Kara will eventually figure out that writing things on the internet doesn't matter anymore (including my comment). One person in facepaint wearing a fake animal pelt moves the needle more than the collected works of Swisher, Greenwald, Taibbi, etc etc. Just another pithy editorial for you to harumph.
Not explicitly, but surely everyone who has a longstanding axe to grind with the government is pleased to see a wedge driven between the establishment and the citizenry
Its real change. What real change is created by pithy think pieces in WaPo, NYT, substack etc? None. The readers are invested in the establishment so they'll never offer more than the odd tish-tosh and go back to their lives. Take for example, established media discussions of climate change or Apple labor practices -the dear readers offer a witty condemnation in a comment but don't actually change their habits.
edit: I can see why my comments earn dowvotes...HN readers think they are disruptors but in reality we are just the dweeb army slaving away to hold it all together
Just want to say one person here is a centrist and as they say "actions speak louder than words" and also.. "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
People aren't stupid no matter what the left paints the right as ...and I don't know if the left can continue to put a lid on this simmering pot of resentment from tens of millions of SILENCED people.
The anger has a reason and can't just be ignored and hidden away.
I think they made an egregious error and this anger is going to come back at them at some point.in the future.
Until recently these people were not silenced in any significant way. That they thought they were was part of their whole warped world view where holding the presidency, a slim majority of the senate, and a slim minority of the house means that they are oppressed and unheard.
It's like radical evangelicals who claim that Christians are being oppressed while a majority of our elected government identifies as Christian including the president of the united states (none of which have ever not identified as Chrsitian).
If you continue to post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN, we are going to have to ban you again. We had to ask you this just a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25773385.
Apparently, he was trying to cast a spell by chanting as he walked down “ley lines”.
Alternatively, someone with his background knew that he’d likely provoke a melodramatic response which in turn would turn more people against the establishment.
Just like everything Trump said, words didn't matter until they did. But the real world actions wouldn't have happened without the words. Of course words matter. Including yours.
I often observe there’s a reason the first amendment was put before the second. A man with a rifle can cause dozens of deaths. A man with a big enough megaphone can cause millions of deaths.
It’s funny that the specious argument that the second amendment doesn’t protect arms the framers didn’t have available isn’t applied to the first amendment. The Internet and mass persuasion is way more unforeseeable than a rifle that shoots faster. Perhaps it’s time for common sense speech control? This isn’t unconstitutional, freedom of speech is not unlimited under the constitution it’s just a matter of where to draw the lines.
There are quite a few limits on the first amendment, especially in the context of the current discussion and they’ve been covered both in the media and in comments here on HN at length.
You’re downvoted but you have a point. We listen to the talking heads all day but action often has a bigger effect. And that’s not just Trump supporters but also BLM.
It’s really bizarre that these people all insist that President Trump “incited” the attack. There’s a sinister undertone of hate and othering behind this narrative. They want revenge against 75,000,000 (and growing) populist right-leaning voters.
Read the transcript. He actively exhorts his supporters to fight for the Constitution "today", exhorts Mike Pence to "do the right thing", telling them to fuck the media in general and in general inciting hatred against everything, with direct calls for encouraging them to "stop the steal" and put the pressure on Congress and Mike Pence - actively encouraging them to force Pence to use his power to call for a recertification.
Either way, I just Googled Trump Capitol Transcript and that was the first link that gave the speech (I had gone through it earlier in full). If you can't be bothered to read, then I can't help you further.
Please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN (like this and the swipe in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25810704), regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It only contributes to destroying this place further.
We've had to warn you about this more than once before. When accounts keep doing it, we ban them, so please stop.
Read the transcript. He actively exhorts his supporters to fight for the Constitution "today", exhorts Mike Pence to "do the right thing", telling them to fuck the media in general and in general inciting hatred against everything, with direct calls for encouraging them to "stop the steal" and put the pressure on Congress and Mike Pence - actively encouraging them to force Pence to use his power to call for a recertification.
https://www.newsandguts.com/trump-if-you-dont-fight-like-hel... summarizes the basis for impeachment. If you only listen to FOX and Steve Bannon's warroom you will hear repeatedly that Trump only explicitly said to go and peacefully cheer on those who did not want the election to be stolen.
If you are a participant of hacker news I'd hope that you can perform a google search to find and validate this information rather than parrot the feigned ignorance of pundits.
