I would agree. I used to really enjoy that community. But it's gone downhill. I think the moderation rules were brilliant. And effective. The problem is, there needs to be a core set of user setting good norms, and they've all left. What's there now is kind of a mess.
What's interesting is that your observation directly relates to the article. "We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have [paid] humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they're not scalable and if they're not scalable they can't make tons and tons of money."
Indeed! I'm actually writing about that in another community right now.
I am reluctant to put it here, but maybe just a taste?
[flame suit on :D ]
I disagree. Honestly, one can make tons of money, and incorporate the humans too. That can all scale, though the margins are not as good. So what? There is still tons of money to be made, just not the absolute maximum tons of money to be made.
The difference between those two is profound when it comes to the potential impact of social media on society today.
A while back, some friends and I did an experiment. What we did was set the expectation that people need to treat other people well, assume good intent, and in general, don't be a dick.
Anything else is a risk.
Being a dick comes with risk. It may be small, it may be significant. It's hard to know, by design.
See, when we define how shitty people can be to one another, they end up being exactly that shitty, plus a little.
Give people targets and they will meet them. Give them rules, and they will game them.
So then, make the only clear target real, human, discussion, mutual respect and consideration, and as time passes, the community will see more and more of that.
What does this have to do with the discussion we just started? Hang with me for a minute. I have to lay some foundation first.
Here is the money part:
Agency. When someone says something shitty to us, we are in control over how we respond. The number one response in most communities, is righteous indignation. The number two is to return that with equally shitty discussion.
And from there, it's a meta mess. They said, you said, he said...
Everyone wants "the platform" to handle this for them, to protect them, to enforce "the rules", etc... Ask people this, and they will go on at length about it all.
You can also give them scenarios, and they will also tell you indirectly, "the rules are great, but I need an exception, because other people are shitty to me."
This behavior dynamic is chronic. Rule based systems won't fix it. Machine learning won't either.
Now, what happens when people understand this is on them?
Someone calls us an asshole. They are strangers, we don't know them, they have established little to no credence. Or, they are trolls and are seen as such. Maybe they are clowns.
With agency in play, we have many options!
Righteous indignation
Laughter
Ignore them
Score their insult (C+ Weak sauce, try harder)
On Quora, I will often apply this. Someone goes off, and I will say, "You should edit that away before someone reports it. Then we can try again."
Doing that is sometimes amazing. I've had some awesome exchanges with others that started out on a very bad basis.
We are in control of our end of the conversation. We manage whether it goes bad or not.
So much of the angst we see related to all this social media boils down to the fact that many people do not recognize their agency in dialog, and they expect the system to take care of them, relieve them of the burden of actually interacting with other people.
Now, where it comes to the real / unreal, there is a dynamic in play I find extremely disturbing, and this is the part I am reluctant to put here, so again, just a taste:
Our body politic is ill. Our mainstream media is not delivering a robust, real, inclusive dialog on policy. Tons of Americans have come to realize this, and it's a growing problem for the big money, establishment media.
A couple examples:
Where is the anti-war movement in the US, and what coverage does it get on mainstream media?
What percentage of news and opinion produced by mainstream media in the US do so from the labor, poverty point of view?
When is the last time any of us saw a reasonable debate on mainstream media about Net Neutrality, Copyright, and the basic problems and dynamics we are seeing where society, the law, and technology intersect?
There are many more. I just picked a few to make a ...
I'm not sure I agree with everything you said, but I thank you for making a well thought out post that isn't yet another overly cynical "delete FB" post.
I think your comment is gold. Because I've been also thinking about the construction, organization, and mechanism of online communities in general, most of my comments were posted to another community, but I posted some related comments on Hacker News as well. I'll start dumping comments as well, I hope you find them interesting. Feedback is appreciated.
1. First, I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself.
* The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group
Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard.
We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro-LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State.
On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post-modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate ...
Except that Slashdot isn't using engagement-driving AI algos in the sense of FB, YT, or Twitter. It's a simple capped-upvotes system.
And it's still a dumpster fire.
