5 ms·

The article was interesting to read not necessarily as a generative spark but as a datapoint, a symptom of how effective, in the long run, the response from tho

The article was interesting to read not necessarily as a generative spark but as a datapoint, a symptom of how effective, in the long run, the response from those who saw the internet as a threat was. Only someone who's lost the plot (or arrived late) would summarily conflate Barlow's 1996 Declaration with "one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under maritime law". The article itself has fallen victim to the weaponized co-optation whose framework it describes. The author says "I remember thinking it was genius when I first read it. I was young enough [...]", believing it was due to being impressionable, but it's more likely that it was due to having lost something along the way. Or rather, it was stolen from them and they didn't even realize. The Declaration was right, it was just naively optimistic and severely underestimated its opponent + incorrectly presumed digital natives would automatically be on the "right" side. Now we are where we are. And it's just the beginning of the pendulum's counterswing.

mindslight 5mo ago
Could you please keep going? Maybe I'm just old, tired, and have other responsibilities, but things are feeling pretty bleak these days. Google is back to pushing remote attestation (ie WEI), Apple has already had it for quite some time. "AI" is a great Schelling point excuse for capital structures to collude rather than compete, whether it's demanding identification / "system integrity" (aka computational disenfranchisement) for routine Web tasks or simply making computing hardware unaffordable (and thus even less practical for most people, whether it's GPUs, RAM, or RPis for IoT projects). There are some silver linings like AI codegen empowering individuals to solve their own problems, and/or really go to town hacking/polishing their libre project for others to use. But at best I see a future 5-10 years down the road where I've got a few totally-pwnt corporate-government-approved devices for accomplishing basic tasks (with whatever I/O devices are cost-effective from the subset we're allowed to use), and then my own independent network that cannot do much of what's required to interface with (ie exist in) wider society.
- schoen 5mo ago
  Alongside "1984 wasn't an instruction manual" we may need the slogan "'The Right to Read' wasn't an instruction manual".
- js8 5mo ago
  In many countries, people have already won a similar fight with printing press, press censorship and encryption. I think there is a reason for optimism (of the will). If AI can code, and empower individuals to do it on a local device, it is already smart enough to educate masses on the matters of their self-interest, such as freedom and solidarity. I don't think the powers will be able to gatekeep it. There might be some grief but overall human freedom will prevail.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - prinny_ 5mo ago
    I doubt AI can educate the masses simply because the masses would have to prompt it to educate them. Almost no one in my social circle knows, let alone understands Google’s recent work on pushing web attestation, or any other tech company’s power plays enforced on us. They are people blindly hitting accept all in every banner that pops up in their online journeys or use chat apps that blatantly spy on them. They don’t know what they could have or why the new captcha is funny, thus they can never come up with a prompt that leads to them being educated on the matter. They would have to know that they don’t know and since there is no public discourse for such matters in their Facebook timelines, their thinly right wing digital news outlets and their Viber and what’s app chats they will never know that they don’t know.
  - mindslight 5mo ago
    > If AI can code, and empower individuals to do it on a local device, it is already smart enough to educate masses on the matters of their self-interest, such as freedom and solidarity. oof. I do not see that this follows, at all. For starters, describing "AI" as "smart" is falling into the trap of anthropomorphization. But the core dynamic of LLMs I see is a reflection of context - both training and the data sources that are presented, but also the questions you ask. On its own it's not going to lead someone to ask about self-empowering approaches to problems or freedom in general. So sure, genAI seems to be greatly helping my own locally-hosted infrastructure approaches (it changes projects from needing a clear head over the course of a day or two, to something I casually push forward on for an hour or two at night). But I don't see that there is a huge pent up demand of people determined to do homeprod/homeautomation/etc projects but unable to find the time. Also keep in mind we're not even near the enshittification stage of "AI" yet. Existing businesses are enshittifying using genAI, yes. But that's much different from when the genAI providers themselves start trying to extract wealth.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
