You might be more comfortable thinking about deploying math and code as your tactic, but I want to talk to you about the full suite of tactics that we use to effect change in the world. And this is a framework that we owe to this guy Lawrence Lessig.
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Underlying this project is a pretty simple and we think powerful idea that provides a solution to a complex challenge that’s facing online communities like Twitter, like Reddit, within the CivilServant universe. That challenge is the increasing automation of the enforcement of legal rules and norms online.
You may have heard people come up to you and say like, “Hey, you’re young. That makes you a digital native.” Something about being born after the millennium or born after 1995 or whatever, that makes you sort of mystically tuned in to what the Internet is for, and anything that you do on the Internet must be what the Internet is actually for. And I’m here to tell you that you’re not a digital native. That you’re just someone who uses computers, and you’re no better and no worse than the rest of us at using computers.
At that moment when everybody is suddenly caring about this stuff, that’s the moment at which nihilism can be averted. It’s the moment in which nihilism must be averted if you’re going to make a change. Peak indifference is the moment when you stop convincing people to care about an issue, and start convincing them to do something about it.
Maybe what we ought to do is start advocating that hacking is a religion. We can expand, right? We can carry around our little circuit boards with lights and maybe extend to e‑meters or something.
Although we haven’t reached peak surveillance, we’ve reached peak indifference to surveillance. There will never be another day in which fewer people give a shit about this because there’ll never be a day in which fewer people’s lives have been ruined by this.
I made a bot called @corruptum, and he uses a lot of copyrighted content in his corpus, so I was wondering whether it was legal and whether its use qualified as Fair Use.