The Australian federal government is planning to de-anonymize the internet
twitter.com
twitter.com
If think if you asked my grandparents what defined 'being Australian' it would be been belief in freedom, mateship and irreverence of authority.
I also really like Matt Taibbi's "Hate Inc" hypothesis, which is basically that consensual reality is no longer the business model employed by news organizations to get viewers, its more like contempt and fear of the other. It does strike me that Fox pioneered that, although it seems like the rest of the media apparatus has hopped on board.
Structures like churches and local communities have crumbled away, and parents and family have to work so much that the state via schools do a lot of child raising these days. (there are tons of kids who are with the state from 9am to 5 to 6pm, however late after school will take them), then there parent has to give them to grandma or babysitter on the weekend to work some more. People's guiding authority in their life has become the state.
But it’s not just News Ltd anymore. Fairfax has devolved since Nine bought them out, and the ABC is a shell of what it once was. Just look at what happened to Nick Ross for reporting the truth about the NBN, or Emma Albericie for reporting on tax cuts in a way the Government didn’t like. They were basically forced out. Then all the budget cuts leading to redundancies of many of the good voices. There are still a few gems, but the ABC is mostly in a “report in a way we like or it’s more budget cuts” position and are mostly toeing the line.
I suspect this issue extends far outside Australia and the US though.
Freedom of speech and anonymity is being weaponized and used against the west.
> A key element of Moscow's strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives- including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against president Biden- to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration.
> Throughout the election cycle, Russia's online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow's long-standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people.
> Foreign intelligence services are certainly doing a lot of crap online but it's not clear whether they've actually accomplished anything.
?
Government resource allocation is seldom based on a rational cost / benefit analysis.
> Throughout the election cycle, Russia's online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow's long-standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people.
The confidence undermining was all a local issue; Russia had nothing to do with it.
Isn't this just the ol' "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" problem? Hundreds of years of ago we couldn't see germs with a microscope doesn't mean they weren't effective in our lives.
And because we couldn’t see them we misattributed their effects and treated people with bloodletting. Confidently declaring your understanding of an unseen enemy and applying seemingly-appropriate countermeasures is likely to be harmful.
Their goal is to make our system dysfunctional by destroying people's trust in the information presented them.
It is what the Rand institute calls the "firehose of falsehood" https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
And they have been very successful at it.
Do you have a good source explaining concretely how a handful of people, even sponsored by enemy states, can cause such harm? It's hard to imagine that they would have such influence without the general population being more than receptive to it.
I think the trolls, shills and agitators are a symptom of dysfunction rather than the cause. And I think the idea that more authoritarian states are stronger/more stable/better because they don't suffer this is deeply misguided.
In the United States, our political class is deeply and fundamentally unserious. Our legislators seem uninterest in legislating and in general seem to believe that their main job is re-election, and not the work they were elected to do.
Going to attempt a fix
Our legislators seem uninterest in legislating and in general seem to believe that their main job is re-education, and not the work they were elected to do.
To quote chief Nazi propagandist Goebbels from 1928:
We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem… We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.
The modern-day far right is following exactly the same almost-100-years-old playbook, and there are still people who don't recognize that we are letting history repeat itself. What would your (great-)grandparents have thought if you told them that there would be open marches of swastika flag-bearing people in the US?
That happened to a far greater degree in the 1930s. There is nothing comparable today. Formal, large, organized groups representing literal fascism and communism were present in the US back then. Those great-grandparents were certainly aware of it. The US is a large and diverse nation - formed of the world's peoples in many regards - and you're allowed to follow almost any ideology you choose. That means extreme, violent statist-type elements - socialist, fascist, communist, theocratic, et al. - will never cease to be present.
"When Nazis Took Manhattan"
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323...
"American Nazis in the 1930s—The German American Bund"
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if 'the west' has a coherent set of moral principles at all they are probably inextricable with the idea that more authoritarian states are more brittle/more stagnant/worse. Even if it's true that free speech is being used against 'the West', turning our back on it in response would mean there's nothing there to defend.
Indeed, "Let them eat cake." is the most famous thing Marie Antoinette never said, judging by the various anonymous and pseudonymous pamphlets and other printings that popularised during her time that and many other slanderous or otherwise hurtful remarks.
(( And no, I'm not saying a police state or anarchy would be an appropriate outcome. ))
"Better Amazon reviews" and "fewer Reddit shills" aren't worth much.
> I'm not suggesting stripping anonymity or free speech, I'm just pointing out the problem with anonymity online.
In the context of an article about removing anonymity, I don't think it's possible to set "removing anonymity" aside.
If you were buying a microwave oven via Amazon, you could take a gamble and trust Amazon product reviews by people you don't know or have any real reason to trust. Or you could pay an independent party to review it on your behalf[2][3]. Or you could look for a random reviewer on YouTube that receives free samples from manufacturers and compares multiple models side by side, careful to only highlight positives of each product. In any of these cases, the real identity of the reviewers is largely irrelevant. The YouTube reviewer could be wearing a clown suit and go by the name 'SillyClown123' and the review could be far more trustworthy and helpful than other types of review. What you actually want to know, and may not be able to determine, is the motivations for conducting the review, whether the reviewer has manipulated and narrowed (possibly inadvertently) the field of products compared and whether their criteria and weightings for review align with your own expectations.
[1] https://www.modernretail.co/platforms/how-amazon-sellers-are...
[2] https://www.choice.com.au/home-and-living/kitchen/microwaves...
[3] https://www.consumerreports.org/products/microwave-ovens-289...
Privacy, however, is something that needs to be strongly enforced, and that means you have complete control of what personal and private information and communication is available to third parties. Anonymity and Privacy are necessary in places (journalists, dissidents, etc), but many people tend to think of anonymity and privacy as one in the same.
