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Comment by anvandare | Hacker News Reader

The speed of technological development is faster than the speed of societal or legal development.

So yes, right now we've woken up in a world that is not so much cyberpunk as it is techno-feudalism: more and more do you need a presence on the Internet to do things in meatspace... And that presence is by the grace of several feudal lords (Google foremost) - woe betide you should you ever displease them. You do not really own your email adres, your phone (number) or (pretty soon) even your computer. You're merely a serf.

On the plus side, the momentum for legal measurements seems to be increasing. Let's hope they do get broken up. Power, like plutonium, is dangerous if too concentrated. Regardless of where that concentration lies.

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Techno-feudalism is exactly what cyberpunk novels were describing. They were dystopias. They were warnings about letting corporations control everything.

Techno-feudalism and anarcho-syndicalism will form a dynamic balance, if the prophets are to be believed. :-)

True, but so far we just get the bad things (corporatocracy and the the gradual hollowing out of individual liberties) and none of the good things (gene-hacking, neural uplinks, and matrix-avatars) that cyberpunk promised. I demand a refund!

This isn't even a tech problem. It's a lack of regulation to give recourse for individuals and lack of ability for them to be treated fairly by businesses.

We need to treat companies that put themselves into a position like utilities as utilities. Give individuals actual transparency of why actions where taken, and an ability to appeal these decisions with transparency.

It will cost more, but that is ok. What we have now is that the actions have caused real harm and the companies are unwilling to justify them. That's an abuse that needs to be removed through law.

This. The power company can’t cancel you for a tweet for a reason.

Laws that provide meaningful mechanisms like this would also be a good signal to keep companies from being in such a powerful position. That is good for everyone.

I worked at Microsoft for several years about a decade after they lost those famous lawsuits and I can tell you that the company culture around monopoly power and user rights was incredibly well defined. The company was absolutely paranoid about doing anything ever again that would create that set of lawsuits and from what I can tell, in the 8 years since I left MS, that culture is still alive and well. It's probably why MS is the only company I still feel comfortable doing with, among the "tech" companies.

The hard slap they got from the government was enough to apparently permanently change the company culture around treatment of users and other businesses.

I see a lot of the excesses we see coming out of Google, Twitter, FB, to be a consequence of there being, well, zero consequences for their behavior. They're like petulant children who never learned limits and think it's ok to do whatever they want, no matter who they hurt. That's exactly how you teach children -- give them limits. Ironically, the same rule applies to adults.

I like the term "techno-feudalism" - captures the increasing nationalism over things like technology sales to China by the US etc too, the Tik Tok situation...

See also: Kindle books; movies "purchased" from Amazon, Apple, et al; Tesla upgrades you paid extra for; I could go on....

This is precisely why I buy vinyl or music from Bandcamp, and choose the disc version of the PS5.

I view my digital purchases as things I am forever renting.

... You can't store MP3 files why? You're renting your hard drives, too?

I meant digital purchases with DRM or inside a digital store like Vudu or Amazon Prime.

Those discs aren't going to do you much good if you don't have access to or have had access to PSN, since most games ship with a huge day 1 patch to fix all the issues between going gold and the date of sale.

Movies/Music/Books can be displayed and played back on damn near anything. Games, especially modern games, exist in both a variable state (constantly revised/updated), but also with a much more limited ability to access the content.

I lost a small number of games due to PlayStation support not being able to get around the fact that although I purchased some of them via PayPal, I also bought other games with a credit card. They could verify I owned the actual account and I answered all security questions but they still wouldn't fix whatever issue I had (this was at least 5 years ago so I forget particulars).

That experience forever turned me off to relying on digital-only.

To your points, having a PSN account is necessary but I can always create a new one if need be.

Whenever possible, I prioritize non-DRM media for purchase.

I have yet to hear about the first amazon account ban.

I don’t think they’re really interested in that, since the accounts are almost by definition making them a bunch of money.

https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-banned-this-shopper-then-he... talks about it - the primary reason is for excessive returns. Alternatively, there are sellers as well that are more in danger.

I'm having trouble understanding your point. Leaving aside simply googling it, surely you can't be saying that because you haven't heard of something, it doesn't exist or isn't a threat or isn't worth any concern.

