The Internet an instrument of tyranny?
Nov. 19th, 2020 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
come_to_thinkReading: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
I am using my new laptop to catch up on things I have always thought I should read, and now that I have started blogging again, I will try to comment on some of the results.
Atwood's antiutopia is so bizarre that I haven't got much to say about it, tho the author points out that each of the aspects of it has, at one time & place or another, been realized. However, there was one scene that made me catch my breath: When the narrator tries to charge her purchase at a store, she is told her credit card is not valid. When she gets home, she finds out that, as part of an effort to disempower women, all women's credit cards have been canceled or transferred to related men. It struck me that, now that we have the Internet and are increasingly dependent on it, that sort of thing would become far easier and more dangerous. If a government ever achieved a monopoly on cryptography, it could effectively expel people (individuals and chosen groups) from society instantly and without notice. That might well amount to a death sentence.
For the time being, of course, the extreme decentralization of the Internet, and the existence of powerful businesses and other institutions with a lively interest in secrecy, make that scenario implausible. However, those protections are being chipped away at.
I am using my new laptop to catch up on things I have always thought I should read, and now that I have started blogging again, I will try to comment on some of the results.
Atwood's antiutopia is so bizarre that I haven't got much to say about it, tho the author points out that each of the aspects of it has, at one time & place or another, been realized. However, there was one scene that made me catch my breath: When the narrator tries to charge her purchase at a store, she is told her credit card is not valid. When she gets home, she finds out that, as part of an effort to disempower women, all women's credit cards have been canceled or transferred to related men. It struck me that, now that we have the Internet and are increasingly dependent on it, that sort of thing would become far easier and more dangerous. If a government ever achieved a monopoly on cryptography, it could effectively expel people (individuals and chosen groups) from society instantly and without notice. That might well amount to a death sentence.
For the time being, of course, the extreme decentralization of the Internet, and the existence of powerful businesses and other institutions with a lively interest in secrecy, make that scenario implausible. However, those protections are being chipped away at.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-19 08:00 pm (UTC)Unbreakable encryption can never be wiped out, but it can be driven underground. Even China hasn't outlawed VPNs; they're too useful for business. Most countries' Internet is too decentralized to put a "great firewall" around it, and as long as they can't, other countries have an incentive to offer privacy. It could happen, but it would take the work of decades.