from Hacker News

The Rising Threat of Digital Nationalism

by chuhnk on 11/10/19, 9:53 PM with 184 comments

  • by paulddraper on 11/10/19, 11:00 PM

    > As the internet turns 50, the global vision that animated it is under attack.

    The vision in 2019-50=1969 was in fact very far from globalist.

    At that time it was the early stages of U.S. Dept of Defense project ARPANET.

    It's largely the reason why IP/TCP largely lacks any security or DoS prevention features: you needed a U.S. security clearance to even access it.

    First non-U.S. access of any kind to the "internet" was in 1973, though physical access continued to remain heavily restricted for years. (I say "the internet" because it was still ARPANET and the Internet Protocol did not yet even exist.)

    Much later the WWW -- as the name itself suggests -- was a globally-minded endeavor. The World Wide Web is 29 years old.

  • by esotericn on 11/10/19, 11:15 PM

    From what I can tell, the Internet still does effortlessly defy regulation.

    The _businesses_ that operate on the Internet from meatspace don't.

    Because they can't, at a fundamental level. They're based somewhere. They have visible employees in jurisdictions. They represent enormous juicy targets with tens, hundreds, thousands of millions of users to control.

    They're huge companies. They have management structures, bureaucracies, whole departments that result in the sort of nonsense we see like GDPR popups or country blocks.

    That's not the Internet of 50 years ago; it's not even the Internet of 20 years ago.

    Alternatively, you could simply think of it like this - the everyman has been regulated. The power users (for lack of a better term) are in much the same situation that they were in 1990.

    If you discount the fact that 'everyman' expects everyone to be on the "hip new platform" (fb, snap, insta, tiktok, whatever) then honestly the situation is way better than it was back then. It's just hard to ignore the cruft.

  • by chatmasta on 11/10/19, 10:57 PM

    I thought this was going to be an article about people who feel more attached to their digital communities than their geographical communities. That would be an interesting avenue to explore.

  • by gz5 on 11/10/19, 11:00 PM

    The article starts with: "A network that once seemed to effortlessly defy regulation is being relentlessly, and often ruthlessly, domesticated."

    And yet concludes with: "Fifty years after the birth of the internet, it may well be that national governments, wielding enlightened regulation, are the last best hope for maintaining a network that is—at least relatively—open and free."

    Am I missing something? How could "regulation" be a possible answer to "digital nationalism"? Are there examples of what the author is referring to as "enlightened regulation" in which regulation has had the desired impacts? Seems to me that far more often we see a mix of intended and unintended consequences.

    I would add that web != Internet. Internet is closer to printing press. A world in which there are billions of TCP/IP stacks on personal compute with Internet access is not one which is easily controlled (for good or for bad) by regulation.

  • by cromwellian on 11/11/19, 8:06 AM

    Nationalism is a cult of humanity, and humans will use whatever tools are available to aid in the continuance of their interests. Hence, no amount of technolibertarian cleverness in engineering network protocols or cryptography is going to stop it. It can only be stopped in the messy, human world of politics and culture.

    In the late 80s and 90s, I was a big fan of John Perry Barlow, the independence of cyberspace, crypto-anarchy on the internet, the idea that some combination of a uncensorable world wide internet (that could route around governments), could displace even their national currencies, could be end to end anonymous and encrypted, would be a nirvana from oppression.

    The problem with the naive cyberlibertarian world view, is that it treats government as a wholly separate actor from the people who create the society they live in, and if your neighbors want to be Nazis, technological choices aren't going to protect you. It's not just "Digital Nationalism" that's rising. Nationalism is rising. You need only need at the US electing Trump, Brexit in the UK, at some of the neo-fascists elected recently in the EU.

    The optimism of the 90s, has been replaced with a mentality of scarcity, and when that happens, people look to hoard, they become less generous, more tribal, they circle the wagons.

    We are not going to fix Nationalism until we fix the underlying economic and social problems that are giving rise to it.

  • by AzzieElbab on 11/11/19, 1:26 AM

    Why are the terms nationalism, authoritarianism, and chauvinism used interchangeably?

  • by csomar on 11/11/19, 10:46 AM

    > According to the New York Times, at least a quarter of the world’s countries have temporarily shut down the internet over the past four years.

    I was a bit shocked reading this sentence. A quarter of the world's countries is a big percentage. But apparently that is the case.

    There is a good report by Freedom House that analysis "Freedom on the Net"[1] and it seems that the trend of restricting access is a global phenomena. (especially across "less-connected" countries).

    [1]: https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTN_2018_Final...

  • by jadbox on 11/11/19, 3:32 AM

    As the article explains, the Internet is just a tool, and it's been aggressively used as a way to control user behavior to mostly benefit advertisers, producers, or conform behavior to governments. Even worse, political warfare is very easily imposed on today's social networks because they are designed to be echo chambers that receive outside messages from the highest bidder.

    However, this doesn't NEED to be the case as we can design online experiences that bring people together. The last two years I've self-funded a foundation [1] to work on on precisely this problem of using the Internet to try to unify people together. Today we have two platforms we are providing to the public and organizations.

    The first [2] service organizes people at physical events by maximizing the diversity of auto generated discussion groups, and we're having a fair amount of success in schools and events in the US and Austria. The other service [3] is purely an experimental free public social platform that matches people who have different viewpoints to have a timeboxed live discussion to chat about their views.

    I'm not sure if what we've built so far can make a big impact online, but I hope it can serve as an example of what kind of tools that could be built if the focus is squarely aimed at unifying people instead of stuffing them into echo chambers with pay-to-reach walls between groups of people.

