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perhaps an unpopular view as Tor has been a great legal canary and a useful privacy service, but it has also been a substitute for organizing.

if you use Tor you already know what's going on. onion routing didn't save anyone from anything in 20 years. the evils Tor enabled often seem to trace back to the very states and establishments who manage and tolerate them. drug cartels run several of the governments Tor ostensibly protects users from, and human trafficking is within a degree of most western establishments in every direction, from "NGOs" to intelligence operations to the sex trade.

if you want privacy, tech is an inferior solution. make nations that protect it.


This view is unpopular because it is shallow and unserious. A vague call for people to "organize" and "make nations" as a solution to their problems hand-waves away the interesting and important practical problems which face people who actually do try to organize to create alternatives to the dominant political order.

In particular, the campaigns and efforts of those organizers are undermined and attacked through pervasive surveillance.

Tor is not a substitute for political organizing, in this age it's a necessary precursor.

Worrying about surveillance is bikeshedding. Everyone knows, nobody cares. The anti-surveillance culture of an earlier era is predicated on the idea that your individual activity and ideas are more meaningful than they are.

Tor (and privacy tech) has become more like a substitute activity, like being a vegan or recycling plastic where it separates and isolates more than it organizes, and is mostly an empty ritual.

The people affecting the most political change (for better or worse) aren't using Tor, they are using foundations, PACs, unions, charities, churches, and organizing in the open to seize control of political offices. While you were worried about whether your posts are being read by the NSA, they've been flying around in private jets and doing press conferences.

> but it has also been a substitute for organizing

Hard to imagine even a single would-be organizer who got side-quested into zealously advocating for Tor.

On the other hand-- easy to imagine many digital utopianists who on principle don't organize in the sense you mean, and some of them zealously advocating for Tor.

> make nations that protect it

What nations have you made?

Specifically? Mine. I did public sector work to ensure that dozens of government projects serving millions of people were made to respect the privacy and freedom of the people they served.

there's quite a list and tbh, I can probably afford the humility.

There is chasm between “a nation that protects privacy” and “a government that I’ve done good work in”. The former is a nice-sounding rhetorical ideal, but if you do not care to name one that exists I’m not sure what is accomplished by conflating the two other than a sort of non sequitur self-congratulation in the comments of a thread about the tor project.

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