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On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet". Si
by lolinder 2y ago
On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet".
Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.
Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA#Wikimedia_community https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...
- LudwigNagasena 2y ago> Have governments become more authoritarian? It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation". > Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away? People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.
- fireflash38 2y agoDo you think that there's a link between an extreme proliferation of misinformation and people wanting to control it?
- zmgsabst 2y agoNo. Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance. Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.
- selimthegrim 2y agoThe chain of custody issues alone render the laptop story incredible
- zmgsabst 2y agoTell that to the courts, I guess. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-bid... Excerpt: > The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
- selimthegrim 2y agoiCloud isn’t the laptop, let’s be clear
- Sabinus 2y agoIncredible that in this comment thread there are suggestions the Biden government is fascist, even though Biden allowed his son to be prosecuted but if the reverse happened Trump would obviously interfere.
- smsm42 2y agoYes. People who want to control the information want to distribute misinformation freely and be guaranteed nobody can contest them. That's the link. The censors always will be the liars, because once you can control who can say what, it is impossible to resist the temptation to lie a little bit for a good cause. And then a little bit more. We have seen it happen many, many times.
- sofixa 2y ago> We have seen it happen many, many times. Have we? I can only think of wartime censorship (which, even if it was sold for protection from enemy propaganda, was always about morale, so doesn't apply here), and authoritarian regimes, which also don't apply here.
- smsm42 2y agoYes, we have. Those same people who whine about "misinformation" are repeatedly caught lying to the public - for the public's benefit, of course, which they get to define. Which only makes sense - if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselves, and needs a gatekeeper class to define it for them, then it's only a little step from that to deciding the public is not smart enough to make correct decisions based on facts, and needs to be manipulated by the same gatekeeper class by telling them what they need to hear, for their own good. Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.
- sofixa 2y ago> Again, this happened many times just in the recent years. Again, when? Concrete examples if there are so many! > if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselve I mean, whatever one thinks of censorship this is objectively true. We have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, people who drank bleach against Covid, people who believe Ukraine started the war against Russia, the pizzagate nonsense, people who believe in the magical powers of rhino horns and shark fin soups and on and on and on. There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.
- endgame 2y ago> Have governments become more authoritarian? Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like. An Australian example: https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1834455727764869593#m https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1834455727764869593#m
- ruthmarx 2y agoAustralia is an especially bad country in this regard.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoIt's all "beer and barbie on the beach" until you realise that's all illegal.
- ruthmarx 2y agoI'm already annoyed I have to wipe my devices whenever I travel there or risk a $5000 fine and maybe jail time if they want the password and I don't give it up. Australia has to be the least free country in the anglosphere.
- Aeolun 2y agoWhat kind of thing do you have on your PC they’d care about? Actually, I guess if you don’t want them to know you won’t tell me now either xD I don’t like the idea of handing out my password any more, but wiping my PC is too much effort.
- ruthmarx 2y ago> What kind of thing do you have on your PC they’d care about? You get that's not the point, right?
- 2y ago
- typewithrhythm 2y agoAs more normies got on the web more of it becomes about how to herd them. In the early days there was less gain from authoritarian actions, because you are more likely to be resisted by the users of any service. The current users don't know how to bypass restrictions, and are generally more numerous. Making authoritarian actions more valuable. Unfortunately this leads to previously useful sites declining.
- llm_trw 2y agoThe solution is to move to the dark web and make your site unpalatable to normies. The posison slug strategy.
- ggm 2y agoDividing the world into normies and others is a very odd way to characterise widespread adoption of anything. I hesitate to use the neckbeard word, but it's got overtones. There are as many usefully curated sites, as sites where state actors curate content to hide the reptile led barcode truth from the normies.
- bitexploder 2y agoThe nomenclature could use some polish, but on HN we know they mean ability to bypass technological restrictions .
- aaplok 2y agoI am probably not part of the "we" you are talking about, but I had no idea "normie" means that, and I couldn't infer it from the comment. In fact I inferred a completely wrong meaning from that comment (something like "unenlightened"). Isn't "normie" a pejorative word (genuine question)?
- ggm 2y agoThis was the basis of my response too. It's almost never said by people in contexts where it's not pejorative, to my understanding. It's a staple of incels and the elite Mensa types. It dismisses the average lived experience because iamveryspecial.
- ekianjo 2y ago[flagged]
- rootusrootus 2y agoI don't know that COVID is a great example. The people most upset about 'authoritarian' abuses by gov't during COVID are themselves extremely authoritarian. Just about different topics. I otherwise agree that authoritarianism is on the rise, across the board.
- ogurechny 2y agoSo you're ready to insist that, say, Agamben is just some stupid Texan hillbilly just to have an excuse to ignore the not so pleasing thoughts.
- ants_everywhere 2y agoI mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others. And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B. So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions. And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale. You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.
- nradov 2y agoMost of these cases don't involve any actual harm beyond hurt feelings, so that's largely a red herring.
