This is a long-form podcast with Richard Barbrook, the co-author of "The Californian Ideology," a 1995 critique of what later became the dominant ethos of the tech industry.
Lots of interesting history, including a discussion of how Minitel, the French precursor to the web, created a more sustainable form of techno-capitalism even though it was created by the state-owned phone company.
Depressing. I first read it ~11 year's ago after Occupy Wall St failed as I started trying to understand what might actually work, has worked, etc. I was reading about neoliberalism and ultimately Marxism. The essay is excellent but not necessarily better than so much other prophetic work in the Marxist canon.
You do not speak for me. I want decentralization, self hosting, and the right to repair. The modern technology ecosystem has failed me in every one of these areas.
I don't use twitter or mastodon, so I consider it a significant sign that I keep seeing so many of my peers and people whose content I read showing up on Mastodon. I consider myself impartial. That's just n=1 from my perspective, but it's a datapoint nonetheless considering I'm the least likely to be exposed to this.
Mastodon doesn't speak for decentralization, it is decentralized. And that's not really splitting hairs here, it's an important distinction.
I could set up a Mastodon instance (although Writefreely[1] and Pixelfed[2] are more my speed) that advocated for centralized everything. I could even ban folks who argue for decentralization and delete any comments they make in favor of same.
It's a tool that allows folks to speak for themselves, without a central corporate authority dictating what's acceptable and what isn't.
If you don't like a particular Fediverse[0] instance, move to another one or set one up for yourself.
For you, yes, but not for other people which is the whole point. The fact that Mastodon couldn't truly ride the biggest opportunity they will ever have says it all.
What do you mean? Mastodon rode it quite well to the point that servers were straining under the load.
Twitter still exists and is still functional, so why would absolutely everyone move over? I don't think that's ever happened. Every system I've seen where people migrated over elsewhere had it happen over a long period of time.
Your arguments would be more compelling & discussable, if you had any support or contentions you made.
As such, all I can say is: I disagree. We've had difficulty emerging a resillient reliable & compelling path, but we also have spent so many many orders of magnitude less trying, since inherently most creators want & seek control & arent interested in expanding the viable modes of compute.
If we forget about the web for a second and imagine a mostly analog world, people running small businesses have a ton of things they do without having to rely on centralized services. The reason for that is that there is a ton a small business can do themselves with just a little research. People don't choose centralized over decentralized because they carefully weigh one against the other, they choose centralized because it is the only way they see themselves skinning that cat.
If you ask me, the sole reason for people not running their own services is because the whole world fucked up education around how to actually do that. Someone invented the typewriter and it got a teaching subject at schools because offices needed people who were able to type. We failed to do the same for how to actually use a computer to solve problems. Sure, there are benefits to hand writing, but given that in 2023 much of the correspondence and work happens digitally, surprisingly little thought goes into how to translate this into an adequate education on a big scale.
I think people want decentralization, all else equal. Unfortunately, like most things in life, we don't have a way to just change that but keep all else equal.
I partially agree. People do want decentralization but don't want the responsibility of maintaining and moderating those systems. And in the end they, the passive consumers, end up with the same situation they were in when the systems they consumed were centralized.
Decentralization is just the tech equivalent of HOAs.
How in the world is decentralization like HOAs? Decentralization would be more like a neighborhood without an HOA, requiring more order and planning is what an HOA does as it centralized command of the neighborhood rather than leaving it up to the individual homeowners.
It’s like saying “Less sugar is over hyped. People think they want less sugar, but they really don’t.”
Both statements are actually true. My body craves sugar. It’s in my biology. It would eat itself to death if I let it. But the larger system that is me does want less sugar. And to live in a world, where gods producers didn’t operate under the inevitable “if you add sugar they’ll eat more of it.”
We all had answering machines back in the day to hold our voice mail.
There's no reason we have to entrust all our emails/photos/media to big companies that actively spy on us, mine us for more data and in general act against our interests.
If things are convenient enough (i.e.. "just plug in this box into your router and use this address to access your own everything without fiddling with manual backups, network configuration, security, ddos, power outages, spam etc.." ), I genuinely believe that people would prefer that to "trusting big tech with all our data".
I mean i still remember how people made fun of Google for scanning through our emails to show us ads.
The price we have paid for convenience is very high imo.
To be honest "choosing" voicemail is something that has never once crossed my mind. It has always been "just there" as a part of every cell phone I have ever owned.
