I would argue that the hierarchy of loyalties discussed at the end of the article (Family, Community, Mankind, Life) comes from our positions in the Tree of Life produced by the Genetic Algorithm. We protect and grow our branches, starting locally. Hence racism. There is also a strong geographic component.
It's interesting to look back through history when communities who were perpetually at war ally to fight a greater external threat, only to fall back to civil war when jousting for regional dominance.
Peace is the real art, but can only be achieved when no-one has any just cause to overthrow the system. One that enforces a collection of fair laws that all can agree on.
The evolution of our legal systems through the ages is one of our greatest accomplishments. A community answer to the question "What is fair?"
There was mild discontent when the Data Retention laws [1] were being rolled out across the EU in the early 2010s. This was a legal harmonization of existing collection practices for law enforcement purposes. It did receive a lot of press coverage and some small protests (even though in reality the collection was already widespread).
In 2009, Malte Spitz (German Green Party politician) sued his telecom provider for all the information they had stored on him in the last 6 moths. He and others made a good (and spooky) visualization showing how it tracked his entire life [2]. He did a TED talk about it [3], which received a spirited applause and unfortunately minor press coverage.
I think many naively bought the idea that all this detailed data was only for LE (maybe a side effect of all the reporting on the Data Retention Laws?), despite constantly seeing clauses in their EULA's saying their data will be shared with third parties.
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People only care about these issues once they become evident and widespread, and they personally are affected. I remember the shock my friends had when Google Maps released the location history feature. Up until then, its just a theoretical concern.
Good demonstrations, hard hitting expositions and good press coverage are essential.
> "The Methbot is a beautiful simulacrum of a real browser. It's gotten better over time. And by better, I mean, a more perfect life-like copy," said White Ops CEO Michael Tiffany.
It's interesting to look back through history when communities who were perpetually at war ally to fight a greater external threat, only to fall back to civil war when jousting for regional dominance.
Peace is the real art, but can only be achieved when no-one has any just cause to overthrow the system. One that enforces a collection of fair laws that all can agree on.
The evolution of our legal systems through the ages is one of our greatest accomplishments. A community answer to the question "What is fair?"