Is this blatant enough to justify impeachment? I don't know. Apparently it is blatant enough to convince 10 republican congress people.
Read the transcript. He actively exhorts his supporters to fight for the Constitution "today", exhorts Mike Pence to "do the right thing", telling them to fuck the media in general and in general inciting hatred against everything, with direct calls for encouraging them to "stop the steal" and put the pressure on Congress and Mike Pence - actively encouraging them to force Pence to use his power to call for a recertification.
Here in NL I heard a Dutch/US citizen commenting on the election, on national radio: she was glad that Biden won, but still, 70 million people voted for Trump, and ... 'we have got to do something with these people'.
If a 'non progressive' would have said this on national radio, he/she would be accused of inciting a holocaust.
I have yet to see a single news outlet cite a single thing Trump said that unambiguously “incited violence.” As usual, some media outlet conjured it and put it in print, it went viral, and voila the narrative was born to live forever, unable to be challenged. Even the Twitter ban had to use all sorts of stupid and squishy language for their justification. Meanwhile, the Washington Post (just to pick one of countless examples) ran a huge story in 2019 (!!!) with an interview with Hillary Clinton on how she claimed the election was stolen via Russian “interference”. Thank god three years of that wasnt incitement. For centrists like myself, watching this devolve and lose any sense of true objectivity is depressing.
Yeah let's not blame stupid people who fall for idiotic conspiracies, let's blame the platform they read it on. The only reason this doesn't happen with books is because they're too stupid to read them.
You don’t think it happens with books? My dad has a house full of books. He isn’t a talk radio guy and doesn’t do the Facebook that the kids are into these days.
Instead if you look closely at his library you will find plenty of titles by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Bill Bennett, and on and on. It’s a small percentage of what he reads, but it’s how he gets his ideology and has been for 20+ years.
> Yeah let's not blame stupid people who fall for idiotic conspiracies, let's blame the platform they read it on.
The cognitive biases that allow people to fall into these warped worldviews is shared by all of humanity. It could just as easily have been any of us under different circumstances.
I think that's sort of a moot point. The fact is, there are plenty of people out there that can be whipped into a frenzy by misinformation. You can blame them all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that they are there and that they can be a dangerous and destabilizing force.
I agree, but I don't think we should design our technology based on how the stupidest of us could misuse it. Those people need to be kept away from technology starting with sharp rocks.
But how can you keep people like that away from technology short of draconian laws? The fact is, large web platforms and hoards of rage junkies have found a mutually beneficial arrangement. One gets advertising revenue, the other gets unlimited rage fuel. How do you get either side to agree to stop?
Ms. Swisher is one of the tech pundits I always read.watch when she interviews someone. Perhaps she can do this with the new administration and find out why we allow the failed social media experiments to continue.
The notion of misinformation being enabled by "Big Tech" is subtly but unintentionally leaking information.
There are two logical possibilities when mass communication platforms (old or new flavors) in unison raise the specter of "contagious information" that affects deplorable heads:
1 - Mass media owners have been, since the very beginning of mass communication, aware of a curious fact not really understood by the rest of us: ideas and thoughts conveyed via mass communication are unthinkly accepted and internalized by large subset of society. (The birth of modern advertising occurs around the same time.)
2 - Simply having substantial control of mass communication is not enough if establishment views, and version of news, are countered by alternative views and news, in context of a political class that no longer enjoys public confidence.
Madison avenue pretty much is built on #1. Collapse of USSR, itself a master of #1 technologies, could not be prevented by mere state propaganda (#2).
During the entirety of Cold War, no one jammed Soviet and setellite propaganda (such as Radio Moscow). At the same time, Soviets would jam the signal of Western mass communication organs (such as BBC).
In the 90s, the political class in this country caved to capital class and previously illegal consolidations of media, finance, and banking were made permissible again. The degredation in the quality of journalism (and even cultural products) visibly began at that point (if you were paying attention).
Now, having bet on #1 effects during 20 years of entirely questionable (and in times illegal) behavior by the entire political class of US -- 9/11, Iraq wars, and the collapse of the financial sector in '08, and role of the "journalism" in covering these events -- in a political environment that gradually brought us to American 'Pravda' moments, #2 phenomena raised its ugly head. Alt-news was a reaction to bullshit-news of American "journalism". (Hi "Judtih"! ...). It is also quite necessary to point out that many of these mushrooms of American night spewing strange theories smell like intelligence service cointelpro.
