But on the other hand these “technolibertarians” don’t actually seem to be that libertarian. In fact, I get very strong “these are the exact same people who built the nordic eugenics programs” vibes from them. The same naive “I can run people’s lives for them” progressivist elitist attitude, which in business simply either results in a product that solves someone’s problems, or bankrupty, but which in government has historically had the failure mode of forcibly sterilizing about 1% of the population. They don’t seem to reject the idea of running other people’s lives for them, but rather simply to think that they could do a better job at it.
There is a very serious difference though: They do not impose this on you from the barrel of a gun which is very unlike most eugenics programs.
It is becoming harder and harder to have a social life without giving Zuckerberg acces to your private data, but at least he isn’t hiring people to show up at your house with uniforms and truncheons because you decided to stay away from him.
Is there a potential problem? Absolutely! Power, a lot of power, is concentrating into a very small area. If they ever decide that they should use the power of the state to impose on you, it will be easy for them. So far, they haven’t.
Yes, this is currently true. But the mindset seems to be the same, and refraining from such violence doesn’t seem to be the product of principles but rather of opportunity and situation, and that is why the idea of those people taking over the government is frightening. Not as frightening as the idea of Actual Democracy where the bottom 50% in informedness actually have 50% of all power, but frightening nonetheless. It might be better than what we have now, but it would be staggeringly sub-optimal with some very bad failure modes that only the less-inherently-coercive nature of business is keeping in check.
If those people ever start doing a significant amount of democratic politics, I’d expect such failure modes to emerge relatively quickly. The desire to use the state to optimize others, and the ideology of interconnectedness that legitimizes intrusions into people’s personal autonomy are there, and have the potential to turn really ugly and oppressive if combined with bias and lack of hard-to-transmit information about other people’s situations (which the STEM class is displaying in staggering abundance).
And politics happens outside the state as well. Facebook may be well within their rights to require “real names”, but this has massive knock-on effects in outing people and exposing them to stalkers and abusers etc. and may result in someone else showing up at one’s house with the means, motive and opportunity to do violence. And Facebook may be allowed to set their own policies, but banning nudity while allowing violence and hate speech is not apolitical. It’s not even a Grand Principled Stand for freedom of expression; it’s simply a rather cynical acquiescence to certain norms over others, with certain outcomes instead of some different ones.
The desire to optimize without thoroughly understanding shows very well in the real name policy. So many not!white-upper-middle-class-men have expressed that such policies have certain predictable results, due to which it has recently been made less stringent which imo shows that the entire situation could have been avoided if Facebook had been a bit less activist about things it didn’t know enough of, right away instead of having to be told it with a backlash and a lot of innocent people getting hurt. Just because I don’t want to make things worse by having PoliceMob be able to get involved in this doesn’t mean that I consider such private policies to be above scrutiny and criticism.
(via shieldfoss)
2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 38 notes · source: marcusseldon · .permalink
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