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3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2014–2016
1:21:00 · 134K views · May 19, 2014
Slavoj Zizek and Paul Holdengraber discuss surveillance and whistleblowers at the International Authors' Stage, ranging over Snowden, Assange, Pussy Riot and humor.
HN commenters call it an entertaining, complementary philosophical take on surveillance, with a funny story about jamming secret police.
5 comments from Hacker News
As a complimentary perspective: For those who haven't seen it, I think Slavoj Žižek and Paul Holdengräber on "Surveillance and whistleblowers" is worth a watch. The part about surveillance starts at 21:14 so this link will take you there this video Žižek: "The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom you don't even experience, as such. If some of you are feminists ... every good feminist will tell you the first step of feminism is just to realise your situation of oppression... We need something similar here. That's the first point. The second point ... I'm a little bit sceptic about this paranoia 'ooh we are totally controlled' and so on and so on, I think we shouldn't take this too seriously. And this doesn't make the situation any easier if anything it makes it more... it [paranoia] is justified, but we should be aware, again we go in to metaphorics again the NSA the Big Eye knows everything, again the mega-machinery is extremely stupid, they don't know what they know. Do you remember, this is a very superficial anecdote ... a guy in LA was Googling the ways to kill your wife something like that, a couple days afterward the FBI brutally entered his house arrested him blah blah blah. Why? Because Google reported this to FBI. But do you know what was the result, this guy was a was one of the you know all the [TV] series CIS / police investigation, we was simply writing a scenario and wanted to check you know, and you have this again and again or form China they told me a wonde
At this stage it has become apparent that opposing surveillance doesn't appear to be helping. It's pretty clear where this is headed, and it seems to me the only way out of it is through it and out the other side, whatever that might look like. My position on surveillance is now, and has been for a few months, what Slavoj Žižek said: "Yeah but I don't care if we are watched. Here I preach arrogance. So what, let the big 'other' watch me maybe he will learn something and be less stupid, you know, this is not my problem." If you haven't seen it this video[1] of Slavoj Žižek and Paul Holdengräber on "Surveillance and whistleblowers" at the International Authors' Stage, published earlier this year, is quite entertaining. The quote above is at 35:54. 1. this video
Even if you don't like Slavoj Žižek, he has a funny story related to this: this video He talks about how he and his associates were dissidents and had meetings and they agreed on a protocol to talk gibberish at the end. Fake, military sounding code words and stuff. It was a fun thing to do. Years later they discovered the amount of head-aches and resource drain they caused on the secret police who tried in vain to discover the meaning in this nonsense, thinking that perhaps there was some serious stuff going on. That is why I hope one good thing comes out of it, and that is people might start taking cryptography slightly more seriously and they'll also start actively fighting back. This is one way and it is fun too. (for some strange value of "fun").
Slavoj Zizek had a great talk with a talk show host from the Netherlands precisely about this matter. this video Fun watch imo. There's also another session between them two.
To follow up on this, here is the full quote from Slavoj Žižek in conversation with Paul Holdengräber: Zizek: Here I’m a little bit of anti-democratic pessimist in the sense that if you really ask people, cut the bullshit, what do you really want from government, I don’t think people really want that government should not torture people and so on, the point is do it but do it discretely I don’t want to know it. 1. this video