Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

matduggan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 418 posts

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#161

Post by thomastjeffery »

slopinthebag wrote: post #65
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,…

> 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. Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work. To a right anarchist or libertarian, "Free market absolution" is not an ideology o…

> Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work.

The libertarian conception is that groups of people can form hierarchical corporations that compete directly with individuals in the marketplace. The social anarchist conception is usually that people participate in anarchist cooperatives instead. It depends on the anarchist what that means in practice.

> Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work.

Yes, but what they are sorely missing in that argument - in my opinion - is that the problem with copyright is monopoly power; which is also what you get from an unregulated market of corporations. The somewhat regulated market that exists today is obviously dominated by corporations whose anticompetitive participation is predicated on their copyright moats.

> Many [left-leaning libertarians and social anarchists] indeed defend copyright.

Yes, and I'm at least as frustrated about that as with any other political group.

It's incredibly rare to hear copyright's role in our society even described, let alone criticized; even though that role is incredibly significant.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#162

Post by LocalH »

Animats wrote: post #119
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. Right. In the early days of Etak, the company that invented car navigation systems, I got a tour from Stan Honey. Honey remarked that they originally displayed the map with north at the top, and a car arrow that rotated with the direction the vehicle was facing, like…

So 10% of the population got to indirectly dictate how the other 90% do it.

If only left-handed people were so fortunate

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#163

Post by malwrar »

krapp wrote: post #149
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.

I agree. My point in short is that we seem to reflexively frame right and wrong on an axis defined by copyright, and somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that the law itself is used much differently than we might otherwise want.

Technolibertarians confuse free market capitalism via copyright-enabled businesses as a viable strategy for individual freedom, and we find with time that only bastards win in a competition with loose rules and high stakes. Those concerned for the continued flourishing of human creativity in the face of LLMs confuse copyright as a means for small creators to have some ownership over their work, when it actually just seems to be a cudgel that can only be wielded by the wealthiest. Same losing fight, different flavor. I ask: why do we continue to allow “ownership of ideas” to underlie the moral basis of our conversations to begin with?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#164

Post by [deleted] »

js8 wrote: post #151
mindslight wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#165

Post by IshKebab »

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_.

Fine... but it's still better now.

I recently went on holiday to deepest darkest Wales where phone signal is intermittent. Trying to locate people and get messages to them was such a bloody pain.

I remember thinking in 2003 "surely we should be able to book GP appointments online now", and a mere 20 years later we can (depending on where you live) finally do it. It's so much better.

I would not go back, and I don't think anyone else would if it really came down to it, despite any virtuous anti-technology mantras they might pretend to believe.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#166

Post by casey2 »

On the other side, the way people act towards websites and companies has validate most of Ayn Rand's books.

If you are one of the many people railing against YouTube or Facebook I encourage you to leave the platform and go build your own site. It's frankly a miracle that these sites can turn the worthless noise of a crowd into profit, and all this complaining amounts to some private service not being good enough for your taste.

Libertarianism is still the correct philosophy for tech. Be the prime mover, don't be the entitled dude asking to be catered to among a billion other entitled dudes. That is the only losing game, and that is why it feels like the product is getting worse. It's because you aren't the target audience anymore. So weep your tears of betrayal, once; then go and build.

We have the "hindsight" of every country that regulated, they have no relevant technological industry to speak of. Why point to one of the few countries that made it and say "hmm the bonzai tree could look a bit better if we chopped the trunk before it grew" However you dress it up it's always just the government pointing a gun at the head of a builder of a prime mover and saying don't move. That will never result in progress. Sometimes the prime mover wins all the chips due to unfair tax policy (what we saw from 2000-2018/2026), just another government failure in a long list of government failures.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#167

Post by intended »

bluegatty wrote: post #138
AlexandrB wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I too, like my meat and not the killing that it requires.

One day, someone will have to face the reckoning of our preferences vs our values.

May I be the one with the courage to meet it; failing which, not be standing around when the bill is due.

The motto of our era.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#168

Post by krapp »

malwrar wrote: post #163
krapp wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I agree. My point in short is that we seem to reflexively frame right and wrong on an axis defined by copyright, and somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that the law itself is used much differently than we might otherwise want. Technolibertarians confuse free market capitalism via copyright-enabled businesses as a viable strategy for individual freedom, and we find with time that only bastards win in a competition w…

I think it's more that we see copyright as a necessary evil that can be used to defend our rights, but will be abused by the powerful, regardless.

To me, the biggest sin of cyberlibertarianism is the assumption that "cyberspace" is de facto another universe, separate from material reality, that doesn't need to be affected by the mundane and vulgar rules of "meatspace." John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if using a computer actually separates him from the state in some meaningful way, as if he has ascended beyond the flesh and now looks down upon the world as a being of pure Mind. But of course, "cyberspace" is just computers, servers, infrastructure using power and resources and thus is inextricably subject to government and systems of law. Zion was never an escape.

So yes, because cyberspace doesn't actually change the rules of the game, we have to play the game, crooked as it is, with the hand we're dealt. The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power. What do you suggest?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#169

Post by bluegatty »

intended wrote: post #167
bluegatty wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I too, like my meat and not the killing that it requires. One day, someone will have to face the reckoning of our preferences vs our values. May I be the one with the courage to meet it; failing which, not be standing around when the bill is due. The motto of our era.

I think we can have our cake and eat it on this one. The economics line up not entirely unreasonably. Mostly.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#170

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

I suspect this is correct, and the push towards "age verification" (i.e. user id hiding behind a pretext), the insane build out of server farms, which is making commodity computing unaffordable, and the push towards AI in everything are all pointing in the same direction.

The 1990s vision of computing was a bicycle - or car - for the mind. It was libertarian in the sense that if you had a device it would empower you to get where you wanted to go more quickly.

And the rhetoric around it was very much about personal exploration on a new and exciting frontier.

The 2020s vision is more like a totalitarian transport network where you don't own the vehicle, you don't own the network, there's constant propaganda telling you how to structure your journey to the standard destinations, and deviation is becoming increasingly impossible.

The device is just an access port to the network. It's dumbed down, so even if you understand how it works you can't do much with it. And as AI becomes more prevalent, your ability to understand that will diminish further.

So the end result is very plausibly a state where you're completely reliant on AI to do anything. And AI is owned by the pseudo-state oligopoly - the same oligopoly which runs the propaganda networks that sell you ads, hype selected content while suppressing other content, and genrally try to influence your behaviour.

It's the complete opposite of the original vision.

Will consumer AI fix this? Probably not. Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres.

Post reply on HN