14 ms·

The Rising Threat of Digital Nationalism

181 points by chuhnk 7y ago

markus_zhang 7y ago
Extreme Nationalism was and is the symptom of the time. Plus Nationalism is perfectly normal as long as it doesn't go extreme.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Patriotism is perfectly normal, nationalism is not. You could argue that nationalism is an extreme version of patriotism, being that it takes a love and faith for one's country and uses it at the expense of others.
- incompatible 7y ago
  When you look at human history, I don't think that there's anything particularly bad about the present. You could even argue that times have rarely been better, as far as the historical record goes.
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    I don't compare with (our stories of) the past, I compare with the faint inkling I have of what ought to be, the injustice and squandered potential I see right now. Furthermore there is the road we're on and the cliff it ends at: the concentration of wealth doesn't let up, the ability to think and even feel seems to drastically decline before our eyes, the research for control and destruction of humans goes on, and all of that can come home to roost in a very short amount of time. I think it's a bit like sitting on the Titanic and saying "the nice meal and the music we enjoy now is so much better than when we stood at the harbour in pouring rain, before we boarded this ship". edit: Heh, I guess some people thing pretending that isn't so will get them a seat at the table. There won't even be a table. > The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble. -- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" > Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" > If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. -- Stephen Hawking
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Nationalism isn't normal, countries are a completely artificial construct. But it serves well as a way to get people to assign all kinds of emotions, positive ones to their flag and negative to everybody else's.
  - maps 7y ago
    > Nationalism isn't normal, countries are a completely artificial construct. Compared to what? Being a primitive mammal? Sure you could claim that the 'nation' didn't exist long enough to support this but devotion to a local city or tribe feels the same to me.
    - nostrademons 7y ago
      If devotion to a local city or tribe is the same, then why is the Federal government at loggerheads with California over environmental regulations and immigration, and California is at loggerheads with SF over zoning policy and homelessness?
      - shantly 7y ago
        It does not follow from the assertion that devotion to a political unit of any size is a similar mindset or activity, that devotion to any one such thing means precisely identical devotion to all parts of whatever political hierarchy it may be a part of. Your objection doesn't make sense.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Many things we hold very dear are artificial/somewhat arbitrary - that doesn't make them less valuable.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    It also allows a group of people to choose, to some degree, to live life in a certain way. Thinking negatively of other countries is not necessary, but if you personally choose to be my guest.
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  Having read Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism” essays literally yesterday, his voice is quite forcefully poking my brain as I read your comment. Orwell agreed that Nationalistic thinking was almost totally widespread through different peoples and times, but you appear to be saying that a “normal” amount is Ok which he would have fought passionately. Orwell wanted us to contend with the Nationalist inside us, and push them out. Just as we wouldn’t accept a “perfectly normal” amount of racism, don’t accept Nationalist feeling as in any way healthy.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    Racism and nationalism seem extremely dissimilar to me.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      They both boil down to “my tribe is better than yours”.
      - mistermann 7y ago
        For you perhaps, not for me. Are we just making up meanings for words on the fly now? It would be rather ironic if I was being downvoted for a lack of hate.
        Spooky23 7y ago
        More lack of understanding I would guess. I upvoted your comment as it’s important to understand. Racism and nationalism aren’t about hate. They are about pride and superiority. Nationalism is often confused or manipulated as patriotism. Racism is often confused or manipulated as pride in culture or the past. The feeling of superiority enables other behaviors — people feel justified to take negative actions against other humans because they are lesser than them on some axis. These aren’t made up meanings.
        mistermann 7y ago
- squarefoot 7y ago
  There's no such thing as normal nationalism, as nationalism is a form of extremism by itself, more accurately what the perfectly natural love everyone of us feels for his/hers own country becomes once filtered and distorted by propaganda with the purpose of making people do nasty things under the belief they're necessary for a bigger good. Try this test with some of the less extreme nationalists you know: show them a photo of planet Earth taken from space and tell them "this is my homeland. I love it and you should too", then watch their reaction. Some of them may agree, but most won't. The point is that planet Earth does indeed contain their entire homeland, but includes other countries too, which is what many people don't accept. This plain stupid test demonstrates how nationalism isn't about loving one's country rather than not loving other people ones.
  - naxerda876 7y ago
    >this is my homeland Only an imperialist with global ambitions would claim the entire planet as his homeland. >includes other countries too, which is what many people don't accept You seem to be the one who cant accept that there are other countries that are not for you. Nationalists understand this quite well actually >nationalism isn't about loving one's country rather than not loving other people ones Wanting your nation to be sovereign and free of foreign influence is not the same thing as hating other countries like you insinuate. Was Gandhi evil because he was a nationalist? Was Nelsen Mandela? Was Crazy Horse?
  - mistermann 7y ago
    > nationalism is a form of extremism by itself This doesn't make sense to me. Would a desire to paint my own house rather than my neighbor's be a form of extremism, or are you thinking about it on some other way than this? > more accurately what the perfectly natural love everyone of us feels for his/hers own country becomes once filtered and distorted by propaganda with the purpose of making people do nasty things under the belief they're necessary for a bigger good I accept that this is possible and has historical precedent, but I challenge you to produce any convincing evidence this is always the case. > Try this test with some of the less extreme nationalists you know: show them a photo of planet Earth taken from space and tell them "this is my homeland. I love it and you should too", then watch their reaction. Some of them may agree, but most won't. The point is that planet Earth does indeed contain their entire homeland, but includes other countries too, which is what many people don't accept. Have you literally done this, and literally observed that most people don't love planet Earth? I would pay money to see a performance like that in real life, it sounds utterly bizarre and fantastical. > This plain stupid test demonstrates how nationalism isn't about loving one's country rather than not loving other people ones. Even if you actually have conducted this test, saying this demonstrates your point is a stretch. I can easily think of a reason I would have a negative reaction to such a "test", my strong dislike for globalism advocates with their poorly thought out reasons for demanding I behave in a certain way - if I got an intuitive feel that this is what your game was, you would likely get an intuitive feel that I was displeased, but be careful what you attribute that feeling to. I would actually consider this a reasonably good example of a poorly thought out idea that I find annoying.
neiman 7y ago
digital totalitarianism, digital surveillance state and now digital nationalism. I think I found the joker word of 2019.
