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This is an important debate that comes up all too often. I do think this is the proper forum for this, so I'm glad you brought this up and I would be happy to

This is an important debate that comes up all too often. I do think this is the proper forum for this, so I'm glad you brought this up and I would be happy to share my thoughts. The more information people have had in the history of humanity, the more freedoms and liberties we have also had. We would likely still be living in monarchies if not for the spread of information -- North Korea is a prime example. If information is good and people agree with it, they will consume it and the swarm will be well seeded and public consensus will have spoken. If information is bad and people disagree with it, they won't consume it and the swarm will be sparse at best, at which point, it will be easy for ISPs and others to block access to these swarms. Torrents have been around for a long time, but terrorists haven't really utilized them much. On the other hand, anime really has to give its thanks to Bram haha. Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check. The same goes for information or discourse and the 1st amendment. The day we censor ourselves is the day we throw away liberty.

schleck8 5y ago
> Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check I don't think this is a good comparison. The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken, i. e. shortly after the war for independence on american soil against an empire, which was fought with militias (hence the third ammendement). That's a totally different scenario than the 21st century. It should be monitored who acquires an assault rifle. Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita globally[1], because gun owners are either mentally unstable themselves or not capable of preventing a mentally unstable person from getting hold of the rifle due to a lack or knowledge. Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars. Which brings me to the division of powers. The constitution balances executive, legislature and judiciary in its three articles. It is very difficult for either of these organs to abuse power without being met with a restriction. This has been the concept since the very beginning, as you surely know judging by the gh handle, and you bet the federalist paper authors favored an institutional solution over arming each citizen. In other words, the second ammendement is just as little of an ultimate for checks and balances as the web 3 is for whistleblowing. We already have securedrop and globalleaks. Going a step further is possible, but not strictly necessary, and should not be treated as such in my opinion. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155011/number-school-shootings-g7-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155011/number-school-sh...
- publiush 5y ago
  When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, but after hundreds of years, friendships, camaraderies, it's not difficult to have loosely coupled groups infiltrating all branches. Things eventually crumble as perfect systems are hard. This is akin to the monarchies, where a king may have risen to power as a good leader, but a later king may not have been so kind. These things aren't perfect, but having multiple systems to pick up where other systems fail provides us the ultimate leverage in the end. Would you take airbags out of cars because they sometimes fail and always harm those who feel their impact and chemicals and everyone is "supposed to wear seat belts by law" anyway?
  - afavour 5y ago
    > When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, I’d argue the opposite: it’s the threat of armed resistance that only works with a young government. The idea that an armed group could overthrow the government in the US today has always struck me as fanciful. The army would shut down such an attempt very, very easily.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      You forget the ties between the army and the 2nd amendment people, don't you? I'm no American but I can't really see most soldiers starting to shoot their own?
      - afavour 5y ago
        In that case surely the second amendment isn’t necessary, then. You’ve already got the army!
        skinkestek 5y ago
        Look to Turkey for a failure of that model. Although I should say that I am always convinced by those who say that that particular coup was staged by Erdogan as a pretext.
sterlind 5y ago
Personally, I think the right state answer isn't censorship, it's infiltration. Find and bust the people creating the illegal content. That's what the Feds have done with unsavory hidden services.
- noduerme 5y ago
  This is sort of the right answer, but it assumes someone is willing to devote as much time to each individual terrorist as the terrorist themselves is willing to spend creating networks and preparing violence, or that there's a well-enough agreed upon set of ideas that a given society can make a mass effort to infiltrate those networks. Usually that happens via government or very rarely journalism; there aren't any great examples of vigilante anti-terror or anti-mafia or anti-pedo infiltration networks I'm aware of. Again, because crime (or you could say, 'evil') is an asymmetrical affair, and it takes full time 100 LEOs to find one kid before he blows up his school. It's not really possible for private vigilante networks to compete with that, even if average people did have as much free time as full-time psychopaths.
noduerme 5y ago
Censorship would be shutting things down after the fact. I think the important question now is whether it's irresponsible to build channels that (A) terrorists will find useful, (B) will allow them to look more savvy and attractive than they actually are, (C) seed their ideas to a wider audience than they have - see [1] - and (D) count on less motivated people with nonviolent ideas and less time on their hands to offer countervailing ideologies and "win" the space. The space you're creating and enabling. [1] People with more time on their hands and/or a more absolute/violent agenda are more apt to find ways to game a system, whether it's a swarm or a newsfeed. Their time and motivation are asymmetrical to the normal functioning of a marketplace of ideas in which good/logical ideas are supposed to outperform bad/emotional appeals. The true question is not whether this platform can or will be gamed, or trying to guess and preempt how it will be gamed, but deciding whether it's immoral to exert your intellect to give leverage to griefers by giving them more visible surface area. If the result is something that only marginally helps average people but drastically improves the lot of griefers, then the surface area you're providing them to attack everyone else will be exponentially larger than the defensible area of reasonable ideologies you hope to have counter the bad ones. In other words, all the talk of open ideas is true in a truly open marketplace, but violence tends to fill a vacuum, and in a closed system or especially a new, empty space with experimental tooling, it is entirely possible for bad actors to drive out good ones.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Just to add to this. Back in 2012 I started coding something that I considered a necessary libertarian corrective to the centralized social networking world. I'm not going to post the idea here because I still consider it too explosive. Thankfully no one has done it yet. There came a point deep into the development when I realized that all my arguments to the contrary - arguments which sounded exactly like yours - were wrong. The system I was building to free humanity from centralized, moderated, let's say channeled forms of controversy, would be exploited by the worst, not the best. The fascists and the trolls would absolutely dominate the space, and if they did, the stakes would be life and death. And it would be me who had built that space that they were now using; a space they couldn't have conceived of themselves. This was why I shut the project down. Looking back, I was right. What's happened with FB and Twitter and January 6th was a pale shadow of what my concept might have opened up, in those years, when anyone was looking for any new platform. The sickening thing is that while we're in the business of opening up communication and tell ourselves we're creating liberty, we do have to weigh the question of whether average Joes are ready for it and be honest with ourselves - a lot of times they're not.