If you want intelligent discussion, you go elsewhere. HN is pretty good (though with numerous glaring exceptions). Any part of Reddit that's not ruthlessly moderated (and/or still highly obscure) fares poorly. I've got small groups on Mastodon and Diaspora which work fairly well.
But clue flees idiocy and mindless conflict hard. And if your system breeds either, intelligence won't loiter long.
The commitment to "no comments deleted ever" was great 'til racist trash became the most common theme in comments. Nowadays their moderation system just doesn't scale, and IMO the page would be significantly improved by a filter on the n-word
Too bad Malda sold it before the social media valuations like of Facebook.
Slashdot had some commercial awareness (e.g., there was a lot of predictable "take my money!" meme about products), but wasn't thinking along the most profitable lines, and maybe never could've. (I've been wondering how much/often dotcom founders of successful startups reshape the world in their image, and I doubt that Malda saw the world with a Zuckerberg eye, for example.)
Another big property that was bought by the same people was SourceForge. Which didn't fetch anywhere near the price of GitHub.
That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do both; the first one obliterates the second.
Yeah and you are a part of a huge fan base that will downvote me into oblivion. There is nothing bad with that. You can love bad writing. Why not?
However it will still not change anything about him being a mediocre writer. His inability to write endings became a meme even within the fan base. His inability to write non-cringe female characters is horrible ans sometimes quite questionable (Snow Crash). Especially these days. The way he stretches nothingness over endless pages is painful and just another sign of bad craftsmanship and yes we get that he likes to deliver some scientific ideas but there are ways to not make it look like you copy a wikipedia article. It's been done in literature. It can be copied and as to say it in Ursula Le Guins words: everybody does it.
Much could be done if the editor(s) wouldn't be so afraid of him. I can't explain it otherwise.
>Q: How would you describe the current state of the internet? Just in a general sense of its role in our daily lives, and where that concept of the Miasma came from for you.
> Neal Stephenson: I ended up having a pretty dark view of it, as you can kind of tell from the book. I saw someone recently describe social media in its current state as a doomsday machine, and I think that's not far off. We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they're not scalable and if they're not scalable they can't make tons and tons of money.
How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?
This line about perception of reality somehow being different today than it was, say, in the 1980s keeps coming up. The main shift is that the number of (dis)information sources has risen sharply and they've become much more efficient. Secondarily, entire media channels (newspapers and TV) have lost relevance to all but the older generation. Increasingly, those news outlets just track social media, which may be the oddest development of all.
In this context, the effective discontinuation of the White House press conference was inevitable. For better or worse, the president talks directly, unfiltered, to everyone. That's the real doomsday machine if put into the wrong hands.
> How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?
Because size matters, and in this case social media is a lot more pervasive (I'd say at least an order of magnitude more) compared to TV news of the 1980s or to newspapers. I knew of lots and lots of people who to didn't read newspapers 30 years ago, also the majority of the people around me didn't give that much thought on what was presented as "news" on TV because we knew they were mostly lies anyway (I grew in an Eastern-European country located on the wrong side of the Wall), but nowadays even the remotest shepherd has a cheap Android phone with an Internet connection which he mostly uses for Facebook and Whatsapp.
In other words social media is a quantitative change (billions of people are using it) which has transformed into a qualitative one (because billions of people are using social media things are different this time).
> So that means that access to that kind of higher-quality view of the world becomes a class-based situation where people who've got the money to pay for or partially pay for human editors and curators are getting higher-quality info, which I think is just a slight kind of magnification or intensification of the way things are now anyway.
I repeat:
> …intensification of the way things are now anyway.
Now, here I disagree with Mr. Stephenson, these things were much more intense in prior times.
What he observes seems to be the development in the U.S. in terms of tonality of political discussions.
If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such "intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not go online without FB or other easy ways. Operating keyword here is easy. For many people, who just made the jump into being alphabetised, or being the first in their family to be so, many SN outlets are a somewhat more comprehensible access point to info, then "Google Fu".
>If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such "intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not go online without FB or other easy ways.
That's hardly an argument in favour of social media. The US is a democracy where people used to have civic debates around a shared reality.
