[stcredzero]

From the article:

> The machine does not treat us as human beings with minds and free will, Moglen continuted, but as "stimulus and response correlations" to be sorted and sold as "mineable human attention."

That is how people seem to act, if you weight by the volume of their speech on the internet. Since the 90's, the internet has gone from a place of intellectual wonder and discovery to a mob scene of the lowest common denominator, where "telling it like it is" is seen as the highest virtue. It's the realization of the metaphor about distributing a piano to every classroom without providing funds for instruction. ("Chopsticks culture.") Is this the end of the world? No. Human beings will create more culture, and it will eventually become as refined and rarefied as anything that came out of a 19th century salon or 15th century patronage.

The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT. Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly makes it available to anyone with an internet connection.

It's a pity for common people that the depredations of corporations with DRM has demonized it. As horrible as it is when used by companies, it would be a tremendous boon if it could be used by individuals to protect themselves against companies. Just as secrecy of individual information is privacy, and good for individuals and society, and the opposite of that for companies (openness) is also good for society, so it is with cryptographically auditable trusted execution on the behalf of individuals vs. companies. There is an asymmetry that makes it horrible in one direction and great in another.