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The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

• cratermoon 5mo ago
  For more along this line of criticism, read Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech by Paulina Borsook
  • HotGarbage 5mo ago
    And Cyberlibertarianism by David Golumbia
• randallsquared 5mo ago
  > examples of the ideology that powered and continues to power tech Would that it were so. Semi-connected rant: What happened to so many startups to kill the mood was the pattern of: Do something technically legal (or technically illegal!) in a way that seems fixable at first, scale to huge size to get lawyers and lobbyists, pivot to strongly supporting government efforts to rein in "lawlessness" or "combat fraud" or "protect children", and then entrench oneself as the status quo while authoring or suggesting legislation to raise a moat against any competitors that might newly start up. PayPal, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and others tried this. Backpage and e-gold are unsuccessful examples of the same strategy.
  • oh_my_goodness 5mo ago
    The article walks through the logic. Briefly, wide adoption of the ideology expressed in that Davos declaration ("you can't make us obey laws if we're online") enabled the lawbreakers you mention (corporations violating the law while saying "you can't make us obey the laws if we're online").
  • bethekidyouwant 5mo ago
    I have trouble supporting the viewpoint that these things should’ve been “illegal” in the first place. The pendulum swings I suppose…
    • randallsquared 5mo ago
      If they should have been illegal, then we should oppose the actions, or if they shouldn't be, we should oppose the regulatory capture of making them illegal or wrapping them in red tape afterward. No need to agree on which are which to disapprove of the pattern.
    • danaris 5mo ago
      You don't think banks should have to follow rules about how they safeguard their depositors' money? (PayPal) You don't think hotels should have to follow rules about how they keep their properties, or require their tenants to follow local ordinances? (AirBnB) You don't think it should be illegal to be someone's sole employer, have full and total control over their schedule and duties, and yet treat them for legal and tax purposes as if they're a contractor? (Uber, et al) 'Cause if you're the type of person who believes that laws and regulations like these shouldn't exist, you are 100% part of the problem, and you are (much like the rest of us) only able to live the kind of life you do because of the existence of such laws and regulations, so your desire to remove them is just a matter of pulling up the ladder behind yourself writ large.
      • zozbot234 5mo ago
        PayPal is not a bank, AirBnb is not a hotel and plenty of drivers will freely serve rides from Uber, Lyft and a variety of other ride sharing services; they aren't "employees" of any single firm. (Of course they must serve a single ride at a time for sensible policy reasons, but aside from that they're quite free to pick their favorite ones.) These things actually make sense, even though they might not be what you're directly used to.
      • pas 5mo ago
        yet PayPal was (is still?) notorious for freezing accounts for monts without any communication, and since they had no branch offices, all anyone could do was wait or sue them (which is a very expensive form of waiting). Laws and regulations should exist to make efficient markets. But obviously there are serious problems today in housing and transportation (and banking too), and in large part due to very suboptimal laws and regulations.
  • lorecore 5mo ago
    Indeed, that phenomena is called regulatory capture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
• loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
  Dunno man, those things you say were “horrible” before the advent of mobile phones, media players and gps (not even the internet; usable incarnations of those inventions were entirely independent from the internet) - I was also there and it was _fine_.
  • pdonis 5mo ago
    I never had the problems with tapes that the author describes--but I still preferred CDs when they came out, and I greatly prefer having my entire music library on a single USB stick that I can just plug into my car. I was able to find my way around okay with paper maps--but I still prefer having GPS in my phone. My issue with those passages is that the author is conflating "digital" or "computers are involved" with "Internet". They're not the same.
    • loloquwowndueo 5mo ago
      I’m not saying the newer alternatives are not convenient! Just saying the old ones were OK; not the garment-rending disaster TFA purports them to be.
      • pdonis 5mo ago
        It would appear that they were a "garment-rending disaster" at least to some, like the author of the article.
    • ajross 5mo ago
      > having my entire music library on a single USB stick Worth pointing out how this too is an example of somewhat mistaken value analysis based on libertarian ideals. The market winning solution, of course, is to put THE entire music library, all of it, everyone's, in the cloud and get to it from any device anywhere. Obviously you perceive value in the local storage that the rest of the market does not. Which was one of the points of the linked article.
      • bryanrasmussen 5mo ago
• napierzaza 5mo ago
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• gchamonlive 5mo ago
  The free common individual can't really coexist with an economic doctrine that only accepts the pursuit of constant financial growth. Cyberlibertarianism as well as any form of self determination needs a regression to the mean, where we equalize everyone's expression and power. This, however, needs a different mindset, that which is not centered solely on the individual as it's own project of perpetual self improvement and denial of death, but one that realizes that true freedom lies in the common good. One such form of moral doctrine which as been transformed in a product we call the church is called the love of Christ, but it's also encoded in virtually every religion that preaches the care for the other, and also in the philosophy of care. Those are the foundations we need to build in order to truly decolonialize our cultural medium.
  • thinking_cactus 5mo ago
    I agree that if profits are always put about everything else, disaster for any society is essentially guaranteed. (I'll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader)
• SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
  > Democracy will flourish. The gap between rich and poor will close. The lion will lie down with the lamb, and the lamb will have a Pentium II. We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong. Not 'directionally wrong' or 'wrong in the details.' Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation. This is where I fundamentally don't align with the author's perspective. To me it seems obvious that this is exactly what happened. Democracy is by far the most common style of governance, extreme poverty is falling even as the population rises. A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to. How can you possibly look at the world as it exists today and not conclude that technology has radically changed our lives for the better? The author points towards real problems, certainly, but they're problems because they prevent otherwise great new things from being even more amazing. Would I prefer it if apps that give me interesting photos and videos on-demand had fewer dark patterns and better moderation policies? Yes, that'd be nice.
  • bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    > A substantial majority of all human beings have a magic screen in their pocket that lets them look up any information they're interested in or contact anyone on the planet who they'd like to talk to Or allow their bosses to contact them anywhere. Or allow corporations to know their location at all times and use that information for advertising. There have been tradeoffs to smartphones, and arguably they are worse for individuals than no-smartphone. They increase some convenience which doesn't necessarily translate to a better society or better life for individuals Take parking for instance. Every parking lot now has an app. So in order to park in many lots you need the app to pay with. But there isn't just one "parking" app, there are parking apps for whoever manages the lot. It's not an improvement at all over just paying at a kiosk, but it means the parking company doesn't have to pay someone to man the kiosk so it's better for them I'm just saying if you weigh the convenience of your smartphone versus the annoyance, I wouldn't be surprised if the annoyance won a lot of the time. I know it does for me.
• pstuart 5mo ago
  What? No mention of Web3? Hacks like Curtis Yarvin proclaim that code wranglers have solved all the problems and should be running the show because they made money flipping shiny shit to gullible buyers. Where is Web3 in solving all our problems? What does technofeudalism get the people?
  • Lerc 5mo ago
    I feel like using Curtis Yarvin as an argument against tech solutions is like using Terry Davis as an argument against Christianity.
