This year's topic was decoding digital colonialism.
This session was particularly improvised as the original plan was to share a dialogue with @hellais on open technologies to guarantee human rights. Enjoy!
I have contacted Yolanda and she after something went wrong. She's going to see what happened with the organization that Cibervoluntarios delegated the diffusion of the video on YouTube to. I'm sure this will be solved soon. But it certainly looks like someone in the chain didn't like what I said. Certainly not #EmpoderaLIVE organizers though.
I really recommend going to the event if you have the opportunity, as it is very welcoming.
What we think for granted is under threat. We're still alive and kicking though.
Technology is a power infrastructure.
The internet protocol means you could talk the protocol and be part of the network.
Over the last 20 years, people were naive about the internet. Strategic autonomy is at stake. Sovereignty is in danger. We should end with alternative networks and stop using Gaggle.
The internet is consuming a lot of energy. Strong narratives are coming to us from people who want to make money out of it. But we who know about tech must debunk those narratives.
"The internet is broken, but we can fix it"
A book that is not yet translated, written in 2019.
If we want to fix the internet we have to have democratic control over the internet. The internet should be considered as a Commons. We're looking into capital and how extraction works.
From what I understand, everybody within the @EU_Commission was very happy and supportive of the #EUVoice experiment by @EDPS. Everybody within @EC_NGI is absolutely delighted with the work done by @NGIZero, yet, when EDPS asked what branch of the European Union would take charge of the #ActivityPub presence of the Union, everybody turned they heads away.
Yet, the #EU keeps spending tons of public money on X or Meta. This is #shameful.
Now, from May 18, 2024, we, European citizens, are left with no public access to European institutions, since all their communications will go through US-based private companies that the #EU fined repeatedly for breaking the European Law.
What kind of political power is that? Submitting #GDPR protected citizens to the global surveillance of NSA through USA's "National Security Exception to GDPR"?
On the one hand you're giving us, European citizens and free software developers, the task to build our own sovereign public digital infrastructure, and at the same time, on the other hand, you're spitting in our faces.
This is disgusting. You do not deserve us. We have to make it happen in spite of your ignorance and stupidity, this is what it is.
#Mastodon forms new 501(c)(3) non-profit entity with new board of directors in the United States to facilitate tax-deductible donations and in-kind support:
Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:
"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”
GNU @Taler is free software, and @NGI_Taler has open calls to let you implement the payment system for your free software. It would totally make sense to apply at protocol level to solve it for #ActivityPub federation.
> (c) put in place a policy to respect Union copyright law in particular to identify and respect, including through state of the art technologies, the reservations of rights expressed pursuant to Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790;
Article 4(3) of the above says:
> expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online.
If I want to expressly forbid data-mining of public contents by AI, where should I put it?
If I put it in one place (e.g., my canonical website), is it enough, or should everyone add specific lines of code EVERYWHERE to avoid feeding AIs? (What a waste of resources)
Is there a /.well-known/ space for this? Or a HTTP header? Or an HTML header? Or a specific (machine-readable) blurb to put somewhere? Where? How?
I see a lot of talk about "privilege" as if in disgust of those having "spare time" to help others. And I get it. Privilege is stacked in layers. From the low state of lying in a ditch dying, up and up, right to Mars where billionaires live.
Was I privileged when I quit job, started doing community work? Hell yes! Frugal lifestyle saw me some savings in the bank, most now gone.
From then on I was also sacrificing. Burning privilege at the altar of the Commons to shed my sins of individualism.
The term "Green Extractivism" recreates the violent colonialist extractivist structure with a green agenda. It criminalizes resistance, capturing the narrative, telling the public that people who resist extractivism are actually working against progress and saving the planet.
The propaganda is extremely violent, removing autochtone population from the picture and replacing them with modernity and 'clean' mining.
Copper is going to be a key element, since it's required and cannot be substituted, contrary to lithium which can be substituted with sodium.
The demand for copper is going to drive prices up: there's not enough copper to satisfy the projected picture at a global scale.
We need to make choices as a society: I don't need the latest model, I can perfectly do with second hand devices. People should be choosing, not companies, not markets, not governments.
National growth is antithetical to keeping minerals underground. Indigenous and peasant populations are always sacrificed.
The focus on growth means the hunger for more metals won't go away easily. We must think about fighting this ideology.
More solidarity among affected communities should be a priority. I want electrical public transport, more justice. Invest in trains not cars. Reduce our dependance on new products. Bring back autonomy to people.
Would you prefer driving an electric car or drinking water?
Questions:
How do you see environmental and digital activists working together? Concrete synergies.
We need a diversity of actions on different fronts from policy to legislation, from media to ground action. Mining companies are stock companies, they can be attacked on markets and their investors can be influenced.
Climate philanthropy is very keen on tech optimism. Digital rights can share..