The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism • Hacker News Board

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#151

Post by js8 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:07 PM UTC

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…

In many countries, people have already won a similar fight with printing press, press censorship and encryption. I think there is a reason for optimism (of the will).

If AI can code, and empower individuals to do it on a local device, it is already smart enough to educate masses on the matters of their self-interest, such as freedom and solidarity.

I don't think the powers will be able to gatekeep it. There might be some grief but overall human freedom will prevail.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#152

Post by thomastjeffery » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #105

thomastjeffery wrote: post #36

The problem with [conservative] libertarians is that they are half anarchists. They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it. If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them,…

> If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation. But "corporation" is an extremely broad term. Mom and pop businesses are corporations. A friend and I own a corporation that makes games, just the two of us, no…

Everything that Meta owns is either copyright or hardware that facilitates the ownership of its distribution. They wouldn't have the interest or capital to run giant datacenters without the ability to profit from their "owned" users' data. Facebook and Instagram can only be valued because they are proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright. Even Meta's VR headsets are sold at a loss, with a walled garden app store designed to pay the difference.

> Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in.

Yes, that's the thing I'm arguing against. Would you mind considering it for a moment?

> No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.

That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals. The argument that a corporation should not be treated as an individual is irrelevant, because that is its role in a marketplace. That's who individuals directly compete with!

> Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market.

They are creatures in a market. Whether that market is free does not define them, only their opportunity. I agree that they get the opportunity of government favoritism, and that that is a significant part of the issue. My point is that it is not the root cause of the problem. In a "free market" that incorporates copyright and patents, any corporation who owns IP can leverage it as a moat, enforced by state violence. The fact that any individual can do the same does not change the power imbalance between an individual and a corporation: it increases it.

Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation. Even Amazon's anticompetitive behavior is predicated on their vertical integration of Amazon the delivery/fulfillment service with Amazon the marketplace. The fact that a marketplace can be owned at all is predicated on copyright.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#153

Post by layer8 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:09 PM UTC

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

This isn’t really true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_indices#Prominent_de...

If you look at the V-Dem Electoral and Liberal Democracy Indices there, you can also see that it’s been decreasing since around 2010. It’s back to mid-1990s levels, coincidentally around when mainstream internet usage started.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#154

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

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…

> Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense.

I disagree. By meaningful real-world standards, the average Internet space is in fact extremely humane and polite. People will bring up the random exceptions where groups of people absolutely hate one another and these hates eventually spill over into online spaces, but that's what these are, limited exceptions. By and large, the average online interaction is potentially far more reflective of desirable human values than the ways complete strangers usually interact offline. Perhaps this is a matter of pure self-selection among a tiny niche of especially intellectually-minded folks, but even if this was the case it would still be creating an affordance that wasn't there before.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#155

Post by paganel » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:21 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…

> 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 KiwiFarm

For starters, that Putin was right when he was calling the internet a CIA project back in 2010, 2011, those whereabouts.

Later edit: From 2013 [1]:

> Barlow: Let me give you an example: I have been advising the CIA and NSA for many years, trying to get them to use open sources of information. If the objective is really to find out what is going on, the best way to do this, is by trading on the information market where you give information to get information.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-want-to-tear-down-the-v_b_4...

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#156

Post by paganel » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:26 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…

I've driven from here in Bucharest to Geneva, Switzerland, about 10 years ago and without using the GPS and I only got lost once, on the return trip around Lago Maggiore because I had chosen to use the "Statale" national road instead of the "Autostrada". It was all on me, and it was a really beautiful place to get "lost" (I ended up on the highway after 45 minutes - an hour of not knowing exactly where I was). I repeated a similar trip about two years later, this time I went all the West to Brittany, France, again, without using the GPS for 99% of the time. The one time when I asked the person sitting on my right to guide me via GPS was when I got lost in the roundabaouts just outside Orleans. Which is to say that one can for sure drive without GPS with almost no issues, no need to sleep in the middle of nowhere at night.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#157

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:29 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #73

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

PayPal is not a bank, AirBnb is not a hotel and plenty of drivers will freely serve rides from Uber, Lyft and a variety of other ride sharing services; they aren't "employees" of any single firm. (Of course they must serve a single ride at a time for sensible policy reasons, but aside from that they're quite free to pick their favorite ones.) These things actually make sense, even though they might not be what you're directly used to.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#158

Post by armchairhacker » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:29 PM UTC

scuff3d wrote: post #95

You read an article like this, and despite some flaws, it restores your faith in humanity a little bit. Maybe I'm not the only one looking at the shitshow in horror. Then you come to the comment section and are immediately reminded why the whole god damn world has lost its mind.

What are some examples of bad comments and how do they contradict the article?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#159

Post by armchairhacker » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:30 PM UTC

The author argues for regulations, but the reason the internet today is anticompetitive is because of anti-circumvention regulations. The ideal world would have digital regulations, but a world with no digital regulations would be better than today's.

And how would you install your regulations? Right now, both the average voter and oligarch prefers centralized platforms.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#160

Post by II2II » Sat, May 09, 2026, 8:31 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…

I can't speak to that specific example, because I'm unfamiliar with the US highway system, but plenty of people got lost in the bad old days. At the very least, if you missed a turnoff, you would have to re-anchor yourself on a map. Some people can do that quite easily. Other people cannot do it at all.

Keep in mind, the lost husband buried in maps was a common joke in those days. Also, in the early days of GPS, someone getting lost by following the directions on their phone, was also a common news story. (Presumably these people would still have had situational awareness/direction from using maps in the past.)

As for the shirtless Kentuckian, you're probably right. That said, I've found motorists skittish when I ask them for directions or when checking to see if they need help. I've always chalked that up to being part of car culture.