[alansammarone]

I share your feelings - both the sadness about the path we seem to be going down and the wonder about what the Internet used to be.

I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense, but is constructed - every day, little by little, by each and every one of us. What the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.

Put another way - this is a rhetorical question - can do we do anything about it? Maybe.

[matheusmoreira]

I've given up on trying to change the world.

> What will the world will be like in the future is decided by us every day.

That's the problem.

This "us" you're referring to. People. They're the problem. They have no principles. They stand for nothing. They think they do, but the reality is their principles are easily compromised. They are highly susceptible to manipulation by way of emotion. Powerful emotions like terror and rage.

Conjure up some drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorist boogeyman and they'll compromise immediately. Suddenly freedom is being traded away for security. Suddenly free speech is no longer absolute. Then you see that these weren't principles that entire nations were founded upon, they were more like guidelines, thrown away at the first sign of inconvenience.

The harsh truth is that danger must not only be accepted but embraced in order to have true freedom and independence. The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals. There is no way around it. Compromise even a little and it's over.

People are the problem. They endlessly compromise on things. No ideal can ever be reached. It's an existential problem that cannot be solved.

To be an idealist is to be an extremist. Sadly people are not prepared to pay the costs of idealism. The ideal of a decentralized, encrypted and uncensorable communications medium, for example. It requires that they accept the cost that criminals will not only use it but be enabled by it. They won't accept it. Thus we march not towards the ideal but towards its opposite: centralized plain text surveilled and controlled communications.

[throaway1975]

Attitudes like yours are ones that "they" want us to adopt. Chat Control just got defeated by people power TWICE. Never ever think that you have no power. Why else would they try to control you?

[immibis]

Chat Control getting voted against had nothing to do with people power. It was always going to be the outcome, as long as we're lucky enough to have MEPs who are wiser than MECs. Social media outage had nothing to do with it - it was entirely up to who sits in the European Parliament.

[throaway1975]

Well they specifically called out the website set up for the mass emailing campaign as the (a) reason why they couldn't ignore the outrage. Never mentioned anything about social media, but the idea that parliamentary officials are immune to people power is just naive. They do not exist in a vacuum.

https://www.politico.eu/article/one-man-spam-campaign-ravage...

Id also seriously question your assertion that it was inevitable that CC would be voted down, given how much support it has among EU membership.

[immibis]

Interesting. I know in the USA each congressperson has a small team of people to filter emails, including deleting repetitive ones. I thought this was universal.

> Joachim's mass email campaign is unconventional as a lobbying tool, differing from the more wonky approach usually taken in Brussels. But the website's impact has been undeniable.

Ah, so this is completely new to them - for some reason. Possibly due to constituents having a fear of retaliation on other issues, as Europe has only weak free speech. Well, don't worry, soon the European Parliament will have filters in place to ignore its constituents just as efficiently as every other Western democracy.

[throaway1975]

Lol. They won't. A small team to delete repetitive emails has nothing to do with getting hundreds of emails a day from different people in your constituency. Also "weak free speech" is pretty much just a US-centred meme.

[alansammarone]

I don't necessarily disagree with you, broadly.

The good news is that, I think, we don't really need - if fact, we probably don't really want - most people to accept anything, at least the specific context of this thread. It's about whether we can carve out a space - some space - for people like you and me.

> I've given up on trying to change the world.

I don't think you have. Speech matters. Ideas matter. I'm not going to try to quantify such things, but looking at your HN submissions and your comments - including this one - I think you are actively changing the world, for better or worse. If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think. We have a surprisingly large number of people who don't.

> Believe in Truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

[matheusmoreira]

> It's about whether we can carve out a space - some space - for people like you and me.

Yes. Society at large is a lost cause but maybe we can select some number of known good individuals and form a microsociety inside it where we can enjoy the freedom we crave.

There is a name for that: elitism. I'm not against it. Those who don't make the cut certainly will be.

> If nothing else, you believe in objective truth, I think.

I do.

[squigz]

"Everyone else is stupid. I'm not though. I should be part of the elite"

The apathy and disdain people like you display for your fellow citizens is doing more harm to freedoms all over the world than most other efforts.

[matheusmoreira]

Oh please.

I've tried to debate politics with people so childishly stupid they thought just giving everyone a million dollars would make everyone rich and solve the world's problems. They thought the government just didn't want to give them the money, like it was a conspiracy to keep them down.

I'm tired of it, and I'm tired of people like that having a say in the future of nations.

I'm no super genius but I'm done being humble. Even a total pleb like me can rise above a good chunk of my "fellow citizens" because frankly the bar's pretty low.

[squigz]

Too bad intelligence isn't the prerequisite to being an elite, so you'll be turned into Soylent Green just like the rest of us.

Anyway I'd take those people over someone as elitist and arrogant as you any day.

[Ntrails]

> The internet that connects us also connects criminals, the cryptography that protects us also protects criminals.

Agreed. If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc.

idk - it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones

[mistercheph]

I wish there was a country all those people could go and be happy, fat, and safe, and I could remain here with freedom. Maybe China or the UK would be nice places to suggest for these people to go? More closely aligned with their values

[salawat]

Even if you aren't malignant, or evil, then stupid is the only option left, because you've observed the structure of the problem space, understood the new problems and vulnerabilities and points of abuse introduced, accepted their existential nature, and then simply turned off your brain and ceased to continue processing to the inevitable conclusion. You can be evil/malignant. You can be stupid. If you choose to be stupid, none of us can separate you from the evil/malignant camp.

