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I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided. It's likely projection on m

I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided. It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers. That certainly is my own worry, at least.

throwway120385 26d ago
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
- krupan 26d ago
  You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything. A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
  - FireBeyond 26d ago
    What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen? All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc. I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
    - WalterBright 26d ago
      > I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.
      - paulryanrogers 26d ago
        Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
        deleted 25d ago
        [deleted]
        krupan 25d ago
        The US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so. Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
        pocksuppet 25d ago
        Did the US stand with the USSR?
        WalterBright 25d ago
        > Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work. There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked. When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
  - throwway120385 26d ago
    Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
    - krupan 25d ago
      We in the US are so very far still from meeting the goals of libertarianism. Even farther than before with our current administration! The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc. With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
    - WalterBright 25d ago
      > and general reduction of the size of government What? Seriously? The size of city government, state government, and federal government grows every year in scope, regulations, and spending.
  - bcrosby95 25d ago
    So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them? If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
    - sylos 25d ago
      David and goliath is not a story of a little man defeating an impossible giant. It's the story of a technologically advanced crack pistol shot vs a guy a with a knife and a hundred yards to cover
    - AnthonyMouse 25d ago
      > So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them? It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert. Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens. Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed. How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
      - judemelancon 25d ago
        Such a scheme absolutely explodes in complexity as it comes to each level of additional detail. This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best. The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk. Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled? If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category. † Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly. There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions. Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
  - wyre 25d ago
    How is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism? The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business? What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
    - krupan 25d ago
      It is troublesome that libertarianism isn't super well defined, but no version of libertarianism has the government "doing business" with anyone. It only enforces laws, it doesn't buy and sell anything, and it certainly doesn't do anything to insulate anyone from market forces (like governments do now with regulations, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).
      - wyre 25d ago
        So then what will the government due about supplying their military, offices, supplying technology, constructing the buildings that they work out of, purchasing or renting the land those buildings are on, or any other of the material goods that it needs to do the bare minimum of enforcing laws. I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
        krupan 25d ago
        Ok, maybe I went too far. There are the total anarchist libertarians that don't want any form of government. Personally I'm not sure I want to go that route. So my libertarian government will need a police force of some sort. That could be a collection of small local private businesses that small local governments do business with, giving them jurisdiction over the small local area. And there could be some hierarchy so that eventually they all are accountable to the central government. Like, city police contractors report to a state contractor, and the state contractors report to the federal contractor. I totally just made that up, so I'm sure we could work out details and make it better, but the overall point of minimizing government power and distributing it could be preserved as much as possible. No system is going to be perfect, but there is so much more we could do to take power, and therefore the temptation of corruption, away from the people we allow to rule over us. Giving fallible human individuals more power is never the right solution.
  - preg_match 25d ago
    In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior. Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”. Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly. I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer. Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times. There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
    - WalterBright 25d ago
      > Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition. The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial. > It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer. Ever wonder what happened to IBM?
