It's silly how privacy detractors try to associate so-and-so terrible group with any software that simply lets people talk without corporate or government surveillance, as if the concept of a private conversation is a strange and suspicious thing now.
I think in principle most people agree that it's appropriate under some limited circumstances for authorities to listen in to private conversations, given well-founded suspicion of illegal activities taking place, so digital tools making that outright impossible do pose a problem most people find a bit uncomfortable, whether or not they feel the benefits outweigh the downsides.
The problem is that there's no effective way to enforce those limits without compromising everyone's privacy. It simply is not possible to have privacy and any amount of eavesdropping.
as our social life makes more and more use of digital communication, it must have the same protections as a face to face conversation in my home.
in germany wiretapping is only allowed for serious crimes and home surveillance is even more restricted.
in other words if digital communication gets the same protection as home surveillance then you can just use that home surveillance or try to install a listening tool on the persons phone. if home surveillance is not possible then why should digital surveillance be any easier?
yes, but german law also protects the sanctity of my home, and the measures to allow surveillance need to be in proportion to how they affect the sanctity of the homes of the general population. the legal possibility to home surveillance does not imply that everyone has to keep their doors unlocked (unencrypted communication) nor does it require for the government to have a key to everyones door (backdoor to encrypted communication) and the government has to accept that in some homes surveillance is physically not possible without alerting the subject (nor is it even legal in all cases).
if these principles hold true then the general population must be allowed to use unbreakable encryption for their communication, just as i am able to build my home in such a way that hidden surveillance is not possible.
Is it? A narrow majority of Americans polled when it was a topic of current debate expressed support for warrantless wiretapping to combat terrorism so I think it is extremely likely that much greater numbers would support a more limited process subject to more scrutiny.
> I think in principle most people agree that it's appropriate under some limited circumstances for authorities to listen in to private conversations, given well-founded suspicion of illegal activities taking place,
You're right. You know where the most illegal activities take place ? In the parliament. Can we listen to the private conversations of our representatives ? /s
To play devil's advocate: private face-to-face conversations do not allow for effective coordination of actions across large distances. There are plenty of good arguments for keeping the government out of everyone's private messages, but this kind of messaging and a conversation are not the same thing.
Aware that I'm reacting to someone playing devil's advocate...
> private face-to-face conversations do not allow for effective coordination of actions across large distances. <snip> this kind of messaging and a conversation are not the same thing.
Technology allows it. The same way it allows for myriad other applications that technology has made possible via extension of a base capability. I would argue that the technological ability extend 'topic X' makes it close enough to "the same thing".
If a Government has a problem with an app because it allows private conversation between physically distant individuals, then that Government likely also has a problem with private conversations between non-physically distant individuals. They just won't mention that because it's transparently obviously authoritarian.
The 'technology' angle only has political play because there will always be a core contingent of society that is scared enough of technology to have a much louder voice than their numbers would indicate.
exactly, technology changes our social life. many things that used to only be possible when people were at the same location, are now possible over the distance. this not only affects how we interact but also who we interact with. in the past i could only have friends where i lived. now i have friends all over the world. why should the communication with those distant friends be any less private than the communication with my friends at home?
Just as the governments power to violate anyones privacy when needed was previously tolerable only because it was physically limited.
ie warrants and wire taps and physically breaking in to buildings and safes could be done to anyone at any time, but not everyone, at the same time, all the time, from afar, without even being seen.
It's disingenuous to rationalize or excuse one without acknowledging the other.
And even the old form of the right and ability to break in to any safe still didn't magically un-burn a paper, so that argument against encryption was never valid.
Devils advocate is a critical role, but in this case it only serves the valuable role of showing that no matter how hard one tries, there is no validity to authoritarian/statist attacks on encryption, or indeed any self-actualized tech.
Sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own. The difference is in the number of people who can be involved and the distances that can be conquered, but those differences completely change the possibilities of online speech.
But there's nothing fundamental about that distinction that warrants a separate set of societal rules. It's just scale: more people, farther distance, shorter time frames.
