Um, @notabot, that's not too hard for me to do because...I'm not a member of a
university and have only a B.A.
There are such people, imagine.
Catherine
On Sunday, November 10, 2019, 07:21:43 PM EST, later <[email protected]>
wrote:
I have never gotten involved here, not least because there are no like-minded
people.
Thank you, Catherine, for taking time to write. Not that your liberal lenses at
the world seem any less distorted and oppressive, just differently distorted
and oppressive than those of techie libertarians, but at least you share your
blind spots and half-completed claims trying to engage in an argument, and I
respect that attempt. I wish there were more dialogue across our fault lines,
and I am the first to admit my intolerance towards liberals and libertarians
alike...
@Catherine: I'd like to ask you to think/imagine real people in this world,
body after body, who cannot become "a member of a university".
On 11/10/19 5:27 PM, Catherine Fitzpatrick wrote:
I rarely get involved in debates here because there are no like-minded people,
except some who lurk.
A founding coder of Diaspora committed suicide, too. If Diaspora were viable,
we'd all be there now, but it isn't, so we're not. It was "given to the
community" which is geek-speek for saying "unpaid open source zealots got tired
of working on it". Maybe that's why you can't find it anywhere.
I'd invite you to contemplate more deeply how the nihilistic, extreme culture
of the hacker in fact led us to the abusiveness of Twitter, Facebook, Google
and others and even the exposure of our elections to Russian GRU agents.
It's not unrelated. The profound disdain for private property is intimately
related to the rampant lack of privacy now, like it or not. You didn't want to
see democratically elected politicians regulate the Internet through SOPA or
CISPA; so you got the Russians to regulate your Internet for you.
If you don't like the fact that academic publishers charge money to cover
costs -- and no, your research grant or the university's grants don't "already
cover these costs", then don't buy them. There are workarounds. One of the most
obvious workaround is to be a member of that university with a library card in
that university -- then you get the publications for free! In fact, Swartz
could have taken out publications for free with an MIT card if he were truly
interested in finding some journal for his research. But he didn't do that,
because he wasn't about that.
He wanted to commit a raucous "propaganda of the deed" by making it big and
criminal to "make a point". Except, rarely does extremism bring that desired
effect.
You can get friends to get you publications; you can join Academia.org and
get many of those you need for free, and for their low subscription fee get
others. Pay walls are not the crippling effect on scholarship imagined. In
fact, I never hear techies complain about the real crippling effect, which is
the high cost of textbooks, even e-books, in the hundreds of dollars. And
really, the high cost of education in general, caused by all sorts of things,
including the addition of numerous officials who now have to watch for Title
IX, gender, transgender, etc. issues. And it's ok to question these costs and
these programs and these methods and still support the rights of LGBT and other
minorities.
The reason the academic journals were targeted is that they enabled activists
to choose a hated target -- imagined greedy middlemen gouging poor students and
professors -- that wasn't the academic world per se, but was part of their
hypothetical "The Man" and "Neo-Liberalism" and blah blah. These campaigns
aren't about academic freedom. They are about technocommunist partisans'
movements against capitalism. The sort of capitalism that enables Stanford,
where this list is homed, to exist and thrive. If you want to have a radical
hackers' movement espousing communism, that's fine, but don't pretend it's
about academic freedom.
Prosecutors overreach all the time. The plea-bargaining system creates all
kinds of abuses and the bail system is broken. But you can tackle those
problems without committing crime -- all sorts of groups from the ACLU to local
committees, churches, synagogues, etc. which I and many others support are
helping refugees do this all the time. They don't break and enter into server
rooms and paralyze networks and steal files to do this.
If someone is "neurologically atypical," which is meant as a badge of pride
like "indigo children," to overcome real or imagined prejudice, that doesn't
mean if they commit suicide, that the government or society or evil capitalists
or anything of the sort has killed them. They are responsible for their own
actions.
I'm going to continue to use Facebook because there is nothing as good,
whatever its faults. People and groups in poor countries, like Ukraine or
Belarus or Turkemenistan, which I follow, use Facebook as a kind of free web
site -- institutions like the parliament or the military even of countries like
Ukraine have Facebook pages instead of paying money to maintain websites. They
do this also to avoid censorship in their homelands. Of course Facebook is
where you keep up with relatives because the imagined privacy tradeoffs are
absolutely nothing like being hacked and doxed by Anonymous and other
criminals, something I've experienced personally many times because they don't
like my criticism, they are totalitarians. It's not the NSA that exposed
people's privacy when they legitimately gathered data; it's Glenn Greenwald who
put up the photos and information of girlfriends of the Taliban and their
children. And so on.