    • pstuart 5mo ago
      No, I'm using Web3 as an argument against "tech solutions" and named Curtis Yarvin, a figurehead of technofeudalism, as a representative of technofeudalism.
      • Lerc 5mo ago
        Perhaps I should rephase then. I think Curtis Yarvin(And indeed Davis) are not a representative example of any particular idea. Pathologies perhaps, but while the symptoms of such things have enough similarities to identify them, they do not manifest in a way that can characterise a typical expression of the phenomenon. To do so can be dangerous, and result in management of a set of symptoms rather than the cause. Put into the context of Terry Davis. Terry was not racist because he was Christian, and neither is it true to say that people with schizophrenia will be racist. It was a complex and unique manifestation. I think Curtis Yarvin has a similar level of incomparability
        • pstuart 5mo ago
          I was commenting about "cyberlibertarianism" -- which is actively embraced and promoted by SV technocrats. Yarvin very much is a public figure in this area, but it's not about him specifically, it's the Web3 gang that wants to replace democracy with their shiny toys. Put it on the blockchain, problem solved!
• gverrilla 5mo ago
  This is analog to 'ecology without class struggle is gardening'.
• schoen 5mo ago
  I was a great admirer (and later friend) of Barlow, and I'm still very deeply influenced by the Declaration and many adjacent phenomena. I agree with some fraction of this post in terms of seeing many people shelving these principles when it gets inconvenient for them. In the past few months, I've been troubled by one specific part of the Declaration, in the final paragraph: > We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Specifically, I think the cyberspace civilization, to the extent that it exists, has been a failure lately on "humane" in the broad sense. The author of the linked post might say that this has to do with the need for moderation (indeed this is a big surprise from the 1996 point of view, as there were still unmoderated Usenet groups that people used regularly and enthusiastically, and spam was a recent invention). I think there are lots of other things going on there over and above the moderation issue, but one is that the early Internet culture was very self-selected for people who thought that the ability to talk to people and the ability to access information were morally virtuous. I was going to say that it was self-selected for intellectualism but I know that early Internet participants were often not particularly scholarly or intellectually sophisticated (some of our critics like Langdon Winner, quoted here, or Phil Agre, were way ahead on that score). So, I might say it was self-selected in terms of people who admired some forms of communicative institutions, maybe like people whose self-identity includes being proud of spending time in a library or a bookstore, or who join a debate club. (Both of those applied to me.) This is of course not quite the same thing as intellectual sophistication. People were mean to each other on the early Internet, but ... some kind of "but" belongs here. Maybe "but it was surprising, it wasn't what they expected"? "But it wasn't what they thought it was about"? Nowadays "humane" feels especially surprising as a description of an aspiration for online communications. It's kind of out the window and a lot of us find that our online interactions are much less humane that what we're used to offline. More demonization of outgroups, more fantasies of violence against them, more celebration of violence that actually occurs, more joy that one's opponents are suffering in some way. (I see this as almost fully general and not just a pathology of one community or ideology.) I'm troubled by this both because it's unpleasant and even scary how non-humane a lot of Internet communities and conversation can be, and because it's jarring to see Barlow predict that specific thing and get it wrong that way. Many other things Barlow was optimistic about seem to me to have actually come to pass, although imperfectly or sometimes corruptly, but not this one.
• linuxhansl 5mo ago
  > Wrong the way it would be wrong to predict that if you set your kitchen on fire, the result will be a renovation. This might be favorite metaphor ever, and one I'll quoting in the future! :) I think the author conflates social media with other inventions like a portable GPS device, an electronic map, a music player, or indeed a cell phone. As far as social media goes the author is (IMHO) spot on. You do not have to look far to see how that is at least harming democracy around the globe. For democracy to flourish you need reflective voters who can entertain multiple viewpoints and make informed decisions. That is what social media - in its most common current form - discourages and rather optimizes for attention-time (which is money). And of course (some) anonymity paired with global reach would not bring out the best in people. Anger and flames spread faster than conciliatory messages and get you more dopamine posting those. Just my $0.02.
  • boredhedgehog 5mo ago
    I stumbled over that metaphor. Isn't it true that a consequence of setting your kitchen on fire will be a new, better kitchen?
    • thinking_cactus 5mo ago
      Well, as a secondary consequence maybe, but then you could not set your kitchen on fire and still renovate it. Supposedly the first step you think of when renovating your kitchen isn't "Let me set my house on fire!"?
      • wallst07 5mo ago
        Two ways to think of this: 1) Sometimes a incident is the best way to get a project done. Working in FAANG I've seen a project get done in 1 day during an outage that was projected to take MONTHS during normal business. 2) Sometimes that renovation would never happen due to reasons. Sometimes you need some kindle to start the fire [pun intended].
    • pdonis 5mo ago
      As long as you can convince your insurance company that you didn't do it on purpose to get a renovation, I guess. :-)
• nothinkjustai 5mo ago
  > The cyberlibertarians wanted you to believe that radical individualism plus deregulated capitalism plus inevitable technology would produce communitarian utopia. This is, on its face, insane. It is the economic equivalent of claiming that if everyone punches each other really hard, eventually we'll all be hugging. The alternative, of course, is that a nanny state + highly regulated tech + inevitable technology leads to exactly the outcomes we have now. I’d prefer something else personally.
  • mikem170 5mo ago
    What about radical individualism + regulated tech - inevitable technology? I don't see anything wrong with individuals who by consensus choose to regulate "inevitable" technology. Technology is not a person, and we don't need to make ourselves subservient to it. I'm thinking of things like liability as a publisher for algorithmic feeds, anti-trust enforcement against companies competing unfairly, mandates for inter-operability to avoid user lock-in, limitations on surveillance capitalism, protections for personal data, maybe also regulating things like advertising, campaigning, fake news, etc.
    • nothinkjustai 5mo ago
      “Individuals by consensus” feels oxymoronic to me. If that’s a description of the outcome, it’s possible today! Individuals can chose not to use a technology and if enough do so to form a consensus, they may be able to impose constraints on the technology akin to regulation. However anything else would require coercive power structures which go against the idea of radical individualism.
      • mikem170 5mo ago
        Big tech is a coercive power. They are cooperating with the government to control the population. Doesn't that worry you? Don't you think there should be limits, beside profitability? I think of it as flaws in our system that need to be patched. The masses are manipulated by their algorithms. Those who would protest are surveilled by them. The rich seem to be running everything to their advantage. The rugged individualist is running out of space.