Plus, there's really no option for non-centralized voicemail to choose from. I can't replace my AT&T mobile's voicemail service with an answering machine box that I keep on my desk. Your only option is centralized voicemail. So, obviously everyone "chooses" it.
What I meant to say was that... everyone wants decentralization but few are willing to take the responsibility if/when something goes wrong because of their own fault.
I wish I had more time right now to contribute to this discussion but regardless of what arguments I present, this debate cannot be solved. It's like a debate on pros/cons of social security. I trust myself to handle my retirement and I wish I could opt out of SS contributions. But no...
I don't know... I think there's a middle ground where we can have a decentralized base with large players that add convenience for naïve users. Email is a successful decentralized service. The issue is navigating the risks to lock-in and embrace-extend-extinguish tactics from the larger players in the space.
Decentralization is simply the only response because we don't have any competition.
We don't need 4 billion little companies doing the same thing, but we need more than 1 or 2.
For example: We don't need everybody running a mail server (although at least the ability would be nice). But we need somebody to break up Google's and Microsoft's duopoly over this.
The global village is basically here, courtesy of social media like TikTok (which did not come from California). What we didn't expect was that the village idiots would also come along.
Tiktok is a specific kind of entertainment, nothing more, and hardly a medium to debate ideas. Maybe twitter is a more engaged kind of crowd but there too, the people making the loudest voice get preferential treatment. But certainly the global village does exist and this podcast is even a good example of it.
Some of us did expect that. The initial techno optimism about global connectivity that I think really picked up during the 90s (all of this was before my time, correct me if I'm wrong about timing) always seemed doomed to this particular end given the lack of segmentation. You can't have a village with 8 billion people.
I distinctly remember a period when the iPhone came out and the high score leaderboards for certain apps went from like a couple thousand to tens of thousands to like a million. I realized this kind of connectivity is going to select for a tiny percentage of hyper competitive winners. Those people are mixed in with billions of people not used to operating in that kind of a space. More and more people are being forced into a competition they don't really want to be a part of. The rooms are way too big and way too flat to allow for proper self selection and sorting into like minded peer groups at similar levels. They make 99% of people miserable, including many of those at the top who need to work ungodly hard to maintain positions that used to be more secure due to less global exposure.
What you can do is create a village of about 200 people and their networks with a much more interesting and larger set of like minded people than what your geography limits you to, and self select and bypass gatekeepers to create new and emergent communities beyond anything people might have dreamed or expected. But that requires a kind of community maintenance and segmentation that we haven't figured out how to do yet.
I think what makes technology so hard to be optimistic about is that there are two sides of the coin. There is the side that this is a utility for our species, that tech should exist to serve us better, that things should get more efficient and take less time. That side exists entirely in opposition to the other side of the coin, that is most likely to win out as its the more profitable side. That is the side that tech is merely a product to be marketed like any other, that it should further a profitable status quo versus introduce something new that might not be as profitable, that taking up more users time is more profitable because you can monetize more of it, etc.
All the incentives of our society, are aligned to give us a lot more of the latter sort of products, and not much of the former. Imagine if the wheel were invented today; how many times will a dozen companies have reinvented it in ten years time trying to get around the patent, each with their own patentable twists to the idea? I don't believe this sort of thinking can be sustainable for long.
Well, take HN. HN was that - not a couple hundred, but maybe a few thousand. And it was a high quality community, and therefore worth being a part of. And therefore it grew.
And as it grew, it became a more attractive target for zealots, propagandists, and trolls. And as it became a larger community, it became - to some degree - a diluted one.
Metcalf's Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. V = k N^2.
AnimalMuppet's Law, which takes into account the greater attractiveness of larger networks to those whose activities destroy value, says that you must subtract a term proportional to the fourth power of the number of users: V = k N^2 - K N^4. Depending on the values of k and K, there will be some optimal number N of users, beyond which the value stops growing - or, beyond which the value to each user stops growing.
Highly recommend High Noon on the Electronic Frontier for a glimpse of the cautious optimism of the late-80s, early-90s Internet. Book was way ahead of its time in many ways. It kind of missed mobile computing (phones) but most of the social and ethical issues in computing it covered are still relevant and debated today.