Social media with anonymity allows bad actors to masquerade as whomever they want, say anything without recourse or accountability, and social engineer people at large scales. The issue is that we tend to trust people, and if those people are foreign disinformation agents then we end up with the division we have today. Social media should be private - complete ownership of your data and audience - but it should not be anonymous.
People that call for accountability are modern witch hunters in my opinion. The try to put blame on people that are probably not responsible for perceived ills.
I am pretty aware of the difference between anonymity and privacy and there is a strong correlation in many cases.
Do say, 2OEH8eoCRo0!
THAT is one of the most authoritarian things I've ever read. You're full on down the fascist road once you start believing things like that.
The net certainly increased possibilities for foreign actors to reach domestic audiences, but claims of such cases are vastly exaggerated in my opinion.
That said, troll, shills, agitators and propagandists might have a good understanding of peoples fears and desires and will use that against you. More effective the more you know about the target. This is why surveillance is dangerous.
The first two points are fine, obvious even. Although they are not a satisfying answers to the questions "Why are authoritarian ideologies becoming more popular?" These answers seem equivalent to answering a physics question with "we live in a strange world" and then just leaving it at that.
The latter 2 points are bothersome. I much prefer the default "social contract" implied by most messages: "These are my thoughts. I welcome further thoughts or counter arguments. I may or may not participate in further discussion." That goes without saying and seems much nicer than "I'm smart and my arguments are sound, but don't expect further discussion, see ya".
There's an interesting discussion to be had around point 2 and the pros and cons of different ideologies. All of that was buried beneath points 3 and 4, asserting your intelligence and discouraging further discussion.
Especially when people are more safe than ever before, the measures proposed here merit some pushback.
If you are an IT professional, and earning 100k+ a years, there is no wonder you didn't meet much of these before. There is simply not a lot of opportunity for social classes to cross in daily life today.
We, rich people, learned it the hard way in Russia 20 years ago.
I call it a "revenge voting": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/10/electi...
I really believe the West needs to learn from how the early modern Russia unravelled, and how it came to 1991 being undone through effectively a democratic process.
Things will change. They always do.
I see similar on the left. You see a lot of people who had good things to say marginalized because they pushed back against the current populism or people who should know better embracing it so save their own hide (my senator being one of the latter).
Second to it, is the reality on the ground is that the latter outnumber the former tens of times over.
It ain’t poor people running these countries.
One of the elites who is on the outs or doesnt have a path forward uses it as a tool to grab power for themselves, then uses that power to do what elites always do.
It's pretty much NEVER that one of the lower classes is the one that rise up and gain power via populism. Even Stalin would be "Elite" in that he went to Seminary.
I’m talking about the model of decision making and how distributed it is. That is fundamentally more important.
Ironically, HN is throttling my account for talking about this.
Where were you going with this?
Curious if we saw a similar trend in pre-WWII America. The point being, maybe banding together and tolerating more-authoritarian tendencies is a natural human response to perceived threat. For Australia, this comes from China. For America...I don't know.
There's the PATRIOT Act for GWOT, but a lot of people don't seem to realize it didn't actually give law enforcement new powers. It extended powers they already had for drug and organized crime cases and let them apply to terrorism cases. We had already accepted an erosion of due process and civil liberties in order to defeat the Mafia and fight the War on Drugs.
This absolutely happens as a response to the perception of threat.
In fairness, it's not always clear this is universally wrong. The only reason the US has a federal government and a permanent standing military at all, which were not always givens, is in response to the threat that European colonial powers would have retaken all the land if we didn't, and this was probably a correct assessment.
Maybe rising authoritarianism is simply the natural outgrowth of overusing this impulse. The population, exhausted by the constant blaring of sirens over increasingly esoteric threats, would rather hand over the task of vigilance to some authority so they can finally catch some shut-eye.
We always need high level stress in my opinion. We need to always have a little bit of “it’s bad” in our life to set our priorities. Being comfortable for more than a few months is the absolute worst thing that you can ever do to yourself.
People who have time on their hands at home watch their neighbors and become Karens because they don’t have anything important to deal with.
People who don’t have an existential threat of world wars and a small country taking over the world don’t think it’s worthwhile to guard against that. (Not that I want a world war.)
They say you don’t know good until you’ve had it’s bad and I think that’s so true.
For example, the ruling party has strong links into coal, oil and gas companies (big political donations going one way, much bigger grants and subsidies going the other). They cut subsidies for renewables because they “always let the market decide”, and now when older coal power stations are increasingly uneconomic they’re literally bringing in a forced subsidy to keep them going (sold as a “capacity payment” to “ensure reliability of the grid” - even though the clunkers are increasingly unreliable). It’s going to cost somewhere between $150 and $400 a year per-household on our power bills if they get it through.
Other things are like trying to come up with some kind of way to fine or sanction banks who refuse to lend to fossil fuel companies, or stop activist investors trying to force companies to go green. This is all by the side of politics who claim the utmost commitment to free markets and small Government! Same party pushing all these authoritarian surveillance laws too…
People really seem to be hung up on equivocating a sitting president attempting to overturn an election with people on twitter saying mean things.
The FBI concluded in Aug. 2021 that there was no insurrection attempt.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-e...
Note that Pelosi is still trying to suppress why she didn't provide adequate Capitol security as requested for 100,000 attendees.
Late-term abortion at the state level? That's all I can even think of.
It's more painful and fear-inducing to lose something you have, so the more you have the stronger the allure of laws that are sold as reducing your risk of loss.
