Their podcast is great, although mostly unrelated to the rationalist stuff. This episode was particularly good, apparently they will be on in a future one for more similar discussion.

The part about “hacktivist” culture was interesting, never looked into that beyond the general outgrowth of the hippie movement, I need to find a book or something about it.

I think they’re getting Snowden wrong towards the beginning here. If you’re familiar with the case, he did repeatedly try to raise the alarm within the institution and was shot down, he didn’t immediately go off and leak stuff because he didn’t believe in collective action. I understand why they think that. They’re ventriloquizing his vague expressions toward right libertarianism of the early days, but the truth is he just wasn’t a very thorough and considered political thinker in the early days – except for a strongly felt moral impulse towards civil libertarianism, which I think is different. For one because it’s a dimension of both left and right libertarianism.

Didn’t his leaking allow something to be released to the purview of democratic politics, mass politics even, which we otherwise would never have known about?

The QAnon Anonymous podcast had a premium episode about that subject matter, I’ll look into that podcast soon.