alt Hacker NewsMaybe 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.
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> There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server
Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway.
That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!"
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.