My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
"Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)"
Article subtitle:
> Altering the internet's economic and digital infrastructure to promote free speech
I am somewhat skeptical of crypto, but I do hope that the DeFi ecosystem, 20 years in the future, will act as a democratizing force for financial markets.
That seems like a terrifying point of failure to have, unless I'm misunderstanding how it works.
Perhaps a parallel here is: if the fiat markets are struggling, then small businesses may struggle and lack the business they need to sustain themselves due to economic fears and self-preservation, but that business can exist in some form without the market through free trade or other means of currency or agreements to provide products and services, not beholden to the mercy of a volatile, inaccessible digital system that the vast majority of people don't understand very well.
Disclaimer: I don't hold solana or ETH.
Other people are not like you. Most people have still never even heard of Etherium. Most people won't touch something like that without explicit approval from a government. Which, obviously, is somewhat contrary to the point.
I think the real long term (20+ years) winners in this space will gracefully marry the old world with the new, until society has gotten used to these concepts and we can slowly deprecate some of the centralization.
This statement was true in 2016, 2018 and 2021. The difference being the momentum - a LOT more people have heard of Ethereum now than back then. I think you might be underestimating the network effect that Ethereum has in the space. All the tooling, beginner-friendly tutorials/books/blogs, institutions and funds flowing into the projects, the sheer number of people working on projects is super impressive.
For anything else to catch up with Ethereum, it's going to take a lot more than "being better technologically". Ethereum currently does have major scaling issues but the community is converging on the "rollups" Layer-2 solutions [1] as a temporary option until it gets added into Eth2. So I suspect the next few months will be a little rough but things like Matic.network or Optimism will start maturing.
[1] https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r...
So, yeah, sticking by that statement.
I just think it's similar to some of the earlier internet days like shopping online or sending emails - in its early days most people did not know much about these concepts except for the tech community and early adopters.
In general social psychology have to be factored in as well. Anecdotally speaking, shutting down outdoor dining pushed more people to party at home.
Non-n95 masks / etc don't filter much when breathing in. We wear masks to protect others...
We need to put more people at risk, because we can't meet some nebulous, ever-shifting standard that asks us to trade human lives for dollars of economic activity. Nobody wants to pin down exactly how many dollars they think a human life is worth, though.
On the one hand, we've got every special interest group under the sun loudly shouting that their business is special, and must be allowed to operate as if nothing has changed over the past year.
On the other hand, we've got public health - a communal good, that everyone is responsible for, but nobody gets held responsible for.
Unfortunately what and how things were closed seemed haphazard and not entirely justified or communicated effectively.
There should have been more contact tracing and a focus to close only areas prone to spreading Covid-19.
Otherwise, it's just an argument that risk exists, which is obvious and uninteresting.
Does it count as a slippery slope fallacy if the government argues that not stopping encrypted communications will result in terrorists killing your grandma? Because I heard that one a lot when Bush was president and they haven't really ever stopped using it. Is there a better fallacy for that example?
The main one though is assuming the parties cant adjust course part way though. "If we turn this ship this way we will crash into that island in two days!"
Extropolation is different as it takes into a account changes in behaviour and real world constraints
So an opposition that relies on "what if" scenarios to oppose progressive change is often one which is either unaware-of or has explicitly looked at other nations that are 10-50 years ahead on whatever the policy is, and discovered that enacting step X did not, in fact, lead to a downward spiral into nightmare scenario Y.
Bah! You're only saying that because induction worked the last n times ;)
If I say it's a slippery slope from A to B, what that's supposed to mean is that A being true will increase the risk of B becoming true if other things happen as well.
How it's often used though is that if A is a slippery slope to B then A is equivalent to B, and thus any issue with B is an unavoidable issue for A. And of course it gets worse when people jump from A to Z.
Like... if an event has an 80% chance of occurring as a result of an action, it seems that the event is highly likely to occur. If this has an 80% chance causing of a different event, which has an 80% chance of a different event, leading to an 80% chance of a different event, the probability of the final event from a point in time before the first event occurred would be 41%.
Arguments are a construction of information intended to induce an understanding of probability among others, and skipping steps along the way weakens trust in that conclusion.
Otherwise we'd be fine with the concept of e.g. trying methamphetamine just a few times and then planning to stop.
> Logic and critical thinking textbooks typically discuss slippery slope arguments as a form of fallacy but usually acknowledge that "slippery slope arguments can be good ones if the slope is real—that is, if there is good evidence that the consequences of the initial action are highly likely to occur. The strength of the argument depends on two factors. The first is the strength of each link in the causal chain; the argument cannot be stronger than its weakest link. The second is the number of links; the more links there are, the more likely it is that other factors could alter the consequences."
