5 ms·

It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measur

by fouc 5y ago

It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.

adrianN 5y ago
If cryptography would work for this it would simply be outlawed.
- freeflight 5y ago
  Funny story about that: For quite a while the US government considered cryptography, that was too secure, a "controlled munition" [0]. It took a lot of activism to change that and it's something that's still under attack to this day in the form of governments demanding backdoors into all kinds of encrypted communication. [0] http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/ http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/
  - hkt 5y ago
    You missed the best part of the struggle: how Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP, had to publish his source code in a book so it'd be protected as speech under the first amendment. His alternative was being thrown in prison for a few decades for illegal export of munitions.
na85 5y ago
I remember those days. There was a lot of optimism and a feeling of being powerful, especially things like watching the early days of Anonymous vs Scientology. The internet was supposed to be the great enabler of the masses, and instead assholes like Zuckerberg co-opted it to line their own pockets by selling us wholesale to advertisers. In any case, I also remember reading TFDeclaration a year or two after it came out, and I feel the same way about it now as I did then: it kinda makes me cringe. Declare independence all you want, but to paraphrase the Warden of Shawshank Prison: Your ass belongs to somebody.
- developer93 5y ago
  Zuckerberg didn't force anyone to join Facebook, this was all voluntary, we did it to ourselves
  - hkt 5y ago
    FOMO and network effects are a powerful coupling though. And the social media companies have worked hard to ensure they're very hard to quit, too.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      Society as whole, interest groups, governments, banks, retailers and their discounts, forums, HN, itself relies on FOMO and network effects. The only thing making it hard to quit is that value provided by FB as a address book to the individuals who use it is worth the trouble it causes. That's just economics. There's always a choice.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  As I recalled it, he found himself with a bullet in the head, his life in ruins. My ass doesn't belong to anybody but me, but yeah there are people out there who wants it and quite a lot of people who want to tell me it belongs to them.
  - na85 5y ago
    Well, my point is that your ass belongs to the government where you live. You can pretend to be a citizen of the internet but the police will still come after you in meat space.
rayiner 5y ago
I was never a cyber anarchist—I always thought the Internet should be more like the open road of the 1950s than the Wild West of the 1850s. More Democratic libertarian than anarchist. I never imagined it would devolve into basically the feudalism of the 1350s, with dueling warlords not answerable to either the serfs or to any government.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  No one is a serf on the internet. You can always choose another website. For all the problems Facebook has, hoarding the secret sauce building the world's largest phone book isn't one of them. After all isn't the point being of being free, whether in life or one the internet, having to answer to no one?
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Likewise in the Middle Ages you were always free to go off into the forest and fend for yourself.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      You're also free to voluntarily associate with individuals who share your views and do so on your own terms. Something made more prevalent thanks to personal freedom. On the Internet, there's no limit to the ways and choices one can make to achieve that. There's no bind on your legs or whip to your back. That can't really be said for the serfs of the Middle Ages.
freeflight 5y ago
> This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps. Not necessarily, I can imagine a post-privacy scenario were absolute transparency turns private information commercially worthless by making it a good readily and freely accessible to everybody. I admit it would be a rather radical paradigm change and difficult to actually implement but actually fits perfectly fine with the mindset of "information should be free". Imho our current problem is not all the information that's collected, it's how said information is monopolized to the purely commercial benefits of only a select few.
- antihero 5y ago
  I guess it's about personal privacy vs private privacy.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  "[All] information should be free" is Zuckerberg's view in its entirety. But even if privacy was no longer an important value how that information is collected is still going to be important distinguishing factor. Information is not and cannot be monopolized. Facebook does not have special powers to extract information directly from individuals. Facebook's "monopoly", if that's what you want to call it, is in employing the best statisticians and data scientists to draw abstractions and correlations to pack and sell to advertisers. It's not about the data taken, but the metadata that's created and the secondary and tertiary observations about your life that can worked back from what you do on the website or any website with a Facebook Pixel.
Ajedi32 5y ago
I don't think it necessarily has to be all the time; just having anonymity available when you want it could be enough in theory. I guess the issue there is that if the general population spends most of its time on platforms which discourage anonymity then it becomes that much more difficult to achieve anonymity when you do need it. Cyberspace can only be independent so long as it is a place that "is not where bodies live". "Our identities have no bodies" isn't true if your online identity is associated with your real name and photograph. You can't have a world that "all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth" if "all" doesn't include people whose race, economic power, and station of birth hasn't been disclosed to you in advance.
tastyfreeze 5y ago
The internet is still the greatest communication tool humans have ever created. It may not be the completely free landscape envisioned in the 90's but the internet has been the seed of revolution around the world.

by fouc 5y ago

It's a sad reminder of the optimism for the power of the internet we had in the 90's. This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps.

