The Matrix vs Ghostbusters

[Mr. Tea]

Yeah, also I'm wary of modern technology. I don't like anything "smart". I don't want a phone that collects masses of data on me, a fridge with an iPad in the front, an eReader where I don't own any of the books I buy and they can be removed at any time.

You should definitely get one of these

The smart toilet era is here! Are you ready to share your analprint with big tech?

Loo design has barely changed in 150 years – until now. Will people trade their privacy for the chance to find out exactly what is in their waste?

www.theguardian.com

 

[Clinamenic]

this jenn ashworth book i was reading, she talks about various forums she's on and one of the things she says is how people regularly switch up their usernames (i guess like what starb did recently) so as to minimise the sense of a trail.

Yeah that was part of my motivation as well, in addition to the psychological impact of a clean-slate persona.

 

[version]

Why does it bother you? Do you think Sufi is going to round us all up one day?

I doubt it, but I'm conscious of it being a public forum.

 

[version]

Dissensus isn't exactly a huge presence though, which is why it doesn't bother me as much as stuff like smartphones. There's a difference between posting about books and music on an obscure forum and carrying around a device which can record all sorts of things about not just your thoughts, but also your bodily functions and movements.

 

[Clinamenic]

Personally I’m more concerned about what private sector actors are doing with my data, than with what public sector agencies are doing with it.

That’s why all the newsletters and non-essential accounts I make use an email with a made-up name and persona, which also has a twitter account with a deep fake profile picture.

 

[version]

Personally I’m more concerned about what private sector actors are doing with my data, than with what public sector agencies are doing with it.

The distinction between the two seems increasingly blurred.

 

[craner]

there's a lot of incriminating information on here. you deleted loads of old posts didn't you?

Well, there's some stuff that's a bit embarrassing, but I don't know about incriminating.

 

[Clinamenic]

Recently I’ve been getting phishing emails, on my main personal email, from personae claiming to have watched how much I masturbate, that I masturbate with disturbing frequency and that I should be ashamed of myself, etc.

Very unsettling approach being taken here, but one I would imagine is successful in blackmailing unscrupulous wankers.

 

[version]

Well, there's some stuff that's a bit embarrassing, but I don't know about incriminating.

Yeah, when I delete stuff it's either because I'm embarrassed or just think it was crap or pointless. Sometimes I get overly conscious of how many posts I've made and delete what I think are the worst in an effort to keep the numbers down.

 

[craner]

I never saw the appeal of anonymity, to he honest. Stupidly, I always felt like it took more courage and discipline to make a fool of yourself transparently. The upside is, if you have any great successes, you reap the rewards.

I am as vain as I am foolhardy. But I have also never really believed that any of this incriminating evidence would be of interest to anybody anyway.

 

[Clinamenic]

Much more insidious than the approach taken of how some African royalty needs an account to wire his fortune to or some such.

 

[craner]

I suppose I wouldn't be comfortable if Dissensus was a big Google presence, and the one time it was I did have a bit of a fit about it.

But that's more reputational jitters rather than data paranoia.

 

[yyaldrin]

i would like to get rid of all that smartphone stuff as well but it would simply mean i would have no contact with my friends any more.

 

[version]

Automation, the reliance on algorithms and the stuff Yuval Noah Harari was talking about in that clip Biscuits posted the other day is the kind of thing which concerns me most. The idea that enough information will be amassed that you can just feed all these seemingly banal data points into a machine and come up with a set of instructions on how best to manipulate people and influence every aspect of their lives.

 

[craner]

But to what end, selling you stuff?

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah we seem totally behind the ball in terms of treating data privacy as a human right, which I think should be the case. Not sure what public policies really do about this, currently.

 

[Clinamenic]

But to what end, selling you stuff?

That, and also making online experiences more addicting via precision marketing and gamification, which may not always be felt as a negative, but to those who hate the feeling of being systematized it may seem dystopian.

 

[craner]

I guess I know exactly what I want from the internet: out of print books, Italian films on blu-ray, Instagram, Dissensus and a platform to offer my amazing essays to the public. Beyond that, nothing. So in that sense I don't feel vulnerable or open to manipulation.

 

[Clinamenic]

One of the reasons I think it can be important to try to understand this stuff, as it may enable some sense of control, the sort of comfort in control that comes with naming something - you now know that something enough to represent it in your internal system.

If it remains alien and technical to you, it will only seem more and more so.

 

[version]

But to what end, selling you stuff?

That would definitely be one aspect of it, but then look at stuff like personalised advertising during elections, the suggestion of providing people on benefits with programmed digital currencies so that they can't choose what to spend their money on, racial profiling through crime prevention algorithms.

It all slots together to form a pretty horrifying society, at least in my opinion.