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Notes -
What do you think about cyberlibertarianism?
Cyberlibertarianism is exactly what it sounds like: the belief that the internet should be fully unrestricted and ungoverned. The idea coalesced in the 1990s when the consensus on tech was far more optimistic.
I think it's a beautiful, unattainable ideal. It symbolizes (more than libertarianism) a broader absolute freedom and physical transcendence, to realize whatever you dream. But in reality, absolute freedom is impossible, power hierarchies are inevitable, and the internet is a physical construct that can be seized (on the other end of the spectrum, individuals and companies bypass without consequence internet restrictions like copyright, even in repressive countries via complex VPN setups). Intersectionally, the internet has led to good (e.g. long-distance communication with friends/family) and bad (e.g. asociality and toxicity from social media); should it be as unregulated as today if individuals and groups won't stop themselves from negative spirals (which may anyways lead to future violence and restrictions)?
Cyberlibertarianism's Origins
The ideas of cyberlibertarianism have been described in Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, Alvin Toffler, 1994) and A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (John Perry Barlow, 1996).
Basically to summarize the latter, it begins with
and includes statements like
Langdon Winner's "foresight"
The actual term "cyberlibertarianism" first appeared in Cyberlibertarian Myths And The Prospects For Community (Langdon Winner, 1997).
I think this is a good read. In a sea of cyberlibertarian idealism and optimism, Winner was realistic and pessimistic. He actually defines cyberlibertarianism in detail, then predicts how it will be adopted and warped, in practice, with outcomes.
Specifically, Winner defines cyberlibertarianism by breaking it into four sub-beliefs:
Then he pivots to realism with this (IMO) excellent paragraph
In the remainder, Winner successfully predicts that cyberlibertarian dogma will lead to:
Winner didn't have extreme foresight, just observation. These "predictions" had already began: the television industry (e.g. CNN) was already large and influencing the zeitgeist to further its interests, toxic online communities had already started forming (e.g. Usenet), and local stores were already being replaced (e.g. by Amazon). Winner also looked at historical literature on philosophy, economics, and politics.
The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism
This blogpost showed up on Hacker News and inspired my post.
tl;dr: the author of this rambling blogpost describes the evolution of the internet under cyberlibertarianism (the dominant viewpoint in its early years), then criticizes cyberlibertarianism using the problems of today's internet.
I don't really like it: it's full of ad hominems, meaningless analogies, and overconfident claims (especially about other's thoughts). But it's somewhat informative, and I agree with the underlying ideas: cyberlibertarianism is naively optimistic, hence today's internet has failed to reach its full expectations.
The underlying wrench in the works for cyberlibertarianism is spam. This is a fundamental problem that messes with the very notion of free speech. This was true even before LLMs, though obviously the problem is much worse now.
In case it’s not clear how this is related, consider trying to run a website like this one according to cyberlibertarian ideals: ideally, the website would be distributed somehow, not hosted on a centralised server where whoever is paying the bill has arbitrary control over what happens on the site. Each participant on the network would contribute some minor amount of resources for storing messages, and messages would be synced by having the peers talk to each other. But what do you do when someone spams the network with terabytes of messages? You say "Ok, well let’s put a rate limit for each user" alright, the spammer makes new accounts and uploads at the max rate for each account as fast as they can create accounts. You say "Ok, well let’s limit account creation." But how? Who decides whether you’re allowed to make an account or not?
With the advent of blockchain, I actually do think there are some answers here—you can bind account and post creation to payment on a blockchain, and that will cull the spam. But now you have a pay-to-play system, which is arguably not very cyberpunk-ish at least according to colloquial intuition, but moreover, who’s going to participate when they could just join a forum like this one for free?
And this isn’t even touching on the fact that building decentralised systems is really hard compared to building a typical centralised website. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together and a bit of grit can make their own website. But making your own decentralised system requires you to be a legit 140+ IQ big brain who knows the arcanery of software engineering inside and out.
For these reasons, the ideal is rarely pursued, and even when it is, it’s in clunky ways that don’t provide the "full service" experience you get with centralised software. For example, torrents are decentralised, but they don’t address the very-much-relevant question of "where do you get the metadata for the torrent you want in the first place?" And answering that question has traditionally landed right back at "use a centralised service like ThePirateBay," where you get the regular old whac-a-mole dynamics of law enforcement seizing domain names and issuing warrants while the devs run off to some Pacific island and register a new domain there (and the US government will promptly bribe the local government to close the domain and arrest the devs, which may or may not work—they tend to just take the bribe money and not actually do what was asked, so you have to resort to aggressive negotiations, yada yada, but I digress)
Oh great, I just got a spam email that hacked one of my email accounts to send me "pay us bitcoin or we send your naughty browsing history to everyone" blackmail attempt.
I don't have a camera and microphone attached to my PC so I laugh to scorn your clumsy efforts at "we took control and recorded you self-abusing to disgusting porn", criminals!
But these idiots want to make it even easier for criminals to scare money out of the gullible, and more importantly, clog up the inboxes of those of us who don't care if the world sees our perverted kinks history?
No, thank you. That's like the "all drugs of whatever sort should be legal and available without limit" notion, only considered a good idea by those who don't have to deal with the kinds of people who want to take all sorts of drugs all day long and/or deal in same.
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What? Nonsense! That's the purest expression of cyberlibertarianism!
People are too used to everything on the internet being "free". Many people who might be associated with cyberlibertarianism in truth really want cybersocialism.
But in the long run, if the internet is indeed to retain some degree of liberty instead of being turned into a state-controlled panopticon, more granular and automated models of actually paying for what you want are going to become the norm, or else we will drown in ads and spam as you correctly pointed out.
Everyone, since again as you correctly pointed out, public and free spaces will be utterly destroyed by bots sooner or later.
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Yeah, Duggan is imo 100% wrong. This has nothing to do with ideology - today's social media is anything but cyberlibertarian anyway - and everything to do with what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever: Before, if you grew up in a crackpot community you might literally be unaware of the viability of alternative viewpoints well into your teens. Same deal for the relatively ubiquitous benign moderate religious communities. I've grown up in the latter, and we still had plenty of crackpots, too. Not to mention that Duggan seems like the kind of person who would like to just generally ban any speech to the right of Bernie Sanders.
I think unfortunately, this also goes the other way. Misinformation is also much easier to get, giving us the toaster fucker problem:
"Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers."
'Man wakes up in 2040, tells his friend "I want to fuck a toaster". The friend replies "You know you can just order a sexbot, right? I really don't want to know about the details."'
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The EFF and their dreams of a digital frontier were both right and wrong. Right in that it was a frontier, right in that it did create a new world, wrong in that the new world wasn't one of anarchy, wrong that its tether to realspace didn't allow it to survive as an independent entity.
I've expanded on this idea before, but all politics are ultimately totalitarian. In this sense the lover of liberty has a duty to fight a vain and unending war on all attempts at control. What may be called cyberlibertarianism is just one more battle, one that was, as all battles for liberty, ultimately lost.
Now we fight a new fight, one of cypherpunks against totalizing surveillance and enforcement. One that we will most likely lose too. With our only solace being the fact that total power is ultimately self defeating. And that what few cracks we create may grow large and destroy our enemies long after we are all dead.
Take whichever sides you want. But man's lust for freedom isn't hypocritical, it is, if anything, tragic.
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