chatmasta 7y ago
I thought this was going to be an article about people who feel more attached to their digital communities than their geographical communities. That would be an interesting avenue to explore.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  as did i; my favorite on the subject is this one: https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society > As ever more opt out, the larger culture is damaged.7 The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground—our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution! > With enough of these gaps, where is ‘American’ or ‘French’ culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce—France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives. > The national identity fragments under the assault of burgeoning subcultures. At last, the critic beholds the natural endpoint of this process: the nation is some lines on a map, some laws you follow. No one particularly cares about it. The geek thinks, ‘Meh: here, Canada, London, Japan, Singapore—as long as FedEx can reach me and there’s a good Internet connection, what’s the difference?’ (Nor are the technically-inclined alone in this.8)
  - opportune 7y ago
    Subculture is not the same as opting out, though. Nor is there a dichotomy of being either a member of a subculture vs society at large. There are American otaku geeks who are nationalistic christians. I mean, that is a lot of what 4chan is these days. >You can test this yourself. Tell yourself —‘The country I live in now is the best country in the world for people like me; I would be terribly unhappy if I was exiled.’ If your mental reply goes something like, ‘Why, what’s so special about the USA? It’s not particularly economically or politically free, it’s not the only civilized English-speaking country, it’s not the wealthiest9…’, then you are headed down the path of opting out. This is just wrong. There are plenty of well adjusted people who aren't nationalists.
paulddraper 7y ago
> As the internet turns 50, the global vision that animated it is under attack. The vision in 2019-50=1969 was in fact very far from globalist. At that time it was the early stages of U.S. Dept of Defense project ARPANET. It's largely the reason why IP/TCP largely lacks any security or DoS prevention features: you needed a U.S. security clearance to even access it. First non-U.S. access of any kind to the "internet" was in 1973, though physical access continued to remain heavily restricted for years. (I say "the internet" because it was still ARPANET and the Internet Protocol did not yet even exist.) Much later the WWW -- as the name itself suggests -- was a globally-minded endeavor. The World Wide Web is 29 years old.
- skissane 7y ago
  > First non-U.S. access of any kind to the "internet" was in 1973, though physical access continued to remain heavily restricted for years. One could argue that the current "Internet" based on TCP/IP has only existed since 1983, and the 1969-1982 ARPANET was a different internet given it was based on a different and incompatible protocol stack (NCP). "An internet" is just any network which connects networks. In that sense, there have been (and may yet be) other internets running other protocol stacks. "The Internet" is a particular internet running a particular protocol suite (TCP/IP), and defined as such the Internet began operation on 1983-01-01.
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    Correct. It's a matter of semantics. Though "50-year-old internet" could only refer to ARPANET. As an aside, English style guides formerly required "an internet"/"the Internet" distinction, however that has been changing in recent years to lowercase "internet" in both cases. In school I was marked down for writing "the internet", and now English professors say that is in fact the right way to do it. Not even English is immune to versioning.
    - dijit 7y ago
      That’s because it was seen as a name of a product. Now it is a common idea/service. Think “couch” vs Ikea.
gz5 7y ago
The article starts with: "A network that once seemed to effortlessly defy regulation is being relentlessly, and often ruthlessly, domesticated." And yet concludes with: "Fifty years after the birth of the internet, it may well be that national governments, wielding enlightened regulation, are the last best hope for maintaining a network that is—at least relatively—open and free." Am I missing something? How could "regulation" be a possible answer to "digital nationalism"? Are there examples of what the author is referring to as "enlightened regulation" in which regulation has had the desired impacts? Seems to me that far more often we see a mix of intended and unintended consequences. I would add that web != Internet. Internet is closer to printing press. A world in which there are billions of TCP/IP stacks on personal compute with Internet access is not one which is easily controlled (for good or for bad) by regulation.
- knzhou 7y ago
  It’s an example of Russell conjugation. My country performs enlightened regulation. Your country causes unintended consequences. Their country ruthlessly promotes digital nationalism. Three verb phrases, one meaning.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Right. > The trend is no longer restricted to authoritarian states. I guess that depends on how you define "authoritarian state". It's arguable that all control is authoritarian.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Perhaps so. That doesn't mean that all control is equivalent, though. There is (at the moment) a significant difference between the Great Firewall and the level of regulation that exists in, say, the EU.
    - squiggleblaz 7y ago
      Get rid of the authoritarian state and get authoritarian warlords competing in anarchy (using your body). I mean, give a word a meaning. Surely the difference between North Korea and Canada isn't merely in the stress.
esotericn 7y ago
From what I can tell, the Internet still does effortlessly defy regulation. The _businesses_ that operate on the Internet from meatspace don't. Because they can't, at a fundamental level. They're based somewhere. They have visible employees in jurisdictions. They represent enormous juicy targets with tens, hundreds, thousands of millions of users to control. They're huge companies. They have management structures, bureaucracies, whole departments that result in the sort of nonsense we see like GDPR popups or country blocks. That's not the Internet of 50 years ago; it's not even the Internet of 20 years ago. Alternatively, you could simply think of it like this - the everyman has been regulated. The power users (for lack of a better term) are in much the same situation that they were in 1990. If you discount the fact that 'everyman' expects everyone to be on the "hip new platform" (fb, snap, insta, tiktok, whatever) then honestly the situation is way better than it was back then. It's just hard to ignore the cruft.
- netcan 7y ago
  In the first point, I agree. What has changed is who's on the internet. The average person may be snooped on, but they're not very regulated. What's regulated are companies, especially large multinational corporations. Essentially, when we say "regulate" today, that's kind of what we mean: regulating bodies that that make rules for large corporations. Increasingly regulated and a increasingly corporate came in tandem. On your second point... I think it's kind of moot. Sure, the international "old internet" still exists. You can take part in it like you did in 1996. It's just dwarfed by the new internet. I'd argue that's a technicality, the important parts of that internet's "freedoms" are pointless when it's a vestigial artifact.
pshc 7y ago
Counter oppressive regimes by decentralizing. Build mesh networks.
swedtrue 7y ago
Again, it comes down a lot to privacy, especially in response to the growing inclusion of governments in our digital life. -Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail (https://protonmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/) -Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk) -Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple (https://www.duple.io/en/ https://www.duple.io/en/) -Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal (https://signal.org/ https://signal.org/)
- squarefoot 7y ago
  "Duple (https://www.duple.io/en/)" https://www.duple.io/en/)" 100% closed source as for now. They promised to make almost all of it open source, sadly except the most important part. Security is a chain: a 99% open source app is still 100% insecure as a 100% closed one.
