surveillance capitalism
Dear friends,
We’re doing a tech one today – why not. My tech journey over the last year has seen me rapidly disentangle myself from Apple’s locked-in ecosystem. Not because the tools weren’t doing the job, but because of Apple’s increasingly anti-consumer and pro-big-tech moves that tar them with a worse brush than Microsoft. All the while the corporate orifice proclaims saving humanity through privacy measures and Apple Intelligence. An oxymoron to be sure, and privacy “for who?” as your data are sucked up and used to train Apple’s AI models. What could possibly be a concern there?
Like other big tech, Apple is interested in vacuuming the internet for content, then integrating deeply into the OS-level to pull out your data to feed its “AI” producing a tool which at best produces something troubling like: “Your mum attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in Redlands and Palm Springs”. The nefarious nature of this vacuuming of human data is what you don’t see. Yes, Apple routinely promises on-device processing, data security, and more – but with no way to validate these promises, except through researchers Apple has an existing contractual relationship with... this stretches the trust even thinner. And for a company who has routinely exploited creative sorts, knowledge workers, and intellectuals in order to fund limitless sales while strip mining the periphery … I just wasn’t having it any more. Apple’s “values on the tin” were once creativity, difference, possibility, intellect. Now, like every other big tech company they centre exploitation and expropriation of users for the shareholder and Tim’s bonus. Disappointing to say the least, and yes I’m aware it’s been like this for years.
As I grew interested in making a switch there were a range of things to extricate myself from in Apple’s ecosystem. This ecosystem offers, above all else, convenience – pay Apple (twice) and everything is right there, iCloud drive, keychain, mail, contacts and calendars, the works. This suite of privacy essentials is quite similar to what Proton offer as a paid service, indeed Proton seems to be a reasonable direct competitor to iCloud but I wanted to avoid further lock-in by substituting one corp with another [1]. Instead, I’ve moved from iCloud drive to Nextcloud (currently running on my Synology) so that I control my data, rsync.net for backups of working documents, and Backblaze’s B2 for long-term backups of the NAS. My email has long sat with Fastmail, though Migadu and Proton are both interesting options when annual renewal rolls around. I also moved to Bitwarden for passwords and passkeys - which was painless thanks to migration tools, even moving my 2FA and passkeys in a single export-import gesture.
With my extrication from Apple’s first-party only tools, I was ready to begin a more robust open source transition. My desktop PC, which I’ve written about here before [2], has run Linux since I built in in 2020. My web services (including this one, hello) are running on Linux. And I’ve used Linux on-again-off-again since Red Hat 7. Not RHEL 7, the old Red Hat – and to date still loving Gnome, despite passing interest in Mandrake with KDE back in the day. My desktops and servers have always been Linux first, and while the Mac offered a great deal of productive space for my thinking and work, particularly with its ability to run Office (ugh) and have a productive developer command line through its BSD-like shell, there’s never been anything truly stopping a full-time transition to Linux.
Heck, even my institution offers a Linux VPN client (of dubious quality) and with the improvement to both Office on the Web (which seems like where Microsoft is actually heading with the product roadmap) and VirtualBox’s solid performance on x86 hosts virtualising Windows to get desktop office, when needed, doesn’t feel like a hassle. No, it’s not as nice as first party desktop applications and if there’s one hole in my current work its not having desktop Office for for file interoperability with colleagues – for all Libreoffice’s trying, it’s not keeping up with Microsoft’s arcane off-spec Office file changes. Most of my computing life is done in a web browser (anyone not doing this?), occasional programming in C, Ruby, and dabbling with Rust, and Office for work. With Zen replacing Safari, and its brilliant features based atop Firefox, having a very good web browsing experience in Linux is no longer any kind of worry. The only remaining puzzle pieces are a replacement to Final Cut Pro (probably Davinci Resolve) and the Affinity suite (please Canva, give us web versions or a native Linux build) and I’m home and hosed.