    [1] Foundation: https://www.newdialogue.org/

    [2] Group diversity mixer: https://www.mixopinions.com/

    [3] Social platform: https://www.dinnertable.chat

  • by cryptica on 11/11/19, 8:10 AM

    I think this article focuses on the wrong kind of nationalism. I think that there are going to be virtual nations with virtual governments based around cryptocurrency ecosystems.

    The existing physical governments will slowly lose their influence.

    As existing governments become weaker, virtual nations will realize that they can seize companies (the means of production) and take possession of their revenues by strategically corrupting employees inside those companies.

    The virtual governments will use seized company revenues to buy-back and burn their own cryptocurrencies to give their currencies more value and gain more power.

    Eventually the virtual nations will take control of physical land in various countries by corrupting and manipulating existing government officials. Each new nation will be scattered geographically through all continents.

  • by petery on 11/11/19, 5:08 AM

    A lot of these regulations are at democracies because of citizens demanding data protections. I founded the company InCountry that's mentioned in the article. What you're seeing here is that countries are starting to regulate the Internet like they regulate everything else. McDonald's has to comply with a ton of regulations on food, employees, tax, etc. everywhere they are. But for the longest time, not how they treated consumer data.

  • by neonate on 11/10/19, 11:43 PM

  • by markus_zhang on 11/10/19, 10:48 PM

    Extreme Nationalism was and is the symptom of the time. Plus Nationalism is perfectly normal as long as it doesn't go extreme.

  • by pshc on 11/10/19, 11:15 PM

    Counter oppressive regimes by decentralizing. Build mesh networks.

  • by cmdshiftf4 on 11/11/19, 6:17 AM

    At this point I'm very pessimistic about the future of the open World Wide Web, and see little in the works in terms of securely replacing it when it does come apart.

    We, its users, are all to blame. We've stood idly by as the concept itself went from a largely decentralized protocol for sharing information via hyperlinks, to a bastardized, immensely centralized platform for stealing people's attention, even creating addictions, mine their data while they stare on and use the two to sell them more shit they don't need.

    At best we passively supported this, but most of us actively partook in it. We use Google products, buy Apple products, share our data on instagram/facebook/etc., click shitty clickbait links and more. In doing so, we made some companies incredibly rich, enabling them to buy out or use their money to fund lawsuits against emerging competition, further centralizing their power.

    Not satisfied with simply supporting these actions, we're on a platform right here that actively encourages companies to spin up attention/data harvesting platforms with the goal of "going public" or being bought out by one of these giants. You could be easily justified in saying those of us in the tech industry are the most culpable.

    The governments, rightly so, have recognized the threat that power bears. Some chose to work with them, and use FISA or other means to secure backdoors to all the data they hoover up on us, and then work around pesky laws by sharing it with buddies such as those in Five Eyes to give eachother mutual access to one another's data. We know this. We did nothing about it. Others chose to work against them, such as China.

    Instead of taking a stand, the big, powerful tech companies we all revere bent over and did what they were told in order to access the markets of those working against them to steal more attention and make more money.

    And we stood idly by. At the micro level, we're now in a phase where if a vocal enough internet group takes offense to some sort of content within our sphere of influence, or against something someone posted 10 years ago, that they can pressure providers to deplatform their targets. Some stand idly by, others applaud it as progress.

    And so it will continue to crumble. Wise countries, recognizing both the threat of the internet giants and the opportunity of getting access within them, will apply the necessary pressure to have those giants make the internet "their way". "Wise" internet groups, recognizing both the threat of wrongthink and the opportunity to deplatform those who think wrong will apply pressure on the same giants to make the internet "their way".

    The only possible saviour is some sort of international body, comprised of representatives of all nations, cultures and subcultures, coming together to agree on keeping things open and clear. Given that we can't even make the UN effective, such a group would never agree on anything and would merely continue to justify its own take on censorship and thus wouldn't be viable from the start.

    And so the Web many of us came up on here, which provoked our interest in computers, networks, software and hardware, is doomed, and it's all because we are weak, and the giants we've allowed emerge are ultimately weak also.

    And none of that has anything to do with nationalism.

  • by SubiculumCode on 11/11/19, 1:37 AM

    Open digital borders has had a number of positive and negative consequences, and of these the increase in foreign influence campaigns has been both positive and negative forces from a moral perspective, to a nation-state an open-borders internet is a huge security risk.

  • by hirundo on 11/10/19, 11:33 PM

    Woodie Guthrie had a label on his guitar that read "This machine kills fascists." I was naive once. I thought that the internet was such a machine. But instead of a tool for decentralizing power it's becoming a tool for centralized power to wield control, to enforce conformity in ever greater detail.

    What would a tool of actual decentralization look like? It wouldn't be something that helps us communicate or brings us closer together, because those things evolve into instruments of control. It would be something that divides us into separate ecological and memetic niches. The only example I can think of is a multi generational space ship.

    We're in a race between diaspora and social lithification. I wish I thought diaspora was the better bet.

  • by TurkishPoptart on 11/12/19, 7:01 PM

    Hey-uh, is there anything we can do about this awful paywall? Perhaps the devs should add a thing to all WSJ articles to bypass.

  • by TurkishPoptart on 11/12/19, 7:02 PM

    How are any of you guys reading this with their horrific paywall?

  • by swedtrue on 11/10/19, 11:25 PM

    Again, it comes down a lot to privacy, especially in response to the growing inclusion of governments in our digital life.

    -Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail (https://protonmail.com/)

    -Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk)

    -Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple (https://www.duple.io/en/)

    -Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal (https://signal.org/)