Ideally, we just run our own lives, collaboratively. That's the anarchist default position that we all start in.
What we really need is to meaningfully participate outside of the hierarchical monopolistic systems that demand our participation. That doesn't just mean that we create and hang out in distributed networks: it also means that we make and do interesting shit there, too.
The biggest hurdle I see is that we only really use uncensored spaces to do the shit that would otherwise be censored. We don't use distributed networks to plan a party with grandma, or bitch about the next series of layoffs. We don't use distributed networks to share scientific discovery or art.
I think part of the solution is to make software that is better at facilitating those kind of interactions, and the other part of the solution is actually fucking using it. How many of us are only waiting for the first part?
but what if the alternatives are fundamentally worse? Turns out centralization has a lot of advantages.
I think it's an error to demand the alternatives be as good-- that might not even always be possible. But even if they're less good they're usually still better than anything we could have imagined decades ago-- they're good enough to use.
And that should be enough because we shouldn't consider handing control of ourselves to third parties to be an acceptable choice at all.
Let's dig into what makes them worse, and see what we can do about it.
I think the main struggle is moderation. Moderation requires a hierarchy, which is much more compatible with a centralized model. I'm thinking that curation would be a good alternative. Rather than authoritatively silencing unwanted content, just categorize it well enough for users to filter what they want.
I agree with you, but many people have yet to understand that content they disagree with will continue to exist, no matter what, and central gatekeepers are not helpful in eliminating that content.
The fucking “nazi bar” analogy has ruined an entire generation. You would think after centuries of trying to stamp out competing ideas, humans would finally come to terms with the fact that it cannot be done.
Small curated groups are the only way to enforce ideological orthodoxy. You cannot force it on the public, nor can you punish the public for holding bad ideas without creating blowback and resistance.
I don't think we have to argue against the "nazi bar" analogy, though. In that analogy, nazis are allowed to exist in the world, just not in the bar. The difference is how we implement the concept of "in". The same analogy works if you are out on the street: everyone is allowed to be there, but that doesn't give nazis the right to your attention.
Until we have a real way to meaningfully process natural language (I have a serious idea for that, but that's another conversation), we won't be able to automate content filtration. The next best thing is ironically similar to what we came here to complain about: attestations in a web of trust. If everything we bother to read is tied to a user identity (which can be anonymous), we can filter out content from any user identity that is generally agreed to be unwelcome. The traditional work of moderation can be replaced by collaborative categorization of both content and publishers. Any identity whose published content is too burdensome to categorize can simply be filtered out completely. The core difference is that there are no "special" users: anyone can make, edit, and publish a filter list. Authority itself is replaced by every participant's choice of filter. Moderated spaces are replaced by the most popular intersection of lists. Identity is verified by the attestation of other identities, based on their experience participating with you.
I think we agree, the problem is people defining global platforms as “the bar”. We overemphasize the importance of global reach; it is important, but not everything needs to be global, least of all personal communication between small groups of friends. I don’t really want everyone herded into these public platforms where central authorities can determine who is blessed with the ability to speak to other people. I also don’t want people with political grievances to be cut off from places where they can air those grievances publicly, as this leads to bad outcomes. We need both kinds of spaces.
The web of trust idea is good, I have thought about it before as well, and I think there’s a couple of people who tried building a platform around it (I don’t think they got very far into the process though). I should be able to filter based on trusted people with similar taste. I shouldn’t have to accept a central authority’s notion of what is acceptable, excepting content that violates US law. That’s all I care about in terms of moderation.
That's one of the two main claims made by in favor of hardware attestation; so it makes sense to argue against it. Of course, the other claim (that categories of people must be kept "safe" from categories of content) is more insidious, so it does deserve more attention.
No. That would be a relatively better circumstance, but we would still have the root problem.
> Most of the thread seems to be a call for attestation to die, which feels impractical and unachievable.
I disagree, and I expect GrapheneOS devs do, too. Hardware attestation is a new thing, that isn't even really here yet. It absolutely can and should meet its demise.
