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.
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 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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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").
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.
> 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 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.)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
"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. "
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.
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.
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.
This is completely incoherent. Not all social problems are derived from lack of privacy, no one has ever suggested such a thing. Justifying skepticism about the moral value of privacy with such a profound non sequitur is transparently bad faith. I'm gobsmacked at the gall to even post this "think about the children" level of discourse. It can only be assumed you know exactly what you're doing, given you made a throwaway account for it. Extremely shameful.
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?
> 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.
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!"?
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.
>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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
"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!).
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.
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.
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! :)
> 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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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!
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.
The problem is that you, american m..r..n, truly believe that you can ignore the war you wage on Russia, your genocide in Gaza and an attempted genocide in Iran, and continue to live in your "democratic" fantasy land, drinking other people's blood.
I just hope you understand what you are without other massacres. And stop your berserk running to a cliff.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improvement and denial of death, but one that realizes that true freedom lies in the common good. One such form of moral doctrine which as been transformed in a product we call the church is called the love of Christ, but it's also encoded in virtually every religion that preaches the care for the other, and also in the philosophy of care. Those are the foundations we need to build in order to truly decolonialize our cultural medium.
I agree that if profits are always put about everything else, disaster for any society is essentially guaranteed. (I'll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader)
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.
Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.
Further reading:
1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.
2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.
3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013.
5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019.
7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782.
9) Bria, Francesca, and José Bautista. ‘The Authoritarian Stack’. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Future of Work, 8 November 2025. https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/.
10) Durand, Cédric, Morozov, Evgeny, and Watkins, Susan. ‘How Big Tech Became Part of the State’. Jacobin, 24 November 2025.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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!"
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.
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?
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 think this article touches upon something quite apparent in this modern age.
Talking to people with different opinions is considered tantamount to joining them. It is much better to point the finger of blame rather than suggest a way forward. The best way to criticise someone's argument is to take their words, explain what they really meant by that in a way that supports your argument, making the counterargument ridiculously easy.
What I don't understand is that how people have come to believe that arguing for the things that corporate interests fought for represents standing against those interests.
The thing that has it in a nutshell was this line
>The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly? This is always the move. The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation.
Cumbersome to everyone without a battery of lawyers. Copyright law has only become more powerful, and the patent process has become more a game of who can spend the most in court on this meritless claim. Disney didn't spend all those lobbying dollars extending copyright out of concern for the welfare of the people. They did it because they wanted to buy and own ideas and keep them for themselves for as long as possible.
I am all for robust well enforced regulation to help and protect people. I thing laws should be in the interest of society and the welfare of everyone more than it should for individuals. I don't think anyone advocating for personal freedoms is necessarily arguing against the interests of the group. There are people out there suggesting ways to correct the system through many many boring but required changes, some of them quite little, some of them large, one of the large ones is getting money out of politics.
I wonder if John Perry Barlow advocated for electoral reform to reign in lobbying? Because it didn't happen, and quite frankly arguing about the world that came to pass without that happening isn't going to represent anyone's plans for the future no matter
So what do we want to build? How should the better world be. Don't frame it as Not that!. Do you want the Revolution and Reign of Terror or the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution?
You can fight to build something better, don't confuse fighting to tear down as the same thing because you are angry and fighting about it makes you feel good about that.
Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.
- John Perry Barlow
Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers.
Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?
> 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.
The alternative, of course, is that a nanny state + highly regulated tech + inevitable technology leads to exactly the outcomes we have now. I’d prefer something else personally.
What about radical individualism + regulated tech - inevitable technology?
I don't see anything wrong with individuals who by consensus choose to regulate "inevitable" technology. Technology is not a person, and we don't need to make ourselves subservient to it.
I'm thinking of things like liability as a publisher for algorithmic feeds, anti-trust enforcement against companies competing unfairly, mandates for inter-operability to avoid user lock-in, limitations on surveillance capitalism, protections for personal data, maybe also regulating things like advertising, campaigning, fake news, etc.
