The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism • Hacker News Board

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#351

Post by _0ffh » Sun, May 10, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #266

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 hadn’t heard of Barlow or these articles prior to this post but after reading them all I am left with the same question I have for every libertarian, cyber or otherwise. When the corporation that runs as a planned economy with only a few unaccountable leaders at the top has as much power as any other existing government, what makes them any different in terms of morality or “goodness”? I have never gotten a coheren…

The corporation (that runs internally as a planned economy) will get more and more inefficient the larger it gets, because that is what planning an economy does. Which in turn means it will loose market share and be forced to lean up until it is competitive again.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#352

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sun, May 10, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

Well the "libertarianism" part is the clue. They were always the corporations.

The essay briefly mentions "Open Source" which of course was the corporate friendly rebrand of Free Software.

I'd quibble about the copyright/patents part. This was a time when large corporations were "harmonizing" their ownship of IP ever higher across the globe.

Wanting less of that wasn't crazy. Assuming the free market fairy would deliver it was at best certifiablly naive, at worst a spoiler operation to distract from actually doing it through normal democratic government channels.

Also, "Magna Carta" is fitting as the original was a deal between a King and his Barons. It's pointed to as a step on the path to modern democracy but that's not what they were doing at the time. The powerful were asserting their rights.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#353

Post by malwrar » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #168

malwrar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. My point in short is that we seem to reflexively frame right and wrong on an axis defined by copyright, and somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that the law itself is used much differently than we might otherwise want. Technolibertarians confuse free market capitalism via copyright-enabled businesses as a viable strategy for individual freedom, and we find with time that only bastards win in a competition w…

I think it's more that we see copyright as a necessary evil that can be used to defend our rights, but will be abused by the powerful, regardless. To me, the biggest sin of cyberlibertarianism is the assumption that "cyberspace" is de facto another universe, separate from material reality, that doesn't need to be affected by the mundane and vulgar rules of "meatspace." John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if u…

> John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if using a computer actually separates him from the state in some meaningful way, as if he has ascended beyond the flesh and now looks down upon the world as a being of pure Mind. But of course, "cyberspace" is just computers, servers, infrastructure using power and resources and thus is inextricably subject to government and systems of law. Zion was never an escape.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here, is it that "cyberspace" couldn't exist as anything "real" because governments can just shut down servers? That's why you can't buy drugs and credit card numbers online anymore, right? Sarcasm aside, you seem to be using the fallibility of the current-popular physical layer to dismiss the otherwise separate tangible "space" that does seem to exist when lots of people can communicate fluidly with each other across vast distances. Or is your critique centered on the ability of "cyberspace" to go beyond just communication and serve as a space one can actually "live" in?

> The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power.

Limiting abandonment of "ownership" to only "copyright" and IP generally, what do you propose the wealthy would control that would allow them to replicate present circumstances in "cyberspace"? The best I can think of would be communications infrastructure, and they didn't build that by themselves (at least in the US) to begin with.

For example, why would TikTok continue to be usable as a brainrot generator & propaganda tool when content is necessarily separate from the algorithm and presentation layers? Current bastards exploit their centralized control based on this house of cards ownership structure. Nothing is practically stopping users from cloning the contents from the cdn and writing a new frontend besides legal threats. This is true of almost every tech business that exists, and many of them themselves exploited this asymmetry during their founding. They exist because billionaires use the legal system to scare individual upstarts from threatening their business model.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#354

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

>> You have to hold these four ideas in your head at the same time to see the trick. The cyberlibertarians wanted you to believe that radical individualism plus deregulated capitalism plus inevitable technology would produce communitarian utopia. This is, on its face, insane. It is the economic equivalent of claiming that if everyone punches each other really hard, eventually we'll all be hugging.

Well, the first rule of Fight Club is that we don't talk about Fight Club.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#355

Post by Certhas » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

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…

You don't actually engage with the point of the article at all.

Why is that a desirable goal? What are the societal implications of this? What implicit assumptions is your framing hiding, and are they true? (All communication is good! All opposition to communication is oppression!)

I don't want a world where everyone can send me any ad they want without my consent. Where Billionaires and Autocrats can use their money and power to amplify their lies. Where utterances that no court has ever recognized as protected speech dominate all carefully stated opinions.

Just retreating to exactly the catchphrases and naivete of the 90s is not cutting it anymore.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#356

Post by happytoexplain » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

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…

As others have said, it's not a change. There's no inconsistency in applying copyright to protect people. When Gigantic Company uses copyright to bully the little guy who isn't doing anything to materially harm Gigantic Company, that's bad. When AI steals the little guy's work, that's bad. They're both bad. That's consistent. It's also obvious that it's consistent - i.e. I don't believe people making the "AI copyright complaints are funny" quip are being honest. I believe they are simply engaging in petty social politics.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#357

Post by salawat » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

asymmetric wrote: post #282

bayleev wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Information asymmetry is the root from which all evil sprouts. There are benign forms no one in their right mind has an issue with. Then there are more malign forms amplified and protected by the very same measures that cordon off the more benign forms. Insider info, beneficial ownership information, trade secrets, even what the Government would see "classified" are all far more destructive overall than their benefit to the handful of individuals keeping them warrants. If there is an ill or a vice to be found, secrecy is a consistent bedfellow thereof. But secrecy is as much a benevolent bedfellow as well, as it curtails mass scale abuses through enforced ignorance. Like the Internet, it's one of those "that which empowers the individual equally if not moreso empowers the organization". You can't make things easier for individuals, without making it easier for groups of individuals to turn around and abuse unorganized individuals with the same tools.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#358

Post by happytoexplain » Sun, May 10, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #207

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…

> 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…

The Luddites were rational and correct.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#359

Post by Certhas » Sun, May 10, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #327

txrx0000 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resource…

This is so blindingly obvious just by looking at what is happening...

It's like the believe that markets are inherently efficient and we just need to get rid of all the government interference that distorts the free market.

There is no evidence for it, the theoretical argument is so flimsy it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the various ways in which markets are inefficient are several entire subfield of economics. Yet the idea persists...

The notion that you just need a proper free market of ideas and then the best ideas will automatically win, and we just need to get rid of everything that interferes with this free market of ideas is cut from the same cloth...

Maybe it has the same attraction as "blame the immigrants". It gives you an immediate automatic scapegoat for everything you see in society that you don't like.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#360

Post by Certhas » Sun, May 10, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

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…

Do you also suggest to make it illegal to pay someone to publish certain posts/texts? And plan on enforcing this somehow worldwide? Because otherwise, if I have the money to make someone post my opinions, I already have twice the influence of everyone who doesn't have that money. And there are people who have the resources of entire nation states at their disposal and have a big incentive to influence public discourse in their favour.

There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in what you write...