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72 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 8 Apr \ on: How fast food is becoming a new surveillance ground privacy
I think we need to get used to thinking of this as a general property of modernity, like the dark face of btc: since it technically can be done, and can't realistically be prevented, and there's some upside to doing it, people will do it.
How to act based on that understanding is another question, though.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct that it's a part of modernity. I think it's crossing the bridge from "this may be happening" to "this is absolutely happening" that's a big thing for lots of folks (myself included). I'm always assuming a general state of surveillance (as well as a surveillance state), but the specifics of "that vending machine" or "Taco Bell" weren't ones I'd really thought about.
(Or, to be more precise, I'd assume any surveillance was at the economic level, not necessarily the physical one.)
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Yeah, it's hard to stretch your mind to restructure around these new affordances.
This is a v similar feeling I had at the time of the Snowden revelations -- I know how TCP/IP works and how the broader internet architecture is laid out, so the fact that the mass surveillance was technically possible was not a surprise, any technical person had known that for literally decades. But the cultural norms around it, the sheer amount of bullshit that would have to be done to make it practical, made it seem ridiculous.
And yet, as I mentioned above: it was technically possible, there was a benefit to doing it, so someone did it.
Snowden changed how I thought about everything. In particular, I think there's a giant frying pan headed for the faces of bitcoiners more broadly. If a world arrives where btc is 10x more valuable, modern cultural norms and institutions will be woefully insufficient to prevent a Latin American hellscape of kidnappings and organized crime (technically possible, check; benefit to doing it, check).
We desperately need new norms and institutions as a herd immunity. Failing that, we won't like the world we find ourselves in, even if we're rich. I made a post about that here.
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Is this not the case for a citadel? Bitcoiners protecting bitcoiners? Kidnapping becomes a social norm, plus it’s easier than trying to manage a 9-5 in a Mandibles-esque world. The only people you might be able to trust are other bitcoiners with significant wealth.
Let’s assume that we fail to create new social norms. “This is happening.” The incentives to commit crime are too powerful. What do we do? Maybe the citadel is the only answer that might bring us a decent quality of life in this dystopian hellscape that you describe. I hope that we as bitcoiners can infect the culture around the world, turning bitcoiners into leaders or vice versa. Just my 2 sats.
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A citadel would help with this danger, so long as you never wanted to leave it for the untamed outside world. But that seems pretty unlikely to me. On the other hand, I think the idea of normalizing the security measures and access practices described in that post is being severely overlooked in this (and the original) discussion.
Bitcoiners have converged on things like "not your keys, not your coins" and the importance of UTXO management and other bons mots of that sort; they could similarly campaign for practices that would prevent the reality I describe from taking place, but they'd have to think it through sufficiently first, and most seem unwilling or unable to.
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That (the post and the comments on it) was a good and also bleak read, and one I'm glad I read. Definitely stuff everyone needs to be thinking about.
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