- SoftTalker 2y agoThese days, causing hurt feelings is called violence by many people. Or sometimes, saying nothing at all is.
- intended 2y agoNot sure what cases you are referring to, but “Hurt feelings” in India have caused multiple riots, resulting in utter carnage, spilling over to years, decades longs strings of terrorism and reprisals against minorities. Feelings are the reason people get up to live in the morning. I get why we used to make that statement. In a way it’s about rationality mattering, and how feelings being hurt are different from actual hurt. In the context of this conversation, I’ll argue its an un-pragmatic dismissal of a pertinent fact. I’ll make this argument: “At the scales we are talking, and across the breath of human cultures, feelings end up mattering.”
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago>>> Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away? Yes, naive to think that we could live in a world without fences. The internet makes it very cheap to tear down fences. Yet, good fences make for good neighbors. It was always naive to think that governments would let a torn-fences world, remain untouched.
- Rury 2y agoIt's just politics... Replace "open internet" with "land" and imagine countries (ie people) are attempting to block others access to some resource. It was naive to assume that the internet wouldn't adhere the nature of our reality.
- ziofill 2y agoThat’s not a fair comparison: land is finite in a way that the open internet isn’t.
- shnock 2y agoHuman attention and energy is relatively limited though, and the medium of the Internet and its control is just for that
- pahbloo 2y agoIn fact, the most valuable resource on the internet is finite: atention with the possibility of influence those who give it to you. This is already a question of national security.
- lolinder 2y agoYep. It's hard for us to un-learn the instincts taught by millions of years of evolution. We see scarcity in everything, even where there is none.
- hnbad 2y agoThe problem isn't that we "see scarcity", it's that we intentionally introduce scarcity. You can make more money with scarcity. It's a lot harder to make any money without scarcity, even. Instead of Napster letting you download any song anyone ever bothered to digitize, we now have a dozen different music streaming services giving you access to the music from whichever publishers they managed to sign deals with and you have to pay a monthly fee and can only use a number of devices at the same time and not share with friends and family unless they also pay for the access. Yes, of course there are good reasons for this: without paying, the artists don't get paid and that means making music becomes no more than an expensive hobby and yadda yadda but that's my point: we may have corporeal justifications for the scarcity we impose on the Internet but the scarcity exists and we deliberately created it and use the police and military to enforce it.
- anal_reactor 2y agoInternet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly. Looking back, it was extremely naive to think that even though we regulate every single aspect of social life, the internet would remain the bastion of freedom just because it would be cool if it did. Think about all the rules we have about what can and what cannot be said not to break social cohesion on TV, or radio, or newspaper, or street sidewalk, or workplace, or family gathering - the internet is moving in the same direction. The anarchy was never meant to last.
- haccount 2y ago"needs to be" No it doesn't. And neither do we need regulation for what I can say at a family gathering or on the street. Thought policing and other neo-puritanian movements can go fuck themselves.
- sofixa 2y ago> And neither do we need regulation for what I can say at a family gathering or on the street It's slightly different, since you don't do your banking, taxes, business, information gathering at that family gathering; nor can malicious actor effortlessly spam misinformation/scams at every family gathering/street. Especially considering we know multiple countries have extremely active operations online trying to sway opinions their way, it's naive to compare the internet to a neutral public place.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago> Internet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly Don't give in like that. Let those normies get hurt. It's their personal problem.
- account42 2y agoWe don't regulate letters or phone calls (not to mention in-person meetings) in the way that today's governments want to regulate the internet.
- verisimi 2y ago> Have governments become more authoritarian? They were always like this. 20 years of state funded education doesn't go into depth on this topic though. 1984 is a warning about a possible future tyranny, right?
- rustcleaner 2y agoWe must work to build an inter[dark]net which ideally fully divorces the user from the government and laws of the country the user is physically in (unless the user leaks his dox).
- nazka 2y agoI can't imagine the kind of people it will attract. 5% of sane people and 95% doing the most hideous things in mankind. Law and Govs are not so bad that we should get rid of it. They do add value to society compared to a fully lawless anarchic community/tools/etc. There is a place where freedom does have to stop and trespassing that frontier will have consequences. We don't need to through all our laws and Gov (especially in Western countries where really it's not so bad). But instead, we need better law, law enforcement, etc... The key part is it's up to us to fight for it.
- Aeolun 2y ago> They do add value to society compared to a fully lawless anarchic community/tools/etc. Think it depends on how large you want your communities to be. It should be fine until some 200 people.
- drowsspa 2y agoWe already have that. Why are you commenting here? In the end, the real service social networks offer is moderation.
- tim333 2y ago>Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away? Nah, this stuff has been going on forever. See the death of Socrates for example for 'corrupting the youth of Athens' by his speech. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates) Or more recent and a very good movie (imdb all time #61) is Lives of Others about trying to smuggle some info out of East Germany. And a million other examples. The internet has made things much easier as the tech is hard to censor.
- consf 2y ago[dead]