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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#321

Post by txrx0000 »

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.

Bots are only an issue for public posts, not chat groups and DMs where the most valuable interactions happen. Ideally chats would be encrypted, untraceable, and anonymous, except to the people you're talking to. Anonymity is an overwhelmingly positive feature there.

For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlled social media platforms of today. But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion. Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out. And if you want to customize the feed, we could make client-side filters and algorithms. There could be an open-source algorithm called "Hacker News" that you can just download and install into your open-source social media client.

As for keeping the powerful in check, don't forget that we've kind of lost equality before the law at this point, as shown by the Epstein saga. If we try to remove anonymity from the Internet right now, it will only be used to surveil regular citizens but not the people we need to keep in check. I would happily support a law that selectively enforces the other way around, though: let's mandate real identity for all government personnel online and expose their Polymarket accounts.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#322

Post by zahlman »

This is the first I've seen anyone coin the term "cyberlibertarianism".

The argument presented doesn't seem at all specific to cyber-anything. It's just a typical argument contra libertarianism, at a typical level of uncharitability.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#323

Post by goda90 »

roenxi wrote: post #275
goda90 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort

According to Jevon's paradox[0], this would lead to more consumption of resources. We're already straining at the limits of the Earth. Depletion and collapse won't be good for anyone.

> provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost

Given every LLM's propensity to hallucinate, the only quality advice is that which can be followed back to a human expert-vetted source. But we already have people who don't check sources and get bad advice.

> revolutionise research

Maybe, but AI is also being used in a mass spread of misinformation.

> a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management

I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but from what I'm seeing so far, this looks like it will massively increase wealth disparity, which is bad for most people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#324

Post by vga1 »

trhway wrote: post #296
vga1 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that once we reach fascism, the opposing voices stop mattering. I think it's naive to think that anything happening in the digital world can properly fight that. And since technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism, it's not a net good anymore.

>technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism looks like we're talking different fascisms. I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes.

>looks like we're talking different fascisms.

Okay, what fascism are you talking about? I'm talking about the actual rising fascism that we see right now and which has boosted its influence via social media by a lot.

>I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes.

No worries, I've learned not to be offended by people being wrong.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#325

Post by krapp »

flomo wrote: post #251
krapp wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!)

>This term was how 'true leftists' would separate themselves from the Soviet Union and 'old communism'.

Soviet communism is different from Maoist communism, which is different from Juche. Every political model has variations in terms of ideology and execution, and they do evolve over time. It is correct to differentiate between Chinese communism and Soviet communism just as it's correct to distinguish between European and US capitalism.

>Or as Chomsky says, USA is also state capitalist, so could be anyone!

I think an argument can be made that the US is headed in China's direction in that regard, yes.

Rigid political taxonomies tend to lead to thought-terminating cliches, which is why they get deployed in propaganda. Reality tends to be more subtle. Socialism can exist within capitalism, and capitalism within socialism. Communism can be authoritarian, and it can be so egalitarian that it collapses (as happened with many communes in the 1960s.) Communists can be ideological enemies in the same way as Christians, Muslims and Jews, despite ostensibly having the same origin. And plenty of self-described free market capitalists would love for America to have free economic zones like Shenzhen.

Whatever China is, it does seem to be more capitalist than communist to me.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#326

Post by TrackerFF »

Many followers of cyberlibertarianism see themselves as potential cyberlords, who can rule over their fiefdoms, but still under the protection of the king (state/government).

The hypocrisy becomes apparent when these entities grow large, and suddenly need state help to suppress competition.

Phase 1: Skirt laws, move fast and break things. Regulations should be abolished. Steal as much as you can, if it means growth.

Phase 2: Lobby politicians, beg for certain regulations to keep out competitors when you've become a monopoly.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#327

Post by Arainach »

txrx0000 wrote: post #321
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.

Bots are only an issue for public posts, not chat groups and DMs where the most valuable interactions happen. Ideally chats would be encrypted, untraceable, and anonymous, except to the people you're talking to. Anonymity is an overwhelmingly positive feature there. For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlle…

> Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out

This has never been true and never will be. Entities with more resources have dramatically more ability to put their perspective out and dominate the messaging.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#328

Post by watwut »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #88
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…

A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, and it accepts that the state needs to be fair and predictable. I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state. And I would argue that that is h…

> A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force,

It does not accept that. In particular, libertarians are very ok with domestic violence.

Quite a lot of libertanism is all about creating conditions where poorer or weaker people have no realistic recourse.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#329

Post by watwut »

dehsge wrote: post #141
slopinthebag wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of input we have is virtually zero. I have never had a candidate I felt represented me, I have never had a candidate who I voted for win an election, and I have never had a a party who the candidate voted for win an election. Thus my minuscule "input" had absolutely zero impact, both in elections and on my life as a whole. The reason democracy is better than other forms of governance is that it provides in…

If you are in the US. Proportionate representation stopped completely with the Reapportionment Act of 1929. Subsequently the tail end of the gilded age and enacted in June 18, only 5months before the crash of oct 1929. Constitutionally the size of the US government was expected to scale proportionally with population and 3/5ths of slaves. This is why your vote ‘feels’ meaningless. We have been under a state of corpor…

The 3/5 of slave population vote were given to the slaveholders. It was not proportional, it was giving structural advantage to pro-slavery side of it.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#330

Post by jhbadger »

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 think the detail of Barlow being Dick Cheney's former campaign manager was a very useful addition to the narrative though. Barlow (through his Grateful Dead connections) is generally presented as an idealistic, if a bit naive, hippie akin to Richard Stallman. That doesn't really square with being Cheney's supporter.
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