With the utmost respect, the above post is ironic because it's exactly the sort of shallow, snappy internet post (I make them too) that's the opposite of what good "public square" social media discourse should look like, and it ends up as the top post. It's the incentive structure that's inherent in social media that means it's doomed to fail as a method of intelligent discussion from day 1. Maybe this is what "the medium is the message" means, I never really understood it.
In my view a terse, mildly irritated comment is an entirely appropriate response to the sort of aimless rambling we see in pieces like the OP. I'm sympathetic to those who think a "public square" should strive for a good balance, but length is just not a meaningful correlate to "intelligent discussion".
Historically „public squares” are used for lots of things - trade, speech, politics, taxes, faires, revolutions and public executions all come to mind. The square usually remains unchanged even as people do all sorts of things.
If that’s what we take that phrase for, then anything goes - both mildly irritated comments and aimless rambling pieces. Moderation too.
Brevity is the soul of wit. We all have a limited amount of time. For most topics, I'd rather read a quick, witty "hot take" than a longform article or an exhaustively comprehensive academic paper, even if those forms contain the details and nuance required to fully understand the topic.
Yes. I hate reading something that's going to take 20 minutes and starts with an anecdote about Jimmy noticing something funny on a hike 20 years ago and you've got to read for 10 min to understand what it's about.
If you're reading an established author that you know to be interesting, maybe. For a random internet article, I want to know what it's about. I don't know why more people don't include abstracts or summaries at the start
> Yes. I hate reading something that's going to take 20 minutes and starts with an anecdote about Jimmy noticing something funny on a hike 20 years ago and you've got to read for 10 min to understand what it's about.
But A/B testing proves that sort of content has the highest engagement stats! /s
(Maybe they should be measuring how often someone comes back afterwards instead)
> Maybe this is what "the medium is the message" means, I never really understood it.
I think you get it. The nature of the medium itself changes people, not just the sort of content that is being delivered through that medium. TV puts people into couch potato trances. Karma-oriented commenting systems have people alter their beliefs to align with the popular majority. Anonymous commenting systems have people act bolder and ruder, etc.
Time theft of the future will involve couching a simple concept (that could be explained in a single sentence) in paragraphs of ChatGPT vomit, just to make it look more substantive and "intelligent."
SEO has worked this way for years. It helps nobody.
What if each user gets a fixed number of vote points per month? You can vote as many times you like but the more you vote the less each vote weight.
This can be an example of how social media incentive structure can be iterated on.
The main problem is that social media gets very few iterations on the fundamental stuff because you have to build a new audience for each attempt, or risk loosing the one that has already bought into your existing algorithm.
What if a social media platform could be built where "the algorithms" were user created plug-ins that users could subscribe to? Each "subreddit" with their own set of algorithms.
The feed ranking algorithm I implemented for LinkLonk does reduce the weight of your vote the more you vote.
If I upvote what you upvoted then your votes get more weight for me.
This incentivizes each user to upvote what they truly found useful for themselves as opposed to the current incentives of social media which makes you upvote/like the stuff you want others to see.
> What if a social media platform could be built where "the algorithms" were user created plug-ins that users could subscribe to? Each "subreddit" with their own set of algorithms.
I think this goes too broad, like asking "what if we there was one tool that could be turned into any tool?" Well, it wouldn't really be good at any of them.
We have enough data now to understand how different social media designs affect behavior, we should be able to propose changes to disincentivize certain ones. For example, reputation systems tilt towards well-mannered behavior. It's not perfect, but it's about nudges and pokes to subtly shape culture.
One of the most egregious offenders is still Facebook, whose comment and reply system actively boosts toxic content since the platform is only capable of measuring "engagement." Tons of angry reacts? Straight to the top! And the lack of proper comment threading means that everyone just kind of yells in each other's general direction, with no way to follow anyone's conversation.
I am pretty sure that is exactly what the medium is the message means. The medium itself brings its own bias and manner of operation.
Social media and a real public square are completely different. A social media post is never going to be the same as public speaking in front of large groups of people. The latter acts as a huge filter on who is going to speak. The village idiot would be filtered out from tending to not want to be shown to be the village idiot in front of the crowd.
That to me is why social media is exactly doomed to fail. It is exactly giving voice to the village idiot who would be filtered out otherwise. To have large scale intelligent discussion most people need to be on mute.
To me, it is a very strange conflation between everyone's vote counting in elections and everyone's opinion about basically everything mattering. The latter is obviously ridiculous.
