a day ago
- Programmers have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not any single nation, to uphold the Internet as a universal, uncensored knowledge-sharing system.
- Mass surveillance systems, initially built for advertising, are now used by companies like Palantir to enable technofascism through state-corporate fusion.
- Surveillance justified by national security inevitably targets a nation's own citizens, expanding to encompass entire populations under paranoid control.
- The privatization of surveillance to unaccountable corporations blurs lines between policing and military operations, enabling technological violence with impunity.
- Privacy must be enforced through code, not laws or regulation; technical defense via software/hardware is essential against surveillance.
- Current rulers are depicted as a corrupt gerontocracy sacrificing youth and planet for power, using surveillance and automated warfare to maintain archaic dominance.
- The American Empire is unraveling due to internal decay and challenges from new powers, losing its global economic and military hegemony.
- Technological dominance fantasies backfire in real war; true victory requires offering a better life, not just drone strikes that breed future revenge.
- Proponents of automated warfare secretly support drafts, knowing their techno-fascist systems are paper tigers against asymmetric resistance.
- Builders of AI weapons are directly responsible for civilian deaths; shifting blame to AI is a parlour-trick that doesn't absolve accountability.
- Tactical nuclear war is increasingly likely as geriatric authoritarian rulers face fewer restraints over resource conflicts.
- The goal is a peaceful world where the Internet empowers individuals, not a system sending youth to die for corrupt rulers' profit.
- Programmers must build decentralised tools for freedom and prosperity; pacifism is suicidal, but hard power lies in defensive technology.
- The state is a dying pre-Internet Ponzi scheme; technology should decentralise power to individuals and voluntary communities.
- Centralised opaque algorithms and social media monopolies threaten free speech by promoting propaganda and suppressing dissent.
- Building new, cross-border forms of social organisation and distributed autonomous organisations is vital for survival.
- Biometric digital identity systems are the next control step, gatekeeping Internet access to suppress subversive content and organisation.
- True freedom requires anonymity; technology must preserve privacy rights for expression, transaction, and contract formation.
- Global surveillance states are proliferating worldwide, with Palantir aiming to become the operating system of a cross-border secret state.
- Culture wars are a psychological operation to restore hereditary elite rule, counter to Enlightenment values of liberty and progress.
- Technology as an extension of human cognition, combined with AI, could accelerate progress and solve crises like climate change and nuclear war.
- Technologists must choose: either enable humanity's enslavement or create new spaces for freedom, with no middle ground in this struggle.