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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#181

Post by devilbunny »

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…

1) Only 10%?

2) I can read either way, but with a road map what’s in front of you is generally more important than what’s behind you. By selecting the rotating map you don’t just get a rotating map - you get your position pushed to the edge of the screen instead of being centered, which means much more information is visible about the space in front of you. I switched views strictly for this effect.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#182

Post by tkel »

thinking_cactus wrote: post #143

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 libert…

It makes sense when you understand the origins, "libertarian" as a phrase was coopted from socialist-libertarians (now called anarchists), and is full of contradictions and hypocrises, mainly the one you mentioned about private property (in the economic sense of the term), controlling economic organizations as a dictator and owning their collective output as property. Not to mention this type of property is pretty anti-social can only exist with a massive bureaucracy and violence apparatus (courts and cops) which also contradicts their ideology.

I mean, their foundational philosophy is Ayn Rand, a fiction writer? The whole right-libertarian ideology is a joke compared to the intellectual rigor of anarchist theorists like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.

Especially in a world where the entire global economy is controlled by capitalists, it looks silly and just ends up affirming capitalist rule, like the OP has pointed out.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#183

Post by tolerance »

pdonis wrote: post #179
tolerance wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's right.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#184

Post by grumbel »

georgehotz wrote: post #29

Maybe it's just my contrarian nature, but this sells me on cyberlibertarianism. There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server, downloading free software to run it, getting your friends to view it, building encrypted communication apps that no government can crack, pirating any piece of content in the world, etc... A libertarian society won't coddle you, and there's psychopaths like Meta who show up in t…

> There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server

Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway.

That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#185

Post by cmrdporcupine »

"We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong."

I mean and others were swimming around in the same IRC, Usenet, and LambdaMOO etc soup in the early 90s, too, and in the mid 90s I was already screaming about what bullshit techno-libertarian capitalism was, but OK. I didn't live in the Bay Area, I guess I just never caught the disease.

My strident same-ish topic text from the same period back then that I waved annoyingly around, instead, was "The Californian Ideology": https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An...

That one has aged a hell of a lot better. And argues exactly the opposite positions on just about everything. God it feels prophetic now.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#186

Post by 01100011 »

There's a strong overlap between technopositivists who view the world through a very narrow lens of the problems they are trying to solve and libertarians who also have a very narrow view based on problems they are trying to solve(taxation, fettered liberty, gov waste, etc).

I don't want to say it's autism, but they both seem to stem from a very low-dimensional understanding of the world. I get it, having been in both camps in the 90s/early 2000s. I got a reminder of it the other day when I saw Benn Jordan pimping anarchism on his YouTube channel. It reminds me of how I thought of the world as a teenager before I understood the nuances and trade-offs of reality.

It's really hard for me to understand an adult who thinks that way. Anarchism and to some degree libertarianism are both heavily tilted towards the strong and any sort of lack of government authority and coercion will soon be replaced with private entities acting far worse. I wish it were not that way, but that is the universe we find ourselves in.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#187

Post by thomastjeffery »

pdonis wrote: post #180
thomastjeffery wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Yes. Is there something confusing about what I said about that? They own the copyright for your data, and leverage that copyright to isolate your social interactions into their ad platform moat.

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

Yes and no. Copyright also disallows us from de-compiling something and publishing any changes. As an aside, if I ever get this subjective computing idea to work (or LLMs pan out), that distinction will be gone, too...

The main argument, though, is that the data, not the platform itself, is what is monopolized. It doesn't matter what software you use to play a video file (Netflix), buy a book (Amazon), or chat with your friends (Facebook), so long as those interactions can be monopolized. Copyright facilitates just that by enforcing the ownership of the data.

> Again, "corporations" is an extremely broad term.

Yes, so? A mom & pop business is not an individual. A fortune 500 company is not an individual. Is one worse than the other? Certainly. Is one a different category of thing? No. That's the point. The individual is not liberated in a marketplace where they must join (or fail to compete with) a corporation.

> I disagree, for reasons I've already given

You disagree that Amazon leverages their ownership of market listing copyrights to facilitate their private ownership of the Amazon marketplace? What else are they?

I don't disagree with your other complaints, but they all seem to be predicated on Amazon already existing as a profitable business with a strong enough political position to abuse. Is that not the case?

> but I don't see that we're going to resolve that here.

Isn't my perspective worth your consideration at all? This whole time, you have centered your focus on nitpicking what a libertarian believes, or what you believe to be the important problem. Do I get a turn? If not, why bother commenting?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#188

Post by prinny_ »

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…

I doubt AI can educate the masses simply because the masses would have to prompt it to educate them. Almost no one in my social circle knows, let alone understands Google’s recent work on pushing web attestation, or any other tech company’s power plays enforced on us. They are people blindly hitting accept all in every banner that pops up in their online journeys or use chat apps that blatantly spy on them.

They don’t know what they could have or why the new captcha is funny, thus they can never come up with a prompt that leads to them being educated on the matter. They would have to know that they don’t know and since there is no public discourse for such matters in their Facebook timelines, their thinly right wing digital news outlets and their Viber and what’s app chats they will never know that they don’t know.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#189

Post by bluegatty »

iamnothere wrote: post #133
pdonis wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"don’t break norms “just because”, they do it only in specific circumstances based on a calculus."

No - I didn't suggest 'just because', and Libertarians reject norms not 'on a specific basis' - they reject the nature of the limiting impetus on their expression.

Norms are by by default bad and can only be justified in a narrow sense.

Critically, there is no moral impetus but the expression of one self. There is no 'greater good', 'community good', or even 'greater morality' beyond selfish desire.

Rules and norms are only seen through that lens.

Yes - 'rights' can be viewed as norms under most libertarian thought but only to the extent it supposedly protects individual will.

These ideas are useful tool, especially when concerned with materially oppressive systems (such as those Ayn Rand lived through in Soviet Union) but morally and practically bereft or at least lacking outside of more authoritarian systems.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#190

Post by pdonis »

tolerance wrote: post #183
pdonis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you've debated any dualists Dualists in what sense? Mind-body dualists?

That's right.

Ah, ok. I can't say I've ever argued with any in person, but of course there's a vast philosophical literature full of such arguments, of which I've read a fair amount. As far as I can tell, no such argument has ever really changed anyone's mind.
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