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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#171

Post by buildsjets »

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…

Look, on a Cub Scout camping trip in 1987, my father the Scoutmaster drove two hours in the wrong direction on I-80 in Pennsylvania, trying to get home to New York. He had a caravan of about 5 or 6 cars following. They all communicated with CB radios. Nobody noticed until they got to the Ohio border.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#172

Post by vrganj »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #170
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…

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…

> 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.

There's one way to deal with this, but I doubt it'll be popular in these parts: Communal ownership of the means of production.

Don't use the oligarchy's AI. Your personal hardware is going to be too weak. But together, we can own our own server farms.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#173

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

zozbot234 wrote: post #154
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…

By meaningful real-world standards there are bot farms sowing dissent and literally driving people into mental illness which has already destroyed many families.

At the same time there's the Cambridge Analytica/SCL strand where a corporation literally sells election fixing services that rely on data gathered from social media accounts.

To be fair these are all extensions of political and media trends that already existed, and which online tech could amplify by some orders of magnitude.

Even so. The damage is very real.

One standard technique is to use attack bots to find a wedge issue and weaponise it by raising the temperature from both sides.

This can easily be automated now, so we're well past the point where literal humanity is the most important element.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#174

Post by vrganj »

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)…

You can see this playing out right now, with X spreading holocaust denial and all sorts of corrosive messages in Europe, with it's owner being actively hostile to European institutions and the US government actively guarding it from consequences.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#175

Post by DonHopkins »

krapp wrote: post #168
malwrar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

There’s a great moment from the Pirate Bay trial that captures this:

Lawyer: "When was the first time you met IRL?"

Peter Sunde: "We don't use the expression IRL. We say AFK."

Judge: "IRL?"

Lawyer: "In real life."

Peter Sunde: "We don't like that expression. We say AFK — Away From Keyboard. We think that the internet is for real."

— Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay trial (as shown in TPB AFK)

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard; Directed by Simon Klose (2013).

https://archive.org/details/TpbAfkThePirateBayAwayFromKeyboa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPB_AFK

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#176

Post by artyom »

Look, I agree with a good part of this article. I also agree that the whole "unregulated internet" is terrible for humankind in general. Crypto is a scam. Meta should be, plain and simple, shut down. Twitter is a madhouse. The list is endless.

However, every single time I feel like stricter regulation should be in place, a congressman speaks about "servers"... and yeah, maybe not.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#177

Post by scuff3d »

armchairhacker wrote: post #158
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?

Three out of four of the top comments don't even directly engage with the point of the article. They're focusing on nitpicking elements of it or just going off on a tangent only somewhat related.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#178

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

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…

The corpolibertarians are betting massively on AI to liberate them from the working class and in their wake, transforming societies and economies as needed. I think this long term goal is delusional and the day of the pitchforks is coming. They can't endlessly fabricate distractive images of enemies, like migrants or what ever, while inflating budgets and claims about the future.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#179

Post by pdonis »

tolerance wrote: post #142
pdonis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> If you've debated any dualists

Dualists in what sense? Mind-body dualists?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#180

Post by pdonis »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #152
pdonis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 garde…

> Everything that Meta owns is either copyright

How so? As I understand it, their terms of service (which of course nobody reads, but they're there) say that anything you post on their sites becomes their property, not yours.

> proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright

No, predicated on not letting other people see the source code. That would be true even if copyrights didn't exist.

> that's the thing I'm arguing against

I'm quite willing to consider arguments against copyrights and patents. But I don't think "abolishing copyrights and patents will make the tech giants behave, or at least take away a bunch of their power" is such an argument. As I said in my previous post, as long as they continue to get the government favoritism they have now, they won't care if copyrights and patents are abolished.

> That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals.

Again, "corporations" is an extremely broad term. A mom and pop restaurant is a corporation. And yes, it "outcompetes individuals" in the sense that a restaurant where one person tried to do every single task probably wouldn't work very well. But that doesn't make the corporation formed to operate the mom and pop restaurant a bad thing.

> Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation.

I disagree, for reasons I've already given, but I don't see that we're going to resolve that here. I simply don't see copyrights as a significant moat for the big tech giants compared to the other thumbs that are on the scale in their favor.

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