  - swedtrue 7y ago
    The source code is available (bottom of the beta page https://download.duple.io/en/beta.html https://download.duple.io/en/beta.html)
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Duck Duck Go is also closed source and privately owned.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    There is plenty of insecure open sourced software and secure closed source. I'd be surprised if there was any correlation here.
    - squiggleblaz 7y ago
      Depends on the definition of "insecure". I think we mean "the user is a victim of the owner of the product" or "the user has no choice but to overconsent to invasion from the producer". When ssh has a vulnerability, that's not a problem of me overconsenting to something OpenBSD wants to do. It's a problem where some third party has managed to fool OpenBSD into believing I want them to do something on my behalf, when I issued no such instruction. But the vulnerability that is Google Mail is that Google will read any email sent to or from a Google Mail account, even incidentally, and use it to build up a profile which paying customers can use to manipulate me into doing things which, in the absence of the profile, I wouldn't've have done. Moreover there's just massive risks from all that data.
hirundo 7y ago
Woodie Guthrie had a label on his guitar that read "This machine kills fascists." I was naive once. I thought that the internet was such a machine. But instead of a tool for decentralizing power it's becoming a tool for centralized power to wield control, to enforce conformity in ever greater detail. What would a tool of actual decentralization look like? It wouldn't be something that helps us communicate or brings us closer together, because those things evolve into instruments of control. It would be something that divides us into separate ecological and memetic niches. The only example I can think of is a multi generational space ship. We're in a race between diaspora and social lithification. I wish I thought diaspora was the better bet.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  According to what you're saying increased tribalism is the answer, which isn't actually as silly as it first sounds
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It still exists - it is still a tool for decentralization. The thing is that the numbera aren't there. Essentially one can always go "indie" and accept the obscurity of being a counterculture.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  There isn't and never will be a facist-killing machine. There are only killing machines. There is no decentralized information technology. The are only information technologies. The capabilities are loosely determined by the creator; the result is determined by the user. Consider Bitcoin: fully decentralized in theory, yet in practice controlled by an oligarchy.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    Conway's law holds true beyond the scale it was intended for. The things people create mimic the structure of the society that creates them. In an oligarchic world with centralized power structures where few have power over the many, we make a system with centralized power structures where few parts have power over many. The internet won't be democratic and decentralized until the world is.
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/M8592 http://archive.is/M8592 https://web.archive.org/web/20191110215752/https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rising-threat-of-digital-nationalism-11572620577?mod=rsswn https://web.archive.org/web/20191110215752/https://www.wsj.c...
temptemptemp111 7y ago
Globalists are so gay and obsessed with themselves. "WWW" is more syllables than "world wide web," even. And of course it translates to 666. Satanism is pathetic.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
Open digital borders has had a number of positive and negative consequences, and of these the increase in foreign influence campaigns has been both positive and negative forces from a moral perspective, to a nation-state an open-borders internet is a huge security risk.
AzzieElbab 7y ago
Why are the terms nationalism, authoritarianism, and chauvinism used interchangeably?
- OCASM 7y ago
  Because the article is anti-nationalism proapaganda.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Because they are the inevitable correlaries of the root ideal. "The nation above all else."(Nationalism) leads to "Dissent against the government is wrong and treasonous. Obey the nation and make it great!" (Authoritarianism) and "Others are less important." (Chauvanism).
  - mistermann 7y ago
    > "The nation above all else."(Nationalism) Googling that phrase, the first hit I get is Fascism, not Nationalism. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/fascism-1 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/fascism-1 ---------------------------- Definition and Beliefs Fascism is an ultranationalist, authoritarian political philosophy. It combines elements of nationalism, militarism, economic self-sufficiency, and totalitarianism. It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government. Fascism places the importance of the nation above all else. The unity of the national community is prioritized above the rights of individuals. This leads to an intense interest in defining which groups belong or do not belong to the national body. Fascism is characterized by: strident, often exclusionary nationalism fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to the existence of the national community embrace of paramilitarism ---------------------------- These two ideas seem to have become synonymous in the minds of most people, but academically they are distinct.
naxerda876 7y ago
America never enslaved the French or colonized their land what's your take on jewish nationalism and settlements in the west bank?
jadbox 7y ago
As the article explains, the Internet is just a tool, and it's been aggressively used as a way to control user behavior to mostly benefit advertisers, producers, or conform behavior to governments. Even worse, political warfare is very easily imposed on today's social networks because they are designed to be echo chambers that receive outside messages from the highest bidder. However, this doesn't NEED to be the case as we can design online experiences that bring people together. The last two years I've self-funded a foundation [1] to work on on precisely this problem of using the Internet to try to unify people together. Today we have two platforms we are providing to the public and organizations. The first [2] service organizes people at physical events by maximizing the diversity of auto generated discussion groups, and we're having a fair amount of success in schools and events in the US and Austria. The other service [3] is purely an experimental free public social platform that matches people who have different viewpoints to have a timeboxed live discussion to chat about their views. I'm not sure if what we've built so far can make a big impact online, but I hope it can serve as an example of what kind of tools that could be built if the focus is squarely aimed at unifying people instead of stuffing them into echo chambers with pay-to-reach walls between groups of people. [1] Foundation: https://www.newdialogue.org/ https://www.newdialogue.org/ [2] Group diversity mixer: https://www.mixopinions.com/ https://www.mixopinions.com/ [3] Social platform: https://www.dinnertable.chat https://www.dinnertable.chat
petery 7y ago
A lot of these regulations are at democracies because of citizens demanding data protections. I founded the company InCountry that's mentioned in the article. What you're seeing here is that countries are starting to regulate the Internet like they regulate everything else. McDonald's has to comply with a ton of regulations on food, employees, tax, etc. everywhere they are. But for the longest time, not how they treated consumer data.
- andykk 7y ago
  Who will be the advocate for the consumer? The government wants access. Companies want to monetize and viralize. Who will speak and crawl in the dark recesses of power for the people?
- ymolodtsov 7y ago
  Not sure I saw a single rally in Europe where people demanded their data should be kept in the EU. Not sure I saw a single rally in Australia/UK where people were saying “yeah, block that porn for us”.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    I never heard of a rally demanding fines for people who run read lights, either.
