Finding Snowden

I saw Citizenfour at the theatre recently; it's a suberbly minimalist documentary which is less art than political act.  As a rule I hate political docs because most of them are hamfisted attempts to cajole you into a belief; this one is exceptional insofar as it's simply showing the true story of one guy following his concscience against terrible existential threats.  The emotional resonance of that is reason enough to see it: it will, if you're a thinking, feeling human being of any sensitivity, nudge you in the direction of being a better person.  

One thing the film indicated in passing rather than hammering on was that we're living in a perilous situation where the only thing keeping a monstrous apparatus of intrusive surveillance from being unleashed on us all is sheer legal tradition; all it will take is a couple of rulings that go the wrong way and set the wrong precedents and we will in fact find ourselves very rapidly in a very scary world.  There are known technical fixes to help prevent this world from coming about; all that's actually lacking is enough people who appreciate their importance enough to implement them.  I could hate on Apple and Google all day long, but the fact that they're actually moving in the direction of automatically encrypting everything in their OSes, in part due to the cultural influence of the Snowden leaks, is enormously to their credit.  

One thing the film crystallized for me is that, while I'm used to thinking of tech from the standpoint of aesthetics and power, the ethical dimensions of it loom very large in the background and should be more often discussed.  It doesn't take a lot of acuity -- just a sprinkle of cynicism -- to see that you keep people from being oppressed not by reciting pious mantras but by making them hard to oppress, and that any tech that makes it easier to oppress people is evil.  The problem is that a lot of things that get foisted on us in the name of 'efficiency' also make oppression efficient by creating single points of control.  They also make disruptions efficient -- oppressors here can be governments or rogues, and what makes us safe from both is an infrastructure that lacks such privileged nodes to be manipulated in the first place.

I've found it easy to be fatalist about a lot of things over the years, but the film helped awaken my inner Snowden -- realizing that it actually is possible to stop a lot of this insanity, if enough people wake the fuck up and do something intelligent about it.