Me at the Berkman Center
Earlier this month I spent a week at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talking to people about power, security, technology, and threats (details here). As part of that week, I gave a public talk at Harvard. Because my thoughts are so diffuse and disjoint, I didn’t think I could pull it all together into a coherent talk. Instead, I asked Jonathan Zittrain to interview me on stage. He did, and the results are here: both video and transcript.
Be warned, though. You’re getting a bunch of half-formed raw thoughts, contradictions and all. I appreciate comments, criticisms, reading suggestions, and so on.
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WarriorsShade • April 19, 2013 2:40 PM
Bruce,”It is clear to me that we as a society are headed down a dangerous path, and that we need to make some hard choices about what sort of world we want to live in. It’s not clear if we have the social or political will to address those choices, or even have the conversations necessary to make them. But I believe we need to try. ”
The increasingly Machiavellian realization I have come to is that it’s not about whether “we” as in the majority of people and society, have the social or political will to address these choices, and instead about the ability, or lack thereof, to actually affect change even if our will was strong enough.
I’m an Iraq war vet who has spent the majority of my free time since I got out attempting to understand the powerstructure, and I think that hackers always thought we could figure out a way around any restrictions placed on them. The reality is that with the advancement of technology the traditional power elite are very surely cementing their power.
The issue of new regimes of trust is falsely said to be about inter-societal trust, and instead is about the trust the power structure has for it’s given citizenry, and the lengths it’s willing to go to to keep themselves safe from it. Whether the threat is from actual war or from political dissidence, it makes little difference. (and in fact, the main issue I see with ubiquitous surveillance is the chilling effect on free speech it enables).
From a purely analytical point of view, I truly think that it is highly unlikely enough people will come out forcefully enough to prevent totalitarianism in some strange modern proto-global form.