Thread

🛡️
the internet is fucked. - govs can turn off the internet for everyone whenever they want, surveil entire populations, and attack people’s privacy - few corps control the physical infrastructure and can censor websites, domains, block protocols or entire countries - billionaires and mega corps control social media and manipulate news, politics, brainwash entire populations - AI already producing infinite slop responsible for the majority of all new content on the internet today the internet is so fucked.

Replies (33)

🛡️
The west could also go full North Korea. If we get to the stage of worrying if they are killing lora signals we’ve lost anyway. If we’re at the point of worrying about what websites they think they can censor then they’ve lost. Webs of trust are going to be extremely important in the future as @calle says a lot of new content is AI slop. Nostr or similar tech will have its day.
🛡️
It depends on how widespread the crackdown is. It would take a very well coordinated global crackdown. Governments can't afford to keep internet shutdown for long, its causes a lot of economic strain. Most money is digital fiat and it doesn't work without internet. You can connect to the blockchain via satellite, but that means relying on blockstream an American company, and the satellites are third party, Samsung etc. I have no idea if it ever came to anything but some researchers were updating blocks over long range radio signals awhile ago. The network is far more resilient than anyone realises.
Yup. Been that for a while and getting rapidly worse. Just been wandering if this new wave of privacy topics is still worth pursuing. If big tech & secret services can profile you with just 3 tweets/purchases/30 sec voicemail etc. they have everyone in the bag anyway, no? There was a ‘privacy wave‘ in the 1980s among the hacking community (famously called cypherpunks now) and then again in regular intervals until today where it has reached mainstream. And still surveillance on all levels is getting out of hand and protecting against it near impossible. Most important in the current ‘wave’ is the fight against censorship & internet shutdowns and you are doing an invaluable service to the communities! Thank you 🙏 #Bitchat View quoted note →
I agree that the internet is a fundamentally missdesigned system. Easily censorable (e.g. Iran would be offline right now if Elon felt like it). Surveilance is not true tho. Confidentiality is easily achieved by https or other encryptions.
Just go with the flow, don't fight it, cut back on obvious scams though and digitalID, just do normal internet stuff with Bitcoin. Oh and have other private hardware system running in parallel, bolstered by private AI, Nostr, ObscuraVPN and other tools. This is the way.