That exact "logic" is extremely common in journalism, as well as on most social media platforms including this one.

If you think about it, this shouldn't be all that surprising - after all, this is exactly how intuition works, and the human mind runs very much on intuition, people just don't realize it (at the object level).

I've never heard of intuition so this must false. I'm sure I'd know about it otherwise.

Sometimes I get in a kind of a depressed funk, and then a comment like this comes along to refill my optimism-for-humanity tank.

It doesn't have to be an account ban. I've recently started playing games on my old Nintendo 3DS again and discovered that I've lost my Nintendo Network ID password and closed the associated email account. That leaves me in a state where I can't log out of the account on the console without losing the associated digital software licenses.

Not that that's Nintendo's fault but I think something like this will be the fate of every account that's not used, closed or deleted for a long time and owning your data and software possessions would protect against it.

There was the case when they remotely deleted the novel 1984 from a bunch of devices.

Ah, good one. I’d forgotten about that.

I once used to buy digital movies on Amazon and thought it was a great experience. Until my first vacation in Canada where I discovered I couldn't watch my movies. I called them and they said that my movies were region-locked to the United States. To their credit, they did refunded all of my digital purchases. I haven't bought anything digital from them since.

So, not an Amazon account ban, but you quickly learn you are not "buying" a movie, but renting it, sometimes with silly restrictions like "only from these IPs".

Kindle books were actually pretty good, back when they could reliably be liberated. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.

In general, I think that's also a point we can draw from the cyberpunk genre, or maybe from Harry Harrison's old-school prefiguration of it in the Stainless Steel Rat series - the eponymous creature being one well suited to thrive "within the walls" of a society increasingly sclerotized with technocratic bureaucracy, but perhaps equally suited to a life of gnawing through the circumscriptions imposed by competing technofeudalist fiefdoms.

Off-topic, but legitimately purchased Kindle ebooks can still be quickly and easily liberated for the purposes of DRM-free personal backups of owned content. I won't comment on whether Amazon find this acceptable, or if it is legal in any given jurisdiction, but it is definitely possible.

Thankfully it will (probably) never get as bad as Stallman described it[1], but you never know.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

OT: Please tell me you have a blog, I enjoy the way you write.

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I run my own mail server but my VPS provider could be coerced to yank it from me. You’ve made me uncomfortable with revelations. Damn, we’re fucked.

Thank you, but none of my ideas are novel in any way[] and there are far better writers than me already expounding the same points, no need to add to the noise. Stallman, Doctorow, et al. pretty much saw these developments coming years ago and warned about them.

[] Every person's thinking and writing is mostly just a pastiche stitched together of thoughts they heard or read from others anyway. (And this is, of course, the meme idea, which is not an original idea itself either)

> I run my own mail server but my VPS provider could be coerced to yank it from me.

I've got two comments on this.

Firstly, you're already doing much better than most people. Make frequent backups, and if it comes down to it, you can always point DNS at a new provider.

Second, don't put anything on a VPS that you aren't willing to let the VPS provider or whatever Gov. has jurisdiction access. Where email falls on that spectrum for you is of course your own decision.

There is one more solution. Use a VPS only as an endpoint bastion server. Keep the data and services in your own home server. We need not trust the VPS provider this way. And we can easily recover as long as the domain name and the home server are under your control.

Having domain names under my control are a big reason for my excitement for Handshake's/Namebase's existence.

An idea I've been mulling is getting a baremetal server from Exoscale (based in Switzerland) and running a mailserver on it. Haven't done it yet for many reasons, least of which is laziness...and I want to try and create a JMAP server with an IMAP bridge but that's another story.

I liked the term too. If you are large and powerful, you are the law and whatever you say works. Hopefully as society matures we learn to establish some form of rules/laws that are sane and empower people.

But in every society a small circle of privileged people have always been the norm and despite more wider access to information today it seems like consolidation of power and wealth seems to be trending upward.

Rules aren't worth the piece of paper they're printed on unless there is an equally powerful force that can set terms. The problem right now is there is no counterbalancing force.

Not wrong.

But even a little plutonium is too dangerous to let my kid play with it.

Email? Not quite as much.

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