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v6zfzcbq9cur commented on Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program   vice.com/en/article/qjpjq... · Posted by u/jbegley
pmoriarty · 5 years ago
Not to disagree with what you said at all, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in politics without running for office.

Things like organizing, volunteering your time and expertise to political organizations you support, protesting, documenting and reporting on abuses, or doing something that many HN readers are in a rather privileged position of affording to do: donate significant amounts of money to the organizations whose work they support.

v6zfzcbq9cur · 5 years ago
This is true, though I question the point. As far as I can tell, few to none of those things can actually make things happen. Actual exercisable power tends to come only with office, or something equivalently public.

On top of that, and more to the point, most of those things come with the same basic cost- you won't make it past the front door anywhere without answering nosy questions that end up on record somewhere. Even donations aren't private; consider e.g. campaign finance law. I think the only thing on your list you can just show up to is protests, and those can come with severe costs in the end, too.

The general rule of thumb I've come to is that most people who do not want to end up documented on some unexpected corner of the internet would be well advised to stay as far away from government or politics as they possibly can. Hence the irony: anyone who wants to work on fixing society's privacy problem- or anything else for that matter- at essentially any level will first have to throw away their own. This is a great reason to stay home, instead.

(As a side note under "volunteering your expertise", I don't think I've ever seen any organization I cared about express need for e.g. volunteer developers. It seems to be an all but useless skill for fixing these sorts of problems.)

v6zfzcbq9cur commented on Baltimore police lied about almost every aspect of its spy plane program   vice.com/en/article/qjpjq... · Posted by u/jbegley
pmoriarty · 5 years ago
For this to change, more people who share an aversion to mass surveillance have to get involved in politics.

There are lots of people like this, but they are either apolitical, apathetic, hopeless, don't want to get their hands dirty, think politics is beneath them, that their resistance would be ineffectual, or they are too busy with other things.

That has to change.

v6zfzcbq9cur · 5 years ago
As one more thing to consider: there's some irony in that running for office isn't exactly privacy-friendly. I sometimes wonder if elected office, if not any and all kinds of public service, necessarily selects for people who don't care too much about their own personal privacy, and what the consequences of that are. There's no way to get there without essentially throwing away whatever dregs of anonymity you've managed to hold on to.

So, while I don't think I'm any of those things you list, and I've often thought that I would love to run for office some day, just glancing at the paperwork required to show up to the race is typically enough to turn me off of the idea for a while.

u/v6zfzcbq9cur

KarmaCake day3December 30, 2020View Original