Circa three hours ago, I made a post discussing how complicity through inaction threatens digital privacy. In the post, I made connections to the inactions of people during the 1930’s Germany. The post was removed for being posted in the wrong community:
Meanwhile, these are the rules:
I am not trying to pick a fight with the mods. I am trying to point out that there is no privacy without political discourse and action. That’s all I wanted to inspire discussion on.
Peace.
Unfortunately (?), I am not a STEM worker myself and as for programming, I just began learning C about six months ago, barely qualifying even as a hobby programmer. Which is to say, I have no insight into how well-versed or not these people are on history. With that said, I do believe that society as a whole - and feel free to call me a doomsayer - is about to face a third world war, because we haven’t yet broken the cycle that is
tragedy ---> unlearn tragedy ---> tragedy. Society as a whole - not programmers and STEM workers - is forgetting history. As to why, I can only guess. Perhaps we have been made too busy to stay educated, informed and critical. We are stunted and we have been bereft of our tools and motivation to take action. When I say “we”, I mean people of the West, because in those parts of the world where Western imperialism has driven entire populations to poverty, there is a fighting spirit that we have all but forgotten… This is getting out of hand and very farfetched. Sorry!I did not know that about Arendt’s partner! Ever since we read the Banality of Evil as part of a German class, I have viewed her - or at least that particular work of hers - as source of inspiration, since, being born to a Jewish family, she also suffered at the hands of the Nazi for researching antisemitism. I do not view her theories as apologetic, but rather as very important messages to future generations: that every single person is capable of doing everything the Nazi did against the Jewish people under the “right” circumstances. That totalitarianism normalizes “evil” - please don’t get me started on the definition of that - and that with the right indoctrination, even sending a person to a concentration camp can become a banal task.
Smack me for forcfully tying this together, but that banality is yet another threat to digital privacy, just as inaction (as per my previous post, which I realized now you never saw… shoot…) is. Marx says somewhere - heavily paraphrased - that the ideology of the ruling class trickles down to become the ideology of the people through various institutions and I hate to see just that, just now: the process of normalization of the invasion of privacy that is going on in the world.