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I think the main harm identified here is summed up in the line;

"The truth is pay-walled, but lies are for free"

It's not what information is or isn't collected. It can be valuable, and great social good can come out of so-called "big data". And we can, as a society, sensibly decide what is allowable in terms of prediction and prejudice (which are essentially the same thing in this context).

The problem is utility asymmetry. Having a few for-profit corporations own and trade our data is a societal catastrophe in the making, and can only tend toward fascism.

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I read recently about the concept of "civic databases" - someone pointed out the absurdity of the worlds scientific papers being "catalogued by one post grad on the run, but used by everyone".

Yeah. But even if you gave me access to every data set worldwide I still would have trouble making head or tail of it. but it's a start

It stuck with me too. Who's going to write the stored procs and views? Unless it's all going to be tables only.

"Software Diffusion, infer relationships about these tables and create an explorer for me."

jancsika's comment [1] in a thread on The Cypherpunk Manifesto:

> There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain.

> It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555419

> Who's going to write the stored procs and views? Unless it's all going to be tables only.

My upshot was: sci-hub/libgen is a civic database. It exists. Frankly, its current content is some of the most important content that could populate any database.

Given that, what are the most sensible political policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping it from burning down the way previous civic databases did?

Judging by the responses I got, there may not currently be enough public policy domain expertise on HN for such an effort to succeed. (And almost surely not enough time to organize before it burns down.) But I think it's still worth pursuing, if only to begin to generate that experience in the first place.

Whatever the case, if you're talking about which data fields ought to populate which structs, you're quite far afield from the effort I was trying to describe. That's why I started by asking: what would a cipherpunk not do? That was meant to be tongue in cheek, but let's take it seriously and call it plaintextpunk. :)

I think we are all in violent agreement - SciHub is an excellent example of a civic dataset, and frankly a great "cause celebre" for the idea of defending / funding / supoorting civic datasets.

As for having time to lobby for change, I only have optimism to fall back on. But we should try anyway.

I think we could all do more to counter and neutralise disinformation.

There was a disgraceful episode where th City Of London police allowed themselves be mobilised as useful idiots at the behest of Elsevier etc, against SciHub, spreading factually misleading information. I discussed this with several leading security researchers who all recognised it as cheap politicisation of fake-security news and fearmongering.

So it follows that the most sensible political policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping Sci-hub from burning down are also tied to policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping the police from being mobilized as useful idiots at the behest of any corporation big enough (whatever those processes are).

It may very well be the case that law enforcement overreach and corruption is gnawing at the very pillars of civilization.

Yes that one.

Glad it reverberated a little across this corner of the internet.

It's a great term - conveys what we mean. Maybe "Civic DataSets"

> The problem is utility asymmetry. Having a few for-profit corporations own and trade our data is a societal catastrophe in the making, and can only tend toward fascism.

It occurred to me that a few centuries ago every knight had his own little army that was loyal to him, and lent out to the king in the time of need. The idea that the army would belong to the people was alien at the time, however today few question the wisdom (even dictators pay lip service to it).

Could it be that the idea of big information belonging to the people will one day also seem entirely commonplace?

>The idea that the army would belong to the people was alien at the time,

It's still alien to me now. We the people don't tell the armies where to go. If a single person can tell the armies where to go, it's not we the people. To even come close to a we the people decision, the orders would have to be from a committee of reps. Good gawd could you imagine the US military being told what to do by the senate or, gasp, the house of reps? If there's a 2/3 majority rule, the military would never do anything.

It's unfortunately like this with quite a bit of our technology that emerges from the for profit landscape. Companies work hard to guard and legally build a mote around what could be even more valuable technology if proliferated to more thinkers and problem solvers, because that's more profitable to a small segment of investors in the near term. It doesn't matter if its even more beneficial to our world as a whole to let that idea loose, if it means putting a personal cash cow at risk. It also leads to overall ossified process. It really seems that we can't get anything done as a society unless we've greatly incentivized an opportunity for a lucky few to profit. Sure, we are great at delivering new cellphones across the globe and turning that into enormous profits for shareholders, but not really effective at the things that actually matter, like getting a hold of our emissions so they don't reshape our environment faster than we can adapt to it, or protecting genetic diversity among species that is necessary for adaptation and the emergence of traits that we could all benefit from.

To those working on closed source software: fight for it to be opened. Share the knowledge you've painstakingly gained, leave the ladder down behind you, do humanity a service by leaving behind your notes. You will find that its even easier to prove your worth as an engineer for new opportunities if you can point to the very commits you've pushed to the public source code.

Because it is unlikely this data will ever become a common good available to all, we can use creative ways to poison it. For example, I buy things for me under the kids names and have my partner use my card to buy things for herself. I only have one real ID social media account which is intentionally enigmatic and stale. Of course my networks obfuscate a lot. Unfortunately this is a systemic problem, and the one percent like me are a drop in the bucket.

> "The truth is pay-walled, but lies are for free"

Verified, researched information is more costly to build than lies, which anyone can just make up out of thin air.

