> I was young enough that I also thought "Snow Crash" was a serious political document.
Is snow crash worth reading in 2026? I bought it forever ago and it’s sitting in my shelf
The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
211–220 of 418 posts
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#212> I was young enough that I also thought "Snow Crash" was a serious political document. Is snow crash worth reading in 2026? I bought it forever ago and it’s sitting in my shelf
Of course it is.
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs, or something, which is probably why it sounds unattainable. But if you reorient that to something more along the lines of, "the Mullvad of hosted llama.cpp", then it actually doesn't seem that far out of reach.
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
> 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. Ayn Rand is not consensus within libertarian circles. From the top if my head on the libertarian camp I think of Rothbard, Hayek, Mises, Menger, Von Bawerk who debunked Marx economic policies. Also argua…
Most right-libertarians will point to Ayn Rand as their philosophical north star. It's the only "philosopher" name mentioned in the OP. It's comical and unserious.
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#215Also old enough to have been pre-internet: > Paper maps were absolutely horrible… No, and still not horrible. I jeep a trucker's atlas in my van for road trips. Siri and Google Maps (Gigi, we call her) don't seem to realize I want to stay on interstates making distance. Wandering some two-lane country road diagonally through Kansas might save me 10 minutes but having oncoming traffic and the possibility of a rock int…
>> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.
>Except for creating portable playlists, sure.
I think it was the frontman for Phish that said something like “metal sounds great on cassette”, referring to 80’s thrash, and I have to agree. I’m sure part of it is nostalgia, but I feel like 70’s rock/prog sounds perfect on vinyl, and 80’s thrash sounds great on cassette.
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#216I 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…
>has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense. I never saw this as surprising because cyber-libertarianism reads like Gnosticism to me. Even in the sentence you quoted there's already the subtext of being left out "more human than your government" etc. (odd choice of possessive for a man who was campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney) The people who were into this stuff tended to have an unhealthy relations…
> tended to have an Enders Game psychology of feeling both inferior and superior at the same time
I’ve read Ender’s Game about 20 years ago, but I don’t remember that being a theme in the novel. Could you elaborate what you mean here?
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> The libertarian conception is that groups of people can form hierarchical corporations that compete directly with individuals in the marketplace.
I think a principled libertarian would say that a corporation is nothing but a set of individuals who are working towards the same ends ;)
> It depends on the anarchist what that means in practice.
Does it ever. The gap between a social anarchist and an individualistic one is just as large as the gap between a socialist and a capitalist. Or at least, people argue as if it is :P
> which is also what you get from an unregulated market of corporations
A right leaning libertarian would argue that actual monopolies are rare and short lived, and can only be sustained by something like a state which can prevent competitors from entering the market and otherwise provide support through laws like copyright.
> It's incredibly rare to hear copyright's role in our society even described, let alone criticized; even though that role is incredibly significant.
Yep. It's one of the foundational pillars of our economy.
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 corpor…
No, I live in a country under the Westminster system.
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#219Note that at least Negroponte (mentioned in the article once) also had Epstein ties. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media...
Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
#220Maybe 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 n…
Yea it should have been IPv8 from day one. It almost feels like IPv6 was a psyop.