Unfortunately, many people (sadly including the far left, who 10 years ago I would have called myself part of) & the media are actively celebrating these blocks and shutdowns because it serves their ideology. For now.
The financial trading app Robinhood is been hit with a federal class action lawsuit after it restricted trades to stocks popular on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets, sending Redditors and app users into a meltdown.
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York on Thursday, alleges that the app “purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock ‘GME’ from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise, thereby deprived [sic] retail investors of the ability to invest in the open-market and manipulating the open-market.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/robinhood-hit-with-class-actio...
I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.
TBH 'protocols not platforms' has become kind of a slogan lately, but history doesn't make it look too promising. Email is a protocol, but it has largely been dominated by Google.
A really compelling product can capture a protocol.
For me personally, even if we end up with large players offering the largest (presumably most product-focused) instances of various protocols (Gmail with email, imagine Tiwtter hosting the largest Mastodon instance, Discord providing Matrix hosting), the fact I have the freedom to federate and set up my own instance or pay a smaller provider that will respect my privacy, is still a much better situation than the current "platforms, no protocols".
In future use a domain you own as the email address and redirect to your email provider.
Maybe anecdotal every company in my experience is on Office 365. Most private people here have hotmail/outlook as they where first before gmail.
It's a major part of the mega wealthy's lives. They've profited in this pandemic and it's not because of the fundamentals. Shorts squeeze the market too much but they ( hedge funds) should be responsible adults and take their losses. Not force Robinhood to unethically force sell it's massive user base to liquidate b/c their system bit their biggest customer.
We're about to see whether the people actually have rights or if this is actually a class warfare situation. I suspect it's the latter.
It's absolutely the latter. GME is a meme stock that people will forget about in 3 months. If 2008 didn't cause anyone to go to jail (where millions lost their houses and retirements), manipulating a short squeeze on a failing company certainly won't.
I hope so too and I hope that movement will develop and adopt technological solutions and not advocate for government force. This is an opportunity for people to control their means of communication and create a more robust internet that can better withstand censorship attempts in the future. I fear it will instead be taken advantage of by people who want to increase government control perhaps to prevent competition with the currently dominant actors on the market. Any further normalization of government control of communication or the internet must be resisted if we are to have any chance to keep the truly wonderful thing that the internet is today, despite all its imperfections.
Maybe we could amend the law. Seriously.
Lots of people love to dump on the constitution as old and not relevant. But it’s meant to restrict government and protect people’s freedom.
So is it morally allowable to discuss <abhorrent topic> online? Should it be law to allow or disallow <abhorrent topic>?
Who decides what the majority of people consider to be abhorrent?
There is a simple solution to this if you don't like the way they behave: stop using their product, and recommend others do the same.
Of course, your not using it doesn't prevent others from using it if they want to, but that's freedom of choice for you.
social media posts can be a single person communicating with millions.
the damage per unit of effort is much much lower for the unmoderated phone vs the unmoderated social
Right now you have the right to associate or disassociate with whomever you like (protected classes aside). In your altered future, the government forces churches to allow atheists and rival religions to be allowed to speak at the church, despite the desires of the owners and congregation. It would effectively be compelled association.
Trouble is when government gives out monopolies, or supporting monopolies they like.
Government currently closed side.
Government has chosen atheism as its religion. Very hostile toward other religions. Everyone pays for government school, but want to a Christian education, then you have to pay twice.
You're gonna want to provide proof of that claim.
Government schools aren’t atheist - they are secular. They simply aren’t allowed to teach Christianity because Jews and Muslims would have the same “I have to pay twice” complaint you mentioned. Also, what you say about Christian education is factually wrong. There are plenty of places in the USA where you can find a Christian Charter school or use school vouchers.
Subtle difference, as required by the topic.
I'm not a stamp collector. Does that mean I lack a stamp collection, or do I have a collection of a lack of stamps?
If I am asymptomatic, is there a lack of symptoms, or is my symptom the lack thereof?
It's one thing to not believe in unicorns, it's another to define yourself in opposition to unicorn believers, which many atheists do.
Adding 'types' in front of the word just continues us down the path of words not really meaning anything anymore.
Are radical atheists just atheists that act like dicks about it? Don't call them radical atheists, just call them dicks. Is a New Atheist one that does interpretive dance to explain their belief that there is no god? That's just an unlikely combination of two things, one of which is atheism.
Eg. I'm a radical grammarian (a dick when it comes to grammar).