So if it makes you feel better. Cool. I don't see you as an evil mustache twirling person, but you're still a systemic threat from your refusal to take into account the threat these tools represent in terms of being weaponized by the first tyranny minded group of individuals to wander in.

There's differences of priorities that I have no compunctions having a spirited discussion around. What I refuse to engage in is argumentation with people intent on pissing on my shoes and trying to claim it's raining, or trying to get me to fit the Procrustean bed that makes them feel safer at my expense.

[alansammarone]

evil and stupid are certainly the wrong words. I agree this is a nuanced issue. however, I think it is an objective fact that certain orderings of priorities - in particular, the relative priority of freedom, privacy, security, protection, "justice" (depending on how you want to define that word) are strictly worse than others.

and that assumes it's a zero sum game, which I don't think is true generally. It may be true in the limit, but...we're far from the limit, so to speak. we can have both freedom and privacy and safety. And I think giving up on any one of them is objectively bad, both individually as well as a society.

now, on a different tone - and perhaps this really is subjetive/personal - myself, I'd rather die by my own choices than live by others. literally. I think there's close to 0 value in living a life according to values that others chose.

[matheusmoreira]

> If only we could also agree that not everyone who thinks this is not a good trade is evil/malignant/stupid etc.

No. We cannot agree on that.

> it feels like a simple case of priorities. Freedom and privacy are not everyones

Then what is? Survival? People would accept anything if their betters kept their bellies full?

I see your point, I just want humans to be better than that. I want to be better than that. It's not about priorities, it's about basic human dignity. Without dignity, we're reduced to beasts.

People's moral fortitude is tested by crisis. Will they give up their principles or will they stick to them? If you ram two aircraft into the twin towers, will the USA remain the land of the free, or will it turn into a surveillance police state that violates the basic rights and dignity of its own population on a daily basis?

I see people fail this test all the time. I see entire nations fail this test. As such, my own beliefs that people are reasonable and principled are being tested. Is it worth it to have principles, to try to reach an ideal state of society, or is it all about money, force and power in an amoral world? My beliefs are trending towards the latter.

[ericfr11]

Your path seems to be one towards chaos and anarchy. You are part of the people you are referring to, if I may say so.

[wartywhoa23]

Well, enjoy your order and rule of law then - but pray that the rule of law doesn't cross into what even you would deem unthinkable.

[Dilettante_]

  I do believe, however, that the future does not "exist" in any real sense

The future is an immediate result of the present, which is an immediate result of the past. The laws of physics dictate this with no wiggle room. It's complicated and functionally impossible to predict with any certainty, but the future is certain. It is as fixed as the past, and the present that arises from it.

[wartywhoa23]

You are mistaking a realization of a random process for the random process itself.

[Dilettante_]

I don't understand but I am interested, would you give a bit more explanation?

[wartywhoa23]

Sure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realization_(probability)

[Dilettante_]

Thank you, but I seem terribly out of my depth for that level of discussion.

If Claude helped me understand correctly, the error is on me for taking determinism as a base assumption and rejecting the assumption of "randomness" at a universal level? Is this something I would need to buff up on the quantum stuff to come around on?

All I have in my head is Laplace's demon, all I've ever observed is deterministic events: If you flip the coin the same way everytime, it'll come up the same way everytime?

[wartywhoa23]

Laplace's demon requires being able to tell velocity vectors of individual molecules, and tossing a coin predictably takes being able to throw it with equally enormous precision, correcting for the net effect of all collisions with molecules of air along the way, etc.

So in the end of the day posessing such knowledge, or rather having a mind with this much focus, depth and resolution would indeed mean a win of determinism over entropy. How can a cup break irreversibly if we know how to put back all of its shards so that they click in place at atomic scale without gaps and lost pieces?

But our reality is a battlefield between pure will/determinism and pure chance/entropy, and it's depicted vividly in The Matrix as the battle between The Architect and The Oracle. And we seem to be cursed/blessed to be Neos trying to balance that out or escape that Sisyphean task altogether.

[Dilettante_]

Too late to edit: Learned about the Stern-Gerlach apparatus as relating to the uncertainty principle. That's a huge puzzle piece and I'm probably gonna shut up about determinism for a while as I stew on this.

[azalemeth]

I for one take every consumer survey opportunity to spell out why these things are a bad idea, and routinely contact my elected member of parliament to ask about this - she's sympathetic. The other opportunity to rebel is just to be difficult. Route all your traffic always through an anonymising VPN with defence against traffic analysis. If someone geoip blocks you from making a purchase, reach out to their customer support and gently reeducate them. Spend money on open source things, personally and professionally, and never buy DRM. Advocate for e2ee (I work partly in medicine - this is an easy sell) and highlight how decentralisation and encryption puts power in the hands of practitioners rather than big tech giants. If a large corporation breaks eg gdpr rules, report them to the regulator. Be the change you want to see in the world.

I don't like the way it's going either, but the array of technical solutions from mesh networks like zero tier and tailscale to briar, i2p and freenet right the way through to technologies such as wush, v2ray and x-ray, tor or daita all give me some hope that there will be a technological out for a long while yet. The social issues are best served socially though.