The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism | Hacker News Reader

The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

matduggan.com

425 pointsColinWright399 comments

I was a great admirer (and later friend) of Barlow, and I'm still very deeply influenced by the Declaration and many adjacent phenomena. I agree with some fraction of this post in terms of seeing many people shelving these principles when it gets inconvenient for them.

In the past few months, I've been troubled by one specific part of the Declaration, in the final paragraph:

> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense. The author of the linked post might say that this has to do with the need for moderation (indeed this is a big surprise from the 1996 point of view, as there were still unmoderated Usenet groups that people used regularly and enthusiastically, and spam was a recent invention).

I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue, but one is that the early Internet culture was very self-selected for people who thought that the ability to talk to people and the ability to access information were morally virtuous. I was going to say that it was self-selected for intellectualism but I know that early Internet participants were often not particularly scholarly or intellectually sophisticated (some of our critics like Langdon Winner, quoted here, or Phil Agre, were way ahead on that score).

So, I might say it was self-selected in terms of people who admired some forms of communicative institutions, maybe like people whose self-identity includes being proud of spending time in a library or a bookstore, or who join a debate club. (Both of those applied to me.) This is of course not quite the same thing as intellectual sophistication.

People were mean to each other on the early Internet, but ... some kind of "but" belongs here. Maybe "but it was surprising, it wasn't what they expected"? "But it wasn't what they thought it was about"?

Nowadays "humane" feels especially surprising as a description of an aspiration for online communications. It's kind of out the window and a lot of us find that our online interactions are much less humane that what we're used to offline. More demonization of outgroups, more fantasies of violence against them, more celebration of violence that actually occurs, more joy that one's opponents are suffering in some way. (I see this as almost fully general and not just a pathology of one community or ideology.)

I'm troubled by this both because it's unpleasant and even scary how non-humane a lot of Internet communities and conversation can be, and because it's jarring to see Barlow predict that specific thing and get it wrong that way. Many other things Barlow was optimistic about seem to me to have actually come to pass, although imperfectly or sometimes corruptly, but not this one.

The article was interesting to read not necessarily as a generative spark but as a datapoint, a symptom of how effective, in the long run, the response from those who saw the internet as a threat was.

Only someone who's lost the plot (or arrived late) would summarily conflate Barlow's 1996 Declaration with "one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under maritime law". The article itself has fallen victim to the weaponized co-optation whose framework it describes.

The author says "I remember thinking it was genius when I first read it. I was young enough [...]", believing it was due to being impressionable, but it's more likely that it was due to having lost something along the way. Or rather, it was stolen from them and they didn't even realize.

The Declaration was right, it was just naively optimistic and severely underestimated its opponent + incorrectly presumed digital natives would automatically be on the "right" side. Now we are where we are. And it's just the beginning of the pendulum's counterswing.

Could you please keep going? Maybe I'm just old, tired, and have other responsibilities, but things are feeling pretty bleak these days.

Google is back to pushing remote attestation (ie WEI), Apple has already had it for quite some time. "AI" is a great Schelling point excuse for capital structures to collude rather than compete, whether it's demanding identification / "system integrity" (aka computational disenfranchisement) for routine Web tasks or simply making computing hardware unaffordable (and thus even less practical for most people, whether it's GPUs, RAM, or RPis for IoT projects).

There are some silver linings like AI codegen empowering individuals to solve their own problems, and/or really go to town hacking/polishing their libre project for others to use.

But at best I see a future 5-10 years down the road where I've got a few totally-pwnt corporate-government-approved devices for accomplishing basic tasks (with whatever I/O devices are cost-effective from the subset we're allowed to use), and then my own independent network that cannot do much of what's required to interface with (ie exist in) wider society.

Alongside "1984 wasn't an instruction manual" we may need the slogan "'The Right to Read' wasn't an instruction manual".

In many countries, people have already won a similar fight with printing press, press censorship and encryption. I think there is a reason for optimism (of the will).

If AI can code, and empower individuals to do it on a local device, it is already smart enough to educate masses on the matters of their self-interest, such as freedom and solidarity.

I don't think the powers will be able to gatekeep it. There might be some grief but overall human freedom will prevail.

I doubt AI can educate the masses simply because the masses would have to prompt it to educate them. Almost no one in my social circle knows, let alone understands Google’s recent work on pushing web attestation, or any other tech company’s power plays enforced on us. They are people blindly hitting accept all in every banner that pops up in their online journeys or use chat apps that blatantly spy on them.

They don’t know what they could have or why the new captcha is funny, thus they can never come up with a prompt that leads to them being educated on the matter. They would have to know that they don’t know and since there is no public discourse for such matters in their Facebook timelines, their thinly right wing digital news outlets and their Viber and what’s app chats they will never know that they don’t know.

> If AI can code, and empower individuals to do it on a local device, it is already smart enough to educate masses on the matters of their self-interest, such as freedom and solidarity.

oof. I do not see that this follows, at all. For starters, describing "AI" as "smart" is falling into the trap of anthropomorphization. But the core dynamic of LLMs I see is a reflection of context - both training and the data sources that are presented, but also the questions you ask. On its own it's not going to lead someone to ask about self-empowering approaches to problems or freedom in general.

So sure, genAI seems to be greatly helping my own locally-hosted infrastructure approaches (it changes projects from needing a clear head over the course of a day or two, to something I casually push forward on for an hour or two at night). But I don't see that there is a huge pent up demand of people determined to do homeprod/homeautomation/etc projects but unable to find the time.

Also keep in mind we're not even near the enshittification stage of "AI" yet. Existing businesses are enshittifying using genAI, yes. But that's much different from when the genAI providers themselves start trying to extract wealth.

You are severy underestimating the stupidity of the masses.

I suspect this is correct, and the push towards "age verification" (i.e. user id hiding behind a pretext), the insane build out of server farms, which is making commodity computing unaffordable, and the push towards AI in everything are all pointing in the same direction.

The 1990s vision of computing was a bicycle - or car - for the mind. It was libertarian in the sense that if you had a device it would empower you to get where you wanted to go more quickly.

And the rhetoric around it was very much about personal exploration on a new and exciting frontier.

The 2020s vision is more like a totalitarian transport network where you don't own the vehicle, you don't own the network, there's constant propaganda telling you how to structure your journey to the standard destinations, and deviation is becoming increasingly impossible.

The device is just an access port to the network. It's dumbed down, so even if you understand how it works you can't do much with it. And as AI becomes more prevalent, your ability to understand that will diminish further.

So the end result is very plausibly a state where you're completely reliant on AI to do anything. And AI is owned by the pseudo-state oligopoly - the same oligopoly which runs the propaganda networks that sell you ads, hype selected content while suppressing other content, and genrally try to influence your behaviour.

It's the complete opposite of the original vision.

Will consumer AI fix this? Probably not. Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres.

> Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres.

There's one way to deal with this, but I doubt it'll be popular in these parts: Communal ownership of the means of production.

Don't use the oligarchy's AI. Your personal hardware is going to be too weak. But together, we can own our own server farms.

"Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs, or something, which is probably why it sounds unattainable. But if you reorient that to something more along the lines of, "the Mullvad of hosted llama.cpp", then it actually doesn't seem that far out of reach.

> "Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs

The quote is a direct reference to a core tenet of Marxist theory, socialism, and communism.

Historically, communal ownership at scale has almost always been implemented via a centralized state, which has tended to gravitate towards authoritarianism. The Soviet Union and East Germany, and many other countries along those lines, didn't really fit the "hippy co-op" image very well.

There's also the, "Burn down anything which isn't owned by a cooperative or human-scale municipality," option/component, where "burn" means anything from, "Deny construction permits," to, "All you had to do was pay us enough to live."

Not saying that anyone SHOULD do it. Just that you would kind of need both, for the non-authoritarian AI future: block the corporate strong-arm, but also build out your own infra because other nation-states are certainly going to do it and use that capability to try to muscle-in themselves.

And this is where the geopolitical aspect comes in and where an increasing number of studies calls this 'Digital Authoritarianism' with the stated goal of a nation or company (or both in cooperation) keeping control of the population, the narrative and the access to information.

An overview of the literature and studies on the subject: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02681102.2024.2...

A recent study that implicitely inverstigates the role of corporations in the trend: Digital Authoritarianism: from state control to algorithmic despotism https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5117399&... It's a bit long(ish), 29 pages (the last 10 are references) but worth a read.

>The device is just an access port to the network. It's dumbed down, so even if you understand how it works you can't do much with it. And as AI becomes more prevalent, your ability to understand that will diminish further.

The device becomes a magic artifact. Like a palantir. Many fantasy stories look like there were (or still are somewhere out there) great people who made all the magical stuff in the story while the people in the story have no idea how that stuff works.

That is possibly the way our civilization going. Especially when the datacenters will be in space, and only the "dumb" Starlink like terminals on Earth.

The corpolibertarians are betting massively on AI to liberate them from the working class and in their wake, transforming societies and economies as needed. I think this long term goal is delusional and the day of the pitchforks is coming. They can't endlessly fabricate distractive images of enemies, like migrants or what ever, while inflating budgets and claims about the future.

I am also old, tired, and have too many responsibilities, and so are most of the people posting here (or at least they are tired of the bleakness).

The millennials are also likewise tired of AI and corporate fascism. I think they are smarter than our generation. So there's a sliver of a silver lining.

But as to what can be done about it is another matter. Besides "butlerian jihad" the only way I see is by voting with our feet, since ballots don't seem to matter.

I will add, for those that lost the plot: the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location, and therefore people cannot be physically persecuted for what they think and say.

We're far from achieving this goal, and we underestimated our opponents by a lot. But it would be foolish to blame the Barlows of the world instead of blaming the tyrants and corporate opportunists that go to great lengths [0] to sabotage and interfere.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.

Shills don't need anonymity. They can troll and astroturf just fine under their real names, or the names of the people they're paying to shill for them, because there is no one who comes in the night to put a bag over your head for shilling for the establishment.

The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.

With anonymity, they can 1000000x their presence and thus the effectiviness of their message.

How is that supposed to work? The average person is not going to read 1000000 separate posts. They want someone to go on Reddit and see that 10 of the 13 replies to a post about their subject are favorable. They don't need 1000000 accounts for that, they need 10, and getting 10 IDs is elementary for anyone with a corporate or government budget.

Shilling by nation-level actors often involves paying South Asians or Africans to create profiles claiming to be an ordinary person from somewhere completely different. Or people in said countries may not even be paid by a geostrategic rival but are shilling because they identified profit potential in e.g. selling MAGA merchandise. Obvious what they do depends on pseudonymity, and would fall apart if their real names were shown.

> would fall apart if their real names were shown

I don’t think that’s true, unfortunately. You have lots of cases of major propaganda accounts found to be foreign actors and pretty much nothing happened to them

I am talking about the psychological effect, not the accounts being banned. Accounts pretending to be e.g. bona-fide Red State MAGA Americans are not going to successfully manipulate the American populace or move MAGA merchandise if the name "Ramesh Sharma" or "Goodluck Ngozi" or whatever is shown on every one of the account's posts.

Wouldn't "Ramesh Sharma" just file a name change form with the government and hence be known as "John Smith" when they create their account?

And even that is assuming they need the same person to be writing the posts as lending their name. They could also pay a homeless person or food service worker in Kentucky to sign up for the account and still have a troll farm in another country writing the posts.

The astroturfing relies mostly on anonymous users. The vast majority of trolling and shilling on Twitter and similar platforms is done with fake identities. So you have a few open shills who are using their real names, with massive campaigns enabled by anonymous/fake users

What part of that requires anonymity? You pay some broke college students or unemployed dog washers to shill (or let someone else shill) for the big accounts under their name.

There is not only a massive supply of such people, they have high turnover as the seniors graduate but the new freshmen are broke again and the unemployment rate is fairly stable but the specific people distressed enough to sign their name for a buck are constantly in flux, so it doesn't even matter if they get banned.

>Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.

Even if it were so, it is still a win. Without anonymity there is no liberty to the weak at all. And thus for that liberty we must endure all the crap.

Bots are only an issue for public posts, not chat groups and DMs where the most valuable interactions happen. Ideally chats would be encrypted, untraceable, and anonymous, except to the people you're talking to. Anonymity is an overwhelmingly positive feature there.

For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlled social media platforms of today. But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion. Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out. And if you want to customize the feed, we could make client-side filters and algorithms. There could be an open-source algorithm called "Hacker News" that you can just download and install into your open-source social media client.

As for keeping the powerful in check, don't forget that we've kind of lost equality before the law at this point, as shown by the Epstein saga. If we try to remove anonymity from the Internet right now, it will only be used to surveil regular citizens but not the people we need to keep in check. I would happily support a law that selectively enforces the other way around, though: let's mandate real identity for all government personnel online and expose their Polymarket accounts.

> Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out

This has never been true and never will be. Entities with more resources have dramatically more ability to put their perspective out and dominate the messaging.

This is so blindingly obvious just by looking at what is happening...

It's like the believe that markets are inherently efficient and we just need to get rid of all the government interference that distorts the free market.

There is no evidence for it, the theoretical argument is so flimsy it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the various ways in which markets are inefficient are several entire subfield of economics. Yet the idea persists...

The notion that you just need a proper free market of ideas and then the best ideas will automatically win, and we just need to get rid of everything that interferes with this free market of ideas is cut from the same cloth...

Maybe it has the same attraction as "blame the immigrants". It gives you an immediate automatic scapegoat for everything you see in society that you don't like.

The belief isn't unjustified though. One of the defining elements of a government is aggression. Spending resources to force someone (specially with violence) to something is more wasteful than if they were to do it by themselves. Furthermore, most, if not all, cited inefficiencies are linked somewhere to distortions created by government action.

That being said, I do agree that there's a dangerous apathy about how the free markets work. The free market, being the product of voluntary action, is anything but automatic.

But I don't see how that is a scapegoating mechanism for "anything you don't like". Anymore than apathy is, at least. I see human rights (specially the right to live and private ownership) being used as scapegoats much more often.

"Entities with more resources" are not necessarily bad, as you seem to assume. In reality, they're not aligned with eachother. This is just as true for nation states as it is for individuals.

When everyone can talk without censorship and fear of persecution, the best ideas might not always win, but the good ones usually will, and the worst ones will always lose. This is why every authoritarian regime needs censorship to survive.

You're not describing a world of freedom and opportunity. You're describing a world where anyone with money can do whatever they want without consequences.

The good ideas do not usually win. The loudest ones tend to win. The worst ones frequently win.

The world I'm describing is one where anyone, rich and poor, can say whatever they want without being silenced or persecuted, without fear. People with more resources will have the means to make themselves louder in public as they do now, but unlike the situation we have right now, they will not be able to monitor other people's private conversations, nor can they censor and compell other people's speech. That's a world of more freedom and opportunity.

The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols. Ideas will clash, leaving only what people think is good in common. And that is the definition of the common good.

Do you have any better ideas? Or do you think that you possess the superior definition of "good" such that public discourse to search for it is unnecessary?

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

> The loudest ones are not aligned with eachother. Their efforts to influence public opinion will neutralize eachother, and none of them can gain moderating power over the platform because the platform is just protocols

This does not match reality. Those with money and power DO have a lot of goals that are aligned with each other. They're not incompetent, and they understand the power of collusion. If you think they cancel each other out you're living in a fantasy.

> The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

The solution, presuming said law to be fair, is to make a world where no one has to sleep under bridges, to beg on the streets and steal their bread. Not getting rid of the rule of law. Of course, that presumes said law to be fair (aside from the last part, it isn't).

> Those with money and power DO have a lot of goals that are aligned with each other. They're not incompetent, and they understand the power of collusion.

Most people share goals, understand the benefits of collaboration, and exploitable conflicts still arise. The problem isn't caused by a lack of shared goals, but the presence of conflicting ones. Even just one can inhibit collaboration and induce sabotage. After all, there is no long-term collaboration to be had if your goals are mutually exclusive.

Also, it think it bears reminding that the alternative, regulation, is enforced through a powerful corporation that is structurally much harder to hold accountable (despite best efforts, although it was always a non-starter), the state.

> But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion.

How has this worked out with email, text messages, or the phone system, or even postal mail.

I rarely receive messages from kindly anti-propaganda bots, but sure receive a lot of messages from actual propaganda that bypass filters and infect everything like cockroaches.

