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The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism

102 points by empath75 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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sneakernets 8y ago
The problem with fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. It always fails, it is not sustainable. Too bad its followers never got that memo. I thought the Internet would just make the next attempt that much faster to die out, but apparently I was wrong! In related news, a relative of mine complained that he was receiving fascist posts on Facebook. Thing is, he didn't follow those groups, but one of his friends did, and Facebook's stupid algorithm thought it would share what his friend liked in his news feed, without asking.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. Historically both fascist governments and fascist movements require external attack to collapse - or a succession crisis, which takes a while. And a lot of people can get killed along the way.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    I'd read somewhere that the downfall of fascism is always on the battlefield. Fascism simultaneously requires that a large population believe they are a persecuted group in danger of extinction (else there's no reason to subjugate one's individual will & liberty to a strong leader) and that they are superior to those who oppose them (else their cause is futile and they ought to ally themselves with the superior force). The distortions in reality needed to justify these contradictory beliefs filter up into the leaders' decision-making itself, such that they eventually make stupid decisions like bombing Pearl Harbor or opening a second front in the European war.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    Personally I think it is more 'they ensure they will get attacked and bite off more than they can chew'. Since the fundamentals of totalitarianism just plain aren't sustainable. I mean Hitler's economy was a conquest dependent mess and the Soviet Union ended up collapsing under its own weight. As for ending up attacking each other I think that is a general authoritarian thing with purging to take/secure power - it happens with communism and it happened with monarchies. One interesting outlier along the lines was Fascist Spain. It was caused by a chain of events caused by internal attack of fascists for their own cynical reasons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_Blanco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_...] Combined with a secret liberal king, Juan Carlos and the power was used to restore democracy.
    - agsdfgsd 8y ago
      >I mean Hitler's economy was a conquest dependent mess No it wasn't. The economic recovery occurred way before the war did.
    - andrekandre 8y ago
      soviet collapse was not so simple as just economic “overweightness” as much as gorbachevs “liberalizations” causing the whole thing to spin out of control: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Un...
- hnauz 8y ago
  >I thought the Internet would just make the next attempt that much faster to die out, but apparently I was wrong! That's how politics work, it's a pendulum. It has swung too far to liberalism, we're almost at Weimar republic now. Now it's time for the pendulum to swing back. If anything, the Internet is going to accelerate it.
  - arduanika 8y ago
    Strongly disagree with any theory of history based on analogy to Newtonian mechanics. History simply isn't that predictable. History is stochastic. History only happens once. Read Popper.
    - deleted 8y ago
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- c3534l 8y ago
  Historically, fascism has collapsed because free societies tend to have better economies. Indeed, democracies are very new in the grand scheme of history. The US is going 200 years strong, but slavery was part of that is still younge in the history of civilization.
  - XorNot 8y ago
    It's also worth noting that all of this is a historical anomaly - it's in no way clear that our present technological civilization requires free society to keep the economy going. Which is to say we need to be clear about our objectives: if free society and individual liberty is important to us, those need to be the goals potentially at the expense of short-term economic growth.
    - roenxi 8y ago
      Do you have a source on that? It is easy to underestimate just how _stupidly_ a non-free society can behave. I'm not even talking democracy vs other (there can be non-free democracies, or notionally authoritarian regimes that are quite free in practice), I mean the really basic "if you can work to better yourself, then go for it" style liberty. The system of corporations we have today is a super-civilised way of wresting power and control from existing structures - if you can do something better and cheaper than the company currently in power, you can displace them quickly and with minimum fuss. The core of that mechanism in the west is if you think a companies management are just clueless you can start your own company and compete. That is a big component of what freedom is - if you think you can do it better you can try to do it better. Non-free societies would almost certainly disrupt that mechanism as the first thing they did. Given how complicated a modern economy is, I'm not sure they'd be competitive with a free society. The inefficiencies would build up to spectacular levels.
      - balfirevic 8y ago
        Genuine question - how does China fit into this narrative?