But a vast majority of research is publicly funded (by tax payers). So if it's paid for by said individuals should they have to pay again to see the results?

That seems to be changing, slowly.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/brea...

https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires...

The same is true for court proceedings: we paid for it, it's our data.

It's not so simple. Good lies, the kind of disinformation that swings elections, wins wars, and controls populations, can be extraordinarily difficult to build. Think Operation Mincemeat. The backstories, legends, covers and dissemination costs can rival research in pursuit of truth. And by the same token, deep truths are sometimes there in the open for anyone with eyes and the wits to observe and write-up.

What I think you're talking about is "bullshit", which is really a kind of ephemeral non-data, like spam, advertising and opinions.

Flooding the public sphere with that, especially now using ever more plausible generative "AI" tools, devalues public truth and makes private intelligence stores seem more attractive and valuable.

In the limit this can even become a justification for cloistered data, as the Church understood so well with Latin scriptures. We'll be told "The people can't be trusted with the truth".

> It can be valuable, and great social good can come out of so-called "big data". And we can, as a society, sensibly decide what is allowable in terms of prediction and prejudice (which are essentially the same thing in this context).

Let's agree to disagree

I wish you'd quoted less.

Disagreement is good and helps me think.

But do you disagree that we might usefully leverage large datasets and bring social benefits?

Or that a democratic concensus on policy is possible?

Or that prediction and prejudice amount to the same thing?

> "The truth is pay-walled, but lies are for free"

Maybe on the internet. irl we have something called a "public library". more people should check them out

imo both truth and lies are paywalled. It's just that truth tends to be a lot more boring than lies, and a lot easier to take in with just a glance

> and a lot easier to take in with just a glance

meant a lot harder

The truth has always been paywalled. Good information comes at a cost, information asymmetry is power. What is different now is that information of all types is being shadowbanned

> information of all types is being shadowbanned

That sounds interesting, please say more.

If we did, that too would shadowbanned. For example, look at how people were pointing to early studies that the mRNA jabs caused heart issues in males 40 and under about 1.5 years ago. Raising such concerns was enough to get account here shadowbanned even when they posted to papers.

The interesting thing is the truth there was not behind a paywall. It was in the anarchic corners of the internet that allowed such heresy. What was behind the paywalls was pure state serving propaganda.

The last few years have been a real lesson to those who are paying attention. Unfortunately I've been really disappointed with how few of my friends have kept an open mind despite the poisoned information landscape.

> It was in the anarchic corners of the internet that allowed such heresy.

Which is part of the reason I deem kiwifarms more beneficial than not. Because a lot of shit they document is REALLY bad shit.

The biggest problem I have with them is posting dox's, altough, every one that I saw came from public information.

The only reason the Internet was a "bastion of truth" for awhile was that the whole thing was outside the walls.

The walls have moved and the truth has been confirmed, everything that is outside the walls is heresy, don't even think of going to look at it, as it is bad.

Counterpoint: Public media. While I don't think there's any statutory obligation, you will likely never find paywalls or brokered data. And the content is very reliable.

> Counterpoint: Public media. While I don't think there's any statutory obligation, you will likely never find paywalls or brokered data. And the content is very reliable.

That's because the cost has been sent towards the government, & indirectly paid for via taxes & government bonds. Effectively, the cost is shouldered by the general public without them noticing.

That's not true. Public media gets very little government funding. The CPB gets a Congressional appropriation once a year and sends it via grants to various public media orgs. But PBS, NPR all their affiliates, the Associated Press, Pro Publica etc are all private orgs that get most of their funding from donors and sponsors.

> That's not true. Public media gets very little government funding. The CPB gets a Congressional appropriation once a year and sends it via grants to various public media orgs. But PBS, NPR all their affiliates, the Associated Press, Pro Publica etc are all private orgs that get most of their funding from donors and sponsors.

That still means that the cost is shouldered by multiple entities, each with their own goals & agendas. The cost of the media itself doesn't go away because someone else bore it.

In fact, given that they're bearing the cost, there'll inevitably be a larger sway in placating to the cost bearer's desires & beliefs in order to have a greater chance at continuing to receive donations from them in the future. Failure to do so may prompt the donator(s) to see their money as being lit on fire instead of being properly spent.

Even in the best base of a "blind donator", who doesn't care about the media produced & will fund it regardless of the stances of the produced media, the money from them is still finite & requires (their earnings > their expenditures).

It's somewhat ironic that I cannot view the full article; it's paywalled, and I am not a Wired subscriber.

Using wget pretending to be something else will probably see you right. Text based without JavaScript pulls Wired articles nicely.

https://archive.ph/pQQV1

This is not remotely true. Lies can be very much pay-walled too.

facts can be found everywhere, for free or for pay.

But what is harder to find is what people really want, which is to be told how to feel about something, and that's more and more behind a paywall.

(Which can still be completely wrong mind you!)

Being told how to feel is more behind a paywall? This is also not remotely true.

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