corporate_shi11 7y ago
There is no alternative to nationalism. There will always be centralized political power, and that power manifests in nations. We can have smaller nations, or we can have larger nations. Both scenarios involve nations. Nations are the only bulwark against corporate savagery. Without nations, corporations run rampant (more than they do today). A one world government is impossible. In a democratic framework such a structure would quickly fall apart. Rebellion would be the inevitable outcome for a one world dictatorship as well.
cmdshiftf4 7y ago
At this point I'm very pessimistic about the future of the open World Wide Web, and see little in the works in terms of securely replacing it when it does come apart. We, its users, are all to blame. We've stood idly by as the concept itself went from a largely decentralized protocol for sharing information via hyperlinks, to a bastardized, immensely centralized platform for stealing people's attention, even creating addictions, mine their data while they stare on and use the two to sell them more shit they don't need. At best we passively supported this, but most of us actively partook in it. We use Google products, buy Apple products, share our data on instagram/facebook/etc., click shitty clickbait links and more. In doing so, we made some companies incredibly rich, enabling them to buy out or use their money to fund lawsuits against emerging competition, further centralizing their power. Not satisfied with simply supporting these actions, we're on a platform right here that actively encourages companies to spin up attention/data harvesting platforms with the goal of "going public" or being bought out by one of these giants. You could be easily justified in saying those of us in the tech industry are the most culpable. The governments, rightly so, have recognized the threat that power bears. Some chose to work with them, and use FISA or other means to secure backdoors to all the data they hoover up on us, and then work around pesky laws by sharing it with buddies such as those in Five Eyes to give eachother mutual access to one another's data. We know this. We did nothing about it. Others chose to work against them, such as China. Instead of taking a stand, the big, powerful tech companies we all revere bent over and did what they were told in order to access the markets of those working against them to steal more attention and make more money. And we stood idly by. At the micro level, we're now in a phase where if a vocal enough internet group takes offense to some sort of content within our sphere of influence, or against something someone posted 10 years ago, that they can pressure providers to deplatform their targets. Some stand idly by, others applaud it as progress. And so it will continue to crumble. Wise countries, recognizing both the threat of the internet giants and the opportunity of getting access within them, will apply the necessary pressure to have those giants make the internet "their way". "Wise" internet groups, recognizing both the threat of wrongthink and the opportunity to deplatform those who think wrong will apply pressure on the same giants to make the internet "their way". The only possible saviour is some sort of international body, comprised of representatives of all nations, cultures and subcultures, coming together to agree on keeping things open and clear. Given that we can't even make the UN effective, such a group would never agree on anything and would merely continue to justify its own take on censorship and thus wouldn't be viable from the start. And so the Web many of us came up on here, which provoked our interest in computers, networks, software and hardware, is doomed, and it's all because we are weak, and the giants we've allowed emerge are ultimately weak also. And none of that has anything to do with nationalism.
cromwellian 7y ago
Nationalism is a cult of humanity, and humans will use whatever tools are available to aid in the continuance of their interests. Hence, no amount of technolibertarian cleverness in engineering network protocols or cryptography is going to stop it. It can only be stopped in the messy, human world of politics and culture. In the late 80s and 90s, I was a big fan of John Perry Barlow, the independence of cyberspace, crypto-anarchy on the internet, the idea that some combination of a uncensorable world wide internet (that could route around governments), could displace even their national currencies, could be end to end anonymous and encrypted, would be a nirvana from oppression. The problem with the naive cyberlibertarian world view, is that it treats government as a wholly separate actor from the people who create the society they live in, and if your neighbors want to be Nazis, technological choices aren't going to protect you. It's not just "Digital Nationalism" that's rising. Nationalism is rising. You need only need at the US electing Trump, Brexit in the UK, at some of the neo-fascists elected recently in the EU. The optimism of the 90s, has been replaced with a mentality of scarcity, and when that happens, people look to hoard, they become less generous, more tribal, they circle the wagons. We are not going to fix Nationalism until we fix the underlying economic and social problems that are giving rise to it.
- hyperdunc 7y ago
  You call nationalism a cult, I call it a grand narrative underpinned by shared values that allow people to more easily trust each other (and hence coexist). That just isn't going to happen globally.
  - richardjdare 7y ago
    It's the same thing at different levels of abstraction. If you are from a locale where low-trust, feuding groups are interacting with each other but on a largely negative basis, and you're tired of it - then nationalism looks like something positive that can unify people into something more peaceful, and more capable of doing large scale projects together etc. If you are from a locale where low-trust feuding nations are interacting with each other on a largely negative basis, and you're tired of it - then you want to develop a global structure which unifies them into something more peaceful, and more capable of doing large scale projects together etc. What is it about nationalism that makes that particular level of abstraction become reified and hard to move beyond?
cryptica 7y ago
I think this article focuses on the wrong kind of nationalism. I think that there are going to be virtual nations with virtual governments based around cryptocurrency ecosystems. The existing physical governments will slowly lose their influence. As existing governments become weaker, virtual nations will realize that they can seize companies (the means of production) and take possession of their revenues by strategically corrupting employees inside those companies. The virtual governments will use seized company revenues to buy-back and burn their own cryptocurrencies to give their currencies more value and gain more power. Eventually the virtual nations will take control of physical land in various countries by corrupting and manipulating existing government officials. Each new nation will be scattered geographically through all continents.
- drewstiff 7y ago
  Which virtual nation do I become a part of? Does one just join whichever group of criminals make one feel safest?
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    Is crime that important to you that you would choose a group of criminals? I would guess that most people would form peaceful pacts with their family, friends, etc.
csomar 7y ago
> According to the New York Times, at least a quarter of the world’s countries have temporarily shut down the internet over the past four years. I was a bit shocked reading this sentence. A quarter of the world's countries is a big percentage. But apparently that is the case. There is a good report by Freedom House that analysis "Freedom on the Net"[1] and it seems that the trend of restricting access is a global phenomena. (especially across "less-connected" countries). [1]: https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTN_2018_Final%20Booklet_11_1_2018.pdf https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTN_2018_Final...
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
Hey-uh, is there anything we can do about this awful paywall? Perhaps the devs should add a thing to all WSJ articles to bypass.
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
How are any of you guys reading this with their horrific paywall?

