Veering offtopic a little, but your comment reminded me, hilariously, that after Stay-At-Home was mandated, my older, "prepper" friends and acquaintances were generally the first to crack and start complaining on Facebook about unfair it was that they were expected to just stay home in their bunkers and not go to bars and shop for their khakis. So much for the rugged self-reliance they loved to crow about!

I can imagine the Internet Anarchists behaving the same way. They'll be, in reality, the first to sign up for the AmazoGoogoMetaAppleInternet so they can keep posting to Social Media and doing their online shopping.

Not-unrelatedly, a history of political privately-owned firearms use in the US looks pretty bad for the "it's for FREEDOM!" side of the debate. They're used to enforce (local) tyranny or abridgment of civil rights, at least as often and at least as effectively as they're used to defend freedom. If we ever see a full turn toward authoritarianism, I fully expect private arms will be more help than hindrance to its rise.

There were other powers on North America.

But no, instead we should pretend it had something to do with shooting a president you don't like. Because that's what "freedom from tyranny" is.

As flawed as the founding fathers were, they were probably smart enough to understand that the nature of the threats the country would face were likely to evolve over time.

Do you think this makes you look smart?

The important thing is you feel smug.

Popped-collar-lacoste-polo madras-shorts-wearing dudes whose only survival skills are knot-tying, trying to get by in the apocalypse. LOL.

Besides, it's not about being excited as much as trying to find silver linings in a rapidly deteriorating environment.

I can certainly sympathize, but I think the best path forward for any anarchist would be to fight the attestation initiatives fiercely, rather than to resign and say “maybe we could have a good web again if we start over fresh”.

That aside, I’m not sure what you are saying with that comment about myself. I don’t think it serves the discussion.

More likely is a bifurcation of the internet between West and BRICS, which is already partially in place

wym?

Absolutely. Smarter people than me have predicted it at various points over the last 30 years, and it has yet come to fully pass. We are seeing pieces coming slowly together, though.

> More likely is a bifurcation of the internet between West and BRICS

You are using BRICS very liberally here - I don't think Brazil is particularly internet-hostile, and South Africans have more important issues to think about.

Is there a movement towards a more balcanized network? Absolutely - most European countries now have individual DNS blacklists (the UK one is basically at full discretion of an opaque paralegal entity that answers to no-one); Turkey, Iran, and every other Middle-Eastern or South-Asian country (including Israel, India, Pakistan) can and do shut down their networks whenever they see fit; China have had their Great Firewall since Day 1; and Russia, well, they do what Putin likes to do on any given day.

None of that is particularly new though, it's just the usual autocratic crap. Corpweb will be much more cyberpunk.

As opposed to the masses of people exploring sites other than Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit? We're already there.

If we expect consumers to choose the open, anarchist, Internet over the corporate clean Internet, then we expect too much of them.

The other way around is not so simple, because of the IDs etc.

Hence the anarchists lose.

As someone who intentionally has removed myself from social media, it's been a win. The same goes for a lot of online services.

There is a cost side to this, it's not a free ride, but the scale problem reduces the cost. My crappy $200 hosting box scales to hundreds of users.

Their revealed preference is that they don’t want a free information superhighway.