Where does the "Free Internet" truely lie?

Communities Blog
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I had an interesting, to me at least, thought last night. As the title asks, where is the free internet? We are always using Corporate sites and private places, so what is really an open place? Freedom of speech doesn’t really count everywhere on the internet, does it?

Theres been some videos from different places, not even the same year either, that asked that. If we use google, yes we can ask in a query, but then thats their query, right? Anything you say an G+ is just like a Miranda warning, anything you say can and will be used against you. So where constitutes as a free as in freedom place to chat or say stuff? IRC? I almost wonder if something designed to be stable and decentralized could inherently also be set up to be as free as the American Constitution dictates.

Sooooo, where does that put us? The dark net? I guess i2p is a good place for that sort of thing, but then you’re put on 800 watch lists. I’m kind of surprised that no one has tried to draw comparisons to how the US operates and how China operates, its just the Chinese know whats going on and Americans are too worried about sales and 5 buckets of chicken for 4.99 at KFC.

Do we really have a free place of speech on the internet? I’d even argue that for IRL but thats subjective. I know technically we can say whatever we like and do whatever we like, sure, but where is that line drawn? It’d be interesting to see what people constitute as a free place to speak. Even now I get shadow-banned on twitter every week for calling an SJW out on their bullshit or pointing something out that twitter fucked up on. I see that with a lot of stuff now. I can’t really use FB either because my inherent nature is to point that out. Hmmmm.

I guess the problem with my earlier idea, a decentralized place of inter-connectivity, is that either it has to be treated as a communist society, which in our little lizard brains doesn’t work because everyone gets to think they’re big shit, or it has to be safeguarded by a group, but then you’re back to the failing design you had in the first place. Then again, you have this forum. I’ve pretty much been able to say whatever I like here for… 3 or 4 years now with only 5 post deletes.

Then, I guess, the place of free speech we want on the internet should be brought by communities rather than companies? Then you’re back to the communist parts again. Then again, I guess thats how IRC and G+ work, minus the needs for servers. Maybe the idea is flawed from the start. A utopia of being that could only exist in the mind perhaps? There are systems like Mastadon that work like that. Though I’m not sure those could ever be big enough that they would overcome something like discord or skype.

Maybe its just too much to ask for humans to not be apes. In the end, I guess the best place for freedom of speech is just mano a mano. Conventions such as DEFCON are moreso the place for this sort of thing to be created, rather than a web forum. Though the idea of a forum that only creates and never deletes sounds pretty fun. No admins means no blockers. A muting system could be in place so that, say, someone posts porn of some sort and you don’t want to see that. Moderation is done by the users rather than by the webmasters. Course then you get the SJW twitter problem again.

Who knows. Time will tell.

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Utopia much?

-Fallen

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Its hard to rely on humans when they are inherently flawed. Its the reason why we convince ourselves that we work better on things solo in school.

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Freedom isn’t free, no there’s a heavy fucking fee.

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eventually we will get an AI that will fix all the things, they will use our body as a battery, and we will live in a “Free & Happy matrix”

-Fallen

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There’s a related essay by Yonathan Zunger titled “Tolerance is not a moral precept” that basically rationalizes restricting freedoms of individuals to harm other individuals. Considering speech can cause harm (taking a look at your elected leadership and aftermath that’s still unfolding as an example) I’d argue that some form of censorship is necessary in a world where individuals that would do harm to restrict other people’s freedoms exist.

US is actually fairly open when it comes to what constitutes protected speech, there’s better, there’s worse.

Is there a particular type of speech that I’m not aware of you wish was protected in the US?

(also, on the technical side of things, posting anonymously online from the US is not that hard, tor over tunnelbear + encrypted backups in usenet can work fine)

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Theres things that you can legally talk about here that still get you arrested. I assume you are from europe?

We have a clause in the constitution that says that if the country is going to hell, the people have the right to burn it all down and start over. Theres no voting process in state for that, its literally a rider for allowing a riot to reset everything. At least in the modern interpretation.

