Extremely powerful entities like the CIA or NSA could easily personally identify me from my HackerNews profile if they wanted to, as could a dedicated attacker. The problem with "privacy" on the internet right now is that it's a lie - you only have privacy from your peers and ordinary citizens, but not from powerful entities. It would be better if we had a level playing field and everyone could be identified by everyone. Then the normal evolved human behaviours of trust-based social networks could function properly, and we could also fight AI-bot-based social media control, scam, and fraud.

It's not "privacy" it's "information asymmetry" which I'm attacking.

If I stop my internet use that won't save anybody, so there's no point in doing it. If shutting down the whole internet is necessary to save a life, I would support it. The only reason I don't is because that's not possible and even if it were possible it would not actually save more people than it would harm right now.

Humans are inherently social, and social networks are based on trust. Trust is primarily a function of reputation, peer pressure, and legal consequences. Reputation requires tying behavior to a stable identity. Peer pressure only works when you’re not anonymous. For there to be legal consequences for bad behavior, we must identify bad actors. I don’t see why anyone would want to remove any of this. To protect some freelance journalists in Iran?

Also I don’t think that the “pro privacy” activists really understand the scale and severity of harm being done to children through the internet. I as a programmer who makes my living on the internet, would gladly support the shutting down of the whole internet if it would save the life of a single precious child.

There are huge hidden costs in datacenter prices that are simply unnecessary for most casual users of compute. Salaries of staff to maintain datacenters, redundancy and high availability of nine 9s that are simply not required by most customers, as well as real estate costs are all non-existent costs in a homelab setup because those are living costs you pay for anyway, with or without a home server.

As a business owner, I can think of multiple reasons why a decentralized network is better for me as a business than relying on a hyperscaler inference provider. 1. No dependency on a BigTech provider who can cut me off or change prices at any time. I’m willing to pay a premium for that. 2. I get a residential IP proxy network built-in. AI scrapers pay big money for that. 3. No censorship. 4. Lower latency if inference nodes are located close to me.