• georgehotz 5mo ago
  Maybe it's just my contrarian nature, but this sells me on cyberlibertarianism. There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server, downloading free software to run it, getting your friends to view it, building encrypted communication apps that no government can crack, pirating any piece of content in the world, etc... A libertarian society won't coddle you, and there's psychopaths like Meta who show up in the space and convince a lot of people to follow them. Of course those people suck, but the solution isn't government. It's to stay strong, help your friends be strong, and accept that not everyone will make it. That has always been the flip side of freedom. The Internet, and now AI, delivered so many of the dreams of my childhood. It is a mostly free society, for better or worse. I'm hoping that intelligence remains distributed, enshittification stops when my agent deals with it for me, and the physical world remains as free as it is. But these aren't things that would be changed with new governance of cyberspace, these are features of the optimization landscape of reality and technological progress. Do we live in the best possible world, of course not. But this one is pretty good, and it's easy to imagine non libertarian ones that are so much worse. I feel a huge debt to the people who designed the Internet with the foresight that they did, the capture exists at a psychological layer, not a physical one.
  • vrganj 5mo ago
    > Of course those people suck, but the solution isn't government. Why? That seems like a big assertion to make in a side sentence without any supporting argument.
    • slopinthebag 5mo ago
      Well, governments are coercive forces with a total monopoly on the legal system and the use of violence. Perhaps monopolies being bad is reason enough? There are the hundreds of millions (billions?) of people murdered by governments throughout history, including the many atrocities modern governments are committing today, which is almost surely reason enough. And then there are the philosophical arguments against political authority, called philosophical anarchism, which can be quite convincing. It seems the onus is on the other side to justify the state, and that we should't be trying to find alternative solutions to the problems it attempts to solve.
• bayleev 5mo ago
  A good example of this is the mythological way people think often about cryptography imo, as a guarantor of an individual's privacy against the prying eyes of the state, etc. But the reality is that your usual cryptographic circuit (TLS connection) is just that, a circuit, a cordoning of space off for an interaction between two or more parties. The interaction inside that circuit can be very highly exploitative indeed, i.e., you can now apply for payday loans, gamble, ingest anti-human propaganda online, without anyone around you knowing anything about it. Which is not to say that cryptographic technology might not broadly be a positive but it's inane to think that all social problems could continually be solved with more code and more cryptography. It has arguably been a key driver of enhanced financialization and militarization of daily life in its current iteration.
  • skinfaxi 5mo ago
    The ability to keep secrets is a fundamental human right. Encryption is a technical protection against that violation, separate from legal consequences. Encryption means I can keep my secrets even if the government locks me up until I reveal the password. I don't see how it is a key driver of militarization and enhanced financialization.
    • bayleev 5mo ago
      In the above conceptualization, the protection of the often trivial secrets of individuals is often used as a kind of moral and informational camouflage for the actual re-orientation of power around secrets that really matter, i.e., bank account balances, account numbers, insider trading tips, etc. Hence why Apple markets their devices as protecting a fairly nebulous notion of privacy, it's not wrong, but it's not the most interesting part of what happens.
      • asymmetric 5mo ago
        What is the most interesting part of what happens? I find your line of thought interesting but I’m not sure where you’re leading it.
• tolerance 5mo ago
  I get that the information produced and consumed online does has a profound effect on how we think. But right now I need to point out a steady gripe of mine that may or may not be tangential to the author's points depending on how you view things. There is something unsettling about how the disjunctive experience that digital media environments produce is romantically portrayed. I think we need to get over the concept of things like "cyberspace". There are no corners of the internet that you "inhabit". "Digital gardening" can go too. Media/information environments shouldn't be thought of in the same way that physical ones are. I don't know why I feel this way. At least I can't form a strong argument to support why...yet. But I think this way of thinking is psychologically detrimental. Go debate a dualist and let me know how it goes. "Saving the internet" may require that we adopt a realist perspective on what the internet is. You are exchanging data. There's more to it, I'm sure, and the effect of this exchange shouldn't be taken for granted. This is an over simplification, but I think it's a start. I mean...Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Palantir, Flock are information technology companies, right? I can get a little obtuse and say that this is the case for most companies involved in the transfer of content of all kinds from one place to another. Tech companies are lawnmowers and the internet is not where your lawn is. Don't expect either to help you touch or cut your grass.
  • pdonis 5mo ago
    > Media/information environments shouldn't be thought of in the same way that physical ones are. I don't know why I feel this way. Maybe because media/information environments aren't the same as physical environments? The word "environment" might be the root issue here. Using digital tools to connect with other people isn't the same thing as treating your digital tools as an "environment" that takes the place of the physical world. The former is very useful and can often be vital. The latter, I think, is where problems can occur.
    • tolerance 5mo ago
      Pardon the melodrama. This is a tough conceptual block to chip away at. HCI research and any tentative breakthroughs in AR/VR might not lend any favors to convince people that digital environments are not ideal surrogates for the real world, or as complimentary to the world in the way that I think more even-keeled people would like to believe. The same goes for technologically-driven existential malaise. And people who refer to their Obsidian vaults and collections of linked Org-mode files as their "second brains". If you've debated any dualists please share your notes, win or loss.
• thomastjeffery 5mo ago
  The problem with [conservative] libertarians is that they are half anarchists. They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it. If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations. This is where most people, including the author, present liberalism as the solution. Free market + democratic regulation is a great way to manage an economy; but is it really a good way to manage the rest of society? The article brings up copyright without exploring the idea at all. I think this is the greatest mistake of all. Copyright is what forces every facet of society to participate in a capitalist market. Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires. Wouldn't that be nice? Next, we wouldn't be structuring all human interactions with corporate ad platforms. There seems to be a lot of unexplored opportunity there. Even more exciting, moderators would suddenly have all the power that they need to manage the responsibility they are given. No more begging to reddit admins! No more fighting automated censorship! Doesn't that sound good? It boggles my mind how people from nearly every political perspective have accepted copyright as the one perfect inarguable virtue. Even the cyberlibertarians op argues with are only willing to concede copyright with the promise of a magical free market replacement! Now's as good a time as ever to think about it.