The distance between rich and poor is now so big, both in economic and cultural terms, that anyone with even a modicum of wealth is obsessed with "not becoming one of Them", and will accept any rule as long as "it keeps Them in their place".
I find they are if the discussion is within 140 characters or less.
When the conversation turns long form with details of what's going on and the implications folks tend to get a bit shocked and don't like it.
Long form discussions sharing details are something we need more of. Short form opinions aren't helping us. Many people are just unaware.
In my country, Canadians used to be a stereotype for tough, independent minded people.
Gun rights, speech rights, etc, all are weighed against the common good at every juncture. Hate speech has never been considered a personal right in Canada.
Not to insult anyone and much less Canadians, but I can see Ghaddafi or Khmer Rouge using this expression to justify whatever they decided to do.
Freedom of speech would serve Canada better in the long run than censorship and government control of speech
There's one where maybe a little greater weight on personal freedom was indicated.
You're right that we do have a different balance of the common good vs individual liberties as compared to the USA, but of course there are many countries that one could compare to.
Canada certainly doesn't abide by free-speech absolutism, and "hate speech" is a good example. That term used to be applied to very specific, extreme examples. Unfortunately that has been watered down in recent years, and we've seen encroachment in others ways on various freedoms. Not Australia levels, but not great.
I have worked with Canadians for a while, but the past 2-3 years they seem to be more controlling/authoritarian even in the corporate structure. I am in the US, and I am more "here is the outcome we need, achieve that how you like". I think the Canadians I worked with used to be the same way, but now they seem to be more "it needs to be done one way, everywhere, with oversight".
With a global company there are local differences in culture, laws, and priority so the "one way" seems to be a poor fit.
Those over-generalizations of yours don't match my experience in any way. I'm not sure where that perception is coming from, but I see none of that. I think you're drawing correlations from too little data here.
I have seen major changes in politics however, especially as it relates to the progressive left. Perhaps you're seeing a different shift at play.
Not doubt those folks still exist they are just a small minority now.
WRT the coronavirus restrictions, australians arguably had a free-er life than most of western europe this past year. Personally i d prefer to sacrifice international travel if it meant that we can still freely go to work/entertainment/gym etc
Young and old, irreverence was strong and frequently demonstrated, even towards people's own groups and circles.
On a good day, you could earn an approving glance from an old ANZAC in uniform with a fart joke, if the ceremony wass going overtime.
Mass surveillance was and the erosion of civil liberties were literally the biggest parts of post-9/11 legislation to the point where drone striking a US citizen became socially acceptable among conservatives. Conservatives also called for the deaths of Snowden and Assange for "treason".
You can at least admit this isn't a partisan issue even if US politicians love to frame it as one.
I can’t tell if your joking. Obama definitely was not a conservative, and he actually called a drone strike on a US citizen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
However the people right now calling for Orwellian surveillance and restriction of travel are not right wingers.
Remember the PATRIOT Act? Remember the NSA mass surveillance program (which is btw still ongoing)? Remember black sites? Remember Guantanamo Bay? Remember No Fly Lists? Remember the 60 Words? Remember the militarization of the police force? Remember dragnet phone surveillance? ... Remember the PATRIOT Act?
I didn't say it's only right-wingers. I said it's not a partisan phenomenon.
Uh, isn’t that completely opposite though? No conservatives are pushing for government control of the internet, because we already have it with these companies that are directly working with/for the government.
Governments don’t need to build their own spy apparatuses, they just ask FAANG for the data.
It was popular conservative news for weeks that Jen Psaki admitted they were in contact with Facebook to remove problematic posts about topics that were against the Administration's goals.
Their own AG, Merrick Garland said they needed to be careful that this is “walking on thin ice”.
I think you were misunderstanding some of the conservative points of view, I recommend actually speaking to a conservative.
In Australia, our opposition has really moved from the centre left to the centre right as the party in Government has moved further right wing, mostly just over the last few years. We still have a left wing minor party, but they don’t get many seats yet.
The good old "if you're not a liberal when you're young, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative when you've grown up, you have no sense" is just a way to morally justify a political shift that happens to align with a change in financial interests, nothing more.
EDIT: Here's a source since people seem to downvote based on their feelings: https://www.insidehook.com/article/politics/millennials-voti... It doesn't outright say the difference is wealth but it does say the expected trend towards conservativism doesn't present in Millennials to the same degree.
I'm an "old" millennial but there's certainly a trend among young millennials and gen Z to put government mandates in place to stop all sorts of things they find "distasteful".
The first is that the idea of inaction is unacceptable. "We have to do something, we can't just do nothing". This manifests itself in ever increasing intervention in problems that seem really minuscule. Removing a statue of Robert E Lee.... well I can understand that. Removing a boulder because it was once given a name with a racist slur nearly a hundred years ago.... come on.
The second is the idea that if you aren't actively helping, you are actively hurting progress. This takes various forms such as "silence is violence" and "it's not enough to just be not racist, you must be actively anti-racist".
The confluence of these two schools of thought is what I think is leading so such rabid polarization and vitriol. I, of course, have no way to actually prove any of this, but I think it is a model with good face-validity.
“We must do something, even if it’s the wrong thing”
And I’ve never considered that to be more apt.
“You have to pick a side” seems to be a product of the increased polarization.
Personally I think this is due to the fact that in westernized nations they are VERY well off all things considered. The downside of this is that life is so easy they're lost and have no purpose. So, they make a purpose by creating issues where they do not exist or turning what are very small problems into gigantic ones.
I'm starting to think that after a few generations people are unable to relate to actual atrocities and they start to pursue things that inevitably lead down bad roads as proven by history. We may be doomed to constantly repeat these authoritarian moments. I guess people have to experience it to understand it unfortunately.