adrianN 5y ago

If cryptography would work for this it would simply be outlawed.

freeflight 5y ago
Funny story about that: For quite a while the US government considered cryptography, that was too secure, a "controlled munition" [0]. It took a lot of activism to change that and it's something that's still under attack to this day in the form of governments demanding backdoors into all kinds of encrypted communication. [0] http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/ http://www.geekytattoos.com/illegal-tattoos-rsa-tattoos/
- hkt 5y ago
  You missed the best part of the struggle: how Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP, had to publish his source code in a book so it'd be protected as speech under the first amendment. His alternative was being thrown in prison for a few decades for illegal export of munitions.

na85 5y ago

I remember those days. There was a lot of optimism and a feeling of being powerful, especially things like watching the early days of Anonymous vs Scientology. The internet was supposed to be the great enabler of the masses, and instead assholes like Zuckerberg co-opted it to line their own pockets by selling us wholesale to advertisers. In any case, I also remember reading TFDeclaration a year or two after it came out, and I feel the same way about it now as I did then: it kinda makes me cringe. Declare independence all you want, but to paraphrase the Warden of Shawshank Prison: Your ass belongs to somebody.

developer93 5y ago
Zuckerberg didn't force anyone to join Facebook, this was all voluntary, we did it to ourselves
- hkt 5y ago
  FOMO and network effects are a powerful coupling though. And the social media companies have worked hard to ensure they're very hard to quit, too.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    Society as whole, interest groups, governments, banks, retailers and their discounts, forums, HN, itself relies on FOMO and network effects. The only thing making it hard to quit is that value provided by FB as a address book to the individuals who use it is worth the trouble it causes. That's just economics. There's always a choice.
tomjen3 5y ago
As I recalled it, he found himself with a bullet in the head, his life in ruins. My ass doesn't belong to anybody but me, but yeah there are people out there who wants it and quite a lot of people who want to tell me it belongs to them.
- na85 5y ago
  Well, my point is that your ass belongs to the government where you live. You can pretend to be a citizen of the internet but the police will still come after you in meat space.

rayiner 5y ago

I was never a cyber anarchist—I always thought the Internet should be more like the open road of the 1950s than the Wild West of the 1850s. More Democratic libertarian than anarchist. I never imagined it would devolve into basically the feudalism of the 1350s, with dueling warlords not answerable to either the serfs or to any government.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
No one is a serf on the internet. You can always choose another website. For all the problems Facebook has, hoarding the secret sauce building the world's largest phone book isn't one of them. After all isn't the point being of being free, whether in life or one the internet, having to answer to no one?
- rayiner 5y ago
  Likewise in the Middle Ages you were always free to go off into the forest and fend for yourself.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    You're also free to voluntarily associate with individuals who share your views and do so on your own terms. Something made more prevalent thanks to personal freedom. On the Internet, there's no limit to the ways and choices one can make to achieve that. There's no bind on your legs or whip to your back. That can't really be said for the serfs of the Middle Ages.

freeflight 5y ago

> This sort of reality only becomes true if we all use cryptographic measures all the time perhaps. Not necessarily, I can imagine a post-privacy scenario were absolute transparency turns private information commercially worthless by making it a good readily and freely accessible to everybody. I admit it would be a rather radical paradigm change and difficult to actually implement but actually fits perfectly fine with the mindset of "information should be free". Imho our current problem is not all the information that's collected, it's how said information is monopolized to the purely commercial benefits of only a select few.

antihero 5y ago
I guess it's about personal privacy vs private privacy.
Dracophoenix 5y ago
"[All] information should be free" is Zuckerberg's view in its entirety. But even if privacy was no longer an important value how that information is collected is still going to be important distinguishing factor. Information is not and cannot be monopolized. Facebook does not have special powers to extract information directly from individuals. Facebook's "monopoly", if that's what you want to call it, is in employing the best statisticians and data scientists to draw abstractions and correlations to pack and sell to advertisers. It's not about the data taken, but the metadata that's created and the secondary and tertiary observations about your life that can worked back from what you do on the website or any website with a Facebook Pixel.

Ajedi32 5y ago

I don't think it necessarily has to be all the time; just having anonymity available when you want it could be enough in theory. I guess the issue there is that if the general population spends most of its time on platforms which discourage anonymity then it becomes that much more difficult to achieve anonymity when you do need it. Cyberspace can only be independent so long as it is a place that "is not where bodies live". "Our identities have no bodies" isn't true if your online identity is associated with your real name and photograph. You can't have a world that "all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth" if "all" doesn't include people whose race, economic power, and station of birth hasn't been disclosed to you in advance.

tastyfreeze 5y ago

The internet is still the greatest communication tool humans have ever created. It may not be the completely free landscape envisioned in the 90's but the internet has been the seed of revolution around the world.