Author: Neil Mather

I’m reading through at the moment. The chapter linking the work of to the ideas of is very interesting and I am getting my head around some of the ideas.  Solid and get a namecheck, which is pretty much just under a different guise.

(Most of the chapter from the book is also available online here: Fanon and (digital) self-determination).

A better way to understand what we mean when we talk about privacy, then, is to see it as a right to self-determination. Self-determination is about self-governance, or determining one’s own destiny.

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I think there are some parallels with what said here:

p2p networks weren’t primarily about evading surveillance, evading copyright, or maintaining anonymity, but one of netwerk-resilience and not having someone with power over the ‘off-switch’ for the entire network

Future Histories:

digital privacy—and its philosophical twin, freedom—involves anonymity, secrecy, and . Autonomy is not just evading surveillance. Autonomy means the freedom to act without being controlled by others or manipulated by covert influences.

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I am going to read Ton’s posts on networked agency, as I feel like there is a connection there. (And they will be good, even if not).

Self-determination is both a collective and individual right, an idea of privacy that is much more expansive and politically oriented. It is about allowing people to communicate, read, organize and come up with better ways of doing things, sharing experiences across borders, without scrutiny or engineering, a kind of cyberpunk internationalism.

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Self-determination, autonomy, agency – it certainly does sound related.

Autonomy, digital self-determination, agency

I made my wiki have a view. I like it, I think it works well for wikis.

2020-07-20_20-27-16_xU4hlD4.png

I think it’s probably something that could be a browsing style option built into the browser, rather than forcing it into an individual website, but hey, it’s not, so here we are. Roll on !

I copied most of the code for it from Jethro Kuan’s Cortex Hugo theme (which he says he mostly copied it from azlen.me), and then wrangled it into my org-mode process.

It’s Miller time

Replied to https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/07/14707/ by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

Another good find by Neil Mather for me to read a few times more. A first reaction I have is that in my mind p2p networks weren’t primarily about evading surveillance, evading copyright, or maintaining anonymity, but one of netwerk-resilience and not having someone with power over the ‘off-switc…

Yes it’s interesting that they focus on privacy.  I do agree with the main thrust of the article, that without diligence, and when just focusing on the tech, the decentralised can easily be centralised again.  And in some cases the absence of privacy can be the attack vector.  But I think I find things like the anti-disintermediation of blogging, email (gmail) and git (github) as more low-hanging examples of what we need to prevent against, where privacy had nothing to do with it.
Replied to https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/07/14701/ by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

Bookmarked for reading (found in Neil Mather’s blog). Actual cases of ‘tethered’ economic transactions where a buyer is bound into an ongoing relationship with the seller with an uneven power balance, are already easy to find: John Deere suing farmers for tinkering with their tractors (with De…

It’s troubling too to think how this will encroach on more and more transactions, as so many things become are becoming so-called ‘smart’.  As Paul says in his Info Civics article, “All authority is borrowed from the server, and so the users possess no authority of their own. As a result we must describe these services as authoritarian.”  It’s provocative but I think the same could be applied here.

We have an interview with one of the authors, Aaron Perzanowski, here – https://therestartproject.org/podcast/crisis-copyright/.

Replied to https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/07/14698/ by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

I’ve been keeping Zettelkasten style notes in Obisidian for about a week now, and this morning I made the first new connection between some of my notes / thoughts. It was a bit of a ‘well duh’ realisation, but one I never made explicit for myself before even if in hindsight it is obvious those…

That’s great. I hear lots of good things about Obsidian. How did the connection happen? (I’m very interested in constellation formation!)

Obsidian constellation

Replied to https://desmondrivet.com/2020/07/19/100600 by Desmond RivetDesmond Rivet (desmondrivet.com)

Interesting. How do you think this would apply to something like a distributed game, where you want a certain kind of enforcement of the rules between players?

I think the argument would be that any enforceable rules would be built in to the protocol itself.  Kind of like the idea of smart contracts I guess – certainly not without its own range possible pitfalls, but the idea being that it requires much more consensus to change a protocol.
In thin client/thick server models, the server does all the work and has all the power. Any authority for the user to do something is borrowed from the server (which can also remove it at any point).

The society of users in thick-server applications route their actions through the server. When they message each other, they are updating entries in the server’s database. When they publish files, they are writing those files to the server’s disks. The server has ultimate authority over those systems. Users can access the interfaces provided by the server to control them, but the server may override a user’s choice at any time. All authority is borrowed from the server, and so the users possess no authority of their own. As a result we must describe these services as authoritarian.

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Centralised applications are authoritarian

Liked It’s not you, it’s me by Graham (davx.radium-basement.com)

So here we are now. A collection of text files, a lot of bash scripts and a single Perl file to handle the web mentions – because no one wants to be trying to parse JSON using shell, am I right?

Looking good!  Are you going to add h-entry markup?
Bookmarked This is Fine: Optimism & Emergency in the P2P Network by Cade Diehm (newdesigncongress.org)

The resilience of centralised networks and the political organisation of their owners remains significantly underestimated by protocol activists. At the same time, the decentralised networks and the communities they serve have never been more vulnerable. The peer-to-peer community is dangerously unprepared for a crisis-fuelled future that has very suddenly arrived at their door.

h/t @Aadil