  • slopinthebag 5mo ago
    > They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it. Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work. To a right anarchist or libertarian, "Free market absolution" is not an ideology or a goal, it's just the result of private property rights + freedom of association. Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work. I would assume that left leaning libertarians and social anarchists would also similarly agree that copyright is nonsense but I'm not so sure - the time I spent in those communities have me wondering if they even hate authority and hierarchy, or if they simply desire their own forms of it. Many indeed defend copyright.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• Lerc 5mo ago
  I think this article touches upon something quite apparent in this modern age. Talking to people with different opinions is considered tantamount to joining them. It is much better to point the finger of blame rather than suggest a way forward. The best way to criticise someone's argument is to take their words, explain what they really meant by that in a way that supports your argument, making the counterargument ridiculously easy. What I don't understand is that how people have come to believe that arguing for the things that corporate interests fought for represents standing against those interests. The thing that has it in a nutshell was this line >The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly? This is always the move. The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation. Cumbersome to everyone without a battery of lawyers. Copyright law has only become more powerful, and the patent process has become more a game of who can spend the most in court on this meritless claim. Disney didn't spend all those lobbying dollars extending copyright out of concern for the welfare of the people. They did it because they wanted to buy and own ideas and keep them for themselves for as long as possible. I am all for robust well enforced regulation to help and protect people. I thing laws should be in the interest of society and the welfare of everyone more than it should for individuals. I don't think anyone advocating for personal freedoms is necessarily arguing against the interests of the group. There are people out there suggesting ways to correct the system through many many boring but required changes, some of them quite little, some of them large, one of the large ones is getting money out of politics. I wonder if John Perry Barlow advocated for electoral reform to reign in lobbying? Because it didn't happen, and quite frankly arguing about the world that came to pass without that happening isn't going to represent anyone's plans for the future no matter So what do we want to build? How should the better world be. Don't frame it as Not that!. Do you want the Revolution and Reign of Terror or the Declaration of Independence and a Constitution? You can fight to build something better, don't confuse fighting to tear down as the same thing because you are angry and fighting about it makes you feel good about that. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government. - John Perry Barlow
• janpeuker 5mo ago
  Excellent text and Winner's "Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community" is a milestone. Further reading: 1) Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. ‘The Californian Ideology’. Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72. 2) Harvey, David. Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005. 3) Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006. 4) Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013. 5) Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. The Wellek Library Lectures. Columbia University Press, 2019. 6) Greer, Tanner. ‘The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite’. The Scholar’s Stage, 21 August 2024. https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-paideia-of-the-american-tech-elite/ https://scholars-stage.org/the-silicon-valley-canon-on-the-p.... 7) Stevens, Marthe, Steven R. Kraaijeveld, and Tamar Sharon. ‘Sphere Transgressions: Reflecting on the Risks of Big Tech Expansionism’. Information, Communication & Society 27, no. 15 (2024): 2587–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2353782. 8) Lewis, Becca. ‘“Headed for Technofascism”: The Rightwing Roots of Silicon Valley’. Technology. The Guardian (London), 29 January 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jan/29/silicon-valley-rightwing-technofascism https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/j.... 9) Bria, Francesca, and José Bautista. ‘The Authoritarian Stack’. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Future of Work, 8 November 2025. https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/ https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/. 10) Durand, Cédric, Morozov, Evgeny, and Watkins, Susan. ‘How Big Tech Became Part of the State’. Jacobin, 24 November 2025. 11) Spiers, Elizabeth. ‘The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites’. Elizabeth Spiers, 1 April 2026. https://www.elizabethspiers.com/the-anti-intellectualism-of-silicon-valley-elites/ https://www.elizabethspiers.com/the-anti-intellectualism-of-....
• fukinstupid 5mo ago
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• killretards 5mo ago
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  • nothinkjustai 5mo ago
    It’s possible for something to be both highly regulated and bad. Regulation is not a silver bullet.
  • nephihaha 5mo ago
    Maybe the regulations are there to protect large corporations and the government but not the rest of us? I hate the way politics is presented as a binary choice between getting controlled by big business or big government (or a combination of the two).
• bluegatty 5mo ago
  Yes, and this is the paradox right at the heart of 'Hacker' in 'Hacker News' aka an arbitrary usurping of established norms - notably without moral impetus. Institutionalists view the very word 'Hacker' as 'Wrong' because they're essentially 'Rule Breakers'. But sometimes rules are bad, and need to be broken. Libertarians view rules as constraints, so why not break them? More often than not, rules are there fore a reason. (Obviously it's complicated) There's a huge grey area there but what is not grey ... is the issue of the 'morally neutral' impetus that the author is talking about - the seed of which is right at the root of 'Hacker'. YC does not say 'build something useful and beneficial' - they say 'build something useful'. Aka no moral impetus towards the greater good. 'Build a gear that is useful to other gears, without concern for what the gears are actually doing'. It seems benign when there's no power involved - aka startups. But it's not benign when there's huge concentration of power. That system leads to endemic competition - which - at the highest levels is economic warfare, or even actual warfare. There is no flattening in these systems - those things end up in Feudal Power Structures - everyone 'somewhere on the pyramid'. If you're 'under Musk' right now - anywhere (and that includes literally almost every VC for whom it's too risky to say anything critical, or so many people in finance tangentially related to $1.5T IPO, or business etc) - you dare not speak out against him. That's the opposite of 'flat or decentralized' - it's just power without democratic impetus, techno authoritarianism, which is paradoxically the thing they seem to lament.
  • iamnothere 5mo ago
    Hacking in its original sense is not about rule breaking (except maybe implied rules). It’s about finding ways around limitations. This could be finding unusual routes through a campus, as when the term was invented, or altering software to work the way you wanted it to. Often the only limits to using a tool the way you want to use it are in your mind. Hacking was distinct from phreaking (illegal use of the phone system/theft of services) and cracking (breaking copy protection). It’s only later that people started using “hacking” to be synonymous with these terms as well as attacking systems, stealing passwords, etc. “Hacking” in its original sense is a good thing. It’s applied creativity, nothing wrong with that. I think that maybe you understand this because you refer to hacking as breaking norms. The thing is, uncodified norms in a society are often tools of the powerful. “You violated the norm!” while the norm is flexible is a great way to shut down any and all competition. Especially when wielded by those with the resources to shape the media. Because of this, norms that aren’t codified will eventually be broken in a complex society. They don’t have to be codified by law, many norms in Japan for instance are defined by what it is to “be Japanese”. (But they are an ethnically homogenous society, so they are able to pull this off.) Hackers are just ahead of the curve.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• mystraline 5mo ago
  Libertarianism sounded great. Its all about freedom, and the right to do with yourself what you want. And who doesnt want that? But they also wanted that freedom for their property and money. And if youre willing to skirt or plainly violate the laws, you can make bank. And then as a company, you can basically bribe politicians and do all these horrible things. The end result of libertarianism is simple: He who has the gold makes the rule. Dont like your pay? Fuck you. Quit. Dont like the conditions? Fuck you. Die. Dont like political manipulation? Too fucking bad. You have no choice. Dont like policies at mega-internet corp (meta, alphabet, microsoft)? Too bad, we'll erase you. Libertarianism creates semi-autonomous enclaves of technofeudalism. And their power is enforced by non-internet mundane government laws, like the DMCA. You violate a company, and they delete you. You violate government law, and they arrest or kill you. Of course its in line of duty, or defense of officer - all the eupamisms. But long story short, I do not trust libertarians in any way. They do indeed want freedom to control everyone else.
  • nephihaha 5mo ago
    Is technofeudalism even a thing? Yanis Varoufakis goes on about it (despite being a keen WEF collaborator)... But it seems to me that in mediaeval feudalism that the lords needed the peasants downstream to produce food and military units. In the technocratic system we are heading towards, the lower classes (us) will be needed for labour and military purposes even less, thanks to automation etc. They will have less and less need for our income since they will have automated investments too. The one similarity to feudalism will be an information caste to make sure we tow the line but even that can be automated. Not an attractive situation but not a very feudal one.
    • fragmede 5mo ago
      Not for military purposes, but if you're an employee of eg Google, life is pretty good. Free food, spacious offices, great health insurance; all sorts of perks. All at the behest of Lord Sundar.
