It’s weird. The simple fact of being watched and told what you can say. And the possibility that what you’re saying is being edited and what you’re hearing is edited too.
This strikes me as abhorrent. But most of the people here call it necessary, preferable and even desirable.
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No, we are not.
What do you want? To be private or avoid censorship?
You haven’t been censored in the sense that it’s plain for me to see from your post history you’ve been on a crusade against “them” in the past couple weeks. Some of your posts were unpopular but they haven’t been removed. I am “watching you” in the sense that I can see that post history, but I know nothing of you aside from that.
On people “telling you what you can say”, it’s just as much a right for people to express what they do and don’t want to listen to as much as it’s your right to express yourself. (And as a sidenote: the Canadian standard of application of your rights has been within “reasonable limits” since the adoption of the Charter in the 80s).
The design of lemmy is that there is not one set of rules to do or not do unlike Reddit. If you are not happy with how you are treated on one server, leave and join local communities on another, or start your own.
What is it that you want to say but can’t?
[(verb) redacted][(name of high-ranking politician in the US Executive Branch) redacted]
Im honestly confused. Youre mad that the post youre making in a public space so that anyone can see it, is seen by anyone? Youre mad that people want rules in these spaces, so it can be a friendly place instead of devolving into a cesspit? If you want to talk privately, yes of course this isnt the space to do so.
Theres plenty wrong with the surveillance state the entire world is moving to, but your take seems to be a hot one.
I mean, it’s been around as a concept for a couple centuries. If anything I’d say that it’s “on the out” as something seriously suggested in popular discourse. It’s just that we’ve semi-accidentally built the infrastructure to implement such a thing very quickly.
But most of the people here call it necessary, preferable and even desirable.
To be clear, where’s “here”? Lemmy, your IRL location, somewhere else?
This isnt 1984. You have as much freedom to say whatever you want as you did in an equally-dense area in 1955, and you’re exactly as subject to what you say being reported inaccurately.
What’s changed is that you actually have a plausible ability to broadcast yourself. Today’s equivalent of newspapers and TV stations have infinite channels and infinite paper, and mostly just let you say whatever you want.
If you do cross that “whatever” , though, they can and do refuse to publish your stuff, but you’re free to go elsewhere.
And if it’s actual surveillance you’re worried about… Well, much hasn’t changed since “Enemy of the state” and you should be practicing both good privacy safeguards and rhetorical defense of the same whenever you can.
It’s already happened, cell phones for example. In the early days of internet 1.0, it was widely expected that everything you say online could be observed by the authorities. Of course, the people at this time were all nerds, we didn’t have computers in our pockets making access for the nudniks and normies so easy.
Wake Me Up When (Eternal) September Ends.
Yeah, but my point is most of the people here will actually argue in favor of it. Saying that it’s the best and only way etc. you got to wonder where that came from
most of the people here will actually argue in favor of it
On Lemmy? This is the place that’s jazzed for GrapheneOS releases so they can degoogle their phone. We go on and on about private messenger apps, Proton, running non-corporate OSes, and privacy. Most of us are here because we don’t like the shitty direction Reddit is taking.
I think you can make the argument that generally people are ambivalent about privacy, but Lemmy is a definite exception to that rule.
Unless a person lives in a cave, there is almost no way around it.
This strikes me as abhorrent. But most of the people here call it necessary, preferable and even desirable.
I don’t and I won’t ‘call it necessary, preferable and even desirable’. That’s a nightmare that’s being build right before our eyes, with the (often unconscious) complicity of a lot of us (me included, for many years).
Here in France, certain ideas are literally outlawed from any public discussions (it’s in the law, what an impressive feat from a country so proud of its promotion of free speech). But it’s everywhere and at every level, even in the way we’ve learned to not use certain words in our everyday exchanges or to not try to understand something a little better before condemning it—we do like all the people around us, we hate what and who we’re being told to hate.
That’s why I steer away as much as I can from digital means of communication. And do as much as I can offline and the analog way.
