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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the dream dept.

While the Net has certainly scored a point or two against the State, the State has scored a lot more points against the Net. If the State wants your domain name, it takes it. If that's independence, what does utter defeat and submission look like?

Worse: whatever state tyranny exists, it's obviously dwarfed by the private, free-market, corporate tyrannosaurs that stalk the cloud today. We can see this clearly by imagining all these thunder-lizards were actually part of the government. "Private" and "public" are just labels, after all.

Imagine a world in which LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and the NSA were all in one big org chart. Is there anyone, of any political stripe, who doesn't find this outcome creepy? It's probably going to happen, in fact if not in form. While formal nationalization is out of fashion, regulation easily achieves the same result, while keeping the sacred words "private enterprise."

How do today's technologists win freedom from State control?


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:33PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:33PM (#257232)

    How do today's technologists win freedom from State control?

    The basic outline of what you would need to do to get what you say you want:

    1. Move to a place without any state control. There are several to choose from: International waters, Somalia, Libya, much of Syria and Afghanistan, etc. Anywhere else, and the State could shut you down whenever it wanted to, using their claimed monopoly on the legitimate use of force in the area they control (which is essentially what the State is).

    2. Defend yourself from everybody in those places who wants to take all your stuff and possibly kill you in the process. This will almost definitely involve more than one person, because if one person tries to take on the organized groups of people that are running around the places with no functioning State, they'll lose. That group of people needs to, therefore, be organized enough to win the fights they are in and not take each others stuff, while disorganized enough to avoid becoming The State (because that's what you're fighting against).

    3. Design and build from scratch hardware suitable for some kind of peer-to-peer network (you can't use hardware built by a place run by The State, because that might be compromised to spy for The State). Using materials and tools that you got your hands on without using anything produced by The State, such as US dollars.

    4. Create a peer-to-peer network from the hardware you just built in step 3 using only voluntarily-implemented open standards. Again, there can't be any kind of central authority in your design, because that would be a State, and you can't have that. So, for example, you're going to have to come up with some kind of peer-to-peer system that manages who has what address and can't be defeated by a malicious actor who wants to spy on the other people in that network.

    So there's your blueprint for a technological libertarian utopia. Be aware that Step 2 has happened approximately once in human history (Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, and it didn't last), and steps 3 and 4 have never even come close to happening. Have fun!

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Ugmo on Sunday November 01 2015, @08:46PM

    by Ugmo (5721) on Sunday November 01 2015, @08:46PM (#257251)

    So a Technologist should move to a lawless area with roving bands of stateless armed aggressors. That last part is a little wordy. Let's call them barbarians. The technologist has to work alone to defend himself. You say that cannot be done because the barbarians outnumber him. But he has knowledge and technology! He will use his secret knowledge to build systems of defense and substitutes for manpower: armed drones, robots. He should set up shop at a defensible location like a mountain top or a tower, or better yet a tower on a mountain top. Working alone, surrounded by servants born of secret knowledge and technology, seeking to gain ultimate power to fight back at the evil governments that subjugate the rest of the world.

    What we have here is a plot for a Jules Verne novel, or from the barbarian's point of view a "Conan versus the evil Wizard" story.

    I am down with that. Where do I sign up?