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > The problem with fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. That's also the "endgame" of pure democracy, and of basically every other "pure" form of government. (Classical Western philosophers knew this very well, BTW - they had very detailed models of how these violent crises happen, and how they lead to different forms of government in turn, with their own inbuilt instability.) It's one reason why sustainable government is pretty much always based on a variety of institutions that enable ongoing checks and balances among different organized interests. It's why we have republics, and not pure ("direct") democracies.
  - natmaka 8y ago
    Polybius, 22 centuries ago, already saw at least some of those inbuilt instabilities and a resulting cycle (sequence of anacyclosis) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis IMHO Leopold Kohr enlightened us about all this, "centralized political and economic structures" are the main culprits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy
- _iyig 8y ago
  China seems to be doing fine. Having survived the Culutural Revolution, the Party seems quite wary of the failure mode you describe.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Unfettered education (non-proscribed and auto-didactic forms in particular) has always been a threat to authorities. And, as always, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And, as Engelbart predicted, it has created a race. Lets take a look on online content, and we see that - because of vested interests - there's very little in-depth content available (at any price) and plenty of superficial content to foster the dangerous. (What's there has largely not been a concern of SV.) Television (and FM radio before it, as the creators of both complained) played a similar role (with better control-rods) before the net. Pouring out thoughtless sludge creates the expected result.
- blitmap 8y ago
  It's been a lot of fun for me to think about how knowledge can be conveyed 'superficially'. Make it cute, make it pretty, make it gamified. I love Wikipedia and I know many others get lost in that article forest too, but I've been trying to learn how to illustrate my understanding of something in a way that is easy to consume by others. This has led me from low-level systems programming to web development and using frameworks like d3 to create animations of what I'm describing. I think we'll counter authoritarianism on 2 fronts: 1) Make more information freely accessible. 2) Take existing, accessible information and convey it in a friendly way for the masses.
  - Klover 8y ago
    Can you show what you’ve made so far? I’d love to see it.
- ggm 8y ago
  Unfettered education (non-proscribed and auto-didactic forms in particular) has always been a threat to authorities. Yeeeesss but, and it's a huge but, auto-didacticism in particular has huge risks. Misapprehension of core knowledge self acquired is remarkably hard to shift. Hence, huge numbers of ant vaxx, anti agw and like movements with self sustaining belief about science data and it's interpretation. Monkton is a prime example. Tries to claim authority vested in his own interpretation of the science inputs. I guess I'm agreeing.
opwieurposiu 8y ago
Author proposes the solution to authoritarianism is more laws and more government intervention. That's not the solution, that's the definition!
- sayno3 8y ago
  Anarchistic unrestricted capitalism will just pool the resources to one person/group until they can do whatever they want anyway. And there won't be anything to stop them. We just need enough laws to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power.
  - yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
    We also need to make sure tens of millions of people don’t die this time around.
    - sayno3 8y ago
      I assume you are referring to communism implemented by the Soviet Union or something along those lines. That was still central control of resources and power. The only thing that was communistic about that was how it was applied to the lowest rungs of society.
- karmasimida 8y ago
  That is the problem, what author thinks as ways to freedom, would probably viewed as means of slavery by the people on the other end of the spectrum. That is why while I am interested to read such article, it will never work: the author is talking to him/herself, while instead he/she supposedly should talk to people who disagree with him/her in the first place.
- danans 8y ago
  > That's not the solution, that's the definition! A legislature passing laws is not authoritarianism, but is instead the normal functioning of a legislature in a representative democracy, whether or not one agrees with the laws themselves. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism "1. Limited political pluralism, that is such regimes place constraints on political institutions and groups like legislatures, political parties and interest groups" Authoritarianism is, among other things, about the head of government constraining the legislature from performing oversight of the head of government. It's about the head of government being effectively above the law, either by the law itself being changed to codify that, or by the non enforcement of laws against the head of government when they break them.
norswap 8y ago
Maybe. What isn't seen isn't taken into account: what would have happened if the internet hadn't been. Maybe things could have happened that didn't. It's hard to tell, but it's quite possible.
malvosenior 8y ago
