Pirate Bay founder: We’ve lost the internet, it’s all about damage control now | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay founder: We’ve lost the internet, it’s all about damage control now

thenextweb.com

54 pointsbenevol17 comments

In Sunde's opinion, people focus too much on what might happen, instead of what is happening. He often gets questions about how a digitally bleak future could look like, but the truth is that we're living it: "Everything has gone wrong. That's the thing, it's not about what will happen in the future it's about what's going on right now. We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who's basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn't elected by anyone. Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we're already there. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don't think there's a way for us to stop it." One of the most important things to realize is that the problem isn't a technological one. "The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."

This is an important thing to bear in mind - it's happening now, we are being spied upon, soft-censored, self-censored, and opinion-corraled. Facebook's news feed is a far more sinister mechanism for social control than any Pravda, since it is transparently tailored to each user. And it's proprietary. So we're robbed of a primary weapon against propaganda: the ability to collectively discuss it.

However...

>Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don't think there's a way for us to stop it

I think that's going too far. I can think of far worse scenarios. We have GNU/Linux. We have Free encryption software, and BitTorrent. We have a social backlash against Facebook, people that recognize the problems and are organizing to combat it, a dim vision of a decentralized future that many software projects are struggling towards (IPFS et al). And none of these things are illegal. Yet.

Things tend towards centralization in capitalist or communist societies. When need to rethink things to avoid that by leveraging technology to allow for diversity and evolution, with holism where it is needed.

I think in terms of the internet the answer is meshnets.

If you like Dan Brown-Style books (and are able to overlook a couple of blatant technology-based plotholes), you might like Daniel Suarez' books "Daemon" and "Freedom™". They toy around with a couple of related ideas.

> I think in terms of the internet the answer is meshnets.

No it's not b/c that would assume the average person is willing to learn about meshnets.

Why? The average person doesn't need to know about TCP/IP to use current centralized networks

correct. Perhaps the word "learn" wasn't a good choice. What I meant is that people have to be willing to change their behavior because mesh nets are not something a powerful entity is going to force them to use.

He's dead on except it's not just FB it's also western governments who not only don't interfere (as he points out) but have given up on championing freedom and now go in the exact opposite direction. When it comes to damage control its the latter we have to influence because it's the governments who want to take away what's left of the decentralized web. Maybe a decade ago or so everyone in the western sphere was mad concerning how China, North Korea et al. control their citizen online. But now there is this international trend of slowly but surely limiting the usefulnesses of the free Internet by pretending to fight some form of illegal activity. They're after encryption (to "fight terrorism"), they are after free speech (to "stop hate"), they block websites ("just" to fight child pornography) and so on.

"companies will always have to put their financial gains first"

Though there is a ton of evidence for this, I've always disliked this type of statement. A company does not have a mind of it's own, and therefore has no concept of self-interest. It is the people at the company who are making the decisions. It's why there is a backlash when companies don't behave the way their customers expect them to.

In the end, it all does come down to people and the cultural influence. For the past 50 years, we've culturally been dragged into a big business, security, get rich mindset which has driven aspirations at the cost of our freedoms, environment, and general social good.

I personally don't believe the Zuckerberg is 'evil'. Though the news feed has issues, his overarching goal is admirable. I believe that Facebook now understands the political difficulties the news feed creates, but if Facebook were truly a dictatorship, they wouldn't be spreading multiple oposing propaganda, would they? Zuck would have picked the candidate he liked, and promoted that person. Facebook didn't do that, they let the people decide what they wanted to see.

if you lead a company, and dont do whats in the best interest of your shareholders, youre getting sued and then you go to prison.

unless you get the law changed, companies absolutely have to put their financial gains first.

Isn't the bar for criminal liability fairly high? Doesn't a CEO usually get fired and/or fined?

I'd be interested in learning about an case where a CEO goes to prison because he didn't pursue shareholders' interests aggressively enough.

Never has happened. You can be socially responsible even if it means "making less than absolutely possible."

It's idiotic to think that any C-level has to always be doing what will absolutely maximize profits. It's impossible for them to be doing that constantly, all the time.

This is a misreading of the law. And plainly not the way that a lot of large companies behave.

See http://www.corporatepolicy.org/2012/03/25/are-corporations-r... for instance.

You absolutely will not go to prison. You probably wouldn't even get sued. You'd just be fired.

>"I believe that Facebook now understands the political difficulties the news feed creates, but if Facebook were truly a dictatorship, they wouldn't be spreading multiple oposing propaganda, would they?"

Of course they would. They claim to be simply a "platform" for "diverse" opinions. Yet, at the first sign of someone being offended against something that's not popular, they shut it down. Even if they do it to the left and the right, what they're then essentially doing is forcing everyone into this average middle area where no one can say anything wildly-diverging from the mainstream narrative. But, from my point of view, the "mainstream" is currently rampantly left-leaning. So any "in your face" right-leaning points of view are very easily deemed to be in contradiction of some sort of "community standards", and are promptly shut down. I follow pages that have to regularly make numbered "back-up copy" Facebook groups/pages so that they can contact their followers after Facebook shuts them down, which is inevitable.

It really is all or nothing when it comes to free-speech. People self-censor and avoid the things that naturally make them uncomfortable. But if you shift the responsibility for that to some centralized entity, you're going to have problems that alienates many.

For one, we've lost these services to capitalism, because it's difficult for any alternative to operate in a capitalistic society. How many are going to work on the open source alternative and still make enough to live comfortably? Decentralized services are difficult to design to be usable and operate reliably. We can't underestimate the amount of resources that goes into software development.

Which is why I appreciate when a startup like WhatsApp spent so much effort on end-to-end encryption with little to no financial incentive..

I think we can still have free internet, in the lagrange points between the giants, if we propell them against one another in fierce clashes - to try users to migrate from one walled in garde to another. There will always be little pockets of freedom for a short period in new markets emerging. There will always be open source where companys have no real interest to maintain near public infrastructure. I think one way to get open source to win, is to have it as a way for companys to discard liability. If the plattform you hosdt is open source, why should you be responsible if somebody else uses it to fling viruses into the world. But to win against companys in user space, that is near impossible.

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