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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> I've honestly never really quite recovered from watching the dreams of the cypherpunks die so hideously and completely.

This is really what the rage on the internet is about. People like to pretend they're mad at the government overstepping its Constitutional boundaries, but what they're really mad about is the failure of their attempt to re-litigate the division of power between government and the people.

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I think that's true, though there's a third axis, companies, which is a big part of that failure. One major change in the tech scene over the past few decades is that a significant proportion of us effectively went over the other side: many techies now work for companies whose goal is, as with the government, to collect data on people, construct profiles, and share it around as convenient. That left rather fewer (though still vocal) people working for the opposite goal of anonymity, non-trackability, and flexible/modifiable pseudonymous identities. It also made it much easier for the government to piggyback on that tracking infrastructure we ourselves are building.

That's a great point, and it points to a weakness that most privacy advocates don't really address very well: knowing more about you allows some companies to do things better for you. They have to answer the question, how do we provide the same awesome services while also preserving privacy?

It's the conflict between two different paradigms for the internet. Cyperpunks want to think of the internet as a tool for trading ideas, potentially subversive ones. Most people think of the internet as a social or commercial space.

Nicely put. When viewed that way, the internal "nymwars" at Google looks like a pretty direct culture clash between those paradigms: should G+ allow pseudonymous profiles to protect free exchange of ideas (possibly including stigmatized or even dangerous ones), or should it insist on real names, to reduce spam, trolling, and other trouble-making, and improve the quality of the data collected?

It seems Google had a significant number of employees in each camp. But the market logic was pretty firmly in one of those camps and not the other...

> It also made it much easier for the government to piggyback on that tracking infrastructure we ourselves are building.

Not just easier: we made it possible.

The government couldn't have created Facebook on their own. But now that it exists, it's an intelligence agency's dream come true.

That's it in a nutshell.

Every time we see another consumer web startup which relies on advertising or mining user data, we see yet another nail in the coffin in freedom and privacy for users. But, that's okay, because we're totally killing it, and that bridge round is coming any time now to keep us in our expensive lofts and designer foods.

Way to go, folks. Hope it was worth selling out the rest of your fucking race.

Yes because I really did hold my grandmother at gunpoint as she gave me the 14th update in the last hour about her stupid cat.

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