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> Hey if they want to keep communicating they can send letters ... You can still set up your own ISP If you don't like how the others are playing If you're try

> Hey if they want to keep communicating they can send letters ... You can still set up your own ISP If you don't like how the others are playing If you're trying to make jokes, then you need to work on your delivery. > What I see is the logical conclusion of that open society. If people didn't know we were going here they weren't paying attention I generally hate references to the paradox of tolerance, but you're essentially advocating intolerance that takes advantage of tolerance. I'd say that when the logical conclusions of rules that currently lead to an open society are abused to create an ever-more closed society, those rules need to be amended - it's foolish to assume that the outcome is moral by construction. Even when pushed you seem to be pretty explicitly support corporate authoritarianism, so I doubt I'm going to change your mind. But as I said in another comment - it's quite comfortable to cheerlead for authoritarianism when it aligns with your preferences, but the winds can change at any time.

shadowgovt 3y ago
> it's foolish to assume that the outcome is moral by construction I believe it's also foolish to assume the outcome of forcing people to transit signal harmful to them is moral. The nice thing about the status quo is we can address this problem with our own choices: if one doesn't like HE's behavior, for instance, one can de-peer from HE. The 'net can interpret censorship as damage and route around it, as it were. I'm not so much in favor of authoritarianism as individual sovereignty, and sometimes the "individual" is a corporation or large association. But so long as it can be routed around, it's fine (and if it cannot be routed around, we have antitrust for that). But consider Mastodon, where individual users are continuously deciding who to follow and who to block and node operators are continuously deciding similar questions at the node-to-node peer level. It's beautiful chaos, not authoritarianism. What business would the State of California have dictating to every Mastodon admin the rules of their node (or, for that matter: ¿cui bono? from the state even tracking those policies? Maybe it's none of the state's damn business who I let on my node and who I peer / de-peer from.
- mindslight 3y ago
  > forcing people to transit signal harmful to them This is like the third time you've swapped in a sympathetically-small example to make it sound as if any regulation of large companies implies that grassroots individuals would be forced to unreasonably do things against their will. But we're not discussing a vibrant competitive landscape of Mastodon instances, local mom-and-pop ISPs, websites run by individuals, or "people". Rather we're talking about the likes of Twitter, Google, and Comcast. > I'm not so much in favor of authoritarianism as individual sovereignty, and sometimes the "individual" is a corporation or large association I wholeheartedly agree with individual sovereignty, and that's precisely where my comment is coming from. The second part is fallacious induction - scale is the entire crux of the matter, especially with the context of Metcalfe's law. The larger these companies get, and the more they cooperate with each other, the more inescapable interacting with them becomes. This destroys the ideal of individual sovereignty for actual individuals. Hand waving about "antitrust" is an excuse that doesn't redeem the narrative. If you were actually concerned about coercive power created through anticompetitive actions, you'd lead with the utter lack of anti-trust enforcement and arrive at very different conclusion. For example reforming this bundling of identity, data hosting, and software that is pervasive across the industry would go a long way to reforming the power dynamics. On the topic of actually running more decentralized nodes, I'm all for it. If you want to discuss things non-normatively as an assumption of the worst case fusing of government and corporate power, I'm right there with you. But in the context of the big tech power consolidation, what are currently small-time self-help options for the technical few to hide from the overall trend aren't particularly relevant. For example even though I've always run my own mail server and recommend people get their own domains, I can still condemn the negative societal effects of Gmail having unilateral control over many individuals' online identities. (In fact doing so gets even more important because Google blazing the trail of unilateral corporate authoritarianism has caused the domain registries to want to get in on the shameless action)
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    I think we can agree to disagree at this point. You believe that corporate power will lead to authoritarianism and the only way to stop that is a stomp on that power at the cost of liberties (because we can't just regulate Google or Twitter; California's registration policy nets up every Mastodon node and every home gardening forum and every still existent BBS). I think the liberties are more important and people should have authority to shape the network, and government intervention hampers that freedom. You see authoritarianism as coming from corporations; I see it as coming from the government. I'm also extremely leery of anything that makes it more difficult for any operator in this network to put up a sign that says "This is not a Nazi bar," even if it at the same time makes it easier for somebody to put up a sign that says "This is not a gay bar." Because I'm not worried about the authoritarian threat posed by unfettered communication in the LGBTQIA community, but I sure am worried about it from the white supremacist community.

