From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Thu Dec 16 1999 - 09:39:09 MST
On Wed, Dec 15, 1999 at 09:54:47PM -0800, Spike Jones wrote:
> Judging by this and some of the responses I got offlist, I will plop my
> bony middle-aged ass down and reply: you missed the point! Its not
> just that there are a jillion ways to fool big brother, and furthermore,
> they would be *fun* to do! Nor is it just that it gives us a new
> opportunity to play gags on the authorites, like we used to in college.
It's not fun when they decide it's an indicator of criminal intentions
and raid your home at four in the morning.
Would you walk into a bank wearing a stocking mask because you don't like
being taped by the security cameras? No. Why not? Because it's a good
way to get yourself a ticket to the nearest hospital mortuary. Wearing
a stocking mask in a bank is _not_ a criminal offense, but it's crime-
associated behaviour. Likewise, trying to fool biometric monitors in
public may well come to be seen as storngly crime-associated behaviour.
> No, the real point is that at some point we (and the British) must just say
> no to the government.
I don't like to play Cassandra, but ...
The British government is in place because it largely has the support of
a majority of the population. The Labour government in Westminster has
the largest parliamentary majority this century, if I'm not mistaken.
(That didn't happen by accident; their predecessors were the most corrupt
bunch of trough-guzzlers since 1832, if not earlier. Not that I'm a fan
of Tony Blair, either, but _any_ political party that can produce forty or
more financial and sexual scandals in just five years, and have one or
more ministers subsequently jailed for perjury and attempting to pervert
the course of justice, seems to be trying for a very special record.)
What most worries me about the current bunch is their self-righteous
attitude to the machineries of oppression. Yes, _their_ souls might be
pure -- and it's even possible (snort!) that in some abstract sense
everything they do is for the best -- but the machinery they're installing
is a secret policeman's wet-dream, and sooner or later they will yield
their place in government to other people who may not be quite so pure.
What worries me _next_ is the fact that despite all this, they're
popular. But then, I'm enough of a black sheep to be on this list. (I
am not a libertarian; I'm a member of the Liberal party -- not to be
confused with the Liberal Democrats.) Most of the ideas current among
extropians are _not_ current in the mainstream; in fact, they'd tend
to alarm many ordinary people if they were exposed to the full gamut of
transhumanist thought suddenly.
> The colonists did it, in the form of tea in the
> harbor. I know I am a strange one to be pointing this out, being as
> I was an early advocate of universal surveillance, however, I have
> come pi radians on this issue, and now realize that universal surveillance
> should apply *only to the willing*, those who will gladly give up all privacy
> in exchange for something else. For those whose privacy is being taken
> against their will, I wish to use my inventivess to defeat those mechanisms
> which take away privacy.
Agreed, broadly -- but the whole thrust of politics today is inimical to
that kind of freedom. (As politicians lose the power to affect economic
destiny in any meaningful way, they seem to be grasping for the levers
of social power. My theory is they're doing this because they need to
be seen to be Doing Something to justify the salary, and it's easier to
make a lot of sound and fury about trivia than to really change the way
things are.)
-- Charlie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:06:06 MST