As you can see in my above comment they never respond, they just downvote when I bring this up because they know it's true. They do not want to read things that upset them so they trend towards censorship and having government create laws to remove any chance they might get upset.
One problem is that countries around the world are increasingly being run by Twitter and social media. We're not looking at a blip near the end of history. We're in the middle of a tectonic disruption similar in scale to the introduction of agriculture or the printing press.
"Extremely online" people have found an endless spring of resentment, fear, and totalitarian thinking welling up from some place inside themselves, an ancient and primal source that you can read about in sociology or cultural anthropology textbooks. Regular people don't think like this, but the "extremely online" dominate online conversation through sheer weight of the hours they spend on it. Politicians, journalists, and other decision-makers internalize this online environment as their view of the real world --- consciously or not --- due to availability bias [1]. Regular people have become progressively disenfranchised by the extreme skew of participation in public discussion. (Censorship isn't helping either.)
Yes, policymakers poll the public --- but polls provide only intellectual information. A policymaker might know, at some level, from the polls, that the people as a whole prefer policy X --- but when his experience, online, day to day, is seeing nothing but volume-11 support for policy Y instead and vicious attacks on policy X, the primate part of his brain guides him towards finding a reason to support policy X instead. Motivated reasoning is extremely powerful.
You might think that elections would make policymakers accountable, but that's not really how it works. Elections are infrequent and subject to thousands of confounding factors that make it difficult for them to act as an accountability mechanism for day-by-day decisions. Policymakers have always relied on public feedback for that, and now the "public" (as least the part visible to policymakers) consists of those with some personality tic or mood disorder or whatever that prompts them to spend eight billion hours per day dunking on everyone else on social media.
For a while now, I've had doubts about the fundamental compatibility of the internet with liberal democracy. Social media takes the whole world and puts it into one village, one city-state, one tight ball of low-friction engagement-optimized information flow. It moves actual governance closer to a direct democracy --- but a direct democracy of the dysfunctional and aggrieved.
Thing is, direct democracies tend to be quite unstable. Look at the histories of the Greek and Italian city-states: they end up, via the their beloved democracies, enacting boggingly stupid policy [2], perpetrating grave injustices [3] [4], and ultimately getting destroyed by tyrants [5]. In a community with low-friction, low-latency information sharing (like a tiny ancient city-state or a modern country with Twitter), there's no impediment to memetic propagation. You see wave after wave of resentment, gossip, fear, and anger bounce around the meme-sphere, interacting with each other, intensifying under conformity pressure. Memetic pressure spikes rapidly, and bad decisions get made under incredible passions without proper reflection. It's like a washing machine with a brick in it. It gets worse and worse until --- without the damping effect of high-latency communication latency and indirect representation --- the whole thing explodes into a cloud of outrage. (That might be a mushroom cloud in our age.)
The printing press led to sweeping structural reforms in society that took centuries to play out, and so will the internet, and I don't think the old forms of governance are viable in the new technological environment. What's happening in Australia is this disruption playing out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Expedition
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates
I'd like to go a step further about your talk of elections and accountability. So many districts, I think, are essentially predetermined by the demographics and drawn boundaries of the district. To eject a Democrat from a deep blue seat, let alone a 60-40 seat is nigh impossible (as with a Republican in a rural red district). In fact, it also seems like the seats that do flip tend to flip as a result of new arrivals moving in with different beliefs. The electoral process seems largely disconnected from popular support and approval.
>Social media takes the whole world and puts it into one village, one city-state, one tight ball of low-friction engagement-optimized information flow.
These are very good points. There's kind of a "tree in the woods thing", but people can now hear every tree falling everywhere 24/7.
I think there is also a recency bias creeping in about "things that have never happened before". "Never before" can mean: since the advent of social media or since the internet has been used widely. There's probably also a hole in the pre-DVR or VCR era where things happened, but were not recorded/saved by the normal populace.
Second, it's worth noting that most records of Athenian democracy come from its detractors. People like Thucydides were basically members of an oligarchic club who consistently conspired with the Spartans against Athens.
I don't know if direct democracy is unstable. The most direct-democratic nation in Europe is Switzerland, and they are so stable they're basically stationary. I don't even know if Athens was particularly unstable for its time-period - it's not like the surrounding city-states, Sparta included, had a particularly good decision-making record.
Twitter users here are (as a group) routinely insulted both in Parliament by Government MPs (usually as something like “that might be popular with the Twitter rabble, but…”) and in the media.
Increasingly the Government actually seems scared of it - for instance many grassroots groups (with names like “Voices of [electorate]”, “Voters of [electorate]”) starting on Twitter are showing potentially some real world clout, raising tens of thousands of dollars to campaign for independents and minor parties in electorates with the ruling party’s MPs. If they manage to swing the couple of percent some of these seats are held by, it could be several seats lost in the electorate. Just today Government figures were kicking up a stink, accusing them of breaching fundraising laws (they aren’t, according to them) which shows they’re at least somewhat rattled.
"freedom, mathesip" lol, you need to lean your own history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenou...
"The conflict has been described as a genocide resulting in the elimination of the full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal population"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detenti...
"The Migration Act 1958 allowed discretionary detention of unauthorised arrivals until 1992."
https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2017/10/20/australian-governmen...
"... questions remain unanswered on Australia’s commitment to human rights for all when it comes to marriage equality, transgender people accessing birth certificates and protecting intersex people from harmful medical procedures,"
Australia's support for the invasion of Timor in the 70' causing 300.000 deaths to steal their oil and gas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqegTsi6SiE
Support for human right terrible abuses in West Papua to steal resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjU8R8oj328
The only thing new about this can be summarized by the famous Thucydides quote: "the tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself"
It's easy to see why they all have Stockholm Syndrome in relation to the absolute draconian lockdowns.