181 points by chuhnk 7y ago

Extreme Nationalism was and is the symptom of the time. Plus Nationalism is perfectly normal as long as it doesn't go extreme.

bduerst 7y ago
Patriotism is perfectly normal, nationalism is not. You could argue that nationalism is an extreme version of patriotism, being that it takes a love and faith for one's country and uses it at the expense of others.
incompatible 7y ago
When you look at human history, I don't think that there's anything particularly bad about the present. You could even argue that times have rarely been better, as far as the historical record goes.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  I don't compare with (our stories of) the past, I compare with the faint inkling I have of what ought to be, the injustice and squandered potential I see right now. Furthermore there is the road we're on and the cliff it ends at: the concentration of wealth doesn't let up, the ability to think and even feel seems to drastically decline before our eyes, the research for control and destruction of humans goes on, and all of that can come home to roost in a very short amount of time. I think it's a bit like sitting on the Titanic and saying "the nice meal and the music we enjoy now is so much better than when we stood at the harbour in pouring rain, before we boarded this ship". edit: Heh, I guess some people thing pretending that isn't so will get them a seat at the table. There won't even be a table. > The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble. -- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" > Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" > If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. -- Stephen Hawking
jacquesm 7y ago
Nationalism isn't normal, countries are a completely artificial construct. But it serves well as a way to get people to assign all kinds of emotions, positive ones to their flag and negative to everybody else's.
- maps 7y ago
  > Nationalism isn't normal, countries are a completely artificial construct. Compared to what? Being a primitive mammal? Sure you could claim that the 'nation' didn't exist long enough to support this but devotion to a local city or tribe feels the same to me.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    If devotion to a local city or tribe is the same, then why is the Federal government at loggerheads with California over environmental regulations and immigration, and California is at loggerheads with SF over zoning policy and homelessness?
    - shantly 7y ago
      It does not follow from the assertion that devotion to a political unit of any size is a similar mindset or activity, that devotion to any one such thing means precisely identical devotion to all parts of whatever political hierarchy it may be a part of. Your objection doesn't make sense.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- deogeo 7y ago
  Many things we hold very dear are artificial/somewhat arbitrary - that doesn't make them less valuable.
- mistermann 7y ago
  It also allows a group of people to choose, to some degree, to live life in a certain way. Thinking negatively of other countries is not necessary, but if you personally choose to be my guest.
thundergolfer 7y ago
Having read Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism” essays literally yesterday, his voice is quite forcefully poking my brain as I read your comment. Orwell agreed that Nationalistic thinking was almost totally widespread through different peoples and times, but you appear to be saying that a “normal” amount is Ok which he would have fought passionately. Orwell wanted us to contend with the Nationalist inside us, and push them out. Just as we wouldn’t accept a “perfectly normal” amount of racism, don’t accept Nationalist feeling as in any way healthy.
- mistermann 7y ago
  Racism and nationalism seem extremely dissimilar to me.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    They both boil down to “my tribe is better than yours”.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      For you perhaps, not for me. Are we just making up meanings for words on the fly now? It would be rather ironic if I was being downvoted for a lack of hate.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        More lack of understanding I would guess. I upvoted your comment as it’s important to understand. Racism and nationalism aren’t about hate. They are about pride and superiority. Nationalism is often confused or manipulated as patriotism. Racism is often confused or manipulated as pride in culture or the past. The feeling of superiority enables other behaviors — people feel justified to take negative actions against other humans because they are lesser than them on some axis. These aren’t made up meanings.
        mistermann 7y ago
squarefoot 7y ago
There's no such thing as normal nationalism, as nationalism is a form of extremism by itself, more accurately what the perfectly natural love everyone of us feels for his/hers own country becomes once filtered and distorted by propaganda with the purpose of making people do nasty things under the belief they're necessary for a bigger good. Try this test with some of the less extreme nationalists you know: show them a photo of planet Earth taken from space and tell them "this is my homeland. I love it and you should too", then watch their reaction. Some of them may agree, but most won't. The point is that planet Earth does indeed contain their entire homeland, but includes other countries too, which is what many people don't accept. This plain stupid test demonstrates how nationalism isn't about loving one's country rather than not loving other people ones.
- naxerda876 7y ago
  >this is my homeland Only an imperialist with global ambitions would claim the entire planet as his homeland. >includes other countries too, which is what many people don't accept You seem to be the one who cant accept that there are other countries that are not for you. Nationalists understand this quite well actually >nationalism isn't about loving one's country rather than not loving other people ones Wanting your nation to be sovereign and free of foreign influence is not the same thing as hating other countries like you insinuate. Was Gandhi evil because he was a nationalist? Was Nelsen Mandela? Was Crazy Horse?
- mistermann 7y ago
  > nationalism is a form of extremism by itself This doesn't make sense to me. Would a desire to paint my own house rather than my neighbor's be a form of extremism, or are you thinking about it on some other way than this? > more accurately what the perfectly natural love everyone of us feels for his/hers own country becomes once filtered and distorted by propaganda with the purpose of making people do nasty things under the belief they're necessary for a bigger good I accept that this is possible and has historical precedent, but I challenge you to produce any convincing evidence this is always the case. > Try this test with some of the less extreme nationalists you know: show them a photo of planet Earth taken from space and tell them "this is my homeland. I love it and you should too", then watch their reaction. Some of them may agree, but most won't. The point is that planet Earth does indeed contain their entire homeland, but includes other countries too, which is what many people don't accept. Have you literally done this, and literally observed that most people don't love planet Earth? I would pay money to see a performance like that in real life, it sounds utterly bizarre and fantastical. > This plain stupid test demonstrates how nationalism isn't about loving one's country rather than not loving other people ones. Even if you actually have conducted this test, saying this demonstrates your point is a stretch. I can easily think of a reason I would have a negative reaction to such a "test", my strong dislike for globalism advocates with their poorly thought out reasons for demanding I behave in a certain way - if I got an intuitive feel that this is what your game was, you would likely get an intuitive feel that I was displeased, but be careful what you attribute that feeling to. I would actually consider this a reasonably good example of a poorly thought out idea that I find annoying.

neiman 7y ago

digital totalitarianism, digital surveillance state and now digital nationalism. I think I found the joker word of 2019.

chatmasta 7y ago

I thought this was going to be an article about people who feel more attached to their digital communities than their geographical communities. That would be an interesting avenue to explore.

