Hacker News Reader

Comment by adolph | Hacker News Reader

I much prefer Sivers' vision of tech independence[0] over Doctorow's vision of a law-regulation for every problem. They aren't necessarily incompatible with one another. Sivers is exit compared to Doctorow's voice (in the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty framework[1]). However, I think what Doctorow advocates is more likely to result in regulatory-capture than people-power. I think that capture is more likely to result in a world with higher costs in choosing forms of exit.

0. https://sive.rs/ti

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

View on HN

We are in such a connected age though. I do want to exit and start my own shit, but I don't want to walk away from all my friends and family who aren't into pioneering a new digital existence.

Sure I can keep running my xmpp server & begging people to contact me over xmpp. But I'm going to miss all the life updates & chatter my friends are doing on Facebook or Instagram or Discord.

The points in this article seem super spot on. The anti-cirumvention laws obstruct any kind of fair rise of an interesting alternative. We can walk away, but only if we are ok severing ties. Competitive compatibility is the relief we need to allow meaningful choices.

The world of physical products allowed consumers a lot of property rights to the stuff they purchased, but in the cloud age these lords of the cloud have everything tightly sealed up in data-keeps and you likely stand 'in felony contempt of business model' (and are likely liable for these fines that start at half a million dollars for first infraction for just making the tool), if you do anything that isn't explicitly built into the app already.

This shift from the world having some property rights to being ruled over from afar by contract law was pointed out by Mark Lemley, decades ago, and highlighted in the lovely Web scraping for me but not for thee, which points out that big companies all got their start off the exact sort of violations & scraping & mercenary-done competitive compatibility that would get you or I blasted out of the waters in a heartbeat. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970

Exit is only interesting if it doesn't mean going off to live in a digital barrel. I absolutely fully agree, we need to own the means of connection. We fully need to bootstrap real alternatives. But if the alternative has to create a walk-away movement to succeed, that's a horrible thing. And, people everywhere should have some informational property rights. That there are digital system & cloud stuff involved shouldn't so fundamentally strip people of rights & freedom as it does.

Walking away from Social Media does not necessarily mean walking away from friends and family. Family/social connections existed before S.M. and they will exist after it’s gone. If your friends are not even willing to keep in touch unless it is over a specific BigTech-mediated advertising platform, well, that probably says more about them and about the reality of your relationship.

I detest this with a passion. It's a common refrain, and one that rejects any empathy or sympathy; strikes me as relentless, heartless, and small.

Sure I can keep in touch with friends and family. Even if I walkaway from the active broadcast channels they use, I don't necessarily lose total contact with them. At least some of them.

But they are chatting & sharing in conversations that I will no longer see or be a part of. My walking away has a huge loss to me, is me walking away from gathering spots and places where others habutate. Trying to disregard that loss feels like a gambit I hear a lot from people who are regressive, who want us in a pre-social-media age & think we ought to all walk away. I do not think it's anywhere near that simple, and I think there's huge value that we have entered a connected era, that we do keep in some contact with people from such a wide range of our lives. The serendipity of interacting with someone we otherwise wouldn't, across sometimes such great time and space: that's so neat. I don't want to walk away from that. I want to improve it.

I did not mean it as a personal dig against you. Quitting social media was eye opening for me, and really crystalized who in my life actually gave a shit and who didn't. It helped me to understand how meaningless this surface-level "contact" is where someone just reads an update, hits the like button and moves on. I think a lot of people are confusing "social media contact" with "healthy personal relationships." Reasonable people can disagree of course, but I don't think I really lost anything valuable leaving all that behind.

you offhandedly diminish the power of convenicence

I'd use matrix before xmpp.

I at least use Signal now, that's not bad.

My own take on [0] is that is way too focused on the technical aspects of the problems

but most of these problems aren't technical in nature.

no amount of 'tech hacking' can solve what are ultimately political (socioeconomic) issues.

these are matters of government policy and such. the law is not about the words used to write it down with, but about the principlies behind, about the intents of the people who wrote it; regardless of who is reading.

but I also consider that "law making" and computing are ultimately solving a very similar problem so do feel free to dismiss what I say

Sivers and Doctorow discuss different problem-solution pairs. Are the problems posed by Doctorow not technically solvable?

Primary Automobile diagnostic codes: Doctorow's hypothetical tech solution already exists in OpenPilot. This is due to a technical standard, CAN bus[0]. The CAN is is easier to access with the government mandate of an ODB connector[1] but that wasn't necessary, just helpful.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics

Tech independence is, at best an individual solution. Sure, maybe you can be free, but you leave everyone else behind.

What we need are collective solutions. Solutions that work to protect your parents, your children, your friends, your co-workers—everyone—from tech megacorporations whose intention—in some cases openly and explicitly—is to own the world and make everyone pay rent to them for existing in the digital space.

At worst, "tech independence" is a mirage. You may have your own physical server, running an OS you've built from scratch, whose code you've inspected and verified free from infiltration, but you're still communicating over wires owned by those same megacorporations. If too many people walk away and say "not my problem anymore," rather than fighting for better laws and regulations to rein in the massive overreach of big tech companies, we lose the critical mass to be able to continue to fight them.

Which would you rather have:

A world where no one has to pay that digital rent? Where everyone can communicate, network, etc privately and safely, with end-to-end encryption over open protocols?

Or one where you get to play the Lone Hero Standing Alone Against The Evil, while others continue to be abused?

This works for certain things, like email and such - but it only works for very tech-savvy people, not the general consumer, and it stops working at a certain scale: One of the examples from the article is about car manufacturers (who also employ big tech like business methods). Good luck engineering your own car.

Similarly, while I could pay 2-3 times more for a Fairphone or such, it'd be better if tech independence was available to everyone, including for consumer-grade smartphones.

On a related note, I think devices such as Fairphone and Framework laptops prove that even without regulation, "free" (as in freedom) products are already more expensive, you don't need regulations to make that happen.

Honestly, perhaps I’m a purist, but Derek Sivers’ list isn’t sufficient for this type of “tech independence”. You can’t get around having to essentially rent your domain from the registry, unless you set up a registrar yourself. Perhaps you’re fine with using a numeric IP address and you don’t need to engage DNS; then you are still relying on your ISP: Comcast, Centurylink, Starlink, etc. OK, set up your own ISP - it is possible. But your connectivity to other regions of the state/province, country, or globe is fundamentally an _interdependency_ relationship, and pursuing independence is anathema to that.

Not to say that this list isn’t incredibly valuable for most people; and I have a similar “tech independent” setup myself. But it’s definitely not an alternative to the types of solutions that Cory Doctorow puts forth.

Edit… I missed your note about them not being incompatible so this whole comment is a bit of a strawman. But I highly respect the depth of knowledge that Doctorow has on these matters and don’t think he means for government regulation to be an alternative to personal tech agility.

Welcome to Hackernews, where the strong hand of government is the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

Government has power which we individually lack. It makes sense to harness that power for individual freedom and the common good. The idea that this will be subverted by corporations to fulfill their ends is naive, because they are trying to do that anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com