I think this author has a really odd definition of authoritarianism. People who you don't agree with politically being allowed to have a voice isn't authoritarianism, quite the opposite actually. They spend a lot of time focusing on Richard Spencer which is really strange because there's always been fringe white supremacists out there and I don't see how the internet has made Spencer any more relevant than the Nazis Geraldo used to have on his show in the 80s.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  The internet has allowed him and his ilk a bigger voice, platforms to more efficiently spread their ideology and organize. In the past, neonazis and fascists had to lay low and work in the shadows. But the internet has a hell of a lot of shadows, and they're all accessible from everywhere. They are also getting better at hiding their true intent behind "identity" and "heritage" and other "soft" forms of their ideologies. That is precisely why fascism is now a real actual threat to millions of people, and the reason why we must never let down our guard, we have to root them out and expose them for what they are.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    > The internet has allowed him and his ilk a bigger voice, platforms to more efficiently spread their ideology and organize. And that's parent commenter's point: for all the "efficiency" of modern social media, these groups are still as fringe as they always were. And "identity and heritage" were always a part of the appeal too, so there's nothing new in that either - but let's not pretend that there aren't plenty of genuinely "softer" ideologies that appeal to the exact same things.
  - agsdfgsd 8y ago
    >The internet has allowed him and his ilk a bigger voice, platforms to more efficiently spread their ideology and organize. But again, that's not authoritarianism. Quite the contrary, the left demanding that people like him not be allowed to speak, and in many cases demanding he be attacked or even killed, that is authoritarian.
cheezymoogle 8y ago
I wrote a response to this article that ended up being way too long: http://txti.es/technorealism http://txti.es/technorealism tl;dr: Like every other long-term and protracted crisis, people predicted it was going to happen, but everyone acts surprised when it actually does.
- ndiscussion 8y ago
  Thanks, I really appreciated this.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  That seems worthy of posting as its own article.
outoftheabyss 8y ago
The solution to this 'authoritarianism' then is banning opinions the author disagrees with (Milo, Trump etc). Bravo
stcredzero 8y ago
One of the deepest ironies of our current situation is that the modes of communication that enable today’s authoritarians were first dreamed up to defeat them If you want to find corruption, then "Follow the money." If you want to find authoritarians, you can follow the flow of fundamental things in much the same way: - Who is doing the silencing? - Who is engaging in coercion? - Who wishes for the power to coerce? - Who is using violence? - Who is distorts the truth to push agendas? - Who eschews the universal for the momentarily convenient? The answer nowadays is the same answer as in other times and places: angry, toxic parties who tend towards the far ends of the political spectrum, both left and right. It's the fringes that want discourse to end and take normal people for an excursion into chaos. It's the fringes that want to roll the dice for their chance at power. The best thing to do is to let people have their voice. There's no authoritarian nonsense, no matter how virulent, which lasts forever and is immune to general good sense. It might take awhile, but people eventually come around. A note of caution: there are a lot of villains who thought they were on the side of good, who turned out to be the opposite. When you've given up on convincing, and you're starting to shout, to hate, and to want to coerce people, you're probably on the wrong side of history.
- empath75 8y ago
  > There's no authoritarian nonsense, no matter how virulent, which lasts forever and is immune to general good sense. Hitler was only in power for a decade or so and did a lot of damage to say the least.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    wades in When Hitler battled to power the Weimar Republic was experiencing hyperinflation and the economy had just shut down. I don't think Hitler's ideology was the biggest problem the Germans were facing. As the communist regimes like China and the Soviets demonstrated again after the war, a mismanaged economy is literally worse than Hitler for the people involved. So I'll admit the situation is too complicated for me to really say this honestly, but the real issue the Germans faced was that they had lost WWI and a bunch of foreign powers were extracting large amounts of wealth from them. They eventually snapped and responded with violence. The fact that the focus when they snapped was Nazi ideology was unfortunate, but the problem wasn't the ideology - it was that foreigners were taking their wealth and the government failed to keep people fed, sheltered and employed.
Animats 8y ago
Something's missing here. Computers have conquered scale. Before cheap computing and networking, large companies had trouble getting out of their own way. There were inefficiencies in companies that got too big. Most of those problems seem to have been solved, and the intrinsic limits to corporate growth have been removed. So now the US has three big banks. Three big drugstore chains. Three big delivery services. Three big cell phone companies, if Sprint and T-Mobile get to merge. Big companies don't have to have regional subsidiaries any more. In the Bell System days, AT&T had about ten regional operating companies, each with somewhat independent management. Today, they don't bother. Amazon is run as one big company. In the US, government hasn't really gotten into this in a big way. Too many governmental units with their own local authority. China, though, or the UK, where the central government has total authority... (This is not about Trump. He's an old guy who does things the 20th century way - broadcasting to large numbers of people and hands-on project management. When we get someone who's similarly authoritarian but understands modern scaling technology, we'll have a real problem. Peter Thiel, maybe.)