Assuming that otherwise won’t happen is a basic failure to understand humanity. Spend a few hours with middle school boys and after observing their behavior, try to determine if your protocols will withstand that goofiness, naivety, rudeness, absurdness, sensitivity, callousness, puerileness, unpredictability, and rambunctiousness.

As a parent to several, I see how educational institutions (school) whose job it is to be experts at this exact behavior are failing catastrophically by not understanding this very basic idea. If your protocol something that is designed for well meaning people with good behavior who trust one another, it probably won’t work to well when given to middle schoolers and will work even worse when someone with the slightest bit of malice gets a hold of it.

> How has this worked out with email, text messages, or the phone system, or even postal mail.

Those are centrally controlled systems where propangandists have home field advantage (email is debatable, it's halfway, it wasn't designed with the existence of companies like Google in mind). But even if that wasn't the case, it's not the same phenomenon as bots on social media. The important difference is that on social media, if there is no central moderation, the bots will cancel out eachother's influence. If I make an anti-propaganda email bot, it doesn't lower the ranking of the propaganda that's already in your inbox. But if I have an upvoting bot for their downvoting bot, they neutralize eachother.

Also, ensuring that nobody except the participants of group chats and DMs can figure out eachother's real identity is already a massive win. That alone makes it a lot harder to beat a population into submission.

Do you also suggest to make it illegal to pay someone to publish certain posts/texts? And plan on enforcing this somehow worldwide? Because otherwise, if I have the money to make someone post my opinions, I already have twice the influence of everyone who doesn't have that money. And there are people who have the resources of entire nation states at their disposal and have a big incentive to influence public discourse in their favour.

There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in what you write...

It was probably a bad goal anyway. Anonymity turned out to be a great tool for fascists, and privacy is not going to save anyone if the fascist shit properly hits the fan.

The opposing voices is what stops fascism. Without anonymity there are no opposing voices.

My point is that once we reach fascism, the opposing voices stop mattering. I think it's naive to think that anything happening in the digital world can properly fight that.

And since technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism, it's not a net good anymore.

>technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism

looks like we're talking different fascisms.

I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes.

>looks like we're talking different fascisms.

Okay, what fascism are you talking about? I'm talking about the actual rising fascism that we see right now and which has boosted its influence via social media by a lot.

>I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes.

No worries, I've learned not to be offended by people being wrong.

Hah, as if the fascists themself are in loving unity. (Or clear on the term itself)

There were and will be opposing voices also in deepest fascism.

More broadly, totalitarism is rather the term, where the whole society is total under control of one ideology. That can be fascism, but also other ideologies strive for that.

But yes, allowing anonymous voices is one way to counter it.

You literally could not be more wrong that opposing voices stop mattering once fascism is reached. Doubly wrong because fascism isn't a binary. Thrice wrong in that you think that a lack of anominity and privacy would somehow be helpful for prevention when fascism already here!

That‘s something I believed 10 years ago, I honestly don’t see how that position can still be defended. What happened is the fascists benefited so much more from anonymity than any opposition.

But I also don’t expect that removing anonymity would in itself improve the current world, things are at a point where people living in democracies are openly advocating for the destruction of every single liberal ideals. Sure that’s in part astroturfed by anonymous accounts but way too many people couldn’t care less if they real identity would be linked to those claims

> the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location

Whose goal is it? The article notes that the goal is immediately dropped whenever it's more profitable to do the opposite. We got tracking pixels, browser fingerprinting, and privacy-focused companies that talk big game about supporting (/selling you?) anonymity online but won't accept anonymous payments.

The anonymous online communication dream is dead. It died after 9/11 when the US government doubled-down on rolling out a panopticon to prevent future "intelligence failures."

It's Barlow's goal as I understood it. The article criticizes corporate opportunists, which is fair. But there are also plenty of other people willing to put short-term profit aside to fix problems and build the future we want to live in. The free and anonymous Internet is not a dream and will be built. It may have been half dead at one point post-911, but it was revived by Snowden and will strike at the panopticon until it shatters.

You don't actually engage with the point of the article at all.

Why is that a desirable goal? What are the societal implications of this? What implicit assumptions is your framing hiding, and are they true? (All communication is good! All opposition to communication is oppression!)

I don't want a world where everyone can send me any ad they want without my consent. Where Billionaires and Autocrats can use their money and power to amplify their lies. Where utterances that no court has ever recognized as protected speech dominate all carefully stated opinions.

Just retreating to exactly the catchphrases and naivete of the 90s is not cutting it anymore.

You already live in a world where anyone can send you any ad they want without your consent, paid for by your tax dollars. The postal service had been trafficking ads direct to your door since before Twitter was a thing.

Billionaires and Autocrats by the very nature of having massive amounts of money can use their money and power to amplify their lies no matter how easy or not it is for normal people to also amplify their own lies. Again, Disney was buying swamp land in Florida through shell companies long before the internet decided forcing Elon Musk to buy twitter would be funny. Or see also that insider trading is illegal for you and me, but if you're a congressman, that's just a perk of the job.

As far as "utterances that no court has ever recognized as speech", I'd be interested in what you think qualifies here, because the recent history (where by recent I mean over the course of the 1900's) has been an ever expansive definition of what sort of things constitute speech. Tinker v. Des Moines found wearing a black arm band is speech. Texas v. Johnson found burning a flag was speech. Brandenburg v. Ohio found advocacy of force and law violations was broadly speech, leaving only a small exception against speech that would induce "imminent lawless action". Hustler V. Falwell found parody of public figures even when that parody intends to cause emotional distress of the person being parodied were speech. Snyder v. Phelps found posters saying things like "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "God Hates Fags" outside of a funeral were speech. And let's not forget National Socialist Party v. Skokie, finding that a literal Nazi rally was speech.

> The Declaration was right, it was just naively optimistic and severely underestimated its opponent + incorrectly presumed digital natives would automatically be on the "right" side. Now we are where we are. And it's just the beginning of the pendulum's counterswing.

I think you're completely ignoring the premise of the articles argument (as I understand it). The failure of the declaration was a feature not a flaw. In otherw words it was never about the freedom of the individual but the freedom of large corporations.

In the end governments (even totalitarian ones in a limited sense), are vehicles of the people. Unregulated spaces will favor the person with the most resources and thus lead to more concentration of power. It's essentially a information centric continuation of Reaganomics. The article argues that this could have been (and was, e.g. by Winner) anticipated in the 90s, and that in fact this was the intention of Barlow and co.

I think the detail of Barlow being Dick Cheney's former campaign manager was a very useful addition to the narrative though. Barlow (through his Grateful Dead connections) is generally presented as an idealistic, if a bit naive, hippie akin to Richard Stallman. That doesn't really square with being Cheney's supporter.

> I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue, but one is that the early Internet culture was very self-selected for people who thought that the ability to talk to people and the ability to access information were morally virtuous.

Honestly I think it mostly self selected based on who had the technical ability to participate, especially at that time.

Also early internet access was gated by institutions. Most people were using their work or school internet access to be online, and so behavior was naturally more controlled. When I was first online (circa 1990), I could have been "kicked off the internet" by my college's IT department.

Very good point. Ability and access.

>has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense.

I never saw this as surprising because cyber-libertarianism reads like Gnosticism to me. Even in the sentence you quoted there's already the subtext of being left out "more human than your government" etc. (odd choice of possessive for a man who was campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney)

The people who were into this stuff tended to have an unhealthy relationship to their physical bodies, physical community, felt excluded, tended to have an Enders Game psychology of feeling both inferior and superior at the same time (extremely bad combination for people with power), equipped with the secret cyber knowledge that would give them access to some new space nobody else knew off, and I was never surprised that you got Peter Thiel and Palantir out of this instead of a digital utopia.

> tended to have an Enders Game psychology of feeling both inferior and superior at the same time

I’ve read Ender’s Game about 20 years ago, but I don’t remember that being a theme in the novel. Could you elaborate what you mean here?

Sure, for the long and more articulate version I'd point to this excellent essay by John Kessel (https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating...)

but in short, Ender is the archetypal victim hero. He's always bullied, tormented, abused but also stronger, more intelligent, more emotionally deep and yet always remains the victim who even when inflicting planet scale violence remains ostensibly innocent. This is also the stereotypical young adult show anime protagonist or the fantasy of the bullied high school nerd.

And that really is the psychology you'll find with a lot of folks of the 90s libertarian internet circle in particular those who amassed a lot of money and power.

The revelations that Epstein had interest and involvement in the development of 4chan really makes me wonder what we would find behind the curtain at next iterations like KiwiFarms, etc if we looked hard enough. Not to sound an overly conspiratorial note, but sewing division within a foreign culture is one of those things that intelligence communities excel at, might match some patterns we’ve seen, and would serve to help explain some of the divergence between expectation and reality, here.

There is a theory that some skeptics of tech optimism have advanced for a while, that governments like Internet freedom and widespread availability of ICTs in rival nations because it either (1) makes people there hate and fear each other, or (2) makes them easier to propagandize.

In this account the U.S. State Department's Internet Freedom Agenda (which many of my friends and colleagues have been directly funded by) is about destabilizing other countries, while Russian or Chinese spies in turn relish American Internet freedoms because they can stir up conflicts here.

I have never endorsed this view but I've run into forms of it again and again and again. Adjacent to it is the idea that some of our prior social harmony was due to a more controlled or at least more homogeneous media landscape.

I definitely buy into the “monoculture” argument a bit. When hundreds of millions of people are all voraciously consuming the same very limited cultural messaging - three TV stations, a handful of movie studios, a handful of major book publishers - there is bound to be a leveling of interpersonal expectations that will be absent in a more fragmented culture.

That’s not some kind of crypto denunciation against cosmopolitan diversity, but it is what it is and I do think there’s a there, there.

You can see this playing out right now, with X spreading holocaust denial and all sorts of corrosive messages in Europe, with it's owner being actively hostile to European institutions and the US government actively guarding it from consequences.

Which part of my comment do you relate this to?

Usage of the internet to sow dissent among citizens of a government by a power that's at odds with said government, presumably

ICTs?

("Information and Communication Technology" does not make sense here)

> ICTs?

I think "Information and communications technology (ICT)":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Information_and_c...

ICT is correct. It’s the economic bucket that Facebook, Google, etc are categorized under for export accounting. “Social Media” would have worked in its placed.”

That idea sounds like it is a Freudian slip of sorts of an authoritarian mind. Basically, involuntary ideological tells from patterns of their thinking that slip through into their speech. The sorts of things which would give a spy away.

The idea you mentioned is the mark of an authoritarian who considers expressed dissent a sign of weakness instead of a crucible for the strength of ideas. That they literally cannot conceive of a purpose of it other than propaganda or division because they see democracy as inherently a weakness and they think that a 'strong man' is needed to create unity.

It is a similar tell to bigots who cite 'homogeneous society means' as being inherently socially cohesive or responsible for low crime because they cannot comprehend a cohesion based on something other than ethnic unity.

Or reflexive deceivers promising to 'restore a sense of trust' because the thought of being trustworthy even never comes to mind as something to promise as a lie. I have seen that one in officials in response to corruption or abuse scandals far too many times. A cousin to that is expressing fear of 'turning into a low trust society' where they promise parades of horribles to try to poison the well against people rightfully distrusting them.

Related, and visible in cable not-news: "If you don't believe in my correct religion, then there is nothing is stopping you from murdering people!"

> The revelations that Epstein had interest and involvement in the development of 4chan really makes me wonder what we would find behind the curtain at next iterations like KiwiFarm

For starters, that Putin was right when he was calling the internet a CIA project back in 2010, 2011, those whereabouts.

Later edit: From 2013 [1]:

> Barlow: Let me give you an example: I have been advising the CIA and NSA for many years, trying to get them to use open sources of information. If the objective is really to find out what is going on, the best way to do this, is by trading on the information market where you give information to get information.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-want-to-tear-down-the-v_b_4...

> Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense.

I disagree. By meaningful real-world standards, the average Internet space is in fact extremely humane and polite. People will bring up the random exceptions where groups of people absolutely hate one another and these hates eventually spill over into online spaces, but that's what these are, limited exceptions. By and large, the average online interaction is potentially far more reflective of desirable human values than the ways complete strangers usually interact offline. Perhaps this is a matter of pure self-selection among a tiny niche of especially intellectually-minded folks, but even if this was the case it would still be creating an affordance that wasn't there before.

By meaningful real-world standards there are bot farms sowing dissent and literally driving people into mental illness which has already destroyed many families.

At the same time there's the Cambridge Analytica/SCL strand where a corporation literally sells election fixing services that rely on data gathered from social media accounts.

To be fair these are all extensions of political and media trends that already existed, and which online tech could amplify by some orders of magnitude.

Even so. The damage is very real.

One standard technique is to use attack bots to find a wedge issue and weaponise it by raising the temperature from both sides.

This can easily be automated now, so we're well past the point where literal humanity is the most important element.

>By meaningful real-world standards there are bot farms sowing dissent and literally driving people into mental illness which has already destroyed many families.

Real living standards have been stagnant or falling since 1971. We've been making time up by working more, buying plastic and filling our free time with distractions.

Blaming the internet for 50 years of policy is both stupid and pointless. In short: what governments want you to do instead of asking why your grand father could buy a house at 20.

Propaganda is only effective when it's true.

> there are bot farms sowing dissent

Junk messages trying to use "wedge issues" for attention are nothing new, they existed in the 1990s too. You underestimate just how transparent they are, even on modern-day social media which in many ways is a highly favorable environment to such tactics.

> People were mean to each other on the early Internet, but ... some kind of "but" belongs here. Maybe "but it was surprising, it wasn't what they expected"? "But it wasn't what they thought it was about"?

For me, the "but" is that I would rather have someone be mean to me than have a corporation collecting all of my data and using it to try and advertise at me

Yeah. Conflict is part of social life, it's unavoidable. Spying on people to make money, putting unknown and often malicious executable code on almost every page for 20 years, sending saboteurs and astroturf squads to disrupt natural communities and channel the herd into monetizable social media slave pens where only approved speech is allowed and corporate propaganda is displayed between every message... not so much.

I hadn’t heard of Barlow or these articles prior to this post but after reading them all I am left with the same question I have for every libertarian, cyber or otherwise.

When the corporation that runs as a planned economy with only a few unaccountable leaders at the top has as much power as any other existing government, what makes them any different in terms of morality or “goodness”?

I have never gotten a coherent answer and a few times I’ve received violence in response to the question(also a lol as one of the violent ones was also the one to introduce me to the concept of NAP).

Libertarians seem incapable of rationality and are about as convincing as any true believer of a religion you don’t believe in as an outside observer.

To me it seems that in the end main measure is how deep/powerful are hierarchies in a system. How much power has one individual over the other.

Many libertarians and liberals believe that it's the freedoms one has that make system anti hierarchical.

But as you point out when you have absolute freedom in market based society then you eventually end up with intensely deep hierarchies.

In other words you are free to do everything but there is no guarantee you can do anything - even the most basic things like get food or shelter. And most end up with the short side of the stick.

The reason is that your question makes no sense, and shows a lack of understanding of how markets operate.

Corporations work on markets, with customers, and need to dynamically adapt to the demands of the customers. Therefore the concept of planned economy goes out the window.

Leaders in a corporation are accountable to the share holders, so again, what you say makes no sense.

Morality relates to value carriers, in the form on conscious human beings, it has no relevance to "the corporation", so for ethical questions you ask the person.

I know you will never research this, but for others who are interested in the only ethical and realistic system to govern society, libertarianism, to great places to start is Johan Norbergs The capitalist manifesto, and Ludwig von Mises Liberalism.

When I say corporations run as planned economies, I meant their internal operations. There is no market dynamics going on when the board and C*Os tell you the budget you have for the year and what you are working on.

When I say leaders I am referring to the shareholders. Take Meta for example. Zuckerberg is the only one who has an ultimate say.

I am aware of the theorists you say I will never research. I am also aware you will never change your mind if you think the internal dynamics of mega corps are beholden to market dynamics.

The corporation (that runs internally as a planned economy) will get more and more inefficient the larger it gets, because that is what planning an economy does. Which in turn means it will loose market share and be forced to lean up until it is competitive again.

Or it just uses its power to influence government regulations and suppress or buy out competition.

Like what one of the current crop of mega corps has an internal market for how its capital is allocated. The closest example I could think of in history was IBM and its blue dollars.