      - WalterBright 25d ago
        You might want to read "Titan" by Chernow before telling me I am wrong.
      - 25d ago
  - pocksuppet 25d ago
    A major point of libertarianism is to tear down government structures that hinder libertarians from engaging in world domination and retain government structures that hinder other people from hindering libertarians from engaging in world domination.
    - sph 25d ago
      OP’s point is that world domination is possible only in collusion with the State. You can’t have trillion dollar companies without going to dinner with the President of the banana republic to kiss his ass and line his pockets.
      - pocksuppet 25d ago
        How did Apple kiss Obama's ass?
        krupan 25d ago
        How hard would it be for you to look up whether Apple does any government lobbying, or if there are any laws, regulations, or tax codes that (whether intentionally or not) give Apple an advantage over a start up that wants to compete with them. Don't ignore things like copyright laws, patent protections, international trade agreements, corporate tax structures, insider trading by politicians, etc., etc.
- WalterBright 26d ago
  That isn't remotely what libertarianism is.
  - coldtea 25d ago
    Doesn't matter what it is in principle.
    - WalterBright 25d ago
      It certainly is not feudalism.
      - coldtea 25d ago
        Yeah, it's corporate-feudalism instead.
        ethbr1 25d ago
        To expand, I believe the idea here is that what libertarianism is in principal matters less than what it collapses to in practice, similar to the difference in communism. And there's a central tension that libertarianism, as far as I'm aware of, doesn't resolve in how to promote individual freedom across a highly economically unequal society. Trusting those with all the capital to act in anything other than their own best interest doesn't seem a solid foundation.
        pocksuppet 25d ago
        In a true libertarian society, since it's small government, the government wouldn't help rich people stay rich. You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Nobody believes in true libertarianism.
        ethbr1 24d ago
        > You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Which they always could, given the vastly different economic starting positions.
- lowbloodsugar 25d ago
  Libertarianism is entirely self-serving. I am rich and have property, so my ideal government is one whose only job is to create property registries and allow their enforcement with violence. Ideally, the poor people are taxed (not me of course) to fund a government violence force to enforce the rules on the poor people, as is the case in the USA. Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
  - wyre 25d ago
    How is communism self-serving when, you said it yourself, the main concept is assigning resources to everyone?
    - bigfishrunning 25d ago
      If "assigning resources to everyone" is a net gain (IE the voter doesn't have resources), then yes it is self serving.
      - jst1fthsdys 25d ago
        Pretty much everything is self serving using that definition. Clean up trash in a park? Self serving. Donate money to the poor? Self serving.
        bigfishrunning 25d ago
        I think you misunderstand me -- perspective matters. If you have 12 cookies, and I have 2 cookies, and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies. "Clean up trash" and "Donate money to the poor" are not as unevenly beneficial. Also "Donate money to the poor" is a far cry from "Seize money and give that to the poor".
        1659447091 25d ago
- ethbr1 25d ago
  > There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism So much this. People forget that for all its fault, democratic government is democratic to some degree. Corporations are democratic to zero degree. (And before someone brings up shareholders: institutional investors and dual-class shares)
MomsAVoxell 26d ago
>mass surveillance Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively. Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks. Plus, there's that whole degradation of culture factor. Sure, you trust your government today. But do you trust the government of tomorrow? Anyone who thinks this is misguided is probably seeking to profit from it at some point. And that is precisely the problem.
- b112 26d ago
  In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly. Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers. So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
  - pocksuppet 24d ago
    In the Netherlands the Nazis were able to exterminate Jews much more thoroughly than they had in Germany, because the Netherlands kept such meticulous records of the name and address of every Jew. And everyone else, but the Nazis were after the Jews.
- lenerdenator 25d ago
  > Sure, you trust your government today. Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0] In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1] I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either. [0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-remains-near-time-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-... [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-of-trust-in-public-institutions-2024-results_9a20554b-en.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...
wyre 26d ago
Remember Cambridge Analytica and PRISM? I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us. Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
exolymph 26d ago
It's projection on your part. The general public (excluding the "very online" subset thereof) is barely even aware of mass surveillance.
- krupan 26d ago
