[sudo-discuss] Sudo! Wanna co-host this surveillance event?
GtwoG PublicOhOne
g2g-public01 at att.net
Mon Feb 3 08:14:25 PST 2014
Hot Damn also, David, when you write, you right! Downright excellent.
I'll be able to reply to this tonight after work, but right now I have
to scoot.
More about Kapital and resistance and other stuff later tonight...
-G.
=====
On 14-02-03-Mon 6:43 AM, David Keenan wrote:
> damn, g. when you write you right.
>
> You're completely on point - but of course, I actually do care a lot
> about this issue. All I was inferring is once in a while the time
> comes to just shift productive energies into a new paradigm and maybe
> stop playing whack-a-mole with unsecurable modalities like email, and
> instead work on using something better to replace it. Same with the
> declining fair use and vanishing anonymity of the internet in general
> - the wonderful work the mesh folk are doing are to me a really big
> part of this solution. I almost mentioned something about
> appropriation (or feeding biting hands styrofoam peanuts) as a tactic
> being a noble way to cannabilize and take back our infrastructure that
> our tax dollars largely built, so I am 100% with you there. I have
> also said many times myself how we need to start a movement to have a
> right to data about ourselves, so I am thrilled to hear you say the
> same thing. Absolutely.
>
> When it comes to the event, we need to fight back with technological
> tools, but also with ideas. Not sure which is more important (or if
> thats even worth asking), they might be equal, but for me it comes
> down on the side of ideas, as all the tech in the world won't help if
> people don't give a hoot because they're too exhausted by the
> Spectacle-induced trance of capital etc to care, or dont see why its
> necessary or in their self-interest. I fully support the cryptoparties
> - what we also need are the crypto-semantic frames i guess, to help us
> put this fucking insane world where companies pirate and monitize our
> digital lives into a moral logic everyone, even our grandmas, can all
> intuitively grasp and therefore resist. Drive the demand as it were,
> for 'privacy'. I see events like this being part of that conversation
> on the side of ideas, but the cryptoparties, and making them less
> technically abstruse, are the other half for sure. Theory + practice =
> praxis, we need both.
>
> You know the only thing I'm not totally sure I agree with is that
> money is information..if we're talking about money and not capital I
> might agree, if we're talking about capital (which of course is not
> just 'money') I'm too tired to know if I agree or not.
>
> On the one hand, I am wary of what I see everywhere as a massive
> informationalization of our lives and in our language, of experience
> and of concepts... a scientism really thats always trying to quantify
> the qualitative - or at least, valorize the former and dismiss the
> later, if it cannot transmute it. Its a naturalizing, essentializing
> cultural phenomenon wherein we are led to simply accept without
> question that the essential aspect of anything in the world is
> ultimately 'information': Music is 'information', plants are
> 'information', we - online and in our 'genes' and 'dna' - the universe
> - are fundamentally reduceable to codes, chemical properties, etc. I
> suspect this aspect of our culture is tied to capital ideology (marx:
> 'they don't know it, but they are doing it') and biopower (think
> Patrick McCuehen saying 'I am not a number! I am a FREE MAN!'),
> although I can't think of how right now, because as I said I'm pretty
> tired, but anyway its a real mythology that needs unpacking, or
> totalizing kool-aid that needs a bit of unslurping. Nothing against
> 'information' or using 'information' as but one metaphor with which
> analyze the workings of the world, but we should never mistake our
> tools of analysis - i.e., our abstracted representation of reality,
> like calling the smell of a rose 'information' - for reality itself,
> and it seems like that's whats actually happening at some level. We
> must be epistemologically reflexive and catch ourselves before we fall
> into that trap. So, I have to think a lot before I decide that money
> is 'at its root' essentializable as 'information', too.
