Quote from: offbeatadam on June 04, 2013, 02:59 amI find it too hard to lose track of some posts here ^.^I agree entirely with what you said. I suppose in some ways, I actually was thinking that this was the reality, but it is easy to turn it into war being the necessity for invention, when a lot of the immediate imagery would like one to see it that way.Right now I've been pondering more on a reality that I seldomly see talked about outside of healthcare. Right now when I take a look at individuals in power, I see a very clear line between generations. We are already very aware that our generation is drastically smaller than our parents (and in some cases, their parents too). Adding that we do not face the extreme famine and the massive population declines that disease (spanish flu), war (ww 1 & ww 2 & korea & vietnam) and famine (great depression & dust bowl) that the generation before our grandparents suffered through. People live longer, that is all there is to it. While we are happy to become adults and get the freedom that comes along with it, I'm beginning to get this collective feeling that, perhaps I haven't gotten out from under the "wing" of my parents.The global changes that are happening as a matter of course thanks to the rapid increase in connectivity, is largely lacking in understanding by the generation that dominates politics today. It is almost universal amongst all countries, agnostic of religion or social identification... there is a gap between the digital and analogue ages, and that gap is making the policies that suppress us further each day. I've frequently seen on a number of the intellectual/tech/young topic magazines and internet columns the phenomenon that the people whom we believe would appropriately support policies that are in accordance with our views on freedom and information rights. The problem is usually observed that those individuals have too much angst against the political machine to begin with, and while they want change they believe there is too much resistance towards it.I usually chalked that up to the normal "then why complain if you don't want to fix it?" but after a while I've really started to think about it, and while it sucks I am beginning to believe it is more than that, and I'm beginning to believe that change won't come so long as we have our parents in government. It seems childish to say that, and ultimately I feel childish for saying it, but as Will Smith & DJ Jazzy Jeff said... "Parents just don't understand." I can't have an intellectual conversation with my father over why I think the amount of money our country spends on imprisoning some highly intelligent indivduals and marking them as felons for carrying a few tabs of MDMA to a concert, while murders walk out for good behavior. I can't have an intellectual debate with my father over why I utilize things like Tor because I believe I have a right to think what I want to think, and that I should be able to do that without being watched by an Orwellian society.And I don't know how to reconcile that issue in my head yet. I'm still pondering.I think that you're right, there is simply no genuine way to participate in the democratic process any more for this generation, and I also think that unless we succeed at creating the Darknet, we also risk being at the mercy of a gerontocracy. I'm sure you've noticed the cavalier approach of the anti-snowdenites, "not fit to be a grocery bagger", "he's just 29, how dare he" and my favorite: "he's just a systems administrator!" and many other things vaguely along those lines. Extraordinary statements when you think about it. Pure class warfare, it's funny how Americans once looked down upon Britons for that behavior, and now here it is and they don't even recognize it. All that is typical of the present to future relation between a wealthy class and a destitute younger underclass. I think it is disgusting and completely undeserved. Being a beneficiary of quantitative easing is immoral. It eats at both the ethos of both capitalist and socialist ideals. Incredibly, the baby boomer generation has poisoned two of the most important elements of our civilization: democracy and markets. Now they may not have much in common, but the libertarian right and left should really join forces against this zombification of society. Centrism is what we really have (once you get past all the bluster and get down to matters of practical policy), and it is pure poison, it leads straight to fascism. It's odd how it's commonly accepted today that a 'proper person' is supposed to avoid 'extremes', and hold moderate views in order to be considered an objective person, when it is obvious that socialism and capitalism effectively cancel each other out, which must mean centrist ideology is inherently the ideology of stagnation. If political extremes such as fascism and communism then come out of the woodwork, it is only because of the impotence of centrism that the pendulum swings too wildly afterward. A surveillance state creates an asymmetry of power. Power outside of market economics is a zero sum game. There is an absolute amount of it and taking it from person X gives it to person Y, whether by votes or guns. This surveillance asymmetry creates 3 factions. The technocrats, of which there are two groups, the state technocrats and the cypherpunks, and the general population. You could sum up what is happening is that the people who understand the system obtain almost god-like powers, while everybody else gets screwed.Without a surveillance society, there is simply no real demand for anonymity networks. I notice after the Prism reporting, that the speed of the Tor network dramatically climbed by as much as four or five times. Surveillance only increases the demand for Darknets, which also intensifies the asymmetry of power. It is analogous to free markets and black markets. The freer the market, the smaller the black market. You can get rid of the Darknet in the same way as getting rid of the black market. That is: in the long term, never. The only long term way to change these things is to change yourself, and I don't think the government is about to have a bout of introspection any time soon. People talk of housing bubbles, tech bubbles. It is the government that is in the real bubble. It's the mother of all bubbles, it's the sector of the economy that has increased in size practically every year for a century. Unless we finish the government, I fear that it will finish us all, the moniker leviathan is appropriate in more ways than one.