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by rolux
5019 days ago
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Remember that there are two possible outcomes, one where the internet successfully manages to cause a swing to the edge of freedom, and another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was. It seems so me that in the 1990s, the future that was widely (outside some truly dystopian sci-fi fringes of the net discourse) regarded as the worst-case scenario was the Internet becoming like radio -- i.e. another peer-to-peer medium turned into a broadcast medium. So it may be worth noting that while the best-case scenario hasn't changed much since then, the worst-case scenario has. |
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This is the most poignant insight in the article. For some decades now, it has been accepted--with minimal opposition--that we are beholden to some party (the state) for the right to travel. Then it is not far-fetched to imagine that in some decades, the right to communicate may be popularly regarded as a mere "privilege" which is granted by the generosity of the state. We accept random searches at airports, centralized driver licensing, red light cameras, etc. The legislature already flirts with the digital equivalents of those concepts.