TikTok is popular because it brought back humans, and importantly nice humans to the Internet.
> was that the village idiots would also come along
An example of a village idiot would be someone with Down syndrome, I couldn't say I see it more or less than real life on TikTok. I think that's complex, we didn't handle that well in the past, we don't handle it well now but it's still orders of magnitude better.
TikTok is more human than anything else, unlike Instagram for instance, but it's still an escape from the real world. It's not fair to expect it to be reality, we have reality for that. Just be happy it's non-toxic.
Vouched for your comment because it's spot on. It's for gold nuggets like that I'm happy there's the showdead option!
If there are indeed "idots" in society in a sense that they have physical or mental problems, I think looking down on them is wrong.
But I really wonder if there are "idots" at all. What's most likely is that tech people are angry that non tech people have different tastes and preferences, and by virtue of being a larger group, have the market cater to them.
However, who's to say that for example teaching is more important than the NBA? TikTok success should be a cause of celebration, as it means people with different tastes that weren't served by the market, now have an offering that makes them happy.
If you don't like it, don't participate. I don't like cellphones, so I don't operate one. Yet the few times I've had a friend show me funny stuff from TikTok I've been legitimately happy for them.
"De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum".
EDIT: BTW I checked your other comments, you don't bother with the niceties and speak your mind. And you are a goldmine! I especially loved the great content you gather about IQ and theory of the mind on https://i.redd.it/i1ywg8dajac71.png
The biggest problem with the content you link is that it was gathered from convicts. Why would you assume that they'd care about looking smart to some random researcher? Also the way I.Q. scoring works, there's roughly as many people with <90 I.Q. as >110 I.Q. and so on. Even assuming that these accounts are true, they're likely heavily influenced by that environment.
The content is questionable, but I'm a firm believer in testable hypothesis, and this collection connects together very nicely different fields (ASD, IQ, theory of the mind, computational cost) of interesting testable hypothesis for models that could be tested with a different population.
It made me think about how IQ may just be an estimation of the Kolmogorov complexity threshold of problems a human brain can compute.
It's certainly influenced by the environment and many other things: for a computer equivalent, the CPU is not all that matters: you need RAM (working memory, IIRC the human brain "stack" is on average 6 elements), SSD (memory of experiences) but it was thought provoking and I'm genuinely grateful to the shadowbanned poster for having exposed me to such interesting ideas!
Intelligent discourse is a losing proposition. In the social market, whatever captures people's interest _is_ definitionally speaking the most important social thing. If intelligent discourse isn't capturing social attention then it's not socially valuable.
This shouldn't be news to anyone familiar with Society of the Spectacle. If you want sorcery over the spectacle, there are much better ways than pining for intelligent discourse.
"Most important" and "most captivating" are not exactly the same things, because people's attention is imperfect.
Hence the ability to play the meta game, to capture and direct mass attention, is what remains the most efficacious skill, as it has been for centuries, if not millennia. Sadly, it is rarely used to direct the social attention towards a more intelligent discourse.
The amount of people who cannot keep track of their money with a simple Excel sheet is astonishing. Heck, scratch that, people don't even keep track of their money with a calculator or even pen and paper.
And yet, keeping an eye on your money and seeing where it flows is an incredible tool to adjust your spending and maybe save up where it matters and afford to step up your game.
Technology without education is borderline useless, the liberation will always lie in spreading knowledge.
Now take a look at the multitude of fantasy books describing the problems of mere mortals which can't handle a magic artifact, and what happens when it falls into wrong hands.
The recent and ongoing events clearly show that politicians do not learn anything from history, as the lust for power, money, notoriety, and what not, is too strong.
Everyone agrees socials are the scourge of the net, amplifying the most hyperbolic trash available, but they (seem to) increasingly just accept this to have been inevitable (or more erroneously, they blame human nature itself lol). This is actually worse than wrong because it creates apathy and hopelessness that re-enforce the problem. It's not difficult to find out who funded these virtual gulags or to imagine what motivated them to seek re-centralization.
I would have thought that computer scientists would not really fall into debates about "centralisation" or "decentralisation" when we're so busy changing from one strategy to the next in CPU and software designs. At the broadest level first it was mainframes, then client server, now it's all in a kind of giant mainframe again which we just call a cloud service provider and yet it's not exactly monolithic.
