The #encryptionist detour

Let’s be honest about a big part of the last decade of #openweb failure, we got pulled off the path. Not only by enemies, but by a mix of fear, fashion, and half-understood technical “solutions” that felt right to fearful people at the time. The rise of the dogmatic, blinded #encryptionist mindset came out of real conditions of mass surveillance revelations (Snowden era), common sense #neoliberal distrust of states and corporations and the real harms of our worship of the (same neoliberal) #deathcult of the #dotcons Encryption mattered – and still does – private space matters, protection matters. But what happened next at this time is where things went wrong – we shifted focus from necessary tool to blinded totalising path. For the #geekproblem and its fashionista followers – encryption shifted from being a tool in the stack to the answer to everything. Instead of asking what should be public? – what should be private? – how do we build shared, accountable space? We got a flattened…