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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 s

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.
  - vrganj 5mo ago
    In a democratic society, government is the representative of the people. It is also the only entity powerful enough to stand up to other monopolies, businesses, which are dictatorships without any democratic control. There will always be a power structure. I'd prefer one I can vote out. The fundamental flaw in any type of libertarian / anarchist thinking is denying the reality that power will always be concentrated somehow. The libertarian fantasy would result in neofeudalism, if theres no state to stop it.
    - arto 5mo ago
      Corporations are state-created and state-protected entities. Remove limited liability and other special state privileges from businesses and you'll have a lot less to complain about.
      - vrganj 5mo ago
        The concentration of wealth and thus power is inherent to capitalism. No state needed.
    - slopinthebag 5mo ago
      > In a democratic society, government is the representative of the people. Representative of who exactly? Generally governments around the world win with <50% of the vote. Those who vote make up a small fraction of the population. Of those who voted for the winning party, only a small fraction of them actually feel fully represented by their party - often people vote strategically, or they vote for the "lesser evil" rather than voting for a representative who wholly represents their views. The rest have a government who are not representative of them in power over them. Hardly representative of the people.
      - vrganj 5mo ago
        That might be a problem of the specific state you live in. Some systems are better at representing the people than others.
  - 5mo ago
steve_taylor 5mo ago
There's nothing stopping you from setting up your free (as in freedom) slice of cyberspace for you and your friends, for now. Looking at all the new and proposed laws coming through, I don't think we'll have those basic freedoms all that much longer.
igor47 5mo ago
On this side of the wall, you and your friends are strong and happy and free in your garden. On the other side, a hellscape filled with giant monsters debating how best to filet you. You will keep ceeding them ground, your garden gets ever smaller. The monsters ate Brian, oops, well that's the consequence of freedom! But you're next, isn't it completely obvious you're next? Why would you unilaterally disarm against the monsters? Why for the love of God why would you say "no the monsters are good actually!"
rini17 5mo ago
If you have friends with some shared meaning then anything is easy. Everyone else can get get strip mined for attention and croak, you don't care.
harimau777 5mo ago
That would be great if any of it worked. However, we tried that and now find ourselves living (I use that term loosely) in a capitalist hellscape.
- vga1 5mo ago
  We do?
icegreentea2 5mo ago
A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, and it accepts that the state needs to be fair and predictable. I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state. And I would argue that that is hardly an outlandish fear. It's barely an extrapolation at all.
- watwut 5mo ago
  > A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, It does not accept that. In particular, libertarians are very ok with domestic violence. Quite a lot of libertanism is all about creating conditions where poorer or weaker people have no realistic recourse.
tosti 5mo ago
Hi George. Have you seen RoboCop? A free market survival-of-the-fittest gets us closer to a dystopian 1984-like society. Overregulation will also do that. Regulation isn't exactly at odds with freedom. One could certainly regulate freedom in order to foster it. I agree on the "information wants to be free" aspect. In the early days of the Internet, it felt like a free as in freedom shadow world where anyone could do anything they want. The moment copyright infringement lawsuits started to happen, that sense withered. Nowadays the companies with the highest market cap are computer technology companies. They're bigger than probably at least half the countries on Earth in terms of revenue. They're abusing their multinational power such that goverments become a tool to achieve more power and more money. I personally think that us humans have to repeatedly go through centuries of bad decisions and evil overlords to learn an important lesson. Kindness can't exist without evilness. Jing-jang has a dot of the opposite color on each side. But I digress. Cheers! Edit: IDK what the lesson is, either. Perhaps it varies per person?
- GaryBluto 5mo ago
  > Have you seen RoboCop? Out of curiosity, why cite a 1980s action film?
  - tosti 5mo ago
    Because it's a reference most people would get. The entire premise is that everything will be privatised, including healthcare and the police. (BTW, I doubt a Motorola heart would cost $1, but I still think that's hilarious.)
grumbel 5mo ago
> There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway. That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.
- georgehotz 5mo ago
  Yea it should have been IPv8 from day one. It almost feels like IPv6 was a psyop.