>
> Along the same lines another argument against money as essentially,
> fundamentally 'information' thing is this notion that its ultimately
> governed by 'math', or that the cycle of capital exploiting our
> surplus labor value is ultimately governed by math, or that financial
> markets are ultimately governed by math. I'm not sure I agree, because
> markets are also ultimately governed by human beings, who are not just
> information, and human beings, as Plato well knew, but maybe Adam
> Smith and Descartes did not, are simply not rational. At all. This is
> in large part why game theory is a total fail, why people vote against
> their economic self-interest, and also why people are not outraged at
> the deprivation of their digital liberty, etc. Scientific rationalism
> is in a way a beautiful dream, like a wonderful, utopian idea, and a
> nice way to organize a representation of the world, but it is not
> /the/ world, and we don't operate, for even one millisecond, as
> rational creatures. Just as we do not build up the world out of a
> series of concepts - we just ARE in the world, all at once, and from
> that, we think of concepts to organize it with, for ourselves. We are
> subject to cognitive and emotional centers in our brain that were
> indirectly induced to connect in accordance with certain decidedly
> a-rational cultural ways and mores through processes of socialization
> of which we had no control...
>
> Folks are tempted to think about 'math' as something pure, a religion
> practically, but how often do people get reflexive about math? Like
> the fact that we can't conceive of 'math' without also simultaneously
> conceiving of metaphors that have nothing whatsoever to actually do
> with math, but without which we could not perform math: If I say one
> is a 'higher' number than two, that has no strictly mathematical
> meaning. One is not 'higher' than two. An increase in quantity is not
> an increase in height. It's simply an increase in quantity. And yet
> numbers go 'up'. Makes no sense man...mathematically. But it does at
> the level of non-math, in real life, because if I pour you a glass of
> water, the quantity increases as the level rises. But what if we lived
> in a society where I we poured water out on the floor and drank it
> from there. Would you say that numbers go up or down? Hm. So math
> itself is actually utterly imbricated with entirely qualitative
> dimensions that only make sense from the perspective of human
> experience. And so is not so pure: the basis for 'money', perhaps,
> after all.
>
> Sleep now. Good nite.. and thanks for your awesome email..
> -d
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 5:15 AM, GtwoG PublicOhOne
> <g2g-public01 at att.net <mailto:g2g-public01 at att.net>> wrote:
>
>
>
> David, it's not to your discredit, it's to the discredit of
> Kapital, and it's been foisted on the whole Neo-Proletariat, which
> is anyone making less than six figures a year (look up union wages
> in 1974 and then apply increases at the rate of inflation every
> year with compound interest: that's what we all _should_ be
> earning right now). We shouldn't blame ourselves for getting screwed.
>
> Here's another example of Kapital sinking its hooks into our
> brains (I'm quoting you here not to criticize you, but to
> illustrate how common this type of dynamic has become):
> "Personally, once I gave up on email qua email as being
> meaningfully secure, I sort of stopped caring who my provider was."
>
> The emotional narrative in that sentence is: "...once I gave up...
> I sort of stopped caring..."
>
> That's what the Bigs want us to do: give up and stop caring, the
> better to spend our efforts producing and consuming. And they are
> enormously clever at how they go about it: too much work, just
> enough bread, and plenty of circuses. About which more below
> under "Kapital."
>
> Where you say "I really don't have an answer for this one," that
> makes the vitally important point that we ALL need answers to
> this. The fact that we don't have comprehensive answers and
> solutions shows exactly where our efforts need to be.
>
> Agreed, email is broken. IMHO the whole internet architecture is
> broken (don't get me started;-) but in any case we need new
> infrastructure and a solid collaborative effort to build it. Not
> just "good enough for coders & geeks to use" but "good enough for
> your grandmother to use without you providing tech support." You
> shouldn't have to _teach_ people to use crypto: it should be
> built-in, with nothing more than a check in a box to
> encrypt/decrypt email. The global community of hackers can build
> all of that and much more if we choose.