Buying out maybe, but that only exacerbates the problem for the company in the long run. Regulatory capture is what actually works, but not within the libertarian framework, because regulation again is not a market mechanism, but government intervention into the market - exactly what libertarians say we should have less of in the first place.

Mind you, not different, or "better" intervention, but less, or even none at all. One could argue the point about libertarianism is that you can't trust the government to do a good job because it is based on force, and not voluntary market interactions, and hence lacks the proper incentives. It's just a bunch of guys on a spending spree with other peoples money, and their incentive is to make as much of it as humanly possible land in their own pockets.

To me the biggest problem w. libertarianism & game theory etcetera is that humans are not only motivated by greed/personal gain.

Pure anecdata; the libertarian/capitalist anarchists I've met have all been close to sociopathic in their disregard for others. I always figured that people who have an underdeveloped sense of empathy project this onto everyone else.

I prefer to judge such advice by the available facts, not by hearsay about the moral character of the advisor - especially not hearsay spread by his enemies. Your ad hominem has no bearing on the argument.

So, how is trusting politicians and bureaucrats to be selfless and focused on their duty to society working out for you?

Cool, how is letting companies go even more hog wild a solution when right now the problem is occurring from their semi hog wildness.

And it’s not an ad hominem on its own when the argument he is making is that the people espousing a certain world view are doing so because they believe everyone else has their same myopic view on reality and empathy.

What problem would that be that has not already been addressed further up the chain?

And it is an ad hominem - it's nothing more than an allegation impugning the character of libertarians in order to dismiss their arguments. The allegation alone does neither prove anything about the actual character of these people, nor what their view on reality and empathy actually is, nor if that view is actually wrong, nor who is doing the actual projecting here.

I come from Sweden and would say it worked great until '86 or so.

Humane, as a secular and universally applied sentiment, is a bit of a modern idea, once backed by common goods; shared institutions, third places, extended families, good economy, religion, etc. With those common goods fading, I see people more and more lashing out against each other; particularly in a frictionless environ that incites/outlets fantasy desires. The war of all against all from the safety of our screens; at least for the growing numbers who live their lives on the upper-case Internet.

Lower-case internet is ok as a tool for making spaces. But I reckon humane-ness, or really, virtue, is a habit built from within. And the habits the Internet rewards are generally the wrong ones.

One small edit: many also look to the Internet to meet their needs, beyond just fantasy or desire. Their lashing out comes after the disappointment: when the internet simply cannot fill the hole in them the way the common goods once did.

The term 'humane' meaning basically kind seems a bit optimistic as to how humans are. A lot can be not very kind, especially if anonymous on the web.

> I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue

This gets referred to as the "moderation issue" because its true cause is too inconvenient.

Algorithms that promote engagement also tend to promote conflict. The major services want people spending more time on their service looking at ads, so they promote engagement and therefore conflict.

The cause of it isn't the decentralized internet, it's the centralized corporate feed.

Now, I boil the whole discussion down to the question "What price freedom?" - the sentiment of which is attributed to Jefferson but according to Gemini can be traced back to John Philpot Curran

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance"

Thomas Jefferson the slave owner?

Hypocrisy indeed!

The 7 billion or more current animal enslavers and devourers of the world would like to have a word, just in case some of have a few choice quotes on the nature of freedom as well.

Also old enough to have been pre-internet:

> Paper maps were absolutely horrible…

No, and still not horrible. I jeep a trucker's atlas in my van for road trips. Siri and Google Maps (Gigi, we call her) don't seem to realize I want to stay on interstates making distance. Wandering some two-lane country road diagonally through Kansas might save me 10 minutes but having oncoming traffic and the possibility of a rock into the windshield (or worse)—not worth it.

I plan my routes with the paper map.

> In practice it was mostly an annoying game of attempting to guess where people were. You'd call their job, they had left. You'd call their house…

That does not ring a bell at all with me. Sure, I'd call and someone wasn't home, but that was the end of it. If someone else answered, it was "Hey, have them give me a call…" And of course answering machines became a thing…

You know, there was just generally less of an urgency to get a hold of someone then.

And you know what sucks now? Someone able to get a hold of you whenever, wherever. (Unless I go out of my way to shut off my device.)

I used to laugh at a family member and spouse. They were early mobile phone adopters and I watched them call one another constantly with, "When are you going to be home?" I finally commented, "You know what would have happened if you had not called? They would have just shown up in 10 minutes or whatever."

Urgency, expectations… too high these days.

> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.

Except for creating portable playlists, sure.

Anyway. <rant off>

I've stopped submitting quality reports to Apple Maps because they're all met with "while we couldn't make the change you suggested, we hope you continue to waste your time reporting these".

The issues are egregious too, like blatantly incorrect lane guidance that would send you in the wrong direction, or diverting me off a highway onto an unmarked, narrow country road that no one with any knowledge of the local roads would take ever.

Though I'm confident whatever BPO slaves they have processing reports 5000 miles away have a better understanding of the roads than I, as they are wholly incapable of even using Google Street View to confirm details (probably by policy) so they always demand I provide a photo or video a month after the fact. Because when you're lost in the middle of nowhere your first thought should be "Let's backtrack so I can grab some pictures for Apple".

Google Maps isn’t much better. Outside of major population centres, you have to fight with it to keep you on major highway.

Google and Apple both prefer “efficient” routes with unsealed roads that are 4WD only, impassible when wet, have no services, no mobile coverage, and where if you need medical help it literally comes by aeroplane.[1]

[1] https://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/

Google maps has a spelling mistake on a major road in Calgary which is amusing to me but probably confusing to newcombers

The road is called Macleod Trail

Parts of it are in the Google Maps api as "Macleod Trial"

It's very obvious when the voice directions read it out, too

I stopped contributing to big tech platforms. Better to contribute to Open Street Map instead.

>> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.

>Except for creating portable playlists, sure.

I think it was the frontman for Phish that said something like “metal sounds great on cassette”, referring to 80’s thrash, and I have to agree. I’m sure part of it is nostalgia, but I feel like 70’s rock/prog sounds perfect on vinyl, and 80’s thrash sounds great on cassette.

I have been converting old tapes to digital and they do sound both different and better.

I think there's an aspect of this format having been a target for professional mixing. But there's also the background hiss and the warping of rolling tape and the low fidelity of the heads... It all mixes together nicely for a dirtier sound.

Unfulfilled desire: a reel-to-reel machine.

This is more of a Analog vs Digital debate?

There are people who spend A LOT of money on audio systems keeping them 100% analog (no DACs).

> Urgency, expectations… too high these days.

Hear hear.

I was amused to watch the trajectory of all my older relatives, from "I don't understand why you spend all your time on that computer" to "I texted you some idle shower thought ten minutes ago, and it's frankly rude that you haven't replied yet".

Lots of people seem to have lost all sense of perspective.

Google and Apple maps are terrible at showing you back roads which actually go through. So I carry Delorme Atlas books. On the other hand, I'm glad I no longer need a Thomas Guide (or whatever your local urban mapbook was called.)

maybe give comaps a go. it uses openStreetMap for its map data. i dont know what routing algorithm it uses or how it compares to google/apple but i do like how easy it is to start routes with this app. and if it goes off course is fairly easy to just tap another road and the click "add stop" to have it re-route

another plus is being able to download as many map areas as you would like, and unlike google its actually giving you the full map data (although i havnt used google maps in over a decade now but i remember downloading a map once but then certain POIs would only show up when i had data/cell turned on)

https://www.comaps.app

This is the way. I use printed maps when on vacation. Then I laugh at tourists who are hysterical because their smartphones ran out of power.

I print my boarding cards and then I laugh at hysterical people who's smartphonse do not work.

When I walk around on town, I do not take my phone with me, so anyone looking for me has to leave a message on my answering machine or send me an email, and I'll get back to them when I feel like it.

Have I ever, for many decades, missed anything important because someone just had to get hold of me this second? Never. Magically, everything always sorted itself out.

The idea that we must be available 24/7 is a mind virus that needs to be eradicated.

> This is the way. I use printed maps when on vacation.

Come on, then you know their limits. Get to your destination city? Better hope your road atlas comes with a city map, and the road you're going to is large enough to have its name printed. Otherwise, you're shopping at the next gas station. Have the city map? Better hope the outer borrows are on it, too. Found your destination on the map? Better hope you have a competent navigator riding shotgun, because otherwise you'll have to stop and park 15 times to consult your map while navigating an unfamiliar jungle of a city.

I think much of the software written over the last 20 years is very close to worthless. A significant fraction has negative worth.

But geospatial software is amazing.

It's weird that people (claim to) have had bad luck with cassette tape, because it worked pretty well for me. I don't believe I ever had a player chew tape, although I was never rich enough to afford a car stereo with a tape player so maybe those were more prone to it.

Also, paper maps! Excellent! The trick was you had to have done Orienteering at school, where (and I'm not making this up) a teacher would drop you off in the middle of nowhere with a map and if you were very lucky a compass, and tell you they'd see you back at the school, and if you could try to make it back before 9pm because then the teachers would still have time to get a few rounds in at the pub before closing time.

Most common fault would be hitting eject before stopping the tape, causing the cassette to eject and mangle the tape in the process.

As usual, this is a UX concern. Better tape players did not allow eject to work when the tape was engaged.

I generally agree with you but paper maps really were horrible for this of us who have no sense of direction (despite trying for years). I remember multiple times trying to go somewhere, getting horribly lost (in one case I was within half a mile of the house I was trying to find the whole time but couldn't find it for an hour), and giving up and going home. The day I bought a TomTom (GPS that you could use without telling Google where you were going -imagine that!) was lifechanging.

But GPS is kind of an interesting one because it's not actually the internet. And it can be used without any loss of privacy.

> examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech

Would that it were so.

Semi-connected rant: What happened to so many startups to kill the mood was the pattern of: Do something technically legal (or technically illegal!) in a way that seems fixable at first, scale to huge size to get lawyers and lobbyists, pivot to strongly supporting government efforts to rein in "lawlessness" or "combat fraud" or "protect children", and then entrench oneself as the status quo while authoring or suggesting legislation to raise a moat against any competitors that might newly start up. PayPal, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and others tried this. Backpage and e-gold are unsuccessful examples of the same strategy.

The article walks through the logic. Briefly, wide adoption of the ideology expressed in that Davos declaration ("you can't make us obey laws if we're online") enabled the lawbreakers you mention (corporations violating the law while saying "you can't make us obey the laws if we're online").

I have trouble supporting the viewpoint that these things should’ve been “illegal” in the first place.

The pendulum swings I suppose…

If they should have been illegal, then we should oppose the actions, or if they shouldn't be, we should oppose the regulatory capture of making them illegal or wrapping them in red tape afterward. No need to agree on which are which to disapprove of the pattern.

You don't think banks should have to follow rules about how they safeguard their depositors' money? (PayPal)

You don't think hotels should have to follow rules about how they keep their properties, or require their tenants to follow local ordinances? (AirBnB)

You don't think it should be illegal to be someone's sole employer, have full and total control over their schedule and duties, and yet treat them for legal and tax purposes as if they're a contractor? (Uber, et al)

'Cause if you're the type of person who believes that laws and regulations like these shouldn't exist, you are 100% part of the problem, and you are (much like the rest of us) only able to live the kind of life you do because of the existence of such laws and regulations, so your desire to remove them is just a matter of pulling up the ladder behind yourself writ large.

PayPal is not a bank, AirBnb is not a hotel and plenty of drivers will freely serve rides from Uber, Lyft and a variety of other ride sharing services; they aren't "employees" of any single firm. (Of course they must serve a single ride at a time for sensible policy reasons, but aside from that they're quite free to pick their favorite ones.) These things actually make sense, even though they might not be what you're directly used to.

yet PayPal was (is still?) notorious for freezing accounts for monts without any communication, and since they had no branch offices, all anyone could do was wait or sue them (which is a very expensive form of waiting).

Laws and regulations should exist to make efficient markets. But obviously there are serious problems today in housing and transportation (and banking too), and in large part due to very suboptimal laws and regulations.

Indeed, that phenomena is called regulatory capture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Look, I agree with a good part of this article. I also agree that the whole "unregulated internet" is terrible for humankind in general. Crypto is a scam. Meta should be, plain and simple, shut down. Twitter is a madhouse. The list is endless.

However, every single time I feel like stricter regulation should be in place, a congressman speaks about "servers"... and yeah, maybe not.

The EU seems to have a different take. As I understand it, regulations are much more malleable in Europe. When problems arise, regulations are put in place. When regulations are problems... it takes a lot longer to remove them, but can still happen eventually. Nothing like the USian deadlock system.

And when they do write them, it's always about general principles. The GDPR doesn't speak of cookie consent banners, instead it speaks of personal data and data controllers and data processors and the reasons you may control or process personal data, one of which is consent, so of course the industry made it as obnoxious as possible.

There are probably places that are doing even better than Europe.

> USian

American. Please avoid the childish term "USian" unless you're going to commit to calling people from South Africa "SAian" too.

To be fair, "american" could refer to anything made in the American continent (North, Central and South America)

In some languages, but not really in English. Convention in the cultures of the Anglosphere is that the world comprises seven continents, and the Americas comprise two of them, not one. And in English, both formal and informal, “American” is generally considered the demonym of the United States of America, not the Americas. Although I call myself estadounidense in Spanish (an odd term—why don’t people from Estados Unidos Mexicanos count?), the equivalent English term is “American,” not “United Statesian.”

Not in English.

And USian could refer to folks from Mexico (and at prior points in history a number of other countries), so it's hardly unambiguous.

Who are you to make rules for others to follow?

I'm citing a rule, not making one. American is in the dictionary, used by the UN, recognized by everyone and their dog as the proper demonym for citizens of the United States. Who are you to question that authority and replace the proper demonym with a neologism?

I didn't. Languages aren't defined by dictionaries. If they were they would not have come into existence in the first place and they wouldn't evolve the way they do.

Because of onerous regulations, the EU has much less startups. You may think that’s good, but I’m sure some missed-potential startups would’ve improved QOL. They at least would’ve increased the EU’s economy and internet control and decreased its dependence on the US.

"Because of onerous regulations, the EU has much less startups". That old trope.

Is that also the reason Miami or St. Louis have less startups?

I have started companies in the UK. The process is about the same as in the USA. The problem in Europe is that there is a lot less VC capital. Just like in Miami. It had nothing to do with regulation.

One reason there's less VC capital because they don't control the world reserve currency like the US does, so they can't just print money and export inflation. Thankfully the current US leadership is intent on resolving this discrepancy.

To be fair to us, the Euro is also a world reserve currency, alongside of course the US Dollar, the British Pound, the Japanese Yen, and the Chinese Renminbi. And the Euro is in fact the second largest in terms of external reserves, being only beat by the USD.

Of course, the USD has been for a while the largest one of these, but as you say, they're really trying to get away from that. And a currency falling in relevance isn't new, one can always ask the Pound about that.

I generally agree with you message but the UK isn’t the EU anymore, and starting a company in Germany, France is definitely more expensive and involved than in the UK or the US. Regulation also has a responsibility, but not in the way people on HN generally think. The EU single market is messy, lots of things haven’t actually been consolidated, you have to take in account all the differences between each member state regulations if you want to get access to the whole EU. And if not you’re limited to mostly one region. If the EU can complete the single market we should be in a way better position to compete.

I really hope we can see The 28th Regime[0] becomes reality soon, that would be such an improvement

[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BR...

And of course the reason that there is a lot VC capital in Europe has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you'd be crazy to do a startup in e.g. Denmark (because doing so will likely be personally ruinous even in the unlikely case that you get some traction, due to unrealized gains tax) or to directly invest in one in e.g. Germany (where you'd be expected to physically sit through, on location, a few hours of a notary reading stuff out to you)? Do you actually have any idea how much additional legal risks, costs and time wasting bureaucracy are associated with even just forming a company in a typical EU country?

Miami, and Florida in general, have basically zero universities anyone has ever heard off, and still boast a higher number of unicorns per capita than Germany, despite the latter having at least one world-class technical university.

Europeans are aware of this but they do not want to engage in a race to the bottom. Socialism was a conscious political decision in response to the oligarchy.

It is incomprehensible to Americans but not everyone wants to be like them. It would actually be a capitulation.

