[responsible]

PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance. I’m tired of these articles that suggest we’re helpless fools sleepwalking into a dystopia. Encryption is all we have now to fight Orwellian dystopias and it’s worth having good opsec (depending on your threat model). I feel very safe and cozy on the web and with technology in general because it’s all locked down. MFA. Password managers, AD blockers, secure operating systems, compartmentalized identities etc

[motohagiography]

Where reading PKD and absorbing his worldview ends and a career in infosec begins is incresingly vague. I've been in it since the 90's and tbh, sometimes I think cybersecurity is just a way of collecting undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenics and setting them against one another for sport. If it weren't, how would we know?

There is a great talk by him from about '77 where he outlines the basic idea that we are living in a simulation that became the basis for the plot of The Matrix movies, and the logic is pretty classic psychological disassociation and paranoia you get from using drugs over time. Not to diminish his huge contributions, but there's stuff that's right on the edge. One of the beautiful elements of the "Mr. Robot" series is that this underlying question is also a major plot point. You can see him in the video here (sorry, the better versions seem to haven scrubbed) https://youtu.be/_U6lgSbPj8Q?t=47 , and he's got the kind of blunted affect that is typically associated with decline. His book "Exegesis," which were the letters he was writing to people at the time are consistent with indications something was going wrong as well. When I was just learning synths and a new sampler over the pandemic, I produced a track from a live session with samples from the speech, albeit they were in reference to the "Computer Controlled" logo on the 303 bass synth I used in it: https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/exegesis , but I sampled just the best parts.

This is to say, neither PKD nor hackers concerned about surveillance dystopia today may have a reliable picture, as paranoia can be really enveloping. That said, of course that's what They would say - you can see how this becomes an inescapable spiral. Paranoia is the iterated logic of an idea and unless you uproot the foudational one, by virtue of perfectly reasonable and consistent logic, it's going to creep back.

[alsetmusic]

If you trust encryption, sure[0]. But state actors have basically unlimited resources. I don’t think any individual can stand up against that forever.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoored-and-stole-keys/

[Finnucane]

And in addition, to say we can use encryption to fight the surveillance state is a tacit admission that the system actually works as described, or at least that is the intent. And again Dick was not trying to predict actual technology. He was mainly thinking about how it could be used, and he was frequently on the mark.

[TheBlight]

To add to that: https://youtu.be/_ahcUuNO4so - "Crypto Won't Save You Either" from Peter Gutmann

[kastagg]

To illustrate how far this discussion is from PKD's frame of reference, PKD didn't need encryption when VALIS used a pink laser beam from space to trigger anamnesis so he remembered that he was a secret Christian in ancient Rome, and also predicted that his son would suffer from an inguinal hernia.

In case that wasn't clear enough, PKD wasn't talking about what you're talking about.

[causi]

I’m tired of these articles that suggest we’re helpless fools sleepwalking into a dystopia

We aren't. 95% of people are.

[curun1r]

You're assuming that we're talking about a government surveillance setup where information is intended to be private. But the article's discussion still applies when the subject matter is canceling people on social networks.

In fact it seems even more apropos of the dual identity of both subject and narc that the article discusses. Traditional government surveillance makes most of us solely subjects with little role in the enforcement process. But in a world where mob justice applies social sanctions, we're all simultaneously judges and candidates to become defendants, able to be condemned by our own words. Encryption is irrelevant when those words are intended for public consumption.

Black Mirror did an episode on what it would look like if your social reputation were reified into concrete societal privileges. That kind of ad absurdum exploration makes the surveillance state of social networks much easier to recognize.

[paulpauper]

PKD didn’t consider encryption and the many tools we can use to thwart spying and surveillance.

I have lost count of the times people used encryption and either it was broken or subverted in some way, an example being the FBI creating its own encryption app as a major honeypot. Encryption apps, chat programs , protocols, etc. have a recurring tendency to be broken or have leaks.

[anony23]

This either satire or laughably naive. You think big brother doesnt have disproportionate access to crack or backdoor the tech that makes you feel so safe?