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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)
I'm not sure Cyberlibertarianism implies that companies (or other owners) should be unable to moderate their forums, since normal libertarianism doesn't argue that people and companies should be unable to trespass unwanted guests and intruders in their owned buildings.
In your home, you can kick out people for any reason. You don't like their hair, you think they suck too much at Mario Party, and yes, because you don't like something they said or they were too loud or they wouldn't shut up. Why shouldn't that be the same rights to your privately owned internet forum?
This is what I call the "mandated friend" issue. Your friend choosing to not hang out with you after you called his mom a whore isn't a free speech issue, they're exercising their own right to association which is an associated right of free speech. Free speech does not mandate you a friend.
It's when government gets involved, as the party that claims a monopoly over violence and whose every action is subtly backed with that potential violence in the background, that rights start to be violated. Bad individuals use violence from time to time too, whether a bar fight or a political assassination, but those are not accepted and they get arrested and charged. It is government that asserts a monopoly on force.
Most free speech complaints in the western democracies nowadays are mandated friend style complaints, government does get involved at points, sometimes overtly bullshit but these tend to stick out because they're relatively rare now.
It's not merely a matter of moderation -- in the traditional tech model, there's actually only one governance system: absolute monarchy. Whoever controls the server controls the forum, and that's the end of it. They can moderate their forum, yes, but they can also edit the comments of users they don't like to make them say whatever they want. I'd wager this level of power is not what anyone actually wants out of a discussion forum. The reason everything is built this way isn't because people want it this way, but because it's easy to build.
The intuition libertarians are trying to capture is we want to somehow have a governance model that is something other than absolute monarchy: it should be possible to have a forum that belongs to the participants, and have this be enforced on a technical level. Unfortunately, this is not easy to program.
For what it's worth, even centralised platforms targeted at technical users often do have some level of mitigation to monarchal power here: for example, on Github (or any similar service), you can upload your SSH public key to the service and sign your commits. This means it's literally not possible for /u/spez to use his control over the platform to make malicious edits in your name, because he doesn't have your private key. (Well, there's a lot of asterisks here... but I'll spare the pedantry).
I'm not sure that actually matters too much. Most people are not going to use sites where such explicit abuse is constantly being done and Spez faced a lot of backlash over it, and the bad PR forced him to apologize.
Sure there might be some abuse in small communities but major ones will shy away from it as they currently do. The risk is just too great to constantly employ. Abuse can happen, especially thanks to the Network Effect. But still at the end of the day they can only step down a little bit before most people start to leave.
Ultimately someone or something has to be in charge of it, at the very least to remove stuff like child porn. And once they have that power, they can abuse that power. Except for the whole market thing.
And if you want alternative types of communities because you personally don't trust the mainstream as hosts or you're the type of rare rare niche where no one is boycotting for you, you can also just go make your own and go to them. Like say, TheMotte! I heard that's a site that some people use for a specific niche.
Aren't free markets neat? Without government regulations to tell you otherwise (enforced through violence), you really can just go build your own theme park with blackjack and hookers if you want.
Not really. There’s technically child porn stored in the bits of the Bitcoin blockchain, and there’s no way to remove it, yet this doesn’t seem to bother anyone. I was honestly kind of shocked that no major government tried to use this as an excuse to prosecute anyone running Bitcoin as a trafficker of child porn, because this is in a literal sense technically true.
Anyway, people often conflate filtering and censorship, but these aren’t the same thing: filtering is the ability to control what you see; censorship is the ability to control what others see. You can indeed have the former without the latter, and that’s all you need to have a decent user experience. For example, like Bitcoin, torrents have nobody in charge to do censorship. You can just make a torrent of child porn, and I’m sure many have, yet nobody associates torrents with child porn, and you’re unlikely to ever encounter it unless you explicitly search for it. Filtering works!
The issue here is that there is material that general society agrees on removing even in the US, which is one of the most open and free speech focused nations like the aforementioned child porn. That Bitcoin gets away with it on some technical issues doesn't mean that the world is going to be happy if this becomes the default of the internet and pedophiles are spreading around undeletable images.
There's also of course, stuff that people want to delete of themselves. Accidently posted a nude selfie of yourself from your phone instead of the pic of your dog? People are gonna want to delete that, not have it enshrined forever in the public eye. There's also stuff like trade secrets, and copyright. Piracy is already a major issue for creators today, companies are not going to embrace a widespread system where everything is permanent and takedowns are impossible. Or about how lies that cross the line into legally defamatory material? Gotta figure out a way for courts to order it removed.
There has to be a way to remove things, and once there is a way to remove things that way can be abused. "You can choose to not see the child porn or copyrighted material" isn't going to make society or companies happy.
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