The policies I mentioned (just as nepo-baby Mamdani's programs to abolish programs for gifted children) have, of course, precisely and deliberately the effect of cementing an existing parasitic elite and screwing over talented and hardworking people from a non-privileged background.

Which part of this do you fail to understand? Who do you think will be more inconvenienced by the removal of gifted programs, some intellectual mediocrity who goes to a $70'000/year private school anyway, or a smart child from a family with a yearly total income that's a fraction of that schooling cost? Who do you think is going to be more likely to find themselves financially ruined by being hit with enormous taxes on illiquid assets (such as equity in a pre-IPO startup they founded or where an early employee in) -- someone entirely self-made or your "oligarch"?

Hey, just because 99% of cryptocurrencies are a scam doesn't mean that crypto as a whole is a scam.

Sturgeon's Law. 99% of everything is shit.

Ok. Where is crypto currency used in a way that fiat currencies cannot be, and is adding value to the world?

I can think of nothing.

Then you need to read outside your bubble.

It would have been as easy to write a valid answer as a non-answer; _unless_ there is no valid answer.

Monero gives people the ability to transact privately online. Privacy is a human right; therefore, through the technical innovation of private cryptocurrency, Monero allows individuals to exercise this right, adding value to the world.

Please look into Monero and try to understand privacy activist's, marginalized peoples', and my point of view. You don't have nitpick, you can accept this one cryptocurrency as having benefits—I agree that a vast majority of cryptos are a scam and are unnecessary and bad for the environment, but there are some cryptos that are less flawed than the banking system.

Here's a good discussion to learn more: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841149)

Monero is only as private as its entry and exit wallets and the availability of the appropriate keys.

This can be done with cash delivered via post with no return address. Observers cannot know who sent the money or even that the receiver is getting money without opening their mail. The sender remains anonymous regardless.

You aren't replying to my post, you are changing the subject.

Anyway, we can compare cash to Monero. I'm not sure why some people here are obsessed with cash. I like cash too, it has some advantages any digital payment solution in general, but it's not more anonymous than Monero. It's not as easy to use as Monero, it's not as secure as Monero, and it's much more centralized than Monero.

Cash is more private than Monero. It is possible to engage in untraceable transactions through drop sites and post, whereas Monero wallets can reveal transaction participants when view keys are available.

I don't need to connect to any network to exchange cash, or engage in mathematical backflips to convince the network to accept my transaction. That makes it more decentralized and more fault tolerant.

>Ok. Where is crypto currency used in a way that fiat currencies cannot be, and is adding value to the world?

>I can think of nothing.

Buying/selling drugs, weapons, hiding bribes/extortion transactions, pretty much anything that the issuers of said fiat currencies would put you in a cage for doing.

That's not to say that fiat currencies aren't also used for such things, but relatively untraceable coins like monero make it easier to do those things across large distances, while fiat currencies need to be physically exchanged.

Addenda: Replying here to Cider9986's (now dead) reply[0[ to the above, where they said:

   So Signal or Tor is only useful for criminals? Privacy is 
   a human right, financial privacy is no exception. 1000s 
   of legal service accept Monero.

   Buy Italian cheese with XMR (https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/LJ4F/)

I'll ask you, where exactly did I say anything about Signal or Tor (I use both, BTW, as well as using monero for the stuff for which it's useful -- to pay for my VPN subscription, among other things)? In fact, I didn't mention either at all. Don't put words in my mouth.

As for your Italian cheese link, GP asked "Where is crypto currency used in a way that fiat currencies cannot be, and is adding value to the world?"

Am I unable to purchase Italian cheese with fiat currency? What additional value is there using Monero to purchase such cheese rather than fiat currency?

I'd also point out that since you replied to me, I cannot mod you down, nor would I have done so if I was able. That said, you're not making a very good argument for monero by railing at (really bad) strawmen, especially since I think monero is a good thing, because governments love to put people in cages for really stupid reasons.

Not sure why you're so bitter/angry, but it might help to talk to someone.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48101518

The congressional technology committee Gingrich killed could've fixed this. You can't half ass democracy, you have to keep getting better at governing and convince people it's worth it.

I agree wholeheartedly.

There's an innate tension between "freedom of speech" and "weaponized misinformation".

I think Karl Popper’s "paradox of tolerance" needs to be front and center in this discussion -- as it's playing out as predicted: free speech is embraced by those who are empowered by it, who then clamp down on free speech to suppress dissent.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administr...

All the noise from the "absolute free-speech" folk who wanted to promote their conspiracy theories and hate speech are notably quiet now. And ironically, their "free speech" rants were not First Amendment issues as they were complaining about being platformed by private parties.

A good example of this is the mythological way people think often about cryptography imo, as a guarantor of an individual's privacy against the prying eyes of the state, etc.

But the reality is that your usual cryptographic circuit (TLS connection) is just that, a circuit, a cordoning of space off for an interaction between two or more parties. The interaction inside that circuit can be very highly exploitative indeed, i.e., you can now apply for payday loans, gamble, ingest anti-human propaganda online, without anyone around you knowing anything about it.

Which is not to say that cryptographic technology might not broadly be a positive but it's inane to think that all social problems could continually be solved with more code and more cryptography. It has arguably been a key driver of enhanced financialization and militarization of daily life in its current iteration.

The ability to keep secrets is a fundamental human right. Encryption is a technical protection against that violation, separate from legal consequences. Encryption means I can keep my secrets even if the government locks me up until I reveal the password. I don't see how it is a key driver of militarization and enhanced financialization.

In the above conceptualization, the protection of the often trivial secrets of individuals is often used as a kind of moral and informational camouflage for the actual re-orientation of power around secrets that really matter, i.e., bank account balances, account numbers, insider trading tips, etc. Hence why Apple markets their devices as protecting a fairly nebulous notion of privacy, it's not wrong, but it's not the most interesting part of what happens.

What is the most interesting part of what happens?

I find your line of thought interesting but I’m not sure where you’re leading it.

Information asymmetry is the root from which all evil sprouts. There are benign forms no one in their right mind has an issue with. Then there are more malign forms amplified and protected by the very same measures that cordon off the more benign forms. Insider info, beneficial ownership information, trade secrets, even what the Government would see "classified" are all far more destructive overall than their benefit to the handful of individuals keeping them warrants. If there is an ill or a vice to be found, secrecy is a consistent bedfellow thereof. But secrecy is as much a benevolent bedfellow as well, as it curtails mass scale abuses through enforced ignorance. Like the Internet, it's one of those "that which empowers the individual equally if not moreso empowers the organization". You can't make things easier for individuals, without making it easier for groups of individuals to turn around and abuse unorganized individuals with the same tools.

The more I think of it I thinkt that secrets are a tool of the rich and powerfull to keep the weak and poor subjugated. I for one think that a society with lots of transparency (think at least on financial transactions and wealth) would reach a more honest state.

And there are examples where this actually works - like the stock exchange: people agree that to be able to take good decisions, the publicly listed companies must be transparent.

Of course changing from "full secrecy mode" to "let's be more transparent" can't happen suddenly, but there are places where there are more transparent (ex: in Norway you can ask for someones tax declaration) and the country continues to function. And you can't do it in all places: if you are in a place where people hate each other for various reasons with passion (ex: skin color, place of birth, what you believe in etc.) then keeping secrecy is smart while the society solves the other things. If you think secrecy is what protect I think it is taking a huge chance. Hatefull people around will make at some point a mess and can affect someone, secrecy or not.

I assure you, if, under the current system, everyone were required to reveal all our secrets

a) the rich and powerful would be able to use the secrets of the weak and poor to exploit and subjugate us even more

b) the rich and powerful would use their wealth and power to ensure that their secrets remained hidden, regardless of the law

Dunno man, those things you say were “horrible” before the advent of mobile phones, media players and gps (not even the internet; usable incarnations of those inventions were entirely independent from the internet) - I was also there and it was _fine_.

I never had the problems with tapes that the author describes--but I still preferred CDs when they came out, and I greatly prefer having my entire music library on a single USB stick that I can just plug into my car.

I was able to find my way around okay with paper maps--but I still prefer having GPS in my phone.

My issue with those passages is that the author is conflating "digital" or "computers are involved" with "Internet". They're not the same.

I’m not saying the newer alternatives are not convenient! Just saying the old ones were OK; not the garment-rending disaster TFA purports them to be.

It would appear that they were a "garment-rending disaster" at least to some, like the author of the article.

> having my entire music library on a single USB stick

Worth pointing out how this too is an example of somewhat mistaken value analysis based on libertarian ideals.

The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere.

Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not. Which was one of the points of the linked article.

>Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not.

lots of people perceive higher quality media as having value, in fact there are markets for those people, just not the largest market which values convenience more.

> the largest market which values convenience more

To me, having my music library on an USB stick is convenience. I don't have to worry about whether my car or something in it has an Internet connection just to listen to music.

> The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere.

Not in a free market (which is part of "libertarian ideals", or at least it's supposed to be). In a free market, there is no single "solution"--there are whatever solutions people are willing to pay more than they cost for. If you want your music in the cloud, and you pay for that, and I want my music locally, and I pay for that, that is the libertarian ideal.

Trying to own the entire market and force your "solution" on everyone, just because you happen to have enough users to be able to get away with such bullying, at least for a time, is not a free market. But that's what the tech giants are trying to do.

> Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not.

That the majority of the market does not, yes. But I don't think I'm even close to being the only person that doesn't want to depend on "the cloud" for everything I do.

But in real life, any time you have "a free market", by the definition of "no or minimal regulations", you will inevitably end up with a very un-free market, by the definition of "lots of choice for the consumer, healthy competition".

And far, far too many self-proclaimed libertarians think that any regulations that "encumber" the market take it farther away from being "free", when in fact, there are regulations that help and regulations that harm, and you have to be able to actually understand them and use human judgement, rather than thinking One Simple Rule can be applied in every situation without fail to achieve perfection.

Exactly. My point sort of the converse: that the upthread comment reflected a set of values that, while grounded in "cyberlibertarian" thought, do not reflect actual market value as measured by an actual market. The libertarians tend to think simultaneously that "The Right to Pursue my Niche Ideas" and "The Supremacy of the Market" are related concepts, and they emphatically aren't.

And in particular that the former tends to be the first thing stomped on by runaway market forces.

> do not reflect actual market value as measured by an actual market.

How does the fact that you can have your music in the cloud, and pay a fair price for that, and I can have my music locally on a USB stick, and pay a fair price for that, not reflect "actual market value as measured by an actual market"?

As for the rest of your post, I'm not sure which "libertarians" you're talking about.

> "a free market", by the definition of "no or minimal regulations"

There is no such thing.

A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. That means the market is regulated by the voluntary choices of all of its participants. And since people won't voluntarily choose to make a trade that doesn't benefit them, a free market will be dominated by win-win, positive sum trades. That's how wealth is created.

It's true that a market can also be regulated by a government. Any such regulation will either force people to make trades they wouldn't otherwise choose to make--which means they are worse off--or will prevent people from making trades they otherwise would choose to make--which means they are worse off.

> far too many self-proclaimed libertarians think that any regulations that "encumber" the market take it farther away from being "free"

No, libertarians think that regulations that come from anything other than the voluntary choices of market participants make us worse off. The logic is simple: I just gave it above.

> there are regulations that help and regulations that harm

Please give a specific example of a government regulation that has helped, as compared with a free market regulated by the voluntary choices of all of its participants.

Same. I’ll gladly take CDs and DVDs over modern streaming platforms. Before all of this streaming crap music and taste had weight. You find people with the same interests and you share physical medium. No corporation in the world had a power to stop me from giving my copy to another person. Now you either like and pay forever like a good cattle or you hide like a rat from the watchful copyright gods on torrents.

I've always thought that the hippie environmental types wanting data (music) stored as plastic was ironic. "I prefer my music to be made of petrochemicals and trees, the way it ought to be." I get it, but I still think it's funny.

Instead of what - vast data centres full of electronics, consuming huge quantities of electricity, controlled by techno-feudalistic megacorps who keep almost all of the money and supply a pittance to the artists? Everything has a cost but those records, CDs and cassettes look like a good deal from here. I still have LPs I inherited from my parents. They still play on my 20 year old turntable.

No, store it on your computer/phone/iPod. But honestly data centers are probably very efficient for this. I'm not going to do the math, but storing data on flash and serving it to billions of people probably is efficient if I had to guess.

I would like to see a full cost comparison. Centralised storage - replicated, distributed and maintained online as necessary - vs media that, once manufactured and distributed, essentially costs nothing to maintain. iPods/phones get replaced much more frequently than LPs/casettes/CDs. And that’s just the resource consumption comparison. There’s then the economic polarisation of wealth to the small handful of online music renters vs distributed ownership (of copies: the original work of art remains with the artist, at least in theory).

>vs media that, once manufactured and distributed, essentially costs nothing to maintain

Eh, not really, it costs it's own storage and care. This is not free even if you have discounted in to the rest of the cost of your life. Not destroying LPs for example is a good bit of work.

With music itself, it's electronic storage is insanely cheap. One middleling server could easily contain just about the entirety of all mankinds works. Parallel distribution really is the bigger factor, and I guess that costs almost nothing itself. Marketing and software around marketing likely is the majority of the cost here.

Trying to compare a cellphone to a record is just not a really workable thing. People are going to have the cellphone anyway. The fact it is a media player is a welcome bonus.

Couldn't you just extrapolate the same reasons people say living in urban areas is more efficient than rural?

It seems trivial to see that storing all the music in 1 or more DCs for the entire world is more efficient than a whole industry to create and redistribute plastics and specialized devices to play this plastic.

Do you think DVDs were manufactured in mom and pop workshops untainted by corporate influence? Quite the opposite actually. Every DVD and DVD drive legally sold had to pay licensing fees! So is blueray!

https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-victory-means-royalties...

https://blu-raydisc.info/flla-faq.php

> Instead of what - vast data centres full of electronics, consuming huge quantities of electricity, controlled by techno-feudalistic megacorps who keep almost all of the money and supply a pittance to the artists?

So what's your alternative, stocking every single video store in the country with plastic discs with DRMs transported by diesel trucks? Do you seriously think the material cost of manufacturing and transporting a disc is less than what it takes to send its contents over the internet?

Yes, I would like to see a full cost comparison. Transferring one time digitally will no doubt cost (a lot) less than physical manufacture and distribution. But it’s not one time transfer: it’s streaming on demand, every time each person listens to each track, because the economic model is rental not purchase.

I use streaming services. I like the flexibility and ubiquity of access. But my favourite music I still buy on cd or vinyl. Why? Because it means I’m not subject to the whims of a megacorp removing access and it means more goes to the artist. I’ve been buying music for 40 years and still listen to some of stuff I bought then. I hope to live long enough to do the same for the music I buy now.

"Transferring one time digitally" DRM-free audio files is possible and above-board (i.e., you pay and the artist gets paid) through services like bandcamp.com and their ilk. Of course your artist needs to have their music there first.

Not sure why petrochemicals and trees ie hydrocarbons are any more or less absurd than the silicon, metals, etc quarried and mined from around the world needed to store information digitally in data centers (or mobile devices).

Storing data of any kind in plastic as opposed to silicon metal seems like a meaningless distinction that only comes about from imagining that there is some disembodied, ethereal and platonic notion of digital “data” which is decoupled from any physical substrate. everything is always materialized and mediated through some complex, and probably vaguely arcane, geologically extractive process in some way.

Because a billion people can share the file at once. It's tough math to do, but I can't believe transporting physical media all over the world is really better.

It reminds me of the inane motivated reason backwards reasoning from people desperate to cast Amazon as a villain and nonsense they claimed. About how online shipping was a carbon villain. Acting as if goods are simply teleported onto store shelves and they aren't delivered using trucks and then picked up by consumers with their own vehicles. While pretending that every delivery consists of only one package per truck on a route.

About the only worse case of motivated reasoning I have seen are from NIMBYs straining their brains to claim how any new development would be catastrophic. One notable example being a claim that adding trains would bring in more criminals to the neighborhood and lead to more burglaries.

I used to be with you on that ... but getting of my lazy bum to actually pay for Spotify - and looking past all the fair/unfair issues bad/good corporate stuff ...

The ability to browse music is very powerful.

I lost my 1 Soundgarden CD 20 years ago. Now I can listen to all their albums.

You can do the entire Beatles catalogue <- this is a different form of listening.

