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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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As a silver lining maybe it's best people don't associate him with what the site has become. He was a piece of its history, but he wasn't trying to found what Reddit has become
Yes. I think Aaron would want to take his name off from there.
If I were him, I would be more concerned with my name being attached to this defense of child pornography: https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/
If I were him I'd stand by that defense. It's a carefully worded and sane defense. He's not defending child abuse, he's saying, extremely clearly and plainly, that possession of evidence is not the same as committing abuse, and that the law shouldn't use possession as a scapegoat. Which, given that every attempt to censor the internet in the last 10 years has started with "protect the children", I'd say he was trying to cut that tactic off at the head.
Disagree. The entire post is predicated on the false assertion that data is just a collection of arbitrary bits.
Its not a binary, wether "X" should be legal is based on the intent of the prosicutors and procicuted. Here, both are dubious going on the tiny amount of info i have
Such a weird stance to take and to make a point of wedging in there. I thought perhaps on reading I'd find he's being misinterpreted or taken out of context but he's very explicitly like "child porn isn't an issue and we should do nothing about it." Quite a worrying position for him to take.
People have a real way of finding the single most negatively-portrayable thing about a person and using it to smear their entire legacy. Post-humously. That page was written Dec 2002 according to the archive, which would make him a month over 16 years old when he wrote it. In the context of an argument in favor of having unlimited free speech, not a dedicated page on his website to "I want child pornography".
It's also the last of the points, which he ordered from least to most controversial.
Well, free speech is more about the ideas than actions or words. He would be excercising free speech by stating that such free speech should be unlimited, but his infamous example wouldn't really be a valid one
Every justification for pervasive online surveillance starts with "it will protect the children."
So if you're someone who hates pervasive, overreaching, surveillence, taking the position that CP isn't actually harming children makes sense as a tactic. I don't think he was winning over too many converts to that POV though.
I think it's possible to recognise that valid concerns are hijacked for other purposes without needing to take a stance against the concerns themselves though.
IE I think child porn is a bad thing and we should work as a society to address it in a multi-faceted way. I also think that using that as a way to gain legal capabilities to infringe on people's rights in a way that is not actually related to the prevention of child porn is also a bad thing. Those aren't mutually exclusive ideas. Though I did see the claim that he was 16 at the time he wrote it, so it's possible he worked that out later?
I'm not sure I'm willing to force my brain into considering the relative shadiness of different arguments for child pornography. It is a worrying stance, splitting hairs over whether he could have said something worse or not seems like an unproductive discussion.
Yuck. People are making this argument now that AI-generated images exist but there is a reason r34 drawings of underage-looking fictional characters are banned too. Anyway, his points on copyright are alright; I don’t see why companies should retain rights to 20-year-old abandonware that they haven’t touched upon since its discontinuation.
I mean, perhaps in the most general sense that is technically true. For example, there have been cases about this that have come from parents taking pictures of their kids in the bathtub, even if the charges were eventually dropped. If that particular court case had gone differently, it might've set a very destructive precedent that served only to rip apart families.
Still, 99% of the cases that produce this material are done so in an exploitative and abusive context; definitely not arguing with that. No idea what Aaron was talking about in that particular link, but this is the one counterexample that I think of that is valid, assuming it went a different direction in court.
The link makes a (imo pretty valid) case for decriminalization of CP “consumption”, at least in cases where it’s not provably voluntary.
Sharing though is a different issue altogether and there’s absolutely no way someone sharing that stuff on the internet is doing it unintentionally.
I think it's a very specific case that needs to be taken in a very narrow context; it's essentially an innocent mistake that needs to be recognized as such. The moment you step outside of that, I see no reasonable arguments for decriminalizing anything.
Thing is it’s very hard to prove what’s an innocent mistake and what’s intentional behavior if we’re just talking about viewing. I personally think that alone shouldn’t guarantee more than getting put on a watchlist.
Parents taking pictures of kids in the bathtub is evil and I would try to put my parents in jail for it if I could.
I don't really think it's something people should do, but I can honestly see it happening to ordinary people if they aren't thinking about what they're doing.
99%? Man you can just go full 100%
The only exception would be the r34 drawings if you consider them to be on the same level
Medical material. Keepsake photos of your newborn. A minor sending a nude pic to their minor partner.
Plenty of situations where technically illegal material is made with no malice at all.
Picking and choosing isn't the game I want to play, I'm just highlighting that there are circumstances that can result in actually innocent people doing things without thinking. Pornographic content of any kind (drawings or otherwise) that depicts underage people in any context is something I think should be illegal and avoided at all costs, but I'm highlighting that there is edge-cases in everything.
And I just said you didn't have to use 99% and could go full 100%
I don't know why the grandkids or a corporate publisher of something written 75+ yrs ago should still get royalties based on copyright either but here we are with insane copyright laws.