- uabstraction 8y ago
  > Big companies don't have to have regional subsidiaries any more. [...] In the US, government hasn't really gotten into this in a big way. It is a mistake to assume that the solution which works in industry is equally applicable in government. Businesses and governments are very different institutions. They have different missions, different stakeholders, different legal obligations, and different responsibilities. Surely, things would be more efficient if we just had one large uniform, monolithic state institution, but a (small R) republican state cannot exist without extensive delegation. It is only though the process of delegating power to states, counties and municipalities, that we can even attempt to execute the will of the people. This all comes with tons of redundant infrastructure - thousands of city councils, mayors, police departments, courts, and school systems. 50 governors, 50 state cabinets, 50 independent boards of elections, 50 different state legislatures - but each community has its own needs and its own ambitions, and nobody knows those needs better than the community itself.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
LolNoGenerics 8y ago
The overlays totally ruin this site. Help!
mikedilger 8y ago
This article is mostly political, and not very technical. I don't think it is appropriate on HN. But as that is not my call... The Data & Society report by Rebecca Lewis (quoted in this article as a source) is very poorly done. It brands people who are clearly on the left as "alt-right" because they have either once spoken to an alt-right person, or even (in one case) simply been at the same event (not an alt-right event) with an alt-right person (Tim Pool, evidence in his YouTube videos on the subject). I'm defending the 4/5 people who have been labelled "alt-right" by groups like Data & Society and by articles like this one, who believe in equal opportunity, legal immigration, individualism, and principles of the enlightenment. Most of them are progressives and several of them are jews. Lumping them in with "fascists," "racists", "nazis", or people who yelled "Jews will not replace us!" is factually wrong, morally wrong, and has done real-world damage to them. This includes people such as Jordan Peterson, Tim Pool, Eric Weinstein, Dave Rubin, James Damore, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and yes even Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad). I am NOT defending Richard Spencer, Stephan Molyneux or Milo Yiannopoulos. I've listened to them, I disagree with them, and I think "alt-right" is an appropriate for them. There seems to be a mass delusion going on here. Folks on the left talk about the boogy-man "alt-right" and label people at whim, and then everyone is scared to actually go and fact-check lest they be discovered watching "alt-right" material. The predictable result? The set of people labelled "alt-right" just gets bigger and bigger.
- someguydave 8y ago
  I appreciate the courage it took to write this comment on HN.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  All of the people you mentioned are working to further fascism and inflame hatred and division. Don't just believe what they say, do some actual digging. Contrary to what you believe, we lefties do actually fact check, and it's not looking good for Jordan P. et al.
  - brynjar 8y ago
    ‘working to further fascism’ Examples please!
gdubs 8y ago
It’s almost like a bunch of people in the 60s dropped acid and decided it’d be a great idea to connect every person on the planet to every other person on the plant. Oh wait... Kidding aside, this brings back memories of Clifford Stoll’s book, “Silicon Snake Oil.” I’d love to read it again. I know, he’s been panned for making really wrong predictions (“no one’s gonna use a credit card over the internet”), but I’d love to read it again standing on the other side of the internet experiment. I feel like for all the stuff he got wrong, he got a lot right when it comes to there being more to being human than the internet has ever been able to deliver.
- fluxty 8y ago
  Clifford Stoll, I suppose, had a certain amount of skepticism, seeing as he was the person to help track down and prosecute the first recorded case of computer hacking. A large part of the Cuckoo's Egg was about how there simply weren't systems for dealing with hacking--he'd go to the police, and they'd be like, "Cool..." and do nothing.
- hnuser355 8y ago
  Hmm, I read a book a few months ago where the author spent a lot of time discussing the intellectual background for Silicon Valley and why he thought these guys ruined journalism and probably lot of other stuff. It was called “World Without Mind” I believe.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    Personally I feel "journalism" (read: media companies) ruined itself by going for profit at the expense of fundamentals - a recipe for downfall in any business. Now it is now shooting the messenger. Just like the corrupt blaming destruction of trust on the whistleblowers instead of their misdeeds. Actual journalism is doing better than ever - just look at the state of the art of fact checking and detailed refutations of the tripe published in comments.
throw-far-away 8y ago
Inverted totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism There is a rise, among both neoconservatives and neoliberals, to eschew due-process as "a waste of time," "unnecessary" or "the correct opinion is already known;" which results in a brutal door-slamming and a fundamental lack of democratic principles, resulting a popular pattern of illiberal treatment of one-another and reinforced divisions between people.

