Where is the digital rights renaissance?

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I’ve been biting my tongue on this topic in hopes that somebody else would bring this forward but alas eons have passed without a peep.

I’ve been inquisitive about the concept of privacy and digital rights advocacy in the form of art for a while. If you take a cursory glance at major points of activism you’ll see the arts have played a major role in causes, with conscious rap immediately coming to mind. The general consensus is that privacy is foundational to other human rights. Yet the gap in representation is actually quite head scratching. Then again, this is a niche of a niche so I’m not too surprised.

I understand digital rights as a whole is very complex but art has the ability to condense nuance into something more personal. I think a lot more people who are normally complacent with the status quo would at least be willing to engage with the discourse if there was more representation.

I think this is exactly why the Clippy movement was so successful because it allowed people to personify their frustrations about the rampant and often arbitrary injection of AI by turning it into something that is not just a smug copy pasta manifesto.

I’d argue in many ways in this twisted timeline that if you are a creative and are anti big tech or a digital anarchist or anything of that sort you are well aware that a high key war is waged on your essence in the form of GenAI. What better way to combat this than by creating the counterculture?

Am I on to something here or am I tripping?

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Tripping, my essence is not threatened by GenAI.

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I’d even go as far and say that AI can help with privacy if you do it right. Some small local AI models right now are on the same level as SOTA models 1-2 years back. You can run them on your system and nothing has to leave it for a lot of tasks.

As with many things it’s not the technology itself that is inherently evil, it’s how evil companies create them and how they force people to use it.

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It’s true that many people resent technological captivity. I feel like I should teach digital freedom, but it takes a lot of consistent work from the person learning it. It can also be difficult when all you do is point out what they are doing wrong, even if it’s accurate.

Some friends know about this and are actually interested, having improved since knowing me. I’ve pulled back from trying to teach random people though. I need ideas on how to share this knowledge because most efforts haven’t worked except with a small group who genuinely care about my perspective.

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OK, I think this was poor wording on my part. My point wasn’t about generative AI specifically I more so using it as an example for people’s frustration with big tech and creating the counter culture I was more so trying to emphasize the lack of representation (to my knowledge as I don’t really pay attention to mass media anymore) of issues like privacy, right to repair under art like music and illustrations instead of just technical content and blogs , etc. I was asking if I was tripping over that as a concept

it is in the sense that it is actively stealing your work and AI slop taking attention away from your potential demographic but I will say AI can’t innovate like humans do if you think that’s going to replace you artistically maybe there wasn’t much there to begin with

Hit hard with this one. When people say they hate a certain technology they likely only been exposed to it from the corporate context and have a skewed perspective I think a good example of this is social media and smartphones. The fediverse feels way cooler and productive than their big tech equivalents and because of the way its built its almost enshittification resistant and smartphones wouldve been so cool if they werent all trying to homogenously be an iPhone

this is all dependent on your motivations and perspective. There are reasons to want privacy that aren’t being discussed enough

Preservation of authenticity, spiritual practice, the impact of surveillance on mental health, experimenting with business ideas and the list never stops

Going based on technical jargon will only interest technical people and while I’m a fan of nerd talk the pertinence of this particular subject is a much a larger scope then people realize so in my opinion every angle in this field matters all I can say is make it personal.

Maybe I should be taking my own advice tho :skull:

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On one end I think that a ton of sci fi already explored the issues that were dealing with in the digital rights space. That’s not new. Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but I think you may be asking about art concerning digital rights as a form of activism. To that I say that the digital rights movement is growing, but is still small. So I think the art community is smaller still. As the former grows, hopefully so does the latter. Maybe someone just has to be inspired.

Anywho, here is the closest example to what I think you’re talking about off the top of my head.

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You are making too many assumptions about my art and who I am, my work is free to use by anyone and my demographic is myself.

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Fair enough, my apologizes for assuming instead of asking and thats a very based take

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Apparently it is based, but my perspective is that artists are already inspired by each other anyways, it is not like I started my journey by being a hermit under a rock for my entire life. I had to learn from others before I started creating art for myself, and my standard for impressing myself is so high that it is the only bar that matters anymore. Leaving an impression on others is just never enough, and no amount of external validation is sufficient.

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I find myself more in between external and internal validation. I benefit so much from feedback. So I’m willing to take criticism, even if it’s a bit of a chink in the armor to the ego because I know I don’t know everything

Yet simultaneously, I am willing to take a more unconventional routes in the name of attempting to preserve my authenticity and integrity

It drives me insane that people don’t even think twice and just release to the ether tho because I’m such a perfectionist its only relatively recently that I’m allowing myself to show off my flaws.

This isn’t even a mindset I have exclusively to art. I tweak like this all the time when it comes to privsec setups too since people can be very absolute and cultish in this space at times

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Right, I stopped paying attention to other peoples’ workflows a long time ago, and spend a lot of time refining mine, so that everything I do is coherent and I understand the consequences of what I am doing.

It may interest you to know that pretty much everything I publish is under CC0, because I do not want to bother starting legal drama and shutting down other creative artists inspired by my work. I am down for a free-for-all because that is already how the world works anyways, so the license matches my perspective, and this keeps me focused on improving my artistic proficiency instead of being distracted by legal sinkholes.

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This an interesting angle I don’t know if I would follow this approach personally but I am a fan of the principle that derivatives should not be punished. what is your artistic outlet if I may ask?

