Benjamin Mako Hill

you can decide not to buy corporate products

That's a fallacy by both choice and externality.

There are cases in which there is no choice but to use specific corporate products, or in which choices are made without an individual's consent or involvement.

Karen Sandler, co-host (with former FSF directory Bradley Kuhn) of the "Free as in Freedom" podcast has an implanted, closed-source proprietary medical device. She can literally chose between non-free software (which includes surveillance), or death.

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/mar/26/sandler-fsf-free-software-award/

Emergency medical services, government contracts, third-party contracts by various firms and organisations, third-party use of Gmail either directly or as a hosted email service (see Benjamin Mako Hill's "Google has most of my email because it has all of yours": https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours), and the issues of spillover externalities (Amazon Ring doorbell surveillance, third-party tracking of mobile phone SIMs, MACs, and Bluetooth signatures, facial surveillance) mean that, no, actually, you cannot decide not to participate in corporate surveillance.

And, as a final point, both government and corporate surveillance and oppression very often speak to the same underlying dynamic: that of power to defend both itself and its wealth and/or golden geese. Examples are numerous, though the Johnson County War would be a good case history: …

Hi Seth! I'm reminded of an Aaron Swartz story that I suppose we could share:

==

During my first few years in Cambridge, Aaron was one of my favorite people to scheme with. We started and — then usually abandoned — a whole string of projects. We would argue for hours and hours about sociology, economics, technology, and ethics.

I remember one time I took Aaron to the Boston vegetarian food festival to see a talk by Peter Singer who is an ethicist at Princeton who many people credit as the intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement. Aaron went to ask Singer if we (humans) have an ethical obligation to keep animals from hurting each other?

As Aaron approached Singer, I sort of shrunk back a little bit. Embarrassed. The question just seemed, I don't know, “troll-ish” and I figured it would just annoy Singer. But, to my surprise, Singer sighed, thought for a bit, and said something like, “yes, if we can do it without causing more suffering in the process, I suppose we should.”

That that's the Aaron I knew. A recklessly creative intellectual refusing to be hemmed in by what most of us take for granted. And in that process, always thinking about the greater good.

-- Benjamin Mako Hill, https://mako.cc/talks/20130311-bmh-aaron_swartz_memorial_remarks.html

This reminds me of the Overprice Tags project by Benjamin Mako Hill of the MIT Media Lab/Sloan. See http://mako.cc/fun/overpricetags/

Students at MIT, Brown, and other schools labelled the journals in their libraries with pricetags showing the cost the university was paying for each journal. Nuclear Physics A&B <//elsevier.com/locate/nuclphysa> cost $25,888 in 2005.

Similarly, Students for Free Culture have been working on both the Open University Project and the Open Access Project, pressing universities to reform their use of journals. See http://freeculture.org/

Lastly, public universities have been known to disclose the cost of journals they subscribe to -regardless of NDA status- at the issuing of FOIA or CPRA type requests. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Records_Act

Another interesting bit of history was the Seiko Message Watch, which had time-sync and one-watch messaging over an FM radio sideband:

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/tribute-to-the-seiko-messagewatch

Back before cell phones were ubiquitous that was pretty novel. I remember being struck by how cool it was to step off the plane in Taipei and see it update to local time while I watched. Getting pages about server downtime using the email gateway was also a nice way not to lug a pager around.

The system didn't outlive Y2K, however, and since it was clear where the market was going they simply shut it down rather than fix the Y2K bugs.