We are talking specifically with regard to private communication between people, not speaker's corner online, that's a separate discussion, although I'd have similar views on that topic as well.
It's not the same. But it's not fundamentally different, it's just the technology makes it such that meeting up with someone to talk, no matter where they are, is trivial. It's like a pulley.
Am I the only who finds it odd how Wired is treated as a person?
The article begins with
>The Wired article by David Gilbert
Acknowledging that there is a real person called David Gilbert who wrote the article and it wasn't just an amalgamation known as "Wired" who did. Yet later it says:
>Wired just a month earlier encouraged its readers to adopt encrypted messaging apps, making its current stance even more contradictory.
But that article was written by Lauren Goode and Michael Calore.
If Wired had a stance in this, it would be exercising editorial control, which some would criticize for censoring the authors. Instead, Wired publishes whatever its authors write, and then some criticize for writing contradictory articles.
If I was Wired I'd just shrug because you can't win.
When you own a trademark that is for publishing and you let people slap your logo on their writing, you take responsibility for what they say. That's the whole point of the trademark, to take credit for publishing the words. You can't have it both ways.
Usually, when real journalism publications do this, they make sure to prominently display "OPINION" before these writings, along with a disclaimer that the views of the author do not reflect the views of the editorial board.
Normally (at least in the now-distant pre-internet past), newspapers were supposed to be as unbiased as reasonably possible and just report the news, though they frequently had opinion sections ("op-ed") which were clearly marked as such. Magazines catered to specific groups of people with specific interests, so those could be more biased (e.g., Motor Trend was quite blatant about its pro-car bias, for obvious reasons). But yes, along with this was consistency in ideology: you wouldn't buy Motor Trend and expect to see both pro- and anti-car opinions expressed there, and if you didn't like cars and car culture, you wouldn't buy the magazine to begin with.
If I were charitable, I would say there are technologists who are skeptical of completely unauditable, untraceable communication and they don't necessarily need to be government stooges to think that.
Same way we might read an article from a muscle-car-lover glowing about a Land Rover right before an article calling for bans on pure-ICE vehicles in MotorTrend.
It's perfectly possible that Wired is a brand known for its high quality writers, and those writers just happen to write well-written, well-researched articles with opposing viewpoints.
It's also possible that's not the case and they just publish whatever.
In any case what I mean is that I find it odd to ascribe intent to everything a publication publishes. They publish a lot of things by a lot of authors. They probably have more than one editor checking the articles. It's not possible to control the whole narrative.
Even if you assume that Wired has an agenda and that it exercises editorial control to further that agenda, that agenda isn't necessarily related to this particular topic. There are hundreds of topics to have agendas for. They may have a general pro-technology bias without bothering to decide their stance on every single sub-topic within their niche, for example.
> Am I the only who finds it odd how Wired is treated as a person?
Wired is a brand, and they have editors. Nothing gets published without editors.
Those editors can choose what to push, or not. There will be a policy about what they push, and why. That policy is what decides if it's Drudge Report, or Avanti!, Fox News or Mother Jones, etc.
>SimpleX design restricts message visibility and file retention, making it far from ideal for those looking to coordinate large networks.
Telegram's and discord's "news" style channel features have always seemed to attract the wrong kind of usage.
An article criticizing private messaging apps for dedicated features like that which enable hate groups and scammers would be more interesting. Encryption seems like a red herring.
I'm also curious how it would affect CSAM proliferation. That's one of the biggest angles of attack on encryption (see how many times the UK has tried to ban it). If their techniques mitigated that, then it could take done if the wind out of the sales of folks trying to weaken encryption
If they made a desktop version you'd know they are serious about privacy. Instead you are forced to use mobile platforms which are, in reality, anti-privacy.
truely private comunication is the abdolute and fundimental requirement for a healthy civilisation
and the archiological record is strewn with the evidence of human endevor to achive a private and reliable mail system going back to the very first
attempts at symbolic representation of ideas
the failures and pitfalls were known from ancient
times,and in the case of the Mongol tribes,there were some who looked down on the tribe of Temugin
and his decendents,because they would write things
on paper,as "literacy" was seen as proof of a weak
mind.....
face it,secure absolute trust comunication,or fatal dependencies....on the civilisational level
Although I have no real need to know about it, it's somewhat useful to read about what extremist groups are doing. I hadn't read the Wired article yet, so I thank the people linking to it (both at SimpleX and Hacker News) for bringing it to my attention.
