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@downey@floss.social
Important new article this week in Jacobin magazine.
It's an important awakening (or reminder) that #US policy continues a multi-front attack on #humanRights and digital autonomy by continuing to strengthen #bigTech and #surveillanceCapitalism through fearmongering and the spectre of whatever country the boogeyman-of-the-quarter might be. 1/4
The article rightly points out the thin line between national "#digitalTransformation" & "digital #authoritarianism" -- through governments, or the corporations those they coddle/empower.
It also reminds us that for non-US leaders, "increasingly, the biggest threat to the future of the internet is the United States".
(Including nonprofits, who've increasingly been exposed in building and deploying systems that are misused to abuse human rights like privacy.)
2/4
It leaves out the important reminder that many of the #digitalPublicGoods used to create this so-called "public #infrastructure" have their roots in #FreeSoftware, which allows citizens to control of their own "digital lives" without government or quasi-government corporate #surveillance as intermediary.
e.g., I may have a Chinese-made phone sold with Google's #Android spyware, but because it's #OpenSource I am free to install a privacy-protecting OS instead.
3/4
There is a path forward for citizen-level digital autonomy out there, and software freedom is at its core.
Keep pushing for investment in, support for, and use of these alternative products.
"We should absolutely be concerned about governments surveilling their populations and tech companies monetizing people’s data without their consent. But when naming those responsible, the list should include Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden alongside Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin."
4/4
@downey Nice! As I wrote on the other side: If they really meant to support democracy they'd support FLOSS, which can potentially be divorced from its original intent.
Open Technology Fund is a small but positive example. (NGI in EU is now better.) University funding which gave us GNU, BSD etc. was good.
Stiglitz wrote in 2006 that the Clinton White House bullied South Korea not to use GNU/Linux (in order to help maintain the dominance of Microsoft worldwide). https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz#Making_globalization_work_(2006)