@tomjennings I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to maintain the connections with people in an increasingly hostile Internet.

Do I start living on Tor?

@tomjennings in the late 1980s, I was part of a cimena club connected to the squatter movement. We had a print newsletter with the monthly program. For about one year, we debated whether to put the addresses into a database (FileMaker) to make handling easier and reduce returns, or whether adopting computers was inherently buying into the administrational logic of the military-industrial complex. Eventually we went with the database (which I also advocated for), but over the years my suspicion has only grown that my friends on the other side of the argument had a point.

@tomjennings @festal I'm looking into air-gapped options (with some local ad-hoc data exchange provisions) again for that very reason...

It's nice to be able to organize your data and get stuff done with less effort. It's less nice when you also have to become a guardian for that data in an environment that goes from secret service agent movie levels of hostility to even worse.

@tomjennings The Internet (packet switched IP) is still there and does everything it was designed to do. Resilient and reliable.

Email newsletters are still (after 25 years) a powerful and useful tool.

The web, for many people, has become a series of walled gardens full of poisonous snakes. But that is not "The Internet ".

The web is still useful, here we are. Wikipedia? Duckduckgo? One a non-profit, one for profit, both good.

Please do not throw the baby out with the bathwater

@tomjennings I would participate in something like that.

Also really makes me miss FidoNet and BBSes. You could connect with a wider audience but also *disconnect*.

@tomjennings My parents were always convinced the FBI was going to beat down the front door. Like it was Wargames or I was Kevin Mitnick.

@worik@mastodon.social

Please do not throw the baby out with the bathwater

Everybody is connected with everyone all the time, that's a problem.

Using other communication systems allow for some calm instead of the constant anxiety trifecta made up of:

• dopamine-inducing "did anybody respond/fave/follow?" (and yes, the Fediverse is as bad at this as anything)
• what horrible thing happened in any part of the world that now floods my feeds/portals/front pages?
• is my data still secure or did some clown hack my systems or the ones that I'm using?

(with a bonus fourth for some: "when will the censor step in, and will I even notice?")

The Internet might still be a useful tool as cheap-and-available distribution method for overlay networks (until it ceases to be), but in my opinion anything that encourages "always-on" is poison.

Give me a store&forward system (that, ideally, can just switch away from IP to something else, perhaps "microSD cards in an envelope sent via traditional mail"¹) any time.

¹ For the global connections that I came to appreciate, I was checking out what a global SD card ring would mean. A regular letter could carry 3 µSD cards within its weight limits. Just one of them is essentially infinite storage for human-scale data transfer needs, even when serving entire regions that way.

Sending one or two such envelopes constantly east/west, forming a global ring, with each hop taking the data that's for their region to redistribute, and adding data destined for elsewhere, at a weekly cadence, that would come out at ~20€/month for the EU->US hop.
And yes, it's high latency. A worthy trade-off.

@tomjennings yeah, these were, at least for us, pre-internet days. Stand alone machines. But the argument concerned also such machines, as embodying administrative logics and its politics. That was a very European/German view, where counter culture, shaped by echoes of the Holocaust and contemporary resistance against nuclear power, was resolutely anti-tech (with exceptions like the chaos computer club)

@robdaemon @tomjennings
Back in the early 1990s, a friend of mine ran a 'Waerz' BBS from an upstairs front room. We all joked about good opsec and fast disk destruction methods.
One day I was at his place, copying some files to/from floppies and talking about stuff. A cop car skidded to a halt at a house nearby. He moved a foot under the desk, kicking the switch on an extension cord. Instant power-off. When we were sure the raid was for someone else, he went through the power on sequences.

@robdaemon @tomjennings
Everything had a BIOS password, so I looked out the window (as you do).
The main file storage was on a Novell server, and there were a few filesystem errors but they all got recovered.
My floppy disk (being written to at the time) was corrupted, but that was easy to reformat.

The extension cord had a built-in power switch with a little rubber foot added to it, so that kicking it turned it off.

The house nearby was a minor weed bust, we found out later.