if our lives are going to be pervasively surveilled, is it better we should be surveilled by

(1) private corporations, which at least don't have direct license to coerce us with violence; or

(2) the existing state, whose management is, however imperfectly, somewhat democratic and accountable to the public?

(for readers who live in places where the state can be described as imperfectly but somewhat democratically accountable)

better surveilled by

build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.

build a bigger moat and those fools can never leave.

@admitsWrongIfProven no. i lurk on twitter (too much still), just to stay current on misinformation, outrage, and trends in influence operations.

@admitsWrongIfProven i’m subtooting elon musk.

it makes more sense once you realize the business model of his site is basically antisemitism controversies and similar outrages.

@mongoose his birth certificate must have been a scroll or a hieroglyph.

when people decades younger than you refer to themselves as old people.

gonna start the PIMBY movement.

(Play In My Back Yard)

(when i get a back yard.)

(indistinct chatter)

@John (if basically anyone could register a TLD, however expensively, i'd be fine with it. but i don't think that's the case.)

@John with IPv6 everyone can have a big IP space. I don't think it has much to do with DNS names?

i'm a bit grossed-out to learn that google has its own top-level domain.

[new draft post] How rights make wrongs https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/11/15/how-rights-make-wrongs/index.html

@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter i don’t think anyone thinks you are arguing coercion doesn’t exist! but i think the lines you are drawing about how we can distinguish where it is from where it isn’t might be a bit blurrier than we all would like.

@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter sure. whether there’s some partial relevance and to what degree we can debate. but just conceptually, can we agree that under some, perhaps irrelevant, circumstances, provision of a carrot, a voluntary choice, can be a piece of a larger coercive enterprise?

@cshentrup @AdrianRiskin @HeavenlyPossum @passenger @whatzaname @magitweeter (land and villagers are just a simple example. suppose the leaders of a country that profits from exporting sweatshop labor refuses any social safety net provision, despite it being affordable and utility improving, because the existence of a safety net would raise the reservation wage of workers and reduce profits to sweatshop owners?)

I wish journalists (hi NPR!) would tell us the news without leavening every story with their speculations about how the news might affect various politicians' electoral prospects.

Why don't you just let us know what's going on, and then we can decide what we think about it all and vote however we choose.

This is life and death, not a horserace.

@admitsWrongIfProven undead 🧛‍♂️

@SteveRoth Right. Neoliberal economics is based on the presumption of an innocent or "natural" default, that could be left untouched, "undistorted". But of course there is no such thing in social affairs. The world as it exists is a result of our choices, across a whole spectrum of (de)centralization and institutions that look nothing like the atomized price takers of models. Those institutions continue to make choices, none of which can be neutral.