That social media isn't going to ruin the debate climate in corporate-governmental societies where civilians don't have any input anyway doesn't really calm my nerves. In fact it frightens me. If the future of the internet is a cluster of entertainment bubbles with business and government bending reality to their will, and China is an example of the future, I'm not really keen on duplicating it. It's actually a very prescient observation: There seems to be a strong correlation between societies with high technological development but no democratic tradition, and the demise of traditional channels of media in favour of social media.
Which society "with high technological development but no democratic tradition" witnesses a "demise of traditional channels of media in favour of social media?"
I don't think I can actually name you a Chinese mainland newspaper that isn't government owned and controlled. So calling it a demise might have actually undersold it, I don't think independent journalism plays a role at all.
If anything, social media is worse in Asian countries, being used for massive scams, for genocides, for vigilante justice (which often targets completely innocent people), massive amounts of fake news, etc.
Human beings have always been mythological beings. It's just that the myths that they now believe are amplifications of their own beliefs, or what they want to believe, rather than the collective beliefs of their societies, elites, thought leaders, and media masters. So yeah that's doomsday for society, in that there are no longer any shared myths holding everyone together. Those myths were never really true... they were just a tool of control, maybe even self-control of society. Without them the chaos amplifies.
Heck even without social media it seems like there was a progression in politics where things were becoming unhinged. Things were becoming more and more polarized and what is/was considered progress was more further and further from many people's ideas of progress. So there is a series of issues that are coalescing together in our time with a background in the century of self, identity politics, etc.
its actually terrifying how accurate this is. most people live extremely mundane lives so they latch onto some lore whether its a book or their twitter feed. just the recent game of thrones petition/outrage shitstorm, the show gave people something to war over twitter about, with their coworkers, their family
its definitely why politics now is incredibly toxic and i dont really understand why anyone contributes or even cares about political twitter dunking, its definitely not healthy
a community in chaos, full of micro tribes following their own lore used to be cause for war and now we have it, in extremely quick replies at all times anywhere
>How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?
In the sense that having some hot oil spill on your hands while frying something is not the same as being submerged in burning oil as a medieval punishment.
Network and scale effects affect the impact of technological innovations. Even quantitative increase, over time, leads to different qualitative impact. But here we also have qualitative differences (e.g. TV networks didn't know shit about you, social networks know everything about your preferences, searches, friends, and so on).
>How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?
Accountability. Someone is ultimately responsible for every newspaper article and every TV program. If a national newspaper decided to publish a piece of paid foreign propaganda, someone would have a lot of explaining to do, possibly in a court of law.
There's no such accountability for algorithmically-driven systems. It's not our fault that our platform keeps promoting propaganda, it's just a quirk of the algorithm; we don't really know why our algorithm is doing this and we're not going to let you review the source code.
I don't know what the possible solutions might be, but there's clearly a problem. Social media companies have largely abnegated responsibility for what goes on their platform and their platforms can't function without that abnegation of responsibility.
> In this context, the effective discontinuation of the White House press conference was inevitable. For better or worse, the president talks directly, unfiltered, to everyone. That's the real doomsday machine if put into the wrong hands.
Interestingly, that shift seems to have happened everywhere, not just in politics. Many companies have also realised that they don't need to go through the media/journalists any more, and started advertising directly to their customers/users/fans too.
Wonder if there's a term for that sort of social shift?
Decentralization. Although this term does not yet apply to the avenues through which this outreach occurs, but give it ten to twenty years and that too will change.
Newspapers and TV couldn't
(a) Collect as much, if any, individual data
(b) They couldnt tailor their content on an individual basis
(c) There were not as many sources of data tracking your likes, location, buying patterns, eating patterns, entertainment patterns, writing patterns, voting patterns, reading patterns, etc.
(d) Those sources of data could not be collated together
I think fundamentally the issue is that too much personal data is being collected, and put together, making profiles on people that can be used and abused. Social media is the first major area where that data is being employed and often being deployed irresponsibly (although I question the idea that so much personal information could ever be deployed responsibly).
Part of the problem is the participation trophy and helicopter parent mentality.
Who are you to tell me my beliefs are wrong? I can be anything I want, I am qualified to be an expert on something because I want to be. The Earth is flat, who are you to tell me otherwise?
