Techdirt Podcast Episode 245: Pandemic Privacy
from the ethical-questions dept
COVID-19 has thrust old questions about privacy into the spotlight, often with new and different framing, and has raised the big question of whether our conception of privacy needs to change entirely in the midst of a pandemic. On this week's episode, we're joined by reporter, analyst and investor Esther Dyson to discuss the challenging ethical quandaries raised by the pandemic.
Also, as a bonus, Dyson (who is a former founding chair of ICANN) takes a moment at the beginning to respond to our recent episode with Mike Godwin.
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Imperialism has intensified and spread worldwide the most virulent
racist practices and ideology. Racism is built into US imperialism and
imperial culture feeds on and creates racism. Racism is institutionalized as a
system of control and containment, necessary to enforce the exploitation
and oppression of colonized people. In the Third World, racism takes the
form of cultural warfare, the displacement of populations and genocide.
Pandemics for white people only are coming next. White people will stay inside while people of color take over the means of production.
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Interesting discussion, particularly like the points about the cost and who is paying for it for those who are having to isolate and the economics for the individual. But also the society wide issue of having people who perhaps should be isolating and are not isolating because they are concerned about feeding their children. It just makes me think more seriously about a major change in how we do things, and perhaps Universal Basic Income in some form could be the answer.
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Universal Basic Income
As food prices climb and real incomes decline, broad sectors of the population are beset by mounting debt, loss of savings, fear for jobs.
Food production, distribution, and agricultural land have become
concentrated in monopolies ((jailer! agribusiness) since World War II, with
reliance on fertilizers, pesticides, new methods of drying and storage and
mechanization that consume enormous amounts of energy. Agribusiness
rests on the super-exploitation of farm workers and share-croppers on the
one hand, and giant programs of government subsidies (welfare for the rich)
to keep vast stretches of fertile land deliberately unproductive. This is to
keep prices up in the US. H amounts to government-enforced shortage,
malnutrition for millions of people in the US, hunger and starvation for the
world's people. Universal basic income would fix that.
Of all the consequences of the US use of world resources for profit,
the most serious is beginning to come to the fore: a major crisis in the world
food supply. What is experienced here as shortages and high prices is
translated in the Third World as real famine and paralysis of industrial
development. The US with its mechanized agribusiness lias a monopoly on
food exporting, and it controls a vast sector of the food-producing land in
the world. A rise in food prices devastates Third World countries. They must
depend on the US for food. Agricultural la mi throughout, the Third World is
turned info a plantation system of "cash crop*;" 1 by imperialism (tobacco,
rubber, coffee, cotton). Two thirds of all the arable, land in Latin America is
planted with non-nutritious eash crops — weallh for the colonizers, not food
for the people. South Vietnam, once the rice howl of Southeast Asia, is now
forced to import "miracle" rice from the US. Imperialism's irrational use of
agricultural resources to produce vast quantities of meat to feed some of the
US population means that the amount of protein wasted by US agriculture is
comparable to the protein deficiency of the rest of the world. Universal basic income would fix that.
Starvation, hunger and food shortages will unleash and sharpen ail
the. basic contradictions. The imperialists will respond with solutions like
population control, war, and greater monopoly power. Hut hunger is too
stark and the conflict irreconcilable. This contradiction could well define the
coming period. Universal basic income would fix that.
Or was it contact tracing that would fix it, I forget. Or self isolation. Or saying "hands up don't shoot" 100 times in the dark when you're alone. It's one those things....
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Re:
Still wiping the Shiva Ayyadurai off your face, Hamilton?
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