102 points by empath75 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

The problem with fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. It always fails, it is not sustainable. Too bad its followers never got that memo. I thought the Internet would just make the next attempt that much faster to die out, but apparently I was wrong! In related news, a relative of mine complained that he was receiving fascist posts on Facebook. Thing is, he didn't follow those groups, but one of his friends did, and Facebook's stupid algorithm thought it would share what his friend liked in his news feed, without asking.

pjc50 8y ago
> fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. Historically both fascist governments and fascist movements require external attack to collapse - or a succession crisis, which takes a while. And a lot of people can get killed along the way.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  I'd read somewhere that the downfall of fascism is always on the battlefield. Fascism simultaneously requires that a large population believe they are a persecuted group in danger of extinction (else there's no reason to subjugate one's individual will & liberty to a strong leader) and that they are superior to those who oppose them (else their cause is futile and they ought to ally themselves with the superior force). The distortions in reality needed to justify these contradictory beliefs filter up into the leaders' decision-making itself, such that they eventually make stupid decisions like bombing Pearl Harbor or opening a second front in the European war.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Personally I think it is more 'they ensure they will get attacked and bite off more than they can chew'. Since the fundamentals of totalitarianism just plain aren't sustainable. I mean Hitler's economy was a conquest dependent mess and the Soviet Union ended up collapsing under its own weight. As for ending up attacking each other I think that is a general authoritarian thing with purging to take/secure power - it happens with communism and it happened with monarchies. One interesting outlier along the lines was Fascist Spain. It was caused by a chain of events caused by internal attack of fascists for their own cynical reasons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_Blanco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Luis_Carrero_...] Combined with a secret liberal king, Juan Carlos and the power was used to restore democracy.
  - agsdfgsd 8y ago
    >I mean Hitler's economy was a conquest dependent mess No it wasn't. The economic recovery occurred way before the war did.
  - andrekandre 8y ago
    soviet collapse was not so simple as just economic “overweightness” as much as gorbachevs “liberalizations” causing the whole thing to spin out of control: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Un...
hnauz 8y ago
>I thought the Internet would just make the next attempt that much faster to die out, but apparently I was wrong! That's how politics work, it's a pendulum. It has swung too far to liberalism, we're almost at Weimar republic now. Now it's time for the pendulum to swing back. If anything, the Internet is going to accelerate it.
- arduanika 8y ago
  Strongly disagree with any theory of history based on analogy to Newtonian mechanics. History simply isn't that predictable. History is stochastic. History only happens once. Read Popper.
  - deleted 8y ago
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deleted 8y ago
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c3534l 8y ago
Historically, fascism has collapsed because free societies tend to have better economies. Indeed, democracies are very new in the grand scheme of history. The US is going 200 years strong, but slavery was part of that is still younge in the history of civilization.
- XorNot 8y ago
  It's also worth noting that all of this is a historical anomaly - it's in no way clear that our present technological civilization requires free society to keep the economy going. Which is to say we need to be clear about our objectives: if free society and individual liberty is important to us, those need to be the goals potentially at the expense of short-term economic growth.
  - roenxi 8y ago
    Do you have a source on that? It is easy to underestimate just how _stupidly_ a non-free society can behave. I'm not even talking democracy vs other (there can be non-free democracies, or notionally authoritarian regimes that are quite free in practice), I mean the really basic "if you can work to better yourself, then go for it" style liberty. The system of corporations we have today is a super-civilised way of wresting power and control from existing structures - if you can do something better and cheaper than the company currently in power, you can displace them quickly and with minimum fuss. The core of that mechanism in the west is if you think a companies management are just clueless you can start your own company and compete. That is a big component of what freedom is - if you think you can do it better you can try to do it better. Non-free societies would almost certainly disrupt that mechanism as the first thing they did. Given how complicated a modern economy is, I'm not sure they'd be competitive with a free society. The inefficiencies would build up to spectacular levels.
    - balfirevic 8y ago
      Genuine question - how does China fit into this narrative?
zozbot123 8y ago
> The problem with fascism is that its endgame always ends up with its adherents attacking each other. That's also the "endgame" of pure democracy, and of basically every other "pure" form of government. (Classical Western philosophers knew this very well, BTW - they had very detailed models of how these violent crises happen, and how they lead to different forms of government in turn, with their own inbuilt instability.) It's one reason why sustainable government is pretty much always based on a variety of institutions that enable ongoing checks and balances among different organized interests. It's why we have republics, and not pure ("direct") democracies.
- natmaka 8y ago
  Polybius, 22 centuries ago, already saw at least some of those inbuilt instabilities and a resulting cycle (sequence of anacyclosis) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis IMHO Leopold Kohr enlightened us about all this, "centralized political and economic structures" are the main culprits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy
_iyig 8y ago
China seems to be doing fine. Having survived the Culutural Revolution, the Party seems quite wary of the failure mode you describe.

