RE: DIY Facial Recognition and Porn
Regardless of the consequences of our actions for which we are personally responsible, as you point out, the fact is that my grasp of this story indicates greater power coming to individuals as a result of technology, in this case facial recognition. Long have covert thugs been able to conceal the authors of our abuse, and this tech enables us to identify those perps. While it's presently focused on popular amusements, the implications are profound for oppression and freedom.
I have long advocated for seizing the means of production, not by taking them from centralized walled gardens protected by thugs, but by innovating personal manufacturing, and this is a highly public advance that brings that potential empowerment of individuals into mind for normies. Ending criminal people farming is going to increase our productivity and enable us to retain the profits of our production. That simultaneously erodes the parasitism of financial vampires dependent on us for their power to oppress us.
In that way, for those reasons, I strongly support this. Sorry if that seems somehow abusive. You may note that I maintain pseudonymity to the degree I am able, and it is because vampires have long had power like this over us. Our attainment of that power as individuals is precious as a means of resisting depredations of profiteers. There are consequences to our freely expressing our lives. Failure to reckon exposure to those consequences is a mistake in my understanding. I hope you and yours aren't harmed by this increase in our ability to protect ourselves from predators.
It never ends up that way, in the end, as always, they'll find a way to suppress the technology by criminalizing it's use, in the meantime only those in trades like this article represents will be hurt by their free choice to engage freely expressing their lives as they choose.
To the contrary, it always ends up that way, and institutional controls (making it illegal) are temporary at best, and completely useless most often. I don't think you'd feel this way about this broad dispersal of facial recognition tech if it didn't impact your family negatively in the short term. I hope you will soon personally experience the benefits of this tech becoming available to you and your community, and the temporary discomfiture that it may cause your family - simply by causing potential responsibility for actions they've undertaken - minor and of little import.
You are naive to think that this system benefits the average person. It will never be used against the powerful but will end up being a tool that will benefit the powerful further against average citizens.
I don't think anything, including the use of this software could have stopped my sister from engaging in her current occupation. My perspective is from the same standpoint as denying her the ability to use my IP to conduct her business while she is here staying with me for awhile after reaching an emotionally breaking point while living down south. I do not desire the kind of advertising that will start to show up on my computer let alone the same bunch of weirdo's that participate/engage tracking my IP and messing with me thinking I am her, therefore I would not appreciate it either to have my name, location, etc., put out there as a place that engages in porn activities so why would someone such as I suffer the consequences of something I am not engaged with...she is my family and she needs my help right now, granted her occupation, which she doesn't yet or hasn't yet come to grips with the reality is doing her more harm then good, someone reaching out to her shouldn't be tarnished across the internet. I think this tool would for the most part be helpful when it comes to trafficking or may make a college student think twice about engaging in such behavior but the internet generally doesn't hold the compassion/understanding between those seeking to reach out to someone versus those who are engaged for profit. There's just to much potential for abuse, slander, miss-identification, etc.
While I do appreciate your present concerns which are of far greater import to you today than those I consider, I believe that those concerns are blinding you to historical reality. This is not unique to you, and I have similarly been constrained in my considerations heretofore.
First, facial recognition already constrains the powerful more than average folks. Paparazzi taking pics of famous people far more strongly impacts them than you or I.
More generally, you can consider the industrial revolution, which has been a massive change in personal liberty and practically created centralization, as an example. As it began families were broken up and children sent to school until able to be exploited in factories, because this freed parents to work in factories, as well as destroyed the craft industries people previously conducted with their kids to produce the economy that supported them and competed with factories. It is hard to see that event as beneficial to those families. They certainly didn't like it, and Luddites were one expression of that opposition.
Yet, if you look back on seemingly unrelated matters but peripherally affected, people's lives were dramatically improved as a result of industrialization, if only after first causing horrific disruption and harm. Hygiene, science, and transport were all products of industrialization, and no one can deny the huge benefits in health, mobility, and knowledge people today have realized as a result, even as centralization has dramatically decreased the relative wealth of families versus their rulers.