  Not true. The major rallying cry in my home state is "no more surveillance data centers!"
  - pocksuppet 25d ago
    Which proves they don't know anything because the surveillance is barely related to the data centers.
- scarecrowbob 25d ago
  I mean... Ken Paxton?
gjsman-1000 26d ago
> are often misguided Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT. In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."
- scarecrowbob 25d ago
  I agree with you. Maybe consider my conciliatory rhetoric ("folks here think") in the original post as statement about what I think the vicious and hyper-authoritarian tech bros here believe, namely everything from obviously dumb crap ranging from - "it's ccp propaganda" - or "you don't have a right to provacy in public" - or "the environmental concerns are overblown" - or "you already have a cellphone so why you bitchin" - or "it's a private company so you don't have to worry about the gov" to less arguable but widely held neoliberal premises like "the state has a perogative to do what it wants so if you're not able to participate in the [typically closed] {city council|senate|NSA} decisions that lead here then you have no right to take direct action". Thus you might understand what I am writing here is an attempt to not trigger the VC bros and to get them to consider that all us unwashed masses might have some kind of point? I am often not the clearest writer, but the first sentence literally is about what I understand a lot of people on the site to believe, not a statement about what I belive. People on this site have a highly propagandized view of what (they think of as) the proles think, and I'd like the folks of the site to consider that people really do understand the vicious ends to which these technologies are put, hence the rhetoric. To be clear, on some level, I think my average no-kings/Tucker-Carson-stan-ing friends can accept the argument that cops will use this tech to give worms to ex-girlfriends. While that should be enough of a reason to reject the tech it really doesn't go far enough into why that tech is objectionable: forcing warrants for the mass-survellience network aren'r really sufficient to remedy my own worries. From my position, that idea of tech/policy-as-solution is indeed misguided because my deeper worry is that the state will use it for "counter-insurgency". Considering oneself a potential insurgent is foreign to about anyone in US mainline politics. It is, however, what I feel deeply when think about how folks might indeed be "misguided", and I am not sure if you'd agree with that or not. I can read that into a lot of the posts responding above. But that more radical concern not what I wrote about when I wrote that post. So sure, you're 100% correct and I agree with your point. I do not think the idea that "folks undrstand the survellience aspect of all this tech" is generally legible to the fascists and other anti-leftist US "centrists" who populate this specific message board- I think the conversation in this thread supports that view. It's hard to make that point into something they are able to read. I'd still like them to consider it.
AnimalMuppet 26d ago
Mass surveillance? You could be right. Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better. People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
- _def 26d ago
  They understand that they don't need to care as long as there are enough others getting eaten before them.
- iso1631 25d ago
  > But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
  - deleted 25d ago
    [deleted]
- pessimizer 25d ago
  > But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear It's the opposite that is true. Governments can selectively enforce laws against companies based on whether they comply or not, and pay them for whatever they want them to do. The wealthy and their companies own Congress and the Executive because those positions rely on publicity to be elected, and they own the judiciary because the judges are both aligned with political parties and completely bribeable. They do not, however, exactly own the secret police funded by secret budgets - that's where the real executive lies, and that's where efforts are coordinated and conflicts between powerful blocs are adjudicated. The performance we get is meaningless. The only important parts of the show we get to watch are following where the money is going and watching who state power is currently killing. > People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there. People certainly do understand. The media and the upper-middle class have made it almost a religion to spend their entire political life calling those people crazy. Why have upper-middle class people chosen such a stupid religion? Because a lot of money has been dumped into their stock portfolios.
euroderf 26d ago
Think about it the way the US thought about them pesky Rooskies during the Cold War: Don't look at intentions. Look at capabilities.
ActorNightly 26d ago
The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right. By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late. Age old story in human history.
mywittyname 25d ago
Government agencies (foreign and domestic) will just be just a few of the many buyers of this information. Private companies buy up this information like mad. It's so cheap - five figures gets you a database of every person over 18 in the USA and their addresses. Another five figures gets work history for them. Another five figures gets you property information. Another gets you social media feeds. Etc. Some vendors even sell it ad hoc with little up-front cost. For less than a million a year, any company can build an extensive profile on every person in the USA. These companies are just adding to that list.