nyolfen 7y ago
as did i; my favorite on the subject is this one: https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society > As ever more opt out, the larger culture is damaged.7 The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground—our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution! > With enough of these gaps, where is ‘American’ or ‘French’ culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce—France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives. > The national identity fragments under the assault of burgeoning subcultures. At last, the critic beholds the natural endpoint of this process: the nation is some lines on a map, some laws you follow. No one particularly cares about it. The geek thinks, ‘Meh: here, Canada, London, Japan, Singapore—as long as FedEx can reach me and there’s a good Internet connection, what’s the difference?’ (Nor are the technically-inclined alone in this.8)
- opportune 7y ago
  Subculture is not the same as opting out, though. Nor is there a dichotomy of being either a member of a subculture vs society at large. There are American otaku geeks who are nationalistic christians. I mean, that is a lot of what 4chan is these days. >You can test this yourself. Tell yourself —‘The country I live in now is the best country in the world for people like me; I would be terribly unhappy if I was exiled.’ If your mental reply goes something like, ‘Why, what’s so special about the USA? It’s not particularly economically or politically free, it’s not the only civilized English-speaking country, it’s not the wealthiest9…’, then you are headed down the path of opting out. This is just wrong. There are plenty of well adjusted people who aren't nationalists.

paulddraper 7y ago

> As the internet turns 50, the global vision that animated it is under attack. The vision in 2019-50=1969 was in fact very far from globalist. At that time it was the early stages of U.S. Dept of Defense project ARPANET. It's largely the reason why IP/TCP largely lacks any security or DoS prevention features: you needed a U.S. security clearance to even access it. First non-U.S. access of any kind to the "internet" was in 1973, though physical access continued to remain heavily restricted for years. (I say "the internet" because it was still ARPANET and the Internet Protocol did not yet even exist.) Much later the WWW -- as the name itself suggests -- was a globally-minded endeavor. The World Wide Web is 29 years old.

skissane 7y ago
> First non-U.S. access of any kind to the "internet" was in 1973, though physical access continued to remain heavily restricted for years. One could argue that the current "Internet" based on TCP/IP has only existed since 1983, and the 1969-1982 ARPANET was a different internet given it was based on a different and incompatible protocol stack (NCP). "An internet" is just any network which connects networks. In that sense, there have been (and may yet be) other internets running other protocol stacks. "The Internet" is a particular internet running a particular protocol suite (TCP/IP), and defined as such the Internet began operation on 1983-01-01.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  Correct. It's a matter of semantics. Though "50-year-old internet" could only refer to ARPANET. As an aside, English style guides formerly required "an internet"/"the Internet" distinction, however that has been changing in recent years to lowercase "internet" in both cases. In school I was marked down for writing "the internet", and now English professors say that is in fact the right way to do it. Not even English is immune to versioning.
  - dijit 7y ago
    That’s because it was seen as a name of a product. Now it is a common idea/service. Think “couch” vs Ikea.

gz5 7y ago

The article starts with: "A network that once seemed to effortlessly defy regulation is being relentlessly, and often ruthlessly, domesticated." And yet concludes with: "Fifty years after the birth of the internet, it may well be that national governments, wielding enlightened regulation, are the last best hope for maintaining a network that is—at least relatively—open and free." Am I missing something? How could "regulation" be a possible answer to "digital nationalism"? Are there examples of what the author is referring to as "enlightened regulation" in which regulation has had the desired impacts? Seems to me that far more often we see a mix of intended and unintended consequences. I would add that web != Internet. Internet is closer to printing press. A world in which there are billions of TCP/IP stacks on personal compute with Internet access is not one which is easily controlled (for good or for bad) by regulation.

knzhou 7y ago
It’s an example of Russell conjugation. My country performs enlightened regulation. Your country causes unintended consequences. Their country ruthlessly promotes digital nationalism. Three verb phrases, one meaning.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Right. > The trend is no longer restricted to authoritarian states. I guess that depends on how you define "authoritarian state". It's arguable that all control is authoritarian.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Perhaps so. That doesn't mean that all control is equivalent, though. There is (at the moment) a significant difference between the Great Firewall and the level of regulation that exists in, say, the EU.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    Get rid of the authoritarian state and get authoritarian warlords competing in anarchy (using your body). I mean, give a word a meaning. Surely the difference between North Korea and Canada isn't merely in the stress.

esotericn 7y ago

From what I can tell, the Internet still does effortlessly defy regulation. The _businesses_ that operate on the Internet from meatspace don't. Because they can't, at a fundamental level. They're based somewhere. They have visible employees in jurisdictions. They represent enormous juicy targets with tens, hundreds, thousands of millions of users to control. They're huge companies. They have management structures, bureaucracies, whole departments that result in the sort of nonsense we see like GDPR popups or country blocks. That's not the Internet of 50 years ago; it's not even the Internet of 20 years ago. Alternatively, you could simply think of it like this - the everyman has been regulated. The power users (for lack of a better term) are in much the same situation that they were in 1990. If you discount the fact that 'everyman' expects everyone to be on the "hip new platform" (fb, snap, insta, tiktok, whatever) then honestly the situation is way better than it was back then. It's just hard to ignore the cruft.

netcan 7y ago
In the first point, I agree. What has changed is who's on the internet. The average person may be snooped on, but they're not very regulated. What's regulated are companies, especially large multinational corporations. Essentially, when we say "regulate" today, that's kind of what we mean: regulating bodies that that make rules for large corporations. Increasingly regulated and a increasingly corporate came in tandem. On your second point... I think it's kind of moot. Sure, the international "old internet" still exists. You can take part in it like you did in 1996. It's just dwarfed by the new internet. I'd argue that's a technicality, the important parts of that internet's "freedoms" are pointless when it's a vestigial artifact.

pshc 7y ago

Counter oppressive regimes by decentralizing. Build mesh networks.

