Hello comrades!
I want to outline a few potential projects the Lemmygrad community could benefit from and expand its reach. I think they could foster real growth and be not only of help, but actively create counter-spaces to the Right in various domains.
FOSS in this case means free and open source. For more information, check out this.
Privacy Guide
I’m personally interested in tech privacy. The biggest places around are r/privacy, and PrivacyGuides, the de facto flagship website for privacy and security advice.
The sub-Reddit is known to be overtly against China and non-western FOSS communities. It’s mostly a circlejerk of Westerners screaming “We don’t want to be like 1984 China!” without any kind of material analysis. Besides, Reddit is Reddit and we know how that goes.
Now, PrivacyGuides. It is definitely a helpful resource, but there are a few issues with it. First off, the administrators frequently promote Apple products on their forum, one of them, Jonathan, even being an Apple fanboy. Apple products are non-FOSS and shouldn’t be trusted, especially since they’re in PRISM and collaborate with the NSA. This leaves out all the drama they’ve been through since they split with privacytools.io, the latter claiming PrivacyGuides stole thousands of euros from them.
What I’m saying is that I think there’s a need for a more community-based approach, with a strong Marxist tendency to counter liberals and conservatives (and sometimes ancaps) in the privacy field. This has the potential to educate people, even radicalize perhaps. This is related to the second project.
edit: We could also add an Internet etiquette guide for Lemmygrad members. This could include safety procedures while posting, general privacy advice and more, in order to not get targeted by the US.
Hosted Services
Lemmygrad can expand itself and offer hosted services for its members. They can include a Git forge, e-mail (although this one is debatable if it’s worth it because of security practices), PeerTube, and any other service that is deemed useful by the community. I think the format outlined below could be useful.
I’m tying up my idea here with the concept of public access unix systems, or short for “pubnixes”. They’ve recently had a revival, the tradition dating back to the '80s. In a nutshell, someone provides a Linux/BSD server and gives user accounts to people who request them. It has a strong focus on using the shell, and anti-corporate service alternatives. Sadly, it’s dominated by either conservatives or anarcho-capitalists, rarely seeing a ML on there. I think this can be improved a lot upon, because Marxists have missed this opportunity to radicalize people in the “Small Web” communities. We need a healthier and better overall version of the Web, and I think it can provide a useful outlet for not only radicalizing new comrades, but educating everyone on technology and how to use it safely and in a healthy manner. If you’re interested in checking out the Small Web movement, check out this manifesto. Gopher and Gemini, being the two most popular non-WWW protocols, are completely dominated by conservatives and such. A ML presence there could help turn the tide in the small/sustainable computing sphere.
I’m also thinking of setting up a mechanism of democratically run services, trying to destroy the “benevolent dictator” mechanism the software administrators have. I’m only aware of one attempt so far at this, here.
Healthy Computing
Speaking of healthy, this could be a potential third project, a mental wellness guide for technology. Of course, with a strong focus on FOSS projects. I think we need better structured resources for people to access, more “polished”, in order to garner attention as viable alternatives to what liberals and conservatives are pushing online. There is a lot of pseudo-science regarding mental health in general, and especially regarding computing, so it could be a fully featured guide to say the least.
This could tie in with other resources written from a ML standpoint for people, perhaps countering the whole “self improvement” movement with diverse explanations and such.
Zine
I think Lemmygrad could publish a Zine. ML-themed findings from the Web, personal essays, stories, and anything fitting. Then it can be easily printed. Monthly releases would be neat. Could also include the news of that month, and so on. Could make a fitting alternative for paid Leftist monthly newspapers and such.
Contributing
I want this to be up for public debate so everyone can contribute with ideas! I’m personally versed in hosting things, but additional help is very much needed. If you want to contribute with an idea, or are skilled in contributing directly to any of these projects, let’s get in touch. Perhaps we could get the Revolutionary Technical Committee involved in this if they’re willing to contribute to a Marxist technological “front”.
What do you think of what I’ve outlined above? Let’s discuss.
One concern would be where these places are hosted. In many cases, yeah sure you’re privacy against bourgeois interests can be guaranteed… at least until they order the FBI or other similar Imperial thugs to raid the server farms supporting the infrastructure, both eliminating the service while allowing digital forensics teams to parse the metadata and learn identities.
My biggest desire is for Lemmygrad as a whole to migrate infra to a well established AES state capable of defending itself from cyber attacks and espionage, like China. Already as it stands I am nervous about my current profile here since I know I make privacy mistakes using this profile every day, and it is my current understanding that Lemmygrad is hosted in the Imperial Core.
If I am wrong about this, please correct me.
I still like this post’s idea, but tbh I don’t think we should worry about things like the state spying on us for shitposting on lemmygrad. It’s far more likely (and dangerous!) that if you actually organize in real life and start to gain momentum that the intelligence apparatus will begin real, personalized surveillance of you (like, illegal wiretapping etc.)
I don’t think Lemmygrad is infiltrated per SE, but it’s definitely being scraped by bots as any webpage on the Internet is. And the CIA/NSA have access to that information. All members should have a good Internet etiquette for protection, such as using a Tor/VPN and other things. Perhaps it would be good to have one pinned.
I just don’t think they care about our shitposting that much, they are going to be far more concerned with monitoring orgs like cpusa, psl and the like. Maybe this will change if there’s actual momentum
I can’t make guarantees about PSL, though it is safe to assume they have a spook or two.
CPUSA on the other hand, I can 100% promise with 100% certainty they are, or at least have been in very very recent times, heavily infiltrated by US intelligence entities.
In a less enlightened time bleepingblorp was military intelligence and now has a degree in Strategic Studies and Defense Analysis, and many of my professors were active duty intelligence while simultaneously teaching. The CPUSA is used by intelligence as a textbook example of how to disrupt and infiltrate an org, and was feature in some of my course material as such, particularly in my “Insurgency and Counterinsurgency” course.
I’ve been out of that world for a while now, so depending on how good the CPUSA has been about cleaning out their ranks of the filth and spotting saboteurs, my knowledge may be outdated now. I hope for the sake of other US comrades in there that it is indeed outdated.
Oh don’t get me wrong, most ideas are still good to go, like for example the Zine would be excellent for our current situation. However hosted services can become risky if we aren’t careful. For instance, hosted email. Imagine, some ML parties decide they want to use Lemmygrad email services to conduct email communications. The Imperial Core decides to increase its defense posture against communist movements and opts to seize the email servers. Now, the Imperial Core has all the identities, communications, and massive amounts of sensitive data regarding plans and uses it for mass arrests, raids, and so on.
Yes that’s a good point. We should have end-to-end encryption for everything in order to prevent these kinds of seizures. Of course, an AES VPS would be perfect, though they’re hard to find. AFAIK Cuban VPSes are only for people who have Cuban passports.
Huawei has cloud services which could resolve a lot of these problems if the Lemmygrad community could afford their services. Collectively I have no doubt we could. Hell I could pay for a few of their low end elastic cloud services myself if Lemmygrad resource demands aren’t usually very high.