“Individuals by consensus” feels oxymoronic to me. If that’s a description of the outcome, it’s possible today! Individuals can chose not to use a technology and if enough do so to form a consensus, they may be able to impose constraints on the technology akin to regulation.
However anything else would require coercive power structures which go against the idea of radical individualism.
Big tech is a coercive power. They are cooperating with the government to control the population. Doesn't that worry you? Don't you think there should be limits, beside profitability?
I think of it as flaws in our system that need to be patched. The masses are manipulated by their algorithms. Those who would protest are surveilled by them. The rich seem to be running everything to their advantage. The rugged individualist is running out of space.
Libertarianism sounded great. Its all about freedom, and the right to do with yourself what you want. And who doesnt want that?
But they also wanted that freedom for their property and money.
And if youre willing to skirt or plainly violate the laws, you can make bank. And then as a company, you can basically bribe politicians and do all these horrible things.
The end result of libertarianism is simple: He who has the gold makes the rule.
Dont like your pay? Fuck you. Quit.
Dont like the conditions? Fuck you. Die.
Dont like political manipulation? Too fucking bad. You have no choice.
Dont like policies at mega-internet corp (meta, alphabet, microsoft)? Too bad, we'll erase you.
Libertarianism creates semi-autonomous enclaves of technofeudalism. And their power is enforced by non-internet mundane government laws, like the DMCA.
You violate a company, and they delete you. You violate government law, and they arrest or kill you. Of course its in line of duty, or defense of officer - all the eupamisms.
But long story short, I do not trust libertarians in any way. They do indeed want freedom to control everyone else.
Is technofeudalism even a thing? Yanis Varoufakis goes on about it (despite being a keen WEF collaborator)... But it seems to me that in mediaeval feudalism that the lords needed the peasants downstream to produce food and military units. In the technocratic system we are heading towards, the lower classes (us) will be needed for labour and military purposes even less, thanks to automation etc. They will have less and less need for our income since they will have automated investments too. The one similarity to feudalism will be an information caste to make sure we tow the line but even that can be automated.
Not an attractive situation but not a very feudal one.
Not for military purposes, but if you're an employee of eg Google, life is pretty good. Free food, spacious offices, great health insurance; all sorts of perks. All at the behest of Lord Sundar.
As someone for whom the Declaration strongly resonated with, and still does, I think this is the crux of how things end(ed) up going sideways:
> Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit seeking business firms. (Winner)
This is a core American delusion that runs much deeper than merely the Web or the Internet. It's even been legally codified in things like Citizens United - a fallacy that large companies are merely groups of individuals. It's basically the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" dynamic applied to activities rather than money.
In reality, large companies are top-down authoritarian structures where most of the individual humans involved have their own individual will suppressed. Rather they are following direction from above, and any individualist choices they are allowed are within that context. If they go against the direction/orders too much, they will simply be replaced with a different more obedient cog (this is something so-called "right libertarianism" directly whitewashes by rejecting analysis of most forms of power dynamics aka coercion).
I do not think it is inconsistent to still believe in those individualist ideas applied to individuals, while also viewing Big Tech - with its many qualities of actually being government - as something whose at-scale "policies" should be subject to democratic accountability. But to do that, meaning to achieve reform without throwing out the whole idea of individual freedom in the online world, requires us to openly reject that corpo fallacy whereby individuals empathize with billion dollar corporations!
But of course from an American perspective this is all kind of moot for the next few years at least as the main support behind the current regime is exactly Big Tech looking to head off any sort of de jure regulation. And so we must not be tempted by their political calls that might claim to address these problems, as this regime's bread and butter is using very real frustrations as the impetus to implement fake solutions that perpetuate the problems while setting themselves up as lucrative speed bumps (eg look at the shakedown currently happening to mere wifi routers).