Discover artists I would never have otherwise heard of.

It has it's downsides, but I dont think CD was 'better'.

We just have an imperfect situation.

And the biggest part of the money you pay the streaming platform goes to neither Soundgarden, nor the remaining Beatles, nor to those artists you discovered but to Taylor Swift[1]. This is in stark contrast to how CD economics worked.

As someone who spent a lot of his youth carefully avoiding big label acts and trying to support small artists, this is what bothers me the most: there is no way to do that anymore if you use streaming.

[1] https://mertbulan.com/2025/08/10/why-paying-for-spotify-most...

I don't like how the sausage is made, I just like the sausage, is all I'm saying.

I too, like my meat and not the killing that it requires.

One day, someone will have to face the reckoning of our preferences vs our values.

May I be the one with the courage to meet it; failing which, not be standing around when the bill is due.

The motto of our era.

I think we can have our cake and eat it on this one. The economics line up not entirely unreasonably. Mostly.

If there was a way to support smaller artists outside of spotify, that would be great.

There's Bandcamp. I'm sure it's more difficult the more mainstream music is, but in my areas of interest, I'd estimate that at least 80% is available from Bandcamp. And for those who really want to optimise on where their money goes, you can save you cart for Bandcamp Friday where the store forgoes its cut (if I understood it correctly).

I recall my tapes sounding ever so slightly worse after each playback. I also once left one too close to my CRT monitor, which erased all the high frequencies from the sound.

Also over time friction would build up in the medium, causing the tape to occasionally resist being pulled so strongly that some sections would stretch and introduce a hard to ignore "wah" effect.

Overall not my favourite means of storing information, like you said - it was fine. I've listened to a huge palette of mixes made by friends for friends and the social aspect of this is something I appreciated greatly.

How did you feel about the ephemerality of knowing your tapes wouldn't last forever and you'd get new ones? I think computers have spoiled us for archiving. Back in the day, people didn't try to make things last forever. Right?

Reminds me of one of my favourite episodes of one of my favourite TV shows ever, The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Technically a children's show, but with such cool, philosophical layers.

"What if you could only hear [your favourite song] once, and that was it?"

Also very relevant to modern day concerts, with so many in the audience focusing more on recording their crappy phone videos than on appreciating the live moment.

Strong agree. That passage seems to me to be decrying the friction of the real world, whereas it's become increasingly clear to me just how valuable friction is in the world, and how inextricably tied the tech companies war on friction to the bad outcomes technology seems to engender.

There's a great piece in the current New Yorker about that very thing: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/our-longing-for-inco...

"I have a CD player in my home, a VCR in a closet. But I’m also inclined to think about the work that older devices demand of a person compared with the frictionless present day, when we are told that any and all content is at our fingertips (a myth, but a myth that sells.) And I can’t help but think of the reality that there are many significantly larger and more consequential inconveniences that Americans, plainly, do not have the heart or stomach for. One example might be the inconvenience caused by a mass political uprising, one that risks the security, safety, and comfort of its participants. I have seen glimpses of people’s threshold for that level of friction. "

Fine... but it's still better now.

I recently went on holiday to deepest darkest Wales where phone signal is intermittent. Trying to locate people and get messages to them was such a bloody pain.

I remember thinking in 2003 "surely we should be able to book GP appointments online now", and a mere 20 years later we can (depending on where you live) finally do it. It's so much better.

I would not go back, and I don't think anyone else would if it really came down to it, despite any virtuous anti-technology mantras they might pretend to believe.

> Once when driving from Michigan to Florida I got so lost in the middle of the night in Kentucky that I had to pull over to sleep and wait for the sun so I could figure out where I was.

Not sure what's going on here, but this reads like 90s cosplay.

First off, GPS-guided trips had not yet eroded people's sense of direction because they did not yet exist.

Second of all, the (odd-numbered) interstate(s) that flow from Michigan to Florida are large and feature many prominently-placed, large signs with large, readable fonts. Even if you exit to a state road, those roads are littered with interstate signs for dozens of miles that will direct you back to the interstate, using words like "North" and "South" which are displayed in large bold lettering.

It's one thing to ignore all those signs because the voice in your Iphone is actively telling you a different thing. It's quite another for those signs and your paper map to be your only known sources of truth, and to steadfastly ignore all of them until you have to pull over and go to sleep.

In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't.

Edit for the "directionless" iphone-directed youngsters:

* Signs on the interstate in the 90s came with industrial lighting, as they do today. You can read them in the middle of the night

* Signs on state/county/municipal roads were painted to be highly readable even with the comparatively puny headlight strength of the 1990s

* This was certainly before the opioid epidemic and probably also before the heyday of meth. So shirtless guy was probably just a shirtless Kentuckian checking if OP was OK.

Also, you have a compass. Just drive South until you reach the Gulf of Mexico, then drive East until you reach the Atlantic ocean, then drive South until you reach where you're going ( it will be daylight by then ).

/edit i guess it could be possible to drive South and end up in key west but it will be daylight long before you run out of road.

> i guess it could be possible to drive South and end up in key west

Your compass would be telling you you were going west well before you got to Key West. :-)

I can understand getting turned around and not wanting to blithely drive Southward on a random Kentucky highway using one's compass. Using that method OP could have potentially drifted away from the interstate they were trying to get back on.

What I'm saying is that a) 90s-era OP would definitely have been using the interstate and b) if they drove more than 30 minutes off the interstate then they ignored so much data and common sense that it's unlikely tech would have helped them here. (E.g., if you want Iphone directions to L.A. but it gives you Louisiana, you still have to interpret the data the phone is giving you to notice you're not going to the correct destination.)

Did people really carry a compass? (and did it even work inside a car? I think you could get one to stick on the mirror.)

It wasn’t uncommon for cars to have a compass built in.

They definitely work inside cars! And you could get cool dashboard mounted ball ones.

> In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't.

Right. In the early days of Etak, the company that invented car navigation systems, I got a tour from Stan Honey. Honey remarked that they originally displayed the map with north at the top, and a car arrow that rotated with the direction the vehicle was facing, like a compass. Honey is into sailing, and sailors do not rotate maps as the ship turns. But they discovered that about 10% of the population cannot cope with a map that always has north at the top. So they had to make the map rotate. That became standard in GPS displays.

So 10% of the population got to indirectly dictate how the other 90% do it.

If only left-handed people were so fortunate

You're gonna lose your mind when I tell you about Europe.

1) Only 10%?

2) I can read either way, but with a road map what’s in front of you is generally more important than what’s behind you. By selecting the rotating map you don’t just get a rotating map - you get your position pushed to the edge of the screen instead of being centered, which means much more information is visible about the space in front of you. I switched views strictly for this effect.

You could still push your position to the edge even if you don't rotate the map.

In theory, yes, but it’s not been an option on any I have used.

IMO both are "best" depending on the task.

For getting an anxious or overstimulated driver from A to B, orienting relative to the direction of travel helps them not-mess-up by misunderstanding their direction of travel or missing their turn. It removes some information they aren't prepared to process anyway.

When the driver has more familiarity and will recognize when an important intersection is coming up, then locking North helps them contextualize the area relative to other major landmarks like highways, lakes, etc.

> In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't.

As someone who graduated high school in the early 80s, I also was puzzled by this. Driving from Michigan to Florida wouldn't typically involve leaving major interstates for local roads in rural Kentucky. But if for some reason that was your desired route, you'd plan for it, especially if it was to be in the middle of the night.

Unlike perhaps the 1950s, paper maps and road signage in the 90s were quite good but more importantly, people knew how to use them because that was how the world worked. This struck me as more of a "I was so young/dumb/sleep-deprived/high (pick any two) I did something unbelievably stupid and met with the expected consequences."

It sounds more like OP left on a multi-day, cross-country road trip with only a couple free multi-state maps, which show such a large area they contain no local detail beyond major cities and interstates. If so, leaving the interstate would be foolhardy. Even if you see a single black line on the map connecting two interstates, people in the 90s would not take that 'shortcut' if it was many miles across an unfamiliar rural area, especially in the middle of the night. Because on local roads there will be little road lighting and much less signage AND you don't have a map showing any of the cross roads, small jags or local topology. Miss one road sign in the dark and you're screwed. So, yeah, expected result.

One of the downsides I see in mobile phone natives like my teenager is not only a lack of basic navigation and way-finding skills but also a lack of broad situational awareness. The sense of always being connected gives them a sense of security without an appreciation of what can happen when more than one thing goes wrong. So I've tried to teach you are never more than "three mistakes (or failures) away from bad things potentially happening."

I've driven from here in Bucharest to Geneva, Switzerland, about 10 years ago and without using the GPS and I only got lost once, on the return trip around Lago Maggiore because I had chosen to use the "Statale" national road instead of the "Autostrada". It was all on me, and it was a really beautiful place to get "lost" (I ended up on the highway after 45 minutes - an hour of not knowing exactly where I was). I repeated a similar trip about two years later, this time I went all the West to Brittany, France, again, without using the GPS for 99% of the time. The one time when I asked the person sitting on my right to guide me via GPS was when I got lost in the roundabaouts just outside Orleans. Which is to say that one can for sure drive without GPS with almost no issues, no need to sleep in the middle of nowhere at night.

I can't speak to that specific example, because I'm unfamiliar with the US highway system, but plenty of people got lost in the bad old days. At the very least, if you missed a turnoff, you would have to re-anchor yourself on a map. Some people can do that quite easily. Other people cannot do it at all.

Keep in mind, the lost husband buried in maps was a common joke in those days. Also, in the early days of GPS, someone getting lost by following the directions on their phone, was also a common news story. (Presumably these people would still have had situational awareness/direction from using maps in the past.)

As for the shirtless Kentuckian, you're probably right. That said, I've found motorists skittish when I ask them for directions or when checking to see if they need help. I've always chalked that up to being part of car culture.

Look, on a Cub Scout camping trip in 1987, my father the Scoutmaster drove two hours in the wrong direction on I-80 in Pennsylvania, trying to get home to New York. He had a caravan of about 5 or 6 cars following. They all communicated with CB radios. Nobody noticed until they got to the Ohio border.

> Not sure what's going on here, but this reads like 90s cosplay.

This reads like Reddit-style "debunk" culture to me.

Improbable things happen. They happen often, because even if the individual improbable thing is itself improbable, the sum total probability of improbable events is high enough that some improbable event happens to all of us with regularity.

Yes, people actually used to get lost. Take a wrong turn, lose your bearings, and you're on some dust road in a corn field. Car GPS did not meaningfully exist. Many people (then, as now) can barely read a map. Highway signage can be busy and confusing. People are young and inexperienced and tired.

Literally any single person who drove before the smartphone era will be able to recount a story to you of getting lost at least once.

> This was certainly before the opioid epidemic and probably also before the heyday of meth. So shirtless guy was probably just a shirtless Kentuckian checking if OP was OK.

Note how this sort of thing is not actually debunking anything in the article, OP said nothing about opioids or the shirtless man's motivation. All we know is that (a) OP awoke in a car in an unfamiliar place, (b) a shirtless stranger hovered over OP, (c) OP found this disconcerting. It's such a tell-tale sign of Reddit-style debunk culture to "fact check" recounts by inventing details, wildly hypothesising, and then "fact checking" their own wild hypotheses against a Wikipedia-level understanding of the situation.

It profoundly annoys me to see such a pedestrian response to an interesting and thoughtful piece. It adds nothing. It actively detracts, in that people with interesting things to share equivocate over doing so, because they cannot be bothered dealing with this lowly form of engagement. And so we get a sea of Redditors and their worthless "well akshually"s drowning out the actual human experiences that are actually worth reading.

> Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation.

This might be favorite metaphor ever, and one I'll quoting in the future! :)

I think the author conflates social media with other inventions like a portable GPS device, an electronic map, a music player, or indeed a cell phone.

As far as social media goes the author is (IMHO) spot on. You do not have to look far to see how that is at least harming democracy around the globe. For democracy to flourish you need reflective voters who can entertain multiple viewpoints and make informed decisions. That is what social media - in its most common current form - discourages and rather optimizes for attention-time (which is money).

And of course (some) anonymity paired with global reach would not bring out the best in people. Anger and flames spread faster than conciliatory messages and get you more dopamine posting those.

Just my $0.02.

I stumbled over that metaphor. Isn't it true that a consequence of setting your kitchen on fire will be a new, better kitchen?

Well, as a secondary consequence maybe, but then you could not set your kitchen on fire and still renovate it. Supposedly the first step you think of when renovating your kitchen isn't "Let me set my house on fire!"?

Two ways to think of this:

1) Sometimes a incident is the best way to get a project done. Working in FAANG I've seen a project get done in 1 day during an outage that was projected to take MONTHS during normal business.

2) Sometimes that renovation would never happen due to reasons. Sometimes you need some kindle to start the fire [pun intended].

As long as you can convince your insurance company that you didn't do it on purpose to get a renovation, I guess. :-)

When was democracy good? was it was it in the 50s when we were all immune to propaganda?

Isn't the old adage that democracy was never good, it was always just better than all the other forms of government. It got more done. It advanced economies more. Etc etc etc.

Then we torched it at just about the same time as the Chinese came along with a new form of government that I'm not sure the world has as yet even given a proper name. (I guess we can call it Communism? But everyone kind of knows that it's nothing like.)

So to global generations that have grown up viewing all these changes, democracy by comparison to what they have in China has started to look not so all powerful. To many of the planet's young people the assertion that "democracy is the worst except for all the others", is by no means obvious. That change in view is going to have profound implications on the world going forward.

China’s ‘new’ form of government is basically their old form of government with some communist rhetoric sprinkled over it.

>Then we torched it at just about the same time as the Chinese came along with a new form of government that I'm not sure the world has as yet even given a proper name. (I guess we can call it Communism? But everyone kind of knows that it's nothing like.)

I think the term is "state capitalism." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism)

This term was how 'true leftists' would separate themselves from the Soviet Union and 'old communism'. So imo, China is something else. (Or as Chomsky says, USA is also state capitalist, so could be anyone!)

>This term was how 'true leftists' would separate themselves from the Soviet Union and 'old communism'.

Soviet communism is different from Maoist communism, which is different from Juche. Every political model has variations in terms of ideology and execution, and they do evolve over time. It is correct to differentiate between Chinese communism and Soviet communism just as it's correct to distinguish between European and US capitalism.

>Or as Chomsky says, USA is also state capitalist, so could be anyone!

I think an argument can be made that the US is headed in China's direction in that regard, yes.

Rigid political taxonomies tend to lead to thought-terminating cliches, which is why they get deployed in propaganda. Reality tends to be more subtle. Socialism can exist within capitalism, and capitalism within socialism. Communism can be authoritarian, and it can be so egalitarian that it collapses (as happened with many communes in the 1960s.) Communists can be ideological enemies in the same way as Christians, Muslims and Jews, despite ostensibly having the same origin. And plenty of self-described free market capitalists would love for America to have free economic zones like Shenzhen.

Whatever China is, it does seem to be more capitalist than communist to me.

Democracy was better when the only viewpoints we were exposed to were from corporate media outlets? Are you sure about that? Better for whom?

Who do you think decides which media the algorithms show you now? It's all corporate, just more addictive and less accountable now.

I know it's (genuinely) hard to believe in this day and age, but pre-2000, and especially before the founding of Fox News in 1996, the news you got was much, much more likely to be genuine, with real investigative reporting that wasn't heavily interdicted by powerful and moneyed interests.

This is not to say there was no bias, nor that the powerful and moneyed interests had no influence—but it was much less than it is today. There was much more of a social norm of news being honest, factual, and relevant.

While I don't necessarily agree that cyberspace should have no regulations, the way we think about regulating cyberspace must be different from the way we think about regulating anything else, because there's no specific place where an event happens.

In the traditional 18th-century nation state model, events always happen somewhere, and it's the government with jurisdiction over that piece of land which decides whether those events are legal or not.If they want those events to stop, they use their monopoly on violence in that place to arrest you and make you stop. This basically doesn't work in cyberspace.

You can't steal candy from a store in Romania without physically being in Romania. This gives Romanian authorities the ability to arrest anybody who steals candy from Romanian candy stores, which makes their anti-theft law enforceable. In cyberspace, things are not so simple. If a German employee of a company incorporated in Delaware with servers in Northern Virginia uses company resources to DeDoS a Slovenian competitor, which prison should they rot in? Who should set the sentence? There's no answer here without unacceptable tradeoffs.

