Title amended to be more precise, less clickbaity.
Sunde says a lot of things there, but in terms of the internet as technology, I think he is largely correct.
The internet is hardware and a protocol, however it has developed in a political and economic context that has determined its fate. We don't imagine many of the possibilities for what it could be, because its centralized nature has been leveraged by corporations and governments. Sunde takes a particularly grim view, very colored by his politics. Much of what has happened on the internet is positive and good.
IMHO we have absorbed a de facto childlike role when it comes to the application of this technology. We cry for attention, we cry for validation, we cry for independence, and we cry for protection and security. When we make these demands we create a power structure, and the means to these ends have more significance than we often admit. When we tame the internet, we tame ourselves. We aren't as scary or as fragile as we think we are, or as we are commonly made to believe. We are good, and the internet can leverage that.
I don't think he's excessively grim given that he, like a lot of us, thought of the Internet as a separate thing with its own politics. This and most of the things he's said over the last couple of years just follow from realizing that the Internet is no escape.
The internet has a culture that is rooted in pre-web days, but as far as politics, I think to the extent they existed, it was only because it was happening below the radar. The early culture was unique in that those of us that came early shared a common intellectual and technical curiosity. The internet has changed the masses, but the masses couldn't come on board without changing the internet.
But we are already moving forward. It's not stopping here. The next networks will be decentralized. The masses will arrive there in the next couple of decades, new economies and cultures will result, and its pioneers will lament what could have been.
I have a thing and you steal the thing. You have a thing, I have no thing :(
I have a file and you make a copy of it. We both have files :D
Copyright might make sense from a policy perspective, if the artificial scarcity is really necessary to get people making things (the success of free software suggests it is not), but there isn't a moral dimension there.
Well, I hang out on r/fantasy with a lot of struggling new authors. There's really no ':D' about it. Instead, it's just another week they can't quit their day job.
I torrent music (which is at least somewhat defensible on practical grounds). I used to steal from grocery and convenience stores regularly. But I don't pretend to morals I don't deserve.
And I would like to quite my job and volunteer to help modernize Axiom's interactive environment and visualization functions, because an adequate free replacement for Mathematica is desperately needed and Axiom is the best candidate. Hacking on aging computer algebra systems does not pay the bills; boring old workflow automation does. Capitalism is not my friend, nor yours. Nevertheless, I don't think failing to provide an incentive to keep producing is the same as denying access to a physical thing. I don't claim sharing is a good thing to do, just solidly indifferent.
The consequences seem very similar, which is what matters to me.
- I don't claim sharing is a good thing to do, just solidly indifferent.
Many do. Most, even, in the torrenting/filesharing/free internet movement regard themselves as on the vanguard of something or another.
I have nothing against it. I'm just saying it won't work without either a complete dictatorship where there's not much freedom, or a society where people aren't required to work (aka a fully automated society).
In a post-singularity society, it works great. And the idea/appeal of it is great.
But either way my comment was more of pointing out that the article doesn't have much to do with the internet itself as it does hating capitalism. I clicked for an article on the internet, not communism.
See like that's reasonable, and I even agree with you on when communism works. Even though I think the article is about the internet (just maybe more about its place in the context of our society), I respect what you're saying. Just next time you could frame it better (than that first comment).
Thanks :)
Yea, I apologize for that first comment. It was more of a snarky knee-jerk response of running across an anti-capitalism article when I just wanted to read cool stuff about the internet and the pirate bay guys.
I mean, it's pretty obvious they're anti-capitalism, but still. By "win this fight for the internet" I imagined they were talking about the rampant DMCA shit, random government takedowns of websites, etc. Not "ahh! people want to use capitalism on the internet!"
Obviously the internet itself is more in line with communism ideals, and indeed we see a natural push that way just in terms of how things function here. The problem is that it doesn't jive with modern society, and that capitalism is useful for getting to a state where communism can take over.
Capitalism doesn't work 'late game' but communism doesn't really work 'early game'. You need to make the switch at some point. And certainly the internet and automation will greatly help with that.
But to write off capitalism as evil and bad for the internet is silly. Most of the internet is literally piggybacking off of capitalism.
His solution is utter chaos. That's some evil villain ultron type shit right there. I feel like that is becoming more and more of a prominent ideal in reality and even in like fiction. People wanting to restart things and rebuild. The issue I have with that is who is to say that the so-called "good guys" are the ones that rebuild this broken world. There seems to be this huge jump from like letting the world collapse to it being rebuilt correctly. I think if you shift power from money it will simply remanifest itself into brute force.