Well, I kinda get the longetivity of trademarks but you should absolutely be able to redistribute 40+ year old movies. If a studio is still making cash off the original Star Wars trilogy, they can remain in the green despite outputting literal garbage. Trademarks should have looser regulation so that you can release a clearly-labeled parody Mario game or non-canon Star Trek animation short without repercussion, like how the Touhou community works.
That's what you get if you take an ideology, that in it self might be ok or even good to the extreme.
Freedom of speech is good, and in many ways there are laws that restrict freedom of speech more than would be good (especially concerning commercial stuff). But if you go freedom of speech fundamentalist, you have to argue for weird and downright evil things like he did in the section you quoted.
Goes to show, once again, that almost anything taken to the extreme turns into something evil.
Even ignoring the obvious issues with the child pornography stance, this blog post starts out on completely the wrong foot. The idea that data is just arbitrary bits is completely falacious and willfully ignorant. He's asking us to ignore the fact that those bits represent information, which is more than an arbitrary set of bits. Or else we wouldn't be sending them.
Not to mention his anthropomorphization of computers, which is also completely inaccurate. A computer "cares" more perhaps even more than us about the precise arrangement of the bits, because that is what allows them to convert those bits into specific actions. A single bit being off could in fact render the entire dataset illegible. Whereas a human who receives a typo-ridden call to arms, for example, may still be able to convert that particular set of bits into an actual act of violence.
I have problems even with the starting point for this ideology.
I totally agree with what you say. I think, though, that the starting points of this post are already an extreme interpretation of the freedom of speech. The whole post is just a twised and extreme viewpoint.
What I find interesting though is, that the argument he arrived at, pretty much contradicts the purpouse of freedom of speech.
He's like "Bits are just bits and the meaning of bits doesn't matter". But if it doesn't matter, why would you need to protect that? Freedom of speech only deserves protection because the speech (or the information) matters. If it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't be a big deal if random combinations of bit-values would be made illegal.
Yes, I think you were correct originally that this is ultimately a freedom of speech issue. I would have the same argument against free speech absolutism. It just ignores the cause and effect related to communicating information. That's why we have laws against speech that incites violence. Sometimes the effect of speech can be equal to or greater (by orders of magnitude) than physical action.
It's always seemed strange to me that free-speech absolutists seem to argue that what people say doesn't have much effect on the world.
If it's so insignificant an act... Why are they so invested in protecting their right to do so without any constraints?
It counters their own argument.
There’s not much for him to be concerned about currently, given that he is dead.
As for 16 yo Aaron who wrote that list of hot takes in order of controversy, is it really surprising that a kid that developed an opinion of free speech extremism penned that down?
Especially after being inspired by this article as per his own admission?
The article also helps provide context for the time period this was written in.
Simple possession was still a relatively novel concept and simulated CSAM wasn’t criminal yet in the US.
Don’t misconstrue my own position on the matter, I originate from, and was legally trained in, a jurisdiction that criminalizes hate speech, imposing a significantly broader limit on free speech than the US currently does, and I think that’s the better path to take.
So I personally don’t adhere to free speech extremism.
Nevertheless, while not agreeing with his take, I can see the logic that persuaded him.
It’s essentially the facetious version of “Why stop here, why not also ban hate speech/guns/drugs/etc?”
All of those can be argued to be gateways to the harm of others, perhaps even disproportionately children.
To me it reads as him challenging the logic, not condoning the outcome much less the subsequent consequences. Very edgy indeed.
As for those who bring up that he reinstated his blog multiple times and with it this particular post from when he was 16, as a way to posthumously attribute this to a more older adult version of him; I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry.
As a fundamentalist such as himself it could also just be an exhibition of his free speech extremism perhaps combined with an effort to maintain transparency.
After all, it could suggest an eroding of his beliefs on free speech if he would remove it “now” with little benefit to him since the cat’s already out of the bag, even if he disagreed with his former self at the time of restoring the blog.
A better indication of his opinions later in life would be comments that reaffirm the prior expressed beliefs or, if the suspicion is that he practiced what he preached, one would expect this to have come out during the FBI investigation, considering they went through all his data.
Do I think it’s healthy to consider him a hero, or anyone else for that matter?
No not really, if only because the likelihood of heroes having irreconcilable blemishes is extremely high just by the very virtue of their, let’s say, unique thinking producing the things we love about them but also the things that might cause pause in many.
That's a weird hill to try and die on.
yeah he's a free speech absolutist
I definitely think it is abuse, how could it not be. But I have a feeling he was talking more about how someone life can be ruined very easily like the linked article talks about. Other than that idk
Yikes.
Welp there are no such things as good people anymore, just good actions by people. This is actually so horrible to see, thanks!