The lack of humility is the real doomsday machine.
Funny you mention flat earthers, I think it's because of social media that the number of times they're mentioned dwarfs the actual number of flat earthers alive today by something like a few hundred thousand to one. Just one example where something gets blown way out of proportion.
We know there are plenty of antivaxers because they sign certificates of immunization exemption. Plus we keep track of immunization rates. In WA there are about 4% kindergarten kids with non-medical immunization exemptions [0]. In some communities, like Vashon Island, the exemption rate goes upwards 25% [1], and the non-vaccination rate upwards to 44% of kindergartners in 2012 [2].
Even if it's a miniscule amount, coupled with antivaxxer's, climate change deniers, etc. leads to pain points in society even having to prove them wrong takes a toll.
Why do you feel compelled to prove flat earthers wrong? Most of them don't even earnestly believe it, but bait people like you into bad faith arguments for sport.
I worry that the online coverage of things like flat earthers might feed the phenomenon. I used to think flat earthers was just some internet nonsense and that you'd be hard-pressed to find someone offline who believed that, but then I found out a long-time coworker does. One of my neighbors is also a climate change denier and it took a long time for us to hit that topic, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out more people I know who are like that.
I believe it is the desire for hidden truths, so that one may begin to understand themselves. Mysticism used to play that role for many. "Here is a practice you can do daily to find hidden truths about oneself." But in the modern world, conspiracy theories fill that need.
All of the hot-button issues are massively blown out of proportion to the actual numbers. That's the salient thing you start to notice when you start drilling into the facts and disregard the rhetoric. We're wound to 11 at each other's throats fussing about the 0.1% issues.
Technologically, it seems to be pretty speculative and hand-wavy. Consider:
> One thing we do know about quantum computers is that once we can get them to work, which is no small task, they will be unbelievably fast and increase available computing power by orders of magnitude compared to traditional computers
> The near-future world of Fall is full of familiar buzzwords and concepts. Augmented reality headsets, next-gen wireless networks, self-driving vehicles, facial recognition, quantum computing, blockchain and distributed cryptography all feature prominently.
Why is social media the poster child for algoritmically driven content? If anything, social media response to scale hasn’t been to use algorithms to drive content from top down, but instead to crowd source that information. Yes Facebook might rearrange your newsfeed. But the information it shows is still driven by the likes and shares of your network. On places like reddit it is driven by upvotes, or hash tags and retweets on twitter. The algorithm is secondary to the user group.
Thus if we really are going to blame social media, it’s because we aren’t more selective about the social networks we embed ourselves in. But this of course is a problem that existed from the dawn of humanity.
The problem is still that the algorithms cause problems. Social media is also a poster child because we could actually observe the transition in many cases: Early Twitter and Facebook as far as I know had entirely chronological timelines, and then changed that to "increase engagement", with all the side-effects that has. Just some examples:
- boosting things that are already popular increases their measured popularity even more, which both
a) over-emphasizes things that get reacted to quickly, which means e.g. quick outragous headlines get even more benefit over more in-depth coverage than they already do by human nature and
b) over-emphasizes popular sources over niche ones.
- Facebook actually does guesses at audiences, which means liking something can actually mean you decrease it's reach with the intended audience. (the "Facebook mom problem": if you post e.g. about your latest scientific paper and your mom likes it immediately, because that's what moms do, Facebook assumes it's family content and is less likely to show it to professional contacts that are the actual audience)
- for commercial content, Facebook intentionally limits reach among people who explicitly choose to follow you unless you pay for visibility
Neither is secondary; both are essential to the socio-algorithmic evolutionary process.
The algorithms are intended to optimize toward some user group behaviour. As the user group's choices influence the behaviour of the algorithms, so too do the algorithms' choices influence the behaviour of the user group.
I'm not convinced that the impact of SM is much different from the impact of 3-network TV programming back in the 50s-60s.
'We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems ....' Like Nielson ratings?
We certainly weren't allowed to play a greater part then. Are we now, really? So, if once again we've allowed corporations to spoon-feed us, in return for watching advertising ... how's that any more of a doomsday than the first time around?