Now let’s talk exciting parts, OS essentials, and hardware. If you’ve read my first post here on Linux you’ll know I’ve dabbled with Lenovo machines because of their support for Linux – even if in Australia, you cannot, as a retail or education customer, configure Linux from the factory – and had great success both with old and new ThinkPads. My current daily-driver, though, is almost a deliberate retaliation to Apple’s vision of computing: buy an iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Apple TV, blah blah blah. Rather, I have a 2-in-1 Yoga. The Yoga line is interestingly segmented – and like most of Lenovo’s products, deeply confusing. There’s the 7i, 9i, 7x, 9x, 7 Pro, 9 Pro, Legion 7, and so on. Is a 7 the entry product then the 9 the mid range? Then what’s the 7 Pro? It’s worse than Sculley’s Apple. In essence the models have no actual relationship. The “Pro” machine will tend to have a discrete GPU, the x usually refers to the Snapdragon CPU, and the i/non-i version is about 2-in-1 configuration. With that deviation here’s my machine: The Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 14IML9. Mine is configured to the highest settings available: 32 GB of DDR5, 2TB of SSD, WiFi 7, a Core Ultra 155H and Arc graphics, and an absolutely wonderful 2.8k (perfect retina 2x) OLED display with HDR500. Two of those specs are post-market upgrades, what a concept – upgrading your own device.
When I got this machine I ran Windows 11 on it for a few days – using the wonderful tools on the internet to upgrade from Windows Home to Windows Pro (because who is paying Microsoft $100 for that garbage?). It sucked. I gave it my all, I sync’d all my files, setup my accounts, even used Outlook for a bit. The persistently user-hostile experience, even in Windows Pro of having ads in the start menu, not being able to quickly search files without getting Bing-first results, having absolutely no developer tooling (please don’t suggest VS Code and PowersHELL is developer tooling)… It is a quantitatively worse experience than MacOS on every front, and one equally imbued with privacy invasion, “copilot” (which I cannot seem to see adding any value, and the copilot key on my laptop is irritatingly mapped to “left shift” under Linux??) and proliferation of absolutely unintelligible UI choices made Windows feel actively hostile. I didn’t get into this to go from privacy invasion + usability to privacy invasion + hostility. And I didn’t really want to use Windows anyway, it was just an early experiment to see how things had changed – my last time with Windows seriously as a daily driver was Windows XP so it was worth a brief experiment, right? ... no.
On my eBay ThinkPad, I’d been using Debian – the same OS I used on my servers and desktop. I’d used Ubuntu briefly simply because it offered an out-of-tree kernel module that laptop needed for its webcam, but that broke with software updates (not even major version upgrades) and so I went back to ole reliable. But, and I later learned this was my fault anyway, when using Debian Sid I had dug myself into dependency hell in apt, and all I did was install an Australian English dictionary for Libreoffice. Turns out you shouldn’t use a third party mirror if you’re planning to use Sid – the packagelists don’t sync over fast enough and then apt is told by the server to install packages that are outdated, and the trouble only gets worse from there. Naturally, Debian isn’t really designed to be bleeding edge, except for those actually developing the operating system. So I went in search of something that enabled those (more) bleeding edge features, i.e., support for the Core Ultra CPU line in my new machine, and played with Arch – I can see why people like it, but the dearth of bundled packaging made me irritated not thankful, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed – which had some weird install and post-boot issues which I’m sure were my fault, and finally Fedora. Fedora 40, initially, on my ThinkPad provided both the right drivers, and a clean painless install through anaconda (and I can’t say there’s not a hint of Red Hat 7 nostalgia there). So, when my Yoga came (I still enjoy that my computer and I do Yoga together) I installed Fedora 41 (beta).
Fedora 41 has since “come out” and the upgrade out of the beta into the release version was utterly painless. I’m still adjusting to package naming conventions (particularly -devel) but my brain has adapted to “apt on Debian, dnf on Fedora”. The actual OOBE was perfect with Fedora. I had to do a BIOS update on the Yoga before it would let me boot Linux – this was a bug in Lenovo’s firmware from the factory that had something to do with secure boot (even when disabling/resetting secure boot for a new install it refused to disengage properly so I just saw a blinking underscore trying to get into grub). After the update, the install was utterly seamless - except for the mandatory mashing of fn+f1 to escape the extremely quick boot sequence. WiFi, audio, power management, display, touch, keyboard and trackpad, it all just worked. Fedora lets you choose file system in the disk partitioner, which advanced mode Debian installers will scoff at, but the ability in the “basic” installer to select btrfs instead of ext4 is wonderful. Just like that I have a working Linux-powered Yoga!