I think few of you ever have to test your beliefs in the real world and see
how they sound to ordinary people. You could try it at Thanksgiving with your
relatives whom you think are morons because they voted for Trump. Most often
they did that because of disgust at campus political correctness and extremist
techie views imposed on us all now. But you'd like to pretend it's only because
they're racists. You can go on pretending that and insist on splitting the
Democrats into more and more fine-tuned sectarian grouplets in which you will
feel you have at last achieved political correctness. But then we'll get Trump
again. Thanks!
Catherine Fitzpatrick
On Sunday, November 10, 2019, 03:19:02 PM EST, Rand Strauss
<[email protected]> wrote:
> you have a disgusting mentality…
Let’s please have no name-calling here, or pretend people have a "mentality",
much less that one can deduce it. Let’s keep the conversation constructive and
curb our impulses to insult each other, even to highlight contrasting views.
We have the institutions we have, and they have advantages and disadvantages.
When the academic publishing groups began, they added a lot of value- there
was no internet. They were expensive because publishing was expensive because
distribution was inefficient. Alternatives are emerging.
Aaron Swartz was one of many non-neurotypical people who were born long
before the term was coined. Back then, one was either fit to stand trial, or
unfit, sane or crazy. Today, we know that there are many spectra of cognitive
abilities and tolerances. Many more people are capable of standing trial, of
thriving in schools, of contributing in many ways to society if accommodations
are made. Aaron had both genius and short-sightedness.
Clearly Aaron missed the many compelling perspectives that showed he was
valued and needed and, after a time at least, could find a community in which
he could thrive. And he continues to have a lot of company in this regard.
Suicide, as well as near-suicide, suicidal thoughts and depression are all too
common, especially in America. Humanity has made some incredible strides in
understanding and treating these phenomena, but there are still huge holes in
distribution.
Many, many prosecutors have been guilty of overreach, filling America’s
prisons with all sorts of people who should never have been there, or should
have had much shorter sentences. These prosecutors reflect a large fraction of
society that reacts to small crimes with name-calling, labelling a whole person
as a criminal, especially if they have a cognitive difference, seem to oppose
an establishment norm, or if their skin is darkened by pigments. This extends
to our schools as well, with the rallying cry of "zero tolerance."
What are we going to do about it?
Except, humanity also seems to be weak when it comes to "we", and "doing."
For instance, I have a list of dozens of web-based political-reform efforts
(sites). While all but mine, and perhaps another, seem unlikely to make a real
difference, there’s no group maintaining the list, much less embellishing it,
much less publishing it, much less (to my knowledge) studying the phenomena to
see what’s promising and what’s missing (much less working on mine...)
> We created it, and it still exists. It's called Diaspora*.
You didn’t even say how to find it ( https://diasporafoundation.org/ ), much
less how to participate on this list through it. Is there a LiberationTech
pod? I spent 5 minutes looking around it- it seems almost impenetrable…
Does MeWe.com satisfy your anti-facebook requirements? We could make a
group there, such as: https://mewe.com/join/liberationtech. To augment,
certainly not to replace, this forum.
Every single one of us, and every single one of "them" is every day doing
what we think and feel is appropriate given our thoughts, feelings and
judgements of our abilities, needs, wants and opportunities in the world.
We’re swept up by inspirations, whether of Aarons willingness to oppose the the
paywalls around knowledge or the prosecutor’s willingness to defend society’s
rules about property and order. Meanwhile, Trump has further institutionalized
chaos and stupidity, CO2 levels are averaging about 406, and the new normal is
ever-worsening climate change catastrophe. While we have many partial answer,
we clearly have a long way to go.
'Best wishes as we approach Thanksgiving. -r
On Nov 10, 2019, at 8:11 AM, Yosem Companys <[email protected]> wrote:
In fact, the masses ✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿 would like to see an Anti-Facebook - with the
potential for limitless friends, more efficient algorithms and no distortion of
information. We can all collectively usher in a more beautiful digital 💻
world, free of Facebook's limitations and unjust ♠️ social media practices #️⃣
But people need to use such alternate, community friendly solutions if they
are to dethrone Facebook. And that requires public awareness. And that requires
mass-scale earned media or expensive marketing/advertising. (In the absence of
collective action, the only other solution is turning these networks into
public utilities.) --
Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial
search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated:
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mode, or change password by emailing [email protected].
--
Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial
search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated:
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mode, or change password by emailing [email protected].
--
Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial
search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated:
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mode, or change password by emailing [email protected]. --
Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial
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