Theres stuff thats just stupid like that. Otherwise, no I really don’t know of anything that I can’t talk about that I would want to talk about in public. The cop beatings, massive killing height engaged by state police in a lot of areas… Theres a lot of shit that groups can make you disappear for here just like china. I’m guessing that people don’t allude to those bridges because of threats and shit.

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Correct.

I grew up in Serbia when at the time the incidence of deadly car accidents and tumblings during nature walks among non government supportive journalists was higher than in the boring journalist kind.
Things are slightly better there now on one hand - younger generations don’t really care about rallying for political causes as much making incendiary rhetoric is harder to legitimize, but on the other hand they don’t even care as much as rest of Europe while greedy dudes still run the country. They’ve basically been brought up to avoid confrontation and be plenty apolitical. There’s also a myriad of stupid reality shows on TV to dull the minds of a typical voter. Any gathering over 30 people needs to be registered at the local police over there.

I’ve been living in Ireland for almost ten years now. News of the day here is about firemen saving a cat, crappy small banks being in trouble, rent being comparable to NYC and London. Relaxing in comparison. Once in a while you hear in the news about 4 young men being arrested in the north, for drunk driving from a single car - which tickles my spidey sense as to why would they all be arrested, surely only one was driving. At the same time there’s “cira” (paramilitary) markered on street poles in Dublin, it gets washed down quickly along other graffiti - usually after a day or two if it was the weekend.

Both these examples to me illustrate how if you really want to do something subversive against the government, you need to treat the government as an enemy consisting of a large group of people weilding government resources, or you need to take the long (or expensive) road and get into politics. The US constitution “right to burn down and start over” always sounded like fake advertising, people who wanna burn stuff will burn stuff regardless - there’s no incentive for the government to help with that.

Considering the amount of war mongering idiots I was exposed to, and the fact I just want to do my job pay my taxes and bitch about government backwardness and inneficiencies and brexit, I actually appreciate the bar being somewhat higher for subversive behavior.

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A wise man once said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. This holds true in our digital lives as much as it does in real life.

Unfortunately no system of governing is ever perfect but I happen to be partial to what the founders of the USA envisioned in the founding documents. Unfortunately, even that was corrupted from the beginning as may were willing to overlook some members of society being enslaved in order to hold this fragile country together. It has only become more corrupted in time and is a shadow of its former glory when it comes to personal freedoms enjoyed by most.

Still the concept of checks and balances have managed to keep this country from devolving completely into tyranny and I believe is still the best way to prevent any one group from gaining too much power and result in communism/oligarchy/tyranny.

People like to talk about America being a Democracy but it really isn’t. It actually is a lot of different governmental types mashed together, a little of this and that. A pure democracy is simply a tyranny of the majority. Yes many things here are based on democracy, we have voting for many important things including on our most important leaders, but we also have the Supreme Court which are appointed for life which represents aristocracy, and of course congress who tend to represent oligarchy though it is tempered with democracy.

Finally we have the President which represents the dictator. He has full power and might of the military behind him and is the single most powerful individual in the US. He can veto bills he doesn’t like and of course appoints the courts (aristocracy). What keeps him from taking over? Checks and balances. He is term limited and must be voted by the people. His military and police are dependent upon congress for funding, and of course if he violates our constitution, can be blocked by the courts.

Why am I giving a quick civics lesson on the American government? Because I firmly believe it is a relevant model to any organization who wants to protect the voices of minorities on the internet. Most internet forums are either tyrannies and whatever the mods say is law. This can work when the mods are benevolent dictators like this site. :grin: Unfortunately this doesn’t always work out and if s head mod goes crazy and decides to burn it all down in a fit of rage? Well, we’ve all seen the results of that too.

Others allow some form of direct democracy in the form of upvotes or downvotes. This often leads to the SJW issue where the majority opinion of the members can silence the opposition or bully them. There’s nowhere there for a minority opinion to thrive.

So if you are thinking of an organization to foster freedom on the internet, I would suggest starting with a system of checks and balances to prevent humans from being all to human to one another.

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er … because they no longer teach it in school?