The problem with [conservative] libertarians is that they are half anarchists.
They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.
If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.
This is where most people, including the author, present liberalism as the solution. Free market + democratic regulation is a great way to manage an economy; but is it really a good way to manage the rest of society?
The article brings up copyright without exploring the idea at all. I think this is the greatest mistake of all. Copyright is what forces every facet of society to participate in a capitalist market.
Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires. Wouldn't that be nice? Next, we wouldn't be structuring all human interactions with corporate ad platforms. There seems to be a lot of unexplored opportunity there. Even more exciting, moderators would suddenly have all the power that they need to manage the responsibility they are given. No more begging to reddit admins! No more fighting automated censorship! Doesn't that sound good?
It boggles my mind how people from nearly every political perspective have accepted copyright as the one perfect inarguable virtue. Even the cyberlibertarians op argues with are only willing to concede copyright with the promise of a magical free market replacement! Now's as good a time as ever to think about it.
> They support "radical individualism" (anarchy) and "free market absolutism" (hierarchy). This is a blatant contradiction no matter how you talk your way out of it.
Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work. To a right anarchist or libertarian, "Free market absolution" is not an ideology or a goal, it's just the result of private property rights + freedom of association.
Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work. I would assume that left leaning libertarians and social anarchists would also similarly agree that copyright is nonsense but I'm not so sure - the time I spent in those communities have me wondering if they even hate authority and hierarchy, or if they simply desire their own forms of it. Many indeed defend copyright.
> Not quite, they support property rights, which is something that social anarchists implicitly accept as well, they just have a different conception of how that would work.
The libertarian conception is that groups of people can form hierarchical corporations that compete directly with individuals in the marketplace. The social anarchist conception is usually that people participate in anarchist cooperatives instead. It depends on the anarchist what that means in practice.
> Most right-wing libertarians and right-wing anarchists (allow me this even if you disagree with the phrase) are against copyright because it's nonsensical in their conception of what property is and how property rights work.
Yes, but what they are sorely missing in that argument - in my opinion - is that the problem with copyright is monopoly power; which is also what you get from an unregulated market of corporations. The somewhat regulated market that exists today is obviously dominated by corporations whose anticompetitive participation is predicated on their copyright moats.
> Many [left-leaning libertarians and social anarchists] indeed defend copyright.
Yes, and I'm at least as frustrated about that as with any other political group.
It's incredibly rare to hear copyright's role in our society even described, let alone criticized; even though that role is incredibly significant.
> The libertarian conception is that groups of people can form hierarchical corporations that compete directly with individuals in the marketplace.
I think a principled libertarian would say that a corporation is nothing but a set of individuals who are working towards the same ends ;)
> It depends on the anarchist what that means in practice.
Does it ever. The gap between a social anarchist and an individualistic one is just as large as the gap between a socialist and a capitalist. Or at least, people argue as if it is :P
> which is also what you get from an unregulated market of corporations
A right leaning libertarian would argue that actual monopolies are rare and short lived, and can only be sustained by something like a state which can prevent competitors from entering the market and otherwise provide support through laws like copyright.
> It's incredibly rare to hear copyright's role in our society even described, let alone criticized; even though that role is incredibly significant.
Yep. It's one of the foundational pillars of our economy.
> If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations.
No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.
But "corporation" is an extremely broad term. Mom and pop businesses are corporations. A friend and I own a corporation that makes games, just the two of us, no employees. But Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc. are also corporations. So "corporation" doesn't capture what's bad about the latter.
> The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.
No, that's not correct. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that, first, corporations are not people--they don't have the same rights as people do. They are tools that people can use in a free market to more efficiently produce things and create wealth. But that's all they are. If we had that kind of free market, corporations that are larger than many countries probably wouldn't even exist.
Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market. The original concepts behind those corporations arose in what was more or less a free market--Larry and Sergey didn't need to get anyone's permission to put the original Google on the web, Jobs and Wozniak didn't need to get anyone's permission to build the first Apple computers. But at the scale those corporations are now, they cannot exist without the support and favoritism of governments. (And not just the US government; Apple, for example, would be dead in the water if it did not have the cooperation and support of the Chinese government for its manufacturing base.) And that means they are not products of "libertarian ideals". They might have started out that way, but they didn't, and couldn't, scale that way.
> Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires.
Sure we would. Zuckerberg isn't a billionaire because of copyright. He's a billionaire because he's convinced a substantial fraction of the entire planet that it's perfectly normal, routine, nothing to see here, to have an immensely valuable social networking tool appear by magic on the Internet for free. Same goes for the Google billionaires. Bezos isn't a billionaire because Amazon holds valuable copyrights; he's a billionaire because he sells something valuable, "what I want delivered to my door when I want it" convenience, and he's able to curry government favors so he can bully his supply chain into making that happen. Apple isn't sitting on a huge pile of cash because of copyrights; it's because they make devices that give a significant minority of the market what they want, no fuss, and governments let them manufacture those devices on the cheap while the market they're selling to is upscale.
Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in. But they'd do just as well, if not better, in a world without copyrights, as long as that world still had governments who would give them the favoritism they get now.
Everything that Meta owns is either copyright or hardware that facilitates the ownership of its distribution. They wouldn't have the interest or capital to run giant datacenters without the ability to profit from their "owned" users' data. Facebook and Instagram can only be valued because they are proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright. Even Meta's VR headsets are sold at a loss, with a walled garden app store designed to pay the difference.
> Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in.
Yes, that's the thing I'm arguing against. Would you mind considering it for a moment?
> No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.
That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals. The argument that a corporation should not be treated as an individual is irrelevant, because that is its role in a marketplace. That's who individuals directly compete with!
> Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market.
They are creatures in a market. Whether that market is free does not define them, only their opportunity. I agree that they get the opportunity of government favoritism, and that that is a significant part of the issue. My point is that it is not the root cause of the problem. In a "free market" that incorporates copyright and patents, any corporation who owns IP can leverage it as a moat, enforced by state violence. The fact that any individual can do the same does not change the power imbalance between an individual and a corporation: it increases it.
Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation. Even Amazon's anticompetitive behavior is predicated on their vertical integration of Amazon the delivery/fulfillment service with Amazon the marketplace. The fact that a marketplace can be owned at all is predicated on copyright.
How so? As I understand it, their terms of service (which of course nobody reads, but they're there) say that anything you post on their sites becomes their property, not yours.
> proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright
No, predicated on not letting other people see the source code. That would be true even if copyrights didn't exist.
> that's the thing I'm arguing against
I'm quite willing to consider arguments against copyrights and patents. But I don't think "abolishing copyrights and patents will make the tech giants behave, or at least take away a bunch of their power" is such an argument. As I said in my previous post, as long as they continue to get the government favoritism they have now, they won't care if copyrights and patents are abolished.
> That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals.
Again, "corporations" is an extremely broad term. A mom and pop restaurant is a corporation. And yes, it "outcompetes individuals" in the sense that a restaurant where one person tried to do every single task probably wouldn't work very well. But that doesn't make the corporation formed to operate the mom and pop restaurant a bad thing.
> Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation.
I disagree, for reasons I've already given, but I don't see that we're going to resolve that here. I simply don't see copyrights as a significant moat for the big tech giants compared to the other thumbs that are on the scale in their favor.
> How so? As I understand it, their terms of service (which of course nobody reads, but they're there) say that anything you post on their sites becomes their property, not yours.
Yes. Is there something confusing about what I said about that? They own the copyright for your data, and leverage that copyright to isolate your social interactions into their ad platform moat.
> No, predicated on not letting other people see the source code. That would be true even if copyrights didn't exist.
Yes and no. Copyright also disallows us from de-compiling something and publishing any changes. As an aside, if I ever get this subjective computing idea to work (or LLMs pan out), that distinction will be gone, too...