I do not go and seek out others who believe in the lack of a diety to associate and grow together.
I don't go on to claim wars over the land holy to my belief of no diety.
I don't go on to terrorize my children and tell them they are unloved because they're born in a way that offends my belief in the lack of a diety.
I don't go on to terrorize my neighbors and tell them they are unloved because they offend my belief in the lack of a diety.
I don't go to other people who have different beliefs and tell them they are wrong due to their belief in a diety. And that my belief is the only way they can be saved.
Atheism is NOT a religion, it is not a system of beliefs in any meaningfully comparable way. You can rearrange words all you want, but the difference in result (not word choice) is anything but subtle.
My intention is not to paint with a wide brush, just to demonstrate that everyone has beliefs, and they manifest in different ways.
>>>>I don't go to a building and dance and sing to my belief of no diety. ( I believe seculars call it a rave.)
>>>>>>I do not go and seek out others who believe in the lack of a diety to associate and grow together. (any number of activities can fall in this category in fact)
>>>>>>I don't go on to claim wars over the land holy to my belief of no diety. (I believe are referring to Bush/Obama nation-building)
>>>>>> I don't go on to terrorize my children and tell them they are unloved because they're born in a way that offends my belief in the lack of a diety. (I believe you are referring to the secular terrorism, that is human-to-human, i.e. calling others "Deplorables" )
>>>>>I don't go on to terrorize my neighbors and tell them they are unloved because they offend my belief in the lack of a diety. (see above)
>>>>>I don't go to other people who have different beliefs and tell them they are wrong due to their belief in a diety. And that my belief is the only way they can be saved. (I believe there is no need to say X is wrong when instead they resort to shut them up #cancelculture)
Atheism is not a religion, but it is a belief system like any other. It may appeal to logical people, but that doesn't make it better or worse. Its just a different way to perceive the world around you.
No more implication than that. It is, however, actively a belief. It's not "I don't care" or "it's different to the one you believe in", or "I don't believe there is a god", it is "I believe there is no god"
Never said atheism was a religion, would never say that because it's objectively false.
Work with your government to have you taxes assigned to the Christian school. Here in Ontario Canada when you file your taxes you select if your child is attending catholic school and the catholic school board gets revenue equal to the number of people attending.
All the cash in my wallet says otherwise.
Having a correct and accurate understanding of that carries a whole host of implications with it, e.g., it makes the tech companies' censorious autocratic behavior a violation of the natural God given human rights that the government is as prohibited from abridging as much as the tech companies that fall under it's jurisdiction.
What we are facing, just to continue the example to further illustrate the point, is the tech companies are violating human rights through their censorious ways and they are violating the Constitution, the highest law of the land. If the USA were still a functional and healthy society any court would issue an immediate order to require all tech companies to not violate the human rights that the Constitution prohibits any inferior jurisdiction (everything falling under the Constitution, i,e., everything) from violating. The US Code even provides penalties for the violation of the Constitutional laws that the Government and the tech companies are persistently and even maliciously violating on a regular basis.
It is rather clear that the far larger problem is the breakdown of fundamental rule of law (mutually agreed upon parameters for peace) and the replacement and encroachment of ever more rule of power (I will do whatever I want because I have the ability to make you). It will not end well one way or another if it is not fixed soon, and it does not look like those with the lust of power in their eyes have any intention of giving up anything.
Its a backdoor way around the constitutional restrictions. AKA the government can't restrict free speech or search your house everyday, but its going to allow everyone else to restrict and search your house for the same effect. Given the close ties between the leaders & .001%, the result is the same. It won't matter to you when you get charged with a crime you didn't commit whether the government was tracking your phone or the phone company reports your phone to the government. The result is the same.
Because where I live the government via corporations is scraping up "metadata" which includes people's web cams feeds, phone records, etc. AKA searching their house. And if you haven't been paying attention, as despicable as the speech is, political "speech" is being suppressed by large tech and media companies, and to a lesser extent what people actually say in public spaces, be that the library or the workplace.
There is a reason Us corporations can’t disclose electronic search warrants to their owners, or why no one kicked Trump off their platform despite incessant rule violations until he was days from leaving, it’s called raw political power.
And when has ever had a legal right to political speech at their workplace? Unless you have an employment contract which explicitly guarantees (such as teacher tenure) your employer can fire you for tons of reasons. Some states have labor laws that require “for cause”, but if you are talking politics at a workplace where that is not the core business, it’s not hard for an employer to argue your discussion adversely affects business.
I mean your basically arguing my point.