8bitsrule 8y ago

Unfettered education (non-proscribed and auto-didactic forms in particular) has always been a threat to authorities. And, as always, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And, as Engelbart predicted, it has created a race. Lets take a look on online content, and we see that - because of vested interests - there's very little in-depth content available (at any price) and plenty of superficial content to foster the dangerous. (What's there has largely not been a concern of SV.) Television (and FM radio before it, as the creators of both complained) played a similar role (with better control-rods) before the net. Pouring out thoughtless sludge creates the expected result.

blitmap 8y ago
It's been a lot of fun for me to think about how knowledge can be conveyed 'superficially'. Make it cute, make it pretty, make it gamified. I love Wikipedia and I know many others get lost in that article forest too, but I've been trying to learn how to illustrate my understanding of something in a way that is easy to consume by others. This has led me from low-level systems programming to web development and using frameworks like d3 to create animations of what I'm describing. I think we'll counter authoritarianism on 2 fronts: 1) Make more information freely accessible. 2) Take existing, accessible information and convey it in a friendly way for the masses.
- Klover 8y ago
  Can you show what you’ve made so far? I’d love to see it.
ggm 8y ago
Unfettered education (non-proscribed and auto-didactic forms in particular) has always been a threat to authorities. Yeeeesss but, and it's a huge but, auto-didacticism in particular has huge risks. Misapprehension of core knowledge self acquired is remarkably hard to shift. Hence, huge numbers of ant vaxx, anti agw and like movements with self sustaining belief about science data and it's interpretation. Monkton is a prime example. Tries to claim authority vested in his own interpretation of the science inputs. I guess I'm agreeing.

opwieurposiu 8y ago

Author proposes the solution to authoritarianism is more laws and more government intervention. That's not the solution, that's the definition!

sayno3 8y ago
Anarchistic unrestricted capitalism will just pool the resources to one person/group until they can do whatever they want anyway. And there won't be anything to stop them. We just need enough laws to prevent the accumulation of wealth and power.
- yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
  We also need to make sure tens of millions of people don’t die this time around.
  - sayno3 8y ago
    I assume you are referring to communism implemented by the Soviet Union or something along those lines. That was still central control of resources and power. The only thing that was communistic about that was how it was applied to the lowest rungs of society.
karmasimida 8y ago
That is the problem, what author thinks as ways to freedom, would probably viewed as means of slavery by the people on the other end of the spectrum. That is why while I am interested to read such article, it will never work: the author is talking to him/herself, while instead he/she supposedly should talk to people who disagree with him/her in the first place.
danans 8y ago
> That's not the solution, that's the definition! A legislature passing laws is not authoritarianism, but is instead the normal functioning of a legislature in a representative democracy, whether or not one agrees with the laws themselves. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism "1. Limited political pluralism, that is such regimes place constraints on political institutions and groups like legislatures, political parties and interest groups" Authoritarianism is, among other things, about the head of government constraining the legislature from performing oversight of the head of government. It's about the head of government being effectively above the law, either by the law itself being changed to codify that, or by the non enforcement of laws against the head of government when they break them.

norswap 8y ago

Maybe. What isn't seen isn't taken into account: what would have happened if the internet hadn't been. Maybe things could have happened that didn't. It's hard to tell, but it's quite possible.

malvosenior 8y ago

I think this author has a really odd definition of authoritarianism. People who you don't agree with politically being allowed to have a voice isn't authoritarianism, quite the opposite actually. They spend a lot of time focusing on Richard Spencer which is really strange because there's always been fringe white supremacists out there and I don't see how the internet has made Spencer any more relevant than the Nazis Geraldo used to have on his show in the 80s.

