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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#21

Post by tempaccount5050 »

wiseowise wrote: post #16
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #4

Dunno man, those things you say were “horrible” before the advent of mobile phones, media players and gps (not even the internet; usable incarnations of those inventions were entirely independent from the internet) - I was also there and it was _fine_.

Same. I’ll gladly take CDs and DVDs over modern streaming platforms. Before all of this streaming crap music and taste had weight. You find people with the same interests and you share physical medium. No corporation in the world had a power to stop me from giving my copy to another person. Now you either like and pay forever like a good cattle or you hide like a rat from the watchful copyright gods on torrents.

I've always thought that the hippie environmental types wanting data (music) stored as plastic was ironic. "I prefer my music to be made of petrochemicals and trees, the way it ought to be." I get it, but I still think it's funny.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#22

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ajross wrote: post #12
pdonis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never had the problems with tapes that the author describes--but I still preferred CDs when they came out, and I greatly prefer having my entire music library on a single USB stick that I can just plug into my car. I was able to find my way around okay with paper maps--but I still prefer having GPS in my phone. My issue with those passages is that the author is conflating "digital" or "computers are involved" with…

> having my entire music library on a single USB stick Worth pointing out how this too is an example of somewhat mistaken value analysis based on libertarian ideals. The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere. Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not. Which was one…

>Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not.

lots of people perceive higher quality media as having value, in fact there are markets for those people, just not the largest market which values convenience more.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#23

Post by boredhedgehog »

linuxhansl wrote: post #20

> Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation. This might be favorite metaphor ever, and one I'll quoting in the future! :) I think the author conflates social media with other inventions like a portable GPS device, an electronic map, a music player, or indeed a cell phone. As far as social media goes the author is (IMHO) spot on. You do not have to…

I stumbled over that metaphor. Isn't it true that a consequence of setting your kitchen on fire will be a new, better kitchen?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#24

Post by bethekidyouwant »

randallsquared wrote: post #3

> examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech Would that it were so. Semi-connected rant: What happened to so many startups to kill the mood was the pattern of: Do something technically legal (or technically illegal!) in a way that seems fixable at first, scale to huge size to get lawyers and lobbyists, pivot to strongly supporting government efforts to rein in "lawlessness" or "combat fraud" or…

I have trouble supporting the viewpoint that these things should’ve been “illegal” in the first place.

The pendulum swings I suppose…

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#25

Post by bethekidyouwant »

linuxhansl wrote: post #20

> Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation. This might be favorite metaphor ever, and one I'll quoting in the future! :) I think the author conflates social media with other inventions like a portable GPS device, an electronic map, a music player, or indeed a cell phone. As far as social media goes the author is (IMHO) spot on. You do not have to…

When was democracy good? was it was it in the 50s when we were all immune to propaganda?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#26

Post by nothinkjustai »

> The cyberlibertarians wanted you to believe that radical individualism plus deregulated capitalism plus inevitable technology would produce communitarian utopia. This is, on its face, insane. It is the economic equivalent of claiming that if everyone punches each other really hard, eventually we'll all be hugging.

The alternative, of course, is that a nanny state + highly regulated tech + inevitable technology leads to exactly the outcomes we have now. I’d prefer something else personally.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#27

Post by [deleted] »

regularization wrote: post #15
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #9

> Democracy will flourish. The gap between rich and poor will close. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the lamb will have a Pentium II. We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not 'directionally wrong' or 'wrong in the details.' Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a reno…

> To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it…

[deleted]

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#28

Post by pessimizer »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #9

> Democracy will flourish. The gap between rich and poor will close. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the lamb will have a Pentium II. We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not 'directionally wrong' or 'wrong in the details.' Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a reno…

> Democracy is by far the most common style of governance

"Democracy" is a meaningless buzzword that is usually thrown around when a Western country wants to kill people and steal things. It is defined as us and the people we support. Meanwhile, two weird little private clubs choose all of the people who go up for election in the US at every level (and have created laws and conventions preventing this from ever changing), and public opinion has absolutely no detectable affect on public policy.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#29

Post by georgehotz »

Maybe it's just my contrarian nature, but this sells me on cyberlibertarianism.

There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server, downloading free software to run it, getting your friends to view it, building encrypted communication apps that no government can crack, pirating any piece of content in the world, etc...

A libertarian society won't coddle you, and there's psychopaths like Meta who show up in the space and convince a lot of people to follow them. Of course those people suck, but the solution isn't government. It's to stay strong, help your friends be strong, and accept that not everyone will make it. That has always been the flip side of freedom.

The Internet, and now AI, delivered so many of the dreams of my childhood. It is a mostly free society, for better or worse. I'm hoping that intelligence remains distributed, enshittification stops when my agent deals with it for me, and the physical world remains as free as it is. But these aren't things that would be changed with new governance of cyberspace, these are features of the optimization landscape of reality and technological progress.

Do we live in the best possible world, of course not. But this one is pretty good, and it's easy to imagine non libertarian ones that are so much worse. I feel a huge debt to the people who designed the Internet with the foresight that they did, the capture exists at a psychological layer, not a physical one.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#30

Post by thinking_cactus »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #23
linuxhansl wrote: post #20

> Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation. This might be favorite metaphor ever, and one I'll quoting in the future! :) I think the author conflates social media with other inventions like a portable GPS device, an electronic map, a music player, or indeed a cell phone. As far as social media goes the author is (IMHO) spot on. You do not have to…

I stumbled over that metaphor. Isn't it true that a consequence of setting your kitchen on fire will be a new, better kitchen?

Well, as a secondary consequence maybe, but then you could not set your kitchen on fire and still renovate it. Supposedly the first step you think of when renovating your kitchen isn't "Let me set my house on fire!"?
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