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Looks like the article is paywalled :(
William Gibson otoh thinks we're on the right track.
Towards dystopia? Or away from it?
Hmm, which one has megacorps with private armies, runaway AIs and hackers hustling for a living ?
That's a very specific dystopia. There are probably very many other kinds.
Now I wonder what Bruce Sterling's take is.
For those on the wrong side of a paywall: https://outline.com/CJVH9a

"I see people make blunders that I wish people had stopped making 10 years ago: that tendency to see something that strikes an emotional chord and immediately share it, like it, pass it on without thinking about it, without considering whether it came from a human being, or a bot, or a troll, or a political actor."

To me there's a lot of truth in this statement, so much of being online seems to be driven by how to emotionally manipulate you, and to pull traffic by being the 1st one out of the gate with a story by being the one passed around. It doesn't feel like a very productive model for making any concrete progress. If you try to be more engaged you end up exhausted due to the energy required to cross check information for veracity.

I get that sense as well. I try to have a lot more restraint now when it comes to sharing stuff, after being burned a number of times when sharing something interesting or compelling to me, then finding out soon after that it was fake or misrepresented.
> If you try to be more engaged you end up exhausted due to the energy required to cross check information for veracity.

This came up in a similar vein in the PG tweet thread yesterday. There is an assumption when commenting that everyone has the same knowledge base and it simply isnt true a large majority of the time.

I wonder if some kind of social media has tried only "sourced" comments. So your comments can be more easily interpreted when you make a leading statement. I presume then you just get into the weeds about what is and isnt a source though..

Good ol' Neal Stephenson... I found HackerNews due to an offhand response made in an interview when asked what message boards he frequents.