We need to reimpose the pre-90s restrictions on consolidations in Banking, Finance, and Media and reinstate the regulatory 'firewalls' that protected the integrity of American political system prior to 90s. A regulatory regime that saw the West face world-class propaganda by Soviets with aplumb and broadcasted the demise of that source of "misinformation" to a world wide audiance, without ever having to resort to ham fisted censorship (with possible exception of the 'red scare' period and it's version of 'cancel culture').
When people stop saying tropes like big tech are “private companies” and “actions have consequences” every time someone from the wrong political ideology gets deplatformed I’ll take this bitching and moaning slightly more seriously. This says nothing about the comically dysfunctional state of our insanely biased media, of which Kara herself and her brazenly political agenda is a symptom of.
Isn't that the point of separating a paper into editorial and opinion? The opinion section should be a place where journalists (or other figures) should be able to voice their concerns on what they see as important.
Kara has been pretty vocal during the last few years on her opinion of social media allowing Trump to spread disinformation and try to incite violence. It took inciting an attempted coup and a couple of people dying before they did the right thing. Her opinion seems to be that they shouldn't have let it get that far, seeing as the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
I'd strongly argue that having an editorial staff has proven to be a catastrophic error for newspapers since it poisons the culture of the newsroom, assigns a political brand to the company (which creates a flywheel where only people of the same ideology are attracted to and eventually accepted at the company whether it's Fox News or NYT), and blurs the lines between opinion pieces and reporting. Today at least, there is no justification for newspapers to have editorial staff at all. Having every media organization drop their editorial department would be an excellent first step in repairing our dysfunctional media.
I'm still surprised at how quickly and permanently Big Finance fell out of the national limelight after the 2008 financial crisis. In my view, big banks and private capital firms have a much bigger impact than Big Tech on the average American's ability to find work and afford housing. My impression is that American press attention shifted to Big Tech around 2012, coinciding with the end of the Occupy movement. I'd be curious to see whether anyone has quantified this shift, such as with NLP analysis of news articles.
The money printing (QE infinity) is the reason of most of the world's current problems, like the amount of capital misallocation that's been going on for 50 years.
Luckily Bitcoin improved on gold as a store of value, so while many are angry, people who understand that having hard money is the most important in current times have an easy life right now.
There's so many MAGA supporters on HN, it's hard to imagine this won't be flagged, but when I look at the pics of the people invading the Capitol, I honestly believe that not a single one of them deserves the technology that's been given them.
Millions of man hours dedicated to solving amazing technical problems which allow greater access to information than ever before in human history, and these useless idiots use it to spread lies, disinformation and foment insurrection.
We require licenses for operating machinery like cars, and I truly, honestly, and without hyperbole think it's time we do the same for information technology. Spreading misinformation and disinformation has cost the U.S. nearly 400,000 lives and counting. That's worse than the number of car deaths by an order of magnitude. Time for us to act accordingly.
Kara wants to blame Big Tech, but I don't. I blame the jerks who abuse and misuse the tech for personal gain, and the idiots who are their willing followers. I loathe Facebook, but it wasn't Zuckerberg inciting people to insurrection.
Big tech has been restrained, all things considered. Think about it. Can you imagine if the head of, say, Microsoft, Apple or Google was as mentally ill as Trump? Serious, serious damage could result.
You want to drive a car? You go take a test that shows you understand the law, and respect others on the road. You want to use a smartphone to share news about politics? You should have to take a test that shows you understand the law and respect others as well.
Huh, I detect sarcasm. Did the words "jerks" and "idiots" really upset your sensitive nature that much? Or was it the labeling the outgoing president who tried to cause an insurrection as "mentally ill"?
I'm going to have to say, that's about as respectful as one can get on this topic without ignoring reality. Unless you think the rioters were "wonderful and intelligent" and that the president's obvious sociopathic narcissism isn't a sign of severe mental illness.
This kind of polarisation has manifested itself in NL too, where 'progressives' paint 'the other side' as uneducated, stupid, backwards or mentally ill. This really took off in the mid-80s after the left abandonded labor.
These people are citizens too, and if you got to know each other, you would probably find you are not so different. Might disagree on some topics.
So I find your post utterly disrespectful. But you are a citizen too, and have every right to hold your opinions.
In the end the proof is in the pudding ( elections ).
> We require licenses for operating machinery like cars, and I truly, honestly, and without hyperbole think it's time we do the same for information technology.
