The boiling frog of digital freedom

I know that Upton Sinclair quote. Who pays my salary?

I could say the same about you. I realize who pays the salary of many of the startups that go through YC. The venture CAPITALISTS do. The Web2 ecosystem that banks at the same bank (Silicon Valley) and had a bank run on that bank kicked off by Peter “build a monopoly” Thiel. You support that ecosystem, and therefore are against any decentralized alternatives. Do you support Palantir and precrime as well?

Perhaps the above doesn’t describe you, only a bunch of tech bros like you in the very shareholder-based ecosystem that has led to the Big Tech oligopoly and is the subject of “boiling the frog” we are talking about. But then again, you are doing the same to me, assuming things based on whatever “Web3” means to you.

First you trot out incoherent strawmen about proof of work and shitcoins. Then, when I point out the issues with what you say, you do an adhominem.

You continue to be deluded. I just got through criticizinf hyper-capitalism like Thiel’s that would make many capitalists blush. Then I proceeded to advocate alternatives that fit the dictionary definition of “libertarian socialism”. You turn around and call that hyper-capitalism.

Well, how about this… in your system, you have monopolies and hardly any competition. It’s digital Feudalism. You are like the slaves supporting the system because the slavemasters were kinda good to you. In the system I advocate, everyone is competing to provide better infrastructure (hosting, security, storage etc) and you are not locked in. There is redundancy, no single point of failure. And no one can usurp power easily.

>All shitcoin uses inordinate amounts of energy and resources to do wasteful calculations to prove a thing.

Sigh. You sound like you’re in 2013. Are you talking about Bitcoin? Because I had the same criticisms of it since before you were in crypto. I made them publicly in ArsTechnica and was covered in the BBC, Newsweek, etc back in 2018. We actually experimented with allowing people to do Monero mining as a way to pay for our apps, and the whole thing went bad pretty quickly and we removed it for precisely this reason. I called out the incentives publicly 5 years ago:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there...

You seem to ignore that every other coin besides Bitcoin and Monero doesnt fit your description, let alone the other distributed systems…

> And in every case, the whole network is actually run by a quorum on the backend. The breathless claims of "decentralized" arent even defensible.

Really? “The whole network” of Dat/Hypercore and Bittorrent and IPFS and safenet are run “by a quorum”? You should read up a bit more on what distributed hash tables are before spouting such nonsense.

Your response is to throw shade and FUD it without engaging in anything approaching substantive, intellectually honest discussion. I back up everything I say with myriad examples that illustrate general patterns. I have arrived at this position by battle-testing my ideas and being open to changing my mind. Are you?

Saying “you’re wrong and deluded” and declaring “it aint” unilaterally isn’t actual substantive argument. It’s just asserting bias.

That’s the neat thing! For most people, you don’t! Until it breaks and you need to fix it, and the manufacturer is out-of-business. But then you can present that strange schematic to your local electronics repairer who can fix it up with a few spare commodity components.

> Client attestation also prevents bots(both good & bad bots of all types including new search indexing bots) from accessing websites. This has a nice side-effect for Google that it restricts building a new search engine(a competitor) without its blessing. Search is a gateway to Google's advertising.

Um, no. Let's imagine a world where Chrome starts warning about "websites that don't support WEI". What does that actually mean? At most it'd mean warning about websites that don't request an attestation. It cannot possibly be a warning about how the website uses the attestation, or whether it even uses it. So in this world where you imagine that Google Search can attest that a request is coming from their crawler, and every site in the world has been strongarmed into requesting an attestation by the mustache-twirling villains at Chrome, nothing about crawlability by smaller search engines has changed. Other search engines can provide their own attestations, and the sites can choose whether to trust them. Websites can choose to ignore the attestations entirely.

> Like any product that any company introduces, it is to drive adoption? The more websites use it, the more normalized and legitimate WEI becomes.

Normalized and legitimate in whose view? Why do they need that legitimacy? It's normally an invisible feature to the users. If it ships in Chrome and is available for Google to use for protecting their own properties against abuse, that's all they really need. They want to make the mechanism available for other sites and other browsers, but not because that third-party adoption is particularly important.

The reality is, anyone with an anti-abuse problem will be delighted to have this signal available, especially as the browser fingerprinting surface will keep shrinking over the next few years. There will be no need to coerce sites to use the API.

It's just a really stupid idea. High visiblity, absurdily high risk of a backlash (having it be a security warning would be obviously untrue), and all for literally no rewards. I will happily take a bet at 100:1 odds that this prediction will not become true. It will not happen by 2027 like the author thinks. It will not happen by 2033. And if that's really the most realistic threat to digital freedom that you can envision, we're in a pretty good shape.

The difference is, culturally that didn't go too well with people so hating in MaBell was a thing. Enough so that it forced politicians to enforce anti-trust laws and break it up, eliminating all these restrictions.

I fear there is no political backbone today to do anything to the monopolists that own the hardware we "buy" from them.