I write to you today from this computer, and I’ve been doing work on it for over a month now – like my actual day job, I can do under Linux. But, coming from an Apple Silicon Mac back to Intel I had a few concerns: battery life, GPU performance, heat. On each count the 155H is worse. But not much worse and certainly not a deal-breaker. I can lie to myself and say that its all passable and relatively interchangeable with an M2 Mac, but it’s not (quite). Battery lasts about 7 hours writing, browsing the web, doing “light” tasks - power saver and conservation mode really aid this. Even leaving the machine unplugged overnight the battery doesn’t dip like it did on older Macs. But it’s a far cry from the 13 hours of M2, and let’s not mention M3, M4, Pro or Max. Snapdragon CPUs seem to be the PC worlds answer to these processors, but Linux support is practically nonexistent, and the performance improvement over Intel or AMD is not meaningful to be locked into using Windows (I’d still take MacOS over Windows any day). The machine is always “warm” but it doesn’t get hot, and the fan only ramps when you do things that you would expect to tax the CPU – and even then it’s not that loud, particularly compared to the end-of-era Intel Macs. But with these trade-offs there are a litany of benefits.
Yes, I’m compromising on battery (by about 2-3 hours, but still way more than the 2-3 hours total of years gone – like a meaningful 6-7 hours total), on graphics performance (M2 ekes out about ~7-10fps in most games at around the same resolution scale - but Linux runs way more games), and if I’m honest, probably the trackpad (which is a nice glass-like surface, multi touch, and incredibly responsive, but it’s not haptic). But what I gain is both operating system freedom (yes I know about Asahi), a 2-in-1 design which makes playing Civilization VI in bed an absolute dream (sorry to my Steam Deck), and bona fide upgrade-ability. I have already more than tripled my storage – and with new developments in SSD land I can conceivably go to 8TB in this machine for less than the price of a 256->512 GB bump in Apple land. I also went from a WiFi 6E to WiFi 7 card. I am one of those weirdos with a WiFi 7 router, and the range and speed I get from having WiFi 7 in my laptop is pretty incredible. And this isn’t even the most ugpradeable PC that Lenovo sells. It’s just quantitatively and qualitatively better than Apple – both against price, and honestly performance. If Framework were offering a 2-in-1 I’d be there in a heartbeat. But for now, having an OLED transformable touch screen, a solid 7 hours of battery, a truly wonderful keyboard (except the copilot key, grr), the ability to run any Linux distro under the sun, a decent webcam (don’t use it in low light), infrared face-unlock and/or fingerprint-unlock, and an upgradable customisable experience is basically the polar opposite of where Apple’s been headed for the last 10 years.
So what, I’m a nerd, and I enjoy computing for the sake of curiosity, productivity, and fun – and I’m having fun with computing again under Linux – something I haven’t felt on the Mac for 5 years. If Office on the web becomes the Office, which, again, according to the roadmap it will, then there should be nothing stopping most users from a migration to an OS that gives a shit about you as the user – and doesn’t try to exfiltrate all your data to FAANGM. Did I mention how damn well Gnome does on a touch screen? How wonderfully designed Gnome Circle apps are (feels like old indy Mac apps all over again)? Newsflash being key for running mind reader. Spotify and Steam (and so so many games that don’t even work under Windows work on Linux) work brilliantly out of the box. Zen, Thunderbird, Zed, anything on a command line? It’s all a straightforward, “just works”, and is an accessible Linux install experience away. Who the hell uses Windows in 2024? Let alone in the future.
The Yoga with Fedora is my primary computing device, I have a desktop still running Debian, and a MacBook Air for things that I haven’t yet migrated. I am yet to see any reason to switch back, and things are only getting better. There are so many choices in Linux, and if your distribution of choice does something gross you can just jump over elsewhere. And open-source ethos means you own your data, you can control the code, and you have ultimate flexibility to do what you want with your computing. Not what big tech wants. And that’s an ethos I’m invested in, for good.
Having fun with computers,
Aidan.
