• 213 Posts
  • 1.37K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2023

help-circle

  • Both of these terms have more than one meaning, some of which overlap with each other, so the question is impossible to answer objectively. Both terms can refer to a belief system that people would usually describe as “left-wing” (~ “anarchism”, “libertarian socialism”, “left-libertarianism”, “anarcho-communism”), or one that people would usually describe as “right-wing” (~ “anarcho-capitalism”, “(right-)libertarianism”, “minarchism”).

    Myself, I use “libertarian” as the antonym of “authoritarian”, so “libertarian” is a positive term for me; after all (like most people) I think authoritarianism is a bad thing. But libertarianism doesn’t need to be, nor is it usually, completely 100% against all hierarchy and all authority. It can still hold that some hierarchy and authority is necessary for getting things to function, but that it should be limited or accountable.

    I don’t consider myself any sort of “anarchist”, I think it’s impossible to completely do away with authority, hierarchy, or government, no matter how much I think those things should have limits to their powers.

    Of course I also very strongly believe that what leftists call “capitalism” (i.e. the economic system the world currently mostly runs on) is not, like they say, just another class society where the function of the state is to keep the ruling class in power. There are no formally defined classes in a liberal democracy like there were under feudalism. The mere existence of private property rights and wage labor doesn’t create a class society; those things have existed for millennia of human history and are here to stay. So for that reason I disagree with anarcho-communists when they say that in an “anarchy”, there would no longer be private property.









  • I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.

    agreed

    Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).

    I don’t agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.

    At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T

    agreed

    and so they should be given a longer leash

    Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.

    Governments also do not have the resources to chase down

    and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?


  • algorithms are

    Everything that happens on a computer is based on algorithms. Chronological sorting of everything you’re following is still an algorithm. But I get what you mean.

    I agree with you that modern personalized recommendation algorithms like the big social media platforms are based on are not a good thing (for people of any age). They break the Internet’s original promise that it should be the general public who decides on what we exchange ideas about on the Internet. They turn social media operators into (essentially) media companies by picking winners with lots of reach and losers with little reach…

    But none of that has anything to do with how old any users are.


  • u wot m8

    The article simultaneously takes the positions:

    • that it’s a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media for young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on “social media addiction” was well decided. (in the section “How Governments Are Regulating Social Media”)
    • that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section “How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned”)

    Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it’s possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn’t have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.