Digital Rights Activism

Status

Cory Doctorow:

"Digital rights activism is more than 30 years old now. The Electronic Frontier Foundation turned 30 this year; the Free Software Foundation launched in 1985. For most of the history of the movement, the most prominent criticism leveled against it was that it was irrelevant: The real activist causes were real-world causes (think of the skepticism when Finland declared broadband a human right in 2010), and real-world activism was shoe-leather activism (think of Malcolm Gladwell’s contempt for “clicktivism”). But as tech has grown more central to our daily lives, these accusations of irrelevance have given way first to accusations of insincerity (“You only care about tech because you’re shilling for tech companies”) to accusations of negligence (“Why didn’t you foresee that tech could be such a destructive force?”). But digital rights activism is right where it’s always been: looking out for the humans in a world where tech is inexorably taking over." (https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59)