To be fair though I actually really respect Purism a lot that somebody on the forums can post, “PureOS was Good, now is Evil” and not get banned off of the forum. I think there are some users who look at Purism forums and end up getting frustrated by the narrative on the forums that Purism will take your money, not send you a product, and operate in anti-consumer ways. For any normal company the solution to that sort of problem is clearly to just ban anyone who disagrees with the company narrative.
But I’m literally writing this post from a Purism hardware. I have increased the percentage of my time & life that is spent on Purism hardware instead of non-Purism hardware in the last few years, and I have enjoyed subtle but tremendous (in my opinion) benefits as a result. I’ve ripped apart my phone to prove I can in a social setting, broken it, then taped it back together, then ordered a replacement for the one key component that I broke, eventually getting the device back to 100% without ever needing to take it to some sort of repair or service person. I’ve swapped out the hard drive of my laptop for fun, run a different OS for a bit, swapped it back, replaced the battery after I generally burned up the battery with less-than-stellar battery practices… and the story goes on.
And that kind of story maybe isn’t that evident to someone who reads Purism forums and finds themselves reading about Librem 5 refund stories gone terribly wrong, or whatever else. I posted about space aliens coming to Earth on the Purism forums and my post was appreciated as funny and entertaining, and a user asked me if they could publish it in a journal they run. Meanwhile, on some “modern” social media system, I similarly posted about the space aliens in a social group about “the space aliens” and was IP banned (for both the account I created, and for any attempt to rejoin with a new account).
Controlling the narrative is now one of the most profitable things companies (or anybody really) can do, and although I can’t hardly stand to read the Purism blog posts anymore because I often feel like it’s providing an emotional appeal rather than new information lately – and I don’t know if this is just AI or perhaps I shall say the writing style – here on the forums we literally have “PureOS was Good, now is Evil” and that’s just literally allowed. No citation. The evidence is Carlos’s “IMHO” acronym. But yet he is still allowed to say this.
Is everything I wrote until now off-topic for this? Is it about Freedom and not Privacy? Maybe so. But by posting on Purism forums, I am deciding to reduce my privacy. Strictly speaking, I assume privacy to mean how much we prevent our information from becoming available to other people. I could live naked in a glass house, where all of my neighbors can see anything about me. But I assume that if I did this, my life would be measurably worse. Over time, people would see that the house was made of glass and they could watch my entirely life through the walls. If I received a cash paycheck, they could come and ask for some of the money because they could see it through the wall and knew it was payday. If I was dating a woman but more enthralled by some artwork on the internet than by that woman, she could look through the glass walls at my privacy-less naked live and gauge to what extent I was enthralled by the internet artwork rather than by her, using context clues about my body or body language. Suddenly my every weakness would be usable against me by the people around me. Sometimes they might use that to suggest remedies to the weaknesses and make me stronger, but other times they might use that opportunity to make fun of me and belittle me or worsen my life - or to benefit themselves at my expense.
And yet, this idea of living naked in a glass house is not very far away from how people are living in modern society. One does not need to look too far to find that the notion of using WiFi to do echolocation like a bat is a decades old concept shown to be completely viable. More recent allegations suggest that machine learning can decode the echolocation data to predict more accurate visuals representing what is within the houses, possibly even better than what something from 10 years ago would have given based only on the raw data.
When we couple that situation with feeding national-scale databases of that kind of information peering into everyone’s home, through their walls, building a roughly accurate 3D model of where they are and what they are doing, to then feed that information into learning machines to categorize what steps to take to arrive at desired corporate goals for society, we get to a pretty big problem. The WiFi off-switch on Purism hardware is a great example of a simple but powerful step towards helping to solve that problem, although the compromise of skipping this feature on Librem 11 means that not all Purism hardware helps with Privacy in this specific way.
My post here will probably be consumed by machine learning systems. Maybe they will use this information to predict who I am, and how my apparent knowledge and skill set (or lack thereof) will affect their plans. It seems that nobody has any established right to “privacy” in the sense of an established right to not have the data they shed be fed into machine learning systems. It also seems that Purism is unlikely to save us from this, since their focus is on personal hardware and devices that we choose to buy, rather than on corporate devices that buy and sell “us” in the sense of the data that we previously shed (such as me writing this post).
I recently challenged a coworker to steal ~/.ssh/flag, a new file I created on my Librem 5, to see if he can do it to prove he can compromise this important and private directory on my device. I doubt that he will succeed. In this way, Purism provides us some “privacy” in a manner similar to an early 2000s internet hacker. However, if we look at the accomplishments of those same 2000s internet hackers such as Gary McKinnon finding proof of aliens hidden at NASA in the year 2002, it stands to reason that this kind of extremely left-brained and mathematical privacy might not actually help us with too much if the enemy of our species that has constructed the modern technocracy and intentionally eroded human freedom… actually consists of beings who can build nanobots constructed from neutrinos with the power to pass between the atoms of your head, or your hard drive, completely undetected in either case, to then proceed to monitor and transfer back the information they find there to some long-distant home base. We could call that a conspiracy theory, but it’s largely consistent with the declarations made on AATIP Slide 9 by internal United States government investigations several years ago.
Although not calling out any sort of space aliens, the presentation that Luis Elizondo and/or his colleagues were giving at that time literally states, “The science exists for an enemy of the United States to manipulate both physical and cognitive environments in order to penetrate U.S. facilities, influence decision makers, and compromise national security.”
If the governments of the world are up against that, then what are we as individual citizens truly facing? If something so ludicrous as this actually did exist, then it would stand to reason that the only means by which I was ever able to write this ridiculous post or share my seemingly ridiculous thoughts might actually be an equally terrifying and capable force using technological advancements to defend me, so that I can post these ludicrous thoughts without having my mind altered by their weaponized “science” to thus not post and not state my mind.