Which brings us back to why that individualist message is so powerful, despite how it ends up going sideways - because when traditional democratic accountability has been hopelessly neutralized, self-help is the only thing people have left.
The problem with [conservative] libertarians is that they are half anarchists.
They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.
If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.
This is where most people, including the author, present liberalism as the solution. Free market + democratic regulation is a great way to manage an economy; but is it really a good way to manage the rest of society?
The article brings up copyright without exploring the idea at all. I think this is the greatest mistake of all. Copyright is what forces every facet of society to participate in a capitalist market.
Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires. Wouldn't that be nice? Next, we wouldn't be structuring all human interactions with corporate ad platforms. There seems to be a lot of unexplored opportunity there. Even more exciting, moderators would suddenly have all the power that they need to manage the responsibility they are given. No more begging to reddit admins! No more fighting automated censorship! Doesn't that sound good?
It boggles my mind how people from nearly every political perspective have accepted copyright as the one perfect inarguable virtue. Even the cyberlibertarians op argues with are only willing to concede copyright with the promise of a magical free market replacement! Now's as good a time as ever to think about it.
> They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.
Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work. To a right anarchist or libertarian, "Free market absolution" is not an ideology or a goal, it's just the result of private property rights + freedom of association.
Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work. I would assume that left leaning libertarians and social anarchists would also similarly agree that copyright is nonsense but I'm not so sure - the time I spent in those communities have me wondering if they even hate authority and hierarchy, or if they simply desire their own forms of it. Many indeed defend copyright.
> Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work.
The libertarian conception is that groups of people can form hierarchical corporations that compete directly with individuals in the marketplace. The social anarchist conception is usually that people participate in anarchist cooperatives instead. It depends on the anarchist what that means in practice.
> Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work.
Yes, but what they are sorely missing in that argument - in my opinion - is that the problem with copyright is monopoly power; which is also what you get from an unregulated market of corporations. The somewhat regulated market that exists today is obviously dominated by corporations whose anticompetitive participation is predicated on their copyright moats.
> Many [left-leaning libertarians and social anarchists] indeed defend copyright.
Yes, and I'm at least as frustrated about that as with any other political group.
It's incredibly rare to hear copyright's role in our society even described, let alone criticized; even though that role is incredibly significant.
> If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations.
No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.
But "corporation" is an extremely broad term. Mom and pop businesses are corporations. A friend and I own a corporation that makes games, just the two of us, no employees. But Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc. are also corporations. So "corporation" doesn't capture what's bad about the latter.
> The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.
No, that's not correct. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that, first, corporations are not people--they don't have the same rights as people do. They are tools that people can use in a free market to more efficiently produce things and create wealth. But that's all they are. If we had that kind of free market, corporations that are larger than many countries probably wouldn't even exist.
Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market. The original concepts behind those corporations arose in what was more or less a free market--Larry and Sergey didn't need to get anyone's permission to put the original Google on the web, Jobs and Wozniak didn't need to get anyone's permission to build the first Apple computers. But at the scale those corporations are now, they cannot exist without the support and favoritism of governments. (And not just the US government; Apple, for example, would be dead in the water if it did not have the cooperation and support of the Chinese government for its manufacturing base.) And that means they are not products of "libertarian ideals". They might have started out that way, but they didn't, and couldn't, scale that way.
> Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires.
Sure we would. Zuckerberg isn't a billionaire because of copyright. He's a billionaire because he's convinced a substantial fraction of the entire planet that it's perfectly normal, routine, nothing to see here, to have an immensely valuable social networking tool appear by magic on the Internet for free. Same goes for the Google billionaires. Bezos isn't a billionaire because Amazon holds valuable copyrights; he's a billionaire because he sells something valuable, "what I want delivered to my door when I want it" convenience, and he's able to curry government favors so he can bully his supply chain into making that happen. Apple isn't sitting on a huge pile of cash because of copyrights; it's because they make devices that give a significant minority of the market what they want, no fuss, and governments let them manufacture those devices on the cheap while the market they're selling to is upscale.
Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in. But they'd do just as well, if not better, in a world without copyrights, as long as that world still had governments who would give them the favoritism they get now.
Everything that Meta owns is either copyright or hardware that facilitates the ownership of its distribution. They wouldn't have the interest or capital to run giant datacenters without the ability to profit from their "owned" users' data. Facebook and Instagram can only be valued because they are proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright. Even Meta's VR headsets are sold at a loss, with a walled garden app store designed to pay the difference.
> Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in.
Yes, that's the thing I'm arguing against. Would you mind considering it for a moment?
> No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.
That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals. The argument that a corporation should not be treated as an individual is irrelevant, because that is its role in a marketplace. That's who individuals directly compete with!
> Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market.
They are creatures in a market. Whether that market is free does not define them, only their opportunity. I agree that they get the opportunity of government favoritism, and that that is a significant part of the issue. My point is that it is not the root cause of the problem. In a "free market" that incorporates copyright and patents, any corporation who owns IP can leverage it as a moat, enforced by state violence. The fact that any individual can do the same does not change the power imbalance between an individual and a corporation: it increases it.
Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation. Even Amazon's anticompetitive behavior is predicated on their vertical integration of Amazon the delivery/fulfillment service with Amazon the marketplace. The fact that a marketplace can be owned at all is predicated on copyright.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Indeed, that phenomena is called regulatory capture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
> 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.)
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is completely incoherent. Not all social problems are derived from lack of privacy, no one has ever suggested such a thing. Justifying skepticism about the moral value of privacy with such a profound non sequitur is transparently bad faith. I'm gobsmacked at the gall to even post this "think about the children" level of discourse. It can only be assumed you know exactly what you're doing, given you made a throwaway account for it. Extremely shameful.
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?
> 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!"?
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)
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.
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.
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?
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:
... 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.
(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!).
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.
They simply scaled until their principles became inconvenient, and then they stopped mentioning them. That's Google and "Don't be Evil".
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.
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! :)
> 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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
You are completely n..ts
The problem is that you, american m..r..n, truly believe that you can ignore the war you wage on Russia, your genocide in Gaza and an attempted genocide in Iran, and continue to live in your "democratic" fantasy land, drinking other people's blood.
I just hope you understand what you are without other massacres. And stop your berserk running to a cliff.
If you’re going to throw out childish insults, at least have the guts to write them in full as if your mother wasn’t watching over your shoulder.
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.
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?
> 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.
The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improvement and denial of death, but one that realizes that true freedom lies in the common good. One such form of moral doctrine which as been transformed in a product we call the church is called the love of Christ, but it's also encoded in virtually every religion that preaches the care for the other, and also in the philosophy of care. Those are the foundations we need to build in order to truly decolonialize our cultural medium.
I agree that if profits are always put about everything else, disaster for any society is essentially guaranteed. (I'll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader)
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.
This is analog to 'ecology without class struggle is gardening'.
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
Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone.
Further reading:
1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.
2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005.
3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013.
5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019.
6) Greer, Tanner. ‘The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite’. The Scholar’s Stage, 21 August 2024. https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-p....
7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782.
8) Lewis, Becca. ‘“Headed for Technofascism”: The Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley’. Technology. The Guardian (London), 29 January 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/j....
9) Bria, Francesca, and José Bautista. ‘The Authoritarian Stack’. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Future of Work, 8 November 2025. https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/.
10) Durand, Cédric, Morozov, Evgeny, and Watkins, Susan. ‘How Big Tech Became Part of the State’. Jacobin, 24 November 2025.
11) Spiers, Elizabeth. ‘The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites’. Elizabeth Spiers, 1 April 2026. https://www.elizabethspiers.com/the-anti-intellectualism-of-....
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 think this article touches upon something quite apparent in this modern age.
