Re: <nettime> Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world

[morlockelloi@yahoo.com]

This is the essential fallacy.

The idea that the security is so complicated that only the guild
members (from gov/corporate employees to open source celebrities) are
supposed to handle it, has been successfully floated for a while.
Which leaves the unwashed with the choice of 'trusting' either the
former or the latter. Whoever they choose, those will continue to
earn 10-20x the poverty level income for performing the holy rites.
The guild members are likely sincere when promoting this notion:
self-preservation is a great motivator. "Never make home brew crypto"
is what got us where we are today.

It's like literacy. There is nothing easy or natural about learning
to read and write. Literacy used to be confined to the ruling circles
and prohibited to the rabble. But literacy for the masses caused great
power shifts, and very few question it today.

Fuck the scribes.

Learning basics about communications security may be somewhat harder
that learning to read and write, but it's not orders of magnitude.
The only security that will work is the one that a person truly
understands, and fuck the UI. Witness the very successful use of
cryptography by those who understand that their well-being depends on
it.

What needs to happen is a shift from "trust me, I'll do it for you",
to "I'll teach you how to make your own". Not the easiest path, not
the quick one, but the one that may work. Bickering about whom to
trust and begging the authorities to stop what they are doing is a
total waste of time.



On 3/10/14 5:35 , Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
> i disagree: not only specialists like "nerds, hackers or cryptographers"
> should have a basic and differentiated understanding of the cultural
> techniques that digital technologies offer; by analogy, of course, you
> can always tell somebody that a vocabulary of 300-500 words is enough to
> read a tabloid newspaper and that should be sufficient for getting by;
> but would you really tell anybody to stop after those 300 words and then
> go do "better things"?




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