      • mystraline 5mo ago
• scuff3d 5mo ago
  You read an article like this, and despite some flaws, it restores your faith in humanity a little bit. Maybe I'm not the only one looking at the shitshow in horror. Then you come to the comment section and are immediately reminded why the whole god damn world has lost its mind.
  • armchairhacker 5mo ago
    What are some examples of bad comments and how do they contradict the article?
    • scuff3d 5mo ago
      Three out of four of the top comments don't even directly engage with the point of the article. They're focusing on nitpicking elements of it or just going off on a tangent only somewhat related.
      • a_victorp 5mo ago
        Thank you! I was trying to find someone pointing this out
      • flomo 5mo ago
        Karmawhore strategy. F5 on /new. Scan the article and then race to object to some minor sentence. Upvotes mean you are a smart lil guy. Happens frequently.
• jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
  I love this. The historical connection, to what all happened, what was, just feels further & further away. This review of where we were feels so important. Generally I really like & think there's so much sensible here. I do really want to hope eventually we get more personal social, that we do start having more humane social. We all have done so little to make opportunities, being so bound to Big Social, Big Tech, and it feels like that can't endure forever. But it's so far off and speculative, such a far hope, hoping for this post-mechanized post-massified post-dark forest social. On the IP issue, I do have a lot more sympathy for the Magna Carta here than is given: > If this analysis is correct, copyright and patent protection of knowledge (or at least many forms of it) may no longer be unnecessary. In fact, the marketplace may already be creating vehicles to compensate creators of customized knowledge outside the cumbersome copyright/patent process And Mat's retort: > The cumbersome copyright/patent process. Cumbersome to whom, exactly? It just seems radiantly abundantly clear that IP is a terrible shit show. There's still endless legal lawfare over h.264. New jerkward patent pools spring up to try to harass and harrie av1 and vp9. This Trying to just send video around is inescapably miserable, with the worst forces from every dark corner spring up constantly, to dog humanity from every attempting to make a basic common good available. It's constant IP terrorism.
• jancsika 5mo ago
  > Once when driving from Michigan to Florida I got so lost in the middle of the night in Kentucky that I had to pull over to sleep and wait for the sun so I could figure out where I was. Not sure what's going on here, but this reads like 90s cosplay. First off, GPS-guided trips had not yet eroded people's sense of direction because they did not yet exist. Second of all, the (odd-numbered) interstate(s) that flow from Michigan to Florida are large and feature many prominently-placed, large signs with large, readable fonts. Even if you exit to a state road, those roads are littered with interstate signs for dozens of miles that will direct you back to the interstate, using words like "North" and "South" which are displayed in large bold lettering. It's one thing to ignore all those signs because the voice in your Iphone is actively telling you a different thing. It's quite another for those signs and your paper map to be your only known sources of truth, and to steadfastly ignore all of them until you have to pull over and go to sleep. In short, OP had an impressive lack of situational awareness/direction and is trying to play it off as a common burden of the olden times. It wasn't. Edit for the "directionless" iphone-directed youngsters: * Signs on the interstate in the 90s came with industrial lighting, as they do today. You can read them in the middle of the night * Signs on state/county/municipal roads were painted to be highly readable even with the comparatively puny headlight strength of the 1990s * This was certainly before the opioid epidemic and probably also before the heyday of meth. So shirtless guy was probably just a shirtless Kentuckian checking if OP was OK.
  • chasd00 5mo ago
    Also, you have a compass. Just drive South until you reach the Gulf of Mexico, then drive East until you reach the Atlantic ocean, then drive South until you reach where you're going ( it will be daylight by then ). /edit i guess it could be possible to drive South and end up in key west but it will be daylight long before you run out of road.
    • pdonis 5mo ago
      > i guess it could be possible to drive South and end up in key west Your compass would be telling you you were going west well before you got to Key West. :-)
• the_af 5mo ago
  I'm impressed by this article. Well written, cogent, and it matches the reality I perceive. I can't imagine it will be well received here in HN, where I imagine most regulars will side with Barlow, but if it reaches at least some of them (I know skeptics about cyberlibertarianism exist even here), I'll be glad.
• mindslight 5mo ago
  As someone for whom the Declaration strongly resonated with, and still does, I think this is the crux of how things end(ed) up going sideways: > Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the activities of freedom seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit seeking business firms. (Winner) This is a core American delusion that runs much deeper than merely the Web or the Internet. It's even been legally codified in things like Citizens United - a fallacy that large companies are merely groups of individuals. It's basically the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" dynamic applied to activities rather than money. In reality, large companies are top-down authoritarian structures where most of the individual humans involved have their own individual will suppressed. Rather they are following direction from above, and any individualist choices they are allowed are within that context. If they go against the direction/orders too much, they will simply be replaced with a different more obedient cog (this is something so-called "right libertarianism" directly whitewashes by rejecting analysis of most forms of power dynamics aka coercion). I do not think it is inconsistent to still believe in those individualist ideas applied to individuals, while also viewing Big Tech - with its many qualities of actually being government - as something whose at-scale "policies" should be subject to democratic accountability. But to do that, meaning to achieve reform without throwing out the whole idea of individual freedom in the online world, requires us to openly reject that corpo fallacy whereby individuals empathize with billion dollar corporations! But of course from an American perspective this is all kind of moot for the next few years at least as the main support behind the current regime is exactly Big Tech looking to head off any sort of de jure regulation. And so we must not be tempted by their political calls that might claim to address these problems, as this regime's bread and butter is using very real frustrations as the impetus to implement fake solutions that perpetuate the problems while setting themselves up as lucrative speed bumps (eg look at the shakedown currently happening to mere wifi routers). Which brings us back to why that individualist message is so powerful, despite how it ends up going sideways - because when traditional democratic accountability has been hopelessly neutralized, self-help is the only thing people have left.
• miki123211 5mo ago
  While I don't necessarily agree that cyberspace should have no regulations, the way we think about regulating cyberspace must be different from the way we think about regulating anything else, because there's no specific place where an event happens. In the traditional 18th-century nation state model, events always happen somewhere, and it's the government with jurisdiction over that piece of land which decides whether those events are legal or not.If they want those events to stop, they use their monopoly on violence in that place to arrest you and make you stop. This basically doesn't work in cyberspace. You can't steal candy from a store in Romania without physically being in Romania. This gives Romanian authorities the ability to arrest anybody who steals candy from Romanian candy stores, which makes their anti-theft law enforceable. In cyberspace, things are not so simple. If a German employee of a company incorporated in Delaware with servers in Northern Virginia uses company resources to DeDoS a Slovenian competitor, which prison should they rot in? Who should set the sentence? There's no answer here without unacceptable tradeoffs. This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger with crypto, AI and drones. It's already possible for. Russian to coordinate a network of American spies, paying handsomely for their service, without ever falling in reach of American law enforcement. With drones, they'll soon be able to do the spying (or the assassinations) themselves. I would be extremely surprised if we don't see a terrorist attack in the next 10 years where the culprits have never set foot in the country the attack happens in.
