Start by recalling the last talk in Amsterdam and remind everyone that cast a vote but don't join a cult, Snowden then turn to the topic of this talk: where we are, how we got here and where we are headed.
For in every country of the world I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states abusing the confidence of their subjects have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal value which had been originally contained in their coins.
He quotes the passage from the book Wealth of Nations to suggest a fundamentally unfair system has been constructed around us. And that system lead to an increasing concentration of resources into fewer and fewer hands in many areas from economy to medias, namely human voices. On every platforms, minority opinions are increasingly hard to survive, however we should have the right and the ability to express. It is the disagreement that makes us progress.
Our life is dependent on all kinds of computer technologies. But in order to use these services provided by big corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. we have to agree to their terms of service. All of sudden, they have the power to control our access to essential services, maybe an instant message app so that we can communicate with our colleges, friends and families, maybe a bank service so that we can get our salaries, pay our billings. In other words they have the power to order our lives. And they collect our data and use that data to benefit themselves almost without any real restrictions. EU pass the GDPR(General Data Protection Regulation), try to fix all these problems but turn out not work.
Now the breakthrough in the AI(Artificial Intelligence) make the case worse by applying machine learning models to the huge amount of data collected through the Internet traffic automatically all the time.
Bitcoin transactions are not private and public available, an enormous proportion of them are fully doxed. That's the finical activity record, who you sent, what you bought, where your donation went. Then other collected data may reveal what you read, who you talked, where you visited. All those data padded out your pattern of life, they can infer your thinking, they can infer your affiliations.Even though the big corporation don't use these big data set to do evil things, it's a huge liability and challenge to protect these data but can they?
The broken Internet reflects a broken world, reflects the consequences of all those winner take all dynamics, reflects the boundless uh ambition of the great power. It has left us with an unfair system, which produce dissatisfaction, resentment, grievance that blossom to the point that now every discussion feels like it is becoming an instrument for War by other means. Competition is everywhere but it's unevenly distributed and only against the powerless, we need to shatter that design, we need to start to cooperate.
Written by Songziyu @China Jul. 2025