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
For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlled social media platforms of today. But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion. Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out. And if you want to customize the feed, we could make client-side filters and algorithms. There could be an open-source algorithm called "Hacker News" that you can just download and install into your open-source social media client.
As for keeping the powerful in check, don't forget that we've kind of lost equality before the law at this point, as shown by the Epstein saga. If we try to remove anonymity from the Internet right now, it will only be used to surveil regular citizens but not the people we need to keep in check. I would happily support a law that selectively enforces the other way around, though: let's mandate real identity for all government personnel online and expose their Polymarket accounts.
The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.
I don’t think that’s true, unfortunately. You have lots of cases of major propaganda accounts found to be foreign actors and pretty much nothing happened to them
Even if it were so, it is still a win. Without anonymity there is no liberty to the weak at all. And thus for that liberty we must endure all the crap.
But I also don’t expect that removing anonymity would in itself improve the current world, things are at a point where people living in democracies are openly advocating for the destruction of every single liberal ideals. Sure that’s in part astroturfed by anonymous accounts but way too many people couldn’t care less if they real identity would be linked to those claims
And since technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism, it's not a net good anymore.
There were and will be opposing voices also in deepest fascism.
But more broadly, totalitarism is rather the term, where the whole society is total under control of one ideology. That can be fascism, but also other ideologies steive for that.
But yes, allowing anonymous voices is one way to counter it.
looks like we're talking different fascisms.
I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes.
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.
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.
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.
And this is where the geopolitical aspect comes in and where an increasing number of studies calls this 'Digital Authoritarianism' with the stated goal of a nation or company (or both in cooperation) keeping control of the population, the narrative and the access to information.
An overview of the literature and studies on the subject: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02681102.2024.2...
A recent study that implicitely inverstigates the role of corporations in the trend: Digital Authoritarianism: from state control to algorithmic despotism https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5117399&... It's a bit long(ish), 29 pages (the last 10 are references) but worth a read.
The device becomes a magic artifact. Like a palantir. Many fantasy stories look like there were (or still are somewhere out there) great people who made all the magical stuff in the story while the people in the story have no idea how that stuff works.
That is possibly the way our civilization going. Especially when the datacenters will be in space, and only the "dumb" Starlink like terminals on Earth.
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.
The quote is a direct reference to a core tenet of Marxist theory, socialism, and communism.
Historically, communal ownership at scale has almost always been implemented via a centralized state, which has tended to gravitate towards authoritarianism. The Soviet Union and East Germany, and many other countries along those lines, didn't really fit the "hippy co-op" image very well.
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.
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.