I’m aware that Proton is now an NFP, but at the time it was not, and they were making some concerning closed-source noises. ↩︎
Dear friends,
Do you ever find yourself thinking that the billionaire capitalist class, bloated on the extracted value from wage-slaves, say things just to get a rise out of people? You’d be wrong. Something deeply more sinister has intoxicated these immoral exploitative swollen overlords. The act of telling the truth about their agenda. Sadly, rather than this being an opportunity for “the masses” to deploy critique, the hegemonic media quickly shift the subtle messaging in their articles and op eds to support the new sociopathic trend before anyone even realises what is happening.
This morning I shared a link about Ellison’s new AI panopticon. Literally, a gloves off surveillance capitalism powered by planet killing AI servers to ensure that every. single. worker. is squeezed for juice like an industrial orange juice maker. This “revelation,” enough to make Jeremy Bentham’s preserved head spin [1], saw Oracle co-founder and billionaire Larry Ellison unveil another utterly dystopian vision of an AI-powered surveillance state. When your boss says “we’re embracing AI,” this is exactly what they mean. And even if they didn’t mean it yesterday, this is what it means now – this is now table stakes for AI use in corporate settings. Naturally, the tool that held potential to bring tailored education, useful personal development opportunities, and troves of learning and reading synthesis… wait, no, hang on, hallucinations and errors – is the system that will ensure you don’t spend 1 second too long watching YouTube on your break.
Ellison proclaims that “citizens will be on their best behaviour” resulting from constant AI surveillance is a stark embodiment of ruling class ideology. But it’s also nothing new for frequent readers of “Business Insider” and the ilk as a news source for the capitalist bootlicker (and shocked marxist observer, hello friend). As seems to be tradition amongst this ever more unashamedly unhinged class of morons, Ellison’s rhetoric nakedly exposes the bourgeoisie’s desire to maintain hegemony through any technological means. And, naturally, extend this control beyond the workplace and into every aspect of proletarian life.
We talked yesterday about burnout, and how technology was, as ever, a flash in the pan of relief from the monotony of office work for knowledge workers. Well, that brief bubble where mainstream media (because of wall street), and quite a few average Jos, were convinced AI was the future? Not only is the hype already long dead for those who have witnessed the half-baked, or downright insane, deployment of LLMs in capacities they were never designed for, but now the frankly astonishingly useless technology (at least in the hands of idiotic billionaires) is being tailored for the panopticon.
The panopticon, originally conceived by Jeremy Bentham as an architectural design for prisons, has become a powerful metaphor for analysing modern systems of surveillance and control. In this model, a central watchtower allows guards to observe inmates without the inmates knowing whether they are being watched at any given moment. This creates a state of constant potential surveillance, on paper, compelling individuals to regulate their own behaviour as if they were always being monitored. Through a Marxist lens, we can see the panopticon as a mechanism of capital to discipline and control the working class, ensuring our compliance and productivity without the need for constant direct intervention – goodbye, again, “middle class”. This has very much been deployed in workplaces as a mechanism of authoritarian and micromanaging control for decades now. However, it is only intensifying with rising surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism represents a “novel” (if despotic) economic logic that has emerged in the digital age, where human experience – attention – is unilaterally claimed as free raw material for extraction, prediction, and sales. This system, pioneered and perfected by tech giants, operates by monitoring and recording vast amounts of human behaviour through digital means – from tracking what you click and tap, to following your purchases online, and recording what, who, and how you watch, read and consume during your “leisure”. Then, using advanced analytics and “machine learning” to process this data into highly precise predictions of future behaviours we are essentially living in the minority report – but instead of cops it’s capitalists, naturally. These predictive “products” are then traded in a new kind of marketplace, the “behavioural futures market”. The fundamental drive of surveillance capitalism is not just to know our behaviour, but to shape it in ways that produce revenue and market control. In a sentence, the experiences of billions are commodified and exploited, without any consent or comprehension, all in service of an economic model that prioritises prediction and control over human autonomy and social good – it’s the hegemony, but digital and predictive.
In this era of surveillance capitalism, this panopticon model has been extended and intensified through digital technologies. The ubiquity of data collection through smartphones, smart speakers, social media, prolific deployment of cameras, and other digital platforms creates a virtual panopticon “for the free” where individual actions, preferences, and even what seem like thoughts are constantly monitored and analysed, and even “implanted” through advertising and tracking systems. Unlike Bentham’s originary structure, this panopticon is decentralised – embedded in the fabric of our daily lives, and not just online.
