy. What the flying fuck? It is a series of bits in an order, it cannot be worn out.
Secondary to the business angle, I would imagine any politician in high office would have noticed by now what the internet just did to the Arab world last year. They are still trying to regain control of the region, as a host of western puppet dictators just got ousted by their people, and we need to be on the winning side. I think we killed Gaddifi to 1. keep a semblance of our own control in the region and 2. prevent an Arab superpower - in addition to any other positive outcome.
So the net is threat. The police who are pepper spraying and beating with indiscretion are not using new tactics - they have been doing just this and covering each others asses for a decade or longer. Now the citizens have cameras, so shit is getting reported. These reports are a threat to order. To a specific mode of thinking and way of being that you and I and all of our friends have been raised to follow, to believe, to live and fully embody. By virtue of that, to maintain control, the net has to be killed. Or maybe repurposed. We want money, and control. So we have to take the net - we have to start by removing anyone who violates our rules.
They can and will do these things - and in order to control the net they need to 1. control the users and 2. control the content. The SOPA / Protect IP act is CLEARLY the latter goal. It essentially allows the government to un-create any site. The blocking would make it as if the site never existed. No access. Reddit, youtube, and G+ are examples of totally legitimate sites that would face exile. Megaupload, 4chan, demonoid and thepiratebay would be gone. Just gone. Inaccessible. Also Protect IP makes it illegal to set up, use, or share information on how to use or set up darknets and TOR relays. Illegal like go to jail. Jail. For pirating Ass to Mouth Queens 9.
The first goal - control the users is just as easy. You need to create a national internet ID for user access. Here is an article about Obama (the left wing democrat!) pursuing such goals: http://www.techi.com/2011/01/obamas-national-internet-id/
McCain and Giuliani both proposed similar requirements for net access. (it's bi-partisan!) Everything you would do would be tracked. Google makes Chrome - Chrome has porn mode. That is evidence to me that google understands some of what you do online should be private. Google lets you download your history and close your account easily. They want you to maintain control of your history - they still use it, and they are still to close for comfort, but they aren't as fascist about it as facebook. I am sure much of this is old news to you, but perhaps this rant will help you frame this issue to friends and families.
Which leaves me to conclude. The net is under threat. Every tiny step toward censorship and control should ring as loud as a bell. All they need is an excuse to implement the ID requirement.
And when they do, facebook has already built a ready-to-go national database of individuals. This is how facebook is killing our children. In 10 years, the net will be gone. It will require a log in, and it will have no semblance to what is was, or even is now. It will be cable. It will be tracked, controlled, astroturfed, and recorded. Law enforcement will continue to use it to track us - to oppress us, but we will be not allowed to use it to communicate freely.
I am serious as a heart attack here. Ten years. Tops. Unless with fight.
17 comments
10 [deleted] 2011-11-20
I agree with everything said here. The lack of cyber privacy is just disgusting, along with lack of political accountability
4 alekben 2011-11-20
I agree with your sentiment, and thinking back to the days before effective search engines (pre-map) brings a tear to my eye. However, I want to point out that if you read the language and exact powers that SOPA / Protect IP provide (and we may refer to them as just SOPA anyway, since Protect IP already passed and its hold would be automatically retracted if SOPA passes), you'll see that as of now, the primary focus is to prevent the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and in a roundabout way, the sale of generics. The issue, and where you are correct, is that this is accomplished by giving the government the right to classify websites as 'domestic' and 'foreign', and any site that is both infringing upon corporate copyright and also on the 'foreign' list must be automatically removed from DNS tables by every ISP, lest they lose there immunity. 'Domestic' sites will be harder to remove, though the powers spelled out in this act are written from the perspective of a nine-year old ("Hurrrr, then we pull out the plug from the internet box and infringement all gone, derr!" [Actual Quote from Act]). I think the real motivation behind these two laws are to remove the courts from copyright enforcement. A company tells the Attorney General, he puts the address on the list, and ISPs must comply without question, nor does anyone have to contact or warn the registrant of a 'foreign infringing' site.
The streaming 'Additional Enhancements' to the act are troubling, but there is nothing in there that hasn't already been written into law, apart the the ridiculous addition of a 'greater than $1000 during a 180-day period' threshold for public copyright reproduction. Meaning, if your product is worth shit, anyone can reproduce it all they want, even with a copyright. The fact that this is in the bill will never be brought to light, nor abused because it's fucking obtuse, but its in there. Sorry, got off track. Anyway, SOPA would certainly give the government the power to 'un-create,' as you say, websites, but these website would first have to be defined under the new criteria. The government would be directly liable for abuse of these classifications, if any legal challenges were to be filed after the fact. Still, you are right that they can force block any site at will, but they would not be able to do this to sites like reddit and youtube without major legal hurdles. Most importantly, the act is written so stupidly that if it ever went to court, it would be deemed unconstitutional in a heartbeat, so legal hurdles will be avoided at all costs, because the giveaway to pharma and entertainment is too juicy to risk. Still hate it, still against it, just don't think its the kill switch some are making it out to be.