Stephenson's a remarkable story-teller but this comment is not helpful. If things look darker, that doesn't mean that they are. TV and Newspaper headlines were essentially algorithmically predictable. 'Darker' stuff wound up in magazines.
Today, anyone with the time can see it all ... unfiltered by news 'experts'. If it looks manipululated, it always was.
"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread." - John Swinton, 1880
> PCMag: The first glimpse we get of Bitworld is this newly sentient virtual mind conceiving its surroundings, its being, and its ability to think and create and learn and adjust in the midst of endless chaos. It was fascinating stream-of-consciousness writing to encapsulate cognition. That must've been a really tricky part to write.
I'm looking forward to reading this, for sure.
But I gotta say that Greg Egan did a good job of this, at the beginning of "Diaspora". Which he published in 1998.
Also interesting is Kevin MacArdry's The Last Trumpet Project, which goes further. Read-only access to the past permits bringing everyone who ever lived into digital heavens. It came out in ~2010.
"My big picture view of this is that broad access to the facts is empowering to everyone who can get it. The broadening of that power base to include more people comes at the expense of the oligarchs of the world, who are always going to be able to reap power, wealth, and benefits from keeping everybody else in the dark."
This is a very interesting quote to me because it's the type of quote that "the oligarchy" uses to label those like Alex Jones wing nut conspiracy theorists.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadhttps://www.pcmag.com/news/368417/neal-stephenson-explains-h...
I am reluctant to put it here, but maybe just a taste?
[flame suit on :D ]
I disagree. Honestly, one can make tons of money, and incorporate the humans too. That can all scale, though the margins are not as good. So what? There is still tons of money to be made, just not the absolute maximum tons of money to be made.
The difference between those two is profound when it comes to the potential impact of social media on society today.
A while back, some friends and I did an experiment. What we did was set the expectation that people need to treat other people well, assume good intent, and in general, don't be a dick.
Anything else is a risk.
Being a dick comes with risk. It may be small, it may be significant. It's hard to know, by design.
See, when we define how shitty people can be to one another, they end up being exactly that shitty, plus a little.
Give people targets and they will meet them. Give them rules, and they will game them.
So then, make the only clear target real, human, discussion, mutual respect and consideration, and as time passes, the community will see more and more of that.
What does this have to do with the discussion we just started? Hang with me for a minute. I have to lay some foundation first.
Here is the money part:
Agency. When someone says something shitty to us, we are in control over how we respond. The number one response in most communities, is righteous indignation. The number two is to return that with equally shitty discussion.
And from there, it's a meta mess. They said, you said, he said...
Everyone wants "the platform" to handle this for them, to protect them, to enforce "the rules", etc... Ask people this, and they will go on at length about it all.
You can also give them scenarios, and they will also tell you indirectly, "the rules are great, but I need an exception, because other people are shitty to me."
This behavior dynamic is chronic. Rule based systems won't fix it. Machine learning won't either.
Now, what happens when people understand this is on them?
Someone calls us an asshole. They are strangers, we don't know them, they have established little to no credence. Or, they are trolls and are seen as such. Maybe they are clowns.
With agency in play, we have many options!
Righteous indignation Laughter Ignore them Score their insult (C+ Weak sauce, try harder)
On Quora, I will often apply this. Someone goes off, and I will say, "You should edit that away before someone reports it. Then we can try again."
Doing that is sometimes amazing. I've had some awesome exchanges with others that started out on a very bad basis.
We are in control of our end of the conversation. We manage whether it goes bad or not.
So much of the angst we see related to all this social media boils down to the fact that many people do not recognize their agency in dialog, and they expect the system to take care of them, relieve them of the burden of actually interacting with other people.
Now, where it comes to the real / unreal, there is a dynamic in play I find extremely disturbing, and this is the part I am reluctant to put here, so again, just a taste:
Our body politic is ill. Our mainstream media is not delivering a robust, real, inclusive dialog on policy. Tons of Americans have come to realize this, and it's a growing problem for the big money, establishment media.
A couple examples:
Where is the anti-war movement in the US, and what coverage does it get on mainstream media?
What percentage of news and opinion produced by mainstream media in the US do so from the labor, poverty point of view?