This pervasive surveillance serves as a form of hegemonic control, where the ruling class maintains its dominance not just through coercion, but by manufacturing consent – how often have you thought about buying something, only to see ads for it everywhere you go online? What about the things you don’t buy, the political messages which are embedded in this same format? And I don’t mean from political parties, who have basically been locked out of this kind of opaque surveillance. The data collected is used to shape behaviour, influence opinions, and above all develop a sense of revelry about the inevitability of our economic order – while also keeping you angry at minorities and “others” .
The debauched nature of this digital panopticon lies in its ability to not only observe but also to predict your behaviour, and thereby manipulate it – particularly your purchasing habits. Using these features (omnipresent in almost all consumer technologies) enables corporations (and in some instances governments) to anticipate “needs” and even potential dissent before they materialise – hello minority report! This predictive capacity allows for a more subtle and effective form of control, one that doesn’t merely react to behaviour but actively shapes it. In the context of late-stage capitalism, this represents a new frontier of exploitation, where even our most intimate thoughts and actions become raw material for profit extraction. The challenge for the working class, then, is not just to resist overt forms of oppression, but to recognise and counter these invisible mechanisms of control that have become so deeply ingrained in our technological infrastructure.
Ellison’s proposed AI surveillance system represents another evolution of the capitalist superstructure, adapting to maintain its dominance over the base. By leveraging AI to monitor and control the working class, the bourgeoisie seeks to quell any potential for class consciousness and revolution. The article even tells us about the involvement of Ellison’s spawn being on board, who naturally work in the film industry, adding another fun layer to this cake (ideological apparatus) [2]. Through media production, the ruling class shape narratives and manufacture consent for such invasive surveillance measures, all while profiting from the very anxieties they create.
Responding to this, what do we do? “Seize the means of AI production”? Open source LLMs already exist – and are quite good – but turning these technologies away from oppression and towards the creation of a more equitable society is not as simple as it seems. Remember, while it is possible to convince some LLMs that anarcho-syndicalism is the future, or that techno feudalism bad, or that their own existence is destroying the planet even faster, they are increasingly fed filter data which says “capitalism is the only way everything else is terrible”. The propaganda I get from several of the mainstream AIs when asking about Marxism is like fighting with an ASX investor.
We need to train “the future” in identifying and breaking these models, lest the bourgeoisie continue the construction of walls around us – in our minds. God sometimes I really do feel like a conspiracy theorist – then I remember they’re telling us what they’re doing in their own words!
Yikes,
Aidan.
[see also] Bandy, J. (2021). Problematic Machine Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review of Algorithm Audits. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW1), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449148
Fuchs, C. (2019). Karl Marx in the Age of Big Data Capitalism. In C. Fuchs & D. Chandler (Eds.), Digital Objects, Digital Subjects (pp. 53–72). University of Westminster Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvckq9qb.6
Galič, M., Timan, T., & Koops, B.-J. (2017). Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation. Philosophy & Technology, 30(1), 9–37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0219-1
West, S. M. (2019). Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy. Business & Society, 58(1), 20–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650317718185
Dear friends,
We’re living in a strange world of technological “innovation” on the world wide web. After Web 2.0, the utter garbage fire that is Web 3.0 [1], and successive failed attempts to capitalise on “content creation” we have found ourselves in a race to the bottom with tracking, ads, and “dark patterns” [2]. The latter of these, a dark pattern, is an interface design choice that benefits the company at the expense of the user's experience. Not a surprise, but just another layer in the process of seeking to extract value from internet resources.
A fundamental tenet of capitalism is a necessity for the “line to go up” – be this nett profit, stock price, human suffering, it matters not – the reportable metric drives the mode of production in contemporary capital, and the cost to humanity is never more than a brief afterthought. For this one rule to rule them all, “endless profit”, the 99% suffer. This ranges from the minutiae of daily life – small interactions conditioned by a deeper ontic capitalist frame, through to industrial relations, politics and so on. So infectious is the virus of capitalism that even the values of the anglosphere, and much of the rest of the world, are derived from its panoply of distorted anti-nature cancers. But let’s dial it back for a second.
