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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Technology
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Exactly. I'm tired of more and more of my life being decided by boardroom execs instead of elected officials. Why are we trying to privatize ethical decision making? Government officials may be only barely accountable, but at least that's more than a private company. And don't even get me started on 'voting with your wallet'. I feel like that phrase is going to be as ridiculed by later generations as we ridicule 'trickle down economics'.
To me, going after oblique methods (like shutting off basic utilities) just to deal with criminal behavior represents a failure of the system. And the response to that failure shouldn't be to make these hacky workarounds more accessible, but rather should be addressing the core problems in the first place. We shouldn't be lobbying to shut off rapists power and water anymore than we should be trying to self sabotage our Internet infrastructure to deal with our rampant hate speech issues. Instead we should focus on actually addressing these issues by proper enforcement of laws we already have (which is often the sole issue), clarifying and updating where appropriate and developing responsive and auditable methods of problematic speech. In a way that isn't totally up how one CEO feels that day.
Why are we so quick to relinquish control of our digital lives to the very corporations we claim to hate?
The system is failing right now. People are exercising any means to get the system to listen. When someone in the system finally listened, the response is to complain that action is happening? Is this ideal? No, but also these aren't public utilities. We don't have laws which make them such. We don't have protections to ensure the utilities don't cause harm (there's no obligation to provide power to someone who wired their own home, not up to code because we want to protect our public utilities). Furthermore this gets complicated in terms of who's hosting the content versus who's routing it - we might not allow a utility company to shut off power, but we certainly allow the police to do so and we give them instructions on how and when to do it.
Why is the EFF grandstanding and making a blog post about this specific issue when there are so many other examples, including ones that they quite literally link to, where real harm is being caused? KF isn't suing, this isn't an announcement about how they are going to provide legal support. This is the system working exactly how it has always worked, and they decide to make this the hill that they wish to die on? There's a thousand other hills already present why aren't they getting blog posts?
This isn't relinquishing control. We never had it. Maybe focus on that? Maybe focus on how things could be better? How the system should work? We don't need to make a martyr out of these assholes.