This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger with crypto, AI and drones. It's already possible for. Russian to coordinate a network of American spies, paying handsomely for their service, without ever falling in reach of American law enforcement. With drones, they'll soon be able to do the spying (or the assassinations) themselves.

I would be extremely surprised if we don't see a terrorist attack in the next 10 years where the culprits have never set foot in the country the attack happens in.

Are the trade-offs really unacceptable? Like why can't we just build treaties and international accords and just like do what humans have always done forever, and muddle through?

> Democracy will flourish. The gap between rich and poor will close. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the lamb will have a Pentium II. We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not 'directionally wrong' or 'wrong in the details.' Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation.

This is where I fundamentally don't align with the author's perspective. To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?

The author points towards real problems, certainly, but they're problems because they prevent otherwise great new things from being even more amazing. Would I prefer it if apps that give me interesting photos and videos on-demand had fewer dark patterns and better moderation policies? Yes, that'd be nice.

Or allow their bosses to contact them anywhere. Or allow corporations to know their location at all times and use that information for advertising.

There have been tradeoffs to smartphones, and arguably they are worse for individuals than no-smartphone. They increase some convenience which doesn't necessarily translate to a better society or better life for individuals

Take parking for instance. Every parking lot now has an app. So in order to park in many lots you need the app to pay with. But there isn't just one "parking" app, there are parking apps for whoever manages the lot. It's not an improvement at all over just paying at a kiosk, but it means the parking company doesn't have to pay someone to man the kiosk so it's better for them

I'm just saying if you weigh the convenience of your smartphone versus the annoyance, I wouldn't be surprised if the annoyance won a lot of the time. I know it does for me.

I don't download random business apps, and I live in a pretty tech heavy area, but I've never encountered a parking lot where I couldn't pay at a kiosk or booth. What I do encounter sometimes are friends who "have to" download the app because they're used to the convenience of app-based payments, or because they don't feel a need to carry cash.

I strongly feel that the convenience vs. annoyance is heavily tilted towards the convenience side, and I think people who feel otherwise are just not noticing all the ways that having a PC in their pocket makes their lives easier.

Then I think you're lucky; I live in a major city (London) and can attest that there are parking spaces where the kiosk and booths are gone and the app the only way to pay.

Interesting. Perhaps it's a European thing?

I encountered it at Pearl Harbor.

> To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?

For who? The people who have been living in Gaza for the past millennia (or who were driven there by arms during the Nakba) who the western establishment decided could be deprived of food in 2024? Meaning a genocide. How is all this benefiting them? This is harming them. And many others. Even, to a much lesser degree, the 20% of Cloudflare workers cut this week.

> A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better?

And substantial majority of them spend half of their waking time staring at TikTok. An improvement for sure.

I'm sorry, but there are so many alternatives to spending your time on TikTok, more than ever, and more accessible than ever.

Perhaps people do want to spend their time on TikTok, that's what freedom is. It is certainly addictive by design, but it's not magic, it is addictive exactly because it's giving you what you want.

We got so much of what we wanted, that was the goal and we are achieving it. Of course, getting everything we want is often not good for us. And what we want to want is not always the same of what we actually want.

Of course people want to spent their time on tiktok. People want to smoke, too. Have you tried smoking? It's the best. It's like your whole life you've been standing, and you just sat down.

We didn't really get much of anything we wanted. The Internet is, really, like... 12 companies? Maybe? I'm being generous, for most people it's much less. Media is just as concentrated and corporate as ever, arguably more. Censorship is the worst it's been in a while, I mean you can't even say "kill" on tiktok. Have you heard young people talk? They have their own new PC language, it's weird. Democracy is dying, not just in the US but across the entire west. Misinformation and lies dominate all communication. Fascism is rising like it's the early 20th century. And nobody is better educated. Allllll this information and everyone is still dumb as rocks.

> Democracy is by far the most common style of governance

"Democracy" is a meaningless buzzword that is usually thrown around when a Western country wants to kill people and steal things. It is defined as us and the people we support. Meanwhile, two weird little private clubs choose all of the people who go up for election in the US at every level (and have created laws and conventions preventing this from ever changing), and public opinion has absolutely no detectable affect on public policy.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Democracy seems to you like a meaningless buzzword because it's won so thoroughly. You're evaluating whether average citizens have independent influence, because the question of whether they have influence at all is completely uninteresting; who cares whether the majority can band together and vote a guy out of office if the "powers that be" control his replacement? But most guys for most of history did not agree that anyone should be allowed to vote them out of office!

I mean, who cares if people can band together to vote a guy out of office if the powers that be control his replacement?

Voting isn't any different than non-voting if it can't bring about real change for the better.

Global extreme poverty has fallen because we have raised the floor, largely through international collaboration that if anything has happened in spite of the cyberlibertarianism, certainly not because of it. Paradoxically, "developed" nation inequality has hit 1920s levels.

Likewise, the number of countries/populations calling themselves democratic has grown, but the global democratic index has declined and mature democracies are substantially threatened.

> Paradoxically, "developed" nation inequality has hit 1920s levels.

That’s not a paradox. Inequality is a completely separate measurement that emerges anywhere there are extremely wealthy people despite the average population doing really well.

A high density of tech billionaires in California doesn’t prevent a regular family in Tennessee from putting food on their table. Poverty rates would.

>A high density of tech billionaires in California doesn’t prevent

I put this in the case of 'eh, maybe'. Not a definite yes or no. The particular place where this breaks is asset ownership and other forms of VC fuckery that start raising the costs for everything around the country.

Money is power. Extreme wealth means extreme power. That power can be used to screw people over even if their income looks nominally decent.

But a high density of tech billionaires does prevent a regular family in Tennessee from putting food on their table, by increasing the poverty rates.

They do this by a number of mechanisms, including lobbying to reduce or end programs like SNAP, gutting labor protections, and various other political means; and more generally by making money in zero-sum ways (financialization of the economy means that people are getting rich by skimming off money from other people, rather than by creating value themselves).

I don't think the fact that people in developing nations are becoming more wealthy is all that comforting for those of us trapped in this capitalist hellscape. It's nice that it's happening but it doesn't help me survive.

> Democracy is by far the most common style of governance

This isn’t really true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_indices#Prominent_de...

If you look at the V-Dem Electoral and Liberal Democracy Indices there, you can also see that it’s been decreasing since around 2010. It’s back to mid-1990s levels, coincidentally around when mainstream internet usage started.

It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. In the background, the wealthy and powerful disregard all of this and seem to do whatever they want, and the little guy looks at millions of dollars in legal costs to defend themselves in either case. Costs that are increasingly a rounding error to their opposition as they continue to grow by exploiting a broken system, and the “little guy” now includes whole industries.

I feel like adversarial interoperability more than free market capitalism should have been the death knell for most of the negatives highlighted in this post. Everyone is still so determined to make money from mere ideas however that we still use 1700s law designed to protect book publishers to enable the existence of “businesses” so warped in valuation that they are now trillion dollar entities yet always face the existential threat of copy+paste. What if the more profound truth is that tech is beneficial to humanity but inherently worthless to sell, and that our present woe’s shape is determined by the antiquated institutions built service this illusion of value? In an inevitable future age of generative AI as an accessible technology, as opposed to a business model with a moat, what even is our goal for such institutions? What sorts of creativity do we want motivate, and what meaningful regulatory constraints even are there to begin with? I hope we figure it out soon, because IP will be impossible to enforce post-deglobalization in any case.

>It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators.

That isn't a change. Both claims are true.

I agree. My point in short is that we seem to reflexively frame right and wrong on an axis defined by copyright, and somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that the law itself is used much differently than we might otherwise want.

Technolibertarians confuse free market capitalism via copyright-enabled businesses as a viable strategy for individual freedom, and we find with time that only bastards win in a competition with loose rules and high stakes. Those concerned for the continued flourishing of human creativity in the face of LLMs confuse copyright as a means for small creators to have some ownership over their work, when it actually just seems to be a cudgel that can only be wielded by the wealthiest. Same losing fight, different flavor. I ask: why do we continue to allow “ownership of ideas” to underlie the moral basis of our conversations to begin with?

I think it's more that we see copyright as a necessary evil that can be used to defend our rights, but will be abused by the powerful, regardless.

To me, the biggest sin of cyberlibertarianism is the assumption that "cyberspace" is de facto another universe, separate from material reality, that doesn't need to be affected by the mundane and vulgar rules of "meatspace." John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if using a computer actually separates him from the state in some meaningful way, as if he has ascended beyond the flesh and now looks down upon the world as a being of pure Mind. But of course, "cyberspace" is just computers, servers, infrastructure using power and resources and thus is inextricably subject to government and systems of law. Zion was never an escape.

So yes, because cyberspace doesn't actually change the rules of the game, we have to play the game, crooked as it is, with the hand we're dealt. The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power. What do you suggest?

There’s a great moment from the Pirate Bay trial that captures this:

Lawyer: "When was the first time you met IRL?"

Peter Sunde: "We don't use the expression IRL. We say AFK."

Judge: "IRL?"

Lawyer: "In real life."

Peter Sunde: "We don't like that expression. We say AFK — Away From Keyboard. We think that the internet is for real."

— Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay trial (as shown in TPB AFK)

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard; Directed by Simon Klose (2013).

https://archive.org/details/TpbAfkThePirateBayAwayFromKeyboa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPB_AFK

The whole thing just shows a huge lack of imagination, at least for something which is supposedly a 'founding document'. Barlow's "cyberspace" is for irrelevant shit like furry larping or talking about the latest Deep Space 9. Its not a place where you do banking (or even watch DS9).

> John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if using a computer actually separates him from the state in some meaningful way, as if he has ascended beyond the flesh and now looks down upon the world as a being of pure Mind. But of course, "cyberspace" is just computers, servers, infrastructure using power and resources and thus is inextricably subject to government and systems of law. Zion was never an escape.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here, is it that "cyberspace" couldn't exist as anything "real" because governments can just shut down servers? That's why you can't buy drugs and credit card numbers online anymore, right? Sarcasm aside, you seem to be using the fallibility of the current-popular physical layer to dismiss the otherwise separate tangible "space" that does seem to exist when lots of people can communicate fluidly with each other across vast distances. Or is your critique centered on the ability of "cyberspace" to go beyond just communication and serve as a space one can actually "live" in?

> The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power.

Limiting abandonment of "ownership" to only "copyright" and IP generally, what do you propose the wealthy would control that would allow them to replicate present circumstances in "cyberspace"? The best I can think of would be communications infrastructure, and they didn't build that by themselves (at least in the US) to begin with.

For example, why would TikTok continue to be usable as a brainrot generator & propaganda tool when content is necessarily separate from the algorithm and presentation layers? Current bastards exploit their centralized control based on this house of cards ownership structure. Nothing is practically stopping users from cloning the contents from the cdn and writing a new frontend besides legal threats. This is true of almost every tech business that exists, and many of them themselves exploited this asymmetry during their founding. They exist because billionaires use the legal system to scare individual upstarts from threatening their business model.

Think it's just the hypocrisy. Either copyright for everybody or copyright for nobody is much more defensible than the current state of affairs, where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich. Some random guy in Nebraska had to pay $250,000 to a music company for downloading one MP3, but OpenAI can download all music that ever existed and pay nothing. Meanwhile they prosecute "Anna" who did the exact same thing, because "Anna" isn't politically well-connected.

> where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich.

This isn’t true. A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026. How they acquired those materials matters. Wealthy corporations hold no legal advantage in this space. For example, Anthropic recently settled for $1.5 billion due to acquiring books via piracy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...

My understanding is that an individual could likely pirate the same books without paying a dime (not due to differing legal standards but simply due to the fact it would be hard to identify them in many jurisdictions). In a practical sense it seems corporations are held to a higher standard in this regard.

The discrepancy is that some people equate training a model with piracy even though they are not the same thing. This is typically due to intellectual laziness (refusal to understand the differences) or willful misrepresentation (due to being an ideologically opposed to generative AI). No need to make such a mistake here though.

Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over.

The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially exploiting the media with neither a license to do so, nor any intentions to pay the rights-holders for their use.

By the media conglomerates' own math, these GenAI companies should all be drowning in lawsuits over kazillions of bajillions of dollars.

> The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media.

My contention is that this is not happening. Most generative AI companies do not source their training data from illegal torrents and the few that do are currently paying for it. Further, I suspect the companies that get away with it today are _smaller_ not larger.

Training data is typically sourced by scraping the publicly available web.

> Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

Setting aside your own moral standards here, we should at least be able to agree that from a legal standpoint training a model is not copyright infringement.

> A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026.

Updating an old adage for the modern age:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France

> It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up.

I doubt many individuals actually changed their opinions. Just that a large crowd of previously-silent people decided AI is a threat to them and they can attack it on copyright grounds. The AI revolution is a great argument against copyright law. The US's lax enforcement means that the incredible, world-changing tech could be built before the luddites got organised to try and stop it. The productive path appears to be illegal, but they took it anyway and we're all the better off for it.

Why do you think we're all better off?

The reasons that jump out at me are that, as a society, we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort, provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost, revolutionise research and it looks like we're going to be able to get a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management which is huge in and of itself. The wins seem like they're going to be big.

> we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort

According to Jevon's paradox[0], this would lead to more consumption of resources. We're already straining at the limits of the Earth. Depletion and collapse won't be good for anyone.

> provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost

Given every LLM's propensity to hallucinate, the only quality advice is that which can be followed back to a human expert-vetted source. But we already have people who don't check sources and get bad advice.

> revolutionise research

Maybe, but AI is also being used in a mass spread of misinformation.

> a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management

I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but from what I'm seeing so far, this looks like it will massively increase wealth disparity, which is bad for most people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

The Luddites were rational and correct.

Probably. But not helpful.

Being rational and correct is a low bar, it is likely that all sides of any given debate a rational and correct to some extent. Someone dumping their entire life savings into a casino can be said to be rational and correct if the person doing it genuinely prioritises short term pleasure enough - still a stupid thing to do.

As others have said, it's not a change. There's no inconsistency in applying copyright to protect people. When Gigantic Company uses copyright to bully the little guy who isn't doing anything to materially harm Gigantic Company, that's bad. When AI steals the little guy's work, that's bad. They're both bad. That's consistent. It's also obvious that it's consistent - i.e. I don't believe people making the "AI copyright complaints are funny" quip are being honest. I believe they are simply engaging in petty social politics.

>Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of the night trying to figure out where you are and where you are going.

And then the wolves ate your mules, your wife died of disentery, and you got raped by a grizzly bear. I remember those days too, and all those Oregon Trail kids showed up and ruined it all.

I get that the information produced and consumed online does has a profound effect on how we think. But right now I need to point out a steady gripe of mine that may or may not be tangential to the author's points depending on how you view things.

There is something unsettling about how the disjunctive experience that digital media environments produce is romantically portrayed. I think we need to get over the concept of things like "cyberspace". There are no corners of the internet that you "inhabit". "Digital gardening" can go too. Media/information environments shouldn't be thought of in the same way that physical ones are. I don't know why I feel this way. At least I can't form a strong argument to support why...yet. But I think this way of thinking is psychologically detrimental. Go debate a dualist and let me know how it goes.

"Saving the internet" may require that we adopt a realist perspective on what the internet is. You are exchanging data. There's more to it, I'm sure, and the effect of this exchange shouldn't be taken for granted.

This is an over simplification, but I think it's a start.

I mean...Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Palantir, Flock are information technology companies, right? I can get a little obtuse and say that this is the case for most companies involved in the transfer of content of all kinds from one place to another.

Tech companies are lawnmowers and the internet is not where your lawn is. Don't expect either to help you touch or cut your grass.

> Media/information environments shouldn't be thought of in the same way that physical ones are. I don't know why I feel this way.

Maybe because media/information environments aren't the same as physical environments?

The word "environment" might be the root issue here. Using digital tools to connect with other people isn't the same thing as treating your digital tools as an "environment" that takes the place of the physical world. The former is very useful and can often be vital. The latter, I think, is where problems can occur.

Pardon the melodrama. This is a tough conceptual block to chip away at. HCI research and any tentative breakthroughs in AR/VR might not lend any favors to convince people that digital environments are not ideal surrogates for the real world, or as complimentary to the world in the way that I think more even-keeled people would like to believe. The same goes for technologically-driven existential malaise. And people who refer to their Obsidian vaults and collections of linked Org-mode files as their "second brains".