And those rights are only to protect you from government actions because it’s the ultimate monopoly.
The first amendment does not give you the right to enter someone else’s house to spread your political opinions, just as the second doesn’t give you the right to walk in to their home with your loaded guns.
And stop trying to redefine the word monopoly. The internet is completely free and anyone can post whatever they want on their own web site.
Otherwise, it is not in fact free. Registrars can take your domain (look what is happening to eu domains owned by UK folx) and web hosts, are in part responsible for the content they host and can refuse to continue to do business with you.
Hell, even if you roll your own setup, the ISP you use can still choose not to do business with you, leaving your entire setup offline.
As I see it, the core issue is that with enough substitutes denying business to a person/organization, the customer can effectively be denied access to “the town square”.
In the relevant case law, the “town square” is only applied when there was only a single meeting space in the town. In that case, it was a private mall. Twitter doesn’t apply as a town square on the internet because there are plenty other places to communicate on the internet, even if it is not as convenient or wide reaching. The problem lies in the case where all substitutes for a town square all block you.
The solution historically was to insist on a common carrier designation for certain utilities.
Do you not see how that's contradictory?
And what would it even look like? Would Hacker News no longer be allowed to have moderators?
E.g. see https://www.antitrustinstitute.org/work-product/antitrust-en...
Rather than proposing a new technological solution to the problem ("platforms to protocols") which may work but is unproven, we could simply restart the use of existing tools that have been proven to work. This has the advantage of being a strategy that can be explained to non-technical folks.
The "existing tools" have been proven to have a major weakness, namely they can be neutered by regulatory capture. Unless you can get everyone to magically forget how they circumvented the rules last time, you can't simply restart using them.
Not the definition of Anarchy I would use but I was understanding you had used anarchy == chaos
The process of doing that involves investigation, subpoenas, and warrants, and is subject to laws created in a more or less democratic process. No part of it requires anyone to prevent me from sending illegal emails, just an apparatus to punish me if I do.
I don’t have much hope for this, mainly because being the owner of a platform is much more profitable than being one of many protocol end points. Look at git. It is hard to think of a more open protocol, and yet GitHub absolutely dominates and it is a big deal if they decide to cut off your repo.
A better alternative is for government to fund and operate critical infrastructure or at least heavily regulate it.
I don’t have to worry that I will get deplatformed from mail, because the USPS is there and they have strict legal requirements prohibiting them from deplatforming people. I don’t have to worry that I won’t be deplatformed from roads, because most roads are operated by the government, which is under strict legal precedents that they can’t deplatform me. It is similar with utilities such as electricity, water, gas which are privately operated but heavily regulated.
Some of the internet infrastructure is both becoming more vital as has economies of scale such that there is an inherent drive for consolidation. As such, I think it is becoming time that such things be regulated like utilities.
None of the things you mention are platforms.
Mail is not a platform. Roads are not a platform. Electricity, water and gas are not platforms.
These are all examples of point to point connection. None of them allow you to reach millions of people unfederated.
If you start sending out illegal hate mail to millions of people, you bet you'll be "deplatformed" by the USPS. They will cut off your account and probably press charges.
If you start sending out legal harassment mail to millions of people, you'll get a discount.
It is possible.
It is possible to make money buying lottery tickets too.
The best way to make money is to work for it. Yet because of a demand for profit and return on investment working people are getting squeezed with low wages and bad conditions.
Outrage at a invest platform doing some thing or another - I do not care about that. My outrage is at low wages and bad conditions for ordinary working people
I know that exists in pieces and small projects but it's not like more than a few dozen people in any town even can fathom what that is or why it's a good idea.
Google and Apple would never do this but imagine if every smartphone came not only with built in mesh-wifi ability but was on by default so it all acted as a repeater, you could probably communicate across entire states and countries given enough seconds like store-and-forward and ham radio-like solutions.
Cellphone lockdowns are the keystone here.
There are sensible arguments for cellphones being walled gardens (grandmas can't defend their phone against malware, etc), but this is the devil's bargain you have to accept.
As long as people (a) want everything on their cellphone and (b) want it to be locked-down enough that they can trust it to not listen in on them and stalk their location, everything downstream of the cellphone will be intermediated.
It would be nice if it was easier to enter/exit the garden at will, sure, but thats not the same thing.
I'm technically competent but these systems are so complex i don't think i could defend against malware in a complete open system. Actually, they're so complex that i do not think its possible to completely defend against malware as an end user without serious changes to behavior that is undesirable to most (eg. stop download apps so freely)
What I do care about is moving to protocols and data portability. I want the ability to switch to another provider if I’m not happy with their decisions. I absolutely don’t like my data being held hostage.