I guarantee to you that Wired has been an intelligence front for 20 years at this point. This is an absolutely predictable position from them, and it's meant to be quoted in Congress and in courtrooms.
I don't know anything about wired, but very few people need to be explicit feds for something like wired. Maybe one person high enough just has friends in the intelligence community, and that could more or less be enough - few or none are hired if their perspectives on key issues don't align with management.
It's a conspiracy theory, especially when talking about any specific media organization, but the intelligence agencies certainly did this before, and it came out in the Church committee. There are a few journalists who continue to work at big-name outlets despite being named as assets in the diplomatic cable leaks, for example. So it's not unreasonable to suggest, I'd say.
> Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
Isn't Telegram notorious at this point for being the go-to app for people distributing CSAM? Not trying to tar Telegram, and obviously, most people are using it legitimately. But it's crazy that Wired seems more concerned about what messaging service "dozens" of "neo-Nazis" (no doubt generously defined) are using rather than child exploitation. In fact, the article only mentions child exploitation in two paragraphs. It would be like an article about "Roblox Racists" that ignores its much more serious predator problem.
Telegram gets a bad name too much IMO. I use it with groups of thousands and nothing illegal. It's just a really good chat app if you have large groups. Way better than WhatsApp or signal.
IMO telegram is slavic whatsapp with some crypto spice. And almost any communication medium will be used to transmit bad things and managing that is an expensive arms race. If you really care to, you can probably find examples everywhere.
I’ve been a subscriber to Wired for almost the entirety of the publication. I also subscribe to their RSS feed. Lately they have been heavily pushing articles painting conservatives as being the most destructive in tech, politics, and society. Their bias has been overwhelming to the point where I feel someone is pulling their strings to push a narrative. You can argue however you want about conservatives, but Wired is losing my ability to like them. They’re becoming a political rag. The Verge has also been dabbling in articles like this one as well lately too. There are forces here trying to influence the media recently.
Media in the sense of sensationlist dopamine hits is bad for society in the same way smoking is bad for your lungs. It'll get you high, but you will become worse off for it because you waste so much time and energy being artificially angry about shit that doesn't matter to you. The worst case is when the media is being sensationalist propagandists on someone's dime, then you're artificially angry about shit strictly for someone else's benefit.
Proper journalism, which the media is not, is the so-called Fourth Estate which is of great benefit to society and it isn't impossible. However, proper journalism like any product of labor costs money. Most people by and large do not pay for content that isn't sensationalist, and proper journalism cannot take public money from the government due to conflicts of interest.
The practical prerequisites to enable proper journalism therefore make it impossible.
> If you have to tell me about the bad Nazis I'm not interested in what you have to say. I'm going to be either be pushed to pro-Nazi or have a IQ above the Redditor NPCs who sit around circle jerking about who they don't like, rather than the actual issues in this world.
I’m having a real hard time understanding what you are trying to say here.
He's basically talking about Godwin's Law[1], which reads: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." and "Any off-topic mention of Hitler or Nazis will cause the thread it is mentioned in to come to an irrelevant and off-topic end very soon; every thread on Usenet has a constantly-increasing probability to contain such a mention."
The TL;DR is that whatever you are saying isn't worth anyone's time of day if you're using Hitler or the Nazis in your argument, and you made everyone in the room dumber with just your sheer presence by doing so.
And yes, it's a TVTropes link, but for once it actually is a good read if you aren't familiar with old internet lore.
