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While I agree this is the case, I think this is a consequence of low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse. If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.

I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(

I could imagine true WYSIWYG politics, but it would need a very different temporal organizational structure than current politics.

Currwntly, politicians each have a series of meetings over time with different parties (constituents, lobbyists, domain experts, coalition members) and then at some point one of them drafts and tables a law (that's probably already been informally planned for ages among those in the know) and others vote for it (where many of those votes have probably also been informally pre-arranged for ages.)

To get WYSIWYG, every bit of all of those meetings would need to occur in the open. And likely the only way to practically accomplish that, in a “nothing up my sleeve” manner (i.e. to guarantee that there were no meetings outside of the official ones), would be to have all those meetings occur contiguously as part of one long recorded session in one place, with everyone who wants “a seat at the table” needing to operate on that session’s schedule; and where the politicians involved (i.e. those everyone else is there to influence) have a political career that starts and ends with that single session.

In other words, basically do the papal-election thing, or the sequestered-jury-trial thing: lock all the concerned parties (politicians + PAC leaders + lobbyists + etc) in a building together, and don’t let them out until they make a year’s worth of law. (But unlike either of those—record everything! Don’t allow any two people to be in the same room together without a camera.)

You are quite right. Some laws have a pre-determined break-point; others are to introduce legislation that is not as severe initially, but will become more severe lateron. Age sniffing is one such case. A few EU countries rushed forward; then they are pulled back by the EU commission. The next step will be restrictive measures for all EU countries - I am certain about that part.

> I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work.

Well, it wouldn't work for politicians that pick decisions based on what end benfit they get. Would work fine for people. Would need actually honest media tho

Isn’t it very ironic to post this under a pseudonym?

Which by definition contains some signalling that deviates from WYSIWYG.

Yes, and I'd include Cory Doctorow in the list of Canadians paying attention and writing about it.

Back to 2024: "Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare"

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-07-23...

It would be luckier if the government actually listened to him.

Yeah, but normally when you sign something its because you intend to ratify it in short order.

> the EU, and the UK

The EU has their own cybercrime treaty: https://commission.europa.eu/law/cross-border-cases/judicial...

But you'll never hear a peep from "no logs at all costs" VPN companies based in the EU.

Distantly related: similar to the local councils here in the UK that don't go after the obvious and prolific drug-front barbers and takeaways, because they pay business rates (local business tax) and probably employee taxes too for just enough staff for it to be believable.

Thomas Massie introduced the best privacy bill I have seen. I know nothing about political strategy but i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor. Will it even get voted on if the house speaker doesn't want it?

https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com/

>Warrant required Government must go before a judge to access your metadata, location, or financial records — just like searching your home.

>No Data Shopping Agencies can no longer simply purchase data from brokers to bypass the warrant process.

>Face recognition banned Warrantless facial recognition and AI biometric surveillance in public spaces is prohibited.

>You Can Sue Private right of action means if the government violates your rights, you have legal recourse.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8470...

The effort to erode privacy is so much greater than the effort to preserve it. Governments around the world are like a dog with a bone when it comes to increasing surveillance.

An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.

Frankly? Never. And the root cause is because majority of people have access to the internet now. The small voice of people who care about some stuff is completely overshadowed by billions of people scrolling through YT Shorts / Reels / TT.

The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc.

When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.

We don't need a "new" bill of rights. If they don't respect the first one why do you think they'll respect the next one?

There's a different remedy for the current situation.

As a Canadian user of HN it's really frustrating to see a rare post about a Canadian subject be immediately dominated by a thread about American politics.

Twenty words into your post and you've pivoted to the US.

What mechanism or discussion can we have to encourage the users to show some restraint on this?

> … why can't we make that happen?

Greed. More money to provide the tools of oppression via government contracts.

Because libertarians generally want fewer laws, not more.

When people working for corporate interest will stop being voted in. Good luck

>With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?

Maybe because they're full of shit? (Sorry to swear, but I'm struggling for a better way to phrase this.)

I ran into a lot of open source projects that needed donations that would be considered tiny in any other nonprofit space, but despite all their talk about cipherpunk stuff, they don't seem to put their money where their mouth is.

The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data -- and if you get on their radar, they're just being neutral. (Forgive me if I roll my eyes so hard my retinas nearly detach.)

> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley

As a libertarian myself - these people are fake libertarians, actually better described as crypto-authoritarians. So called "right" libertarianism is fertile ground for this, as it's based on an axiomatic/reductionist framing of rights wherein when someone violates a precondition, their rights then become irrelevant. The philosophy is supremely attractive to authoritarians who go down its rabbit hole - finding a whole bunch of reasons to reject appeals to other people's rights while convincing themselves they are advocating freedom.

Whereas in reality, the "freedom" they believe in is merely the freedom for themselves to oppress others - witness how these billionaires have chiefly made their money with centralized proprietary web apps/services based around removing choice away from users (at the edge) in favor of "take it or leave it" top-down monolithic offerings, slowly made worse over time (ie enshittification) to extract value after sticky network effects have been achieved.

There are of course exceptions - some use their wealth to attempt to pivot to making libre software. And I'm sure there are many more who become disillusioned with the "freedom" they thought they were making, and merely check out. But as the general rule this is why you don't see much actual support for freedom from the rich Surveillance Valley types.

> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley

Those are pro-surveillance, pro-repair-prevention, pro-fascism.

Libertarianism is about your freedom to restrict others, if you are rich and powerful.

Because they're not libertarians. They're greedy narcissists who what to do whatever they want to anybody and just say that it's libertarian.

I wish this was setup like a certificate authority so only the government is able to unmask an individual, but it's going to be pictures of government ID.

I don't think the government themselves are prepared for the amount of identity theft that is going to follow mass collection of government documents.

"We wish it could have a better solution, but you all just couldn't behave" is often the argument in these debates. You seem to be dissatisfied with it, but tacitly accept it as the only way. Let me put a finger on why I will never agree with it:

1. The current situation isn't that apocalyptic.

2. The alternative is so much more horrifying.

The first is a weaker argument because there is always a bottomless bag for the opponents to reach into and grab counterexamples. But none of these things are new. It's been 30 years since the average person could freely communicate with anyone in the world over the internet. 20 or so since the maturing of online scams. Probably at least 15 since nation-level actors started using the internet for propaganda purposes. The elephant in the room is AI, but I feel like AI use has diminishing returns, much like in any other fields. It offers a quick boost, but it's not infinitely scalable. The internet can't be completely taken over by scams and garbage in a way where everyone just keeps consuming it and goes crazy in their own ways. It's almost an ecosystem - pour too much garbage in, and you'll see people retreating into private communities and self-enforce trust, no universal carding necessary. Right now it's just tech people doing this on a large scale, but at a certain point of misinformation and incomprehensibility, treating the internet as untrustworthy by default would just become a mainstream view. It would likely fracture into massive social networks with strong identity verification and small communities that enforce trust in their own ways. As much as I don't like most private businesses, but your suggestion that they could take upon the role of the verifier is more palatable to me because that still leaves air in the room for small, private communities, and because businesses don't have perfect communication with each other or the government, preventing the universal tracking of everything.

The second argument is the real one. Technology would enable governments to track absolutely everything about everyone if we let them. Now this is a space where AI actually provides a novel use case - if before you had to have suspicion about a specific person and have someone look into them, AI will enable them to inspect everything and then form suspicion or document undesirable behaviors by default. It will be like having a personal private investigator that sees everything you do, being on the lookout for anything unusual 24/7. Online identity verification is nothing like having a SIN or a driver's license, because those two are used in specific contexts and don't enable tracking-by-default. The internet is used for ALL communications, so automated tracking of it is tracking of everything we do and say. Instead of showing your driver's license to the officer one time in a defined spot, the officer would come to you because your driver's license is etched into your skin for all to see at all times, and they're concerned about your recent movements that were automatically recorded and processed by a billion cameras. It would be a world without secrets, a world of perfect knowledge and ruthless enforcement. I don't want to live in it. I'm fine with the current world, thank you.

this is insightful.. From a behavioral psychology point of view, there is an assumption among many law and order adherents that "we just need more control-info-courts-punishment" and we will have this done. However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.

Does an entire society have to make the same choices of autonomy and record keeping that are common among members of the uniformed services? Mostly in the West, the answer was "No" but, here we go again.