Cognitive Dissident: Interview with John Perry Barlow

Bob Hellbringer writes "Mother Jones Magazine has an online interview with John Perry Barlow of the EFF, on the things that all slashdotters love: 'the Total Information Awareness project, online activism, file sharing, and the prospect of a digital counterculture.'"

Comments

Another perspective of the TIA

[updog]

Another interesting persepective of TIA can be found here. It basically says that for every 250 people correctly identified as terrorists, there will be 250,000 people incorrectly labeled as terrorists. And, if 0.1% of these people are sufficiently traumatized, they could potentially become terrorists, and you now have 250 new terrorists, just as many as you found in the first place!

Not to mention the violation of privacy and civil liberties of those 250,000 innocent individuals...

Only in our time

[squared99]

could the songwriter for the Grateful Dead become the voice of reason. And a good one at that. Meanwhile "elected" officals are trigger happy, right wing, christian capitalists zeolots.

JPB:
There are a million virtual streetcorners with a million lonely pamphleteers on them, all of them decrying the war and not actually coming together in any organized fashion to oppose it. It strikes me that existing political institutions -- whether it's the administration or Congress or large corporations -- only respond to other institutions.

I hear a lot of complaints about slashdot being too political lately, not enough cool techy stuff. I disagree, if we have the resource of a forum like this one, we need to keep it going. We need to share this infomration, it affects a lot of us and it affects a lot of things to come. The information shared on this site has led to a lot of individual's political awakening, and those that awaken are starting to realize that they can make a difference, either by writing to an elected official, or making a donation to an organization like the EFF.

Keep it up slashdot. Cool toys and gadgets are great, but I like freedom more.

Bless the phamphleteers

[seven89]

JPB said:

There are a million virtual streetcorners with a million lonely pamphleteers on them, all of them decrying the war and not actually coming together in any organized fashion to oppose it.

On a purly practical level, this remark is off base. There was a long build-up to American-Iraqi War I, but there were no serious mass protests (that I can recall) until the bombing began. Then the bombing campaign and the subsequent mop-up ground action was over before the opposition could make much of a difference. Things are very different these days -- the opposition continues to build and the fighting has not even started. I suspect the war will proceed as planned, but at every escalation point the anti-war structures now in place will facilitate a great escalation of opposition from the general public.

Meanwhile, sites such as www.antiwar.com provide hundreds of thousands of people with information about what the Bush administration is doing, what's happening in Europe and in the Arab world. That kind of easy access to relevant news and excellent commentary simply didn't exist during any other war or buildup to war. True, today the guy who checks out antiwar.com every morning might not be doing anything else. But next month maybe he will be marching in streets in protest, and he will have absorbed a great deal of background information that will make a difference in subsequent "yeah, I was there" conversations.

That kind of talk directly adresses a fundamental weakness of the Bush people -- the mass consent, such as it is, they have engineered is based primarily on the shallow propaganda technique of constant repetition. Saying "Saddam has got to disarm!" and "weapons of mass destruction!" over and over again creates in the minds of many people the notion that Iraq is just as dangerous as, say, North Korea. BUT, quite often, really, conversation with more knowledgable fellow citizens can disabuse people from such impressions.

As to the "phamphleteers," if there really are a million of them, that's wonderful! Getting intellectualy involved with issues, formulating one's thoughts, putting them in words, putting them up, almost literally, before the whole world -- those things are often precursors to more active forms of involvement. And I bet some of them have some worthy ideas, too.

Re:Speaking of getting political

[Zoop]

And such an effective political institution it is.

Oh, wait:

<sarcasm>And such an effective political institution it is.</sarcasm>

When, oh when, is the EFF going to get a DC office? A friend of mine called about volunteering. Neither of us had great sums of money, but we had time. Their response?

"Oh, we only accept local volunteer help."

"That's OK, we're in DC."

"Um, we only have an office in SF."

"???"

Helloooooo--the political capital of the U.S. is in Washington, DC, not Berkeley, CA. You don't even have to rent space in the District to be effective. The NRA has a massive complex in Fairfax, VA. So why, oh why, is the EFF only in SF? Do they think that Ashcroft is going to come to them to ask them what they think? Are they going to get videoconferences with congresscritters? Do they think the'll have any political influence without playing the political game? Not with all the more money they bring to the table.

I like the ideals of the EFF, I just find it to be a fairly lackluster effort. I'd give time and what little money I can spare to an effective organization, but at the moment, my charitable money is better given to the Institute for Justice (politically unpopular with Slashdotters, I know) and the ACLU.

It's not as if there are no successful models to follow, people.