Looking at all the new and proposed laws coming through, I don't think we'll have those basic freedoms all that much longer.
Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway.
That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.
Regulation isn't exactly at odds with freedom. One could certainly regulate freedom in order to foster it.
I agree on the "information wants to be free" aspect. In the early days of the Internet, it felt like a free as in freedom shadow world where anyone could do anything they want. The moment copyright infringement lawsuits started to happen, that sense withered.
Nowadays the companies with the highest market cap are computer technology companies. They're bigger than probably at least half the countries on Earth in terms of revenue. They're abusing their multinational power such that goverments become a tool to achieve more power and more money.
I personally think that us humans have to repeatedly go through centuries of bad decisions and evil overlords to learn an important lesson. Kindness can't exist without evilness. Jing-jang has a dot of the opposite color on each side. But I digress.
Cheers!
Edit: IDK what the lesson is, either. Perhaps it varies per person?
Out of curiosity, why cite a 1980s action film?
(BTW, I doubt a Motorola heart would cost $1, but I still think that's hilarious.)
Everyone else can get get strip mined for attention and croak, you don't care.
I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state.
And I would argue that that is hardly an outlandish fear. It's barely an extrapolation at all.
It does not accept that. In particular, libertarians are very ok with domestic violence.
Quite a lot of libertanism is all about creating conditions where poorer or weaker people have no realistic recourse.
Why? That seems like a big assertion to make in a side sentence without any supporting argument.
It seems the onus is on the other side to justify the state, and that we should't be trying to find alternative solutions to the problems it attempts to solve.
Millions of people live in the US and don’t use Google products or pay Google a dime.
Try not paying taxes because you don’t want to support the actions of the federal government and see how that works out.
I think where people go wrong is treating Google the way they treat their weird neighbor Bob. Bob's damage is limited. Google is an immense, powerful, alien entity, far beyond the control of any person, and with its own inscrutable goals which are the not goals of literally any person alive or dead.
I genuinely don't understand the desire to leave this entity unmoored to wreck what havoc it may.
The reason democracy is better than other forms of governance is that it provides incentives for those in power which are better aligned with the upholding of human rights and protection against abuse. Myself casting a vote every few years is de facto meaningless.
Subsequently the tail end of the gilded age and enacted in June 18, only 5months before the crash of oct 1929.
Constitutionally the size of the US government was expected to scale proportionally with population and 3/5ths of slaves.
This is why your vote ‘feels’ meaningless. We have been under a state of corporate capture for coming up to 100years. Last time there was push back from congress we got the Powell memo. That memo reinforces and defends corporate power in American politics.
And all the DDoS and crytocurrency extortions and scams should extend to meatspace too, and you would be okay with it because it's supposedly still better than what govts do?
It is also the only entity powerful enough to stand up to other monopolies, businesses, which are dictatorships without any democratic control.
There will always be a power structure. I'd prefer one I can vote out.
The fundamental flaw in any type of libertarian / anarchist thinking is denying the reality that power will always be concentrated somehow. The libertarian fantasy would result in neofeudalism, if theres no state to stop it.
Representative of who exactly? Generally governments around the world win with <50% of the vote. Those who vote make up a small fraction of the population. Of those who voted for the winning party, only a small fraction of them actually feel fully represented by their party - often people vote strategically, or they vote for the "lesser evil" rather than voting for a representative who wholly represents their views.
The rest have a government who are not representative of them in power over them. Hardly representative of the people.