If you prefer less modern examples, see also Reductio ad Hitlerum[2] which was noted in 1953 by Leo Strauss. George Orwell also observed it in passing in an essay in 1944.[3]
It's silly how privacy detractors try to associate so-and-so terrible group with any software that simply lets people talk without corporate or government surveillance, as if the concept of a private conversation is a strange and suspicious thing now.
They just keep coming back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
I think in principle most people agree that it's appropriate under some limited circumstances for authorities to listen in to private conversations, given well-founded suspicion of illegal activities taking place, so digital tools making that outright impossible do pose a problem most people find a bit uncomfortable, whether or not they feel the benefits outweigh the downsides.
You allow limited circumstances, and then they build MYSTIC to record every phone call in the country illegally.
The tools don’t make it “impossible” though, they just don’t actively assist.
The cops are free to get a warrant and use whatever tools they have in their arsenal.
Traditionally the tools they have in their arsenal include the cooperation of communications providers.
The problem is that there's no effective way to enforce those limits without compromising everyone's privacy. It simply is not possible to have privacy and any amount of eavesdropping.
not at all.
as our social life makes more and more use of digital communication, it must have the same protections as a face to face conversation in my home.
in germany wiretapping is only allowed for serious crimes and home surveillance is even more restricted.
in other words if digital communication gets the same protection as home surveillance then you can just use that home surveillance or try to install a listening tool on the persons phone. if home surveillance is not possible then why should digital surveillance be any easier?
> in germany wiretapping is only allowed for serious crimes and home surveillance is even more restricted.
In other words, in some limited circumstances authorities can listen in
yes, but german law also protects the sanctity of my home, and the measures to allow surveillance need to be in proportion to how they affect the sanctity of the homes of the general population. the legal possibility to home surveillance does not imply that everyone has to keep their doors unlocked (unencrypted communication) nor does it require for the government to have a key to everyones door (backdoor to encrypted communication) and the government has to accept that in some homes surveillance is physically not possible without alerting the subject (nor is it even legal in all cases).
if these principles hold true then the general population must be allowed to use unbreakable encryption for their communication, just as i am able to build my home in such a way that hidden surveillance is not possible.
i would most certainly not agree, that is an egregious assumption
Is it? A narrow majority of Americans polled when it was a topic of current debate expressed support for warrantless wiretapping to combat terrorism so I think it is extremely likely that much greater numbers would support a more limited process subject to more scrutiny.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/politics/new-poll-finds-m...
I think most people would disagree with that premise
Unfortunately, most people hold a variety of silly and counterproductive beliefs.
> I think in principle most people agree that it's appropriate under some limited circumstances for authorities to listen in to private conversations, given well-founded suspicion of illegal activities taking place,
You're right. You know where the most illegal activities take place ? In the parliament. Can we listen to the private conversations of our representatives ? /s
Ha ha ha. Would you like to say something more substantive?
To play devil's advocate: private face-to-face conversations do not allow for effective coordination of actions across large distances. There are plenty of good arguments for keeping the government out of everyone's private messages, but this kind of messaging and a conversation are not the same thing.
Aware that I'm reacting to someone playing devil's advocate...
> private face-to-face conversations do not allow for effective coordination of actions across large distances. <snip> this kind of messaging and a conversation are not the same thing.
Technology allows it. The same way it allows for myriad other applications that technology has made possible via extension of a base capability. I would argue that the technological ability extend 'topic X' makes it close enough to "the same thing".
If a Government has a problem with an app because it allows private conversation between physically distant individuals, then that Government likely also has a problem with private conversations between non-physically distant individuals. They just won't mention that because it's transparently obviously authoritarian.
The 'technology' angle only has political play because there will always be a core contingent of society that is scared enough of technology to have a much louder voice than their numbers would indicate.
exactly, technology changes our social life. many things that used to only be possible when people were at the same location, are now possible over the distance. this not only affects how we interact but also who we interact with. in the past i could only have friends where i lived. now i have friends all over the world. why should the communication with those distant friends be any less private than the communication with my friends at home?
