“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
1/3
“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
2/3
@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.
