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207 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 13h \ parent \ on: Anti-Free-Speech War Escalates As EU Unleashes DSA On Musk's X Politics_And_Law
Is this a consequence of the way the control of information is an asymmetric battle (cheap to spread/copy, expensive to delete/hide)?
Maybe, but that's not why I think that.
Freedom is the default state - the one we are born with. Thus, the only freedoms we don't have 1 are the ones that others take from us. Because there is no monogovernment 2 covering everyone on the internet, there is a plurality of different freedoms taken. But because the internet connects everyone with everyone, these freedoms 3 become extremely visible, especially when you are confronted with a freedom someone else has but you don't.
This influence, although it may lead to resistance, such as the DSA, ought to ultimately bring a reversal to the mean, and in the case of freedom that means less obstruction to freedom, not more, because we're born free. Especially in democracies, where the feelings of the public do make a difference. I don't think that ultimately we'll all be fully free, because I think the majority is too weak for that, but freedoms can and will be won eventually.
One of the reasons why freedom of speech is not as much appreciated in the EU is because it's always the nazis that pursue it the loudest. As Nazis literally gassed people in Europe, there is virtue in not caring about their freedom of speech. But, the reaction to the whole woke/PC way of forcing new societal rules (and thus less freedom) upon people, and to the Covid stuff of course, is shifting this allergy to restrictions on freedom of speech to a much larger group of people; time will tell if it's enough, or that more misery is needed for Europe to be truly shaken back into reality. I fear the latter but I hope not.
Feels like the internet got built without statists and people in charge fully comprehending the implications of a many-pathed web over which information can flow.
The internet - at least by the time I got involved in the 80s - was built because of the shared belief that with free flow of information we all become more knowledgable, and with that, more powerful 4. For me personally, this has probably been true, though I don't know what I would have been without the internet. However, when I upgraded from library to internet, everything became possible. Before that, knowledge was tedious.
Almost as if they took their control of information for granted. Bitcoiners are hoping something similar happens with money: the system gets built before the people in charge realize how fundamentally it shifts the game.
Absolutely. The internet wasn't regulated in the beginning and governments have probably been the least embracing of it, even for their own services, because it is contra to everything government stands for: it erodes their power when things are simple and easy. Now, they're fighting back. We should pay close attention to this because if we think they're fighting Bitcoin now... we're delusional.
Yet there are still jurisdictions like N Korea -- which either imply that a state can still effectively control the flow of information or that I'm being more duped than I thought.
That's just the narrative. Like the WEF, that's a narrative too. Covid should be a good example of how you too got controlled though. It just didn't last and neither will it in NK.

Footnotes

  1. Important: the freedoms we don't have isn't the same as the freedoms we don't consume. ↩
  2. despite the WEF trying real hard ↩
  3. And other benefits... for example, only after mainstream internet made the benefit known, my US friends started asking me about if there really is universal education in Europe and wanting to discuss whether it's truly beneficial. ↩
  4. Try an LLM with and without search capabilities to see my point being made for me in the fullest modernity. ↩
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 5h
ought to ultimately bring a reversal to the mean, and in the case of freedom that means less obstruction to freedom, not more, because we're born free.
While I fundamentally agree with the statement that we are born free, I'm not as hopeful about a trend towards less obstruction to freedom.
It seems like the structures we have made to protect freedom (legal, cultural, technical) are mostly abstract in nature. For instance, we have the Fourth Amendment in the US. It's 54 words long and pretty unequivocally says people in the US should be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures...yet there are things like the third party doctrine and civil asset forfeiture.
Living in the US, I do not feel that my papers are secure from unreasonable search. My tax dollars pay for cameras at intersections all over town that track my movements, they pay the salaries for people who work at OFAC and at the US Treasury who might decide that they don't like my financial activities. The pay
It feels like we have guarantees of freedom in the abstract which are regularly violated in the particular and the vast majority of the people are more or less fine with it as long as it doesn't pose too much of an inconvenience. As long as the violations of our freedom seem to only occur around the fringes, we can still believe that we have much more freedom than we actually do.
And then the freedom that gets talked about, that we hear about, becomes small and withered and the mean to which we revert is farther away from our natural state than we hoped.
I look at things like religion and monarchies and it seems to me that we are very easily convinced to embrace our own subjugation. If our natural state is freedom, how did we come to this? I put up with these systems I know to be depriving me of freedom for some reason, don't I?I feel like I probably need to read The Dispossessed again.
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