![]() Ultimately, they can call it a town square, all these corporate slogans that paint these products and services as socially beneficial. ![]() We don’t have any control over it in any meaningful sense. We have become, over the past couple of decades, dependent in pretty profound ways on computational infrastructures that are run at the whim of these companies that are, as a rule, predicated on mass surveillance. I think we are getting a really clear lesson that is bringing into stark relief the fact that what we think of as “tech” is a collection of companies, and they are controlled by people who have specific incentives: generally profit and growth. I’m curious as to what you think of the environment right now. At a time where authoritarians around the globe are leveraging technology to strengthen social control, it appears Silicon Valley is turning away from the safeguards it belatedly erected to prevent these kinds of abuses. Companies like Meta are laying off large segments of their workforces. Elon Musk has acquired Twitter and seems to be rewriting the rules about who can have access to large platforms. The internet as a whole is in a period of what seems like significant flux. ![]() This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. These apps use end-to-end encryption – a mathematical way of scrambling data that makes it very easy for the sender and recipient of a message to decode it, but extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an eavesdropper to decipher. (When whistleblower Edward Snowden met with lawyers in a Hong Kong safe house in 2013, he urged them to put their cell phones in a refrigerator in a different room to prevent digital eavesdropping.) But since the latter half of the 2010s, apps marrying the convenience of digital communication with the security of an underground car-park meeting have exploded in popularity. In this new online world, the safest way to communicate is still in-person, without electronic devices. But together with the internet’s revolution in connectivity has come an increase in surveillance – from spyware targeting journalists and activists, to governments pressuring technology corporations to hand over users’ personal data. In our interconnected world, underground car park meetings may appear antiquated.
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