throwway120385 26d ago

There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.

krupan 26d ago
You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything. A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
- FireBeyond 26d ago
  What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen? All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc. I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
  - WalterBright 26d ago
    > I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.
    - paulryanrogers 26d ago
      Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
      - deleted 25d ago
        [deleted]
      - krupan 25d ago
        The US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so. Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
        pocksuppet 25d ago
        Did the US stand with the USSR?
      - WalterBright 25d ago
        > Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work. There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked. When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
- throwway120385 26d ago
  Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
  - krupan 25d ago
    We in the US are so very far still from meeting the goals of libertarianism. Even farther than before with our current administration! The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc. With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
  - WalterBright 25d ago
    > and general reduction of the size of government What? Seriously? The size of city government, state government, and federal government grows every year in scope, regulations, and spending.
- bcrosby95 25d ago
  So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them? If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
  - sylos 25d ago
    David and goliath is not a story of a little man defeating an impossible giant. It's the story of a technologically advanced crack pistol shot vs a guy a with a knife and a hundred yards to cover
  - AnthonyMouse 25d ago
    > So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them? It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert. Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens. Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed. How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
    - judemelancon 25d ago
      Such a scheme absolutely explodes in complexity as it comes to each level of additional detail. This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best. The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk. Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled? If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category. † Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly. There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions. Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
- wyre 25d ago
  How is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism? The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business? What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
  - krupan 25d ago
    It is troublesome that libertarianism isn't super well defined, but no version of libertarianism has the government "doing business" with anyone. It only enforces laws, it doesn't buy and sell anything, and it certainly doesn't do anything to insulate anyone from market forces (like governments do now with regulations, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).
    - wyre 25d ago
      So then what will the government due about supplying their military, offices, supplying technology, constructing the buildings that they work out of, purchasing or renting the land those buildings are on, or any other of the material goods that it needs to do the bare minimum of enforcing laws. I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
      - krupan 25d ago
        Ok, maybe I went too far. There are the total anarchist libertarians that don't want any form of government. Personally I'm not sure I want to go that route. So my libertarian government will need a police force of some sort. That could be a collection of small local private businesses that small local governments do business with, giving them jurisdiction over the small local area. And there could be some hierarchy so that eventually they all are accountable to the central government. Like, city police contractors report to a state contractor, and the state contractors report to the federal contractor. I totally just made that up, so I'm sure we could work out details and make it better, but the overall point of minimizing government power and distributing it could be preserved as much as possible. No system is going to be perfect, but there is so much more we could do to take power, and therefore the temptation of corruption, away from the people we allow to rule over us. Giving fallible human individuals more power is never the right solution.
- preg_match 25d ago
  In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior. Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”. Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly. I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer. Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times. There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
  - WalterBright 25d ago
    > Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition. The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial. > It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer. Ever wonder what happened to IBM?
    - WalterBright 25d ago
      You might want to read "Titan" by Chernow before telling me I am wrong.
    - 25d ago
- pocksuppet 25d ago
  A major point of libertarianism is to tear down government structures that hinder libertarians from engaging in world domination and retain government structures that hinder other people from hindering libertarians from engaging in world domination.
  - sph 25d ago
    OP’s point is that world domination is possible only in collusion with the State. You can’t have trillion dollar companies without going to dinner with the President of the banana republic to kiss his ass and line his pockets.
    - pocksuppet 25d ago
      How did Apple kiss Obama's ass?
      - krupan 25d ago
        How hard would it be for you to look up whether Apple does any government lobbying, or if there are any laws, regulations, or tax codes that (whether intentionally or not) give Apple an advantage over a start up that wants to compete with them. Don't ignore things like copyright laws, patent protections, international trade agreements, corporate tax structures, insider trading by politicians, etc., etc.
WalterBright 26d ago
That isn't remotely what libertarianism is.
- coldtea 25d ago
  Doesn't matter what it is in principle.
  - WalterBright 25d ago
    It certainly is not feudalism.
    - coldtea 25d ago
      Yeah, it's corporate-feudalism instead.
      - ethbr1 25d ago
        To expand, I believe the idea here is that what libertarianism is in principal matters less than what it collapses to in practice, similar to the difference in communism. And there's a central tension that libertarianism, as far as I'm aware of, doesn't resolve in how to promote individual freedom across a highly economically unequal society. Trusting those with all the capital to act in anything other than their own best interest doesn't seem a solid foundation.
        pocksuppet 25d ago
        In a true libertarian society, since it's small government, the government wouldn't help rich people stay rich. You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Nobody believes in true libertarianism.
        ethbr1 24d ago
        > You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Which they always could, given the vastly different economic starting positions.
lowbloodsugar 25d ago
Libertarianism is entirely self-serving. I am rich and have property, so my ideal government is one whose only job is to create property registries and allow their enforcement with violence. Ideally, the poor people are taxed (not me of course) to fund a government violence force to enforce the rules on the poor people, as is the case in the USA. Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
- wyre 25d ago
  How is communism self-serving when, you said it yourself, the main concept is assigning resources to everyone?
  - bigfishrunning 25d ago
    If "assigning resources to everyone" is a net gain (IE the voter doesn't have resources), then yes it is self serving.
    - jst1fthsdys 25d ago
      Pretty much everything is self serving using that definition. Clean up trash in a park? Self serving. Donate money to the poor? Self serving.
      - bigfishrunning 25d ago
        I think you misunderstand me -- perspective matters. If you have 12 cookies, and I have 2 cookies, and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies. "Clean up trash" and "Donate money to the poor" are not as unevenly beneficial. Also "Donate money to the poor" is a far cry from "Seize money and give that to the poor".
        1659447091 25d ago
ethbr1 25d ago
> There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism So much this. People forget that for all its fault, democratic government is democratic to some degree. Corporations are democratic to zero degree. (And before someone brings up shareholders: institutional investors and dual-class shares)

MomsAVoxell 26d ago

>mass surveillance Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively. Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks. Plus, there's that whole degradation of culture factor. Sure, you trust your government today. But do you trust the government of tomorrow? Anyone who thinks this is misguided is probably seeking to profit from it at some point. And that is precisely the problem.

b112 26d ago
In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly. Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers. So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
- pocksuppet 24d ago
  In the Netherlands the Nazis were able to exterminate Jews much more thoroughly than they had in Germany, because the Netherlands kept such meticulous records of the name and address of every Jew. And everyone else, but the Nazis were after the Jews.
lenerdenator 25d ago
> Sure, you trust your government today. Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0] In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1] I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either. [0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-remains-near-time-low.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-... [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-of-trust-in-public-institutions-2024-results_9a20554b-en.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...

