• Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 days ago

    I mean, I want to have hope, but the major first world nations of the world didn’t build a god damned surveillance state over the last 40 years for nothing. Those fourteen eyes are watching.

    What’s coming is Hitler’s Shutzstaffel on absolute fucking steroids. We used to say, regarding the Patriot Act, that the tools being developed were the kind the Nazi SS would have fucking wet dreams about.

    Anne Frank wasn’t followed by a GPS tracking unit & surveillance device in her pocket tied to her real name and address that she regularly used to talk with friends. Anne Frank didn’t have to worry about heat-scanners that find people hidden in walls. Anne Frank didn’t have to worry about the internet at the home she was being hidden in was monitored. Anne Frank was still found and murdered by the Nazis, with much less surveillance, and much lower tech.

    I’m not gonna drown myself in hopium and copium. I’m ready for our ramshackle poor-man’s cyberpunk world to pop off and start the Water Wars. Because that’s sadly way more likely than humans getting their fucking shit together.

    EDIT: You want it to get better, start organizing, even for things as simple and small as local mutual aid networks, only using encrypted channels. No, people won’t like it. Yes, they’re hard to use. If you want to not be constantly infiltrated by people trying to stop you doing good works, go ahead and keep organizing in cleartext. If we want to actually make headway against corrupt governments and corporations yes that means you’ll have to learn to do some shit on your own and it won’t be as fancy and clean as the corporate option. Stop relying on the groups oppressing you for the tools to fight your oppression by them. The groups oppressing you will never give you the tools to dismantle them.

    • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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      7 days ago

      Yeah, I’m soon going to be testing out technologies like Meshtastic and ensuring I have a basic survival kit in case natural disaster, revolution, martial law, or some other shit hitting the fan.

      If we can’t trust the people we’ve put trust in to do good for us, then we have to re-make every aspect of our society from the ground up.

      (Honestly speaking about my government, I have faith in my province and city, but if PP gets into federal office I will be very worried).

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        7 days ago

        This is the way.

        Whether we like it or not we rely on modern technology these days. I’d like to see more Mutual Aid Group activity driven to build community mesh-networks and the like. Bring back the ideology of the barbed wire phone networks and community communications. We sold off every bit of communications to corporations, and that’s a problem.

        LoRa texting devices are also pretty dope, too.

        from the ground up.

        An important point. Real change never comes from the top down. Stop looking for leaders and start being a community.

      • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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        7 days ago

        Uuuhh, just like anything that transmits RF, Meshtastic nodes can also be tracked, even if you set location info to some very low precision level.

        It is perhaps less likely to be tracked than a phone, but it still can be.

        • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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          7 days ago

          Yeah of course. You can also seclude yourself in the mountains but planes and drones can track that too. That’s not really the point though.

          The point is that we have to rebuild communities on new trust networks, not the ones operated by billionaires that work in concert with government. With those, information is readily handed over. With smaller locally distributed networks, they have to deliberately take it from us. This tacit censorship and manufactured consent is what I’m trying to defeat. Taking on the surveillance state is far too much of an uphill battle to go alone or in small groups.

          As an analogy, it is trivial to scrape my and other users’ posts off the fediverse, but some actor for the government, data broker or AI has to create the tool or ask every server admin for information rather than a central entity (such as dessalines). This data is less valuable commercially because it is not exclusive to whoever collected it, anyone of the public can too. It is also difficult to just remove us all off the fediverse, because simply taking the site offline doesn’t removes its copies from others. A federated purge would is needed which is harder to acheive on a large scale.

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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      7 days ago

      I mean, I want to have hope, but the major first world nations of the world didn’t build a god damned surveillance state over the last 40 years for nothing

      Tinfoil hat

      I’m 100% convinced the drones in the news lately are prototyping a new mass surveillance program to be kicked off after Trump takes office, likely funded by Musk, likely for purposes related to his planned mass deportations, and so little is being done about it because folks are being told Jan 20 isn’t that far away, you better not.

      /Tinfoil hat

      My slightly less tinfoil hat option B is that it’s only your garden variety mass surveillance program being piloted, kicked off under Biden, and that will be unlikely to be curtailed under Trump.

      Because as a veteran, I refuse to believe that craft the military weren’t intimately familiar with would receive nothing but a shrug in reaction to this, yet that’s all that has happened.

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        7 days ago

        I’m actually with you on both of those possibilities. It was some of the first stuff that came into my head in regards to that issue, as well.

      • ivanafterall ☑️@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        While we’re tinfoil hatting, it’s worth noting the weird uptick in UFO/suddenly “UAP” stuff the last few years. UFOs have often meant “we’re covering up some other program, LOOK OVER HERE DUMMIES!!!” and it just sort of appeared, blew up, then has simmered in the background with no resolution. As UFO stuff is wont to do. And a lot of Republicans have weirdly jumped on board (Rubio, et al.).

    • phx@lemmy.ca
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      7 days ago

      They’re watching, but here’s the thing: at a certain volume, seeing everything actually becomes a detriment as the noise creates false positives and drowns out useful data.

      If EVERYONE is pissed off, angry, and posting about it online etc then sorting out “angry enough to do something” gets harder. It’ll be interesting to see what the “right to bear arms” folks in government come up with when they’re the ones in the crosshairs rather than schoolkids

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Correct.

        When it comes down to the necessary facts, it’s a numbers game. There are so many more pissed off people than there are in power and wealth. They’d essentially have to massacre incredible amounts of people without destroying their own means of making income.

        Guess how much a health care insurance org makes without people to insure?

        $0. Interestingly, the same amount we believe it should make with people to insure as well.