The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism • Hacker News Board

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#141

Post by dehsge » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #70

igor47 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

The amount of input we have is virtually zero. I have never had a candidate I felt represented me, I have never had a candidate who I voted for win an election, and I have never had a a party who the candidate voted for win an election. Thus my minuscule "input" had absolutely zero impact, both in elections and on my life as a whole. The reason democracy is better than other forms of governance is that it provides in…

If you are in the US. Proportionate representation stopped completely with the Reapportionment Act of 1929.

Subsequently the tail end of the gilded age and enacted in June 18, only 5months before the crash of oct 1929.

Constitutionally the size of the US government was expected to scale proportionally with population and 3/5ths of slaves.

This is why your vote ‘feels’ meaningless. We have been under a state of corporate capture for coming up to 100years. Last time there was push back from congress we got the Powell memo. That memo reinforces and defends corporate power in American politics.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#142

Post by tolerance » Sat, May 09, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #114

tolerance wrote: post #33

I get that the information produced and consumed online does has a profound effect on how we think. But right now I need to point out a steady gripe of mine that may or may not be tangential to the author's points depending on how you view things. There is something unsettling about how the disjunctive experience that digital media environments produce is romantically portrayed. I think we need to get over the concep…

> Media/information environments shouldn't be thought of in the same way that physical ones are. I don't know why I feel this way. Maybe because media/information environments aren't the same as physical environments? The word "environment" might be the root issue here. Using digital tools to connect with other people isn't the same thing as treating your digital tools as an "environment" that takes the place of the…

Pardon the melodrama. This is a tough conceptual block to chip away at. HCI research and any tentative breakthroughs in AR/VR might not lend any favors to convince people that digital environments are not ideal surrogates for the real world, or as complimentary to the world in the way that I think more even-keeled people would like to believe. The same goes for technologically-driven existential malaise. And people who refer to their Obsidian vaults and collections of linked Org-mode files as their "second brains".

If you've debated any dualists please share your notes, win or loss.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#143

Post by thinking_cactus » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

Irrespective of anything else, I think libertarians of any kind have to contend with that Corporations can be extremely powerful entities that can be just as bad as governments. At the very least, setting their sights on governments alone seems terribly inconsistent and incorrect. In no small part because megacorps can yield governments in their favor, and by the point they're extremely powerful megacorps, the libertarian calls against regulation (yielded by megacorps against interests of the population) tend to fail.

But it's not just regulation megacorps can use, the most frequent is just various forms of capturing and dominating a market, I guess.

For example, Google is on the process of deciding or severely restricting independent developers on Android. I think by reasonable interpretation, user freedom is being severely restricted. But most people have little recourse, it's either Android or iOS (and by now both are similarly bad in different ways). There are some alternative OSes and devices, but there's a significant chance you may rely on some real world service that needs one of the two major ones.

Without trying to overgeneralize everything, in this particular example I don't see how things could change without regulation.

(and, if you will, in that case you can generalize to the implication that regulation isn't necessarily always bad)

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I think the lesson to take isn't that the cyberlibertarians were 100% wrong and we need maximum government control and surveillance over the internet. The world tends to be complex and most simple stories we come up with (which are the ones that tend to sound good on our ears and be most comfortable) tend to be wrong in various ways. The world demands, at least, flexibility from ourselves. Sure, be inspired by one idea or manifesto or another, but don't follow it blindly always.

A relative freedom of communication and widespread access to information arguably is pretty good for civilization. When you can talk and relate to people from allover, the justification for war seem increasingly flimsy. But various forms of regulation preventing single megacorps from dominating the global internet (or simply local wired internet access in your region), can be important. Maybe we need to protect more discourse against bad actors and the incoming flood of LLM-generated, possibly propaganda-fed content. Keep an open mind. Whatever decisions we make we can walk back and change course.

The fundamental principle isn't this or that ideological current, but that people are living good lives. Happy, in peace, full of awesome possibilities. As someone wiser has once said, remember your humanity and forget the rest! :)

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#144

Post by Forgeties79 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

blatherard wrote: post #132

Forgeties79 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Very good point. Ability and access.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#145

Post by ux266478 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:00 PM UTC

bayleev wrote: post #32

A good example of this is the mythological way people think often about cryptography imo, as a guarantor of an individual's privacy against the prying eyes of the state, etc. But the reality is that your usual cryptographic circuit (TLS connection) is just that, a circuit, a cordoning of space off for an interaction between two or more parties. The interaction inside that circuit can be very highly exploitative indee…

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#146

Post by iamnothere » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

bluegatty wrote: post #123

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…

(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 mo…

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

There is no “social law”; not in the US, at least.

We have never been more divided as to what constitutes appropriate behavior in public. We are not an ethnostate (nor should we be), so all social behavior in the public at-large is essentially undertaken on a battleground. Every ideology, sub-ethnicity, and social group has its own competing norms that often conflict. At times, expressing behavior that is normal (for you) can inadvertently become a political statement and a call to conflict.

Talking loud on a train, as you mentioned, may be unacceptable to some and perfectly normal to others based on culture. Not to mention biological aspects such as neurodivergence.

“Regulation” also does not happen in a vacuum. Regulation imposes a particular viewpoint, one that all may not agree with. These days, the majority may even disagree with the imposed viewpoint, as our ruling class is compromised.

“Implicit regulation” through vague norms is even worse, as you are inevitably oppressing some groups based on their cultural characteristics, and not letting them argue against it. Laws can be debated at least, even if they are bad laws.

It may be that multicultural societies are doomed to implode. (I certainly hope not.) If we are to have a chance of keeping them afloat, light-touch governance and permissive norms are probably the only hope. Perhaps this can be coupled with voluntary collective norms that are crafted as a nation. But we can’t object too loudly if some groups don’t hold to these norms, as long as they are not violating fundamental rights (which we must also find a way to agree upon!).

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#147

Post by tempaccount5050 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

szvsw wrote: post #64

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure why petrochemicals and trees ie hydrocarbons are any more or less absurd than the silicon, metals, etc quarried and mined from around the world needed to store information digitally in data centers (or mobile devices). Storing data of any kind in plastic as opposed to silicon metal seems like a meaningless distinction that only comes about from imagining that there is some disembodied, ethereal and platonic…

Because a billion people can share the file at once. It's tough math to do, but I can't believe transporting physical media all over the world is really better.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#148

Post by krapp » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #100

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't the old adage that democracy was never good, it was always just better than all the other forms of government. It got more done. It advanced economies more. Etc etc etc. Then we torched it at just about the same time as the Chinese came along with a new form of government that I'm not sure the world has as yet even given a proper name. (I guess we can call it Communism? But everyone kind of knows that it's noth…

>Then we torched it at just about the same time as the Chinese came along with a new form of government that I'm not sure the world has as yet even given a proper name. (I guess we can call it Communism? But everyone kind of knows that it's nothing like.)

I think the term is "state capitalism." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism)

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#149

Post by krapp » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:06 PM UTC

malwrar wrote: post #135

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 w…

>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.

That isn't a change. Both claims are true.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#150

Post by thinking_cactus » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:07 PM UTC

gchamonlive wrote: post #8

The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improveme…

I agree that if profits are always put about everything else, disaster for any society is essentially guaranteed. (I'll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader)