The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism • Hacker News Board

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#121

Post by mindslight » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

lampiaio wrote: post #51

schoen wrote: post #19

I was a great admirer (and later friend) of Barlow, and I'm still very deeply influenced by the Declaration and many adjacent phenomena. I agree with some fraction of this post in terms of seeing many people shelving these principles when it gets inconvenient for them. In the past few months, I've been troubled by one specific part of the Declaration, in the final paragraph: > We will create a civilization of the Min…

The article was interesting to read not necessarily as a generative spark but as a datapoint, a symptom of how effective, in the long run, the response from those who saw the internet as a threat was. Only someone who's lost the plot (or arrived late) would summarily conflate Barlow's 1996 Declaration with "one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under mar…

Could you please keep going? Maybe I'm just old, tired, and have other responsibilities, but things are feeling pretty bleak these days.

Google is back to pushing remote attestation (ie WEI), Apple has already had it for quite some time. "AI" is a great Schelling point excuse for capital structures to collude rather than compete, whether it's demanding identification / "system integrity" (aka computational disenfranchisement) for routine Web tasks or simply making computing hardware unaffordable (and thus even less practical for most people, whether it's GPUs, RAM, or RPis for IoT projects).

There are some silver linings like AI codegen empowering individuals to solve their own problems, and/or really go to town hacking/polishing their libre project for others to use.

But at best I see a future 5-10 years down the road where I've got a few totally-pwnt corporate-government-approved devices for accomplishing basic tasks (with whatever I/O devices are cost-effective from the subset we're allowed to use), and then my own independent network that cannot do much of what's required to interface with (ie exist in) wider society.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#122

Post by nephihaha » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

mystraline wrote: post #90

Libertarianism sounded great. Its all about freedom, and the right to do with yourself what you want. And who doesnt want that? But they also wanted that freedom for their property and money. And if youre willing to skirt or plainly violate the laws, you can make bank. And then as a company, you can basically bribe politicians and do all these horrible things. The end result of libertarianism is simple: He who has th…

Is technofeudalism even a thing? Yanis Varoufakis goes on about it (despite being a keen WEF collaborator)... But it seems to me that in mediaeval feudalism that the lords needed the peasants downstream to produce food and military units. In the technocratic system we are heading towards, the lower classes (us) will be needed for labour and military purposes even less, thanks to automation etc. They will have less and less need for our income since they will have automated investments too. The one similarity to feudalism will be an information caste to make sure we tow the line but even that can be automated.

Not an attractive situation but not a very feudal one.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#123

Post by bluegatty » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

bluegatty wrote: post #106

iamnothere wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacking in its original sense is not about rule breaking (except maybe implied rules). It’s about finding ways around limitations. This could be finding unusual routes through a campus, as when the term was invented, or altering software to work the way you wanted it to. Often the only limits to using a tool the way you want to use it are in your mind. Hacking was distinct from phreaking (illegal use of the phone sys…

Thoughtful. Yes 'hack and 'hacking' [1] (Google Ngram Viewer) The traditional use of 'hack' was meant to imply 'half baked' or 'not good' and often used as an insult 'that guy is a hack' etc. 'Hack' as in 'tinkering and improvisation' is relatively new - and it came about at roughly the same time as the 'Phreak' version of 'hack'. Yes - of course norms can simply benefit those with power, I hinted at that, but on the…

(respond to pdnois thoughtful note)

"People who break rules just for the sake of breaking them aren't libertarians, they're idiots. "

-> they're not breaking them 'to break them' - they're breaking them because the rule doesn't serve their immediate purpose.

Like 'talking loud on a train'.

People who do that are not doing so 'just for spite' (sometimes) but rather, the social constraint is too much for them in the moment.

They are putting themselves 'above the (social) law'.

Most of the time, people lack the self awareness and are oblivious to their own actions in this regard especially under the veil of an ideology.

In the more ideological sense, Libertarians are often opposed to 'regulations' on the grounds that it 'limits their choice' etc. but those 'choices' have external effects on those around them.

The Ego is the greatest deluder and it's why self awareness is so hard.

I believe this is the 'root' of what the author is getting at. The Egoic aspiration towards supposed 'freedom' is often an ideological guise for trampling on others and just the pursuit of raw, unhindered selfish desire.

But 'without awareness'. Or worse - 'suppressed awareness'.

That's the key factor here: the 'lack of self awareness' and the deep motivation for people to put themselves before others - that drives this.

You see it all the time in callous Executive statements - it's why they seem so 'detached' - in their minds they are not acting 'badly' or 'immorally' - they're just doing what's good for them (often under the guise of 'shareholder' ideology, which is rooted in classic free market liberalism.), without any kind of self awareness.

And why in some competitive systems, a sense of self awareness can be a detriment.

And by the way - this 'tension' is right at the heart of Adam Smith.

Adam Smith was deeply concerned with the moral outcome - he was a (Christian) Ethicist, before he was an Economist. He wrote more about the issues of power than comparative value.

Friedman is like Adam Smith without the 'self consideration'.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#124

Post by Animats » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

In the print era, distribution was the bottleneck. The sheer amount of plant needed to produce a book or newspaper was impressive. The equipment needed for TV broadcasting was huge and expensive. In the high-speed Internet era, attention is the bottleneck. There's far more content than anyone can absorb.

