I think a good start would be to develop useful technology that doesn't have any choke points for the authoritarians to capitalize on. If the internet were gossipped device-to-device at stoplights and in elevators and wherever people congregate, it would be very hard to control the flow of information.
The hard part (besides the engineering) is that those are the same choke points that the capitalists capitalize on. How do you attract investors to back something that cannot be made to respect the investor's stake in it? We'd have to do it because we want it done, not because it'll make us rich later when wet turn it against its users, and that's not something we're well practiced at.
> But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other?
We're hackers, we solve things with hacks.
But to answer your question, you'd let it be known that whatever happened on stage was a sham, and that the actual award goes to whoever was indicated by whatever consensus process was happening between the devices carried by the people at the event.
But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests, but the signal would propagate widely enough that the state couldn't use disinformation to confuse the situation. A decisive winner, against the state's wishes.
The message would be:
> we can make aggregate decisions without your interference
Which should sound like a bit of a threat coming from people living under the CCP. If you can coordinate an award against the wishes of your oppressor, you can coordinate less innocent things too.
I like acts of civil disobedience against an authoritarian regime but this will accomplish nothing other than put the lives of these people at risk.
If you want to use technology and asymmetric warfare for that, do so online from a safe place. Or be prepared to buy and operate physical weaponry in enough quantity.
This take seems disconnected from the facts of the matter at hand - it wasn't a technology problem, it was a human problem. The Hugo organizers voluntarily chose to censor the awards because a Chinese city had been selected by the venue. Technology was not at issue, nor was capitalism. They chose to support authoritarianism and diminished the integrity of the awards in the process.
Yes but we are makers of technology, not organizers of awards, and the question was: (paraphrasing) what can we do about it?
Resistance needs to come from the people, or not. All we can do from afar is give them capabilities they can download and hope that it helps. We might want those capabilities too (I do).
Actually a great point and I'd much rather be building something that solves the problem than just complaining about it. But what information technology could possibly solve the problem here? The nature of the awards ceremony is that it's public and the issue was with it needing to physically take place in China...
Setting the transport layer aside (which would be tricky, since you have to avoid relying on anything thar can be used to interfere), you'd want all the same things you'd need to pull off an illegal election, or contribute remotely to organizing a protest: A web of trust, a userbase that's practiced in maintaining it, and the ability to vote and agree on some outcome without revealing which real identities correspond with the voters, but while still providing proof that this was indeed an outcome chosen by a majority (or you know, customizable logic here), among people you've explicitly trusted, pseudonymously or otherwise.
It would need to be embedded in some kind of larger system whose use was widespread, a platform for p2p apps. Perhaps there are games like pokemon go, but serverless, which involve going out running into other players at places you've never been before.
It would not be hidden, but rather a coordination module used by apps for all sorts of groupwise coordination. Imagine games which involve forming coalitions and infiltrating other coalitions and communicating in secret, learning which of the other players you can trust, etc.
People would create games on this platform which involve conspiracy towards unimportant goals embedded in the game universe: Place an augmented reality hat on these four statues, all of the same color, or interfere with your enemy's attempts to do so by getting there first and placing the wrong color hat, that sort of thing. But once users were practiced at such things, and had large enough webs of trust which they actually trusted, and had trusted that the software wasn't up to anything shady... Well there would be nothing stopping them from using it to organize around non-AR outcomes like keeping your government in check.
----
I'm working with an urban exploration group--they travel to explore abandoned missile silos and such--and also a guy who puts on IOT murder mysteries at his house. We want to put on murder mysteries in abandoned missile silos, but there's no wifi out there so the dream is to do it peer-to-peer over bluetooth. Sort of a test bed for this kind of thing. I'm the only coder, and it's an audacious goal, almost certainly doomed to fail, but it's got me in the mindset.
I'm simultaneously writing some SF about such a scenario, so even if my software fails I'll have a place to encode my lessons learned that's a bit more digestible than code.
Dreaming this thing up and attempting to build it is my hobby. Larping for democracy.
This is very interesting but I'm confused. When the day of the convention arrives and everyone shows up at the convention center in Chengdu, and you're standing there announcing awards for works of fiction that are illegal in China, and the Chinese police show up and arrest you, how does any of this help? Are you proposing a solution to something other than what the Hugo Awards is doing?
Well, presuming the groundwork was laid, you'd open the envelope, read some lie to a room full of people who knew it was a lie, and simultaneously you'd have someone cast the binding vote on the uncensored decision, and the signal would propagate and there in their pockets the people would have some kind of proof that they could consult to know who actually won. They'd go home, and with them they'd carry the news, and it would eventually reach anyone subscribed to that topic.
Honestly a room full of SciFi nerds would probably be the right crowd for a stunt like that. Good SciFi is a critique of the time it was written, censored SciFi loses that.
I mean, I'm not suggesting anyone should take risks like this. It's their values, their stakes, I'm just some guy who has no business meddling in politics on the other side of the world. I'm just saying that if somebody somewhere wanted to make a stand against authoritarians, they'd be better served with a toolkit for aggregate coordination in the face of a capable adversary than without. And if we want to help then making that tech would be a start.
The hard part (besides the engineering) is that those are the same choke points that the capitalists capitalize on. How do you attract investors to back something that cannot be made to respect the investor's stake in it? We'd have to do it because we want it done, not because it'll make us rich later when wet turn it against its users, and that's not something we're well practiced at.