  I suspect this is correct, and the push towards "age verification" (i.e. user id hiding behind a pretext), the insane build out of server farms, which is making commodity computing unaffordable, and the push towards AI in everything are all pointing in the same direction. The 1990s vision of computing was a bicycle - or car - for the mind. It was libertarian in the sense that if you had a device it would empower you to get where you wanted to go more quickly. And the rhetoric around it was very much about personal exploration on a new and exciting frontier. The 2020s vision is more like a totalitarian transport network where you don't own the vehicle, you don't own the network, there's constant propaganda telling you how to structure your journey to the standard destinations, and deviation is becoming increasingly impossible. The device is just an access port to the network. It's dumbed down, so even if you understand how it works you can't do much with it. And as AI becomes more prevalent, your ability to understand that will diminish further. So the end result is very plausibly a state where you're completely reliant on AI to do anything. And AI is owned by the pseudo-state oligopoly - the same oligopoly which runs the propaganda networks that sell you ads, hype selected content while suppressing other content, and genrally try to influence your behaviour. It's the complete opposite of the original vision. Will consumer AI fix this? Probably not. Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres.
  - vrganj 5mo ago
    > Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres. There's one way to deal with this, but I doubt it'll be popular in these parts: Communal ownership of the means of production. Don't use the oligarchy's AI. Your personal hardware is going to be too weak. But together, we can own our own server farms.
    - jpk 5mo ago
      "Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs, or something, which is probably why it sounds unattainable. But if you reorient that to something more along the lines of, "the Mullvad of hosted llama.cpp", then it actually doesn't seem that far out of reach.
- throwawayqqq11 5mo ago
  The corpolibertarians are betting massively on AI to liberate them from the working class and in their wake, transforming societies and economies as needed. I think this long term goal is delusional and the day of the pitchforks is coming. They can't endlessly fabricate distractive images of enemies, like migrants or what ever, while inflating budgets and claims about the future.
- jkwn 5mo ago
  I am also old, tired, and have too many responsibilities, and so are most of the people posting here (or at least they are tired of the bleakness). The millennials are also likewise tired of AI and corporate fascism. I think they are smarter than our generation. So there's a sliver of a silver lining. But as to what can be done about it is another matter. Besides "butlerian jihad" the only way I see is by voting with our feet, since ballots don't seem to matter.
txrx0000 5mo ago
I will add, for those that lost the plot: the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location, and therefore people cannot be physically persecuted for what they think and say. We're far from achieving this goal, and we underestimated our opponents by a lot. But it would be foolish to blame the Barlows of the world instead of blaming the tyrants and corporate opportunists that go to great lengths [0] to sabotage and interfere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations
- BlackFly 5mo ago
  The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.
  - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    Shills don't need anonymity. They can troll and astroturf just fine under their real names, or the names of the people they're paying to shill for them, because there is no one who comes in the night to put a bag over your head for shilling for the establishment. The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.
    - vga1 5mo ago
      With anonymity, they can 1000000x their presence and thus the effectiviness of their message.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
        How is that supposed to work? The average person is not going to read 1000000 separate posts. They want someone to go on Reddit and see that 10 of the 13 replies to a post about their subject are favorable. They don't need 1000000 accounts for that, they need 10, and getting 10 IDs is elementary for anyone with a corporate or government budget.
cycomanic 5mo ago
> The Declaration was right, it was just naively optimistic and severely underestimated its opponent + incorrectly presumed digital natives would automatically be on the "right" side. Now we are where we are. And it's just the beginning of the pendulum's counterswing. I think you're completely ignoring the premise of the articles argument (as I understand it). The failure of the declaration was a feature not a flaw. In otherw words it was never about the freedom of the individual but the freedom of large corporations. In the end governments (even totalitarian ones in a limited sense), are vehicles of the people. Unregulated spaces will favor the person with the most resources and thus lead to more concentration of power. It's essentially a information centric continuation of Reaganomics. The article argues that this could have been (and was, e.g. by Winner) anticipated in the 90s, and that in fact this was the intention of Barlow and co.
jhbadger 5mo ago
I think the detail of Barlow being Dick Cheney's former campaign manager was a very useful addition to the narrative though. Barlow (through his Grateful Dead connections) is generally presented as an idealistic, if a bit naive, hippie akin to Richard Stallman. That doesn't really square with being Cheney's supporter.

