“The current political situation is a situation of constant surveillance. Not only are we constantly watched and monitored, we are also constantly being recorded. Any collection of data becomes a treasure trove of information. A target.”
A long time ago, Sunil Shah convinced me that Kept Pages are better than keeping old revisions of wiki pages forever. This is unlike a source code repositioned. We don’t need version control software for conversation.
https://oddmuse.org/wiki/Kept_Pages
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“In computer science, it’s easier to keep everything. It just costs space on a disk. Forgetting is hard. And thus, being lazy, we decide to build a world that makes it easy to undo all our mistakes, to prove all our mistakes, to keep all our records, and so the road to the police state is paved with good intentions.”
As software developers, we often find that designing humane software is harder then ignoring human needs. But it’s what we need.
https://oddmuse.org/wiki/Kept_Pages
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@dredmorbius writtes about the same issue under the title “data is liability”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hn4r5/on_the_media_asks_what_can_we_learn_from_ashley/
I recently thought about this again in relation to “eternal messages” and Secure Scuttlebutt (#ssb). Why are we designing software to model conversations as a set of contracts? “I don’t like to design a system that doesn’t allow for any take backs. Human lives, our legal systems, or social conventions – they all allow for take backs wherever possible.”
https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2018-06-29_No_Take_Back
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@kensanata @dredmorbius This is a really interesting thread. There is an interesting tension between the desire/need for archival and erasure. It seems like we need a clear definition of what should be archived and who should control those archives.
Pre-Internet letter archival makes for an interesting model.
@kensanata hmm, using something like #reddit as a blog is a great idea @dredmorbius
@kensanata Outside of computer science, it's really easy to keep everything, too. You just write it down. It just costs space on paper. Inside of computer science, it's easier to have an audit trail, so deleting stuff is, if anything, easier.
Police states and surveillance states functioned just fine before computers existed. They are different now, sure, but they are not a modern creation. Thinking about them in terms of computers alone robs us of the lessons of history.
@c25l Sure. What I care about is that we shouldn’t design systems to make this the default, though.
@kensanata which is why the founding fathers said no unreasonable search and seizure. they knew stuff could be evilly searched even then ;)