Google sucks, but one thing I think they did right was giving you a way to print out a list of one-time passwords that can be used to recover an account if you forget your password.
So if all we did was decide to stop growing corn to turn into ethanol, and we used only that land for generating only solar power, we'd be able to generate 84% more electricity on an annual basis than we do today from all of our energy sources.
Damn. Factorio lied to me about the space efficiency of solar panels.
The ideal is people doing it just because they can, but how many people have the financial means for that? I'd say another reason for Reddit going to shit is all the people wanting to express themselves somehow, but only having a little bit of time to type something out on their phones and not enough to put thought or research into what they are saying. Streamers, youtubers etc. put a lot of work and practice into making something someone might consider good, and a lot of that is only possible because they get paid and so don't have to get another full time job that removes any time for creative pursuits.
It's under clear attack, but is not yet nullified. I already touched on this but the examples you cite are exactly where it's doing what it is mean to; the clear illegality of these things is something people can recognize, and courts still have power. As an American, I'll say that this is the only civic principle with any sort of universal recognition that matters, and it is the biggest thing holding the country back from collapse. What else do we have? Surely not a sense that human beings should be treated with care and respect. If freedom of speech ceases to exist, so does the United States; we must never let it go.
But to such a government it doesn’t matter anyway. They will do whatever the fuck they want. They will introduce new laws if they feel like it.
They need to entirely trash the constitution and effectively dissolve the US republic first. Maybe they're heading that way, but it is a barrier, and the lack of ambiguity of
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
is the whole substance of that barrier. If you think an exception for hate speech isn't something that can be abused, look at all the countries right now criminalizing protest of the Palestinian genocide using it as legal justification. Think about the entire situation that is prompting these killings; we have clear legal rights to peaceful protest, and people are exercising those rights, for which they aren't arrested and charged with speech crimes but killed outright in profound contempt for the law, because they don't have a legal process to silence them, just the ability to kill people. This is exactly when we need free speech the most, and it makes very little sense to fantasize about removing it so you can silence others when you are the one whose speech is in dire need of protecting right now.
There is no reality where repeating state propaganda lands you in jail, unless maybe you do it in some way the state doesn't like. Government censorship can't solve this problem, it can only make it worse.
I feel like there are also other potential reasons to want to publish software anonymously though, even if monetization is not the goal. For instance, to keep it game related, there have been plenty of noncommercial fan projects that get shut down mainly just because the companies that own the IP are run by assholes.
This seems like a good idea, but a related question I've been wondering about is, what is the best way to anonymously run a software project facing this type of threat model, when you also want that software to be accessible to people? Does anyone know about any tips or resources for this? Is there some kind of darknet github? How do you do social media or collect donations/payment? Also, are there any good examples of projects that did this right?
“Instead, the disclosure claims that the memo was rolled out in a secretive manner in which some agents were verbally briefed while others were allowed to view it but not keep a copy,” Blumenthal said. “It was reportedly clear that anyone who openly spoke out against this new directive would be fired.”
Violence is in fact unique among forms of human action in that it holds out the possibility of affecting the actions of others about whom one understands nothing. Any other way one might wish to affect another’s actions, one must at least have some idea who they think they are, what they want, what they think is going on. Interpretation is required, and that requires a certain degree of imaginative identification. Hit someone over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrelevant. Obviously, two parties locked in an equal contest of violence would usually do well to get inside each other’s heads, but when access to violence becomes extremely unequal, the need vanishes. This is typically the case in situations of structural violence: of systemic inequality that is ultimately backed up by the threat of force. Structural violence always seems to create extremely lopsided structures of imagination.
As I understand anarchism, the idea is a society where human culture becomes powerful enough to overcome and replace this sort of violently imposed top-down structure.
My current understanding is, destruction of current system of government (violently or otherwise) followed by abolition of all law. Following this, small communities of like minded individuals form and cooperate to solve food, safety, water and shelter concerns.
I think your main mistake is to get this backwards; the mere destruction of government and law doesn't by itself effect the formation of anarchism. You need a culture with enough utility and resilience to replace it and endure without falling back on the crutch of structural violence.
The book I linked goes into some detail considering what that might take, focusing on the example of the nearly-anarchist society of 1990 Madagascar, where technically they were under the rule of a formal government, but in practice almost all governance was independent from it and driven by their unique culture. To summarize a little from memory, ambitious people basically aspired to be liches, with living supporters conducting regular rituals involving their tombs and bodies to avoid getting cursed, because having a prominent place in a reputable tomb after death was the only path to be considered an important person. But the main way to get such a position was to provide for people enough that they would become able and socially obligated to maintain your place in the tomb. There's clear social utility there; achievement materially depends on positive contribution.
If it is the case that the concepts and relationships that define society and how we behave are essentially feats of imagination, then it should be possible for this force of imagination to itself be the basis for holding things together, rather than forcing it into artificial molds defined by violent hierarchies. What's needed for that to happen is to sufficiently develop cultural imagination as a technology that it can build systems that stand up to the pressures they need to bear, that currently get handled through destructive shortcuts that treat people as things.