  • nathan_compton 5mo ago
    Are the trade-offs really unacceptable? Like why can't we just build treaties and international accords and just like do what humans have always done forever, and muddle through?
• Animats 5mo ago
  They simply scaled until their principles became inconvenient, and then they stopped mentioning them. That's Google and "Don't be Evil".
• smitty1e 5mo ago
  > Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented. Sea Story: - Background: US Navy ships go alonside an oiler to refuel and hold a course/speed at restricted maneuvering for a while. Hours, even. After this nerve-wracking time period, when breaks away from the oiler, then she comes up to flank three and plays a breakaway song over loudspeakers, the 1MC. Totally not meant for music, but that's not the point. - Story: the CO always wanted "Lowrider", by War, which is an excellent cut, but was well past cliché after so many iterations. The Messenger of the Watch had a boom box, a tape, and the 1MC microphone for the task. Only, this time, the tape was flipped. Dude hit PLAY on the "Dazed and Confused" soundtrack, and Ted Nugent announced that he had everyone in a stranglehold. The Old Man was apoplectic, and the cassette was quickly flipped and we got on with life. Worst way to listen to music, indeed.
• Animats 5mo ago
  In the print era, distribution was the bottleneck. The sheer amount of plant needed to produce a book or newspaper was impressive. The equipment needed for TV broadcasting was huge and expensive. In the high-speed Internet era, attention is the bottleneck. There's far more content than anyone can absorb. At last, anyone can talk. Now it's all about finding people to listen. The implications of this shift were not forseen.
• malwrar 5mo ago
  It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. In the background, the wealthy and powerful disregard all of this and seem to do whatever they want, and the little guy looks at millions of dollars in legal costs to defend themselves in either case. Costs that are increasingly a rounding error to their opposition as they continue to grow by exploiting a broken system, and the “little guy” now includes whole industries. I feel like adversarial interoperability more than free market capitalism should have been the death knell for most of the negatives highlighted in this post. Everyone is still so determined to make money from mere ideas however that we still use 1700s law designed to protect book publishers to enable the existence of “businesses” so warped in valuation that they are now trillion dollar entities yet always face the existential threat of copy+paste. What if the more profound truth is that tech is beneficial to humanity but inherently worthless to sell, and that our present woe’s shape is determined by the antiquated institutions built service this illusion of value? In an inevitable future age of generative AI as an accessible technology, as opposed to a business model with a moat, what even is our goal for such institutions? What sorts of creativity do we want motivate, and what meaningful regulatory constraints even are there to begin with? I hope we figure it out soon, because IP will be impossible to enforce post-deglobalization in any case.
  • krapp 5mo ago
    >It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. That isn't a change. Both claims are true.
    • malwrar 5mo ago
      I agree. My point in short is that we seem to reflexively frame right and wrong on an axis defined by copyright, and somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that the law itself is used much differently than we might otherwise want. Technolibertarians confuse free market capitalism via copyright-enabled businesses as a viable strategy for individual freedom, and we find with time that only bastards win in a competition with loose rules and high stakes. Those concerned for the continued flourishing of human creativity in the face of LLMs confuse copyright as a means for small creators to have some ownership over their work, when it actually just seems to be a cudgel that can only be wielded by the wealthiest. Same losing fight, different flavor. I ask: why do we continue to allow “ownership of ideas” to underlie the moral basis of our conversations to begin with?
• trizuz 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• thinking_cactus 5mo ago
  Irrespective of anything else, I think libertarians of any kind have to contend with that Corporations can be extremely powerful entities that can be just as bad as governments. At the very least, setting their sights on governments alone seems terribly inconsistent and incorrect. In no small part because megacorps can yield governments in their favor, and by the point they're extremely powerful megacorps, the libertarian calls against regulation (yielded by megacorps against interests of the population) tend to fail. But it's not just regulation megacorps can use, the most frequent is just various forms of capturing and dominating a market, I guess. For example, Google is on the process of deciding or severely restricting independent developers on Android. I think by reasonable interpretation, user freedom is being severely restricted. But most people have little recourse, it's either Android or iOS (and by now both are similarly bad in different ways). There are some alternative OSes and devices, but there's a significant chance you may rely on some real world service that needs one of the two major ones. Without trying to overgeneralize everything, in this particular example I don't see how things could change without regulation. (and, if you will, in that case you can generalize to the implication that regulation isn't necessarily always bad) --- I think the lesson to take isn't that the cyberlibertarians were 100% wrong and we need maximum government control and surveillance over the internet. The world tends to be complex and most simple stories we come up with (which are the ones that tend to sound good on our ears and be most comfortable) tend to be wrong in various ways. The world demands, at least, flexibility from ourselves. Sure, be inspired by one idea or manifesto or another, but don't follow it blindly always. A relative freedom of communication and widespread access to information arguably is pretty good for civilization. When you can talk and relate to people from allover, the justification for war seem increasingly flimsy. But various forms of regulation preventing single megacorps from dominating the global internet (or simply local wired internet access in your region), can be important. Maybe we need to protect more discourse against bad actors and the incoming flood of LLM-generated, possibly propaganda-fed content. Keep an open mind. Whatever decisions we make we can walk back and change course. The fundamental principle isn't this or that ideological current, but that people are living good lives. Happy, in peace, full of awesome possibilities. As someone wiser has once said, remember your humanity and forget the rest! :)
  • tkel 5mo ago
• armchairhacker 5mo ago
  The author argues for regulations, but the reason the internet today is anticompetitive is because of anti-circumvention regulations. The ideal world would have digital regulations, but a world with no digital regulations would be better than today's. And how would you install your regulations? Right now, both the average voter and oligarch prefers centralized platforms.
• casey2 5mo ago
  On the other side, the way people act towards websites and companies has validate most of Ayn Rand's books. If you are one of the many people railing against YouTube or Facebook I encourage you to leave the platform and go build your own site. It's frankly a miracle that these sites can turn the worthless noise of a crowd into profit, and all this complaining amounts to some private service not being good enough for your taste. Libertarianism is still the correct philosophy for tech. Be the prime mover, don't be the entitled dude asking to be catered to among a billion other entitled dudes. That is the only losing game, and that is why it feels like the product is getting worse. It's because you aren't the target audience anymore. So weep your tears of betrayal, once; then go and build. We have the "hindsight" of every country that regulated, they have no relevant technological industry to speak of. Why point to one of the few countries that made it and say "hmm the bonzai tree could look a bit better if we chopped the trunk before it grew" However you dress it up it's always just the government pointing a gun at the head of a builder of a prime mover and saying don't move. That will never result in progress. Sometimes the prime mover wins all the chips due to unfair tax policy (what we saw from 2000-2018/2026), just another government failure in a long list of government failures.
• artyom 5mo ago
  Look, I agree with a good part of this article. I also agree that the whole "unregulated internet" is terrible for humankind in general. Crypto is a scam. Meta should be, plain and simple, shut down. Twitter is a madhouse. The list is endless. However, every single time I feel like stricter regulation should be in place, a congressman speaks about "servers"... and yeah, maybe not.