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At this point in time the only free net is your own LAN and possibly a few .onion domains but in the eyes of the authority, using .onion links is more suspicious than a nun doing squats in a cucumber field. Anything not on the internet is the more free internet. Also does drops, those could be considered a free network of sorts

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Tim Pool just recently uploaded a video about major corporations censoring people or refusing people to use their service over political views. Ever since Charlotteville, I’ve been seeing a lot of companies taking advantage of this situation to silence anyone. Even Discord has been going overboard with their censorship by banning servers that shitpost nazi memes.

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I guess the most free place that is decentralized would be a Mastadon server. Since, the local rules are what are applied from who owns the server. So a server running in the arctic circle with an admin with no rules would be ideal.

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We never have.

You’re always beholden to someone. Speak here? Only within our rules. Speak on your own server? Only within the rules of the server provider. Speak within your own server? Only within the rules of the data centre.

And even then, only within the rules of your ISP.

Luckily most of these services provide a server. So if you don’t like something you can go make your own thing. this is what has been mistaken for the internet being all about free speech when it never was.

Arguably there needs to be some protections in place to make ISPs and probably actual data centres mandated to provide service without discrimination or applying their own moral judgement. But you’ll usually find someone who’ll host your stuff anyway, good or bad.

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Assuming freedom of speech is supposed to allow you to criticize government without legal prosecution, there is still no way you can avoid social prosecution. Also, in order to have your right to not be legally prosecuted for what you say, you must be an identifiable legal person behind those words, and not anonymous. If anonymous, you do not have any legal rights until identified as a person having those rights. If not anonymous, social prosecution is a fact. A few implications I’ve perceived so far I am assuming to be correct.

Anonymous posting (such as I do) is (to me) a means to exchange ideas and engage in social experiments which could very well paint me as a social pariah - because on occasion, I really can fuck with extreme edgy fucktards, both SJW, alt-right, and libertarian alike, which inevitably paints me as a socialist racist homophobic cuck faggot to an outsider. Sometimes all of that in a same thread, because reasons. While avoiding social prosecution in real life, by posting anonymously I believe that I am abstaining from escalating my activities to the point where freedom of speech applies. Am I correct or not?

In avoiding social prosecution, I abstain from the freedom I may have had, don’t I?

What is really “free” when it comes to internet? We have public spaces (paid for by taxes) in the physical world where freedom of speech applies. Do we have such public spaces on internet? If not, is that (tax-funding base) why we don’t have a free place of speech on the internet? It is corporate, and not citizen?

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Food for thought: “we are all anonymous to people we haven’t met”

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Isnt private property and a corporations a symptom of freedom? Unless you want the government to control it or somehow a decentralized network created by AI to meat human needs (Skynet, Matrix, Deus Ex -> Helios ) ?

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The problem is that most of these groups shutting people down, domain registrars, DDoS prevention, hosts, and even data centers.

The owners are all in the same groups and of the same mentality. Shut down whatever they dont like even if half your company disagrees with you aka Cloudflare.

So you’re left with 3 options. Go dark web, which is essentially snipping your balls and ending your reach to any normal person.

Find a random host, such as .al or .lol, which is great. But what if that gets shut down? You’re stuck for 60 days before you can transfer again. And no one can keep up with a site changing domains every 60 days.

And lastly. Pay 6,000 to ICANN and spend thousands more to be your own Registrar. And yet, you are still subject to being shut down for ideas.

This is the most terrifying Orwellian shit to happen so far.

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I’ve always thought of “The Internet” as a collection of private networks that some choose to interlink. Telcos provide premium interlinks that you can pay for so you don’t have to build your own private infrastructure to each network you want to connect to. What this means for me, is that if I want any kind of privacy or freedom, I need to tighten my tinfoil hat to the degree that I feel comfortable.

In my imaginary world of unicorns and rainbows The Internet would be completely neutral and agnostic and we could all frolic in fields of puppydogs. But that ain’t happenin’. It’s becoming less free, not more free. Again, my personal stance is Keep Calm & Tinfoil Hat.