swedtrue 7y ago

Again, it comes down a lot to privacy, especially in response to the growing inclusion of governments in our digital life. -Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail (https://protonmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/) -Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk) -Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple (https://www.duple.io/en/ https://www.duple.io/en/) -Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal (https://signal.org/ https://signal.org/)

squarefoot 7y ago
"Duple (https://www.duple.io/en/)" https://www.duple.io/en/)" 100% closed source as for now. They promised to make almost all of it open source, sadly except the most important part. Security is a chain: a 99% open source app is still 100% insecure as a 100% closed one.
- swedtrue 7y ago
  The source code is available (bottom of the beta page https://download.duple.io/en/beta.html https://download.duple.io/en/beta.html)
- bduerst 7y ago
  Duck Duck Go is also closed source and privately owned.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  There is plenty of insecure open sourced software and secure closed source. I'd be surprised if there was any correlation here.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    Depends on the definition of "insecure". I think we mean "the user is a victim of the owner of the product" or "the user has no choice but to overconsent to invasion from the producer". When ssh has a vulnerability, that's not a problem of me overconsenting to something OpenBSD wants to do. It's a problem where some third party has managed to fool OpenBSD into believing I want them to do something on my behalf, when I issued no such instruction. But the vulnerability that is Google Mail is that Google will read any email sent to or from a Google Mail account, even incidentally, and use it to build up a profile which paying customers can use to manipulate me into doing things which, in the absence of the profile, I wouldn't've have done. Moreover there's just massive risks from all that data.

hirundo 7y ago

Woodie Guthrie had a label on his guitar that read "This machine kills fascists." I was naive once. I thought that the internet was such a machine. But instead of a tool for decentralizing power it's becoming a tool for centralized power to wield control, to enforce conformity in ever greater detail. What would a tool of actual decentralization look like? It wouldn't be something that helps us communicate or brings us closer together, because those things evolve into instruments of control. It would be something that divides us into separate ecological and memetic niches. The only example I can think of is a multi generational space ship. We're in a race between diaspora and social lithification. I wish I thought diaspora was the better bet.

faissaloo 7y ago
According to what you're saying increased tribalism is the answer, which isn't actually as silly as it first sounds
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Nasrudith 7y ago
It still exists - it is still a tool for decentralization. The thing is that the numbera aren't there. Essentially one can always go "indie" and accept the obscurity of being a counterculture.
paulddraper 7y ago
There isn't and never will be a facist-killing machine. There are only killing machines. There is no decentralized information technology. The are only information technologies. The capabilities are loosely determined by the creator; the result is determined by the user. Consider Bitcoin: fully decentralized in theory, yet in practice controlled by an oligarchy.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Conway's law holds true beyond the scale it was intended for. The things people create mimic the structure of the society that creates them. In an oligarchic world with centralized power structures where few have power over the many, we make a system with centralized power structures where few parts have power over many. The internet won't be democratic and decentralized until the world is.

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/M8592 http://archive.is/M8592 https://web.archive.org/web/20191110215752/https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rising-threat-of-digital-nationalism-11572620577?mod=rsswn https://web.archive.org/web/20191110215752/https://www.wsj.c...

temptemptemp111 7y ago

Globalists are so gay and obsessed with themselves. "WWW" is more syllables than "world wide web," even. And of course it translates to 666. Satanism is pathetic.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

Open digital borders has had a number of positive and negative consequences, and of these the increase in foreign influence campaigns has been both positive and negative forces from a moral perspective, to a nation-state an open-borders internet is a huge security risk.

AzzieElbab 7y ago

Why are the terms nationalism, authoritarianism, and chauvinism used interchangeably?

OCASM 7y ago
Because the article is anti-nationalism proapaganda.
Nasrudith 7y ago
Because they are the inevitable correlaries of the root ideal. "The nation above all else."(Nationalism) leads to "Dissent against the government is wrong and treasonous. Obey the nation and make it great!" (Authoritarianism) and "Others are less important." (Chauvanism).
- mistermann 7y ago
  > "The nation above all else."(Nationalism) Googling that phrase, the first hit I get is Fascism, not Nationalism. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/fascism-1 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/fascism-1 ---------------------------- Definition and Beliefs Fascism is an ultranationalist, authoritarian political philosophy. It combines elements of nationalism, militarism, economic self-sufficiency, and totalitarianism. It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government. Fascism places the importance of the nation above all else. The unity of the national community is prioritized above the rights of individuals. This leads to an intense interest in defining which groups belong or do not belong to the national body. Fascism is characterized by: strident, often exclusionary nationalism fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to the existence of the national community embrace of paramilitarism ---------------------------- These two ideas seem to have become synonymous in the minds of most people, but academically they are distinct.

naxerda876 7y ago

America never enslaved the French or colonized their land what's your take on jewish nationalism and settlements in the west bank?

jadbox 7y ago

As the article explains, the Internet is just a tool, and it's been aggressively used as a way to control user behavior to mostly benefit advertisers, producers, or conform behavior to governments. Even worse, political warfare is very easily imposed on today's social networks because they are designed to be echo chambers that receive outside messages from the highest bidder. However, this doesn't NEED to be the case as we can design online experiences that bring people together. The last two years I've self-funded a foundation [1] to work on on precisely this problem of using the Internet to try to unify people together. Today we have two platforms we are providing to the public and organizations. The first [2] service organizes people at physical events by maximizing the diversity of auto generated discussion groups, and we're having a fair amount of success in schools and events in the US and Austria. The other service [3] is purely an experimental free public social platform that matches people who have different viewpoints to have a timeboxed live discussion to chat about their views. I'm not sure if what we've built so far can make a big impact online, but I hope it can serve as an example of what kind of tools that could be built if the focus is squarely aimed at unifying people instead of stuffing them into echo chambers with pay-to-reach walls between groups of people. [1] Foundation: https://www.newdialogue.org/ https://www.newdialogue.org/ [2] Group diversity mixer: https://www.mixopinions.com/ https://www.mixopinions.com/ [3] Social platform: https://www.dinnertable.chat https://www.dinnertable.chat

petery 7y ago

A lot of these regulations are at democracies because of citizens demanding data protections. I founded the company InCountry that's mentioned in the article. What you're seeing here is that countries are starting to regulate the Internet like they regulate everything else. McDonald's has to comply with a ton of regulations on food, employees, tax, etc. everywhere they are. But for the longest time, not how they treated consumer data.

andykk 7y ago
Who will be the advocate for the consumer? The government wants access. Companies want to monetize and viralize. Who will speak and crawl in the dark recesses of power for the people?
ymolodtsov 7y ago
Not sure I saw a single rally in Europe where people demanded their data should be kept in the EU. Not sure I saw a single rally in Australia/UK where people were saying “yeah, block that porn for us”.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  I never heard of a rally demanding fines for people who run read lights, either.