That's a wildly more anti-freedom stance than anything even the big social media companies have done. At least they are just private companies exercising their right to control what goes on on their own platform, you're actually advocating for the modern equivalent of requiring all typewriters to be registered.
No one tells you where you can drive once you get your driver's license, we just don't allow incompetent people behind the wheel. No one at the DMV checks to see which party you belong to before giving you a license.
Same thing for an "infotech license". Once someone has demonstrated basic critical thinking, and an understanding of the law, they can say whatever they want to.
I don't agree with your prescription, but your diagnosis is correct. Big Tech (which in context is practically shorthand for "Facebook and Twitter" excluding all the rest) didn't write the content. They didn't even create the groups or channels through which that content is distributed. As the moniker implies, they provided only the tech. In what other context do we blame the tech itself or its makers for how it's used? The only example I can think of is guns. Before someone tries to make more of that analogy than it deserves, guns are fairly unique in that their only purpose is to destroy things (even if it's for a good reason). Social media clearly have purposes beyond the political (hint: it's in the name), let alone beyond the toxic miasma that defines politics today.
There are far more examples of not blaming the maker for the use - microphones, TVs, hypodermic needles, cars, etc. Why do we make an exception for one kind of tech? There are answers that are worth discussing and which might inform our responses, but Swisher doesn't even try to make one and nor do most who just rush to "solutions" that won't actually work.
Users create the problematic content. They were creating it before "big tech" and will quite likely continue creating it even if they're disallowed from using "big tech" products and services. What is achieved, for example, by moving Donald Trump's content from Twitter to trumpmaga.com where there's no moderation or terms of service to enforce? Would his reach really be reduced that much, at this point? We'd just get to have the same debate about whether his host or DNS provider or CDN should deplatform him, with even dimmer prospects of an affirmative answer.
I'm not saying tech companies are blameless, by any means, but let's blame them for things they themselves do and not for the mere presence of users who create problematic content. That lets the kinds of people who organized the January 6 insurrection attempt off the hook too much, along with many other kinds of miscreants. Going only after the platform providers seems a bit too much like looking for the keys under the lamp-post.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...”
Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, 1995.
I’ve had this quote in mind at many points this year. The refusal to wear masks, the inability to agree on basic facts, the wildfire spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
IMHO the only way out of this hole is by doubling down on critical thinking education. Education that focuses not just on skills for a labor market, but skills for thinking. Being able to separate fact from fiction, ‘feels from reals’.
An aside: I’ve often felt that writing longhand on paper produces a different result than typing. Something about the deliberate pace. Technology has given us awesome powers, and the ability to blast out our stream of consciousness at hyper speed. We would do well to slow down a little, reflect more, try to fully grasp issues and consider the sources and validity of things before we share them out.
But above all, we need to find our way back to truth through science - not just what feels good, but what we can sort out through the full power of our mental abilities.
I am old enough to have used NCSA Navigator and read the Manifesto for Cyberspace and all that net-hippy stuff (and believed it).
Cyberspace in the 90s was wide open prairie, a place to settle and built new cultures and civilizations. I was too young to realize that nothing starts from scratch; just like the pioneers that fled poverty and persecution to colonize the prairie, we built cyberspace on the culture we believed in: free market, free speech, growth above all. American libertarian in other words.
The descendants of the French or Russian revolutions will happily tell you that that shit don't work. After you've settled that wide open prairie, you need to lay down rules and regulations, a polity. And what we (collectively) have found out that this ends up meaning well-regulated markets and well-regulated speech, enforced by democratically elected (and audited) authorities. Liberal democracies in other words, with bureaucracies and police and courts, not John Galt.
So, 'no' to the TFA, we shouldn't restart Tech. We should evolve it, past the Pioneer stage into a proper polity and civilization. Regulate Big Tech, control it. We already have paradigms of what we consider appropriate: we can tell our friends whatever we want (free speech in private communication) but we cannot go on TV or on a newspaper and libel because those media have liability. Why should a tweet that 20 people read have the same restrictions as a tweet to 20M? why can't we pick reasonable rules that police the latter? escalated liability based on reach that Twitter (for example) would be liable for?
Will that kill the margins of Twitter and YouTube and Facebook? absolutely, but so what? They are monopolies at a massive scale that our society is already dependent on, like we are on TV, or newspapers or the power grid. They can be fat and rich, just not more powerful than all news publishers in the history of humanity. Combined.