  • pocksuppet 5mo ago
    The EU seems to have a different take. As I understand it, regulations are much more malleable in Europe. When problems arise, regulations are put in place. When regulations are problems... it takes a lot longer to remove them, but can still happen eventually. Nothing like the USian deadlock system. And when they do write them, it's always about general principles. The GDPR doesn't speak of cookie consent banners, instead it speaks of personal data and data controllers and data processors and the reasons you may control or process personal data, one of which is consent, so of course the industry made it as obnoxious as possible. There are probably places that are doing even better than Europe.
    • nozzlegear 5mo ago
      > USian American. Please avoid the childish term "USian" unless you're going to commit to calling people from South Africa "SAian" too.
      • a_victorp 5mo ago
        To be fair, "american" could refer to anything made in the American continent (North, Central and South America)
        • bentley 5mo ago
          In some languages, but not really in English. Convention in the cultures of the Anglosphere is that the world comprises seven continents, and the Americas comprise two of them, not one. And in English, both formal and informal, “American” is generally considered the demonym of the United States of America, not the Americas. Although I call myself estadounidense in Spanish (an odd term—why don’t people from Estados Unidos Mexicanos count?), the equivalent English term is “American,” not “United Statesian.”
• cmrdporcupine 5mo ago
  "We also have the advantage of hindsight and know, without question, that all of these predicted outcomes were wrong." I mean and others were swimming around in the same IRC, Usenet, and LambdaMOO etc soup in the early 90s, too, and in the mid 90s I was already screaming about what bullshit techno-libertarian capitalism was, but OK. I didn't live in the Bay Area, I guess I just never caught the disease. My strident same-ish topic text from the same period back then that I waved annoyingly around, instead, was "The Californian Ideology": https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_Andy_1996_The_Californian_Ideology.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_An... That one has aged a hell of a lot better. And argues exactly the opposite positions on just about everything. God it feels prophetic now.
• 01100011 5mo ago
  There's a strong overlap between technopositivists who view the world through a very narrow lens of the problems they are trying to solve and libertarians who also have a very narrow view based on problems they are trying to solve(taxation, fettered liberty, gov waste, etc). I don't want to say it's autism, but they both seem to stem from a very low-dimensional understanding of the world. I get it, having been in both camps in the 90s/early 2000s. I got a reminder of it the other day when I saw Benn Jordan pimping anarchism on his YouTube channel. It reminds me of how I thought of the world as a teenager before I understood the nuances and trade-offs of reality. It's really hard for me to understand an adult who thinks that way. Anarchism and to some degree libertarianism are both heavily tilted towards the strong and any sort of lack of government authority and coercion will soon be replaced with private entities acting far worse. I wish it were not that way, but that is the universe we find ourselves in.
  • sph 5mo ago
    You are partly right but also prey to the same issue: yes, most technopositivists lack broad enough knowledge to even conceive that technology can be a net negative for society (usually a lack of foundation in humanities, a common issue in CS educated people) Yet your comment has a naive dismissal of anarchism as ‘teenage politics’ which betray a lack of understanding the rich history and meaning behind anarchism, which is common these days. Dismissing it wholesale is like dismissing physics because you think string theory is silly.
• JKCalhoun 5mo ago
  Also old enough to have been pre-internet: > Paper maps were absolutely horrible… No, and still not horrible. I jeep a trucker's atlas in my van for road trips. Siri and Google Maps (Gigi, we call her) don't seem to realize I want to stay on interstates making distance. Wandering some two-lane country road diagonally through Kansas might save me 10 minutes but having oncoming traffic and the possibility of a rock into the windshield (or worse)—not worth it. I plan my routes with the paper map. > In practice it was mostly an annoying game of attempting to guess where people were. You'd call their job, they had left. You'd call their house… That does not ring a bell at all with me. Sure, I'd call and someone wasn't home, but that was the end of it. If someone else answered, it was "Hey, have them give me a call…" And of course answering machines became a thing… You know, there was just generally less of an urgency to get a hold of someone then. And you know what sucks now? Someone able to get a hold of you whenever, wherever. (Unless I go out of my way to shut off my device.) I used to laugh at a family member and spouse. They were early mobile phone adopters and I watched them call one another constantly with, "When are you going to be home?" I finally commented, "You know what would have happened if you had not called? They would have just shown up in 10 minutes or whatever." Urgency, expectations… too high these days. > Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented. Except for creating portable playlists, sure. Anyway. <rant off>
  • washingupliquid 5mo ago
    I've stopped submitting quality reports to Apple Maps because they're all met with "while we couldn't make the change you suggested, we hope you continue to waste your time reporting these". The issues are egregious too, like blatantly incorrect lane guidance that would send you in the wrong direction, or diverting me off a highway onto an unmarked, narrow country road that no one with any knowledge of the local roads would take ever. Though I'm confident whatever BPO slaves they have processing reports 5000 miles away have a better understanding of the roads than I, as they are wholly incapable of even using Google Street View to confirm details (probably by policy) so they always demand I provide a photo or video a month after the fact. Because when you're lost in the middle of nowhere your first thought should be "Let's backtrack so I can grab some pictures for Apple".
• JKCalhoun 5mo ago
  > Radical individualism I grew up in the U.S. and was programmed apparently to think of this as a virtue. (Rugged individualism was an early variant.) As I have become older, visited other countries, I see how selfish that is. I put community above individualism now. > Free-market absolutism Yeah, never been on board with that one. I don't think I've ever been a Libertarian of any stripe. And probably even less so as I get older.
• gardnr 5mo ago
  I have a suspicion most Libertarians are actually something else but who haven't realized it yet. When you really dig into it: idea of private property (as in owning land and charging people rent for using it) is akin to slavery (owning people and extracting labor from them). The pre-colonial indigenous structures of managing societies were much more aligned with my internal values but they are poorly defined in modern vernacular and we don't have a good "common vocabulary" to talk about how we might want to do things in a different way.
  • GaryBluto 5mo ago
    > idea of private property (as in owning land and charging people rent for using it) is akin to slavery (owning people and extracting labor from them) Utter nonsense. Do you think eating fruit is akin to cannibalism because they both involve the consumption of something?
• stogot 5mo ago
  > I was young enough that I also thought "Snow Crash" was a serious political document. Is snow crash worth reading in 2026? I bought it forever ago and it’s sitting in my shelf
  • booleandilemma 5mo ago
    Of course it is.
  • widowlark 5mo ago
    not only is it absolutely worth reading, but the author belittling it's political commentary is foolish and incorrect.
• zeckalpha 5mo ago
  Note that at least Negroponte (mentioned in the article once) also had Epstein ties. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joi-ito-nicholas-negroponte-funding-sex-abuse/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/09/05/133159/mit-media...