As for Facebook though, that shit is way scarier to me.
EDIT: TL&DR: Holy shit that's long, SOPA is for circumventing the courts when initially enforcing copyright law and for preventing generic pharmaceuticals to be sold nationally. SOPA wouldn't stand up to legal challenge, not likely to be abused. Still stupid.
1 alekben 2011-11-20
You know, looking at it again now, I'll have to go through it more carefully. I was more familiar with PROTECT IP, having been majorly pissed off when that little bundle of stupid was dropped on the Senate floor, and went through it meticulously. I figured they would be identical, but there are some interesting 'military' offenses and restrictions pumped in, for what reason I can't fathom, because if a member of the Armed Forces;Feds;LE really did traffic in materials that 'intended for use in a military or national security application, or a law enforcement or critical infrastructure application,' he would be dealt with by military courts in order to avoid, rather be legally forced to, prevent releasing of any security information. There is also an interesting quip regarding trafficking, particularly that if the offender is 'a person OTHER than an INDIVIDUAL', however the fuck you'd like to interpret that, this non-person gets fined and sentenced on average by a factor of three. It would certainly be easy to say that something like Wikileaks is 'other than an individual,' or than any drug-smuggling orgo is 'other than an individual,' but there are myriads of law that handle this already in clearer language. I could see websites being considered 'other than an individual,' and here is the list of things (along with pharmaceuticals) that are considered infringement and trafficking when sold with a 'counterfeit mark': labels, patches, stickers, wrappers, badges, emblems, medallions, charms, boxes, containers, cans, cases, hangtags, documentation, or packaging of any type or nature.
Notice documents, there? That is likely the significant one. There is no need for this list since the line before it defines trafficking of any sort with a counterfeit mark as punishable offense. Strange list.
2 r0t0r00t 2011-11-20
Ten years is very optimistic.
2 s70n3834r 2011-11-20
It has been under attack since it began to pay.
2 [deleted] 2011-11-20
indeed. however people looking for money attack in a different way than people looking to control a nation. in the end they have the same goals.
2 Fopmoon 2011-11-20
Surprising how anything offered for "free" to you on the street, would be looked at with skepticism, but on the web free (facebook, google) is accepted outright.
I don't think any of us can comprehend how much people "need" the internet, personally I think it's almost become as essential as "love" is to many. What will happen over the next ten or twenty years is the old guard retire and the new guard of people who grew up on the net, take over. Perceptions may change, once people who've actually used the web get into power.
The US post office never banned people from sending anonymous letters, I think the internet should be the same.
2 ambiversive 2011-11-20
Make your own social network. Here is some code to get you started.
4 [deleted] 2011-11-20
the entire internet is my social network.
1 thetimeisnow 2011-11-20
We need a website we can work together and create the world we desire.
2 EyesfurtherUp 2011-11-20
the internet is a military invention.
1 SHAGGSTaRR 2011-11-20
Then we must make the web peer-to-peer
I dabble in python and I can tell that it can be done with nought but the python standard library. I'm going to write a caching proxy with an sqlite3 backend that lets you navigate the web and effortlessly store what you read so you can annotate the content through jQuery and save the results so you can share what you've hilighted or changed by sharing the URL. Some folks will have to learn about network address translation and port forwarding. Turning that into a peer-to-peer application will be a matter of connecting to friends, comparing checksums and merging databases. It can definitely be done and it would run on almost any platform, even android.
What's the point of taking a site down when everyone has a copy of it anyway? :)
1 [deleted] 2011-11-20
I fear that after the "reboot" of the net, all data will be piped through "legitimate" means and it will become harder to hide traffic.
Sites change all the time, and the net evolves. 4chan would be impossible to have a local copy of.
3 SHAGGSTaRR 2011-11-20
actually it wouldn't if you wouldn't mind polling it - you'd be running a local version of 4chanarchive - for any site you pleased, though. you could save specific threads even after they're clinically dead, so its swings and roundabouts.
when i said "Turning that into a peer-to-peer application will be a matter of connecting to friends, comparing checksums and merging databases." I meant the program would do that after being told to by the user. What's to say you couldn't schedule polling like rss clients do? It would be integral, because if a website you're storing suddenly goes from its regular content to just a warning from a government agency, you and whoever else whose following the site will know as quickly as your schedule timer permits.
the future of the web is basically a slower imitation of IRC, so decentralisation, if done right would be akin to server linkages, freeing up bandwidth.
from a national infrastructure point of view they cant suddenly whipe out your current networking drivers and hardware regardless of how fast they'll tell you the new internet is, and there is MONEY in maintaining legacy systems - the current internet would be a legacy system.
1 DarfVad3r 2011-11-20
According to the news, a lot more parents are killing their children...maybe because of fb?
-3 Crimsonera 2011-11-20
Tl,Dr?
3 [deleted] 2011-11-20
not for this, sorry. I cover too much ground.