schleck8 5y ago

> Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check I don't think this is a good comparison. The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken, i. e. shortly after the war for independence on american soil against an empire, which was fought with militias (hence the third ammendement). That's a totally different scenario than the 21st century. It should be monitored who acquires an assault rifle. Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita globally[1], because gun owners are either mentally unstable themselves or not capable of preventing a mentally unstable person from getting hold of the rifle due to a lack or knowledge. Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars. Which brings me to the division of powers. The constitution balances executive, legislature and judiciary in its three articles. It is very difficult for either of these organs to abuse power without being met with a restriction. This has been the concept since the very beginning, as you surely know judging by the gh handle, and you bet the federalist paper authors favored an institutional solution over arming each citizen. In other words, the second ammendement is just as little of an ultimate for checks and balances as the web 3 is for whistleblowing. We already have securedrop and globalleaks. Going a step further is possible, but not strictly necessary, and should not be treated as such in my opinion. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155011/number-school-shootings-g7-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155011/number-school-sh...

publiush 5y ago
When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, but after hundreds of years, friendships, camaraderies, it's not difficult to have loosely coupled groups infiltrating all branches. Things eventually crumble as perfect systems are hard. This is akin to the monarchies, where a king may have risen to power as a good leader, but a later king may not have been so kind. These things aren't perfect, but having multiple systems to pick up where other systems fail provides us the ultimate leverage in the end. Would you take airbags out of cars because they sometimes fail and always harm those who feel their impact and chemicals and everyone is "supposed to wear seat belts by law" anyway?
- afavour 5y ago
  > When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, I’d argue the opposite: it’s the threat of armed resistance that only works with a young government. The idea that an armed group could overthrow the government in the US today has always struck me as fanciful. The army would shut down such an attempt very, very easily.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    You forget the ties between the army and the 2nd amendment people, don't you? I'm no American but I can't really see most soldiers starting to shoot their own?
    - afavour 5y ago
      In that case surely the second amendment isn’t necessary, then. You’ve already got the army!
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        Look to Turkey for a failure of that model. Although I should say that I am always convinced by those who say that that particular coup was staged by Erdogan as a pretext.

sterlind 5y ago

Personally, I think the right state answer isn't censorship, it's infiltration. Find and bust the people creating the illegal content. That's what the Feds have done with unsavory hidden services.

noduerme 5y ago
This is sort of the right answer, but it assumes someone is willing to devote as much time to each individual terrorist as the terrorist themselves is willing to spend creating networks and preparing violence, or that there's a well-enough agreed upon set of ideas that a given society can make a mass effort to infiltrate those networks. Usually that happens via government or very rarely journalism; there aren't any great examples of vigilante anti-terror or anti-mafia or anti-pedo infiltration networks I'm aware of. Again, because crime (or you could say, 'evil') is an asymmetrical affair, and it takes full time 100 LEOs to find one kid before he blows up his school. It's not really possible for private vigilante networks to compete with that, even if average people did have as much free time as full-time psychopaths.

noduerme 5y ago

Censorship would be shutting things down after the fact. I think the important question now is whether it's irresponsible to build channels that (A) terrorists will find useful, (B) will allow them to look more savvy and attractive than they actually are, (C) seed their ideas to a wider audience than they have - see [1] - and (D) count on less motivated people with nonviolent ideas and less time on their hands to offer countervailing ideologies and "win" the space. The space you're creating and enabling. [1] People with more time on their hands and/or a more absolute/violent agenda are more apt to find ways to game a system, whether it's a swarm or a newsfeed. Their time and motivation are asymmetrical to the normal functioning of a marketplace of ideas in which good/logical ideas are supposed to outperform bad/emotional appeals. The true question is not whether this platform can or will be gamed, or trying to guess and preempt how it will be gamed, but deciding whether it's immoral to exert your intellect to give leverage to griefers by giving them more visible surface area. If the result is something that only marginally helps average people but drastically improves the lot of griefers, then the surface area you're providing them to attack everyone else will be exponentially larger than the defensible area of reasonable ideologies you hope to have counter the bad ones. In other words, all the talk of open ideas is true in a truly open marketplace, but violence tends to fill a vacuum, and in a closed system or especially a new, empty space with experimental tooling, it is entirely possible for bad actors to drive out good ones.

noduerme 5y ago
Just to add to this. Back in 2012 I started coding something that I considered a necessary libertarian corrective to the centralized social networking world. I'm not going to post the idea here because I still consider it too explosive. Thankfully no one has done it yet. There came a point deep into the development when I realized that all my arguments to the contrary - arguments which sounded exactly like yours - were wrong. The system I was building to free humanity from centralized, moderated, let's say channeled forms of controversy, would be exploited by the worst, not the best. The fascists and the trolls would absolutely dominate the space, and if they did, the stakes would be life and death. And it would be me who had built that space that they were now using; a space they couldn't have conceived of themselves. This was why I shut the project down. Looking back, I was right. What's happened with FB and Twitter and January 6th was a pale shadow of what my concept might have opened up, in those years, when anyone was looking for any new platform. The sickening thing is that while we're in the business of opening up communication and tell ourselves we're creating liberty, we do have to weigh the question of whether average Joes are ready for it and be honest with ourselves - a lot of times they're not.