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Comment by willeh | Hacker News Reader

Growing up as the typical nerd, I used to think that trust was something that needed to be eliminated, that other people weren't worthy of trust and that we all ought to be using TOR, bitcoin, I2P. All our chats be over XMPP with OTR messaging. But growing up, and getting beyond the world of early adulthood I've come to realise that most people can be trusted most of the time. Who doesn't instinctively look away when someone is typing in a password, most bosses aren't trying to scam you out of your pay check. In fact most people instinctively help others - even giving them a little push along.

As amazing, magical and occasionally necessary things like TOR, bitcoin and I2P are what truly is wonderful is that basic trust, that small but significant ∆, much more than clever algorithms and data structures is what makes our lives work.

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What you're missing is that software enables entities you shouldn't trust to work at scale in a way that does make it an issue.

Staying very high level, we're primed to think of privacy in human-defined terms in a way. Your mom snooping over your shoulder on what you're typing/viewing at age 12 on your first PC is the cause.

As a result, with tech privacy, we do a notional looking up and looking around, like you are, to evaluate it... ok, I know 20 people have my finsta, I only give out my number to like less than 2 people a year, I don't have a google account so no need to clear my cookies or use a VPN, and so on...

What you're not accounting for that:

- the very small amount of stuff you do let leak out because "most people can be trusted most of the time" gets ingested by that "most" delta. There is one or few very untrustworthy entities, you're right, but they still touch your online presence. This is the difference maker because of the scale these entities can work at (BlueKai is an example).

- Shadow contacts, and so on, are a thing. You get sucked in either way by other's bad behavior

I agree with your observation, most people are nice.

What I realised growing up is that every day someone is forced to give a percentage or their profits or face jail time, someone gets killed because we socialise the cost of war, people get spied on by state actors and surveillance systems.

All of this despite most people being nice.

The centralisation of power is a weakness and it's being exploited by those who are not nice.

This is completely missing the point of why one should be anonymous and use I2P etc. Surveillance harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say.

> I used to think that trust was something that needed to be eliminated ... I've come to realise that most people can be trusted most of the time

You are confusing the NEED to trust with the ABILITY to trust - and the are almost opposite things in some regards.

You need to trust car drivers to stop at a traffic light not to run over you. This is disempowering: your life is in their hands. If we can remove the need to trust drivers (e.g. with automatic braking) it's good.

If you CAN trust your neighbor to water your plants when you are away this is empowering. You can freely choose what to do.

As a side note, traditional anarchists are all about mutual aid and solidarity, while "anarcho-capitalists" support selfishness (links below)

(By the way, it's written Tor, not TOR)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid_(organization_theor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfishness

> In fact most people instinctively help others - even giving them a little push along.

You may like the book Mutual Aid by Kropotkin.

I would say in our capitalistic system you should have an inherent distrust of your communications channels. Google is reading your Gmail, Facebook is tracking the amount of time you spend looking at any image on its services, many third parties are trying to reverse your identity as you browse. All to sell or otherwise monetize your data.

There are many bad actors out there government and commercial.

That is hardly unique to a "capitalistic system", as history has repeatedly shown.

We live in a capitalistic system today, these are some of its properties. I said nothing about trust in other systems.

Thanks for clarifying.

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