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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

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Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#371

Post by Anamon »

pocksuppet wrote: post #200
Tade0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall my tapes sounding ever so slightly worse after each playback. I also once left one too close to my CRT monitor, which erased all the high frequencies from the sound. Also over time friction would build up in the medium, causing the tape to occasionally resist being pulled so strongly that some sections would stretch and introduce a hard to ignore "wah" effect. Overall not my favourite means of storing inform…

How did you feel about the ephemerality of knowing your tapes wouldn't last forever and you'd get new ones? I think computers have spoiled us for archiving. Back in the day, people didn't try to make things last forever. Right?

Reminds me of one of my favourite episodes of one of my favourite TV shows ever, The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Technically a children's show, but with such cool, philosophical layers.

"What if you could only hear [your favourite song] once, and that was it?"

Also very relevant to modern day concerts, with so many in the audience focusing more on recording their crappy phone videos than on appreciating the live moment.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#372

Post by dleslie »

rwmj wrote: post #335
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…

It's weird that people (claim to) have had bad luck with cassette tape, because it worked pretty well for me. I don't believe I ever had a player chew tape, although I was never rich enough to afford a car stereo with a tape player so maybe those were more prone to it. Also, paper maps! Excellent! The trick was you had to have done Orienteering at school, where (and I'm not making this up) a teacher would drop you of…

Most common fault would be hitting eject before stopping the tape, causing the cassette to eject and mangle the tape in the process.

As usual, this is a UX concern. Better tape players did not allow eject to work when the tape was engaged.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#373

Post by dleslie »

Cider9986 wrote: post #227
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.

Hey, just because 99% of cryptocurrencies are a scam doesn't mean that crypto as a whole is a scam.

Ok. Where is crypto currency used in a way that fiat currencies cannot be, and is adding value to the world?

I can think of nothing.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#374

Post by sillyfluke »

expedition32 wrote: post #345
intrasight wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, I boil the whole discussion down to the question "What price freedom?" - the sentiment of which is attributed to Jefferson but according to Gemini can be traced back to John Philpot Curran "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance"

Thomas Jefferson the slave owner? Hypocrisy indeed!

The 7 billion or more current animal enslavers and devourers of the world would like to have a word, just in case some of have a few choice quotes on the nature of freedom as well.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#375

Post by txrx0000 »

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…

"Entities with more resources" are not necessarily bad, as you seem to assume. In reality, they're not aligned with eachother. This is just as true for nation states as it is for individuals.

When everyone can talk without censorship and fear of persecution, the best ideas might not always win, but the good ones usually will, and the worst ones will always lose. This is why every authoritarian regime needs censorship to survive.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#376

Post by Anamon »

Permit wrote: post #304
pocksuppet wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over.

The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially exploiting the media with neither a license to do so, nor any intentions to pay the rights-holders for their use.

By the media conglomerates' own math, these GenAI companies should all be drowning in lawsuits over kazillions of bajillions of dollars.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#377

Post by txrx0000 »

overfeed wrote: post #343
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 goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location Whose goal is it? The article notes that the goal is immediately dropped whenever it's more profitable to do the opposite. We got tracking pixels, browser fingerprinting, and privacy-focused companies that talk big game about supporting (/selling you?) anonymity online but…

It's Barlow's goal as I understood it. The article criticizes corporate opportunists, which is fair. But there are also plenty of other people willing to put short-term profit aside to fix problems and build the future we want to live in. The free and anonymous Internet is not a dream and will be built. It may have been half dead at one point post-911, but it was revived by Snowden and will strike at the panopticon until it shatters.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#378

Post by txrx0000 »

jonhohle wrote: post #342
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…

> 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. How has this worked out with email, text messages, or the phone system, or even postal mail. I rarely receive messages from kindly anti-propaganda bots, but sure receive a lot of messages from actual propaganda that…

> How has this worked out with email, text messages, or the phone system, or even postal mail.

Those are centrally controlled systems where propangandists have home field advantage (email is debatable, it's halfway, it wasn't designed with the existence of companies like Google in mind). But even if that wasn't the case, it's not the same phenomenon as bots on social media. The important difference is that on social media, if there is no central moderation, the bots will cancel out eachother's influence. If I make an anti-propaganda email bot, it doesn't lower the ranking of the propaganda that's already in your inbox. But if I have an upvoting bot for their downvoting bot, they neutralize eachother.

Also, ensuring that nobody except the participants of group chats and DMs can figure out eachother's real identity is already a massive win. That alone makes it a lot harder to beat a population into submission.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#379

Post by tpmoney »

Certhas wrote: post #355
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…

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…

You already live in a world where anyone can send you any ad they want without your consent, paid for by your tax dollars. The postal service had been trafficking ads direct to your door since before Twitter was a thing.

Billionaires and Autocrats by the very nature of having massive amounts of money can use their money and power to amplify their lies no matter how easy or not it is for normal people to also amplify their own lies. Again, Disney was buying swamp land in Florida through shell companies long before the internet decided forcing Elon Musk to buy twitter would be funny. Or see also that insider trading is illegal for you and me, but if you're a congressman, that's just a perk of the job.

As far as "utterances that no court has ever recognized as speech", I'd be interested in what you think qualifies here, because the recent history (where by recent I mean over the course of the 1900's) has been an ever expansive definition of what sort of things constitute speech. Tinker v. Des Moines found wearing a black arm band is speech. Texas v. Johnson found burning a flag was speech. Brandenburg v. Ohio found advocacy of force and law violations was broadly speech, leaving only a small exception against speech that would induce "imminent lawless action". Hustler V. Falwell found parody of public figures even when that parody intends to cause emotional distress of the person being parodied were speech. Snyder v. Phelps found posters saying things like "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "God Hates Fags" outside of a funeral were speech. And let's not forget National Socialist Party v. Skokie, finding that a literal Nazi rally was speech.

Re: The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

#380

Post by Nasrudith »

vga1 wrote: post #295
trhway wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

You literally could not be more wrong that opposing voices stop mattering once fascism is reached. Doubly wrong because fascism isn't a binary. Thrice wrong in that you think that a lack of anominity and privacy would somehow be helpful for prevention when fascism already here!
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