shadowgovt 3y ago

> it's foolish to assume that the outcome is moral by construction I believe it's also foolish to assume the outcome of forcing people to transit signal harmful to them is moral. The nice thing about the status quo is we can address this problem with our own choices: if one doesn't like HE's behavior, for instance, one can de-peer from HE. The 'net can interpret censorship as damage and route around it, as it were. I'm not so much in favor of authoritarianism as individual sovereignty, and sometimes the "individual" is a corporation or large association. But so long as it can be routed around, it's fine (and if it cannot be routed around, we have antitrust for that). But consider Mastodon, where individual users are continuously deciding who to follow and who to block and node operators are continuously deciding similar questions at the node-to-node peer level. It's beautiful chaos, not authoritarianism. What business would the State of California have dictating to every Mastodon admin the rules of their node (or, for that matter: ¿cui bono? from the state even tracking those policies? Maybe it's none of the state's damn business who I let on my node and who I peer / de-peer from.

mindslight 3y ago
> forcing people to transit signal harmful to them This is like the third time you've swapped in a sympathetically-small example to make it sound as if any regulation of large companies implies that grassroots individuals would be forced to unreasonably do things against their will. But we're not discussing a vibrant competitive landscape of Mastodon instances, local mom-and-pop ISPs, websites run by individuals, or "people". Rather we're talking about the likes of Twitter, Google, and Comcast. > I'm not so much in favor of authoritarianism as individual sovereignty, and sometimes the "individual" is a corporation or large association I wholeheartedly agree with individual sovereignty, and that's precisely where my comment is coming from. The second part is fallacious induction - scale is the entire crux of the matter, especially with the context of Metcalfe's law. The larger these companies get, and the more they cooperate with each other, the more inescapable interacting with them becomes. This destroys the ideal of individual sovereignty for actual individuals. Hand waving about "antitrust" is an excuse that doesn't redeem the narrative. If you were actually concerned about coercive power created through anticompetitive actions, you'd lead with the utter lack of anti-trust enforcement and arrive at very different conclusion. For example reforming this bundling of identity, data hosting, and software that is pervasive across the industry would go a long way to reforming the power dynamics. On the topic of actually running more decentralized nodes, I'm all for it. If you want to discuss things non-normatively as an assumption of the worst case fusing of government and corporate power, I'm right there with you. But in the context of the big tech power consolidation, what are currently small-time self-help options for the technical few to hide from the overall trend aren't particularly relevant. For example even though I've always run my own mail server and recommend people get their own domains, I can still condemn the negative societal effects of Gmail having unilateral control over many individuals' online identities. (In fact doing so gets even more important because Google blazing the trail of unilateral corporate authoritarianism has caused the domain registries to want to get in on the shameless action)
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  I think we can agree to disagree at this point. You believe that corporate power will lead to authoritarianism and the only way to stop that is a stomp on that power at the cost of liberties (because we can't just regulate Google or Twitter; California's registration policy nets up every Mastodon node and every home gardening forum and every still existent BBS). I think the liberties are more important and people should have authority to shape the network, and government intervention hampers that freedom. You see authoritarianism as coming from corporations; I see it as coming from the government. I'm also extremely leery of anything that makes it more difficult for any operator in this network to put up a sign that says "This is not a Nazi bar," even if it at the same time makes it easier for somebody to put up a sign that says "This is not a gay bar." Because I'm not worried about the authoritarian threat posed by unfettered communication in the LGBTQIA community, but I sure am worried about it from the white supremacist community.