corporate_shi11 7y ago

There is no alternative to nationalism. There will always be centralized political power, and that power manifests in nations. We can have smaller nations, or we can have larger nations. Both scenarios involve nations. Nations are the only bulwark against corporate savagery. Without nations, corporations run rampant (more than they do today). A one world government is impossible. In a democratic framework such a structure would quickly fall apart. Rebellion would be the inevitable outcome for a one world dictatorship as well.

cmdshiftf4 7y ago

At this point I'm very pessimistic about the future of the open World Wide Web, and see little in the works in terms of securely replacing it when it does come apart. We, its users, are all to blame. We've stood idly by as the concept itself went from a largely decentralized protocol for sharing information via hyperlinks, to a bastardized, immensely centralized platform for stealing people's attention, even creating addictions, mine their data while they stare on and use the two to sell them more shit they don't need. At best we passively supported this, but most of us actively partook in it. We use Google products, buy Apple products, share our data on instagram/facebook/etc., click shitty clickbait links and more. In doing so, we made some companies incredibly rich, enabling them to buy out or use their money to fund lawsuits against emerging competition, further centralizing their power. Not satisfied with simply supporting these actions, we're on a platform right here that actively encourages companies to spin up attention/data harvesting platforms with the goal of "going public" or being bought out by one of these giants. You could be easily justified in saying those of us in the tech industry are the most culpable. The governments, rightly so, have recognized the threat that power bears. Some chose to work with them, and use FISA or other means to secure backdoors to all the data they hoover up on us, and then work around pesky laws by sharing it with buddies such as those in Five Eyes to give eachother mutual access to one another's data. We know this. We did nothing about it. Others chose to work against them, such as China. Instead of taking a stand, the big, powerful tech companies we all revere bent over and did what they were told in order to access the markets of those working against them to steal more attention and make more money. And we stood idly by. At the micro level, we're now in a phase where if a vocal enough internet group takes offense to some sort of content within our sphere of influence, or against something someone posted 10 years ago, that they can pressure providers to deplatform their targets. Some stand idly by, others applaud it as progress. And so it will continue to crumble. Wise countries, recognizing both the threat of the internet giants and the opportunity of getting access within them, will apply the necessary pressure to have those giants make the internet "their way". "Wise" internet groups, recognizing both the threat of wrongthink and the opportunity to deplatform those who think wrong will apply pressure on the same giants to make the internet "their way". The only possible saviour is some sort of international body, comprised of representatives of all nations, cultures and subcultures, coming together to agree on keeping things open and clear. Given that we can't even make the UN effective, such a group would never agree on anything and would merely continue to justify its own take on censorship and thus wouldn't be viable from the start. And so the Web many of us came up on here, which provoked our interest in computers, networks, software and hardware, is doomed, and it's all because we are weak, and the giants we've allowed emerge are ultimately weak also. And none of that has anything to do with nationalism.

cromwellian 7y ago

Nationalism is a cult of humanity, and humans will use whatever tools are available to aid in the continuance of their interests. Hence, no amount of technolibertarian cleverness in engineering network protocols or cryptography is going to stop it. It can only be stopped in the messy, human world of politics and culture. In the late 80s and 90s, I was a big fan of John Perry Barlow, the independence of cyberspace, crypto-anarchy on the internet, the idea that some combination of a uncensorable world wide internet (that could route around governments), could displace even their national currencies, could be end to end anonymous and encrypted, would be a nirvana from oppression. The problem with the naive cyberlibertarian world view, is that it treats government as a wholly separate actor from the people who create the society they live in, and if your neighbors want to be Nazis, technological choices aren't going to protect you. It's not just "Digital Nationalism" that's rising. Nationalism is rising. You need only need at the US electing Trump, Brexit in the UK, at some of the neo-fascists elected recently in the EU. The optimism of the 90s, has been replaced with a mentality of scarcity, and when that happens, people look to hoard, they become less generous, more tribal, they circle the wagons. We are not going to fix Nationalism until we fix the underlying economic and social problems that are giving rise to it.

hyperdunc 7y ago
You call nationalism a cult, I call it a grand narrative underpinned by shared values that allow people to more easily trust each other (and hence coexist). That just isn't going to happen globally.
- richardjdare 7y ago
  It's the same thing at different levels of abstraction. If you are from a locale where low-trust, feuding groups are interacting with each other but on a largely negative basis, and you're tired of it - then nationalism looks like something positive that can unify people into something more peaceful, and more capable of doing large scale projects together etc. If you are from a locale where low-trust feuding nations are interacting with each other on a largely negative basis, and you're tired of it - then you want to develop a global structure which unifies them into something more peaceful, and more capable of doing large scale projects together etc. What is it about nationalism that makes that particular level of abstraction become reified and hard to move beyond?

cryptica 7y ago

I think this article focuses on the wrong kind of nationalism. I think that there are going to be virtual nations with virtual governments based around cryptocurrency ecosystems. The existing physical governments will slowly lose their influence. As existing governments become weaker, virtual nations will realize that they can seize companies (the means of production) and take possession of their revenues by strategically corrupting employees inside those companies. The virtual governments will use seized company revenues to buy-back and burn their own cryptocurrencies to give their currencies more value and gain more power. Eventually the virtual nations will take control of physical land in various countries by corrupting and manipulating existing government officials. Each new nation will be scattered geographically through all continents.

drewstiff 7y ago
Which virtual nation do I become a part of? Does one just join whichever group of criminals make one feel safest?
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Is crime that important to you that you would choose a group of criminals? I would guess that most people would form peaceful pacts with their family, friends, etc.

csomar 7y ago

> According to the New York Times, at least a quarter of the world’s countries have temporarily shut down the internet over the past four years. I was a bit shocked reading this sentence. A quarter of the world's countries is a big percentage. But apparently that is the case. There is a good report by Freedom House that analysis "Freedom on the Net"[1] and it seems that the trend of restricting access is a global phenomena. (especially across "less-connected" countries). [1]: https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTN_2018_Final%20Booklet_11_1_2018.pdf https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTN_2018_Final...

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

Hey-uh, is there anything we can do about this awful paywall? Perhaps the devs should add a thing to all WSJ articles to bypass.

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

How are any of you guys reading this with their horrific paywall?