[liberationtech] Commercialization makes your online rights irrelevant, more thoughts from my talk with @ioerror at #rp12

[Dmytri Kleiner]

On 20.05.2012 13:52, Pavol Luptak wrote:
> Just few notes:
>
> 1. It's the commercialization (economical profit motivation) that 
> drives
> technological progress and that's why these "centralized social media
> monopolies" have so many features, they are so user-friendly and so
> successful
> for the masses

If they received similar financing, p2p and distributed applications 
could also be user-friendly. However, lacking the capacity for 
surveillance and control, they can't get that funding from capital.


> 2. If these "social media monopolies" become really bad for their
> users, they
> just move to diaspora / identi.ca or something else.
> Now this level of "evil" is too low for the most people, so they
> simply do not
> care.

Those alternatives do not have the network size, nor sophistication of 
the social media monopolies, and this is exactly because they have no 
comparable source of financing.

Whether people "care about it," or not, the issue of systems of 
surveillance and control becoming ever more ubiquitous is a social 
question.


> 3. You have no moral right to steal money from taxpayers and use them 
> to
> regulate business of these social media monopolies, because you think 
> their
> users deserve a better privacy protection.

Please read some basic macroeconmics, the government does not spend 
taxpayer's money.

http://www.dmytri.info/tax-payers-lament/

By the way, if you live in an apartment building, is it morally 
reprehensible to ask you to contribute in some way in order to live 
there?



> PS: I am a big fan of opensource, openness, freedom, but also 
> voluntary
> decisions.

So far, you have given me no reason to care what you think, to be 
honest, since you are just rehashing long discredited 
"anarchocapitalist" garbage.

Have you read any Benjamin Tucker?

http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/tucker13.html
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/tucker/an_or_cap.html

I'm a big fan of Mutualism and Individualist Anarchism.

However, the best thing about "anarchocapitalism" is that it's 
completely irrelevant, and therefore not worth spending any more time 
debunking than transdimensional lizard people conspiracies.

You probably wont really believe me and proceed to write a defense of 
your "anarchocapitalism" which I will happily ignore. I've already done 
my research, and I'm just not interested in any ideology that pretends 
that we are not deeply social.

We are people, not some sort of disconnected individual exchange value 
calculators. We live for each other, we die for each other, we work for 
each other, and we share with and yes, we even steal from each other. We 
have a right to socially determine economic outcomes. More than a right, 
we have a moral imperative that's much stronger than your shallow moral 
indignation over taxation. If we can't collectively decide that we want 
no poverty, no economic barriers to education or health, no business 
models that cause environmental catastrophe, then we can have neither 
democracy nor freedom.

And yes, this means we also have a moral right to decide that we don't 
want surveillance and control to be the driving requirement of our 
global communications infrastructure, and to organize socially and 
politically towards these ends.


-- 
Dmytri Kleiner
Venture Communist