
The Internet Is Making You Less Free - iamnothere
https://areomagazine.com/2019/05/01/the-internet-is-making-you-less-free/
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StanislavPetrov
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Unfortunately we have become less
vigilant while the tools available to suppress our collective liberty have
become vastly more powerful.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Eternal vigilance is possible for the unemployed and childless, unfortunately
for me I have 15 hours a day devoted to decreased vigilance and the 8 hours
devoted to sleeping.

~~~
Siira
Perhaps you should have considered not having a child if you can’t give them a
free life. Not everyone has to have a child; Everyone has to guard the
liberty.

~~~
xena
Hindsight is 20/20, foresight is murky at best.

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alexgambler
Perhaps I agree with this statement, because every day we all spend a lot of
time on social networks or various Internet services or even online games like
[https://casinority.com/au/](https://casinority.com/au/) or others. I'm going
to experiment, if I can stop using the smartphone and the iPad for one month.
I really hope that I can do it.

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jfengel
The article seems to focus heavily on China and Russia, which makes for kind
of an odd notion of exactly who the "you" is in the title. Most of their
readership is not in those two countries. (It also seems to have an extremely
America-centric view of the state of the Internet in those two countries,
which does not strike me as especially well informed. Its view of China's
"social credit" system reflects Fox News version of it and has little to do
with reality.)

The main argument it makes that actually affects its readers is that the
social media giants are cracking down on what they consider antisocial
behavior. It doesn't seem possible to me to make you "less free" by banning
you from doing something that was impossible before the Internet. Alex Jones
may not be able to post to YouTube any more, but he's no less free than he was
in 2005.

It's vacuously true that Facebook and YouTube are less "free" than they were
before they began the crackdown; it needs no article to tell you that. But the
Internet is still "free": Jones is welcome to support his own infrastructure.

As far as I can tell, this is little more than yet another person demanding
access to other people's resources. Which strikes me as inconsistent with its
obvious conservative, libertarian leanings.

~~~
0max
The China part of the argument has more merit as they have been exporting the
infrastructure supporting their "social credit" system to other nations since
the Beijing Olympics in 2008

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-
survei...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-surveillance-
cameras-police-government.html)

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skybrian
To quibble with the headline: not so I'd notice, and I think I know my own
situation better than some random writer on the Internet.

Appealing to people's self-interest doesn't seem like a great argument. How
about talking about how it hurts other people that we want to support?

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jsloss
There is no shortage of examples of how powerful platforms and governments are
using this technology in a way that reduces personal freedom. Surveillance is
the name of the game in our current era of internet business models. Are you
suggesting that this isn't the case?

~~~
skybrian
To put it another way, it's odd that the "you" in the headline promises to
talk about the average reader's situation but then they talk about what's
happening in China.

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iamnothere
China and Russia are given as worst case examples. Halfway through the
article: "Observed in isolation, the authoritarian measures taken in China and
Russia don’t immediately indicate an existential risk to freedom elsewhere."
The author gradually redirects their attention to Western nations.