When is the last time any of us saw a reasonable debate on mainstream media about Net Neutrality, Copyright, and the basic problems and dynamics we are seeing where society, the law, and technology intersect?
There are many more. I just picked a few to make a ...
Honestly, we don't need to delete FB. The core of FB is a good thing. I'll leave my comment as it is for now, food for thought.
1. First, I've been observing various online trolling culture and fringe reactionary political movements for a few years. Mostly 4chan, but I think it applies to the web in general. While I don't agree with their intentions or motivations, but I found it's an extremely interesting phenomenon and pretty post-modernist in itself.
* The cyclist behind an anti-cyclist Facebook group
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731220
* Recommended comments (read the link below before you continue):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731914
Here's a story: a biking hobbyist used his spare time and launched an influential anti-bike movement on Facebook. He posted numerous sensationalized commentaries, posters and memes to demonize bikers, including the various "data" and "charts" for the "bikes are a great threat of traffic order" propaganda, and occasionally advocated violence towards bikers in forms of half-jokes. He also proposed political reforms to introduce restrictive and/or discriminatory traffic laws for bikers. Soon, his campaign has gone viral and attracted a large number of supporters who drive cars. Well, not all bikers follow the traffic rules and some problems surely exist, but they are only as bad as the average day-to-day traffic and usually not seen as something people need to act upon, but this campaign exaggerates it, radicalized it and polarized the issue and created lot of hate. What is his intention then? His only intention is laughing at this fact: he was able to manipulate the car drivers easily and even create a raged populist political movement with a mere keyboard.
We hardly know who's behind the populist political movements online, but this is a well-documented case, and I believe it can be a representative sample which largely reflects the origin, emotions and motivation of the 4chan-like "for-the-lulz" trolling culture. Also, I can immediately point out the similarities to the populist reactionary political movements: the nationalism propaganda used many of the tactics the biking troll has used. Also, Russia is accused by the media to create an army of bots on social media, such as pro-LGBT, anti-LGBT, pro-life, pro-choice, religion fundamentalism, atheism, nationalistic, liberal, etc, with the intention of creating polarized argument and social conflicts in the United State.
On the other hand, the "for-the-lulz" trolling culture itself, even can be used as propaganda, is not propaganda in itself. It is a form of complicated web culture. It's basic definition is "doing some pointless activities to make others to suffer, and laugh at it", but it stands for a lot of things. It has a reactionary, or anti-establishment element, as previously mentioned, but it also includes: (1) cultural jamming, similar to the 70s counter-cultural movement (see those hoaxes in Fight Club), (2) It understands the art of exploiting a vulnerability in the system for one's own advantage, similar to parts of the hacker culture, (3) Also, it has a somewhat nihilist, post-modernist component, sometimes artistic (The Game was popular on early 4chan: once you remember playing it, you lose it), and (4), it reflects the worrying, helplessness and alienating aspects of modern life, and as an entertainment against them using humor and hate, then finally (5) a populist movement. It's core logic is: everyone, look how evil/degenerate ...
Back later when I can consider it properly. You dropped a lot. Great, but I have to plow through it and will.
We have a common interest apparently.
And it's still a dumpster fire.
If you want intelligent discussion, you go elsewhere. HN is pretty good (though with numerous glaring exceptions). Any part of Reddit that's not ruthlessly moderated (and/or still highly obscure) fares poorly. I've got small groups on Mastodon and Diaspora which work fairly well.
But clue flees idiocy and mindless conflict hard. And if your system breeds either, intelligence won't loiter long.
(I have a lower 5 digit account over there)
Slashdot had some commercial awareness (e.g., there was a lot of predictable "take my money!" meme about products), but wasn't thinking along the most profitable lines, and maybe never could've. (I've been wondering how much/often dotcom founders of successful startups reshape the world in their image, and I doubt that Malda saw the world with a Zuckerberg eye, for example.)
Another big property that was bought by the same people was SourceForge. Which didn't fetch anywhere near the price of GitHub.
That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do both; the first one obliterates the second.