KozmoNau7 8y ago
The internet has allowed him and his ilk a bigger voice, platforms to more efficiently spread their ideology and organize. In the past, neonazis and fascists had to lay low and work in the shadows. But the internet has a hell of a lot of shadows, and they're all accessible from everywhere. They are also getting better at hiding their true intent behind "identity" and "heritage" and other "soft" forms of their ideologies. That is precisely why fascism is now a real actual threat to millions of people, and the reason why we must never let down our guard, we have to root them out and expose them for what they are.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  > The internet has allowed him and his ilk a bigger voice, platforms to more efficiently spread their ideology and organize. And that's parent commenter's point: for all the "efficiency" of modern social media, these groups are still as fringe as they always were. And "identity and heritage" were always a part of the appeal too, so there's nothing new in that either - but let's not pretend that there aren't plenty of genuinely "softer" ideologies that appeal to the exact same things.
- agsdfgsd 8y ago
  >The internet has allowed him and his ilk a bigger voice, platforms to more efficiently spread their ideology and organize. But again, that's not authoritarianism. Quite the contrary, the left demanding that people like him not be allowed to speak, and in many cases demanding he be attacked or even killed, that is authoritarian.

cheezymoogle 8y ago

I wrote a response to this article that ended up being way too long: http://txti.es/technorealism http://txti.es/technorealism tl;dr: Like every other long-term and protracted crisis, people predicted it was going to happen, but everyone acts surprised when it actually does.

ndiscussion 8y ago
Thanks, I really appreciated this.
Nasrudith 8y ago
That seems worthy of posting as its own article.

outoftheabyss 8y ago

The solution to this 'authoritarianism' then is banning opinions the author disagrees with (Milo, Trump etc). Bravo

stcredzero 8y ago

One of the deepest ironies of our current situation is that the modes of communication that enable today’s authoritarians were first dreamed up to defeat them If you want to find corruption, then "Follow the money." If you want to find authoritarians, you can follow the flow of fundamental things in much the same way: - Who is doing the silencing? - Who is engaging in coercion? - Who wishes for the power to coerce? - Who is using violence? - Who is distorts the truth to push agendas? - Who eschews the universal for the momentarily convenient? The answer nowadays is the same answer as in other times and places: angry, toxic parties who tend towards the far ends of the political spectrum, both left and right. It's the fringes that want discourse to end and take normal people for an excursion into chaos. It's the fringes that want to roll the dice for their chance at power. The best thing to do is to let people have their voice. There's no authoritarian nonsense, no matter how virulent, which lasts forever and is immune to general good sense. It might take awhile, but people eventually come around. A note of caution: there are a lot of villains who thought they were on the side of good, who turned out to be the opposite. When you've given up on convincing, and you're starting to shout, to hate, and to want to coerce people, you're probably on the wrong side of history.

empath75 8y ago
> There's no authoritarian nonsense, no matter how virulent, which lasts forever and is immune to general good sense. Hitler was only in power for a decade or so and did a lot of damage to say the least.
- roenxi 8y ago
  wades in When Hitler battled to power the Weimar Republic was experiencing hyperinflation and the economy had just shut down. I don't think Hitler's ideology was the biggest problem the Germans were facing. As the communist regimes like China and the Soviets demonstrated again after the war, a mismanaged economy is literally worse than Hitler for the people involved. So I'll admit the situation is too complicated for me to really say this honestly, but the real issue the Germans faced was that they had lost WWI and a bunch of foreign powers were extracting large amounts of wealth from them. They eventually snapped and responded with violence. The fact that the focus when they snapped was Nazi ideology was unfortunate, but the problem wasn't the ideology - it was that foreigners were taking their wealth and the government failed to keep people fed, sheltered and employed.

Animats 8y ago

Something's missing here. Computers have conquered scale. Before cheap computing and networking, large companies had trouble getting out of their own way. There were inefficiencies in companies that got too big. Most of those problems seem to have been solved, and the intrinsic limits to corporate growth have been removed. So now the US has three big banks. Three big drugstore chains. Three big delivery services. Three big cell phone companies, if Sprint and T-Mobile get to merge. Big companies don't have to have regional subsidiaries any more. In the Bell System days, AT&T had about ten regional operating companies, each with somewhat independent management. Today, they don't bother. Amazon is run as one big company. In the US, government hasn't really gotten into this in a big way. Too many governmental units with their own local authority. China, though, or the UK, where the central government has total authority... (This is not about Trump. He's an old guy who does things the 20th century way - broadcasting to large numbers of people and hands-on project management. When we get someone who's similarly authoritarian but understands modern scaling technology, we'll have a real problem. Peter Thiel, maybe.)

