This is a good post on the impact of surveillance in Iran: myprivacy.blog/the-digital-i… It's worth reading. IMO one mistake that freedom advocates often make is that we talk about privacy violation and surveillance as "dystopian", using the word as a semantic stop sign: we know it means "bad", we nod along, and don't really go further to clarify why it's bad. I worry that this approach is long-run unhealthy: when we criticize various companies and countries for being "dystopian" and stop there, then to someone who's not already in the same memeplex, it sounds like we're basically criticizing companies and countries for not complying with our culture's aesthetic preferences. Which is ... duh, companies and countries are *supposed* to not comply with each other's aesthetic preferences, that's the whole point of the "pluralism" thing. What the above article makes clear so well is that "dystopian" surveillance is not bad because it's "dystopian", it's bad because it makes a concrete property of the world worse: the power balance between individual and state. Surveillance enables an outcome where basically everyone other than police and security forces has no opportunity whatsoever to challenge the political status quo without being punished. This means an outcome where a political regime can remain in power forever, without satisfying more than a very small coalition of people who have the eyes and the guns (now drones). The Dictator's Handbook talks about "large coalition" and "small coalition" governments; large coalition governments are the ones that are more pro-human, because they, well, have to keep a large coalition happy. Small coalition ones are the really nasty ones. Here is the near-term dark outcome of dictatorship + automated warfare + surveillance: a regime can literally survive with a coalition of size 1, because an army of all-seeing eyes and robots can defeat the entire populace in battle if needed. In Iran, we see what *just* dictatorship with surveillance can do, once you add automated police, you get to the unholy trifecta. I don't know of a good solution to this. Privacy technology, as well as more work on censorship-resistant internet (I think we should strive for at least basic-quality internet, eg. 1 Mbps, being a global human right outside the domain of nation-state sovereignty), can help somewhat to reduce the possibility of total government control. But what else? --- BTW one implicit frame in the article I take some issue with is framing Iran + Russia + China as the unique antagonists (both in surveillance they do internally, and in the technology they export to other countries). They do a lot of dystopian shit of both types. However, Israeli and US tech companies, and undoubtedly tech companies from other Western nations, also do a lot of dystopian shit. Perhaps one key difference between the surveillance described above, and the Western type, is: * The surveillance in the above article is about exercising *great control over a medium area*: you can see everything, but it requires active participation of the government of the territory being surveilled. * The Israeli / US / Western flavor is about exercising *medium control over a great area*: there are more limits to how much they can do, but their surveillance is global: they know what people are doing even in countries and territories they have no presence in. The distinction is not absolute: Israeli surveillance backstops a lot of its human rights abuse in Palestine, US surveillance reinforces ICE abuses (see the recent article about Homeland Security demanding social media firms reveal names of anti-ICE protesters), etc, and "transnational repression" is done by anti-Western countries. But *on average*, the above seems to be the pattern. The two are differently scary. The former for the reasons I described above. The latter because it allows global projection of power: a politician or civil servant in one country now has to worry about being blackmailed, droned or otherwise attacked from other countries. The USA has shown willingness to go after individual EU officials, ICC officials (see recent articles on both), and others. Ultimately, I suspect that even democratic governments will want more privacy to protect themselves, and we will have to have deep conversations about what "democratic accountability" means: how can a civil servant be accountable to the people, but not accountable to foreign spooks? My high-level frame is: privacy generally helps whoever is weaker. "Weaker" does not mean "moral": sometimes the weaker side is criminal. But in the 21st century, we are at serious risk of stronger factions using modern technologies to establish unbreakable lock-in to power. And so on average, reducing the gradient of power, giving the weak a fighting chance, is something that the world desperately needs.

This is the right way to "make Ethereum be the home for AI". Don't just do what everyone else would do anyway, just on rails with an octahedron logo instead of a square or circle or pentagon logo. Make something fundamentally better, using meaningful technological improvements in ZK privacy-preserving payments and reputation.

I agree with maybe 60% of this, but one bit that is particularly important to highlight is the explicit separation between what the poster calls "the open web" (really, the corposlop web), and "the sovereign web". xitter.cf/tom777kruise/status/20… This is a distinction I did not realize until recently, and I must admit the bitcoin maximalists were far ahead: a big part of their resistance to ICOs, tokens other than bitcoin, arbitrary financial applications, etc was precisely about keeping bitcoin "sovereign" and not "corposlop". The big error that many of them made was trying to achieve this goal with either government crackdowns or user disempowerment (keeping bitcoin script limited, and rejecting many categories of applications entirely), but their fear was real. So what is corposlop? In essence, it is the combination of three things: * Corporate optimization power * An aura of respectableness of being a company with sleek polished branding * Behavior that the exact opposite of respectable, because that's what's needed to maximize profit Corposlop includes things like: * Social media that maximizes dopamine, outrage, other methods of short-term engagement, at the expense of long-term value and fulfillment * Needless mass data collection from users, often followed by managing it carelessly or even casually selling it to third parties * Walled gardens charging monopolistic high fees and actively preventing people from even linking to other platforms * Hollywood releasing the 7th sequel to some tired franchise, because that's the most risk-averse thing to do * Every corporation that rallied around slogans of diversity and equity and the need to overturn society to fight racism in 2020, and then publicly mocked those causes for engagement in 2025 This is all digital corposlop; there are big and important analogues to this in the physical world too. Corposlop is soulless: trend-following homogeneity that is both evil and lame vitalik.eth.limo/general/202… These are things that appear to serve the user, but actually disempower the user. I have many qualms with Apple, but aside from their monopolistic practices, they actually have many non-corposlop traits. They serve users not by constantly asking "what do users want this quarter", but by having an opinionated long-term vision. They have a strong emphasis on privacy. They resist and create trends rather than following them. I just wish they could take the brave step of ending their monopolistic practices and switch to an open source first strategy. It may damage their market cap, but man must live for something higher than market caps. Zac from Aztec was also early to recognize the importance of this, with a post that is on the whole very pro-freedom, but at the same time does not shrink back from labeling what is essentially corposlop a primary enemy, even when it does not violate the libertarian non-aggression principle. xitter.cf/Zac_Aztec/status/19860… In 2000, the understanding of "sovereignty" largely focused on avoiding the iron fist of government. Today, "sovereignty" also means securing your digital privacy through cryptography, and securing your own mind from corporate mind warfare trying to extract your attention and your dollars. It also means doing things because you believe in them, and declaring independence from the homogenizing and soul-sucking concept of "the meta". These are the kinds of tools that we should build more of. Build tools like: * Privacy-preserving local-first applications that minimize dependence on and data leaks to third parties * Social media platforms and tools that let the user take control of what content they see. Appeal to people's long-term goals, not short-term impulses * Financial tools that help users grow their wealth, and do not encourage 50x leverage or sports betting or taking out a loan to pay for a burrito * AI tools that are maximally open and privacy and local-friendly, and that maximize productivity from merging the power of human and bot, rather than encouraging the user to sit back and let the bot do all the work, so they learn nothing * Applications, companies, and physical environments that take an opinionated view on the kind of world they want to see, and have an opinionated culture * DAOs that can support organizations and communities that steadfastly pursue a unique objective, and do not all get captured by the same groups. Privacy-preserving and non-tokenholder-driven voting can help here Be sovereign. Reject corposlop. Believe in somETHing.