Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

Comment by intended | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree. Amazing what was unthinkable in the early days and optimism of the net, has been replaced by near dystopia.

It seems that New tech has an advantage over the incumbents when

1) The early population of users is all experts or hackers of some sort (so diversity of use cases is low)

2) the regulators, are in no way or form able to project force, because they simply cannot recruit people as fast as new tech firms.

Eventually, the tech firms start hitting various frontiers, either slowing down, or failing and ejecting workers. New classes of workers catch up, and government projects start getting built.

Once the Frontier advantages disappear - the extra degrees of freedom new firms enjoyed get captured or shared with other powers, and become common place. Unless you find new degrees of freedom (With market/rule disrupting power) are found, the new dominant firms and the old political powers will start acting on each other.

This is where we are. The thought of a centralized net is pretty troubling, especially where it will end up as tech develops. It has only been 20 years since 2000 and web 2.0. There are countries which don't know that Facebook isn't the internet.

Well, it's only a dystopia if you want freedom over prosperity.

Turns out, most people want prosperity and the only reason they actually want freedom is because they're afraid lack of freedom blocks their attempts at prosperity.

The internet doesn't (yet) actually interfere with freedom in this sense, so few people care, and I suspect many of them are on this forum.

You can't have prosperity without freedom. What you're describing is a sure path to slavery; which is inescapable poverty.

The minute you lose all bargaining power, you become a slave.

Employees of corporations who think that less freedom leads to more prosperity may feel protected now but the minute that your master no longer needs your support, you will become one of the victims.

In all of history, people who live in free countries have always had the upper hand over those who live in oppressed countries.

If your country becomes an oppressed country, many of the rich people (the best among them) will leave and they will bring their money along with them to a free country. Most rich people don't want to live in an oppressed country. They simply don't like to see misery. I'm betting on island nations with relatively small populations.

> You can't have prosperity without freedom.

What about China?

They work very hard and they get relatively little for it. I wouldn't call that prosperity yet. Their stock index (SSE Composite Index) hasn't grown at all since 2009. Their GDP growth has been slowing, especially when you consider that they constantly devaluate their own currency (the inflation should make their growth numbers look bigger).

You can point to nice modern cities like Shanghai and assume that China is prosperous, but you can do the same with Pyongyang and assume that North Korea is prosperous.

Besides that, they seem to have been getting freer over time until about 2009 (compared to what they had before)... 2009 is also when the GDP growth rate started to fall.

> Turns out, most people want prosperity and the only reason they actually want freedom is because they're afraid lack of freedom blocks their attempts at prosperity.

Because we are exploring an infinite problem space, there is no algorithmic solution to the question of prosperity. People who forgo freedom essentially are subjecting themselves to someone else's idea of prosperity, and those who want to keep their freedoms are the ones that don't believe anyone else's exploration to find prosperity can necessarily be better than theirs.

> The internet doesn't (yet) actually interfere with freedom in this sense

But it does. Tremendous human potential is already being wasted in the name of showing ads to eyeballs; from PhDs who run the big data experiments, to the general public that waste their energy on outrage and unintegrable squabbles. Our collective intelligence suffers for this, we are less able to make sense of things as natural as pandemics despite the increased connectivity, and hopelessly stuck in argument for more complicated things. It tremendously and collectively blocks out a lot of prosperity, it just does in a way that doesn't show up on quarterly earnings.

Well advertisement is the basis on which many services can be offered... it isn't clear that a small number of PhDs/etc. being employed in (a mostly automated) discipline is therefore "a waste".

How many of these wasted lives have, for example, enabled all of the youtube creators to have careers?

> who forgo freedom essentially are subjecting themselves to someone else's idea of prosperity,

Yes and no. The problem space may be infinite, but human nature isnt; nor is the capacity of any given society to provide prosperity.

At some point your parents have to decide what bets to make on how you can reconsile your nature with the potential opportunities on offer (eg., to encourage sports, music, academic study, etc.).

And when parenting subsides you likewise have to reflect and make the same sorts of decisions.

Each such decision is a foreclosing of freedom in your sense: ie., it throws away much of the problem space.

Freedom is the currency of life, it's not there to be amassessed for its own sake. Happiness/prosperity/etc. can only be obtained by spending it.

> algorithmic solution to the question of prosperity

There kind-of is. Food, water (and air, I guess), housing, energy, protection from violence, sex. Only the last one, where human needs transform for physiological to psychological, lacks an algorithmic solution - and all further needs, like love, meaningful work, life purpose etc., but there's a reason we call these "first world problems". Also, as much as I like to diss it, religion has pretty good answers for these needs as well. Maybe the reason I dismiss religion is, that I can fulfill these needs myself...

Any system that requires all users to be massively above-average is, almost by definition, doomed to a niche existence.

Please read Master Switch by Tim Woo. It is worth noting that most things that are marketed as grass root are designed to be centralised.

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