[add-sub-mul-div]

You're on a site with a surprisingly high amount of support among commenters for trading privacy and freedom for convenience and comfort where it aligns with their religion/other biases or desired consumer experiences. I don't know if this the best place to ask for advice.

[pjc50]

I'm not sure people realize that HN is already at the most libertarian end, and all the discourse spaces which are much closer to actual power and legislation are much less pro-privacy.

[davorak]

Historically, like 10-20 years ago, libertarian would be staunchly pro privacy. Is this no longer the case? If libertarians have dropped this stance, since it is so close to what was the core beliefs, I really have no mental model of the philosophy/politics for libertarians any more.

Any primer/link on what current libertarians believe is welcome.

[natch]

It’s possible to want something without wanting to live in a system where there is a nanny to enforce that thing. Other means of enforcement exist, such as free markets.

[pjc50]

Yes, but there's really not very many libertarians left who haven't cast their lot in for Republican support, resulting in the present situation. Not that there were many to begin with.

[scarecrowbob]

You might find it useful to distinguish between right and left libertarians.

All my anarchist (left libertarian) friends are pretty consistently opposed to state and corporate surveillance. There is plenty of theory in a canon of literature that goes back to the mid 19th century, even as there are many subgroups and spurs off that general line of thought all with their own sets of (usually somewhat) consistent lines.

If you want something short and brutal, I am a fan of "Desert" by anonymous, but "A Utopia of Rules" by David Graeber is not a bad thing to read and probably closer to a popular line. Or the CIA-Coded Yale academic James Scott has a lot to say, "Two Cheers for Anarchism" and "Seeing Like a State" both seem to have influenced a lot of people.

Historically "right libertarians" (the US Libertarian political party, for instance) have been, uh, "less consistent" in their thinking, so you might have a hard time finding anything that looks like a "philosophy" in that branch of "thought". Plenty of goofy-ass ideas, but little consistency except a strange ability to begrudgingly conform to GOP politics at the end of the day.

[iamnothere]

Reddit seems to have drifted back to more libertarian than HN on privacy issues. At least in technical subreddits. Not sure why that is, perhaps there are more users here whose salaries are tied to surveillance.