Internet anarchists getting excited about the prospect of forking the Internet feels a lot like when a lot of preppers got excited about the potential breakdown of society when Covid hit.
“Finally I can put all my skills to the test, which people have been teasing me about for so long.”
In both cases, this attitude has the problem that they ignore the vast majority of people who would suffer under the new order. Very few people would find their way out of the corporate walled gardens and into the free information superhighway.
> Internet anarchists getting excited about the prospect of forking the Internet feels a lot like when a lot of preppies got excited about the potential breakdown of society when Covid hit.
> “Finally I can put all my skills to the test, which people have been teasing me about for so long.”
Veering offtopic a little, but your comment reminded me, hilariously, that after Stay-At-Home was mandated, my older, "prepper" friends and acquaintances were generally the first to crack and start complaining on Facebook about unfair it was that they were expected to just stay home in their bunkers and not go to bars and shop for their khakis. So much for the rugged self-reliance they loved to crow about!
I can imagine the Internet Anarchists behaving the same way. They'll be, in reality, the first to sign up for the AmazoGoogoMetaAppleInternet so they can keep posting to Social Media and doing their online shopping.
I'm absolutely willing to believe that it wasn't intentional, but you essentially said that being anti-lockdown means that you're weak, right? Regardless of whether that's a true statement, it definitely reads like a culture war sneer.
The US militia that everyone talks about in relation to the 2nd amendment weren't meant to protect the US from Canada. It was in response to a feared slave uprising from within.
The constitution was a set of principles meant to extend beyond the times they were written in.
As flawed as the founding fathers were, they were probably smart enough to understand that the nature of the threats the country would face were likely to evolve over time.
It is 'funny' how much the supposedly anti-government freedum fighters in the US are 100% behind 'back the blue' and the government agency that has the monopoly on the 'legal' use of physical force/violence in society.
Like the Native Americans who were actively raiding settlements and engaging in pretty brutal (by both parties) conflict with the settlers who often responded by generating local militias from normal folk who were then tasked with attacking the native americans.
But no, instead we should pretend it had something to do with shooting a president you don't like. Because that's what "freedom from tyranny" is.
It's a bit sad that a "daytime hacker, night time musician" from Sweden sees "internet anarchists" as something of a slur. I guess punk really is dead.
Besides, it's not about being excited as much as trying to find silver linings in a rapidly deteriorating environment.
Maybe your last sentence was more about some form of nostalgia for a long-lost decentralized Internet than excitedness?
I can certainly sympathize, but I think the best path forward for any anarchist would be to fight the attestation initiatives fiercely, rather than to resign and say “maybe we could have a good web again if we start over fresh”.
That aside, I’m not sure what you are saying with that comment about myself. I don’t think it serves the discussion.
I didn't define myself as an anarchist, you labelled me as such and drew some unflattering connotations to the term. Generally speaking, I don't deal in false dichotomies anyway. I was just saying that this could be the long-predicted inflection point.
Absolutely. Smarter people than me have predicted it at various points over the last 30 years, and it has yet come to fully pass. We are seeing pieces coming slowly together, though.
> More likely is a bifurcation of the internet between West and BRICS
You are using BRICS very liberally here - I don't think Brazil is particularly internet-hostile, and South Africans have more important issues to think about.
Is there a movement towards a more balcanized network? Absolutely - most European countries now have individual DNS blacklists (the UK one is basically at full discretion of an opaque paralegal entity that answers to no-one); Turkey, Iran, and every other Middle-Eastern or South-Asian country (including Israel, India, Pakistan) can and do shut down their networks whenever they see fit; China have had their Great Firewall since Day 1; and Russia, well, they do what Putin likes to do on any given day.
None of that is particularly new though, it's just the usual autocratic crap. Corpweb will be much more cyberpunk.
I read "preppies" as something very different from what you intended, at first, and was really confused, but also got some really funny mental images out of it.
Popped-collar-lacoste-polo madras-shorts-wearing dudes whose only survival skills are knot-tying, trying to get by in the apocalypse. LOL.
Sure, and I think that supports my argument. The law of least resistance rules on the mainstream Internet. Consumers already will pay for devices that surveil them and use their private data to sell them more crap they do not need.
If we expect consumers to choose the open, anarchist, Internet over the corporate clean Internet, then we expect too much of them.
“Finally I can put all my skills to the test, which people have been teasing me about for so long.”
In both cases, this attitude has the problem that they ignore the vast majority of people who would suffer under the new order. Very few people would find their way out of the corporate walled gardens and into the free information superhighway.