Today, decentralization has already begun to decrease the parasitism of individuals that created the economic disparity industrial centralization drove. The ability of individuals to employ means of production to avoid parasitism and keep the profits of their production to themselves continues to grow across all industry, and this is the inevitable result of industrialization itself. Physics has mandated that improved efficiency attained with decentralization, and this ultimately returns civilization to the dynamic of the crafter society that industrialization replaced, while retaining the benefits that were derived from it. All the various decentralized mechanisms are not possible to stuff back in the lamp. Those genies, myriad of them, have been summoned by physics and become the base for the next 'best thing' that will follow.
Centralization is incapable of addressing decentralization in toto because of how it works. Concentrating the power of many individuals in an institution also limits their diverse attention and necessarily deploys that power on limited matters. If it does not, the advantage of that institution is eliminated. One or few of the decentralized mechanisms can be overpowered by institutions deploying centralized advantage, but all of them cannot, because they are individually deployed, rather than centralized in institutions. An action undertaken by a million people can be countered by an institution of some thousands, but a million different actions undertaken by a million people cannot.
Facial recognition tech will affect society in unexpected and seemingly unrelated ways, as individuals adopt it as a result of this iteration. You mentioned harassment and problems that have come from people stalking your sister. None of those problems stem from this technology. Some stalkers physically act to do harm, and your possession of facial recognition tech may well save your life, and that of your sister by enabling you to head them off before they do harm. More broadly, general possession of facial recognition tech will strongly discourage such physical and potentially violent stalking, greatly decreasing the risk you and yours suffer as a result. More broadly yet, nefarious institutions that use gang stalking, unlawful surveillance, and various criminal activities that harm free people will be far less able to project force without consequence after broad dissemination of facial recognition tech.
It is my sincere hope that any problems you suffer as a result of this advance in the power of individuals and our technological arsenal are completely overcome by benefits it will bring. Nothing is guaranteed, nor perfectly predictable. Facial recognition tech did not create the problems you have noted, and I don't see it can increase them significantly, despite your reasonable fears it will. Conversely, objectively considering how this technology will improve your personal, community, and national security strongly suggests you will personally benefit, if not from this particular iteration, but from that iteration's promotion of the technology broadly throughout the populace.
Corrupt cops, burglars, car thieves, rapists, stalkers, and an unending list of criminals will be more constrained from acting to harm you and your sister by you and your community deploying facial recognition, and you will be more free and secure as a result. It is not naivety that causes me to think so, but objectively viewing history, and considering reality today.
I am grateful for your views and the discussion you have made possible by honestly expressing them. I hope your alarm and circumstances don't prevent you from understanding my response, nor that nothing I say is intended to denigrate or harm you and yours in any way.
Thanks!
I think you fail to realize that big brother couldn't be happier that people are freely willing to install this technology that if they themselves were to install everyone would be calling foul. You just think it will unfold for the good of society but ultimately it will lead to big brother watching over your every move more so than you think it will be watching over theirs. You are fooling yourself with this decentralization bullshit, this whole decentralization site is a laughing stock as we can now see with the many lawsuits moving through the court systems where people have been robbed of millions of dollars, safer more effective....I can hardly stop laughing. Moving back into a craftier lifestyle....lol, craftier at what?...stealing each others fortunes.
You may not realize the ability to produce goods and services individually increases the value of their production to the individual producers, but that profitability exists anyway. Making your own doorknob or spoon greatly increases the profitability of your productive work over selling your labor for wages that are parasitized, so that you can purchase a thing manufactured by another whose labor was similarly parasitized, via a transaction that is also parasitized. As the abilities to produce goods and services become increasingly independent of institutional parasitism, actual freedom is the result, and none of this depends on theft from others. In fact, you can see that it directly decreases multiple vectors by which theft is committed.
