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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#271

Post by Terr_ »

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…

IMO both are "best" depending on the task.

For getting an anxious or overstimulated driver from A to B, orienting relative to the direction of travel helps them not-mess-up by misunderstanding their direction of travel or missing their turn. It removes some information they aren't prepared to process anyway.

When the driver has more familiarity and will recognize when an important intersection is coming up, then locking North helps them contextualize the area relative to other major landmarks like highways, lakes, etc.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#272

Post by BlackFly »

txrx0000 wrote: post #230
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…

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…

The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#273

Post by antonvs »

jpk wrote: post #213
vrganj wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> "Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs

The quote is a direct reference to a core tenet of Marxist theory, socialism, and communism.

Historically, communal ownership at scale has almost always been implemented via a centralized state, which has tended to gravitate towards authoritarianism. The Soviet Union and East Germany, and many other countries along those lines, didn't really fit the "hippy co-op" image very well.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#274

Post by andai »

Cider9986 wrote: post #227
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.

Sturgeon's Law. 99% of everything is shit.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#275

Post by roenxi »

goda90 wrote: post #262
roenxi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. I doubt many individuals actually changed their opinions. Just that a large crowd of previously-silent people decided AI is a threat to them and they can attack it on copyright grounds. The AI revolution is a great argument against copyright law. The US's lax enforcement means that the incredible, world-changing tech could…

Why do you think we're all better off?

The reasons that jump out at me are that, as a society, we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort, provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost, revolutionise research and it looks like we're going to be able to get a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management which is huge in and of itself. The wins seem like they're going to be big.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#276

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue

This gets referred to as the "moderation issue" because its true cause is too inconvenient.

Algorithms that promote engagement also tend to promote conflict. The major services want people spending more time on their service looking at ads, so they promote engagement and therefore conflict.

The cause of it isn't the decentralized internet, it's the centralized corporate feed.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#277

Post by AnthonyMouse »

BlackFly wrote: post #272
txrx0000 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.

Shills don't need anonymity. They can troll and astroturf just fine under their real names, or the names of the people they're paying to shill for them, because there is no one who comes in the night to put a bag over your head for shilling for the establishment.

The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#278

Post by pocksuppet »

chairmansteve wrote: post #261
armchairhacker wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Because of onerous regulations, the EU has much less startups". That old trope. Is that also the reason Miami or St. Louis have less startups? I have started companies in the UK. The process is about the same as in the USA. The problem in Europe is that there is a lot less VC capital. Just like in Miami. It had nothing to do with regulation.

One reason there's less VC capital because they don't control the world reserve currency like the US does, so they can't just print money and export inflation. Thankfully the current US leadership is intent on resolving this discrepancy.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#279

Post by GaryBluto »

gardnr wrote: post #209

I have a suspicion most Libertarians are actually something else but who haven't realized it yet. When you really dig into it: idea of private property (as in owning land and charging people rent for using it) is akin to slavery (owning people and extracting labor from them). The pre-colonial indigenous structures of managing societies were much more aligned with my internal values but they are poorly defined in mode…

> idea of private property (as in owning land and charging people rent for using it) is akin to slavery (owning people and extracting labor from them)

Utter nonsense. Do you think eating fruit is akin to cannibalism because they both involve the consumption of something?

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#280

Post by GaryBluto »

tosti wrote: post #102
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…

Hi George. Have you seen RoboCop? A free market survival-of-the-fittest gets us closer to a dystopian 1984-like society. Overregulation will also do that. Regulation isn't exactly at odds with freedom. One could certainly regulate freedom in order to foster it. I agree on the "information wants to be free" aspect. In the early days of the Internet, it felt like a free as in freedom shadow world where anyone could do…

> Have you seen RoboCop?

Out of curiosity, why cite a 1980s action film?

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