The issue is always - by the time they get around to YOU it's too late to complain that the law doesn't protect individual rights.
Or the relevant question: is this a significant break from previous regimes of censorship and surveillance that Australia has implemented, with popular support?
I do get it, people have lives, they’re busy, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”. None of this is in the news. But it’s really quite distressing to see the manipulation working so well and society unknowingly being taken the direction it is.
Netflix and Uber Eats. Long, long ago that used to be called 'panem et circenses'... Oh, and Facebook/Twitter. Let's not forget circuses imply cheering from the crowd.
Australia, on the other hand, can do whatever they feel like, and people who live there have no real recourse. They have, if you will, a monopoly on government.
I always thought of Aussies as flippant and carefree, but rugged and hardworking. It seems like there is a new streak of nanny-statism and parochial mindedness similar to ‘Little Englanders’ in the UK; but knowing a little bit about your political history, maybe it was always there among the affluent colonial class vs the farmers and herders.
If you look at what happened during the Spanish Flu pandemic, you'll find a lot of similarities to today. There's a reason we have a fair bit of U.S. Supreme Court case-law from the 20s about vaccine mandates and what-not: those matters were very relevant in the 1918-mid20s time frame mainly because of the Spanish Flu.
You might notice that people generally obey rules regardless of whether the rules are reasonable and/or justified. When rules are not reasonable or justified we might say that we have "authoritarian governance", as you put it.
If you ever wonder how people tolerated atrocities in, say, 1930s Germany, the answer is mainly two-fold, that they accepted their government's authority, and/or more importantly that anyways there wasn't anything they could do about it. It's the same today, except that our current governments aren't committing atrocities, though are being heavy-handed (and getting more so every day).
The fact that it is practically impossible for most individuals to do anything impactful about unreasonable rules in a reasonable amount of time is probably the most important factor in acceptance of authoritarian governance. I.e., it may not be acceptance of authoritarian governance as such as much as it is acceptance of one's inability to resist authoritarian governance. The latter looks a lot like the former, especially in cynical or apathetic populations, where the reasoning might go like this:
Q: Why didn't you oppose X 20 years ago?
A: Well, there wasn't anything I could do,
so I did that, nothing.
Q: OK, but why not protest?
A: And lose my job?!
In other words, I would say it's necessarily that people willingly accept authoritarian governance, but that we can't really tell how much willing acceptance there is versus how much unwilling acceptance there is, and it doesn't really matter what the breakdown is.
Once a government decides to be authoritarian, it's very hard to stop it. Usually in the West we get to vote them out. In the worst case scenario they'll rig elections or simply assume total power, and then it can be decades before a country can return to a normal state. Like Franco's Spain: he had to die before Spain could return to the Estado del Derecho.
FYI, "Estado del Derecho" is a wonderful Spanish legal term of art that refers to all that which we take for granted in the West, and which translates literally to "State of Laws" ("a law" translates to "ley", while "the law" translates to "derecho", but "derecho" is also a translation of "right" as in "rights"). I wish English had such a pithy phrase in common daily use for the same concept. "State of Laws" doesn't quite capture all that "Estado del Derecho" does, as "Estado del Derecho" means, mainly (among other things), Habeas Corpus and Due Process.
Cross the tracks only at the footbridges in an orderly fashion! Or cop a $100 fine. Don't say we didn't warn you, mate!
DANGER -- KEEP OFF TRACKS -- VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED $100
On online identities linked to passports - the US already asks this kind of in visa / ESTA applications [0]. It’s not currently mandatory to answer, but I get the impression that’ll change.
It’s hard to believe the line that any of this is directed to reducing online bullying, if anything it makes doxxing trivial. Law enforcement already has powers by warrant to do much of what this contemplates, and the rest is not somewhere I want Peter Dutton et al to be able to see.
[0] https://www.esta-online.com/blogs/esta-social-media-question
Source: The Dictator's Handbook - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11612989-the-dictator-s-...
According to the chairman of the committee, the reasoning behind it is https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/57f90da1085b5b8... :
> prevent people from setting up anonymous accounts, and make them liable for defamation suits or even criminal prosecution for menacing messages or harassment.
It's true this could be yet another authoritarian push from a committee chaired by the LNP (oh, what irony: a party founded on the principles of John Stuart Mill championing authoritarianism). However, in the circumstances a mixture political opportunism and gross subject matter incompetence in a cross party committee seems a far more likely explanation.
[0] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hou...
It's becoming more and more commonplace for people outside the US to connect to the Internet exclusively via a VPN egress in the US, creating "US-based" online accounts, and operating online as if they were a US person. It seems in the future this may be necessary just to experience the Internet with even basic expectations of free access and anonymity.
As long as they continue to play ball geopolitically with the rest of the West, nobody is going to call them out, but the last decade in Australia has seen a significant curtailing of human rights. The most surprising thing is that it seems few people are speaking out about it, generally.
Australia is more and more like China every day. The rest of the world is next. We're being pushed into an authoritarian globalist society and we're okay with it.
You can't be serious. I hope you're not being serious.
Kinda glad I live in Europe now tbh
Totally serious, although it’s hard to say if this is directly related to the trucker strike or not. They have been keeping a tight lip on that news. I didn’t believe it because I couldn’t find any news about it, but it’s pretty hard to fake road closures going entirely across New South Wales.