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.
- vrganj 5mo ago
  In a democratic society, government is the representative of the people. It is also the only entity powerful enough to stand up to other monopolies, businesses, which are dictatorships without any democratic control. There will always be a power structure. I'd prefer one I can vote out. The fundamental flaw in any type of libertarian / anarchist thinking is denying the reality that power will always be concentrated somehow. The libertarian fantasy would result in neofeudalism, if theres no state to stop it.
  - arto 5mo ago
    Corporations are state-created and state-protected entities. Remove limited liability and other special state privileges from businesses and you'll have a lot less to complain about.
    - vrganj 5mo ago
      The concentration of wealth and thus power is inherent to capitalism. No state needed.
  - slopinthebag 5mo ago
    > In a democratic society, government is the representative of the people. Representative of who exactly? Generally governments around the world win with <50% of the vote. Those who vote make up a small fraction of the population. Of those who voted for the winning party, only a small fraction of them actually feel fully represented by their party - often people vote strategically, or they vote for the "lesser evil" rather than voting for a representative who wholly represents their views. The rest have a government who are not representative of them in power over them. Hardly representative of the people.
    - vrganj 5mo ago
      That might be a problem of the specific state you live in. Some systems are better at representing the people than others.
- 5mo ago

steve_taylor 5mo ago

There's nothing stopping you from setting up your free (as in freedom) slice of cyberspace for you and your friends, for now. Looking at all the new and proposed laws coming through, I don't think we'll have those basic freedoms all that much longer.

igor47 5mo ago

On this side of the wall, you and your friends are strong and happy and free in your garden. On the other side, a hellscape filled with giant monsters debating how best to filet you. You will keep ceeding them ground, your garden gets ever smaller. The monsters ate Brian, oops, well that's the consequence of freedom! But you're next, isn't it completely obvious you're next? Why would you unilaterally disarm against the monsters? Why for the love of God why would you say "no the monsters are good actually!"

rini17 5mo ago

If you have friends with some shared meaning then anything is easy. Everyone else can get get strip mined for attention and croak, you don't care.

harimau777 5mo ago

That would be great if any of it worked. However, we tried that and now find ourselves living (I use that term loosely) in a capitalist hellscape.

vga1 5mo ago
We do?

icegreentea2 5mo ago

A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, and it accepts that the state needs to be fair and predictable. I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state. And I would argue that that is hardly an outlandish fear. It's barely an extrapolation at all.

watwut 5mo ago
> A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, It does not accept that. In particular, libertarians are very ok with domestic violence. Quite a lot of libertanism is all about creating conditions where poorer or weaker people have no realistic recourse.

tosti 5mo ago

Hi George. Have you seen RoboCop? A free market survival-of-the-fittest gets us closer to a dystopian 1984-like society. Overregulation will also do that. Regulation isn't exactly at odds with freedom. One could certainly regulate freedom in order to foster it. I agree on the "information wants to be free" aspect. In the early days of the Internet, it felt like a free as in freedom shadow world where anyone could do anything they want. The moment copyright infringement lawsuits started to happen, that sense withered. Nowadays the companies with the highest market cap are computer technology companies. They're bigger than probably at least half the countries on Earth in terms of revenue. They're abusing their multinational power such that goverments become a tool to achieve more power and more money. I personally think that us humans have to repeatedly go through centuries of bad decisions and evil overlords to learn an important lesson. Kindness can't exist without evilness. Jing-jang has a dot of the opposite color on each side. But I digress. Cheers! Edit: IDK what the lesson is, either. Perhaps it varies per person?

GaryBluto 5mo ago
> Have you seen RoboCop? Out of curiosity, why cite a 1980s action film?
- tosti 5mo ago
  Because it's a reference most people would get. The entire premise is that everything will be privatised, including healthcare and the police. (BTW, I doubt a Motorola heart would cost $1, but I still think that's hilarious.)

grumbel 5mo ago

> There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway. That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.

georgehotz 5mo ago
Yea it should have been IPv8 from day one. It almost feels like IPv6 was a psyop.