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

251–260 of 418 posts

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#251

Post by flomo »

krapp wrote: post #148
bilbo0s wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the old adage that democracy was never good, it was always just better than all the other forms of government. It got more done. It advanced economies more. Etc etc etc. Then we torched it at just about the same time as the Chinese came along with a new form of government that I'm not sure the world has as yet even given a proper name. (I guess we can call it Communism? But everyone kind of knows that it's noth…

>Then we torched it at just about the same time as the Chinese came along with a new form of government that I'm not sure the world has as yet even given a proper name. (I guess we can call it Communism? But everyone kind of knows that it's nothing like.) I think the term is "state capitalism." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism )

This term was how 'true leftists' would separate themselves from the Soviet Union and 'old communism'. So imo, China is something else. (Or as Chomsky says, USA is also state capitalist, so could be anyone!)

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#252

Post by troad »

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…

> Urgency, expectations… too high these days.

Hear hear.

I was amused to watch the trajectory of all my older relatives, from "I don't understand why you spend all your time on that computer" to "I texted you some idle shower thought ten minutes ago, and it's frankly rude that you haven't replied yet".

Lots of people seem to have lost all sense of perspective.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#253

Post by bentley »

flomo wrote: post #240
chasd00 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, you have a compass. Just drive South until you reach the Gulf of Mexico, then drive East until you reach the Atlantic ocean, then drive South until you reach where you're going ( it will be daylight by then ). /edit i guess it could be possible to drive South and end up in key west but it will be daylight long before you run out of road.

Did people really carry a compass? (and did it even work inside a car? I think you could get one to stick on the mirror.)

It wasn’t uncommon for cars to have a compass built in.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#254

Post by flomo »

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…

Google and Apple maps are terrible at showing you back roads which actually go through. So I carry Delorme Atlas books. On the other hand, I'm glad I no longer need a Thomas Guide (or whatever your local urban mapbook was called.)

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#256

Post by bluefirebrand »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #238
washingupliquid wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stopped submitting quality reports to Apple Maps because they're all met with "while we couldn't make the change you suggested, we hope you continue to waste your time reporting these". The issues are egregious too, like blatantly incorrect lane guidance that would send you in the wrong direction, or diverting me off a highway onto an unmarked, narrow country road that no one with any knowledge of the local road…

Google Maps isn’t much better. Outside of major population centres, you have to fight with it to keep you on major highway. Google and Apple both prefer “efficient” routes with unsealed roads that are 4WD only, impassible when wet, have no services, no mobile coverage, and where if you need medical help it literally comes by aeroplane.[1] [1] https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/

Google maps has a spelling mistake on a major road in Calgary which is amusing to me but probably confusing to newcombers

The road is called Macleod Trail

Parts of it are in the Google Maps api as "Macleod Trial"

It's very obvious when the voice directions read it out, too

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#257

Post by BrenBarn »

Many of the central points here (in particular the quote about conflating individual freedom with that of large companies) are in no way specific to the internet, or to technology at all. The cyberlibertarian idea that me personally being free means I can use my giant company to do whatever I want is bad, because the plain unprefixed libertarian idea of the same is bad. There are things about technology, especially software-oriented technology, that highlight that badness, but the badness is there all the time.

What I think we are seeing in the world today are the consequences of the fallacy of believing that the goodness of freedom is independent of its scale --- that no matter who or what entity we are talking about, it is good for them to have freedom. That simply doesn't make sense. Rather, the greater the potential an entity has to do harm, the less should be its freedom.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#258

Post by troad »

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…

> Not sure what's going on here, but this reads like 90s cosplay.

This reads like Reddit-style "debunk" culture to me.

Improbable things happen. They happen often, because even if the individual improbable thing is itself improbable, the sum total probability of improbable events is high enough that some improbable event happens to all of us with regularity.

Yes, people actually used to get lost. Take a wrong turn, lose your bearings, and you're on some dust road in a corn field. Car GPS did not meaningfully exist. Many people (then, as now) can barely read a map. Highway signage can be busy and confusing. People are young and inexperienced and tired.

Literally any single person who drove before the smartphone era will be able to recount a story to you of getting lost at least once.

> This was certainly before the opioid epidemic and probably also before the heyday of meth. So shirtless guy was probably just a shirtless Kentuckian checking if OP was OK.

Note how this sort of thing is not actually debunking anything in the article, OP said nothing about opioids or the shirtless man's motivation. All we know is that (a) OP awoke in a car in an unfamiliar place, (b) a shirtless stranger hovered over OP, (c) OP found this disconcerting. It's such a tell-tale sign of Reddit-style debunk culture to "fact check" recounts by inventing details, wildly hypothesising, and then "fact checking" their own wild hypotheses against a Wikipedia-level understanding of the situation.

It profoundly annoys me to see such a pedestrian response to an interesting and thoughtful piece. It adds nothing. It actively detracts, in that people with interesting things to share equivocate over doing so, because they cannot be bothered dealing with this lowly form of engagement. And so we get a sea of Redditors and their worthless "well akshually"s drowning out the actual human experiences that are actually worth reading.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#259

Post by Lerc »

pstuart wrote: post #246
Lerc wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Pu…

I was commenting about "cyberlibertarianism" -- which is actively embraced and promoted by SV technocrats. Yarvin very much is a public figure in this area, but it's not about him specifically, it's the Web3 gang that wants to replace democracy with their shiny toys. Put it on the blockchain, problem solved!

Jeffery Epstein was a very prominent financier, but if you pointed to him as an example of a financier I would suspect you are doing so due to properties that are not intrinsic to being a financier. I think you are doing this with Yarvin, unless you truly believe that cyber libertarianism can only ever be supported by far-right racists.

It's a classic Hitler was a vegetarian argument.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#260

Post by armchairhacker »

pocksuppet wrote: post #199
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.

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…

Because of onerous regulations, the EU has much less startups. You may think that’s good, but I’m sure some missed-potential startups would’ve improved QOL. They at least would’ve increased the EU’s economy and internet control and decreased its dependence on the US.
Post reply on HN