Forcing people to peer and forcing people not to peer are as fundamentally different as the bill of rights and the death penalty. One keeps communication channels open, the other closes them.
I choose what you frame as might lead to totalitarianism over being in totalitarianism any day of the week. The moment it becomes practically impossible to self host you are very likely to be on the slope with no way to tell how much further till mass graves. That likely will be the case if Josh ends up at the point at which Kiwifarms cant be turned back on again. Thats why people reference them as a canary. They are among the first that you can expect the wave to hit. With no way to tell up front how the wave is going to look this time around.
Communication channels cant be closed. If this form of mob controlled free-market censorship (or any form ) is here to stay much much harder to censor means of communication will start popping up to keep the kinetic breaks from engaging. Which will get a lot more disgusting then kiwifarms due to tribalistic reactions and people weaponizing the moderation burden, which will speed up the conflict cycle and the race to the bottom even more. Its still not optional. Thats what i meant when i said reactions quickly turn fascist. Making sure that it doesnt is an almost impossible task if you are far enough down the cycle.
The more we even need to talk about this, the more dangerous it becomes. What ever you are doing or trying to do, cutting communication channels can not be the likely outcome.
Not as fundamentally different as you want them to be. They're both saying "This is something the government has authority over, not individuals."
And once that authority is vested in the government, the government shall use it as those in control of the government deem fit. I trust a world where HE can misbehave but there's always another service provider down the pike a lot more than I trust one where the government's dictating who may be compelled to peer; the government, given enough time, always rolls around to being composed of people who de-peer me. Or you. And when they're calling the shots, there isn't a HE competitor down the pipe to turn to.
You keep saying "impossible to host." It's not. KF can still host; they must continue to seek out the coalition of providers that will work with them, the subset of the collective network willing to hear them. It's a big world and they're out there. But it's a vanishingly small group for no other reason than what KiwiFarms does and what they represent. Sometimes, people are all in agreement that something's wrong because it is.
> If this form of mob controlled free-market censorship (or any form ) is here to stay much much harder to censor means of communication will start popping up to keep the kinetic breaks from engaging
That's hardly an argument against the status quo; better point-to-point security benefits the people against oppressive governments. If this provides incentive to build it, good.
> What ever you are doing or trying to do, cutting communication channels can not be the likely outcome.
I used to subscribe to this fallacy. It turns out, cutting communication can be extremely healthy. The government owes everyone a platform for practical reasons. Individuals? They cut ties all the time. Always have. Sometimes someone just sucks, y'know?
For what its worth, i do sympathize with your perspective. And yes, in a perfect world we wouldnt want the government anywhere near this.
The problem is that we now are at the point at which it becomes a practical end to self hosting. Not because everyone is convinced and one of the good guys now but because the power structure that is in place. That dissonance to your intention is where the risk comes from and what i am trying to warn you about. You are describing a mechanism of making communication impossible through applying pressure.
Thats less my object of concern then your willingness to overlook the risks doing this poses by focusing on intention over outcome . While tbh i do take offense to attempting the first, the later is where the giant danger is at. You are doing something that fits the definition of totalitarianism and with it you are faced with its risks. Not safeguarding against them means its extremely improbable that you end anywhere but in a dysfunction nightmare. Which means that weapon able to end self hosting will get into the wrong hands reliably which has good chances result in a quite horrific echo chamber. Which in all likelihood means i will be able to use the downtime between work through extermination sessions in the reeducation camp to argue that being sorry unfortunately has similar impact on reality as the initial good intention. But maybe we can then figure out how we prevent yet another repeat after the new regime hopefully burned itself to the ground.
I am hard pressed to not compare the whole situation to an overconfident and careless cave diver getting lost predictably. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRarNBAG6HY The idiot is fine, but the nature of the way we interact with the world means we get less and less direct feedback from the dysfunctional paths people take. After all, they are quite the downer. Which results in a drastic underestimation of the risks some aspects of reality pose.
> If this provides incentive to build it, good.
Leaving out the very obvious risk of it not being feasible, few people are willing to overlook the risk of creating something that has the potential to create quite a horrific future and very direct and individual harm. As well as the very predictable reactions. The only promise accelerationism can make is misery. Unguided reactions are not a viable plan and failures arent predictable or necessarily timely. That might be the path towards a proper dystopia.
Either way, its still further escalation in a tribalistic struggle that brings out the worst in people. I dont want to end up in an extreme and disfigured opposition to a caricature. This is just stupid.
>Sometimes someone just sucks, y'know?
You are free to do so already. And a bit off topic, good decision for your mental health. But this isnt about the value that person offers but your ability to communicate vanishing completely. Picture finding a manual reading "To easily revert from catastrophic failure ■■■■■■■■■". That very likely happened to some apparatchik with a case of emergency contact never having existed after the last purge. The second and third order effects always bite you. And the utterly horrific stuff that can happen when a powerful apparatus capsules human misery and censors the reports about it can be seen in stuff like the soviet cannibal island. Or any other big atrocity throughout time.
In the end even feudal kings had jesters around to not drift off into a parallel reality. Reality isnt less important then peace of mind. Willfully ignoring this is really hard to frame as good intentioned.
the "weapon able to end self hosting" in this context is "everyone with access to a backbone decides your content shouldn't be part of the larger Internet."
Everyone. That's a huge group.
The easiest way to test your hypothesis that this scenario leads to totalitarianism is to check if KF is still reachable right now. And... Yes, yes it is, via tor. HE chose not to work with them but they're only one corporation. KF has allies. And the government can't force it offline because the choice to peer / provide service or not is a per-company choice in this dimension, not a government regulation.
Contrast with your proposed scenario, where we hand the government the right to regulate peering and, two government changes-of-hands later, KF (and various other services) are forced off with the teeth of legal enforcement behind it. If the government starts sending company owners to jail for hosting KF, how many fewer potential peering partners will be out there to support them? And not just them, but whoever that government deems unworthy?
You're arguing for government control over personal / corporation control and somehow claiming the alternative is totalitarianism. I disagree, and I don't think we're going to come to terms. So I'm taking this opportunity to exercise my own liberty to end this conversation.
I choose what you frame as might lead to totalitarianism over being in totalitarianism any day of the week. The moment it becomes practically impossible to self host you are very likely to be on the slope with no way to tell how much further till mass graves. That likely will be the case if Josh ends up at the point at which Kiwifarms cant be turned back on again. Thats why people reference them as a canary. They are among the first that you can expect the wave to hit. With no way to tell up front how the wave is going to look this time around.
Communication channels cant be closed. If this form of mob controlled free-market censorship (or any form ) is here to stay much much harder to censor means of communication will start popping up to keep the kinetic breaks from engaging. Which will get a lot more disgusting then kiwifarms due to tribalistic reactions and people weaponizing the moderation burden, which will speed up the conflict cycle and the race to the bottom even more. Its still not optional. Thats what i meant when i said reactions quickly turn fascist. Making sure that it doesnt is an almost impossible task if you are far enough down the cycle.
The more we even need to talk about this, the more dangerous it becomes. What ever you are doing or trying to do, cutting communication channels can not be the likely outcome.