>
> Good point about "metadata" being a euphemism to obscure the fact
> that it's OUR data. In the past I've used the term "CDR" for
> "call detail records," a telephony term that has lately been in
> the news since it's what NSA gets from our phone calls (date,
> time, calling number, called number, duration of call); it could
> also be used to refer to email to/from addresses and subject
> headers. But "OUR data," emphasis on OUR, is better, because it's
> so direct and assertive.
>
> This translates to something specific we should be demanding:
> personal ownership of all data about ourselves, without
> compromise. Treat it like copyright with exceptions for fair
> use. Make the maximum demand, so that when the usual attempts at
> legislative watering-down occur, we still get something better
> than if we had tried to "be reasonable" and "pre-compromise" our
> demands.
>
> If it's necessary to use Facebook for publicity, the way to do it
> is by using a fictitious name & email address for the FB account,
> and then putting up a message on the Facebook page saying "find us
> _here_ (link)," which goes to a website on a more trustworthy
> hosting service. Then, that website does not have the accursed
> Facebook beacon-button on it that lets Facebook follow people
> around like a stalker. (Anyone who can't bother clicking a link
> that goes off Facebook, isn't worth the effort to reach.
> Seriously.)
>
> That's the answer to having to feed the hand that bites: Feed it
> styrofoam peanuts with no food value. Use its own infrastructure
> sparingly and temporarily, as a way to get people to leave it
> behind. For example, one of the topics at the surveillance event
> ought to be a how-to for getting the snoops & stalkers out of our
> lives: dumping Google, installing security apps on your browser,
> installing an OFF switch in your mobile device, etc., all with
> specifics: this email service, this app, here's where to find it,
> how to do it, etc.
>
> About Kapital:
>
> Karl Marx got it almost-right, but "surplus value" is an
> abstraction: the real deal is the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
> Kapital depends on "energy conversion." What humans are to
> Kapital, are highly efficient energy-converters that turn calories
> into money. The abstraction layer is between the work output of
> the human organism, and the translation of that into money. At
> root, money is energy converted to information. And information
> is ultimately Platonic, governed by math and orthogonal to
> thermodynamics.
>
> The goal of Kapital is to extract every calorie that's not needed
> to keep the energy-converters producing and consuming. Latest
> example: Amazon's patent for "predictive shipping," where they
> send you things that you haven't ordered, but Amazon predicts
> you'll want, on the premise that you'll probably keep them.
> Translation: people will pay for the "stuff" because they're too
> tired to deal with the hassle of returning it. Amazon predicts,
> humans acquiesce.
>
> The reason that so many people "give up and stop caring" is that
> they are being sucked dry. Think of all the "too tired" moments
> and what they have in common.
>
> In the end, the scam is self-limiting. Kapital thrives on the
> exponential function: the unlimited growth of money and the
> economy despite the limits of a finite planet. Kapital will break
> as it runs into resource limits, including the limits of humans to
> relentlessly produce and relentlessly consume.
>
> -G.
>
>
> =====
>
>
>
>
> On 14-02-03-Mon 2:33 AM, David Keenan wrote:
>> Matt, I will bring up your point at the next organizing meeting
>> for sure. Thank you for being willing to sponsor.
>>
>> Yardena - your point is exceedingly well taken, as I sit here
>> from my gmail account, writing about how if want to do the event,
>> we should post it on facebook...sigh.
>>
>> To my discredit, I really don't have an answer for this one
>> except that in my opinion, email as a medium is itself an
>> inherently broken means of secure communication, a lotta people
>> on sudo have google accounts, and yeah sudo posts regularly to
>> facebook, which is why I asked.. Sometimes you have to reach out
>> to people in an archaic medium they already grok - like on a
>> listserv, or fb - in order to tell them that is maybe not The
>> Best Way.
>>
>> Personally, once I gave up on email qua email as being
>> meaningfully secure, I sort of stopped caring who my provider
>> was. Or teaching people how to encrypt their message content,
>> only to have them never get that doesn't secure their attachments
>> or the "metadata" or render messages readable from the web from
>> any device anymore or or or (I kind of hate the term metadata
>> btw, as in mass culture 'metadata' has seemingly come to infer
>> something other than 'our' data, and as if metadata is not also
>> our data, just like our non-meta data).