wyre 26d ago

Remember Cambridge Analytica and PRISM? I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us. Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.

exolymph 26d ago

It's projection on your part. The general public (excluding the "very online" subset thereof) is barely even aware of mass surveillance.

krupan 26d ago
Not true. The major rallying cry in my home state is "no more surveillance data centers!"
- pocksuppet 25d ago
  Which proves they don't know anything because the surveillance is barely related to the data centers.
scarecrowbob 25d ago
I mean... Ken Paxton?

gjsman-1000 26d ago

> are often misguided Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT. In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."

scarecrowbob 25d ago
I agree with you. Maybe consider my conciliatory rhetoric ("folks here think") in the original post as statement about what I think the vicious and hyper-authoritarian tech bros here believe, namely everything from obviously dumb crap ranging from - "it's ccp propaganda" - or "you don't have a right to provacy in public" - or "the environmental concerns are overblown" - or "you already have a cellphone so why you bitchin" - or "it's a private company so you don't have to worry about the gov" to less arguable but widely held neoliberal premises like "the state has a perogative to do what it wants so if you're not able to participate in the [typically closed] {city council|senate|NSA} decisions that lead here then you have no right to take direct action". Thus you might understand what I am writing here is an attempt to not trigger the VC bros and to get them to consider that all us unwashed masses might have some kind of point? I am often not the clearest writer, but the first sentence literally is about what I understand a lot of people on the site to believe, not a statement about what I belive. People on this site have a highly propagandized view of what (they think of as) the proles think, and I'd like the folks of the site to consider that people really do understand the vicious ends to which these technologies are put, hence the rhetoric. To be clear, on some level, I think my average no-kings/Tucker-Carson-stan-ing friends can accept the argument that cops will use this tech to give worms to ex-girlfriends. While that should be enough of a reason to reject the tech it really doesn't go far enough into why that tech is objectionable: forcing warrants for the mass-survellience network aren'r really sufficient to remedy my own worries. From my position, that idea of tech/policy-as-solution is indeed misguided because my deeper worry is that the state will use it for "counter-insurgency". Considering oneself a potential insurgent is foreign to about anyone in US mainline politics. It is, however, what I feel deeply when think about how folks might indeed be "misguided", and I am not sure if you'd agree with that or not. I can read that into a lot of the posts responding above. But that more radical concern not what I wrote about when I wrote that post. So sure, you're 100% correct and I agree with your point. I do not think the idea that "folks undrstand the survellience aspect of all this tech" is generally legible to the fascists and other anti-leftist US "centrists" who populate this specific message board- I think the conversation in this thread supports that view. It's hard to make that point into something they are able to read. I'd still like them to consider it.

AnimalMuppet 26d ago

Mass surveillance? You could be right. Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better. People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.

_def 26d ago
They understand that they don't need to care as long as there are enough others getting eaten before them.
iso1631 25d ago
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
- deleted 25d ago
  [deleted]
pessimizer 25d ago
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear It's the opposite that is true. Governments can selectively enforce laws against companies based on whether they comply or not, and pay them for whatever they want them to do. The wealthy and their companies own Congress and the Executive because those positions rely on publicity to be elected, and they own the judiciary because the judges are both aligned with political parties and completely bribeable. They do not, however, exactly own the secret police funded by secret budgets - that's where the real executive lies, and that's where efforts are coordinated and conflicts between powerful blocs are adjudicated. The performance we get is meaningless. The only important parts of the show we get to watch are following where the money is going and watching who state power is currently killing. > People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there. People certainly do understand. The media and the upper-middle class have made it almost a religion to spend their entire political life calling those people crazy. Why have upper-middle class people chosen such a stupid religion? Because a lot of money has been dumped into their stock portfolios.

euroderf 26d ago

Think about it the way the US thought about them pesky Rooskies during the Cold War: Don't look at intentions. Look at capabilities.

ActorNightly 26d ago

The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right. By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late. Age old story in human history.

mywittyname 25d ago

Government agencies (foreign and domestic) will just be just a few of the many buyers of this information. Private companies buy up this information like mad. It's so cheap - five figures gets you a database of every person over 18 in the USA and their addresses. Another five figures gets work history for them. Another five figures gets you property information. Another gets you social media feeds. Etc. Some vendors even sell it ad hoc with little up-front cost. For less than a million a year, any company can build an extensive profile on every person in the USA. These companies are just adding to that list.