However it will still not change anything about him being a mediocre writer. His inability to write endings became a meme even within the fan base. His inability to write non-cringe female characters is horrible ans sometimes quite questionable (Snow Crash). Especially these days. The way he stretches nothingness over endless pages is painful and just another sign of bad craftsmanship and yes we get that he likes to deliver some scientific ideas but there are ways to not make it look like you copy a wikipedia article. It's been done in literature. It can be copied and as to say it in Ursula Le Guins words: everybody does it.
Much could be done if the editor(s) wouldn't be so afraid of him. I can't explain it otherwise.
> Neal Stephenson: I ended up having a pretty dark view of it, as you can kind of tell from the book. I saw someone recently describe social media in its current state as a doomsday machine, and I think that's not far off. We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they're not scalable and if they're not scalable they can't make tons and tons of money.
How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?
This line about perception of reality somehow being different today than it was, say, in the 1980s keeps coming up. The main shift is that the number of (dis)information sources has risen sharply and they've become much more efficient. Secondarily, entire media channels (newspapers and TV) have lost relevance to all but the older generation. Increasingly, those news outlets just track social media, which may be the oddest development of all.
In this context, the effective discontinuation of the White House press conference was inevitable. For better or worse, the president talks directly, unfiltered, to everyone. That's the real doomsday machine if put into the wrong hands.
Because size matters, and in this case social media is a lot more pervasive (I'd say at least an order of magnitude more) compared to TV news of the 1980s or to newspapers. I knew of lots and lots of people who to didn't read newspapers 30 years ago, also the majority of the people around me didn't give that much thought on what was presented as "news" on TV because we knew they were mostly lies anyway (I grew in an Eastern-European country located on the wrong side of the Wall), but nowadays even the remotest shepherd has a cheap Android phone with an Internet connection which he mostly uses for Facebook and Whatsapp.
In other words social media is a quantitative change (billions of people are using it) which has transformed into a qualitative one (because billions of people are using social media things are different this time).
> So that means that access to that kind of higher-quality view of the world becomes a class-based situation where people who've got the money to pay for or partially pay for human editors and curators are getting higher-quality info, which I think is just a slight kind of magnification or intensification of the way things are now anyway.
I repeat:
> …intensification of the way things are now anyway.
Now, here I disagree with Mr. Stephenson, these things were much more intense in prior times.
What he observes seems to be the development in the U.S. in terms of tonality of political discussions.
If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such "intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not go online without FB or other easy ways. Operating keyword here is easy. For many people, who just made the jump into being alphabetised, or being the first in their family to be so, many SN outlets are a somewhat more comprehensible access point to info, then "Google Fu".
That's hardly an argument in favour of social media. The US is a democracy where people used to have civic debates around a shared reality.
That social media isn't going to ruin the debate climate in corporate-governmental societies where civilians don't have any input anyway doesn't really calm my nerves. In fact it frightens me. If the future of the internet is a cluster of entertainment bubbles with business and government bending reality to their will, and China is an example of the future, I'm not really keen on duplicating it. It's actually a very prescient observation: There seems to be a strong correlation between societies with high technological development but no democratic tradition, and the demise of traditional channels of media in favour of social media.
If anything, social media is worse in Asian countries, being used for massive scams, for genocides, for vigilante justice (which often targets completely innocent people), massive amounts of fake news, etc.
Heck even without social media it seems like there was a progression in politics where things were becoming unhinged. Things were becoming more and more polarized and what is/was considered progress was more further and further from many people's ideas of progress. So there is a series of issues that are coalescing together in our time with a background in the century of self, identity politics, etc.
its definitely why politics now is incredibly toxic and i dont really understand why anyone contributes or even cares about political twitter dunking, its definitely not healthy
a community in chaos, full of micro tribes following their own lore used to be cause for war and now we have it, in extremely quick replies at all times anywhere
In the sense that having some hot oil spill on your hands while frying something is not the same as being submerged in burning oil as a medieval punishment.
Network and scale effects affect the impact of technological innovations. Even quantitative increase, over time, leads to different qualitative impact. But here we also have qualitative differences (e.g. TV networks didn't know shit about you, social networks know everything about your preferences, searches, friends, and so on).