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Music, my background involves video game music and jazz, and I consume jungle, so my musical journey is best summarized as tributes, improvisations, and sampling, which are quite permissive approaches. My current musical framework is 7-limit JI, so AI cannot assist in creating music derived from it because they are primarily trained on 12 EDO music corpus. The most I can do is use AI to synthesize one-of-a-kind tools to accommodate my microtonality exploration, since microtonality is inherently underserved territory.

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Always fun to run into another musician, I am going to uni for music because it slowly became my calling but the more i learn the more i realize i dont know shit which is fun and humbling

Im not fully against AI In fact when I first started mixing I was using Lumo in combination with people’s ears to start learning how to mix on my own but if i was around people who knew what they were doing i wouldnt necessarily care for an llm’s input

and I have also have used voice cloning on myself in the past to figure out how to expand my vocal range or figure out the delivery before I do a take though I definetly dont rely on it much now that im more confident

im still very much in the learning stages (tho that never really stops)

Reeling this to the original topic I’ve been projecting this entire time I am very passionate about community and grass roots approaches. Art and activism are heavily intertwined for my persona and so I’ve really been frustrated the lack of an artistic outlet for the privacy community.

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My solution to this is self-hosting my own platform, so I remove a lot more third-parties and gain digital sovereignty along the way. The major difference is that I have zero interest in distribution, but if I did, I would use the Fediverse + ActivityPub for public exposure.

One of the largest disadvantages with JI is that it is very difficult for musicians to collaborate with each other due to disagreements with ratios, so I am pursuing introspective fidelity at the cost of social compatibility. If you weigh music as a more social movement, than JI would not be a good fit. I used to manage a band and was the audio engineer, handling DAWs and setting up microphones, but there was so much interpersonal drama involved that it ended up getting in the way of producing music, so now I work entirely alone as a result.

As mentioned earlier, AI cannot assist me in creating 7-limit JI music, but that also means that AI is not easily trained by 7-limit music either, because there is so little of it out on the Internet. Even if there was only 7-limit JI music, every song would use different ratios, so there would be no statistical consensus on what ratio to use at any given moment in a composition. It could be argued that JI is inherently an AI-resistant solution, if you care about something like that.

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For any large policy change or push for new rights, the effort always takes a lot of people, a fair amount of pain, and struggle to go from an era with no rights to those who made it to the other side all agreeing that rights enumerated are the only way for everyone to go forward without problems.

There are a lot of people, and a lot of places on Earth, that see zero financial risk or downside to giving up their privacy. Almost no one understands that Google spends (a guess due to scale) maybe $40 per gmail account per year, and derives (per one estimate) $1,600 per user in ad revenue per year. Sure, some people would be pissed about the disparity there, but then if you suggest something with friction and work, like leaving Google or Apple’s walled garden, the task, to them, is literally impossible to even consider.

Game theory studies the effectiveness of protests and demonstrations, and it takes a huge number of people out in the streets to really even get noticed. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but a figure of 3.5% is generally seen as the start of the threshold on average. But 3.5% of New York is 280,000 people. Actual bodies in motion, actual humans protesting something. In the US, that’s 11-12 million people. It’s the entire populations of LA, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and Philly combined.

Meanwhile, privacy is seen as a niche for online weirdos and kooks out in the woods because almost no one understands how bad it is out there. It’s a perfectly OK show, but there’s a scene in The Audacity where the temp CEO of the mass surveillance company asks her staff “Are you kidding me? Raise your hands if you reject all cookies.” Only the engineer building the surveillance platform raises her hand. It’s not just normal people, even people on the inside don’t get it.

Don’t expect a groundswell of anything, even during a techlash situation like now. Until you show politicians and average people the personal and financial reasons, and make it incredibly easy for them to change habits with no friction, it will not happen.

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Funny, Gerald Celente was just saying we need a new renaissance.

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What was its success?

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a part of me cant take the mainstream discourse surrounding the rejection of privacy all too seriously when I as a person of color have witnessed all too often my practices and culture eventually become aesthetics and fetishes. To me the going back to analouge trend is a signifier of this in the tech world. Get made fun of only to then be adopted so I could care less if I come off unhinged to people who dont understand, Some will, some wont its fine many such cases with any lifestyle. Im okay with that, I just see it as adding to the aura.

Im sure as we get into a surveillance state worldwide privacy will become a class indicator and we will all have Get Ready With Me style videos where influencers are self hosting/hardening as a form of chasing the luxurious life ( Im mostly joking to emphasize a point)

Nihilism and doomerism is so normalized amongst the average person in many contexts the only way past that is through deconstruction. Its still important to plant seeds and water by setting a precedent instead of trying to pressure someone who is resistant to friction

In my experience there are many people who are willing to hear you out even if they dont follow the practice itself as long as you dont insult them for having different choice which is all too common in the privacy space unfortunately

At the end of the day my point was about art regardless of the mainstream opinion, the demographic already exists they just arent represented

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I think your joking point is 100% correct. Kagi and the $60 Brave browser are exactly this: “Pay for an elite tier where we don’t track you.” Which involves trust, and it’s for wealthy tech bros to trust each other. Which is insane to me, but a lot of what they do is insane to me.

Your insights are spot-on. Between the Nihilism and doomerism there’s also a thick band of “It’s not bad if I’m not doing anything wrong” people that feed the beast and give it consent.

The only way normal people seem to get anything to do with privacy is when you frame it like “oh, well, social media was making me crazy, so I deleted the apps.” Which is not the same, of course, but I agree with you that short of a long conversation over beers with someone explaining how bad things are and how secretly they’ve gotten bad, 99% of people just don’t want to hear about anything that implies they’re doing something other than living life perfectly.

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