At last, anyone can talk. Now it's all about finding people to listen. The implications of this shift were not forseen.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#125

Post by nathan_compton » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #107

While I don't necessarily agree that cyberspace should have no regulations, the way we think about regulating cyberspace must be different from the way we think about regulating anything else, because there's no specific place where an event happens. In the traditional 18th-century nation state model, events always happen somewhere, and it's the government with jurisdiction over that piece of land which decides wheth…

Are the trade-offs really unacceptable? Like why can't we just build treaties and international accords and just like do what humans have always done forever, and muddle through?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#126

Post by mrandish » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:24 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #99

> Once when driving from Michigan to Florida I got so lost in the middle of the night in Kentucky that I had to pull over to sleep and wait for the sun so I could figure out where I was. Not sure what's going on here, but this reads like 90s cosplay. First off, GPS-guided trips had not yet eroded people's sense of direction because they did not yet exist. Second of all, the (odd-numbered) interstate(s) that flow from…

> In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't.

As someone who graduated high school in the early 80s, I also was puzzled by this. Driving from Michigan to Florida wouldn't typically involve leaving major interstates for local roads in rural Kentucky. But if for some reason that was your desired route, you'd plan for it, especially if it was to be in the middle of the night.

Unlike perhaps the 1950s, paper maps and road signage in the 90s were quite good but more importantly, people knew how to use them because that was how the world worked. This struck me as more of a "I was so young/dumb/sleep-deprived/high (pick any two) I did something unbelievably stupid and met with the expected consequences."

It sounds more like OP left on a multi-day, cross-country road trip with only a couple free multi-state maps, which show such a large area they contain no local detail beyond major cities and interstates. If so, leaving the interstate would be foolhardy. Even if you see a single black line on the map connecting two interstates, people in the 90s would not take that 'shortcut' if it was many miles across an unfamiliar rural area, especially in the middle of the night. Because on local roads there will be little road lighting and much less signage AND you don't have a map showing any of the cross roads, small jags or local topology. Miss one road sign in the dark and you're screwed. So, yeah, expected result.

One of the downsides I see in mobile phone natives like my teenager is not only a lack of basic navigation and way-finding skills but also a lack of broad situational awareness. The sense of always being connected gives them a sense of security without an appreciation of what can happen when more than one thing goes wrong. So I've tried to teach you are never more than "three mistakes (or failures) away from bad things potentially happening."

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#127

Post by schoen » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:27 PM UTC

mrexcess wrote: post #97

schoen wrote: post #19

I was a great admirer (and later friend) of Barlow, and I'm still very deeply influenced by the Declaration and many adjacent phenomena. I agree with some fraction of this post in terms of seeing many people shelving these principles when it gets inconvenient for them. In the past few months, I've been troubled by one specific part of the Declaration, in the final paragraph: > We will create a civilization of the Min…

The revelations that Epstein had interest and involvement in the development of 4chan really makes me wonder what we would find behind the curtain at next iterations like KiwiFarms, etc if we looked hard enough. Not to sound an overly conspiratorial note, but sewing division within a foreign culture is one of those things that intelligence communities excel at, might match some patterns we’ve seen, and would serve to…

There is a theory that some skeptics of tech optimism have advanced for a while, that governments like Internet freedom and widespread availability of ICTs in rival nations because it either (1) makes people there hate and fear each other, or (2) makes them easier to propagandize.

In this account the U.S. State Department's Internet Freedom Agenda (which many of my friends and colleagues have been directly funded by) is about destabilizing other countries, while Russian or Chinese spies in turn relish American Internet freedoms because they can stir up conflicts here.

I have never endorsed this view but I've run into forms of it again and again and again. Adjacent to it is the idea that some of our prior social harmony was due to a more controlled or at least more homogeneous media landscape.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#128

Post by pixl97 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:28 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #77

dweinus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>A high density of tech billionaires in California doesn’t prevent

I put this in the case of 'eh, maybe'. Not a definite yes or no. The particular place where this breaks is asset ownership and other forms of VC fuckery that start raising the costs for everything around the country.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#129

Post by pdonis » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:31 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #22

ajross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> the largest market which values convenience more

To me, having my music library on an USB stick is convenience. I don't have to worry about whether my car or something in it has an Internet connection just to listen to music.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#130

Post by fragmede » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:31 PM UTC

nephihaha wrote: post #122

mystraline wrote: post #90

Libertarianism sounded great. Its all about freedom, and the right to do with yourself what you want. And who doesnt want that? But they also wanted that freedom for their property and money. And if youre willing to skirt or plainly violate the laws, you can make bank. And then as a company, you can basically bribe politicians and do all these horrible things. The end result of libertarianism is simple: He who has th…

Is technofeudalism even a thing? Yanis Varoufakis goes on about it (despite being a keen WEF collaborator)... But it seems to me that in mediaeval feudalism that the lords needed the peasants downstream to produce food and military units. In the technocratic system we are heading towards, the lower classes (us) will be needed for labour and military purposes even less, thanks to automation etc. They will have less an…

Not for military purposes, but if you're an employee of eg Google, life is pretty good. Free food, spacious offices, great health insurance; all sorts of perks. All at the behest of Lord Sundar.