Maciej Cegłowski’s latest talk, The Internet With A Human Face, is a perfect companion to both his Our Comrade the Electron and Peter Watts’s Scorched Earth Society: A Suicide Bomber’s Guide to Online Privacy: a narrative that explains how the Internet of liberation became the Internet of inhuman and total surveillance. Increasingly, I’m heartened by the people who understand that the right debate to have is “How do we make the Internet a better place for human habitation?” and not “Is the Internet good or bad for us?” I’m also heartened to see the growth of the view that aggregated personal data is a kind of immortal toxic waste and that the best way to prevent spills is to not collect it in the first place.
I have always wanted to have a ‘Death to America!’ slide. Maybe I should just say ‘de-americanize’.
As a naturalized US citizen, whose citizenship can potentially be revoked by court order, let me just say America is the greatest country on Earth, and I am lucky to live there. I am sorry that you can’t live there too.
In fact, we’re so great that we can probably spare one or two of these giant websites and let you replace them with something based here in Europe.
In the past year, you’ve seen that there is not a lot of concern in America for the privacy rights of the average German citizen. I think ‘zero’ would be a fair number to put on that.
If your prime minister can’t get us to stop bugging her phone, how secure do you think your own data is, when you send it to California?
The Internet With A Human Face – Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference Talk