Talking to people with different opinions is considered tantamount to joining them. It is much better to point the finger of blame rather than suggest a way forward. The best way to criticise someone's argument is to take their words, explain what they really meant by that in a way that supports your argument, making the counterargument ridiculously easy.
What I don't understand is that how people have come to believe that arguing for the things that corporate interests fought for represents standing against those interests.
The thing that has it in a nutshell was this line
>The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly? This is always the move. The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation.
Cumbersome to everyone without a battery of lawyers. Copyright law has only become more powerful, and the patent process has become more a game of who can spend the most in court on this meritless claim. Disney didn't spend all those lobbying dollars extending copyright out of concern for the welfare of the people. They did it because they wanted to buy and own ideas and keep them for themselves for as long as possible.
I am all for robust well enforced regulation to help and protect people. I thing laws should be in the interest of society and the welfare of everyone more than it should for individuals. I don't think anyone advocating for personal freedoms is necessarily arguing against the interests of the group. There are people out there suggesting ways to correct the system through many many boring but required changes, some of them quite little, some of them large, one of the large ones is getting money out of politics.
I wonder if John Perry Barlow advocated for electoral reform to reign in lobbying? Because it didn't happen, and quite frankly arguing about the world that came to pass without that happening isn't going to represent anyone's plans for the future no matter
So what do we want to build? How should the better world be. Don't frame it as Not that!. Do you want the Revolution and Reign of Terror or the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution?
You can fight to build something better, don't confuse fighting to tear down as the same thing because you are angry and fighting about it makes you feel good about that.
Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government. - John Perry Barlow
What? No mention of Web3?
Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers.
Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?
I feel like using Curtis Yarvin as an argument against tech solutions is like using Terry Davis as an argument against Christianity.
> 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.
The alternative, of course, is that a nanny state + highly regulated tech + inevitable technology leads to exactly the outcomes we have now. I’d prefer something else personally.
What about radical individualism + regulated tech - inevitable technology?
I don't see anything wrong with individuals who by consensus choose to regulate "inevitable" technology. Technology is not a person, and we don't need to make ourselves subservient to it.
I'm thinking of things like liability as a publisher for algorithmic feeds, anti-trust enforcement against companies competing unfairly, mandates for inter-operability to avoid user lock-in, limitations on surveillance capitalism, protections for personal data, maybe also regulating things like advertising, campaigning, fake news, etc.
“Individuals by consensus” feels oxymoronic to me. If that’s a description of the outcome, it’s possible today! Individuals can chose not to use a technology and if enough do so to form a consensus, they may be able to impose constraints on the technology akin to regulation.
However anything else would require coercive power structures which go against the idea of radical individualism.
Big tech is a coercive power. They are cooperating with the government to control the population. Doesn't that worry you? Don't you think there should be limits, beside profitability?
I think of it as flaws in our system that need to be patched. The masses are manipulated by their algorithms. Those who would protest are surveilled by them. The rich seem to be running everything to their advantage. The rugged individualist is running out of space.
> highly regulated tech
If tech were "highly regulated", the largest tech companies wouldn't be constantly promoting scams to me.
It’s possible for something to be both highly regulated and bad. Regulation is not a silver bullet.
Maybe the regulations are there to protect large corporations and the government but not the rest of us?
I hate the way politics is presented as a binary choice between getting controlled by big business or big government (or a combination of the two).
Libertarianism sounded great. Its all about freedom, and the right to do with yourself what you want. And who doesnt want that?
But they also wanted that freedom for their property and money.
And if youre willing to skirt or plainly violate the laws, you can make bank. And then as a company, you can basically bribe politicians and do all these horrible things.
The end result of libertarianism is simple: He who has the gold makes the rule.
Dont like your pay? Fuck you. Quit.
Dont like the conditions? Fuck you. Die.
Dont like political manipulation? Too fucking bad. You have no choice.
Dont like policies at mega-internet corp (meta, alphabet, microsoft)? Too bad, we'll erase you.