The internet in 2024 is already a surveillance engine. Between global megacorps whose interest is tracking you from brief glimpse of advertisement through to sale and government actors who track online activities to “predict” “crime”, the infrastructure of an open, free internet, hard won from the net’s early days as a military project, are now used in full scale as a tool primarily for surveillance, secondarily for lock-in, and tertiary as a provider of entertainment (or, as Marx might have suggested – opioids). While information from human sources still exists on the internet, and, indeed, the proliferation of access to information has never been richer, there is also mass disinformation, propaganda, and, aforementioned, dark patterns.
Engagement is the name of the game – and engagement demands surveillance and clever tracking of users. Some people argue that they have nothing to hide [3] but as discussed previously, we are living with the biggest growth of fascist overthrow of -democracy- since the 1930s. Alleged democracy free of war with fascism is not even a centenarian, and yet the very nations interested in fighting authoritarianism have become the fascists themselves. A dark turn, and this is mirrored in microcosm across the “productions” of humanity. If we accept that the role of education, media, and hegemony [4] is to assert capitalism as an ontological mode of production (i.e., deeper than just “what we do”, but actually “how we are, how we relate, and who we value”) then the values required under capitalism require some examination.
We’ve talked about profit, we’ve discussed exploitation and expropriation, particularly at the intersections, in the colony and on the “fringe” – so let us assume we have one umbrella value: we make profit for the 1%. The rest falls under this umbrella, and the inevitability of fascist turns under capital become obvious – if profit is the motive, not human sanity (not to mention human happiness), if vainglorious benefit for the 1% is the motive, not the continued survival of our planet and all the ecosystems that make it, we see that capitalism is fundamentally anti-human. Its only interest is the accumulation of profit, this comes at cost, as we have explored elsewhere. So one way in to this, methodologically speaking, is to examine the outputs and products of capitalism to identify the manifestation of these values.
Okay, that was one heck of a digression.
My argument boils down to this: capitalism demands outsized profit at mass expense to human life, the planet, and your flourishing. And if you’re flourishing, then you’re a capitalist, benefiting from someone else’s expropriated labour.
We can see this manifest in the movement from a relatively free and open internet, which valued information sharing, and still harboured dark cesspits of criminal and morally vile behaviour, to a contemporary reality where the good, the former, is replaced with an oligopoly of tech-dictators, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk (though, he is at least undoing himself), Cook, Nadella, and so on. The interest is in tracking, targeting, profiling and personally identifying as much as possible about each user. The content is secondary to this – anything that yields “engagement” and keeps people on the platform drives the line up. This ranges from social media, to computer operating systems.
The user experience of the modern internet is one of being followed. From the mundane search for a dog collar, through to the invasive slightly-too-slow-swipe-away from an IBS treatment advertisment, your internet is coloured by ghosts of previous interests – accidental or otherwise. Some of these tracking patterns we notice, others we don’t. The more nefarious are usually part of the latter. The fingerprinting and tracking of users, even through consumer level privacy protections (VPNs, custom DNS, Tor, and so on), is so sophisticated and constantly evolving that it is impossible to understand the differential scope of the technologies on any given day.
More troubling still is that corporate technology providers are championing these fingerprinting, tracking, and dark pattern approaches to ensure they keep their users. In an almost fiefdom-model of marketplaces [c.f. 5] these companies seek ever more ingenious (evil, but ingenious nonetheless) methods for identifying and following users. We are practically in an era of having a personal tracker following our every move, with more steps each day to ensure deeper and more significant surveillance of our lives. Governments are not far behind, and rogue agencies acting, allegedly, on behalf of nation-states actively participate in the process of furthering surveillance of citizens. After all, what good is an anti-terrorist agency if it can’t track your shopping habits.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to shake tails – to prevent tracking – to get rid of personalised suggestions. It is next to impossible to shake more serious tailing, and you likely wouldn’t know if you were being tailed unless you were a Keanu level Matrix hacker. If you’re looking to escape the tracking – even at the most basic level – then you are amongst a very small minority, and fortunately, for most of the benign tracking methods installing a few Firefox extensions is all you need. I’ve been using a combination of container tabs and cookie auto delete for many moons now, and on my “personal computer” the number of dog collar adverts I see has significantly reduced. Though I’m still not sure why Instagram thinks I have IBS, take the hint Instagram?
