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Relevant: here’s European Digital Rights (@edri@eupolicy.social) live-commenting on their hearing.
And here are their key takeaways.
Overall, this hearing did NOT deliver the democratic scrutiny we were hoping for - our takeout had more spice 🌶️🌶️🌶
She likes the “tech” industry, not “tech” (whatever “tech” is supposed to mean).
Yeah. The article seems to almost be written as a propaganda piece, yet all I see is red flags.
“Her mission letter prioritises bolstering European competitiveness. It significantly varies from her predecessor’s bad-mouthing of tech billionaires.”
Launching a war against tech billionaires is exactly what the EU should be doing. If one genuinely loves tech, and not just the tools of oppression it can provide, one has no choice but to also hate tech billionaires. They are cancer on the planet, they are cancer on society, and they are cancer on technological developments.
Everyone likes tech. Does she understand it?
Should sound like good news. But actually sounds alarming. No one who knows tech likes it. IT people won’t have smart homes for example.
Oh I do have smart home, but it is a closed system, running a an RPi 4B locally, with Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT, and accessible from the internet only via a Wireguard, which bounces through a VPS somewhere in Paris. I am not dependent on any cloud infrastructure, so as long as my RPi is running, I can do this forever as long as the hardware doesn’t break - and then I can just swap the devices with the same type as long as it does Zigbee.
IT people won’t have smart homes for example.
That’s not true. I have quite a bit of smart home stuff. It’s all hosted on premise and walled off towards the internet though.
Can we stop trying to generalize to this degree? It could be good news or bad news depending on the person and not their interest in tech…
IT people won’t have smart homes for example.
No actually, us IT people built our own Smart Homes instead of shoving Googles and Alexas everywhere.
We like tech, we just don’t like the companies behind some of them. Or the users of it lmao
The article sounds like a journalist has been commissioned to write a positive article about her even though he thinks the opposite.
“Virkkunen is not afraid of situations where people have different opinions than hers. She does not back away just because the situation is uncomfortable.” Virkkunen declined an interview request.
She doesn’t give a crap about tech, her party is 100% owned by the Finnish financial elite who dictate policy based on what makes them the most money.
That marks a big shift, both in personality and policies, from her predecessor, France’s fiery, intellectual businessman Thierry Breton. He wrote sci-fi novels, waged a high-profile campaign against major US tech companies,
Elon Musk insulted Thierry Breton when he told him that X had to comply with European laws.
The real meaning of “actually like tech” is more “is ready to bend to the will of tech industry”
