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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Relevant Snowden quote:

    Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say

    I pay for vpn service anonymously even though I probably don’t need to, as my main use is torrenting. I can see a remote possibility that vpn payment records at some point end up being used against pirates, even just as some kind of risk factor flagging, in the same vein as what you are saying: “If someone is paying for a vpn, surely they’re doing something bad?” In countries that really want to crack down on speech and human rights, vpns get banned outright to varying success, and if you can’t pay anonymously in that situation you’re pretty screwed, this hurts those people.

    In general I think everyone should be trying for some level of actual privacy online as a matter of principle, just because of how everyone being fully tracked and observed puts way too much power in the hands of those watching.




  • Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites

    At this point any cryptocurrency discussion space by necessity has strict policies against promotion, people who like to talk about cryptocurrency have realized it’s generally rude and unwelcome to shill their bags outside of designated areas, and crypto scam bots don’t limit themselves to only those spaces. Not every group of people you don’t like is the equivalent of Nazis.


  • if somehow the population of pirates increases, that will lead to maybe tighter controls on piracy or a more global crackdown of piracy

    Yes, I think most people accept that this is how it would likely work. And it actually is the case that many pirates do not agree with what I am saying, and see this as something to be avoided by keeping piracy niche, and would like to preserve their own access that way, and use this reasoning to argue against greater accessibility. But it’s kind of like voting; any action you can take as an individual affecting the broader society is unlikely to make much difference in determining outcomes that affect you personally. It’s possible to mistakenly imagine that they do, it’s possible to not be thinking about it at all, and it’s possible to have different ideas about what you would like to affect; for instance a person wanting to keep piracy niche might have some idea of a group identity of more technically literate and connected insiders like themselves, and want to act to protect the interests of maintaining media access for that group.

    To me, this subjectivity of goals and the relative absence of direct personal consequences make these choices very unlike a game of prisoner’s dilemma, in which you can expect the consequences of your choices to be unambiguous, tangible, and personally experienced. Instead of working out an optimization problem for clearly defined personal interests that are the same for all actors, the task is one of empathy and imagination - what can the world look like, what should it look like, who do we care about and what do we want for them? How do different visions of the world weigh against each other?