If you've debated any dualists please share your notes, win or loss.

> If you've debated any dualists

Dualists in what sense? Mind-body dualists?

That's right.

Ah, ok. I can't say I've ever argued with any in person, but of course there's a vast philosophical literature full of such arguments, of which I've read a fair amount. As far as I can tell, no such argument has ever really changed anyone's mind.

They simply scaled until their principles became inconvenient, and then they stopped mentioning them. That's Google and "Don't be Evil".

I love this. The historical connection, to what all happened, what was, just feels further & further away. This review of where we were feels so important.

Generally I really like & think there's so much sensible here. I do really want to hope eventually we get more personal social, that we do start having more humane social. We all have done so little to make opportunities, being so bound to Big Social, Big Tech, and it feels like that can't endure forever. But it's so far off and speculative, such a far hope, hoping for this post-mechanized post-massified post-dark forest social.

On the IP issue, I do have a lot more sympathy for the Magna Carta here than is given:

> If this analysis is correct, copyright and patent protection of knowledge (or at least many forms of it) may no longer be unnecessary. In fact, the marketplace may already be creating vehicles to compensate creators of customized knowledge outside the cumbersome copyright/patent process

And Mat's retort:

> The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly?

It just seems radiantly abundantly clear that IP is a terrible shit show. There's still endless legal lawfare over h.264. New jerkward patent pools spring up to try to harass and harrie av1 and vp9. This Trying to just send video around is inescapably miserable, with the worst forces from every dark corner spring up constantly, to dog humanity from every attempting to make a basic common good available. It's constant IP terrorism.

Yes, and this is the paradox right at the heart of 'Hacker' in 'Hacker News' aka an arbitrary usurping of established norms - notably without moral impetus.

Institutionalists view the very word 'Hacker' as 'Wrong' because they're essentially 'Rule Breakers'.

But sometimes rules are bad, and need to be broken.

Libertarians view rules as constraints, so why not break them?

More often than not, rules are there fore a reason. (Obviously it's complicated)

There's a huge grey area there but what is not grey ... is the issue of the 'morally neutral' impetus that the author is talking about - the seed of which is right at the root of 'Hacker'.

YC does not say 'build something useful and beneficial' - they say 'build something useful'.

Aka no moral impetus towards the greater good.

'Build a gear that is useful to other gears, without concern for what the gears are actually doing'.

It seems benign when there's no power involved - aka startups.

But it's not benign when there's huge concentration of power.

That system leads to endemic competition - which - at the highest levels is economic warfare, or even actual warfare.

There is no flattening in these systems - those things end up in Feudal Power Structures - everyone 'somewhere on the pyramid'.

If you're 'under Musk' right now - anywhere (and that includes literally almost every VC for whom it's too risky to say anything critical, or so many people in finance tangentially related to $1.5T IPO, or business etc) - you dare not speak out against him.

That's the opposite of 'flat or decentralized' - it's just power without democratic impetus, techno authoritarianism, which is paradoxically the thing they seem to lament.

Hacking in its original sense is not about rule breaking (except maybe implied rules). It’s about finding ways around limitations. This could be finding unusual routes through a campus, as when the term was invented, or altering software to work the way you wanted it to. Often the only limits to using a tool the way you want to use it are in your mind.

Hacking was distinct from phreaking (illegal use of the phone system/theft of services) and cracking (breaking copy protection). It’s only later that people started using “hacking” to be synonymous with these terms as well as attacking systems, stealing passwords, etc.

“Hacking” in its original sense is a good thing. It’s applied creativity, nothing wrong with that.

I think that maybe you understand this because you refer to hacking as breaking norms. The thing is, uncodified norms in a society are often tools of the powerful. “You violated the norm!” while the norm is flexible is a great way to shut down any and all competition. Especially when wielded by those with the resources to shape the media.

Because of this, norms that aren’t codified will eventually be broken in a complex society. They don’t have to be codified by law, many norms in Japan for instance are defined by what it is to “be Japanese”. (But they are an ethnically homogenous society, so they are able to pull this off.) Hackers are just ahead of the curve.

Thoughtful.

Yes 'hack and 'hacking' [1] (Google Ngram Viewer)

The traditional use of 'hack' was meant to imply 'half baked' or 'not good' and often used as an insult 'that guy is a hack' etc.

'Hack' as in 'tinkering and improvisation' is relatively new - and it came about at roughly the same time as the 'Phreak' version of 'hack'.

Yes - of course norms can simply benefit those with power, I hinted at that, but on the other end:

  "Hackers are just ahead of the curve"

... if the dissolution of society is 'ahead of the curve' ...

For every rule that is broken, probably 95 times out of 100, it as broken for selfish or irresponsible or self aggrandizing reasons.

'Little Egos' are just as capable of acting callously as 'Powerful Egos' and usually without any self awareness.

But yes - even in the moments were 'norms should probably be broken' - the 'new norms' can only possibly come about from the 5% which are creating positive new norms, and there underlies the 'Venture Capital' motivation and relationship to 'Hacking'.

And that's exactly the essence of the fallacy of the libertarian creed -the churlish assumption that 'rules are the arbitrary imposition of those with power' and that somehow breaking them is more likely good than not, and that one should aspire to be 'ahead of the curve'.

The only way out of that trap is a consistent application of a 'moral concern'. Obviously, we can argue about what 'moral' is forever, but at very minimum it's a consideration of the 'greater good', which is fundamentally at odds with the egoism at the root of 'breaking the limitations' which are seen to be constraining the desires of a given ego.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Hack%2Chacking...

> the libertarian creed -the churlish assumption that 'rules are the arbitrary imposition of those with power' and that somehow breaking them is more likely good than not

This is certainly churlish, but it's not at all "the libertarian creed". People who break rules just for the sake of breaking them aren't libertarians, they're idiots. I agree there are lots of those around, and that many, if not most, people who crow about "breaking rules" are doing it for selfish or irresponsible or self-aggrandizing reasons. But those people aren't libertarians.

The libertarian creed is that there are different kinds of rules, and you treat them in different ways. And one key part of that is precisely the "moral concern" that you talk about. Libertarianism includes the non-aggression principle: don't violate other people's rights. (Some, including me, would say that's a bedrock tenet of libertarianism.) If breaking a rule would do that, you don't break the rule. And indeed lots of the rules we have in place in our society are there for that very reason--because breaking them would mean violating someone's rights. That doesn't just include obvious cases like the laws against things like murder. It includes rules about fiduciary responsibility when you're taking care of other people's money (someone mentioned Paypal upthread). And it includes norms that aren't codified into rules, like "don't take your users' data without their consent or even knowledge, and then sell it for profit". Doing it at scale to billions of people, as tech giants do, doesn't change that, and "libertarian creed" isn't a get out of jail free card.

You said it better than I would have. GP has a misunderstanding of libertarianism and perhaps of the concept of liberty.

Libertarians (small-l libertarians, colloquially) don’t break norms “just because”, they do it only in specific circumstances based on a calculus. Everyone’s calculus is different, but the usual reasoning would focus on possible infringement of others’ rights when breaking the norm and the seeming validity/grounding of the norm. And perhaps the risk tolerance of the individual and likely consequences.

GP seems to be taking about anarchists (and a particular species of anarchist at that). There is indeed some overlap but libertarians are not allergic to norms. “Rights” themselves are a norm.

"don’t break norms “just because”, they do it only in specific circumstances based on a calculus."

No - I didn't suggest 'just because', and Libertarians reject norms not 'on a specific basis' - they reject the nature of the limiting impetus on their expression.

Norms are by by default bad and can only be justified in a narrow sense.

Critically, there is no moral impetus but the expression of one self. There is no 'greater good', 'community good', or even 'greater morality' beyond selfish desire.

Rules and norms are only seen through that lens.

Yes - 'rights' can be viewed as norms under most libertarian thought but only to the extent it supposedly protects individual will.

These ideas are useful tool, especially when concerned with materially oppressive systems (such as those Ayn Rand lived through in Soviet Union) but morally and practically bereft or at least lacking outside of more authoritarian systems.

> they reject the nature of the limiting impetus on their expression.

Says who? The non-aggression principle is a limit on "expression"--you can't "express" something that violates someone else's rights.

I think the correct word to describe what you're actually thinking of is "libertine", not "libertarian".

> Ayn Rand

Is hardly an example of what you're describing. She explicitly supported property rights and the non-aggression principle.

It's interesting, though, that she refused to identify herself as a libertarian because she saw those who did as anarchists. So she apparently had the same kind of misconception about libertarianism that you do.

Not to mention that objectivism and libertarianism are not synonymous. “Libertarian” isn’t even a great label considering that it lumps in everyone from Hoppeans (“libertarian” fascists) to Georgist UBI proponents to minarchists to Tea Partiers to Glenn Greenwald. You’re not going to find a lot of common ground across those demographics except for a desire to maximize some definition of individual liberty, in a general sense, and a shared distaste for government intervention.

(respond to pdnois thoughtful note)

"People who break rules just for the sake of breaking them aren't libertarians, they're idiots. "

-> they're not breaking them 'to break them' - they're breaking them because the rule doesn't serve their immediate purpose.

Like 'talking loud on a train'.

People who do that are not doing so 'just for spite' (sometimes) but rather, the social constraint is too much for them in the moment.

They are putting themselves 'above the (social) law'.

Most of the time, people lack the self awareness and are oblivious to their own actions in this regard especially under the veil of an ideology.

In the more ideological sense, Libertarians are often opposed to 'regulations' on the grounds that it 'limits their choice' etc. but those 'choices' have external effects on those around them.

The Ego is the greatest deluder and it's why self awareness is so hard.

I believe this is the 'root' of what the author is getting at. The Egoic aspiration towards supposed 'freedom' is often an ideological guise for trampling on others and just the pursuit of raw, unhindered selfish desire.

But 'without awareness'. Or worse - 'suppressed awareness'.

That's the key factor here: the 'lack of self awareness' and the deep motivation for people to put themselves before others - that drives this.

You see it all the time in callous Executive statements - it's why they seem so 'detached' - in their minds they are not acting 'badly' or 'immorally' - they're just doing what's good for them (often under the guise of 'shareholder' ideology, which is rooted in classic free market liberalism.), without any kind of self awareness.

And why in some competitive systems, a sense of self awareness can be a detriment.

And by the way - this 'tension' is right at the heart of Adam Smith.

Adam Smith was deeply concerned with the moral outcome - he was a (Christian) Ethicist, before he was an Economist. He wrote more about the issues of power than comparative value.

Friedman is like Adam Smith without the 'self consideration'.

> They are putting themselves 'above the (social) law'.

There is no “social law”; not in the US, at least.

We have never been more divided as to what constitutes appropriate behavior in public. We are not an ethnostate (nor should we be), so all social behavior in the public at-large is essentially undertaken on a battleground. Every ideology, sub-ethnicity, and social group has its own competing norms that often conflict. At times, expressing behavior that is normal (for you) can inadvertently become a political statement and a call to conflict.

Talking loud on a train, as you mentioned, may be unacceptable to some and perfectly normal to others based on culture. Not to mention biological aspects such as neurodivergence.

“Regulation” also does not happen in a vacuum. Regulation imposes a particular viewpoint, one that all may not agree with. These days, the majority may even disagree with the imposed viewpoint, as our ruling class is compromised.

“Implicit regulation” through vague norms is even worse, as you are inevitably oppressing some groups based on their cultural characteristics, and not letting them argue against it. Laws can be debated at least, even if they are bad laws.

It may be that multicultural societies are doomed to implode. (I certainly hope not.) If we are to have a chance of keeping them afloat, light-touch governance and permissive norms are probably the only hope. Perhaps this can be coupled with voluntary collective norms that are crafted as a nation. But we can’t object too loudly if some groups don’t hold to these norms, as long as they are not violating fundamental rights (which we must also find a way to agree upon!).

> they say 'build something useful'.

Do they?

Or do they just say "build something that will make us money"?

Seems to me even "useful" would be more moral than the reality.

In the print era, distribution was the bottleneck. The sheer amount of plant needed to produce a book or newspaper was impressive. The equipment needed for TV broadcasting was huge and expensive. In the high-speed Internet era, attention is the bottleneck. There's far more content than anyone can absorb.

At last, anyone can talk. Now it's all about finding people to listen. The implications of this shift were not forseen.

> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.

Sea Story:

- Background: US Navy ships go alonside an oiler to refuel and hold a course/speed at restricted maneuvering for a while. Hours, even.

After this nerve-wracking time period, when breaks away from the oiler, then she comes up to flank three and plays a breakaway song over loudspeakers, the 1MC. Totally not meant for music, but that's not the point.

- Story: the CO always wanted "Lowrider", by War, which is an excellent cut, but was well past cliché after so many iterations. The Messenger of the Watch had a boom box, a tape, and the 1MC microphone for the task.

Only, this time, the tape was flipped. Dude hit PLAY on the "Dazed and Confused" soundtrack, and Ted Nugent announced that he had everyone in a stranglehold.

The Old Man was apoplectic, and the cassette was quickly flipped and we got on with life.

Worst way to listen to music, indeed.

> This is how "don't tread on me" becomes "Meta should be allowed to do whatever it wants."

> This is how the rights of the lone hacker working in their garage become indistinguishable from the rights of a multinational with a market cap larger than most countries' GDP.

This is the strongest point in the article, in my opinion. The cyberlibertarian ideals make more sense when you look at then from the perspective of the lone hacker. They are fundamentally different from trillion dollar corporations and should not be treated the same way.

> Once the platforms got large enough to be unstoppable, once they captured enough of the regulatory apparatus to write their own rules, the libertarian rhetoric got quietly shelved like a college poster you took down before your in-laws came over.

> Cyberlibertarianism was the ladder. Once they were on the roof, they kicked it away and started charging admission to look at the view.

Agreed. This is a real hypocrisy.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

>That is the internet we built. It was not an accident. It was the product of a specific ideology, written down by specific people, at a specific cocktail party in Davos, in 1996.

The article is entertaining but I completely don't buy that. The internet would be much the say if nothing had been written in Davos. People would still have linked computers, done good and bad stuff as is human nature, companies would have tried to own and profit from it, governments would have tried to regulate it as is their nature also.

Any human movement at scale is bound to become corrupt really quickly. I say that as someone who was both de-banked and de-cryptoed for noticing the corruption and doing everything by the book.

My belief is that any centralized, collective attempt to fix anything related to politics will only ever create more problems.

The only thing that works is chaos. We should embrace chaos and disobedience.

The nice thing about the Internet is that a person, great or small, can voice their grandiose and yet myopic views of a problem and their absurd solutions to it...freely.

The bad thing about the Internet is that a machine can do that at scale and for very cheap, quickly drowning any human’s voice.

I miss when the Internet was mostly a collection of myopic views from naive people.

This just shows you can be right, you can have convincing arguments for why you're right but unless people listen, you will not change anything.

I wonder how Winner feels about all of this.

A lot of the problems have stemmed actually from a lack of freedom, not too much of it (all of the issues created by the "fantasy of cyberauthoritarianism", rather)

> I was young enough that I also thought "Snow Crash" was a serious political document.

Is snow crash worth reading in 2026? I bought it forever ago and it’s sitting in my shelf

Of course it is.

not only is it absolutely worth reading, but the author belittling it's political commentary is foolish and incorrect.

Irrespective of anything else, I think libertarians of any kind have to contend with that Corporations can be extremely powerful entities that can be just as bad as governments. At the very least, setting their sights on governments alone seems terribly inconsistent and incorrect. In no small part because megacorps can yield governments in their favor, and by the point they're extremely powerful megacorps, the libertarian calls against regulation (yielded by megacorps against interests of the population) tend to fail.

But it's not just regulation megacorps can use, the most frequent is just various forms of capturing and dominating a market, I guess.

For example, Google is on the process of deciding or severely restricting independent developers on Android. I think by reasonable interpretation, user freedom is being severely restricted. But most people have little recourse, it's either Android or iOS (and by now both are similarly bad in different ways). There are some alternative OSes and devices, but there's a significant chance you may rely on some real world service that needs one of the two major ones.

Without trying to overgeneralize everything, in this particular example I don't see how things could change without regulation.

