Tor has lost their mission, which should have been Privacy above all else.
Today they seem to be more focused on Social Justice, and less about privacy.
I don't see this as an implosion. I am not fond of the majority of SJW rhetoric as a lot of the defenses seen in those circles seem to be constructed as thought-terminating cliché.
I have much respect for Virgil, but I also think Tor is in need of a rebrand at home.
Ancap/cypherpunk messages are not agreeable to the mainstream, and they do not maintain a project when it becomes this close to mainstream. The common Western observer begins to equate the network with the abusive practices inherent in anonymous communication. The average user sees "Tor" and thinks "child porn" or "drug dealers", or "Mr. Robot" hacker types. These are things that economic resources that have to answer to Western political authorities will run from, and if the project needs funding, it needs to have a feel-good message that supporters can parrot to politicians and others that actually have power.
I, too, am an anarchocapitalist cypherpunk type. But I'm realistic enough to recognize you can only push that platform so far as an organization scales. Most people still won't care.
Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with Tor, but I have run relays in the past and will likely run more in the future.
The second they learn that tor can and will be used to spread "hate speech" or the classic CP, Drugs, Terrorism, the "mainstream" will (and is currently) demand that Tor sacrifice privacy in the name of defending Social Justice, stopping terrorism, ending CP, or catching drug dealers.
Under new board of Tor, and this new direction I fear Tor will cave to these demands.
Edit..
and just to be clear. Social Justice is not the same as Human Rights. People of late seem to be confusing the 2.
Thanks! I love you too.
> These are things that economic resources that have to answer to Western political authorities will run from, and if the project needs funding, it needs to have a feel-good message that supporters can parrot to politicians and others that actually have power.
This is a totally reasonable response. I would be delighted if Tor Project could make a pronouncement like this.
As a reply, I saw no indication they were having trouble appeasing western authorities---e.g., they had no trouble getting DARPA money for the big MEMEX project. They are voluntarily cutting themselves off from defense because they dislike the politics of the funders. Instead, they are piloting themselves into a position where they are forced to take money from human-rights funders just to stay afloat. And becoming "Human Rights Watch for Nerds", makes Tor work vastly more difficult in the Asia Pacific.
I agree with you that Tor could use a rebrand, but this is a poor choice of one.
At this point I'm 99% sure that (a) SJW backlash is some form of mass hysteria where large groups of people have convinced themselves and each other that these people exist in vastly greater numbers than they actually do (I'm talking multiple orders of magnitude) and (b) many of the most vocal anti-SJW warriors (let's call them ASJWWs) are simply people who at some point in their lives had experiences where they were being a-holes (probably without realizing it), and somebody called them out on it, but rather than learning from the experience and feeling slightly guilty about being a jerk, they decided it was all a big conspiracy against courageous truth-tellers such as themselves.
All based on anecdotal evidence of course, but I'm old enough (and have lived in every corner of the US, around pretty much every demographic there is) to have accumulated an embarrassing amount of anecdotal evidence on this topic.
Having taught in academia/higher education before moving to the private sector, these clowns use public shaming techniques to silence people of differing opinions using threats of intimidation and violence.
It's completely anti-ethical to a healthy society where free speech is stifled socially, to say nothing of a lack of govt interference.
tl;dr, pull your head out of your ass
It does not need to be a conspiracy for SJW to be a movement.