Just as the governments power to violate anyones privacy when needed was previously tolerable only because it was physically limited.
ie warrants and wire taps and physically breaking in to buildings and safes could be done to anyone at any time, but not everyone, at the same time, all the time, from afar, without even being seen.
It's disingenuous to rationalize or excuse one without acknowledging the other.
And even the old form of the right and ability to break in to any safe still didn't magically un-burn a paper, so that argument against encryption was never valid.
Devils advocate is a critical role, but in this case it only serves the valuable role of showing that no matter how hard one tries, there is no validity to authoritarian/statist attacks on encryption, or indeed any self-actualized tech.
Yes, they do, it just takes longer to enact what was coordinated.
There's no fundamental difference between a conversation in a meadow and one online.
Sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own. The difference is in the number of people who can be involved and the distances that can be conquered, but those differences completely change the possibilities of online speech.
But there's nothing fundamental about that distinction that warrants a separate set of societal rules. It's just scale: more people, farther distance, shorter time frames.
Then where is the problem? Let‘s get rid of the online tools and go back to the meadows.
I never said there was a problem with anything.
This is not true. We’ve all observed how differently people behave online. The anonymity aspect creates different social outcomes.
While there are arguments for preserving encryption, acting like online communication is the same as face to face is disingenuous.
We are talking specifically with regard to private communication between people, not speaker's corner online, that's a separate discussion, although I'd have similar views on that topic as well.
It's not the same. But it's not fundamentally different, it's just the technology makes it such that meeting up with someone to talk, no matter where they are, is trivial. It's like a pulley.
Wow what a hit piece from Wired. And not even a month after their article "Seriously, Use Encrypted Messaging".
What the hell happened? Do they hate someone at SimpleX? Or hate Jack Dorsey? This is not journalism...
They don't hate anyone. They just love money.
So what are they doing in the magazine business?
Flailing, mostly
Government propaganda
Curious how their anonymous groups work: https://simplex.chat/contact#/?v=2-7&smp=smp%3A%2F%2FN_McQS3...
Am I the only who finds it odd how Wired is treated as a person?
The article begins with
>The Wired article by David Gilbert
Acknowledging that there is a real person called David Gilbert who wrote the article and it wasn't just an amalgamation known as "Wired" who did. Yet later it says:
>Wired just a month earlier encouraged its readers to adopt encrypted messaging apps, making its current stance even more contradictory.
But that article was written by Lauren Goode and Michael Calore.
If Wired had a stance in this, it would be exercising editorial control, which some would criticize for censoring the authors. Instead, Wired publishes whatever its authors write, and then some criticize for writing contradictory articles.
If I was Wired I'd just shrug because you can't win.
When you own a trademark that is for publishing and you let people slap your logo on their writing, you take responsibility for what they say. That's the whole point of the trademark, to take credit for publishing the words. You can't have it both ways.
Wired can choose to be known for publishing conflicting view points though, of course.
(though if that is the case it hasn’t really made it through to me until now)
Usually, when real journalism publications do this, they make sure to prominently display "OPINION" before these writings, along with a disclaimer that the views of the author do not reflect the views of the editorial board.
In my mind, magazines have had more editorial discretion than "papers of record" like the News section of a national paper.
Though I would expect a magazine to have some more consistency in ideology.
Normally (at least in the now-distant pre-internet past), newspapers were supposed to be as unbiased as reasonably possible and just report the news, though they frequently had opinion sections ("op-ed") which were clearly marked as such. Magazines catered to specific groups of people with specific interests, so those could be more biased (e.g., Motor Trend was quite blatant about its pro-car bias, for obvious reasons). But yes, along with this was consistency in ideology: you wouldn't buy Motor Trend and expect to see both pro- and anti-car opinions expressed there, and if you didn't like cars and car culture, you wouldn't buy the magazine to begin with.
If I were charitable, I would say there are technologists who are skeptical of completely unauditable, untraceable communication and they don't necessarily need to be government stooges to think that.