Facial recognition is already being deployed and used to harm individuals today by institutions, and individuals deploying it themselves doesn't increase in any way the harm to them institutions commit with it. Instead it enables individuals to voluntarily cooperate against institutions that seek to harm them via covert means. Big Brother already uses this, and individuals not using it only increases the value of it to Big Brother. Only by using it themselves can individuals increase their power, as that delivers it's benefits to them, rather than leaving that power limited to their enemy.
Steem isn't very decentralized, since the tokens are concentrated, and that concentrates power. If it fails to decentralize, it will be outcompeted, as individuals will increase their benefit - profit - from their participation in social media, and every other endeavor will similarly compete or die.
While decentralized facial recognition incurs a cost, that individuals are more held to account for their actions, which is what is angering you, it provides far more valuable benefits by also holding institutions and other individuals to account for their predatory and criminal acts. Even if your sister becomes unable to be a camgirl as a result of this technology, in actual financial terms I believe that broad adoption of facial recognition technology will profit her eventually by decreasing the criminal harm not only to her, but to her family, community, and nation.
It may be difficult to grasp these less obvious benefits, especially when you're angry about negative impacts happening to you, but they are real anyway.
That'd be you, your the angry person because you feel the government is a negative impact, my opinion is FR would be a worst impact as it would dictate a person's every move....I don't have to worry about the government watching every single move I make and I find that rather refreshing, if I fart I don't want them knowing about it because my face twitched while I was doing it. You are absolutely crazy thinking that you or anyone like you can spend your life dictating to anyone how they choose to live every single moment by being watched by camera's, your are nuts. My sister and those like her or other criminals face their own negative dilemma's because they choose to put themselves in the positions that they do, I on the other hand shouldn't have to suffer the consequences of never ending peering eyes because of the chosen behaviors of the minority. Like I said, in the end once this technology is implemented in every faucet of life you'll regret that you gave them that kind of control over you, this will only work out FOR government not for individual freedoms.
Don't project. I've never made any such claim of judgment. In fact, throughout this conversation I've been at pains to point out that I do not make any such judgments. I have repeatedly stated that it was my hope that this brings you and yours benefits greater than any hardships you might suffer.
How can that be possible when the government already has cameras everywhere and uses facial recognition tech? I can't do anything about that. Physics determines what does or does not have potential to exist, and people make what can be made. You have a choice though. You can take advantage of what exists, or you can let others take advantage of it and not do so. The whole point I make in the OP and in conversation with you is that YOU now have that power over government and other criminals (like stalkers), and are no longer simply subject to it.
I don't have any choice about what exists. I never gave anyone any control over that. It's utterly delusional to claim I do, or that the universe and physics should or should not grant you privacy. The choice you have is to grant criminals the ability to prey on you unidentified by not using FR technology, or to use it and protect yourself. That's not something I did to you. All I did is tell you that this has happened, and that you can benefit from it.
I do not make the universe you're in, nor do I make your choices. What I have pointed out to you is that you have choices you didn't have before. Cameras exist, and facial recognition software exists. Given those facts - over which I have no control whatsoever - you can choose to use that technology to prevent criminals from preying on you, or you can fail to use it to protect yourself from criminals. All I have said is that individual people - civilians, and not only corrupt governments - are going to use this technology, and that when they do you will be safer.
Deny the facts however you want. Blaming me for them reveals that you are delusional. While I'm sorry you suffer from the inability to grasp reality, it isn't my fault, and I do not accept your blame for it. I didn't do it. You might as well blame your sister for it. She has a lot more experience with using cameras to show people doing things they wouldn't do in public than I do.
Whether you worry about it or not, government uses the myriad cameras it has access to and FR now. All I'm discussing is private individuals gaining that similar power over criminals and government spooks. Are you completely in denial about these facts?
In fact, I suspect that's why you're attacking me over this, because it's a way of shifting blame for what's happening from your family to somebody else. Are you really going to refuse to take advantage of this opportunity to benefit from learning from consequences of actions how to avoid harm by blaming others? Because that's what you're doing here. Failing to learn will leave you vulnerable to exactly the same consequences in the future.
I can't stop you from doing that. Only you can.