mindslight 5mo ago

Could you please keep going? Maybe I'm just old, tired, and have other responsibilities, but things are feeling pretty bleak these days. Google is back to pushing remote attestation (ie WEI), Apple has already had it for quite some time. "AI" is a great Schelling point excuse for capital structures to collude rather than compete, whether it's demanding identification / "system integrity" (aka computational disenfranchisement) for routine Web tasks or simply making computing hardware unaffordable (and thus even less practical for most people, whether it's GPUs, RAM, or RPis for IoT projects). There are some silver linings like AI codegen empowering individuals to solve their own problems, and/or really go to town hacking/polishing their libre project for others to use. But at best I see a future 5-10 years down the road where I've got a few totally-pwnt corporate-government-approved devices for accomplishing basic tasks (with whatever I/O devices are cost-effective from the subset we're allowed to use), and then my own independent network that cannot do much of what's required to interface with (ie exist in) wider society.

schoen 5mo ago
Alongside "1984 wasn't an instruction manual" we may need the slogan "'The Right to Read' wasn't an instruction manual".
js8 5mo ago
In many countries, people have already won a similar fight with printing press, press censorship and encryption. I think there is a reason for optimism (of the will). If AI can code, and empower individuals to do it on a local device, it is already smart enough to educate masses on the matters of their self-interest, such as freedom and solidarity. I don't think the powers will be able to gatekeep it. There might be some grief but overall human freedom will prevail.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- prinny_ 5mo ago
  I doubt AI can educate the masses simply because the masses would have to prompt it to educate them. Almost no one in my social circle knows, let alone understands Google’s recent work on pushing web attestation, or any other tech company’s power plays enforced on us. They are people blindly hitting accept all in every banner that pops up in their online journeys or use chat apps that blatantly spy on them. They don’t know what they could have or why the new captcha is funny, thus they can never come up with a prompt that leads to them being educated on the matter. They would have to know that they don’t know and since there is no public discourse for such matters in their Facebook timelines, their thinly right wing digital news outlets and their Viber and what’s app chats they will never know that they don’t know.
- mindslight 5mo ago
  > If AI can code, and empower individuals to do it on a local device, it is already smart enough to educate masses on the matters of their self-interest, such as freedom and solidarity. oof. I do not see that this follows, at all. For starters, describing "AI" as "smart" is falling into the trap of anthropomorphization. But the core dynamic of LLMs I see is a reflection of context - both training and the data sources that are presented, but also the questions you ask. On its own it's not going to lead someone to ask about self-empowering approaches to problems or freedom in general. So sure, genAI seems to be greatly helping my own locally-hosted infrastructure approaches (it changes projects from needing a clear head over the course of a day or two, to something I casually push forward on for an hour or two at night). But I don't see that there is a huge pent up demand of people determined to do homeprod/homeautomation/etc projects but unable to find the time. Also keep in mind we're not even near the enshittification stage of "AI" yet. Existing businesses are enshittifying using genAI, yes. But that's much different from when the genAI providers themselves start trying to extract wealth.
TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
I suspect this is correct, and the push towards "age verification" (i.e. user id hiding behind a pretext), the insane build out of server farms, which is making commodity computing unaffordable, and the push towards AI in everything are all pointing in the same direction. The 1990s vision of computing was a bicycle - or car - for the mind. It was libertarian in the sense that if you had a device it would empower you to get where you wanted to go more quickly. And the rhetoric around it was very much about personal exploration on a new and exciting frontier. The 2020s vision is more like a totalitarian transport network where you don't own the vehicle, you don't own the network, there's constant propaganda telling you how to structure your journey to the standard destinations, and deviation is becoming increasingly impossible. The device is just an access port to the network. It's dumbed down, so even if you understand how it works you can't do much with it. And as AI becomes more prevalent, your ability to understand that will diminish further. So the end result is very plausibly a state where you're completely reliant on AI to do anything. And AI is owned by the pseudo-state oligopoly - the same oligopoly which runs the propaganda networks that sell you ads, hype selected content while suppressing other content, and genrally try to influence your behaviour. It's the complete opposite of the original vision. Will consumer AI fix this? Probably not. Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres.
- vrganj 5mo ago
  > Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres. There's one way to deal with this, but I doubt it'll be popular in these parts: Communal ownership of the means of production. Don't use the oligarchy's AI. Your personal hardware is going to be too weak. But together, we can own our own server farms.
  - jpk 5mo ago
    "Communal ownership of the means of production" evokes an image of a hippy co-op trying to buy pallets of GPUs, or something, which is probably why it sounds unattainable. But if you reorient that to something more along the lines of, "the Mullvad of hosted llama.cpp", then it actually doesn't seem that far out of reach.
throwawayqqq11 5mo ago
The corpolibertarians are betting massively on AI to liberate them from the working class and in their wake, transforming societies and economies as needed. I think this long term goal is delusional and the day of the pitchforks is coming. They can't endlessly fabricate distractive images of enemies, like migrants or what ever, while inflating budgets and claims about the future.
jkwn 5mo ago
I am also old, tired, and have too many responsibilities, and so are most of the people posting here (or at least they are tired of the bleakness). The millennials are also likewise tired of AI and corporate fascism. I think they are smarter than our generation. So there's a sliver of a silver lining. But as to what can be done about it is another matter. Besides "butlerian jihad" the only way I see is by voting with our feet, since ballots don't seem to matter.

