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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#71

Post by slopinthebag »

vrganj wrote: post #61
slopinthebag wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, governments are coercive forces with a total monopoly on the legal system and the use of violence. Perhaps monopolies being bad is reason enough? There are the hundreds of millions (billions?) of people murdered by governments throughout history, including the many atrocities modern governments are committing today, which is almost surely reason enough. And then there are the philosophical arguments against pol…

In a democratic society, government is the representative of the people. It is also the only entity powerful enough to stand up to other monopolies, businesses, which are dictatorships without any democratic control. There will always be a power structure. I'd prefer one I can vote out. The fundamental flaw in any type of libertarian / anarchist thinking is denying the reality that power will always be concentrated s…

> In a democratic society, government is the representative of the people.

Representative of who exactly? Generally governments around the world win with The rest have a government who are not representative of them in power over them. Hardly representative of the people.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#72

Post by harimau777 »

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…

I don't think the fact that people in developing nations are becoming more wealthy is all that comforting for those of us trapped in this capitalist hellscape. It's nice that it's happening but it doesn't help me survive.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#73

Post by danaris »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #24
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…

You don't think banks should have to follow rules about how they safeguard their depositors' money? (PayPal)

You don't think hotels should have to follow rules about how they keep their properties, or require their tenants to follow local ordinances? (AirBnB)

You don't think it should be illegal to be someone's sole employer, have full and total control over their schedule and duties, and yet treat them for legal and tax purposes as if they're a contractor? (Uber, et al)

'Cause if you're the type of person who believes that laws and regulations like these shouldn't exist, you are 100% part of the problem, and you are (much like the rest of us) only able to live the kind of life you do because of the existence of such laws and regulations, so your desire to remove them is just a matter of pulling up the ladder behind yourself writ large.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#74

Post by harimau777 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #47
pessimizer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 chang…

Democracy seems to you like a meaningless buzzword because it's won so thoroughly. You're evaluating whether average citizens have independent influence, because the question of whether they have influence at all is completely uninteresting; who cares whether the majority can band together and vote a guy out of office if the "powers that be" control his replacement? But most guys for most of history did not agree tha…

I mean, who cares if people can band together to vote a guy out of office if the powers that be control his replacement?

Voting isn't any different than non-voting if it can't bring about real change for the better.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#75

Post by bluegatty »

Yes, and this is the paradox right at the heart of 'Hacker' in 'Hacker News' aka an arbitrary usurping of established norms - notably without moral impetus.

Institutionalists view the very word 'Hacker' as 'Wrong' because they're essentially 'Rule Breakers'.

But sometimes rules are bad, and need to be broken.

Libertarians view rules as constraints, so why not break them?

More often than not, rules are there fore a reason. (Obviously it's complicated)

There's a huge grey area there but what is not grey ... is the issue of the 'morally neutral' impetus that the author is talking about - the seed of which is right at the root of 'Hacker'.

YC does not say 'build something useful and beneficial' - they say 'build something useful'.

Aka no moral impetus towards the greater good.

'Build a gear that is useful to other gears, without concern for what the gears are actually doing'.

It seems benign when there's no power involved - aka startups.

But it's not benign when there's huge concentration of power.

That system leads to endemic competition - which - at the highest levels is economic warfare, or even actual warfare.

There is no flattening in these systems - those things end up in Feudal Power Structures - everyone 'somewhere on the pyramid'.

If you're 'under Musk' right now - anywhere (and that includes literally almost every VC for whom it's too risky to say anything critical, or so many people in finance tangentially related to $1.5T IPO, or business etc) - you dare not speak out against him.

That's the opposite of 'flat or decentralized' - it's just power without democratic impetus, techno authoritarianism, which is paradoxically the thing they seem to lament.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#76

Post by harimau777 »

georgehotz wrote: post #29

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 t…

That would be great if any of it worked. However, we tried that and now find ourselves living (I use that term loosely) in a capitalist hellscape.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#77

Post by kortilla »

dweinus wrote: post #44
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…

Global extreme poverty has fallen because we have raised the floor, largely through international collaboration that if anything has happened in spite of the cyberlibertarianism, certainly not because of it. Paradoxically, "developed" nation inequality has hit 1920s levels. Likewise, the number of countries/populations calling themselves democratic has grown, but the global democratic index has declined and mature de…

> Paradoxically, "developed" nation inequality has hit 1920s levels.

That’s not a paradox. Inequality is a completely separate measurement that emerges anywhere there are extremely wealthy people despite the average population doing really well.

A high density of tech billionaires in California doesn’t prevent a regular family in Tennessee from putting food on their table. Poverty rates would.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#79

Post by kortilla »

igor47 wrote: post #63
slopinthebag wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, governments are coercive forces with a total monopoly on the legal system and the use of violence. Perhaps monopolies being bad is reason enough? There are the hundreds of millions (billions?) of people murdered by governments throughout history, including the many atrocities modern governments are committing today, which is almost surely reason enough. And then there are the philosophical arguments against pol…

But in a democracy, you at least have input! Google is also a coercive force with no real checks on its power, but it doesn't care about anything you have to say. That's the difference, that's it, right there. The answer to abuse of power is not to just unleash raw power, its to subordinate and restrict it. That's what government is for. When you find yourself arguing that power you participate in is bad and shouldn'…

But you don’t have to use Google. That’s the critical difference and why people should be so much more skeptical of using the monopoly on violence to enforce things.

Millions of people live in the US and don’t use Google products or pay Google a dime.

Try not paying taxes because you don’t want to support the actions of the federal government and see how that works out.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#80

Post by bluegatty »

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 used to be with you on that ... but getting of my lazy bum to actually pay for Spotify - and looking past all the fair/unfair issues bad/good corporate stuff ...

The ability to browse music is very powerful.

I lost my 1 Soundgarden CD 20 years ago. Now I can listen to all their albums.

You can do the entire Beatles catalogue Discover artists I would never have otherwise heard of.

It has it's downsides, but I dont think CD was 'better'.

We just have an imperfect situation.

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