Big tech -- and big pharma, and all the other bigs -- are built to be optimized with a system of shareholder value. They weren't built to optimize for civic engagement and thoughtful dialog.
If we want the second -- some of it anyway -- we have to be prepared to give up -- through regulation and governance and then through behavior -- some of the first.
Not to detract from your core point, but also old enough for the memory of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator to have merged, it seems. Been happening to me too lately.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadIts real change. What real change is created by pithy think pieces in WaPo, NYT, substack etc? None. The readers are invested in the establishment so they'll never offer more than the odd tish-tosh and go back to their lives. Take for example, established media discussions of climate change or Apple labor practices -the dear readers offer a witty condemnation in a comment but don't actually change their habits.
edit: I can see why my comments earn dowvotes...HN readers think they are disruptors but in reality we are just the dweeb army slaving away to hold it all together
People aren't stupid no matter what the left paints the right as ...and I don't know if the left can continue to put a lid on this simmering pot of resentment from tens of millions of SILENCED people.
The anger has a reason and can't just be ignored and hidden away.
I think they made an egregious error and this anger is going to come back at them at some point.in the future.
It's like radical evangelicals who claim that Christians are being oppressed while a majority of our elected government identifies as Christian including the president of the united states (none of which have ever not identified as Chrsitian).
They were recently silenced down to the AWS hosting level.
I don't know if any of this has changed by now.
But censorship is never a good idea.
...yes? Until all the social media banning started, these people were definitely, obviously, unambiguously not being silenced in any significant way.
You're saying basically: "they weren't silenced until they were silenced."
So what? They're censored now.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Angeli
Apparently, he was trying to cast a spell by chanting as he walked down “ley lines”.
Alternatively, someone with his background knew that he’d likely provoke a melodramatic response which in turn would turn more people against the establishment.
It’s funny that the specious argument that the second amendment doesn’t protect arms the framers didn’t have available isn’t applied to the first amendment. The Internet and mass persuasion is way more unforeseeable than a rifle that shoots faster. Perhaps it’s time for common sense speech control? This isn’t unconstitutional, freedom of speech is not unlimited under the constitution it’s just a matter of where to draw the lines.
There are quite a few limits on the first amendment, especially in the context of the current discussion and they’ve been covered both in the media and in comments here on HN at length.
Read the transcript. He actively exhorts his supporters to fight for the Constitution "today", exhorts Mike Pence to "do the right thing", telling them to fuck the media in general and in general inciting hatred against everything, with direct calls for encouraging them to "stop the steal" and put the pressure on Congress and Mike Pence - actively encouraging them to force Pence to use his power to call for a recertification.
Regional TV channel
Either way, I just Googled Trump Capitol Transcript and that was the first link that gave the speech (I had gone through it earlier in full). If you can't be bothered to read, then I can't help you further.
We've had to warn you about this more than once before. When accounts keep doing it, we ban them, so please stop.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Could you point me to the relevant section about charging The Capitol? That is what you claimed.
Read the transcript. He actively exhorts his supporters to fight for the Constitution "today", exhorts Mike Pence to "do the right thing", telling them to fuck the media in general and in general inciting hatred against everything, with direct calls for encouraging them to "stop the steal" and put the pressure on Congress and Mike Pence - actively encouraging them to force Pence to use his power to call for a recertification.
If you are a participant of hacker news I'd hope that you can perform a google search to find and validate this information rather than parrot the feigned ignorance of pundits.
Is this blatant enough to justify impeachment? I don't know. Apparently it is blatant enough to convince 10 republican congress people.
Read the transcript. He actively exhorts his supporters to fight for the Constitution "today", exhorts Mike Pence to "do the right thing", telling them to fuck the media in general and in general inciting hatred against everything, with direct calls for encouraging them to "stop the steal" and put the pressure on Congress and Mike Pence - actively encouraging them to force Pence to use his power to call for a recertification.
If a 'non progressive' would have said this on national radio, he/she would be accused of inciting a holocaust.
She was not asked to explain herself.
I had the same thought. It’s amazing how the Democrats and the MSM suddenly started moving in lock step.
I guess it’s like the old saying “make hay when the sun is shining”.
Bring on the downvotes...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
Because that has been the most disruptive conspiracy of this century so far.
Instead if you look closely at his library you will find plenty of titles by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Bill Bennett, and on and on. It’s a small percentage of what he reads, but it’s how he gets his ideology and has been for 20+ years.
