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Why The Left Should Care About Privacy
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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In an ideal (post-scarcity communist) society, we should be able to be completely libertine without judgement from society or from government systems (so long as we're not causing harm). But as with the rest of this ideal we don't know if we can actually get there.
I have an ancient (2016) paper about potential joys of full disclosure (on Wordpress, if you're interested) that portends the enshittification of Google. But it points out Google's original business model, which was to have an enormous body of data that no human being got to look at directly (except their proper owners), and in the meantime the computers would report on observable trends and correlations.
In the end, it got messed up by the usual suspects: Advertising interests pressured Google to reveal more and more. Technicians abused their positions of power to stalk. The police state forced Google to fulfill reverse warrants and list all people near the scene of a crime, making them all suspects. Or to completely reveal all the data of a given suspect, which poisoned the whole idea of your own safe private place to track contacts, dates, travel, etc.
As it is, we need privacy specifically because of all those interests that would want to link our data to us. All the reasons for commercial or state interests to have our data are causes for them to not have our data.
I'm pretty sure Communism is definitely not an option. I don't want to starve or die today.
Always cracks me up to see people who champion open source alternatives hate on communism.
There's an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don't operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there's really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn't do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.
They are not related
You can tell yourself that but communism is very different from libre software
I agree that there are differences, but I feel there are more similarities. Especially with anarchocommunist or collectivist theory.
You shouldn't feel that way, because communism has absolutely nothing to do with open source software.
Communism is a political ideology.
Open source software is a licensing technique for creators and developers. Mostly so that no one has to worry about getting sued if they want to implement or modify said software. You think a communist government would even allow the use of open source software over government issued/approved software?
You personally cant draw comparisons between two separate systems? Seems like a limit of imagination.
You shouldnt presume to know better than others, especially when you dont appear to understand anything about the ideology outside of your bias.
This isn't about "drawing comparisons" this is about how you don't understand why someone would champion open source software and hate on communism...because of course people hate on fucking communism, you dope.
It's proven time and time again that communist governments bring suffering to their people. Like, some fucked up shit. Like starvation, inequality, and lack of basic human rights.
Whereas open source software can be educational, build cost effective solutions for people and businesses, and empower people's lives.
You see the difference?
I see another propagandized ego driven fool who speaks louder and with more venom the less substance he has.
History isn't propaganda
"History is written by the victors".
Notable Communist Governments and Their Human Rights Records:
Soviet Union (1922 - 1991)
China (1949 - Present)
Cuba (1959 - Present)
North Korea (1948 - Present)
Vietnam (1976 - Present)
Laos (1975 - Present)
References: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/global
https://www.discoverwalks.com/blog/world/the-25-most-influential-communist-figures-of-all-time/
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-seven-most-influential-communist-leaders-ever.html
https://www.thoughtco.com/communist-countries-overview-1435178
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/communism/
https://www.history.com/news/communist-leaders-photos
http://v-dem.net/vdemds.html
https://doi.org/10.23696/mcwt-fr58
How?
Yep, that's why we need Communism and not Capitalism.
Its funny that people dying of starvation, in the USSR, is seen as a crime of communism but the exact same people will refuse to accept, by their own "logic", that would make the rest of ALL the starvation in the world a crime of capitalism.
How do you even start to deconstruct that kind of indoctrination?
Communism is a far-off ideal, and we don't yet fully know how it would work, or how we'd get there, but people starving or dying would be a sign that it wasn't working.
You might be thinking of USSR, which sought to create a communist state, but was subject to internal corruption and outside threats (not to mention, Wilson sought a pact with the European states -- some of which were still monarchist -- to sanction trade with USSR, so it was at a considerable disadvantage from the get go.
But while USSR was going through its growing pains, the rest of us were going through the great depression, and those of us living in cardboard boxes and stacks of paint cans were wondering if Lenin had a point, the industrialists boozing and gambling with Hoover were admiring the Austrian fellow. Eventually those industrialists decided they need to create a propaganda package and teach it in our schools.
Huh. I can't post images anymore. I wonder if it's a browser problem or a Lemmy problem.
I don't see how Communism can be built without actively building it through Socialism, so that bit's pretty much solved, and the rest can be figured out by Socialist societies.
A big part of communism is about who owns the means of production. One way to alter this aspect of society is through cooperative economics. A state-less form of socialism (edit: democratically controlled) that's already proven effective in small pockets of our own country (assuming US here) and around the world. One common example is Mondragon in Spain, a cooperative business and the seventh largest company in the country, that has proven its even possible for the cooperative model to reach levels of scale capable of competing in a private capitalist world.
Cooperatives are cool, but unfortunately Markets lead to class contradictions even with cooperatives in place, which is why the goal still needs to be full Socialism.
Cooperatives have different structures to help mitigate class conflicts, but either way the model essentially, or practically, has a baked in, or something akin to a, union by giving members voting rights while not outright excluding the presence of a union.
I don't disagree with having a goal of full socialism. I just see cooperatives as a practical stepping stone in that direction.
They certainly can be a practical stepping stone, and probably will be in some countries, I just wanted to indicate that competing worker coops does not defeat the issues inherent to the profit motive.
Ah right. I see. This is why I think we need to couple this with something like the economy for the common good as an alternative to measuring growth of an economy by GDP.