Eyes Up’s purpose is to “preserve evidence until it can be used in court.” But it has been swept up in Apple’s attack on ICE-spotting apps.

  • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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    7 hours ago

    The thing is - the Internet itself is a fascist technology. Fascists, and especially German Nazis, used electric terms and analogies to refer to their politics. Mostly referring to unification of various parts into one network, except in their case the information medium really used was radio.

    But the basic idea was that any kind of fascism thrives as means of mass politics. Anything unique, specific, individual is in conflict with that. But the Internet is the tool to slowly grind through that conflict, because it gradually reinforces one voice, one way and one meaning.

    It’s a very intelligent trap and one hard to believe in, but our world today is so much more fascist than even in dictatorships 30 years ago, that I think I’m right.

    Also consider that the very shock of something so modern and new and comfortable being used as a channel of control is, too, what Nazis did.

    And when you want to argue that in the Internet one can post their own opinions and create their own spaces and do their own things, think again. These abilities are inherent to reality as well. Make a thought experiment - could you whisper with your friends at a Nazi meeting in the back rows? Could you not even attend? Could you have private conversations on everything you’d want elsewhere? Yes, these all are true. But the only voices to be heard by everyone and reinforced by that system and order were those from the tribune, and millions of voices would answer them in one and the same way, and millions of hands would raise in salute.

    And LLMs and such new tools are going to make this worse, because they are tools of situational speech accord with what you expect, leveled by the common average, just like fascism is an ideology of situational emotional accord with what you feel, leveled by the common average. Fascism is the extreme ideology rejecting logic and semantics, and the Internet on every level has been built to reject logic and semantics as a medium of communication of living people. And LLMs are an even more direct tool to do well only that, all the rest is attempts to sell it, but this is its main trait.

    And let’s recall again how that stopped - by spending all its resources and being defeated in a war.

    A truly visionary and futuristic regime, honestly. It’s funny how Nazis were so futuristic despite being blood and soil barbarians, and Stalin’s regime was really reactionary despite dreaming of space travel, except Stalin’s regime’s official philosophy was dialectic materialism which is the only thing convenient to describe this contradiction.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Stalin’s regime was really reactionary

      Even this is a charitable description. The best term for Stalin’s regime is “despotism”.

      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 hour ago

        That and also anti-intellectualism with ability to physically destroy intellectuals. People like Lysenko and Lepeschinskaya and so on being able to do that to their opponents are, IMHO, the main difference between 20s USSR which was pretty believably in avantgarde and 60s USSR which in all parts of its society just wanted some silent life and no more greatness.

        Even when that anti-scientific crap and repressions stopped, Soviet science fiction and Soviet state ideology and Soviet system couldn’t be believed any more. They’ve lost basis in reality.

        20s’ USSR had just restored its economy to 1914 levels and above in a few years after WWI, the revolution and the civil war, made a new republic, and seemed a successful resolution of Russia’s early XX century dead end.

        60s’ USSR failed agriculture, controlling some of the most agriculturally productive areas on the planet.