>>
>> But yes for sure, if we care about 'privacy', we DO need to be
>> off fb (and onto building up diaspora or something similar), and,
>> we need to be off email. And use some darkmail, or otr or a
>> private forum or something else.
>>
>> I feel like for us to all get off fb, we need a real alternative
>> to go to, and a campaign. Same with email. But before we build
>> that up.. using fb/email or not using it, it seems like being
>> caught between a rock and a hard place when trying to promote an
>> event but not feed the biting hand, you know?
>>
>> As this is precisely the position I feel like the system of
>> capital as a whole places us in, far beyond mark zuckerberg and
>> google and 'big data': We can't help but feed the hand that bites
>> us. We 'need' to be bitten, so our traumatized, bitten selves can
>> feed somebody or something else..often while simultaneously
>> handing a bite to somebody else less powerful, as in in the case
>> of gentrification. If that partially re-inverted idiom still
>> makes any sense..which um, no, looks like it doesn't. Well.
>> Sorry, tired. But I totally get you.
>>
>> Yeah. Tired.
>>
>> David
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 1:12 AM, GtwoG PublicOhOne
>> <g2g-public01 at att.net <mailto:g2g-public01 at att.net>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Re. "what does the rest of sudo think?"
>>
>> Microphones & cameras on shot-spotters? What about the
>> software-controlled mics & cameras on smartphones, that
>> people carry into indoor places where the DAC cameras and
>> mics can't go? If it doesn't have a physical OFF switch or a
>> removable battery, it's always ON.
>>
>> NSA snooping your metadata? What about Google Mail and
>> Google Voice scraping the full content of both sides of every
>> email & conversation for everything down to the level of
>> "sentiment analysis" which is a euphemism for spying on your
>> emotions? "Targeted advertising" is a distraction; Big Data
>> is the real product.
>>
>> DAC data center creepy? What about Facebook creepy, and Sudo
>> having a Facebook page, even as Mark Zuckerberg spends $16
>> million to buy up every house on his block, so his neighbors
>> can't do unto him that which he does unto others...?
>>
>> Big Power is inherently corrupt wherever it resides. Big
>> Data is Big Power. Even if it has good marketing, cute
>> logos, total convenience, free apps, free games, and endless
>> entertainment.
>>
>> Corporate power says "don't bite the hand that feeds you."
>>
>> Resistance says "don't feed the hand that bites you."
>>
>> -G.
>>
>>
>> =====
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 14-02-02-Sun 11:12 AM, David Keenan wrote:
>>> Jeremy - Of course! And we should.
>>>
>>> what does the rest of sudo think?
>>>
>>> On Sunday, February 2, 2014, Jeremy Entwistle
>>> <jwentwistle at cryptolab.net
>>> <mailto:jwentwistle at cryptolab.net>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think that's an amazing idea. How to do you feel about
>>> the mesh and our cryptoparty (2/23) being mentioned? As
>>> both are very practical methods of promoting secure and
>>> decentralized communications.
>>>
>>> On 2014-02-01 21:58, David Keenan wrote:
>>>
>>> Hey all,
>>>
>>> The Bay Area Public School has scheduled a
>>> surveillance awareness
>>> event on Friday 2/21 7-9pm in the common room
>>> entitled Spied Upon:
>>> Surveillance & Resistance. I was hoping we (sudo)
>>> could co-host this
>>> event with BAPS, because I think it'd be really cool
>>> if we start doing
>>> more events together. BAPS can do most all of the
>>> setup, but it'd be
>>> great if Sudo can do outreach too, since I think
>>> it'd be in the
>>> interest of both communities.
>>>
>>> What do you think?
>>>
>>> There's a twofold focus on informants and
>>> technological surveillance.
