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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

matduggan.com

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#221

Post by dleslie »

lc9er wrote: post #215
JKCalhoun wrote: post #191

Also 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.

I have been converting old tapes to digital and they do sound both different and better.

I think there's an aspect of this format having been a target for professional mixing. But there's also the background hiss and the warping of rolling tape and the low fidelity of the heads... It all mixes together nicely for a dirtier sound.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#222

Post by pstuart »

Lerc wrote: post #137
pstuart wrote: post #10

What? No mention of Web3? Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers. Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people ?

I feel like using Curtis Yarvin as an argument against tech solutions is like using Terry Davis as an argument against Christianity.

No, I'm using Web3 as an argument against "tech solutions" and named Curtis Yarvin, a figurehead of technofeudalism, as a representative of technofeudalism.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#223

Post by Barrin92 »

p-e-w wrote: post #216
Barrin92 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Sure, for the long and more articulate version I'd point to this excellent essay by John Kessel (https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating...)

but in short, Ender is the archetypal victim hero. He's always bullied, tormented, abused but also stronger, more intelligent, more emotionally deep and yet always remains the victim who even when inflicting planet scale violence remains ostensibly innocent. This is also the stereotypical young adult show anime protagonist or the fantasy of the bullied high school nerd.

And that really is the psychology you'll find with a lot of folks of the 90s libertarian internet circle in particular those who amassed a lot of money and power.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#224

Post by nerdsniper »

pocksuppet wrote: post #195
schoen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

ICTs? ("Information and Communication Technology" does not make sense here)

ICT is correct. It’s the economic bucket that Facebook, Google, etc are categorized under for export accounting. “Social Media” would have worked in its placed.”

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#225

Post by Lerc »

pstuart wrote: post #222
Lerc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like using Curtis Yarvin as an argument against tech solutions is like using Terry Davis as an argument against Christianity.

No, I'm using Web3 as an argument against "tech solutions" and named Curtis Yarvin, a figurehead of technofeudalism, as a representative of technofeudalism.

Perhaps I should rephase then.

I think Curtis Yarvin(And indeed Davis) are not a representative example of any particular idea. Pathologies perhaps, but while the symptoms of such things have enough similarities to identify them, they do not manifest in a way that can characterise a typical expression of the phenomenon. To do so can be dangerous, and result in management of a set of symptoms rather than the cause.

Put into the context of Terry Davis. Terry was not racist because he was Christian, and neither is it true to say that people with schizophrenia will be racist. It was a complex and unique manifestation. I think Curtis Yarvin has a similar level of incomparability

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#226

Post by schoen »

vrganj wrote: post #174
schoen wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which part of my comment do you relate this to?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#227

Post by Cider9986 »

artyom wrote: post #176

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.

Hey, just because 99% of cryptocurrencies are a scam doesn't mean that crypto as a whole is a scam.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#228

Post by a_victorp »

nozzlegear wrote: post #210
pocksuppet wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU seems to have a different take. As I understand it, regulations are much more malleable in Europe. When problems arise, regulations are put in place. When regulations are problems... it takes a lot longer to remove them, but can still happen eventually. Nothing like the USian deadlock system. And when they do write them, it's always about general principles. The GDPR doesn't speak of cookie consent banners, in…

> USian American. Please avoid the childish term "USian" unless you're going to commit to calling people from South Africa "SAian" too.

To be fair, "american" could refer to anything made in the American continent (North, Central and South America)

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#229

Post by a_victorp »

scuff3d wrote: post #177
armchairhacker wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you! I was trying to find someone pointing this out

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#230

Post by txrx0000 »

lampiaio wrote: post #51
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 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…

I will add, for those that lost the plot: the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location, and therefore people cannot be physically persecuted for what they think and say.

We're far from achieving this goal, and we underestimated our opponents by a lot. But it would be foolish to blame the Barlows of the world instead of blaming the tyrants and corporate opportunists that go to great lengths [0] to sabotage and interfere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

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