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

301–310 of 418 posts

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#301

Post by danaris »

pdonis wrote: post #89
ajross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having my entire music library on a single USB stick Worth pointing out how this too is an example of somewhat mistaken value analysis based on libertarian ideals. The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere. Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not. Which was one…

> The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere. Not in a free market (which is part of "libertarian ideals", or at least it's supposed to be). In a free market, there is no single "solution"--there are whatever solutions people are willing to pay more than they cost for. If you want your music in the cloud, and y…

But in real life, any time you have "a free market", by the definition of "no or minimal regulations", you will inevitably end up with a very un-free market, by the definition of "lots of choice for the consumer, healthy competition".

And far, far too many self-proclaimed libertarians think that any regulations that "encumber" the market take it farther away from being "free", when in fact, there are regulations that help and regulations that harm, and you have to be able to actually understand them and use human judgement, rather than thinking One Simple Rule can be applied in every situation without fail to achieve perfection.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#302

Post by danaris »

vladms wrote: post #109
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.

The more I think of it I thinkt that secrets are a tool of the rich and powerfull to keep the weak and poor subjugated. I for one think that a society with lots of transparency (think at least on financial transactions and wealth) would reach a more honest state. And there are examples where this actually works - like the stock exchange: people agree that to be able to take good decisions, the publicly listed compani…

I assure you, if, under the current system, everyone were required to reveal all our secrets

a) the rich and powerful would be able to use the secrets of the weak and poor to exploit and subjugate us even more

b) the rich and powerful would use their wealth and power to ensure that their secrets remained hidden, regardless of the law

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#303

Post by danaris »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #31
linuxhansl wrote: post #20

> Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation. This might be favorite metaphor ever, and one I'll quoting in the future! :) I think the author conflates social media with other inventions like a portable GPS device, an electronic map, a music player, or indeed a cell phone. As far as social media goes the author is (IMHO) spot on. You do not have to…

Democracy was better when the only viewpoints we were exposed to were from corporate media outlets? Are you sure about that? Better for whom?

I know it's (genuinely) hard to believe in this day and age, but pre-2000, and especially before the founding of Fox News in 1996, the news you got was much, much more likely to be genuine, with real investigative reporting that wasn't heavily interdicted by powerful and moneyed interests.

This is not to say there was no bias, nor that the powerful and moneyed interests had no influence—but it was much less than it is today. There was much more of a social norm of news being honest, factual, and relevant.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#304

Post by Permit »

pocksuppet wrote: post #201
malwrar wrote: post #135

It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. In the background, the wealthy and powerful disregard all of this and seem to do whatever they w…

Think it's just the hypocrisy. Either copyright for everybody or copyright for nobody is much more defensible than the current state of affairs, where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich. Some random guy in Nebraska had to pay $250,000 to a music company for downloading one MP3, but OpenAI can download all music that ever existed and pay nothing. Meanwhile they prosecute "Anna" who did the exact same…

> where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich.

This isn’t true. A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026. How they acquired those materials matters. Wealthy corporations hold no legal advantage in this space. For example, Anthropic recently settled for $1.5 billion due to acquiring books via piracy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...

My understanding is that an individual could likely pirate the same books without paying a dime (not due to differing legal standards but simply due to the fact it would be hard to identify them in many jurisdictions). In a practical sense it seems corporations are held to a higher standard in this regard.

The discrepancy is that some people equate training a model with piracy even though they are not the same thing. This is typically due to intellectual laziness (refusal to understand the differences) or willful misrepresentation (due to being an ideologically opposed to generative AI). No need to make such a mistake here though.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#305

Post by TFNA »

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.

Shilling by nation-level actors often involves paying South Asians or Africans to create profiles claiming to be an ordinary person from somewhere completely different. Or people in said countries may not even be paid by a geostrategic rival but are shilling because they identified profit potential in e.g. selling MAGA merchandise. Obvious what they do depends on pseudonymity, and would fall apart if their real names were shown.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#306

Post by danaris »

bluegatty wrote: post #75

Yes, and this is the paradox right at the heart of 'Hacker' in 'Hacker News' aka an arbitrary usurping of established norms - notably without moral impetus. Institutionalists view the very word 'Hacker' as 'Wrong' because they're essentially 'Rule Breakers'. But sometimes rules are bad, and need to be broken. Libertarians view rules as constraints, so why not break them? More often than not, rules are there fore a re…

> they say 'build something useful'.

Do they?

Or do they just say "build something that will make us money"?

Seems to me even "useful" would be more moral than the reality.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#307

Post by dgellow »

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.

The astroturfing relies mostly on anonymous users. The vast majority of trolling and shilling on Twitter and similar platforms is done with fake identities. So you have a few open shills who are using their real names, with massive campaigns enabled by anonymous/fake users

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#308

Post by dgellow »

TFNA wrote: post #305
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shilling by nation-level actors often involves paying South Asians or Africans to create profiles claiming to be an ordinary person from somewhere completely different. Or people in said countries may not even be paid by a geostrategic rival but are shilling because they identified profit potential in e.g. selling MAGA merchandise. Obvious what they do depends on pseudonymity, and would fall apart if their real names…

> would fall apart if their real names were shown

I don’t think that’s true, unfortunately. You have lots of cases of major propaganda accounts found to be foreign actors and pretty much nothing happened to them

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#309

Post by dgellow »

trhway wrote: post #294
vga1 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was probably a bad goal anyway. Anonymity turned out to be a great tool for fascists, and privacy is not going to save anyone if the fascist shit properly hits the fan.

The opposing voices is what stops fascism. Without anonymity there are no opposing voices.

That‘s something I believed 10 years ago, I honestly don’t see how that position can still be defended. What happened is the fascists benefited so much more from anonymity than any opposition.

But I also don’t expect that removing anonymity would in itself improve the current world, things are at a point where people living in democracies are openly advocating for the destruction of every single liberal ideals. Sure that’s in part astroturfed by anonymous accounts but way too many people couldn’t care less if they real identity would be linked to those claims

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#310

Post by wallst07 »

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.

This is more of a Analog vs Digital debate?

There are people who spend A LOT of money on audio systems keeping them 100% analog (no DACs).

Post reply on HN