In 2019 I wrote this paper "#Epistemology in the #Cloud"
https://medium.com/@bblfish/epistemology-in-the-cloud-472fad4c8282
which argued using a counterfactual analysis of #knowledge developed by Robert Nozick in "#Philosophical Explanations" that #centralized systems will lead to the inability to #think.
We start with Nozick's thought experiment [1] of the possibility of Alpha Centaurians having conducted a raid at night on earth and captured you, dear reader, then brought you up in their labs orbiting the earth and placed your brain in a vat, to make you think you were in front of the screen reading this. This possibility seemed to break down all possibilities of knowledge. Nozick [2] found an answer using counterfactual logic that depends on a distance relation between possible worlds. That world seemed far out in the 1980s and still does to most of us when we are sipping our morning cup of coffee. But what happens if similar problematic worlds become much closer to us? Well, consider this passage from DuskoPavlovic's 2012 paper [3] on the #ManInTheMiddle or MiM attack:
"In the #MiM-attacks on authentication protocols, the intruder inserts himself1 between the honest parties, and impersonates them to each other. MiM is the strategy used by the chess amateur who plays against two grandmasters in parallel, and either wins against one of them, or ties with both. #MiM is also used by the spammers, whose automated agents solve the automated Turing test by passing it to the human visitors of a free porn site, set up for that purpose [20]. MiM is, in a sense, one of the dominant business model on the web, where the portals, search engines and social networks on one hand insert themselves between the producers and the consumers of information, and retrieve freely gathered information for free, but on the other hand use their position in the middle to insert themselves between the producers and the consumers of goods, and supply advertising for a fee."
How much can you know if all your messages go through a MiM who can alter them, filter them, redirect them, emphasise them?
Have we not witnessed in the past 10 years people going crazier and crazier, from the ease with which such messages could be inserted by foreign entities and so people’s thought directed willy nilly towards whatever those who paid the most for wanted?
Do you think your neighbour is a #fascist? Perhaps a #communist even ready to kill your children? Do you perhaps even feel you are on the verge of being #genocided? Well those are symptoms of a 12 year growing #MiM attack.
I will need to update my paper now that #nostr is out since if you sign every note, that changes the argument. At least you know that the message has not been changed, and you could make it difficult for history to be rewritten as it was constantly in George Orwell’s 1984.
[1] that's what we philosophers do! we sit in labs with large comfy chairs and build thought experiments!
[2] Also known as the author of "Anarchy, State and Utopia" which I have not read, but if you push me here, I could put some time aside for it... Leave a note :-)
[3] "Tracing the in the Middle Attack in Monoidal Categories" Dusko Pavlovic
arXiv.org
Tracing the Man in the Middle in Monoidal Categories
Man-in-the-Middle (MM) is not only a ubiquitous attack pattern in security, but also an important paradigm of network computation and economics. Re...
See the discussion here:
But it also finally helped me explain to my father why I did not go to work in a business suite.