The cognitive biases that allow people to fall into these warped worldviews is shared by all of humanity. It could just as easily have been any of us under different circumstances.
1) Writing to appease Google rather than readers. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxLKUM0FlCw) (http://experiment.cjr.org/experiment/features/the-evolution-...)
2) Producing video to appease Facebook. (https://digiday.com/media/the-new-york-times-facebook-live/) (https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/facebook-live-new-york-times....)
3) Have everyone tweet to appease Twitter. (https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/01/dont-try-too-hard-to-pleas...) and how it is going (https://twitter.com/nyttypos).
Ms. Swisher is one of the tech pundits I always read.watch when she interviews someone. Perhaps she can do this with the new administration and find out why we allow the failed social media experiments to continue.
The notion of misinformation being enabled by "Big Tech" is subtly but unintentionally leaking information.
There are two logical possibilities when mass communication platforms (old or new flavors) in unison raise the specter of "contagious information" that affects deplorable heads:
1 - Mass media owners have been, since the very beginning of mass communication, aware of a curious fact not really understood by the rest of us: ideas and thoughts conveyed via mass communication are unthinkly accepted and internalized by large subset of society. (The birth of modern advertising occurs around the same time.)
2 - Simply having substantial control of mass communication is not enough if establishment views, and version of news, are countered by alternative views and news, in context of a political class that no longer enjoys public confidence.
Madison avenue pretty much is built on #1. Collapse of USSR, itself a master of #1 technologies, could not be prevented by mere state propaganda (#2).
During the entirety of Cold War, no one jammed Soviet and setellite propaganda (such as Radio Moscow). At the same time, Soviets would jam the signal of Western mass communication organs (such as BBC).
In the 90s, the political class in this country caved to capital class and previously illegal consolidations of media, finance, and banking were made permissible again. The degredation in the quality of journalism (and even cultural products) visibly began at that point (if you were paying attention).
Now, having bet on #1 effects during 20 years of entirely questionable (and in times illegal) behavior by the entire political class of US -- 9/11, Iraq wars, and the collapse of the financial sector in '08, and role of the "journalism" in covering these events -- in a political environment that gradually brought us to American 'Pravda' moments, #2 phenomena raised its ugly head. Alt-news was a reaction to bullshit-news of American "journalism". (Hi "Judtih"! ...). It is also quite necessary to point out that many of these mushrooms of American night spewing strange theories smell like intelligence service cointelpro.
We need to reimpose the pre-90s restrictions on consolidations in Banking, Finance, and Media and reinstate the regulatory 'firewalls' that protected the integrity of American political system prior to 90s. A regulatory regime that saw the West face world-class propaganda by Soviets with aplumb and broadcasted the demise of that source of "misinformation" to a world wide audiance, without ever having to resort to ham fisted censorship (with possible exception of the 'red scare' period and it's version of 'cancel culture').
Kara has been pretty vocal during the last few years on her opinion of social media allowing Trump to spread disinformation and try to incite violence. It took inciting an attempted coup and a couple of people dying before they did the right thing. Her opinion seems to be that they shouldn't have let it get that far, seeing as the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
Luckily Bitcoin improved on gold as a store of value, so while many are angry, people who understand that having hard money is the most important in current times have an easy life right now.
Millions of man hours dedicated to solving amazing technical problems which allow greater access to information than ever before in human history, and these useless idiots use it to spread lies, disinformation and foment insurrection.
We require licenses for operating machinery like cars, and I truly, honestly, and without hyperbole think it's time we do the same for information technology. Spreading misinformation and disinformation has cost the U.S. nearly 400,000 lives and counting. That's worse than the number of car deaths by an order of magnitude. Time for us to act accordingly.
Kara wants to blame Big Tech, but I don't. I blame the jerks who abuse and misuse the tech for personal gain, and the idiots who are their willing followers. I loathe Facebook, but it wasn't Zuckerberg inciting people to insurrection.
Big tech has been restrained, all things considered. Think about it. Can you imagine if the head of, say, Microsoft, Apple or Google was as mentally ill as Trump? Serious, serious damage could result.
You want to drive a car? You go take a test that shows you understand the law, and respect others on the road. You want to use a smartphone to share news about politics? You should have to take a test that shows you understand the law and respect others as well.
I'm going to have to say, that's about as respectful as one can get on this topic without ignoring reality. Unless you think the rioters were "wonderful and intelligent" and that the president's obvious sociopathic narcissism isn't a sign of severe mental illness.
