Bart Butler
speaker
681 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Bart Butler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
gun how long before somebody comes along to use if it's built somebody's going to use it eventually for purposes that it wasn't designed for how long until china says hey identify all the dissidents for me right who are using this because they have to use their their um their id for everything on the internet right we want to build systems internet systems that can't
be commandeered like this.
This is how we would proton, but I think this principle applies to the larger internet.
This is a kind of a thought experiment, right?
But there was some, I'm probably going to butcher this, but there was some crazy statistic that a huge fraction of East Germans were actually employed as informants by the Stasi on the other East Germans, right?
And, you know, in the height of the Cold War.
The Iron Curtain, of course, fell pretty much right before the dawn of the digital age in some ways, the internet age, right?
I think you could argue, and I think you can look at counterfactual or counter examples like China.
I think you could argue that had some of the Eastern Bloc authoritarian regimes made it into the digital age, that maybe they would have had enough control over information.
to not fall anymore, right?
Because it's so much easier to do this.
So the fact that Facebook and Google, arguably with their ad ecosystems, have built the most sophisticated, okay, China perhaps, but the most sophisticated surveillance systems ever built, right?
And we do the most American thing ever with it, which is we use them to sell you crap you don't need, right?
But that doesn't mean that's the only use for those.
And the fact that those are sitting on the mantelpiece, like Chekhov's gun, waiting for somebody to pick them up and do something truly horrific with them is a threat to free society.
And all this other stuff with check control and age verification is the same thing.
It's saying, we have this harm.
Let's build a system to prevent this harm that then can be used for really nefarious purposes.
We need to make sure that we don't engineer systems that threaten the existence of free society.
Sorry, that was my soapbox speech, but it's something I care deeply about.
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