Blake Haswell @blakehaswell@social.coop

You fight this by building alternatives. Open a zero-waste food coop that collects glass pasta sauce jars and gives them away to customers. Host a FLOSS fair at your public library where you install (and teach basic literacy on) open-source OS's on computers and phones. Don't expect people to go it alone and do all the work, we can all help each other

"Just go zero-waste!" is to environmentalism as "Just give up all the software you currently use and vet, hack, and troubleshoot all of your software yourself, building an encyclopedic knowledge of all the ways you're tracked and blocking each one!" is to infosec

It shouldn't be our responsibility to keep companies from stealing our data, nor should it be our responsibility to keep them from giving us plastic packaging. Especially when the alternatives are so inaccessible to the average person. Stop blaming the victim

Today's Dilbert strip is just brilliant 😂

"The Simulated World": https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-03-03

as a programmer, let me say: stop putting computers in everything it makes the things worse

I have completed my first day as a full-time free software developer 🎉

To hope to tackle surveillance capital you need to understand its origins. It's what happened after the dot com bust in 2001, when companies decided that nobody would pay for web services. There were however people willing to pay for the ability to influence, which is what advertising is about.

Surveillance capital isn't just about surveillance. It's not just about rendering "the market" transparent to certain actors. It's also about altering behavior. "Nudge". The ability to uniquely customise the user experience to each individual, but in a top down way where the individual doesn't decide how that happens.

It's a feedback loop.

The good thing about the fediverse is that while it might be fully transparent the ability to then translate any knowledge gained into influence is far more limited. There is no top down control of timelines. If timeline control happens it will be the user deciding what they want to see, not an advertising company.

To beak surveillance capital decentralized systems in which user agency is primary need to become hegemonic. It's not likely that anyone will talk about this at conferences which are sponsored by Google and Microsoft.

@humanetech @rysiek @switchingsocial Capitalism is expert at shifting blame to the consumer and creating niche markets that allow (usually the privileged among them) to either avoid certain core externalities or rinse their consciences (or do both) through further/alternative consumption without actually threatening the system itself.

“Don’t use Google” is very different to “we should tax Google like tobacco”. Much talk about former, we need more on latter.

@humanetech @rysiek @switchingsocial … we must definitely raise awareness but we must put the blame squarely in the right place while doing so. Instead of blaming people for shopping at supermarkets due to convenience (to use the example given), tax supermarkets and use it to subsidise local mom and pop stores so they can afford to be the convenient alternatives. But that won’t happen unless supermarkets are seen as a social ill instead of job creators, etc.

@humanetech @rysiek @switchingsocial We cannot blame people for using the tools of surveillance capitalism as long as 99.99999% of all investment goes into surveillance capitalism. That’s victim blaming. It’s the same as telling people that they can solve climate change by altering their consumption habits while just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of all carbon emissions. We need systemic regulation of abusers and investment in alternatives.

This is a public service announcement: by saying "IT is crap because users still buy it" you are effectively blaming the victim.

There is a huge information and resources asymmetry between large companies creating software and hardware, and regular person who just wants their Internet-connected device to, you know, not do harm. Companies effectively made a business model out of that asymmetry.

We need education and regulation to make IT not crap.

White people assume niceness is the answer to racial inequality. It's not.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/16/racial-inequality-niceness-white-people

perhaps they can understand better when the message comes from their own people.

The ethical technology of 2019 https://blog.freedombone.net/the-ethical-technology-of-2019

Speaking of DIY skills and such, I think soap and bread are two of the top "it's easier* than it sounds" things you can make and enjoy a direct, material benefit from.

For example, I used to think you needed a bread machine to make bread. Then I realized, "That can't be right. People have made bread for thousands of years."

I think the process of making things like that has become kind of obscured from us in modern life. But you really can just go out and Make A Thing.

Today it struck me how people see #facebook as some public good. The company for sure is trying to build this image of "facebook connects people" and "makes the world a better place", but it surprises me how the average people don't see facebook as the shady data-leaking irresponsible anticompetitive and exploitative mega-corporation it really is. They think it's the "necessary bad".

#Capitalism is a reasonable economic system that destroys 100 million trees a year to mass-produce something that literally no one asked for and literally everyone hates

Imo, one of the most damning aspects of capitalism is that it encourages people to have consumptive hobbies over creative ones.

It actively seeks to bar people from doing things like cooking, or writing, or making pottery, or anything else of that nature. Activities in which you are making something

Things like that are made either too expensive (in terms of money, or time, or both) or framed as something not worth wasting time on, because you can't support yourself doing art/writing/etc