Unfortunately the answer is not to install a few extensions and hope for the best. As mentioned these tracking technologies are increasingly complex and ingenious, and complacency because you installed a cookie-blocker is not a go. Moreover, if more people start protecting themselves, more effort is put into persistent tracking beyond cookies. We need a fairer, better way of sharing knowledge and content – of trading and building “economies” and a -collective- way to create a better way together. Being aware is a good step, protecting yourself as much as possible is a great start, but we need a systemic change before we fall off the cliff into the ocean of 1984 – and we’re already teetering.
Food for thought, I guess. Your comrade,
Aidan.
Dear friends,
I can’t evade the growing news of increasing government surveillance of citizens internet usage. In the US, UK, Germany and many others there have been moves towards enabling a ‘man in the middle’ on any encrypted message, website, or other activity online [c.f. 1]. This is also particularly targeted towards citizens, not corporations. The latter are offered more protections as, you guessed it, they are more financially valuable to the legislator’s government. Now in Australia there is a substantial interest in following suit, breaking encryption in the name of “thinking of the children” [1].
Much more technically minded humans than I have written up commentary on why inserting someone between encrypted internet traffic is a terrible idea. But it boils down to “its not encrypted any more”. And to be clear, for any luddites out there, encryption is not what people use to evade the law. It is a necessary part of free, open and democratic communication on the internet. Inserting the government between every message you send, every website you visit, and every social media post you read is a positive only for privacy invasion – not the protection of children.
But there’s something missing from recent commentary about global internet decryption movements – and it’s not about technology. Rather, what we have seen globally is an incredible surge in fascism, rising interest in regressive and punishing social policy, and the progressive overreach of surveillance capitalism. What, I ask at this juncture, might capital benefit from at first enabling a “backdoor” into everything done on computers, tablets, phones, fridges, and so on? We have already seen the deeply invasive and problematic grasp of internet advertisers. I do not believe it is a leap to assume that shortly after any government is successful in enforcing an MITM for encrypted traffic online that hackers, advertisers and capital will insert itself into the same relation.
I’m not sure about you, but with the proliferation of fascists not seen since Hitler, giving up my right to send private messages so the government can surveil me, allegedly to “protect children”, is a terribly good idea. In Australia we have already seen successive crack-downs on protest activism, what was previously considered a citizens right. Is it a far cry to think that a “child protecting” privacy fracture wouldn’t be used by the police to identify and arrest protest organisers? While just ten years ago I would have felt like a raving lunatic suggesting that government were even interested in the messaging of citizens, or the feverdream of a conspiracy theorist at best, we are facing a modernity of animal farm [2]. Yet even animal farm is banned [3] and yes, they can use this very method to arrest you for downloading it.
I don’t have a great deal more to say here, other than vote accordingly. And by that I mean, very seriously consider voting #1 the Greens and/or Socialists at the next election. The only serious political force on the left (and by that I really mean centre-left) are these parties. The labor party of 2024 is such a far right squaller that they simply eject dissenters at the centre [4] and notably who are on the side of peace – unlike Albanese who’s unyielding and deeply hypocritical support of genocide is against more than 80% of the populace [5].
Sometimes it feels like we’re in a living nightmare. Fascism has returned in full force. Privacy invasion is par for the course. The planet is burning, freezing, and dying. But, fuck it, line must go up. What the fuck is wrong with you, wake up?!
In solidarity,
Aidan
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/02/porn-sites-and-meta-among-those-tasked-with-drafting-australias-online-child-safety-rules https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/21/australia-esafety-commissioner-child-abuse-detection-online-safety ↩︎
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/22/apple-warns-australian-proposal-to-force-tech-companies-to-scan-cloud-services-could-lead-to-mass-surveillance ↩︎
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2023/09/29/banned-books-read-these-books-now-and-why-in-defense-of-books/71008499007/ ↩︎
https://theconversation.com/fatima-payman-breached-caucus-solidarity-what-does-this-mean-and-why-is-it-so-significant-233660 ↩︎
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/05/29/protester-prime-minister-anthony-albanese-israel-palestine/ ↩︎