• erelong 5mo ago
  A lot of the problems have stemmed actually from a lack of freedom, not too much of it (all of the issues created by the "fantasy of cyberauthoritarianism", rather)
• avazhi 5mo ago
  Duggan is all over the place with this one. We even have some hints it’s AI-Slop by the end. Not sure what to tell this guy other than that there’s a universe where parents parent better (ie, by keeping their 10 year olds off the net), and people like him are a little less sensitive, and the internet with all its horrors and wonders does just fine. It really isn’t difficult to not see things that bother you on the internet. For example, it’ll never not be funny to me when moderators cry about getting PTSD by what they see - don’t be a moderator then, genius. The biggest threat by far to the internet is censorship and regulation, because those things take away the choices for everybody. In a quarter century of using the net heavily I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen something I wasn’t expecting to see that shocked me, like a beheading video or something. It is exceedingly rare if you’re not a dumbass to come across unexpected and shocking material. And if Mr Duggan wasn’t so sensitive, even seeing things he finds disturbing wouldn’t be such a big deal. I’ll just chalk this post up to more intellectual and emotional infantilisation that is so prevalent these days among these particular types. ‘Handle with care’ emotional maturity stuff.
• chickensong 5mo ago
  It's a nice rant I guess, but it's mostly just whinging with a focus on the negatives and a vague appeal to regulation. Maybe cyberlibertarianism hasn't manifested in the way of JPB's Declaration, but it was a tall order and most things don't go as planned. Boomer hippies in particular were often unrealistic. The spirit of the Declaration is still viable however, even if the shape of the implementation is different from the original idea. Humans are far too chaotic to ever find a singular utopia, online or off, but information technology is still a great enabler for everyone. There's an increasing trend of articles and blog posts like this one, and unfortunately they share a common theme of complaints about big tech with a call for regulation. Naming and shaming bad actors is good, and not all regulation is bad, but you can't regulate everything to make everyone happy, and eventually you end up in an authoritarian dystopia. Instead of complaining and waiting around for everyone's preferred flavor of regulation to appear, I suggest we instead embrace the spirit of cyberlibertarianism and DIY solutions that work at a smaller scale. The world is a dangerous place, but we've never had better tools to carve out your own niche and develop solutions to the things that matter to you.
• matheusmoreira 5mo ago
  > This is how "don't tread on me" becomes "Meta should be allowed to do whatever it wants." > This is how the rights of the lone hacker working in their garage become indistinguishable from the rights of a multinational with a market cap larger than most countries' GDP. This is the strongest point in the article, in my opinion. The cyberlibertarian ideals make more sense when you look at then from the perspective of the lone hacker. They are fundamentally different from trillion dollar corporations and should not be treated the same way. > Once the platforms got large enough to be unstoppable, once they captured enough of the regulatory apparatus to write their own rules, the libertarian rhetoric got quietly shelved like a college poster you took down before your in-laws came over. > Cyberlibertarianism was the ladder. Once they were on the roof, they kicked it away and started charging admission to look at the view. Agreed. This is a real hypocrisy. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
• lovich 5mo ago
  The title could have dropped the prefix “cyber” and still have been accurate.
• martin-t 5mo ago
  This just shows you can be right, you can have convincing arguments for why you're right but unless people listen, you will not change anything. I wonder how Winner feels about all of this.
• BrenBarn 5mo ago
  Many of the central points here (in particular the quote about conflating individual freedom with that of large companies) are in no way specific to the internet, or to technology at all. The cyberlibertarian idea that me personally being free means I can use my giant company to do whatever I want is bad, because the plain unprefixed libertarian idea of the same is bad. There are things about technology, especially software-oriented technology, that highlight that badness, but the badness is there all the time. What I think we are seeing in the world today are the consequences of the fallacy of believing that the goodness of freedom is independent of its scale --- that no matter who or what entity we are talking about, it is good for them to have freedom. That simply doesn't make sense. Rather, the greater the potential an entity has to do harm, the less should be its freedom.
• trimethylpurine 5mo ago
  Meh. Marketing ruined it. That's what eventually ruins almost everything.
• int27h-tsr 5mo ago
  >Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of the night trying to figure out where you are and where you are going. And then the wolves ate your mules, your wife died of disentery, and you got raped by a grizzly bear. I remember those days too, and all those Oregon Trail kids showed up and ruined it all.
• jongjong 5mo ago
  Any human movement at scale is bound to become corrupt really quickly. I say that as someone who was both de-banked and de-cryptoed for noticing the corruption and doing everything by the book. My belief is that any centralized, collective attempt to fix anything related to politics will only ever create more problems. The only thing that works is chaos. We should embrace chaos and disobedience.
• tim333 5mo ago
  >That is the internet we built. It was not an accident. It was the product of a specific ideology, written down by specific people, at a specific cocktail party in Davos, in 1996. The article is entertaining but I completely don't buy that. The internet would be much the say if nothing had been written in Davos. People would still have linked computers, done good and bad stuff as is human nature, companies would have tried to own and profit from it, governments would have tried to regulate it as is their nature also.
• zahlman 5mo ago
  This is the first I've seen anyone coin the term "cyberlibertarianism". The argument presented doesn't seem at all specific to cyber-anything. It's just a typical argument contra libertarianism, at a typical level of uncharitability.
• TrackerFF 5mo ago
  Many followers of cyberlibertarianism see themselves as potential cyberlords, who can rule over their fiefdoms, but still under the protection of the king (state/government). The hypocrisy becomes apparent when these entities grow large, and suddenly need state help to suppress competition. Phase 1: Skirt laws, move fast and break things. Regulations should be abolished. Steal as much as you can, if it means growth. Phase 2: Lobby politicians, beg for certain regulations to keep out competitors when you've become a monopoly.
• stefantalpalaru 5mo ago
  [dead]
• ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
  Well the "libertarianism" part is the clue. They were always the corporations. The essay briefly mentions "Open Source" which of course was the corporate friendly rebrand of Free Software. I'd quibble about the copyright/patents part. This was a time when large corporations were "harmonizing" their ownship of IP ever higher across the globe. Wanting less of that wasn't crazy. Assuming the free market fairy would deliver it was at best certifiablly naive, at worst a spoiler operation to distract from actually doing it through normal democratic government channels. Also, "Magna Carta" is fitting as the original was a deal between a King and his Barons. It's pointed to as a step on the path to modern democracy but that's not what they were doing at the time. The powerful were asserting their rights.
• YeGoblynQueenne 5mo ago
  >> You have to hold these four ideas in your head at the same time to see the trick. The cyberlibertarians wanted you to believe that radical individualism plus deregulated capitalism plus inevitable technology would produce communitarian utopia. This is, on its face, insane. It is the economic equivalent of claiming that if everyone punches each other really hard, eventually we'll all be hugging. Well, the first rule of Fight Club is that we don't talk about Fight Club.
• mimd 5mo ago
  The nice thing about the Internet is that a person, great or small, can voice their grandiose and yet myopic views of a problem and their absurd solutions to it...freely.
  • sph 5mo ago
    The bad thing about the Internet is that a machine can do that at scale and for very cheap, quickly drowning any human’s voice. I miss when the Internet was mostly a collection of myopic views from naive people.