Month: July 2019

Listened to a summary of The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.  It’s from 1951, but relevant today.  (“how quickly a democratic society can turn against its people”.)

What I took from this digest is how atomisation, isolation and disenfranchisement are fertile grounds for totalitarianism.  Without community and society you lose your sense of self and become easy prey for messages of totalitarianism.  Someone will come along and claim to represent you, and give an outlet for diesenfranchisement.

Once in a totalitarian society, people disengage from analytical and political thought.  The only thing that matters is the leader’s vision for the future.  Challenges to that vision are twisted to be from an enemy trying to mislead the public.

I forgot to post about it but I really enjoyed the Restarters Tooting event from a couple of weeks back.   I helped Ernestine with various problems she was having on both her laptop and her tablet.  If you like helping people and fixing things, I definitely recommend finding or starting a repair group near you, it’s a lot of fun!

Some more photos here: https://twitter.com/tttooting/status/1147549448807047170

Listening to a thing about populism.  Interesting to delve into it.

In a nutshell: it’s a political strategy rather than an ideology, where the people’s interests are juxtaposed against a supposed elite.  It can have various host ideologies.  Personalist leaders claim to represent the people.  It’s hard to roll back populist attitudes once activated.

In honour of ORGCon:

Surveillance by A Frames.

Surveillance Camera,
I am in love with ya

Off to ORGCon today, my first time going.

https://orgcon.openrightsgroup.org/2019/

A conference with topics of data, democracy, privacy, censorship, algorithms and surveillance.

I will watch the keynote from Snowden of course, and then I think the debates on evoting and end-to-end encryption. Maybe IoT and data.