(and, if you will, in that case you can generalize to the implication that regulation isn't necessarily always bad)

---

I think the lesson to take isn't that the cyberlibertarians were 100% wrong and we need maximum government control and surveillance over the internet. The world tends to be complex and most simple stories we come up with (which are the ones that tend to sound good on our ears and be most comfortable) tend to be wrong in various ways. The world demands, at least, flexibility from ourselves. Sure, be inspired by one idea or manifesto or another, but don't follow it blindly always.

A relative freedom of communication and widespread access to information arguably is pretty good for civilization. When you can talk and relate to people from allover, the justification for war seem increasingly flimsy. But various forms of regulation preventing single megacorps from dominating the global internet (or simply local wired internet access in your region), can be important. Maybe we need to protect more discourse against bad actors and the incoming flood of LLM-generated, possibly propaganda-fed content. Keep an open mind. Whatever decisions we make we can walk back and change course.

The fundamental principle isn't this or that ideological current, but that people are living good lives. Happy, in peace, full of awesome possibilities. As someone wiser has once said, remember your humanity and forget the rest! :)

It makes sense when you understand the origins, "libertarian" as a phrase was coopted from socialist-libertarians (now called anarchists), and is full of contradictions and hypocrises, mainly the one you mentioned about private property (in the economic sense of the term), controlling economic organizations as a dictator and owning their collective output as property. Not to mention this type of property is pretty anti-social can only exist with a massive bureaucracy and violence apparatus (courts and cops) which also contradicts their ideology.

I mean, their foundational philosophy is Ayn Rand, a fiction writer? The whole right-libertarian ideology is a joke compared to the intellectual rigor of anarchist theorists like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.

Especially in a world where the entire global economy is controlled by capitalists, it looks silly and just ends up affirming capitalist rule, like the OP has pointed out.

> I mean, their foundational philosophy is Ayn Rand, a fiction writer? The whole right-libertarian ideology is a joke compared to the intellectual rigor of anarchist theorists like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.

Ayn Rand is not consensus within libertarian circles.

From the top if my head on the libertarian camp I think of Rothbard, Hayek, Mises, Menger, Von Bawerk who debunked Marx economic policies. Also arguably Kant and Adam Smith and many others who influenced it.

My guess is that since you know Bakunin and these others there might be a chance you are deep into the other extreme. I think it's okay to disagree but your comparison shows you probably need to do better research before putting things together to avoid the "our blessed homeland, their barbarous wastes" situation.

Most right-libertarians will point to Ayn Rand as their philosophical north star. It's the only "philosopher" name mentioned in the OP. It's comical and unserious.

Many followers of cyberlibertarianism see themselves as potential cyberlords, who can rule over their fiefdoms, but still under the protection of the king (state/government).

The hypocrisy becomes apparent when these entities grow large, and suddenly need state help to suppress competition.

Phase 1: Skirt laws, move fast and break things. Regulations should be abolished. Steal as much as you can, if it means growth.

Phase 2: Lobby politicians, beg for certain regulations to keep out competitors when you've become a monopoly.

The title could have dropped the prefix “cyber” and still have been accurate.

There's a strong overlap between technopositivists who view the world through a very narrow lens of the problems they are trying to solve and libertarians who also have a very narrow view based on problems they are trying to solve(taxation, fettered liberty, gov waste, etc).

I don't want to say it's autism, but they both seem to stem from a very low-dimensional understanding of the world. I get it, having been in both camps in the 90s/early 2000s. I got a reminder of it the other day when I saw Benn Jordan pimping anarchism on his YouTube channel. It reminds me of how I thought of the world as a teenager before I understood the nuances and trade-offs of reality.

It's really hard for me to understand an adult who thinks that way. Anarchism and to some degree libertarianism are both heavily tilted towards the strong and any sort of lack of government authority and coercion will soon be replaced with private entities acting far worse. I wish it were not that way, but that is the universe we find ourselves in.

You are partly right but also prey to the same issue: yes, most technopositivists lack broad enough knowledge to even conceive that technology can be a net negative for society (usually a lack of foundation in humanities, a common issue in CS educated people)

Yet your comment has a naive dismissal of anarchism as ‘teenage politics’ which betray a lack of understanding the rich history and meaning behind anarchism, which is common these days. Dismissing it wholesale is like dismissing physics because you think string theory is silly.

This is analog to 'ecology without class struggle is gardening'.

You read an article like this, and despite some flaws, it restores your faith in humanity a little bit. Maybe I'm not the only one looking at the shitshow in horror.

Then you come to the comment section and are immediately reminded why the whole god damn world has lost its mind.

What are some examples of bad comments and how do they contradict the article?

Three out of four of the top comments don't even directly engage with the point of the article. They're focusing on nitpicking elements of it or just going off on a tangent only somewhat related.

Thank you! I was trying to find someone pointing this out

Karmawhore strategy. F5 on /new. Scan the article and then race to object to some minor sentence. Upvotes mean you are a smart lil guy. Happens frequently.

Many of the central points here (in particular the quote about conflating individual freedom with that of large companies) are in no way specific to the internet, or to technology at all. The cyberlibertarian idea that me personally being free means I can use my giant company to do whatever I want is bad, because the plain unprefixed libertarian idea of the same is bad. There are things about technology, especially software-oriented technology, that highlight that badness, but the badness is there all the time.

What I think we are seeing in the world today are the consequences of the fallacy of believing that the goodness of freedom is independent of its scale --- that no matter who or what entity we are talking about, it is good for them to have freedom. That simply doesn't make sense. Rather, the greater the potential an entity has to do harm, the less should be its freedom.

Well the "libertarianism" part is the clue. They were always the corporations.

The essay briefly mentions "Open Source" which of course was the corporate friendly rebrand of Free Software.

I'd quibble about the copyright/patents part. This was a time when large corporations were "harmonizing" their ownship of IP ever higher across the globe.

Wanting less of that wasn't crazy. Assuming the free market fairy would deliver it was at best certifiablly naive, at worst a spoiler operation to distract from actually doing it through normal democratic government channels.

Also, "Magna Carta" is fitting as the original was a deal between a King and his Barons. It's pointed to as a step on the path to modern democracy but that's not what they were doing at the time. The powerful were asserting their rights.

I'm impressed by this article. Well written, cogent, and it matches the reality I perceive.

I can't imagine it will be well received here in HN, where I imagine most regulars will side with Barlow, but if it reaches at least some of them (I know skeptics about cyberlibertarianism exist even here), I'll be glad.

I have a suspicion most Libertarians are actually something else but who haven't realized it yet. When you really dig into it: idea of private property (as in owning land and charging people rent for using it) is akin to slavery (owning people and extracting labor from them). The pre-colonial indigenous structures of managing societies were much more aligned with my internal values but they are poorly defined in modern vernacular and we don't have a good "common vocabulary" to talk about how we might want to do things in a different way.

> idea of private property (as in owning land and charging people rent for using it) is akin to slavery (owning people and extracting labor from them)

Utter nonsense. Do you think eating fruit is akin to cannibalism because they both involve the consumption of something?

For more along this line of criticism, read Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech by Paulina Borsook

And Cyberlibertarianism by David Golumbia

Note that at least Negroponte (mentioned in the article once) also had Epstein ties. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media...

This is the first I've seen anyone coin the term "cyberlibertarianism".

The argument presented doesn't seem at all specific to cyber-anything. It's just a typical argument contra libertarianism, at a typical level of uncharitability.

>> You have to hold these four ideas in your head at the same time to see the trick. The cyberlibertarians wanted you to believe that radical individualism plus deregulated capitalism plus inevitable technology would produce communitarian utopia. This is, on its face, insane. It is the economic equivalent of claiming that if everyone punches each other really hard, eventually we'll all be hugging.

Well, the first rule of Fight Club is that we don't talk about Fight Club.

> Radical individualism

I grew up in the U.S. and was programmed apparently to think of this as a virtue. (Rugged individualism was an early variant.)

As I have become older, visited other countries, I see how selfish that is. I put community above individualism now.

> Free-market absolutism

Yeah, never been on board with that one.

I don't think I've ever been a Libertarian of any stripe. And probably even less so as I get older.

Maybe it's just my contrarian nature, but this sells me on cyberlibertarianism.

There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server, downloading free software to run it, getting your friends to view it, building encrypted communication apps that no government can crack, pirating any piece of content in the world, etc...

A libertarian society won't coddle you, and there's psychopaths like Meta who show up in the space and convince a lot of people to follow them. Of course those people suck, but the solution isn't government. It's to stay strong, help your friends be strong, and accept that not everyone will make it. That has always been the flip side of freedom.

The Internet, and now AI, delivered so many of the dreams of my childhood. It is a mostly free society, for better or worse. I'm hoping that intelligence remains distributed, enshittification stops when my agent deals with it for me, and the physical world remains as free as it is. But these aren't things that would be changed with new governance of cyberspace, these are features of the optimization landscape of reality and technological progress.

Do we live in the best possible world, of course not. But this one is pretty good, and it's easy to imagine non libertarian ones that are so much worse. I feel a huge debt to the people who designed the Internet with the foresight that they did, the capture exists at a psychological layer, not a physical one.

> Of course those people suck, but the solution isn't government.

Why? That seems like a big assertion to make in a side sentence without any supporting argument.

Well, governments are coercive forces with a total monopoly on the legal system and the use of violence. Perhaps monopolies being bad is reason enough? There are the hundreds of millions (billions?) of people murdered by governments throughout history, including the many atrocities modern governments are committing today, which is almost surely reason enough. And then there are the philosophical arguments against political authority, called philosophical anarchism, which can be quite convincing.

It seems the onus is on the other side to justify the state, and that we should't be trying to find alternative solutions to the problems it attempts to solve.

In a democratic society, government is the representative of the people.

It is also the only entity powerful enough to stand up to other monopolies, businesses, which are dictatorships without any democratic control.

There will always be a power structure. I'd prefer one I can vote out.

The fundamental flaw in any type of libertarian / anarchist thinking is denying the reality that power will always be concentrated somehow. The libertarian fantasy would result in neofeudalism, if theres no state to stop it.

Corporations are state-created and state-protected entities. Remove limited liability and other special state privileges from businesses and you'll have a lot less to complain about.

The concentration of wealth and thus power is inherent to capitalism. No state needed.

> In a democratic society, government is the representative of the people.

Representative of who exactly? Generally governments around the world win with <50% of the vote. Those who vote make up a small fraction of the population. Of those who voted for the winning party, only a small fraction of them actually feel fully represented by their party - often people vote strategically, or they vote for the "lesser evil" rather than voting for a representative who wholly represents their views.

The rest have a government who are not representative of them in power over them. Hardly representative of the people.

That might be a problem of the specific state you live in. Some systems are better at representing the people than others.

But in a democracy, you at least have input! Google is also a coercive force with no real checks on its power, but it doesn't care about anything you have to say. That's the difference, that's it, right there. The answer to abuse of power is not to just unleash raw power, its to subordinate and restrict it. That's what government is for. When you find yourself arguing that power you participate in is bad and shouldn't restraint power you have 0 influence in, that's when it's time to wonder if they've gotten to you.

The amount of input we have is virtually zero. I have never had a candidate I felt represented me, I have never had a candidate who I voted for win an election, and I have never had a a party who the candidate voted for win an election. Thus my minuscule "input" had absolutely zero impact, both in elections and on my life as a whole.

The reason democracy is better than other forms of governance is that it provides incentives for those in power which are better aligned with the upholding of human rights and protection against abuse. Myself casting a vote every few years is de facto meaningless.

If you are in the US. Proportionate representation stopped completely with the Reapportionment Act of 1929.

Subsequently the tail end of the gilded age and enacted in June 18, only 5months before the crash of oct 1929.

Constitutionally the size of the US government was expected to scale proportionally with population and 3/5ths of slaves.

This is why your vote ‘feels’ meaningless. We have been under a state of corporate capture for coming up to 100years. Last time there was push back from congress we got the Powell memo. That memo reinforces and defends corporate power in American politics.

No, I live in a country under the Westminster system.

The 3/5 of slave population vote were given to the slaveholders. It was not proportional, it was giving structural advantage to pro-slavery side of it.

Yeah that’s true, I didn’t go into detail here. I appreciate the clarification.

Logical conclusion: The US is not a democracy.

But you don’t have to use Google. That’s the critical difference and why people should be so much more skeptical of using the monopoly on violence to enforce things.

Millions of people live in the US and don’t use Google products or pay Google a dime.

Try not paying taxes because you don’t want to support the actions of the federal government and see how that works out.

Federal government spending for Google stuff is probably in the $100Ms. If you pay taxes you’re paying Google.

Life without a smartphone increasingly challenging. You have to use either Google or Apple. I use a de googled Android lineage phone but this is always getting harder, as numerous threads on this site will attest. Plus literally every employer I've ever had has used Google services, plus lots of other sites I might have to use implement recaptcha or otherwise invisibly to me share my data or data about me with Google. Also, even if I do figure out a way to stay off Google's radar, they're a powerful force which shapes my world. They hire lobbyists to influence policy which affects me, build data centers which raise my cost of electricity, or sell killer robots to evil people.

I think where people go wrong is treating Google the way they treat their weird neighbor Bob. Bob's damage is limited. Google is an immense, powerful, alien entity, far beyond the control of any person, and with its own inscrutable goals which are the not goals of literally any person alive or dead.

I genuinely don't understand the desire to leave this entity unmoored to wreck what havoc it may.

Since monopolies make stuff scarce and expensive, you basically want free market for violence, it should be be cheap and abundant?

And all the DDoS and crytocurrency extortions and scams should extend to meatspace too, and you would be okay with it because it's supposedly still better than what govts do?

There's nothing stopping you from setting up your free (as in freedom) slice of cyberspace for you and your friends, for now.

Looking at all the new and proposed laws coming through, I don't think we'll have those basic freedoms all that much longer.

On this side of the wall, you and your friends are strong and happy and free in your garden. On the other side, a hellscape filled with giant monsters debating how best to filet you. You will keep ceeding them ground, your garden gets ever smaller. The monsters ate Brian, oops, well that's the consequence of freedom! But you're next, isn't it completely obvious you're next? Why would you unilaterally disarm against the monsters? Why for the love of God why would you say "no the monsters are good actually!"

If you have friends with some shared meaning then anything is easy.

Everyone else can get get strip mined for attention and croak, you don't care.

That would be great if any of it worked. However, we tried that and now find ourselves living (I use that term loosely) in a capitalist hellscape.

We do?

A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, and it accepts that the state needs to be fair and predictable.

I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state.

And I would argue that that is hardly an outlandish fear. It's barely an extrapolation at all.

> A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force,

It does not accept that. In particular, libertarians are very ok with domestic violence.

Quite a lot of libertanism is all about creating conditions where poorer or weaker people have no realistic recourse.

Hi George. Have you seen RoboCop? A free market survival-of-the-fittest gets us closer to a dystopian 1984-like society. Overregulation will also do that.

Regulation isn't exactly at odds with freedom. One could certainly regulate freedom in order to foster it.

I agree on the "information wants to be free" aspect. In the early days of the Internet, it felt like a free as in freedom shadow world where anyone could do anything they want. The moment copyright infringement lawsuits started to happen, that sense withered.

Nowadays the companies with the highest market cap are computer technology companies. They're bigger than probably at least half the countries on Earth in terms of revenue. They're abusing their multinational power such that goverments become a tool to achieve more power and more money.

I personally think that us humans have to repeatedly go through centuries of bad decisions and evil overlords to learn an important lesson. Kindness can't exist without evilness. Jing-jang has a dot of the opposite color on each side. But I digress.

Cheers!

Edit: IDK what the lesson is, either. Perhaps it varies per person?

> Have you seen RoboCop?

Out of curiosity, why cite a 1980s action film?

Because it's a reference most people would get. The entire premise is that everything will be privatised, including healthcare and the police.

(BTW, I doubt a Motorola heart would cost $1, but I still think that's hilarious.)

> There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server

Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway.

That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.

Yea it should have been IPv8 from day one. It almost feels like IPv6 was a psyop.

The author argues for regulations, but the reason the internet today is anticompetitive is because of anti-circumvention regulations. The ideal world would have digital regulations, but a world with no digital regulations would be better than today's.

And how would you install your regulations? Right now, both the average voter and oligarch prefers centralized platforms.

Meh. Marketing ruined it. That's what eventually ruins almost everything.

Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.