Same way we might read an article from a muscle-car-lover glowing about a Land Rover right before an article calling for bans on pure-ICE vehicles in MotorTrend.
It's perfectly possible that Wired is a brand known for its high quality writers, and those writers just happen to write well-written, well-researched articles with opposing viewpoints.
It's also possible that's not the case and they just publish whatever.
In any case what I mean is that I find it odd to ascribe intent to everything a publication publishes. They publish a lot of things by a lot of authors. They probably have more than one editor checking the articles. It's not possible to control the whole narrative.
Even if you assume that Wired has an agenda and that it exercises editorial control to further that agenda, that agenda isn't necessarily related to this particular topic. There are hundreds of topics to have agendas for. They may have a general pro-technology bias without bothering to decide their stance on every single sub-topic within their niche, for example.
> Am I the only who finds it odd how Wired is treated as a person?
Wired is a brand, and they have editors. Nothing gets published without editors.
Those editors can choose what to push, or not. There will be a policy about what they push, and why. That policy is what decides if it's Drudge Report, or Avanti!, Fox News or Mother Jones, etc.
>SimpleX design restricts message visibility and file retention, making it far from ideal for those looking to coordinate large networks.
Telegram's and discord's "news" style channel features have always seemed to attract the wrong kind of usage.
An article criticizing private messaging apps for dedicated features like that which enable hate groups and scammers would be more interesting. Encryption seems like a red herring.
I'm also curious how it would affect CSAM proliferation. That's one of the biggest angles of attack on encryption (see how many times the UK has tried to ban it). If their techniques mitigated that, then it could take done if the wind out of the sales of folks trying to weaken encryption
> Telegram's and discord's "news" style channel features have always seemed to attract the wrong kind of usage.
The only ones I've seen are for porn distribution and crypto banter. What do you refer to when saying 'the wrong kind'?
no one cares what enables hate groups, it's not 2022 anymore
If they made a desktop version you'd know they are serious about privacy. Instead you are forced to use mobile platforms which are, in reality, anti-privacy.
>desktop version
There is an official Linux client for the terminal.
It is likely that someone will eventually make a multi-platform GUI.
1) It makes sense to go where the users are.
2) Major mobile platforms are anti privacy in some ways, reasonably private in others
3) Mobile devices have cameras which make QR/key sharing much easier than desktop
4) GrapheneOS
truely private comunication is the abdolute and fundimental requirement for a healthy civilisation and the archiological record is strewn with the evidence of human endevor to achive a private and reliable mail system going back to the very first attempts at symbolic representation of ideas the failures and pitfalls were known from ancient times,and in the case of the Mongol tribes,there were some who looked down on the tribe of Temugin and his decendents,because they would write things on paper,as "literacy" was seen as proof of a weak mind..... face it,secure absolute trust comunication,or fatal dependencies....on the civilisational level
Try and use full stops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_clause_structure#Run-...
Although I have no real need to know about it, it's somewhat useful to read about what extremist groups are doing. I hadn't read the Wired article yet, so I thank the people linking to it (both at SimpleX and Hacker News) for bringing it to my attention.
I guarantee to you that Wired has been an intelligence front for 20 years at this point. This is an absolutely predictable position from them, and it's meant to be quoted in Congress and in courtrooms.
Citation needed. Wired has generally sided with hackers against government overreach, see eg this recent piece of investigative journalism:
https://www.wired.com/story/fbi-section-702-us-person-querie...
I was personally rather surprised to seem them posting the kind of mainstream media style hit piece justly criticized here.
Like everyone working for Wired is an undercover Fed?
Obviously! It's in the name!
I don't know anything about wired, but very few people need to be explicit feds for something like wired. Maybe one person high enough just has friends in the intelligence community, and that could more or less be enough - few or none are hired if their perspectives on key issues don't align with management.