Democracy is dead because it distributes benefits to the people based on their merit. In the future, all benefit of industry and productivity will be rationed and distributed based on need and consideration for the environment. You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
I think the western elite are in the process of committing civilizational suicide and consenting to being rolled up into Chinese hegemony because they can't do the whole one-child global climate lockdown permanent austerity depopulation agenda under a democratic government. Democracy failed because it was bad for the environment and now we are seeing our leaders commit mass suicide of their countries to save the environment. This is not a temporary emergency, this is forever and they really have to have the systems of control on super tight to manage it. Which is what we are seeing here with the current totally overboard Coronavirus pandemic measures.
It would be nice if we could use technology to solve a political problem, but it seems unlikely.
If you don't matter, sure, you can continue to hide in quasi anonymity in the noise. That's only because they don't have a reason to pursue you.
Authoritarian systems turn the people into the ultimate snitching devices. People learn to be careful with computing devices, it's your own trusted family or neighbor or friends that will burn you. Society gets sculpted to reinforce government policies. That happens in all authoritarian systems. You could even see it in the psycho-rabid mask people, in how batshit crazy irrational they've become. They're wildly emotional lunatics unable to comport themselves as normal humans. They can't think rationally any longer, because they've been driven into a frenzy. The propaganda terrorism scare tactics used on the US population after 9/11 had somewhat similar effects. Authoritarian systems always produce large numbers of those people, they act as an extension of the group/person in power to enforce ideology, laws, religion, behavior, you name it.
But it's for our own health. For the public welfare.
In this time of pandemic crisis strong measures are called for.
/S
Perhaps people are seeing that, on the one hand, large-scale problems (global warming, global pandemics, global economic boom-and-bust cycles, etc.) are having real consequences for individuals, and on the other hand, they cannot be resolved by simple independent action (because if they could, we'd be seeing trends of improvement, not worsening).
There's a crisis of faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. People have traditionally turned to institutional power when individuals seem less trustworthy.
I don’t think that crisis of faith is unwarranted, given the reaction large swathes of people have had to public health measures like vaccination, plus political misinformation and straight out bullshit like Q. The average everyday man is a moron.
An idea. Popular. Backed by compelling arguments. Agreed upon by all the smart people. Broadcast from all the right news channels. Yet still totally wrong and utterly fucked.
It's happened before and it'll happen again.
Best to leave us our right to choose.
No, I said it’s not wrong to lose faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. Right now we have people hospitalising themselves eating horse pharmaceuticals, all the while congratulating themselves on how smart they are for doing their own “research”. It’s pitiable.
In this era, we have more sources of signal to access than ever before. I don't know that people are equipped with enough tools for knowing how to know things to discern fact from fiction given those sources.
In an era where people would have barely known about ivermectin / COVID-19 interaction because most doctors who look at the research discard it as insufficient, there would have been no choice to be made. In this era? Now everyone has to have a passing familiarity with how clinical studies work (or trust authority), because the data isn't filtered (and, in fact, there are people who dedicate themselves to spreading misinformation... This observation is independent of whether ivermectin is effective; we know people have been doing dishonest things "for the lulz" for decades).
This certainly says something about the popular epistemology.
There are less than twenty people who have ever seen the surface of the moon. We believe their testimony on the topic.
So lets welcome the past with all its atrocities but this time for the "correct" reasons. Just like all the previous geniuses did. Who knows may be this time the F&C might win and rewrite history.
There are probably things we can do as a society (improve education being one) that might help.
But no, any observation that large groups people are unable to parse the modern world and come to reasonable conclusions simply must be because that person wants to implement newspeak and purge any that disagree.
Helpful.
Yet these “global issues” are getting worse.
To me it doesn’t seem obvious larger government is the solution. Of course that’s what most governments and media close to governments want you to believe.
See the other comment in this thread that free speech has been “weaponized” and therefor presumably must be curtailed “for our own good.”
It’s like even pointing out the problem makes you a heretic to the free speech absolutist creed.
Because if the government is wrong, and "science" literally caused the problem by playing with "gain of function" research, then they have nothing left to believe in their lives.
Incongruous.
China was performing the research, not the US. Which was precisely the problem. China's lab incompetence (which was documented prior to the pandemic) may have released the virus. The US apparently provided a very modest amount of funding to the lab in Wuhan toward gain of function research.
lol, you need to lean about the history of minorities in Australia starting with the indigenous people and how they were treated.
Same thing with their relations with all their small neighbors and with "undesirable" immigrants.
This is a great place to start: https://www.youtube.com/user/thejuicemedia
There is nothing new to this in Australia's culture, is was just aimed at the weak and vulnerable, but as the famous quote by Tucidides goes: "The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself."
The state policing what people who receive government aid are spending their money on, for example -- I can't imagine anyone being for this 10 years ago.
I've noticed that it's more acceptable to be xenophobic amongst certain groups too.
Many things have been reduce to "us vs. them". Us vs. the "scroungers", us vs. the immigrants, us vs. the "lefties", us vs. the "climate lunatics"
I struggle to recognise the country I left.
Unfortunately most of the last decade we've had a Liberal (Conservative) government and a fairly centrist opposition that tries to minimise their attack surface lest Murdochs Newscorp find a new way to attack them in the media.
Unfortunately this leads to things like this, where it is politically infeasible to vote against it with cries of 'think of the children'.
Basically media forcing the Labor party (historically pro privacy and workers rights) to shift more right to avoid losing votes.
Then they have other accounts where they use a pseudonym, login with a VPN, preferably on a laptop with FDE, and in a dedicated browser profile where they can 'shitpost' and vent or otherwise say things that could potentially get them fired or stop them from getting a job?
Australia thinks people don't do this. They think people are naive and don't compartment their digital identity, but it's common practice.
It seems like they fully understand that people do this and this is exactly the reason why this topic came up.