txrx0000 5mo ago

I will add, for those that lost the plot: the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location, and therefore people cannot be physically persecuted for what they think and say. We're far from achieving this goal, and we underestimated our opponents by a lot. But it would be foolish to blame the Barlows of the world instead of blaming the tyrants and corporate opportunists that go to great lengths [0] to sabotage and interfere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

BlackFly 5mo ago
The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.
- AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
  Shills don't need anonymity. They can troll and astroturf just fine under their real names, or the names of the people they're paying to shill for them, because there is no one who comes in the night to put a bag over your head for shilling for the establishment. The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.
  - vga1 5mo ago
    With anonymity, they can 1000000x their presence and thus the effectiviness of their message.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      How is that supposed to work? The average person is not going to read 1000000 separate posts. They want someone to go on Reddit and see that 10 of the 13 replies to a post about their subject are favorable. They don't need 1000000 accounts for that, they need 10, and getting 10 IDs is elementary for anyone with a corporate or government budget.

cycomanic 5mo ago

> The Declaration was right, it was just naively optimistic and severely underestimated its opponent + incorrectly presumed digital natives would automatically be on the "right" side. Now we are where we are. And it's just the beginning of the pendulum's counterswing. I think you're completely ignoring the premise of the articles argument (as I understand it). The failure of the declaration was a feature not a flaw. In otherw words it was never about the freedom of the individual but the freedom of large corporations. In the end governments (even totalitarian ones in a limited sense), are vehicles of the people. Unregulated spaces will favor the person with the most resources and thus lead to more concentration of power. It's essentially a information centric continuation of Reaganomics. The article argues that this could have been (and was, e.g. by Winner) anticipated in the 90s, and that in fact this was the intention of Barlow and co.

jhbadger 5mo ago

I think the detail of Barlow being Dick Cheney's former campaign manager was a very useful addition to the narrative though. Barlow (through his Grateful Dead connections) is generally presented as an idealistic, if a bit naive, hippie akin to Richard Stallman. That doesn't really square with being Cheney's supporter.