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

281–290 of 418 posts

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#281

Post by zozbot234 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #173
zozbot234 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense. I disagree. By meaningful real-world standards , the average Internet space is in fact extremely humane and polite. People will bring up the random exceptions where groups of people absolutely hate one another and these hates eventually spill over into online spaces, but that's…

By meaningful real-world standards there are bot farms sowing dissent and literally driving people into mental illness which has already destroyed many families. At the same time there's the Cambridge Analytica/SCL strand where a corporation literally sells election fixing services that rely on data gathered from social media accounts. To be fair these are all extensions of political and media trends that already exi…

> there are bot farms sowing dissent

Junk messages trying to use "wedge issues" for attention are nothing new, they existed in the 1990s too. You underestimate just how transparent they are, even on modern-day social media which in many ways is a highly favorable environment to such tactics.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#282

Post by asymmetric »

bayleev wrote: post #56
skinfaxi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to keep secrets is a fundamental human right. Encryption is a technical protection against that violation, separate from legal consequences. Encryption means I can keep my secrets even if the government locks me up until I reveal the password. I don't see how it is a key driver of militarization and enhanced financialization.

In the above conceptualization, the protection of the often trivial secrets of individuals is often used as a kind of moral and informational camouflage for the actual re-orientation of power around secrets that really matter, i.e., bank account balances, account numbers, insider trading tips, etc. Hence why Apple markets their devices as protecting a fairly nebulous notion of privacy, it's not wrong, but it's not th…

What is the most interesting part of what happens?

I find your line of thought interesting but I’m not sure where you’re leading it.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#283

Post by frm88 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #170
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…

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…

The 2020s vision is more like a totalitarian transport network where you don't own the vehicle, you don't own the network, there's constant propaganda telling you how to structure your journey to the standard destinations, and deviation is becoming increasingly impossible.

And this is where the geopolitical aspect comes in and where an increasing number of studies calls this 'Digital Authoritarianism' with the stated goal of a nation or company (or both in cooperation) keeping control of the population, the narrative and the access to information.

An overview of the literature and studies on the subject: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02681102.2024.2...

A recent study that implicitely inverstigates the role of corporations in the trend: Digital Authoritarianism: from state control to algorithmic despotism https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5117399&... It's a bit long(ish), 29 pages (the last 10 are references) but worth a read.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#284

Post by trhway »

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.

>Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.

Even if it were so, it is still a win. Without anonymity there is no liberty to the weak at all. And thus for that liberty we must endure all the crap.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#285

Post by jstanley »

devilbunny wrote: post #181
Animats wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You could still push your position to the edge even if you don't rotate the map.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#286

Post by ece »

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 congressional technology committee Gingrich killed could've fixed this. You can't half ass democracy, you have to keep getting better at governing and convince people it's worth it.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#287

Post by chambers »

chambers wrote: post #268
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…

Humane, as a secular and universally applied sentiment, is a bit of a modern idea, once backed by common goods; shared institutions, third places, extended families, good economy, religion, etc. With those common goods fading, I see people more and more lashing out against each other; particularly in a frictionless environ that incites/outlets fantasy desires. The war of all against all from the safety of our screens…

One small edit: many also look to the Internet to meet their needs, beyond just fantasy or desire. Their lashing out comes after the disappointment: when the internet simply cannot fill the hole in them the way the common goods once did.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#288

Post by int27h-tsr »

>Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of the night trying to figure out where you are and where you are going.

And then the wolves ate your mules, your wife died of disentery, and you got raped by a grizzly bear. I remember those days too, and all those Oregon Trail kids showed up and ruined it all.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#289

Post by trhway »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #170
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…

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…

>The device is just an access port to the network. It's dumbed down, so even if you understand how it works you can't do much with it. And as AI becomes more prevalent, your ability to understand that will diminish further.

The device becomes a magic artifact. Like a palantir. Many fantasy stories look like there were (or still are somewhere out there) great people who made all the magical stuff in the story while the people in the story have no idea how that stuff works.

That is possibly the way our civilization going. Especially when the datacenters will be in space, and only the "dumb" Starlink like terminals on Earth.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#290

Post by vga1 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #277
BlackFly wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With anonymity, they can 1000000x their presence and thus the effectiviness of their message.
Post reply on HN