uabstraction 8y ago
> Big companies don't have to have regional subsidiaries any more. [...] In the US, government hasn't really gotten into this in a big way. It is a mistake to assume that the solution which works in industry is equally applicable in government. Businesses and governments are very different institutions. They have different missions, different stakeholders, different legal obligations, and different responsibilities. Surely, things would be more efficient if we just had one large uniform, monolithic state institution, but a (small R) republican state cannot exist without extensive delegation. It is only though the process of delegating power to states, counties and municipalities, that we can even attempt to execute the will of the people. This all comes with tons of redundant infrastructure - thousands of city councils, mayors, police departments, courts, and school systems. 50 governors, 50 state cabinets, 50 independent boards of elections, 50 different state legislatures - but each community has its own needs and its own ambitions, and nobody knows those needs better than the community itself.
- Nasrudith 8y ago

LolNoGenerics 8y ago

The overlays totally ruin this site. Help!

mikedilger 8y ago

This article is mostly political, and not very technical. I don't think it is appropriate on HN. But as that is not my call... The Data & Society report by Rebecca Lewis (quoted in this article as a source) is very poorly done. It brands people who are clearly on the left as "alt-right" because they have either once spoken to an alt-right person, or even (in one case) simply been at the same event (not an alt-right event) with an alt-right person (Tim Pool, evidence in his YouTube videos on the subject). I'm defending the 4/5 people who have been labelled "alt-right" by groups like Data & Society and by articles like this one, who believe in equal opportunity, legal immigration, individualism, and principles of the enlightenment. Most of them are progressives and several of them are jews. Lumping them in with "fascists," "racists", "nazis", or people who yelled "Jews will not replace us!" is factually wrong, morally wrong, and has done real-world damage to them. This includes people such as Jordan Peterson, Tim Pool, Eric Weinstein, Dave Rubin, James Damore, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and yes even Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad). I am NOT defending Richard Spencer, Stephan Molyneux or Milo Yiannopoulos. I've listened to them, I disagree with them, and I think "alt-right" is an appropriate for them. There seems to be a mass delusion going on here. Folks on the left talk about the boogy-man "alt-right" and label people at whim, and then everyone is scared to actually go and fact-check lest they be discovered watching "alt-right" material. The predictable result? The set of people labelled "alt-right" just gets bigger and bigger.

someguydave 8y ago
I appreciate the courage it took to write this comment on HN.
KozmoNau7 8y ago
All of the people you mentioned are working to further fascism and inflame hatred and division. Don't just believe what they say, do some actual digging. Contrary to what you believe, we lefties do actually fact check, and it's not looking good for Jordan P. et al.
- brynjar 8y ago
  ‘working to further fascism’ Examples please!

gdubs 8y ago

It’s almost like a bunch of people in the 60s dropped acid and decided it’d be a great idea to connect every person on the planet to every other person on the plant. Oh wait... Kidding aside, this brings back memories of Clifford Stoll’s book, “Silicon Snake Oil.” I’d love to read it again. I know, he’s been panned for making really wrong predictions (“no one’s gonna use a credit card over the internet”), but I’d love to read it again standing on the other side of the internet experiment. I feel like for all the stuff he got wrong, he got a lot right when it comes to there being more to being human than the internet has ever been able to deliver.

fluxty 8y ago
Clifford Stoll, I suppose, had a certain amount of skepticism, seeing as he was the person to help track down and prosecute the first recorded case of computer hacking. A large part of the Cuckoo's Egg was about how there simply weren't systems for dealing with hacking--he'd go to the police, and they'd be like, "Cool..." and do nothing.
hnuser355 8y ago
Hmm, I read a book a few months ago where the author spent a lot of time discussing the intellectual background for Silicon Valley and why he thought these guys ruined journalism and probably lot of other stuff. It was called “World Without Mind” I believe.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Personally I feel "journalism" (read: media companies) ruined itself by going for profit at the expense of fundamentals - a recipe for downfall in any business. Now it is now shooting the messenger. Just like the corrupt blaming destruction of trust on the whistleblowers instead of their misdeeds. Actual journalism is doing better than ever - just look at the state of the art of fact checking and detailed refutations of the tripe published in comments.

throw-far-away 8y ago

Inverted totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism There is a rise, among both neoconservatives and neoliberals, to eschew due-process as "a waste of time," "unnecessary" or "the correct opinion is already known;" which results in a brutal door-slamming and a fundamental lack of democratic principles, resulting a popular pattern of illiberal treatment of one-another and reinforced divisions between people.