The main argument, though, is that the data, not the platform itself, is what is monopolized. It doesn't matter what software you use to play a video file (Netflix), buy a book (Amazon), or chat with your friends (Facebook), so long as those interactions can be monopolized. Copyright facilitates just that by enforcing the ownership of the data.
> Again, "corporations" is an extremely broad term.
Yes, so? A mom & pop business is not an individual. A fortune 500 company is not an individual. Is one worse than the other? Certainly. Is one a different category of thing? No. That's the point. The individual is not liberated in a marketplace where they must join (or fail to compete with) a corporation.
> I disagree, for reasons I've already given
You disagree that Amazon leverages their ownership of market listing copyrights to facilitate their private ownership of the Amazon marketplace? What else are they?
I don't disagree with your other complaints, but they all seem to be predicated on Amazon already existing as a profitable business with a strong enough political position to abuse. Is that not the case?
> but I don't see that we're going to resolve that here.
Isn't my perspective worth your consideration at all? This whole time, you have centered your focus on nitpicking what a libertarian believes, or what you believe to be the important problem. Do I get a turn? If not, why bother commenting?
That's the problem with depending on monopoly for coordination.
Maybe if we didn't let one corporation control so much of the distribution chain, we would avoid both the decision to overproduce and the stagnation of overproduced goods.
Of course, the real problem is that we have accepted the notion that food must profit someone, even when we have too much of it.
That's why billionaires use shares as collateral to get loans. It's money once removed, and it continues to be spendable so long as the share price stays high.
I sincerely doubt that Meta's share price would crash as a result of Zuckerberg getting an expensive judgement.
Meaning is abstract. We can't express meaning: we can only signify it. An expression (sign) may contain the latent structure of meaning (the writer's intention), but that structure can only be felt through a relevant interpretation.
To maintain relevance, we must find common ground. There is no true objectivity, because every sign must be built up from an arbitrary ground. At the very least, there will be a conflict of aesthetics.
The problem with LLMs is that they avoid the ground entirely, making them entirely ignorant to meaning. The only intention an LLM has is to preserve the familiarity of expression.
So yes, this kind of AI will not accomplish any epistemology; unless of course, it is truly able to facilitate a functional system of logic, and to ground that system near the user. I'm not going to hold my breath.
I think the great mistake of "good ole fashioned AI" was to build it from a perspective of objectivity. This constrains every grammar to the "context-free" category, and situates every expression to a singular fixed ground. Nothing can be ambiguous: therefore nothing can express (or interpret) uncertainty or metaphor.
What we really need is to recreate software from a subjective perspective. That's what I've been working on for the last few years... So far, it's harder than I expected; but it feels so close.
Yes. The main problem is that they can only lead you to familiar territory. The next problem is that it's hard to notice when you are back where you started.
This has been my main struggle using LLMs to soundboard my new idea. They can write an eloquent interpretation of the entire concept, but as soon as we get to implementation, it stumbles right into creating the very system I intend to replace.
So I would say it's the other way around: LLMs are an excellent map, but a terrible compass. Good enough if you want to explore familiar territory, but practically unusable on an adventure.
That's a feature that could be implemented by a subjective framework.
Traditionally, we use definition as the core primitive for programming. The programming language grammar defines the meaning of every possible expression, precisely and exhaustively. This is useful, because intention and interpretation are perfectly matched, making the system predictable. This is the perspective of objectivity.
The problem with objectivity is that it is categorically limited. A programming language compiler can only interpret using the predetermined rules of its grammar. The only abstract concepts that can be expressed are the ones that are implemented as programming language features. Ambiguity is unspeakable.
The other problem is that it is tautologically stagnant. The interpretation that you are going to use has already been completely defined. The programming language grammar is its own fundamental axiom: a tautology that dictates how every interpretation will be grounded. You can't choose a different axiom. Every programming language is its own silo of expression, forever incompatible with the rest. Sure, we have workarounds, like FFIs or APIs, but none of them can solve the root issue.