I also hope this realization extends to things like GMail which hasn’t yet seen a similar scrutiny
Luckily yes. Online access would be hindered, but nearly all my financial resources are handled through a local credit union.
I'm not in fear of the government seizing my assets, but I don't trust Google not to lock me out due to an algorithm run amok, or Tmobile giving my number away due to simple social engineering (that actually happened).
Apple I trust.
> Robinhood, Parler, Twitter, Reddit (et cetera)
but represent trivial ephemera whose significance for the individual, following abandonment/deletion, vanishes into hindsight once the endowment effect and separation anxiety wears off.
A strong digital rights for users is a good start, but I think the end goal is that they(the tech monopolies) are essential utilities for a majority of the world and should be regulated as such. A CEO should not be able to silence a democratically elected leader from a communications platform(congress or a govt. communications committee should decide), users should be able to buy the stock of their choosing(the SEC can decide to halt trading pending illegal behavior) and not have that right removed by a companies CEO.
Your 'single person' straw man aside, I don't think the conduits of conversation are the right place to attack this problem. It's just far too risky to have utterly unaccountable businesses be in the business of policing what people say.
I have the radical opinion that the police should be doing the policing. If people are criming online (threats of violence, planning to overthrow the government), they should get a visit from The Law.
Everything about what twitter did was stupid. They let him talk for years, and then finally stopped him at the worst time. They cancelled him when there was little more damage he could do and ruined ideas of free speech neutrality and it allowed his ilk to claim censorship and it helped with making him a martyr. Just absolute stupidity.
Letting corporations deal with dangerous thought leaders is not a solution that has even the slimmest chance of working.
Bundling together lots of individual garbage theories into giant piles doesn’t net you anything other than garbage theories, just like bundling bad mortgage securities didn’t mitigate risk in the subprime crisis.
Instead of saying ‘lots of statistical algorithms,’ name one, or even two, that stand up to genuine scrutiny (and that aren’t the readily debunked Charles J. Cicchetti claims.) Don’t hide behind the sheer number of crackpot theories. Or, you know, admit you have nothing but a hunch based on cognitive dissonance.
“The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud.” Based on the study, the group concluded that the machines should not be used in Michigan nor should the election results in Antrim County be certified.
In this county, the vote was actually corrected. And knowing these machines were capable of 70% error rates should have triggered a full statewide forensic audit in Michigan at the least.
Heres the surveillance footage of 30K suitcase ballots with absolutely no chain of custody after the entire building was shut down and all poll watchers kicked out on the basis of a bullshit water pipe leak story, being counted between 11pm and 1am the night of the election: https://rumble.com/vblh33-attorney-jackie-pick-exposes-georg...
At any rate, it's not a hunch. It's a fact. The election was stolen. We live in a banana republic.
1. The Antirim report was conducted by Russell James Ramsland who is the exact same non-expert person who mixed up Minnesota and Michigan. So, yes it does have something to do with it.
2. The report was not ordered by a judge, it was permitted. The distinction matters, because suggesting the judge 'ordered it' implies that it was some sort of impartial inquiry, instead of just another hack job by someone who wanted Trump to win.
3. The surveillance footage and the water pipe events happened on different nights, 17 hours apart.
That's just purely on the basis of facts that even aren't up for argument. There's much more to disagree with when further analyzing your claims, and while I'd be happy to go over them, I don't feel like a deep comment on an old news story is the best place for me to spend my time.
That your three main points contain full on factual misstatements should give you enough pause to reconsider the certainty of your conclusion.
also explain why no court, no intelligence agency (local or international), and the vast majority of the US Senate (consisting of both major political parties) disagrees with your assessment.
Also if the presidential votes are invalid than I guess we need to assume all the other items on the ballet (house, senate, bills, etc) were also invalid correct?
If the left is this good at such a grand conspiracy, then they really should run the country.
We don't have the federal courts, not in the least. It's just fraud. The FBI would rather investigate Twitter shitposters than touch this. They'd rather get jobs at CNN as consultants to pitch their own actual conspiracy theory about Trump being a Russian stooge for three years despite having had exculpatory evidence the entire time. I don't know how Americans are so naive when it comes to the depravity of our system.
It’s weird how almost every post you’ve done has been filled with factually wrong data, eg, the federal courts. But it helps explain why on less factual matters your bias so is severe. The sad part is I think you have no idea about your bias and actually believe what you’re writing.
Tune will change when RSUs and 401ks get effected.