I agree with some comments on that Twitter thread - once (if? when?) it goes live in AU, the rest of the world will follow quick. Want VPN? Show the passport. Want your own VPN in x cloud provider? Show the passport. Want a colocated server so you can host that VPN yourself? Show the passport. Want to host the VPN at home? Well, tough luck - your ISP knows who you are. There are only so many places one can connect to the net from.
The governments will not allow any unreegulated medium for long. It will either get regulated and incorporated or banned and criminalized. That's the sad state of things.
Legitimate users can only do so much to "not have anything to hide". Keep it legit and limit your online presence to the legit stuff, I guess.
How the great are falling everywhere... Australia used to be the country of Crocodile Dundee - "that's not a knife, this is a knife" - but those days seem to be gone. The USA used to be The Land of the free and the Home of the Brave, neither of which are applicable to those who officially represent the country. Quo Vadis, Orbis Occidentis...
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/characters/nm0001330
I can't view the article as unbiased (and neither would I expect that from The Atlantic), although it does make some effort to support measures introduced for the public good - especially in times of pandemic. However, for me at any rate, it was worth reading and gave me food for thought. I worked in Australia for nearly three years (2013 to 2016) and wouldn't like to see a shift in its society to the extent feared by the writer.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
This proposal is the Federal Government, which has been passing increasingly draconian, increasingly authoritarian mass surveillance, “national security” laws and ostensibly “eSafety” laws over decades now. They have passed the worst in the last four or five years, but really it’s been going back to 9/11, even though we never had any “real” terror attacks on our shores… These federal laws stick.
Worldwide, I'm seeing a heck of a lot of extension and precious little expiry so far...
And here we are again: underbelly of the world is once again getting what they want, is once again convincing us that freedom & liberty are too dangerous to keep. They once again are goading us into de-legitimizing ourselves, into making democratic society look like a fool.
These attempts to try to wrest control, to walk back rights, to control speech: they're all giving the terrorists (and other anti-westerns) exactly what they want.
We are in a sticky time. The avenues for exploration that I think are worthwhile hinge around better cross-site online reputation systems. We should forge & publish our own crytopgraphic identities, expose them on places like Keybase. This serves as an anchor, where we can use tools like Web Annotations specification to decentralizedly provide feedback/moderation on this person. Where we can begin to let a track record emerge. We can increase the quality of visibility into those who post, we can make Anonymous Cowards notably cowardly, notably anonymous, where-as today, a well established upright citizen of the world doesn't look any different in most sites, doesn't have much more context attached to them, than a sock puppet in a anti-western government's troll-farm, who created an account three months ago.
A lot of these problems are internal, but a huge amount of the strife we are experiencing right now is nation-state sponsored. For us to secure ourselves by stripping ourselves of freedoms, trying to unmask every evil in our realm, gives in to assault being waged against democratic systems. It reverts to the baser means these nations want to lower us to, it assuages their authoritarian guilt, confirms the sense of hypocracy they want us to be guilty of. We need to build up, we need to tool up, we need to become a more robust information society. Not a more authoritarian one.
In the US, you're crazy if you think your cable modem account, IP history, Apple ID, Facebook account, Instagram account, and Google account aren't all linked to your full name, phone number, DOB, street address and passport number by the NSA/IC.
They consider this to be their job, and they're fairly good at it, because they have access to the large US providers to get whatever data they want.
The news this week is that the “Identify and Disrupt” bill has been passed to allow federal law enforcement to interfere with computer equipment in a way that deserves its own thread. [1][2] That bill was rushed through without time for members to read it [3]
[0] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hou...
[1] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/26/tony-...
[3] https://twitter.com/helenhainesindi/status/14304595485071441...
Though "normal person" for Straya tends to be someone who considers the c-bomb to be punctuation, so it may be tricky to tell if it's having any effect.
Do we really need this when people already shitpost on facebook with their real names?
I always cringe at seeing the anti-mask or whatever protest, but this seems like it's getting out of hand.
Literally taking their cue from China, i.e. 'social credit'?
I find it odd that they don't consider this to be a kind of political suicide, like, after a 18 months of lock-downs, the population has 'had enough' and ready to burst, this seems like a bad idea out of a Will Farrell political comedy.
Consider this: "What would MY government need to do, for ME to decide "This is too much" and take action?
Of course, different people will have different answers, it's a cultural thing. The line often runs close to the physical integrity of themselves or their children.
But knowing the limits of your loyalty to your government (even if those limits seem ridiculously distant now) let's you avoid the fate of "boiling frog". Things tend to go bad slowly for a while – with copious foreshadowing – then all at once.
Examples of people who were "genuinely surprised, SURELY this cannot be happening to this civilized nation" (all the way to the camp/gulag train) are trite in their horrific innumerability.
Consider this: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country"
It only works if we act conscientiously.
If we start with a selfish mindset, and don't consider our obligations, it will all unravel quickly.
The question of government control is of course important, which is why we have to weigh things carefully.
Anti-mask protests are cringe because the mandates are within reason for a quasi national emergency, and it's a very mild form of control, from what I see it's people who are probably angry over a host of things.
The lock-downs, obviously much more severe curtailment of rights.
Arbitrary controls such as this new proposal should be met with revolt, maybe with some protest, but really at the ballot box. It's the kind of thing that should cause a party to lose most of their support, i.e. they propose it, and then 2 weeks later they recant it and pretend it didn't happen because it was such a bad idea.
This is an investigative committee's proposal, my bet is that it won't go forward.
I didn't mean anyone to answer publicly – finding the line is a personal, intimate investigation. Pavlik Morozov-style on one end; anarchists on the other.
Either way, it's good to know where government loyalty stops for you. Where the shit hits the fan, and you're past composing carefully worded posts on social media.