A subjective perspective would allow us to write and interpret ambiguous expression, which could be leveraged to (weakly) solve natural language processing. It would also allow us to change where our interpretations are grounded. That would (weakly) solve incompatibility. Instead of refactoring the expression, you would compose a new interpreter.
Because code is data, we can objectify our interpreters. We can apply logical deduction to choose the most relevant one, like a type system chooses the right polymorphic function. We can also compose interpreters like combinators, and decompose them by expressing their intentions. This way, we could have an elegant recursive self-referential system that generates relevant interpreters.
Any adequately described algorithm or data structure could be implemented to be perfectly compatible with any adequately interpreted system, all wrapped in whatever aesthetics the user chooses. On the fly. That's the dream, anyway.
> Meaning is abstract. We can't express meaning: we can only signify it. An expression (sign) may contain the latent structure of meaning (the writer's intention), but that structure can only be felt through a relevant interpretation.
I'm reminded immediately of the Enochian language which purportedly had the remarkable property of having a direct, unambiguous, 1-to-1 correspondence with the things being signified. To utter, and hear, any expression in Enochian is to directly transfer the author's intent into the listener's mind, wholly intact and unmodified:
Every Letter signifieth the member of the substance whereof it speaketh.
Every word signifieth the quiddity of the substance.
- John Dee, "A true & faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee ... and some spirits," 1659 [0].
The Tower of Babel is an allegory for the weak correspondence between human natural language and the things it attempts to signify (as opposed to the supposedly strong 1-to-1 correspondence of Enochian). The tongues are confused, people use the same words to signify different referents entirely, or cannot agree on which term should be used to signify a single concept, and the society collapses. This is similar to what Orwell wrote about, and we have already implemented Orwell's vision, sociopolitically, in the early 21st century, through the culture war (nobody can define "man" or "woman" any more, sometimes the word "man" is used to refer to a "woman," etc).
LLMs just accelerate this process of severing any connection whatsoever between signified and signifier. In some ways they are maximally Babelian, in that they maximize confusion by increasing the quantity of signifiers produced while minimizing the amount of time spent ensuring that the things we want signified are being accurately represented.
Speaking more broadly, I think there is much confusion in the spheres of both psychology and religion/spirituality/mysticism in their mutual inability to "come to terms" and agree upon which words should be used to refer to particular phenomenological experiences, or come to a mutual understanding of what those words even mean (try, for instance, to faithfully recreate, in your own mind, someone's written recollection of a psychedelic experience on erowid).
That's always been a fun idea. Even a thousand years ago, when most people couldn't read or write, we yearned for more. Even without a description of the problem and its domain, it's immediately obvious that perfect communication would be magic.
The problem is that it's impossible. Even if you could directly copy experience from one mind to the other, that experience would be ungrounded. Experience is just as subjective as any expression: that's why we need science.
> through the culture war (nobody can define "man" or "woman" any more, sometimes the word "man" is used to refer to a "woman," etc).
That's a pretty mean rejection of empathy you've got going on there. People are doing their best to describe their genuine experiences, yet the only interpretations you have bothered to subject their expression to are completely irrelevant to them. Maybe this is a good opportunity to explore a different perspective.
> LLMs just accelerate this process of severing any connection whatsoever between signified and signifier.
That's my entire point. There was never any connection to begin with. The sign can only point to the signified. The signified does not actually interact with any semantics. True objectivity can only apply to the signified: never the sign. Even mathematics leverage an arbitrary canonical grammar to model the reality of abstractions. The semantics are grounded in objectively true axioms, but the aesthetics are grounded in an arbitrary choice of symbols and grammar.
The words aren't our problem. The problem is relevance. If we want to communicate effectively, we must find common ground, so that our intentions can be relevant to each others' interpretations. In other words, we must leverage empathy. My goal is to partially automate empathy with computation.
That's a great description of the boundary between logical deduction NLP and bullshitting NLP.
I still have hope for the former. In fact, I think I might have figured out how to make it happen. Of course, if it works, the result won't be stubborn and monotone..
reply