Libertarianism creates semi-autonomous enclaves of technofeudalism. And their power is enforced by non-internet mundane government laws, like the DMCA.
You violate a company, and they delete you. You violate government law, and they arrest or kill you. Of course its in line of duty, or defense of officer - all the eupamisms.
But long story short, I do not trust libertarians in any way. They do indeed want freedom to control everyone else.
Is technofeudalism even a thing? Yanis Varoufakis goes on about it (despite being a keen WEF collaborator)... But it seems to me that in mediaeval feudalism that the lords needed the peasants downstream to produce food and military units. In the technocratic system we are heading towards, the lower classes (us) will be needed for labour and military purposes even less, thanks to automation etc. They will have less and less need for our income since they will have automated investments too. The one similarity to feudalism will be an information caste to make sure we tow the line but even that can be automated.
Not an attractive situation but not a very feudal one.
Not for military purposes, but if you're an employee of eg Google, life is pretty good. Free food, spacious offices, great health insurance; all sorts of perks. All at the behest of Lord Sundar.
As someone for whom the Declaration strongly resonated with, and still does, I think this is the crux of how things end(ed) up going sideways:
> Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit seeking business firms. (Winner)
This is a core American delusion that runs much deeper than merely the Web or the Internet. It's even been legally codified in things like Citizens United - a fallacy that large companies are merely groups of individuals. It's basically the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" dynamic applied to activities rather than money.
In reality, large companies are top-down authoritarian structures where most of the individual humans involved have their own individual will suppressed. Rather they are following direction from above, and any individualist choices they are allowed are within that context. If they go against the direction/orders too much, they will simply be replaced with a different more obedient cog (this is something so-called "right libertarianism" directly whitewashes by rejecting analysis of most forms of power dynamics aka coercion).
I do not think it is inconsistent to still believe in those individualist ideas applied to individuals, while also viewing Big Tech - with its many qualities of actually being government - as something whose at-scale "policies" should be subject to democratic accountability. But to do that, meaning to achieve reform without throwing out the whole idea of individual freedom in the online world, requires us to openly reject that corpo fallacy whereby individuals empathize with billion dollar corporations!
But of course from an American perspective this is all kind of moot for the next few years at least as the main support behind the current regime is exactly Big Tech looking to head off any sort of de jure regulation. And so we must not be tempted by their political calls that might claim to address these problems, as this regime's bread and butter is using very real frustrations as the impetus to implement fake solutions that perpetuate the problems while setting themselves up as lucrative speed bumps (eg look at the shakedown currently happening to mere wifi routers).
Which brings us back to why that individualist message is so powerful, despite how it ends up going sideways - because when traditional democratic accountability has been hopelessly neutralized, self-help is the only thing people have left.
The problem with [conservative] libertarians is that they are half anarchists.
They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.
If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.
This is where most people, including the author, present liberalism as the solution. Free market + democratic regulation is a great way to manage an economy; but is it really a good way to manage the rest of society?
The article brings up copyright without exploring the idea at all. I think this is the greatest mistake of all. Copyright is what forces every facet of society to participate in a capitalist market.
Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires. Wouldn't that be nice? Next, we wouldn't be structuring all human interactions with corporate ad platforms. There seems to be a lot of unexplored opportunity there. Even more exciting, moderators would suddenly have all the power that they need to manage the responsibility they are given. No more begging to reddit admins! No more fighting automated censorship! Doesn't that sound good?
It boggles my mind how people from nearly every political perspective have accepted copyright as the one perfect inarguable virtue. Even the cyberlibertarians op argues with are only willing to concede copyright with the promise of a magical free market replacement! Now's as good a time as ever to think about it.
> They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.
Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work. To a right anarchist or libertarian, "Free market absolution" is not an ideology or a goal, it's just the result of private property rights + freedom of association.
Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work. I would assume that left leaning libertarians and social anarchists would also similarly agree that copyright is nonsense but I'm not so sure - the time I spent in those communities have me wondering if they even hate authority and hierarchy, or if they simply desire their own forms of it. Many indeed defend copyright.
> Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work.
The libertarian conception is that groups of people can form hierarchical corporations that compete directly with individuals in the marketplace. The social anarchist conception is usually that people participate in anarchist cooperatives instead. It depends on the anarchist what that means in practice.
> Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work.
Yes, but what they are sorely missing in that argument - in my opinion - is that the problem with copyright is monopoly power; which is also what you get from an unregulated market of corporations. The somewhat regulated market that exists today is obviously dominated by corporations whose anticompetitive participation is predicated on their copyright moats.
> Many [left-leaning libertarians and social anarchists] indeed defend copyright.
Yes, and I'm at least as frustrated about that as with any other political group.
It's incredibly rare to hear copyright's role in our society even described, let alone criticized; even though that role is incredibly significant.
> If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations.
No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.
But "corporation" is an extremely broad term. Mom and pop businesses are corporations. A friend and I own a corporation that makes games, just the two of us, no employees. But Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc. are also corporations. So "corporation" doesn't capture what's bad about the latter.
> The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.
No, that's not correct. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that, first, corporations are not people--they don't have the same rights as people do. They are tools that people can use in a free market to more efficiently produce things and create wealth. But that's all they are. If we had that kind of free market, corporations that are larger than many countries probably wouldn't even exist.
Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market. The original concepts behind those corporations arose in what was more or less a free market--Larry and Sergey didn't need to get anyone's permission to put the original Google on the web, Jobs and Wozniak didn't need to get anyone's permission to build the first Apple computers. But at the scale those corporations are now, they cannot exist without the support and favoritism of governments. (And not just the US government; Apple, for example, would be dead in the water if it did not have the cooperation and support of the Chinese government for its manufacturing base.) And that means they are not products of "libertarian ideals". They might have started out that way, but they didn't, and couldn't, scale that way.
> Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires.
Sure we would. Zuckerberg isn't a billionaire because of copyright. He's a billionaire because he's convinced a substantial fraction of the entire planet that it's perfectly normal, routine, nothing to see here, to have an immensely valuable social networking tool appear by magic on the Internet for free. Same goes for the Google billionaires. Bezos isn't a billionaire because Amazon holds valuable copyrights; he's a billionaire because he sells something valuable, "what I want delivered to my door when I want it" convenience, and he's able to curry government favors so he can bully his supply chain into making that happen. Apple isn't sitting on a huge pile of cash because of copyrights; it's because they make devices that give a significant minority of the market what they want, no fuss, and governments let them manufacture those devices on the cheap while the market they're selling to is upscale.
Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in. But they'd do just as well, if not better, in a world without copyrights, as long as that world still had governments who would give them the favoritism they get now.
Everything that Meta owns is either copyright or hardware that facilitates the ownership of its distribution. They wouldn't have the interest or capital to run giant datacenters without the ability to profit from their "owned" users' data. Facebook and Instagram can only be valued because they are proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright. Even Meta's VR headsets are sold at a loss, with a walled garden app store designed to pay the difference.
> Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in.
Yes, that's the thing I'm arguing against. Would you mind considering it for a moment?
> No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.
That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals. The argument that a corporation should not be treated as an individual is irrelevant, because that is its role in a marketplace. That's who individuals directly compete with!
> Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market.
They are creatures in a market. Whether that market is free does not define them, only their opportunity. I agree that they get the opportunity of government favoritism, and that that is a significant part of the issue. My point is that it is not the root cause of the problem. In a "free market" that incorporates copyright and patents, any corporation who owns IP can leverage it as a moat, enforced by state violence. The fact that any individual can do the same does not change the power imbalance between an individual and a corporation: it increases it.
Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation. Even Amazon's anticompetitive behavior is predicated on their vertical integration of Amazon the delivery/fulfillment service with Amazon the marketplace. The fact that a marketplace can be owned at all is predicated on copyright.