This started the thread.
More generally, act = take active measures to protect whatever is on the other side of the line you drew (wherever you drew it; e.g. your life & the life of your kids). At which point you don't recognize the legitimacy of the government and will break its laws and oppose its agents with clear conscience.
The "action" could be as simple as buggering off to a safer country – the winning strategy in the 20th century (especially for Jews). Jollybean also wrote this:
> Consider this: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country"
It's conflating "country" with "government" but otherwise a good litmus test for which side of us-vs-them you see your government. That quote did remind me of Pavlik Morozov [0], when used by jollybean in the context of this particular article on Australia.
Living in Australia for many years, I can't stand reading all those "Privacy in Australia is dead, and look at their lockdowns!" articles here. I can download whatever torrent I want without getting warning from ISP or some antipiracy body. I can post "my prime minister is a cunt" wherever I want and be alright. I don't have mobile ISP injecting ads in my "https" traffic. I'm not forced to install SSL certificates issued by some government body. None of E2EE messengers are banned. Media that have critical view on government do not get their licenses revoked. All the breaches of privacy from the state and all government fuckups are all over the news and not silenced. Not many countries that were my home in the past can boast about all of this. What we have here is one of the best tradeoffs you can get in modern democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
> set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars for every interaction they have, which can impact their socioeconomic status.
We can't have choice, or freedom with duopolys working to prevent any competition. The narative is set and the people molded into one of two beliefs.
Yeah because corporations have been a GREAT steward of mapping online accounts to real persons. There's no way corporations could fudge up identity mapping as badly as governments could. There's definitely no way that people would get a false sense of security from corporations handling that and governments getting their data from corporations instead of directly from the real person. Governments are always bad and will never do anything well ever!
/s
This system imposes an enormous long term responsibility on the organisation(s) storing the data to keep it secure.
I don’t trust any organisation to do that when something as large as facebook or the US military can’t even prevent data breaches.
I’ll change my mind when we have mathematically proven unhackable databases behind quantum resistant cryptography.
One breach there and they have your bank accounts, utilities, and something approximating your identity.
“In China, Kids Are Limited To Playing Video Games For Only 3 Hours Per Week”
(NPR, August 30, 20214:39 PM ET)
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/30/1032489883/china-kids-video-g...
Social Media anonymity is often used to incite riots in many parts of the world.
And obviously, in tyrannical regimes, de-anonymysing is a issue.
The third issue is defining who is tyrannical.
https://7news.com.au/sunrise/on-the-show/federal-government-...
Edit: Apparently not:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-s-a-long-bow-soci...
That's not really true, if Twitter decided to ban Biden or a big DNC politician they would get obliterated by antitrust laws in weeks. They just were able to do it to Trump because it agreed with the consensus of current day power.
From a research paper[2] that studied the effects of the legislation:
"The comparison of flaming proportions between identity verified and non-verified groups, as seen in Table 4 above, supports our inference in that the identity verified users are more likely to repeatedly write inflammatory comments and become aggressive against the opposite opinions."
"The results regarding the Identity Verification Law suggest that some potential commenters may withdraw themselves from writing comments due to the inconvenience and risks associated with the verification process, whereas others who undergo the verification process may do so because they perceive the benefits gained from becoming an online community member and expressing opinions to be higher than the costs incurred from the verification process."
The eSafety Commissioner of Australia position[3] on de-anonymizing online discussions appears to call for a repeat of the naive mistakes that South Korea made with their attempts to de-anonymize the Internet. Likely what would happen if de-anonymization legislation is introduced into Australia is:
1) Local Australian websites and online services would lose traffic to international sites that people gravitate towards (and are even less regulated and more out of Australian law enforcement reach).
2) Local Australian websites and online services will be overrun with people with fringe opinions and views that don't care about using their real name for posting up neo-nazism content, anti vaxxer content, etc. Many of these people are comfortable sharing their views today with their real identities. The reason for an overrun is that those with moderate/mainstream views and opinions will perceive online discourse with their real identity as having too much risk, with no outweighing benefits.
3) Memes and other creative methods will become more commonplace, making enforcement particularly hard if not impossible to achieve. If someone shares a meme such as "Happy Merchant"[4], did they share a picture of a happy old man not noticing the connotation of the kippah in the image, or did they deliberately share the image with an intent to incite racism? Or if we look to a case from China, is it a picture of someone relaxing on the grass by a beautiful lake, promoting tourism, or is it someone sharing the picture with an intent to raise awareness of the "Tang ping"[5] movement?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-name_system#South_Korea
[2] The impacts of identity verification and disclosure of social cues on flaming in online user comments. DOI 10.1016/j.chb.2015.04.046. Full text: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277302786_The_impac...
[3] https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/tech-trends-and-challeng...
Would you consider China to be "hard right?"
Silencing dissenting viewpoints seems to be very much a modern "left" thing to me.
As a liberal, I've been dismayed at how the modern left seems to have completely abandoned the mantle of liberalism.
For the record, calling these policies "left" or "right" is silly as authoritarianism isn't inherently one or the other. But whether China even qualifies as "leftist" is extremely debatable even if it was already quite authoritarian under Mao.
I was commenting on what I am seeing coming from those who described themselves as being ideologically aligned with the "left" today.
I see censorship, speech limiting, "canceling", compelled speech, etc, coming from that area today.
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s this was very much the kind of thing I saw coming from the "right", limiting expression for political and religious reasons.
Like I mentioned, as a liberal (which I don't belive is inherently left or right) I've been disappointed in the modern "left" which seems to me to be taking a step back from liberalism. I see a lot of authoritarianism coming from that direction right now.