Re: [sudo-discuss] Sudo! Wanna co-host this surveillance event?

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 &lt;g2g-public01(a)att.net <mailto:g2g-public01@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: _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss