There is this common narrative I see all the time, implying that we as individuals are empowered to choose and manifest our own destiny, and this comes up often in privacy discussions.
Don’t like Facebook’s privacy nightmares? Just don’t use Facebook!
Don’t like personalized ads? I remember a popular post on reddit saying “if your ad interrupts my YouTube video, I will hate your product”.
Don’t like Google chrome hegemony? Just use Firefox!
And while I agree that we should strive to do that, the battle doesn’t end here. Facebook has shadow accounts for people who never signed up. Google chrome keeps it’s hegemony despite people on the Internet advocating Firefox day and night. And ads continue to be extremely profitable despite you “hating the product” because it interrupted your YouTube video.
Even worse: even if you “hate the product”, you now already know it. You now know they product exists, and possibly whatever they wanted you to know about it. The reality is that these companies own your eyes. They control what shows up on your screen. And even if you hate it, they control what you end up learning.
the reality is that our individual resistance is very far from enough
I am not saying it is completely futile. It is a step in the right direction. But the only effective solution is organized action. We, alone, cannot achieve much. Unless we organize our resistance against privacy violations, we will continue to live through this privacy nightmare.
This post left me thinking in something. What if we could organize, so a city-owned ISP with a built-in pihole exists? What if we can just block tracking at the metropolitan level as we do in our houses? What if we don’t just stop at DNS? What if we made just one city more private? What if we start with that?
You’d basically be harassed by law enforcement and the NSA until you agreed to spy on your users. In the US at least.
I guess your right. My isp shouldn’t have to deal with that. I suppose it’s back on us as individuals to fight that kind of intrusion.
City owned isps do exist! I don’t know if any have filtered the Internet like this but I doubt it, it might be against net neutrality regulations
This reminded me of an idea of using mesh networks to create an internet separate from the current internet. By that I mean physically running Ethernet cables from window to window between houses. It is unlikely to ever happen because it would need a lot of people to join it all at once, but I think it is a cool concept. Perhaps if I put my Jellyfin server on it and tell my neighbors about the free tv opportunity…
Edit: Forgot to mention, this was inspired by the Cuban networks that were basically the same thing. It is worth a browser search if you are bored.
Nice, I’ll look into it, sounds interesting. I’m definitely community driven and anarchism friendly, real freedom comes from our pairs, not from above.