>>> Here's the Sudo Room calendar EVENT LINK [1].
>>> Details are below -
>>>
>>> SPIED UPON: SURVEILLANCE AND RESISTANCE
>>> Join us Friday February 21st 7-9 pm at the Bay Area
>>> Public School [2]
>>> & Sudo Room
>>> 2141 Broadway (enter on 22nd), Oakland - three
>>> blocks from 19th St.
>>> Bart!
>>>
>>> Between the ever-present fear of informants to the
>>> profusion of
>>> metadata collection and the construction of the
>>> Domain Awareness
>>> Center [3] (DAC) in Oakland, the growing problem of
>>> surveillance has
>>> made it into the mainstream dialog, but the people
>>> and communities
>>> most affected are sometimes being left out of the
>>> conversation.
>>>
>>> Join us for an evening of ideas, discussion and
>>> questions about
>>> solidarity in the face of this intimidation. How do
>>> we support one
>>> another and our movements when being targeted by
>>> police, surveillance
>>> and informants? What are the legal, community and
>>> political responses
>>> that can best keep the larger "us" safe and allow
>>> our movements to
>>> flourish?
>>>
>>> - SPEAKERS -
>>> JASON KIRKPATRICK, filmmaker and activist, will show
>>> clips of and
>>> discuss his upcoming film, _SPIED UPON_ [4].
>>> Interviewing activists
>>> across the world and telling his own personal story,
>>> Jason will take
>>> us on a journey into one of Europe's biggest
>>> political surveillance
>>> scandals, documenting growing movements of
>>> resistance to surveillance
>>> along the way.
>>>
>>> ZAHRA BILLOO, Civil rights attorney and Executive
>>> Director at the Bay
>>> Area COUNCIL ON AMERICAN-ISLAMIC RELATIONS [5]
>>> (CAIR), speaks on the
>>> use of informants in a post-9/11 context, their
>>> impact, the
>>> community's resistance and lessons learned.
>>>
>>> RICHARD BROWN, Black Panther and member of the SF8
>>> [6], will share his
>>> history with undercover police and surveillance,
>>> imparting the 'long
>>> view' of solidarity learned from a lifetime of activism.
>>>
>>> - PANEL DISCUSSION -
>>> Q & A with the speakers will follow in conversation with
>>> representatives from:
>>> BAY AREA ANTI-REPRESSION COMMITTEE [7]
>>> BAY AREA COALITION TO STOP POLITICAL REPRESSION [8]
>>> (at AROC)
>>> LEGAL WORKERS OF THE NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD [9] (NLG)
>>> OAKLAND PRIVACY WORKING GROUP [10] (OPWG / anti-DAC)
>>>
>>> All donations gratefully received will go to the Bay
>>> Area
>>> Anti-Repression Committee and the Legal Workers at
>>> the Bay Area
>>> chapter of the NLG - two groups long supporting the
>>> Bay Area radical
>>> community with legal and educational assistance.
>>> Thank you!
>>>
>>> Links:
>>> ------
>>> [1]
>>> https://sudoroom.org/ai1ec_event/spied-upon-bay-area-premiere-baps/
>>> [2] http://thepublicschool.org/node/36455
>>> [3] http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center
>>> [4] http://spiedupon.com/
>>> [5] http://www.cair.com/
>>> [6] http://www.freethesf8.org/who.html
>>> [7] https://oaklandantirepression.wordpress.com/
>>> [8]
>>> http://araborganizing.org/campaigns-our-work/coalition-to-stop-political-repression/
>>> [9]
>>> http://www.nlgsf.org/national-lawyers-guild-mission-statement
>>> [10] https://oaklandprivacy.wordpress.com/
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> sudo-discuss mailing list
>>> sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org
>>> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> https://twitter.com/jwentwistle
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> sudo-discuss mailing list
>>> sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org
>>> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> sudo-discuss mailing list
>>> sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org <mailto:sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org>
>>> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>>
>>
>>
>>
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