The article was interesting to read not necessarily as a generative spark but as a datapoint, a symptom of how effective, in the long run, the response from those who saw the internet as a threat was.

Only someone who's lost the plot (or arrived late) would summarily conflate Barlow's 1996 Declaration with "one of those sovereign citizen TikToks where someone in traffic court is claiming diplomatic immunity under maritime law". The article itself has fallen victim to the weaponized co-optation whose framework it describes.

The author says "I remember thinking it was genius when I first read it. I was young enough [...]", believing it was due to being impressionable, but it's more likely that it was due to having lost something along the way. Or rather, it was stolen from them and they didn't even realize.

The Declaration was right, it was just naively optimistic and severely underestimated its opponent + incorrectly presumed digital natives would automatically be on the "right" side. Now we are where we are. And it's just the beginning of the pendulum's counterswing.

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mindslight 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Could you please keep going? Maybe I'm just old, tired, and have other responsibilities, but things are feeling pretty bleak these days.

Google is back to pushing remote attestation (ie WEI), Apple has already had it for quite some time. "AI" is a great Schelling point excuse for capital structures to collude rather than compete, whether it's demanding identification / "system integrity" (aka computational disenfranchisement) for routine Web tasks or simply making computing hardware unaffordable (and thus even less practical for most people, whether it's GPUs, RAM, or RPis for IoT projects).

There are some silver linings like AI codegen empowering individuals to solve their own problems, and/or really go to town hacking/polishing their libre project for others to use.

But at best I see a future 5-10 years down the road where I've got a few totally-pwnt corporate-government-approved devices for accomplishing basic tasks (with whatever I/O devices are cost-effective from the subset we're allowed to use), and then my own independent network that cannot do much of what's required to interface with (ie exist in) wider society.

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js8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In many countries, people have already won a similar fight with printing press, press censorship and encryption. I think there is a reason for optimism (of the will).

If AI can code, and empower individuals to do it on a local device, it is already smart enough to educate masses on the matters of their self-interest, such as freedom and solidarity.

I don't think the powers will be able to gatekeep it. There might be some grief but overall human freedom will prevail.

	▲	an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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TheOtherHobbes 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suspect this is correct, and the push towards "age verification" (i.e. user id hiding behind a pretext), the insane build out of server farms, which is making commodity computing unaffordable, and the push towards AI in everything are all pointing in the same direction.

The 1990s vision of computing was a bicycle - or car - for the mind. It was libertarian in the sense that if you had a device it would empower you to get where you wanted to go more quickly.

And the rhetoric around it was very much about personal exploration on a new and exciting frontier.

The 2020s vision is more like a totalitarian transport network where you don't own the vehicle, you don't own the network, there's constant propaganda telling you how to structure your journey to the standard destinations, and deviation is becoming increasingly impossible.

The device is just an access port to the network. It's dumbed down, so even if you understand how it works you can't do much with it. And as AI becomes more prevalent, your ability to understand that will diminish further.

So the end result is very plausibly a state where you're completely reliant on AI to do anything. And AI is owned by the pseudo-state oligopoly - the same oligopoly which runs the propaganda networks that sell you ads, hype selected content while suppressing other content, and genrally try to influence your behaviour.

It's the complete opposite of the original vision.

Will consumer AI fix this? Probably not. Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres.

	▲	vrganj 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Even if the hardware keeps improving - debatable - a personal device is never going to be able to compete, in any sense, with an international network of data centres. There's one way to deal with this, but I doubt it'll be popular in these parts: Communal ownership of the means of production. Don't use the oligarchy's AI. Your personal hardware is going to be too weak. But together, we can own our own server farms.

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schoen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Alongside "1984 wasn't an instruction manual" we may need the slogan "'The Right to Read' wasn't an instruction manual".

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throwawayqqq11 13 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The corpolibertarians are betting massively on AI to liberate them from the working class and in their wake, transforming societies and economies as needed. I think this long term goal is delusional and the day of the pitchforks is coming. They can't endlessly fabricate distractive images of enemies, like migrants or what ever, while inflating budgets and claims about the future.