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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#131

Post by schoen »

mindslight wrote: post #121
lampiaio wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disenfranc…

Alongside "1984 wasn't an instruction manual" we may need the slogan "'The Right to Read' wasn't an instruction manual".

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#132

Post by blatherard »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #54
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…

> I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue, but one is that the early Internet culture was very self-selected for people who thought that the ability to talk to people and the ability to access information were morally virtuous. Honestly I think it mostly self selected based on who had the technical ability to participate, especially at that time.

Also early internet access was gated by institutions. Most people were using their work or school internet access to be online, and so behavior was naturally more controlled. When I was first online (circa 1990), I could have been "kicked off the internet" by my college's IT department.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#133

Post by iamnothere »

pdonis wrote: post #111
bluegatty wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the libertarian creed -the churlish assumption that 'rules are the arbitrary imposition of those with power' and that somehow breaking them is more likely good than not This is certainly churlish, but it's not at all "the libertarian creed". People who break rules just for the sake of breaking them aren't libertarians, they're idiots. I agree there are lots of those around, and that many, if not most, people who cr…

You said it better than I would have. GP has a misunderstanding of libertarianism and perhaps of the concept of liberty.

Libertarians (small-l libertarians, colloquially) don’t break norms “just because”, they do it only in specific circumstances based on a calculus. Everyone’s calculus is different, but the usual reasoning would focus on possible infringement of others’ rights when breaking the norm and the seeming validity/grounding of the norm. And perhaps the risk tolerance of the individual and likely consequences.

GP seems to be taking about anarchists (and a particular species of anarchist at that). There is indeed some overlap but libertarians are not allergic to norms. “Rights” themselves are a norm.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#134

Post by nephihaha »

killretards wrote: post #59

[dead]

Maybe the regulations are there to protect large corporations and the government but not the rest of us?

I hate the way politics is presented as a binary choice between getting controlled by big business or big government (or a combination of the two).

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#135

Post by malwrar »

It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. In the background, the wealthy and powerful disregard all of this and seem to do whatever they want, and the little guy looks at millions of dollars in legal costs to defend themselves in either case. Costs that are increasingly a rounding error to their opposition as they continue to grow by exploiting a broken system, and the “little guy” now includes whole industries.

I feel like adversarial interoperability more than free market capitalism should have been the death knell for most of the negatives highlighted in this post. Everyone is still so determined to make money from mere ideas however that we still use 1700s law designed to protect book publishers to enable the existence of “businesses” so warped in valuation that they are now trillion dollar entities yet always face the existential threat of copy+paste. What if the more profound truth is that tech is beneficial to humanity but inherently worthless to sell, and that our present woe’s shape is determined by the antiquated institutions built service this illusion of value? In an inevitable future age of generative AI as an accessible technology, as opposed to a business model with a moat, what even is our goal for such institutions? What sorts of creativity do we want motivate, and what meaningful regulatory constraints even are there to begin with? I hope we figure it out soon, because IP will be impossible to enforce post-deglobalization in any case.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#136

Post by mikem170 »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #84
mikem170 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about radical individualism + regulated tech - inevitable technology? I don't see anything wrong with individuals who by consensus choose to regulate "inevitable" technology. Technology is not a person, and we don't need to make ourselves subservient to it. I'm thinking of things like liability as a publisher for algorithmic feeds, anti-trust enforcement against companies competing unfairly, mandates for inter-o…

“Individuals by consensus” feels oxymoronic to me. If that’s a description of the outcome, it’s possible today! Individuals can chose not to use a technology and if enough do so to form a consensus, they may be able to impose constraints on the technology akin to regulation. However anything else would require coercive power structures which go against the idea of radical individualism.

Big tech is a coercive power. They are cooperating with the government to control the population. Doesn't that worry you? Don't you think there should be limits, beside profitability?

I think of it as flaws in our system that need to be patched. The masses are manipulated by their algorithms. Those who would protest are surveilled by them. The rich seem to be running everything to their advantage. The rugged individualist is running out of space.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#137

Post by Lerc »

pstuart wrote: post #10

What? No mention of Web3? Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers. Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people ?

I feel like using Curtis Yarvin as an argument against tech solutions is like using Terry Davis as an argument against Christianity.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#138

Post by bluegatty »

AlexandrB wrote: post #113
bluegatty wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

And the biggest part of the money you pay the streaming platform goes to neither Soundgarden, nor the remaining Beatles, nor to those artists you discovered but to Taylor Swift[1]. This is in stark contrast to how CD economics worked. As someone who spent a lot of his youth carefully avoiding big label acts and trying to support small artists, this is what bothers me the most: there is no way to do that anymore if yo…

I don't like how the sausage is made, I just like the sausage, is all I'm saying.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#140

Post by mrexcess »

schoen wrote: post #127
mrexcess wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

I definitely buy into the “monoculture” argument a bit. When hundreds of millions of people are all voraciously consuming the same very limited cultural messaging - three TV stations, a handful of movie studios, a handful of major book publishers - there is bound to be a leveling of interpersonal expectations that will be absent in a more fragmented culture.

That’s not some kind of crypto denunciation against cosmopolitan diversity, but it is what it is and I do think there’s a there, there.

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