It's a conspiracy theory, especially when talking about any specific media organization, but the intelligence agencies certainly did this before, and it came out in the Church committee. There are a few journalists who continue to work at big-name outlets despite being named as assets in the diplomatic cable leaks, for example. So it's not unreasonable to suggest, I'd say.
> Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
Isn't Telegram notorious at this point for being the go-to app for people distributing CSAM? Not trying to tar Telegram, and obviously, most people are using it legitimately. But it's crazy that Wired seems more concerned about what messaging service "dozens" of "neo-Nazis" (no doubt generously defined) are using rather than child exploitation. In fact, the article only mentions child exploitation in two paragraphs. It would be like an article about "Roblox Racists" that ignores its much more serious predator problem.
Telegram gets a bad name too much IMO. I use it with groups of thousands and nothing illegal. It's just a really good chat app if you have large groups. Way better than WhatsApp or signal.
Where I live in Spain it's super popular.
Same is true about Rbolox, which is why I compared Telegram with it. My objection was to the ordering of Wired's priorities.
Roblox has a bad name? I've never tried it as it seemed really kiddy. A bit like Meta Horizons in fact. Too 'nintendo'.
I like the more gritty platforms like VRChat.
IMO telegram is slavic whatsapp with some crypto spice. And almost any communication medium will be used to transmit bad things and managing that is an expensive arms race. If you really care to, you can probably find examples everywhere.
I’ve been a subscriber to Wired for almost the entirety of the publication. I also subscribe to their RSS feed. Lately they have been heavily pushing articles painting conservatives as being the most destructive in tech, politics, and society. Their bias has been overwhelming to the point where I feel someone is pulling their strings to push a narrative. You can argue however you want about conservatives, but Wired is losing my ability to like them. They’re becoming a political rag. The Verge has also been dabbling in articles like this one as well lately too. There are forces here trying to influence the media recently.
[flagged]
I challenge the notion that "media" or journalism as a concept are bad for society, or that real journalism is impossible.
Media in the sense of sensationlist dopamine hits is bad for society in the same way smoking is bad for your lungs. It'll get you high, but you will become worse off for it because you waste so much time and energy being artificially angry about shit that doesn't matter to you. The worst case is when the media is being sensationalist propagandists on someone's dime, then you're artificially angry about shit strictly for someone else's benefit.
Proper journalism, which the media is not, is the so-called Fourth Estate which is of great benefit to society and it isn't impossible. However, proper journalism like any product of labor costs money. Most people by and large do not pay for content that isn't sensationalist, and proper journalism cannot take public money from the government due to conflicts of interest.
The practical prerequisites to enable proper journalism therefore make it impossible.
Yes there is a lot of rage/clickbait now. Often times the title doesn't even align with the content...
[flagged]
[flagged]
Interesting, then, that a hit piece on encryption is exactly on trend for conservatives.
I think it's flipped recently, or maybe I'm thinking of another kind.
[flagged]
> If you have to tell me about the bad Nazis I'm not interested in what you have to say. I'm going to be either be pushed to pro-Nazi or have a IQ above the Redditor NPCs who sit around circle jerking about who they don't like, rather than the actual issues in this world.
I’m having a real hard time understanding what you are trying to say here.
He's basically talking about Godwin's Law[1], which reads: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." and "Any off-topic mention of Hitler or Nazis will cause the thread it is mentioned in to come to an irrelevant and off-topic end very soon; every thread on Usenet has a constantly-increasing probability to contain such a mention."
The TL;DR is that whatever you are saying isn't worth anyone's time of day if you're using Hitler or the Nazis in your argument, and you made everyone in the room dumber with just your sheer presence by doing so.
[1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodwinsLaw
And yes, it's a TVTropes link, but for once it actually is a good read if you aren't familiar with old internet lore.
If you prefer less modern examples, see also Reductio ad Hitlerum[2] which was noted in 1953 by Leo Strauss. George Orwell also observed it in passing in an essay in 1944.[3]
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_(insult)
Yeah, the re-emergence of far-right nationalism isn't real! And if it is, why report on it?