These people are citizens too, and if you got to know each other, you would probably find you are not so different. Might disagree on some topics.
So I find your post utterly disrespectful. But you are a citizen too, and have every right to hold your opinions.
In the end the proof is in the pudding ( elections ).
That's a wildly more anti-freedom stance than anything even the big social media companies have done. At least they are just private companies exercising their right to control what goes on on their own platform, you're actually advocating for the modern equivalent of requiring all typewriters to be registered.
No one tells you where you can drive once you get your driver's license, we just don't allow incompetent people behind the wheel. No one at the DMV checks to see which party you belong to before giving you a license.
Same thing for an "infotech license". Once someone has demonstrated basic critical thinking, and an understanding of the law, they can say whatever they want to.
There are far more examples of not blaming the maker for the use - microphones, TVs, hypodermic needles, cars, etc. Why do we make an exception for one kind of tech? There are answers that are worth discussing and which might inform our responses, but Swisher doesn't even try to make one and nor do most who just rush to "solutions" that won't actually work.
Users create the problematic content. They were creating it before "big tech" and will quite likely continue creating it even if they're disallowed from using "big tech" products and services. What is achieved, for example, by moving Donald Trump's content from Twitter to trumpmaga.com where there's no moderation or terms of service to enforce? Would his reach really be reduced that much, at this point? We'd just get to have the same debate about whether his host or DNS provider or CDN should deplatform him, with even dimmer prospects of an affirmative answer.
I'm not saying tech companies are blameless, by any means, but let's blame them for things they themselves do and not for the mere presence of users who create problematic content. That lets the kinds of people who organized the January 6 insurrection attempt off the hook too much, along with many other kinds of miscreants. Going only after the platform providers seems a bit too much like looking for the keys under the lamp-post.
Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, 1995.
I’ve had this quote in mind at many points this year. The refusal to wear masks, the inability to agree on basic facts, the wildfire spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
IMHO the only way out of this hole is by doubling down on critical thinking education. Education that focuses not just on skills for a labor market, but skills for thinking. Being able to separate fact from fiction, ‘feels from reals’.
An aside: I’ve often felt that writing longhand on paper produces a different result than typing. Something about the deliberate pace. Technology has given us awesome powers, and the ability to blast out our stream of consciousness at hyper speed. We would do well to slow down a little, reflect more, try to fully grasp issues and consider the sources and validity of things before we share them out.
But above all, we need to find our way back to truth through science - not just what feels good, but what we can sort out through the full power of our mental abilities.
Cyberspace in the 90s was wide open prairie, a place to settle and built new cultures and civilizations. I was too young to realize that nothing starts from scratch; just like the pioneers that fled poverty and persecution to colonize the prairie, we built cyberspace on the culture we believed in: free market, free speech, growth above all. American libertarian in other words.
The descendants of the French or Russian revolutions will happily tell you that that shit don't work. After you've settled that wide open prairie, you need to lay down rules and regulations, a polity. And what we (collectively) have found out that this ends up meaning well-regulated markets and well-regulated speech, enforced by democratically elected (and audited) authorities. Liberal democracies in other words, with bureaucracies and police and courts, not John Galt.
So, 'no' to the TFA, we shouldn't restart Tech. We should evolve it, past the Pioneer stage into a proper polity and civilization. Regulate Big Tech, control it. We already have paradigms of what we consider appropriate: we can tell our friends whatever we want (free speech in private communication) but we cannot go on TV or on a newspaper and libel because those media have liability. Why should a tweet that 20 people read have the same restrictions as a tweet to 20M? why can't we pick reasonable rules that police the latter? escalated liability based on reach that Twitter (for example) would be liable for?
Will that kill the margins of Twitter and YouTube and Facebook? absolutely, but so what? They are monopolies at a massive scale that our society is already dependent on, like we are on TV, or newspapers or the power grid. They can be fat and rich, just not more powerful than all news publishers in the history of humanity. Combined.
Big tech -- and big pharma, and all the other bigs -- are built to be optimized with a system of shareholder value. They weren't built to optimize for civic engagement and thoughtful dialog.
If we want the second -- some of it anyway -- we have to be prepared to give up -- through regulation and governance and then through behavior -- some of the first.
Not to detract from your core point, but also old enough for the memory of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator to have merged, it seems. Been happening to me too lately.