Younger people have probably never experienced it but good old snail mail (as well as in-person talks) is still private by default (that too is in the law, at least here, doesn’t l mean it’s above the law, which is fine, but at least it’s private). Also, it’s not tracked or algorithmically quantified and validated by anyone.
Mandatory disclaimer (because we live in this absolute moronic age of ‘either you’re with us, or you’re against us’ angry crowds): me protesting against the growing (self-)censorship of any idea does not mean I endorse any of those censored ideas. It just means that I think censorship is a terrible way to fight any idea. As history have shown us countless times.
Younger people have probably never experienced it but good old snail mail (as well as in-person talks) is still private by default (that too is in the law, at least here, doesn’t l mean it’s above the law, which is fine, but at least it’s private). Also, it’s not tracked or algorithmically quantified and validated by anyone.
Contents are not tracked, the metadata sure is. They scan every envelope. They will know who sent a letter to who on which specific days and how frequent do you send letters.
When you say here what do you mean?
Moderated social media. Lemmy etc
I wouldn’t call moderated internet communities a panopticon. You can opt out at any time, which is pretty antithetical to the definition of a panopticon.
It is 100% the conversational equivalent, surely
We are watched. We are dictated to.
You can have conversations IRL that nobody will monitor or have any record of. I swear, people these days have forgotten how to exist in the real world.
There are some truly online takes out there, and this is definitely one of them.
Buckle up, it’ll get worse from here as more people come over from reddit.
What do you want to say/see that you cannot? Which rule is rustling your jimmies the most?
Then I would say it is easy to make the comparison except that in this case they are more akin to clubs with set rules of behaviour, everyone is free to leave at any moment and not interact with anyone.
Panopticon?
A concept for a prison model where the cells are arranged circling a central watchtower. No one misbehaves because the tower could be watching you at any time
Google it. It’s a system where you’re watched all the time.
No. It’s a prison.
Moderated social media is not a prison. Lemmy does not make your financial history public. It does not make your whatsapp, telegram or signal messages public. It does not point a camera at your physical body for all to view at all times.
A panopticon is a prison model where surveillance is possible at all times, and nothing is private.
Moderated social media, is not a prison, and is not mutually exclusive with 100% private conversation outside any given platform, between any two individuals, or within any given group of individuals.
The reason PUBLIC forums need to be moderated is that otherwise they devolve instead of develop conversation.
In the private sphere, the equivalent action taken to mediate conversation is the ability for you to simply stop conversing with a given individual, or for a group to ostracize individuals that sabotage discourse.
Once you reach a group of large enough size, ostracizing no longer works, and you individually blocking someone does not prevent them from derailing topics for everyone else.
It’s right there in the name. All seeing. Pan opticon
Right. Then I’ll just open up your banking history here on lemmy…
Oh wait.
And words have meaning. You can’t just point to their etymology and claim they can be used to refer to everything you consider slightly related.
The fact is, the word panopticon has very specific meaning, and specifically refers to prisons. And you didn’t even get it right. The original concept doesn’t involve constant surveillance, but the possibility of constant surveillance.
Otherwise every single room with someone wearing sunglasses in it, would be one, because you can’t tell whether that person might be looking at you at any given moment.
FWIW the Panopticon has been used metaphorically before.
From Wikipedia (I’d recommend reading the whole Criticisms and use as Metaphor section):
In the mid-1970s, the panopticon was brought to the wider attention by the French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller and the French philosopher Michel Foucault.[30] In 1975, Foucault used the panopticon as metaphor for the modern disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish. He argued that the disciplinary society had emerged in the 18th century and that discipline are techniques for assuring the ordering of human complexities, with the ultimate aim of docility and utility in the system.[31] Foucault first came across the panopticon architecture when he studied the origins of clinical medicine and hospital architecture in the second half of the 18th century. He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology
Fair.
It does make for a much more compelling allegory for society, as much like prison, it’s really hard to “exit” society.
While opting out of moderated social media is not difficult at all.
