Way to back your claim with reason and evidence, SamReidHughes. You think coldtea is blathering? Prove it.
There's a huge difference between "blathering", i.e. incoherence, and disagreement. If you truly find coldtea's comment incoherent, you may have an issue with reading comprehension.
The software response to a "crypto ban" would be wide-scale steganography, I would guess pretending to be unencrypted HTTP. Good luck banning encryption!
Sure it will -- they could run it (at some loss of bandwidth) as a hidden service. When "my favorite site" gets court orders, they can take down their official server, and spin it up somewhere else behind a Tor hidden service.
Yeah, I know -- Hidden Services need some work. As I understand, the problem is solvable, it just needs a few more heads thinking about it to get solved.
I suppose this article faired poorly because of its length and a touch of the vague. I think the premise of an "ideal capitalist product" is either self-contradictory or ill-defined. The analysis of the digital panopticon, and its effect on interpersonal relationships is spot on.
I'll summarize what you might see as HN antagonism in this piece as "refinement of the current digital trends will only make worse appear better". If the digital utopia (another ill-defined term) refers to current-trend network panopticon, then I surely and emphatically agree.
But computers are faithful servants, nothing more. They are currently recapitulating existing hierarchies -- this is how We The Hackers have commandeered them. Who wants to write a distributed system when so much in our tool-belts makes client/server architectures a comparative breeze. It's no surprise that on the first try we've made our servants into centralization machines, into pyramid builders.
The network effects -- for or against hierarchy -- of most (maybe all) previous tech is hard-wired. The steam engine's effects, etched in steel, support hierarchy only to the point thermodynamics and Mr. Carnot will allow. Radio and television are inherently hierarchal, supporting one-way broadcast on account of the physical limits of electromagnetic transmission. There are a myriad other technologies, to be evaluated by these criteria, and I think Lewis Mumford has done a pretty thorough job of it [1].
As for our digital servants -- they aren't hard-wired. Decentralization may be non-trivial today, but when it works, it persists as long as the medium. Bittorrent isn't going away anytime soon, and DHTs are here to stay.
So by all means, leave the digital utopia you've been sold so far. Most popular fiction utopias were strictly controlled hierarchies anyway.
Let's re-wire our servants to decentralize. We can fight the panopticon with the same silicon we used to build it. For in the end, the universe allows encryption.
There's a huge difference between "blathering", i.e. incoherence, and disagreement. If you truly find coldtea's comment incoherent, you may have an issue with reading comprehension.