The future looks more and more bleak as more and more authoritarianism is applied to technology which is supposed to be, to many, as a frontier of freedom.

There are 2 conflicting forces at work. On the one hand you have politics trying to take control of the internet, monitor everything, and censor what they don't like. On the other hand you have people developing decentralised, anonymous, and censorship-resistant technology like Tor and IPFS.

The more work politics puts in to trying to control the internet, the more incentive there is to develop tools to work around politics.

Politics has the force of law behind it, cryptography has irrefutable mathematics. Let's see who wins.

> Politics has the force of law behind it, cryptography has irrefutable mathematics. Let's see who wins.

In the end, force wins. Irrefutable mathematics are just a tool. Every right we have has been won through struggle. Sometimes that struggle is non-violent, sometimes it's less so, but it's always a struggle. A lot of people tend to forget that and think that technology will magically solve things. Or if not technology, something else or someone else will do it.

> In the end, force wins.

Not always. At some point, the cost of enforcement becomes too high and unfeasible.

Didn't seem to have been a problem in USSR (especially with a brainwashed population) and still isn't a problem in China, Venezuella & others dictatorship.

I am from Venezuela.

An example of what I’m talking about is the black market for dollars and the use of bitcoins by Venezuelans to illegally dodge currency controls.

> In the end, force wins.

Thanks for the 2nd Amendment :-) Force doesn't have to be privatized by Governments.

The Syrian people were armed, that turned out well.

Your AR-15 isn't much use against the Airforce's F15. The world has moved on since 1776, local militias can't cope against national military - even one as an expedition force, and in the U.S specifically entire countries can't cope against the U.S. military as an expidition force, what hope does a local militia have against a U.S. based military?

The most you'll get is a guerilla war and terrorism, and that always works out well./sarcasm

Then why hasn’t the mighty US military been able to defeat a bunch of Afghan rebels armed with AKs? You vastly underestimate the power of guerilla war. See also Vietnam, Iraq, and Syria.

And if the US military ever turned against its own citizens on US soil, you can bet a huge number would defect and hell would break loose.

Well if your end goal is to reduce your country to the state of Iraq or Syria, with suicide bombers and destruction of entire cities a daily occurance, that's fine, I guess it's the price you have to pay for having weekly school shootings.

You conspicuously missed the example of Vietnam.

This is the EU. They don't have "amendments".

There are and there will be tools to counter governments' attempts at censoring or controlling the internet, but most people will never find out nor be able to use those tools. Most people use the tools that came with their phone by default.

In addition, as those efforts gain more popularity propaganda from the government will increase, and will make the regular Joe feel like cryptography is for terrorists.

I mean not to be pessimistic, but... :-D

Funny enough that the companies who built a lot of those tools are the first to censor & attempt to control the Internet.

Yup.

We're seeing quite a lot of episodes of deplatforming lately.

It seems as if payment processors are pressuring everyone down below to comply, but it start with them.

Absolutely agree.

The most probable thing to me is that we'll sooner or later have it as bad a what's currently happening in China: spying via heavy use of face recognition, pre-crime, citizen score, etc. etc.

It doesn't look like people are alert/tough enough to hold on to freedom, governments will continue to slowly take it away from us until we have none.

The Internet is really a tool. It can be used to track people, spy on them, censor free speech, spread propaganda and fake news or to organise protests like the yellow vest movement in France, which reminds me of the French Revolution and another tool, the printing press.

These are just tools, the real problem is the complacent, worse... cooperating population.