Accountability. Someone is ultimately responsible for every newspaper article and every TV program. If a national newspaper decided to publish a piece of paid foreign propaganda, someone would have a lot of explaining to do, possibly in a court of law.
There's no such accountability for algorithmically-driven systems. It's not our fault that our platform keeps promoting propaganda, it's just a quirk of the algorithm; we don't really know why our algorithm is doing this and we're not going to let you review the source code.
I don't know what the possible solutions might be, but there's clearly a problem. Social media companies have largely abnegated responsibility for what goes on their platform and their platforms can't function without that abnegation of responsibility.
Interestingly, that shift seems to have happened everywhere, not just in politics. Many companies have also realised that they don't need to go through the media/journalists any more, and started advertising directly to their customers/users/fans too.
Wonder if there's a term for that sort of social shift?
This is like saying why being scared of atom bombs when we already had swords.
I think fundamentally the issue is that too much personal data is being collected, and put together, making profiles on people that can be used and abused. Social media is the first major area where that data is being employed and often being deployed irresponsibly (although I question the idea that so much personal information could ever be deployed responsibly).
Who are you to tell me my beliefs are wrong? I can be anything I want, I am qualified to be an expert on something because I want to be. The Earth is flat, who are you to tell me otherwise?
The lack of humility is the real doomsday machine.
Groups whose soul purpose is to trash talk something are loathsome, even if the target deserves it.
[0] https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/Pubs/348-682-SY20...
[1] https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article26252716.ht...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/health/measles-outbreak-w...
Even if it's a miniscule amount, coupled with antivaxxer's, climate change deniers, etc. leads to pain points in society even having to prove them wrong takes a toll.
> One thing we do know about quantum computers is that once we can get them to work, which is no small task, they will be unbelievably fast and increase available computing power by orders of magnitude compared to traditional computers
> The near-future world of Fall is full of familiar buzzwords and concepts. Augmented reality headsets, next-gen wireless networks, self-driving vehicles, facial recognition, quantum computing, blockchain and distributed cryptography all feature prominently.
Thus if we really are going to blame social media, it’s because we aren’t more selective about the social networks we embed ourselves in. But this of course is a problem that existed from the dawn of humanity.
- boosting things that are already popular increases their measured popularity even more, which both
a) over-emphasizes things that get reacted to quickly, which means e.g. quick outragous headlines get even more benefit over more in-depth coverage than they already do by human nature and
b) over-emphasizes popular sources over niche ones.
- Facebook actually does guesses at audiences, which means liking something can actually mean you decrease it's reach with the intended audience. (the "Facebook mom problem": if you post e.g. about your latest scientific paper and your mom likes it immediately, because that's what moms do, Facebook assumes it's family content and is less likely to show it to professional contacts that are the actual audience)
- for commercial content, Facebook intentionally limits reach among people who explicitly choose to follow you unless you pay for visibility
Neither is secondary; both are essential to the socio-algorithmic evolutionary process.
The algorithms are intended to optimize toward some user group behaviour. As the user group's choices influence the behaviour of the algorithms, so too do the algorithms' choices influence the behaviour of the user group.
'We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems ....' Like Nielson ratings?
We certainly weren't allowed to play a greater part then. Are we now, really? So, if once again we've allowed corporations to spoon-feed us, in return for watching advertising ... how's that any more of a doomsday than the first time around?
Stephenson's a remarkable story-teller but this comment is not helpful. If things look darker, that doesn't mean that they are. TV and Newspaper headlines were essentially algorithmically predictable. 'Darker' stuff wound up in magazines.
Today, anyone with the time can see it all ... unfiltered by news 'experts'. If it looks manipululated, it always was.
"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread." - John Swinton, 1880
I'm looking forward to reading this, for sure.
But I gotta say that Greg Egan did a good job of this, at the beginning of "Diaspora". Which he published in 1998.
Also interesting is Kevin MacArdry's The Last Trumpet Project, which goes further. Read-only access to the past permits bringing everyone who ever lived into digital heavens. It came out in ~2010.
This is a very interesting quote to me because it's the type of quote that "the oligarchy" uses to label those like Alex Jones wing nut conspiracy theorists.