Why would politics ever be free of debate about what is best with centralised or decentralised human organisation?
Lets just say that those who think they know best about everything will be for centralisation at the extreme if they think they can succeed in dominating others or decentralisation in the extreme if they think they cannot.
Where's the class politics among "tech liberation" proponents? It seems like a fairly anti-elitist idea, as far as these things go. And "tech" as a whole has only become more and more accessible over time to those who used to be broadly marginalized for economic or social reasons. Were computers in the socialist bloc really less inherently "classist" than in the West?
Owning a computer in a country of the Soviet-dominated bloc was definitely a sign of privilege. But it would be a game machine.
Tinkering with machines was a lower-class thing; a son of a party official won't usually do that. A professor's son very likely would; still higher class than the working class.
Getting access to a computer in some kind of a club, or at a good school, was not an upper-class thing though, but more of how well-off the city / district was.
> Where's the class politics among "tech liberation" proponents?
Nowhere, it's in the critic. (doesn't make much sense to me, either i'm misreading you or you are) To make it clear "tech liberation" here is the editorialized version of the so-called "californian ideology", which has been coined and attacked by OP, by saying among other things, that it is completely blind of any class-based vision of politics.
> And "tech" as a whole has only become more and more accessible over time to those who used to be broadly marginalized for economic or social reasons. Were computers in the socialist bloc really less inherently "classist" than in the West?
Ooh now i'm understanding your misunderstanding! You seem to have understood "class politics" as defamatory and that's why you thought i applied it to the thing being criticized. It's the opposite: any politic which is not based on class (ie by definition, the only (and all) materialistic criterion relevant socially) is imho based on bogus concepts. Now as is obvious from all my vocabulary the class i'm defending politically isn't the class of owners, but that's another thread. I would be happy already if people doing owner-class politics would publicly acknowledge doing so.
edit: If your not doing class-based politics what are you doing then? Religion-based? Racist? I'm not completely dismissing identity politics insofar that there is sense in fighting for specific rights in some circumstances, but my point is that identity is nowhere near being a working tool for general politics.
Where is the discussion on incentives in this argument?
Globalization has benefited humanity in many ways but also caused massive climate change, increasing inequality, and a winner-take-all economy.
Tech is power, but how that power is distributed is not a given.
We should not assume the power that tech creates just magically diffuses among the plebes.
It's a interesting paradox that consumer surpluses are quite enormous: we live with enormous material wealth: electricity, telephone/mobile device, TV, internet, IoT.
(A poor person lives better than any Absolute Monarch from 100 years ago)
... and yet the same time power imbalances are still problematic and captial concentration is once again a problem.
Russia and China have vastly improved quality of life vis-a-vis 15 years ago and yet they have more limited power and freedoms.
93 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadLots of interesting history, including a discussion of how Minitel, the French precursor to the web, created a more sustainable form of techno-capitalism even though it was created by the state-owned phone company.
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol...
That's kind of the point, IMHO.
Mastodon doesn't speak for decentralization, it is decentralized. And that's not really splitting hairs here, it's an important distinction.
I could set up a Mastodon instance (although Writefreely[1] and Pixelfed[2] are more my speed) that advocated for centralized everything. I could even ban folks who argue for decentralization and delete any comments they make in favor of same.
It's a tool that allows folks to speak for themselves, without a central corporate authority dictating what's acceptable and what isn't.
If you don't like a particular Fediverse[0] instance, move to another one or set one up for yourself.
[0] https://fediverse.party/
[1] https://writefreely.org/
[2] https://fediverse.party/en/pixelfed/
Twitter still exists and is still functional, so why would absolutely everyone move over? I don't think that's ever happened. Every system I've seen where people migrated over elsewhere had it happen over a long period of time.
As such, all I can say is: I disagree. We've had difficulty emerging a resillient reliable & compelling path, but we also have spent so many many orders of magnitude less trying, since inherently most creators want & seek control & arent interested in expanding the viable modes of compute.
If we forget about the web for a second and imagine a mostly analog world, people running small businesses have a ton of things they do without having to rely on centralized services. The reason for that is that there is a ton a small business can do themselves with just a little research. People don't choose centralized over decentralized because they carefully weigh one against the other, they choose centralized because it is the only way they see themselves skinning that cat.
If you ask me, the sole reason for people not running their own services is because the whole world fucked up education around how to actually do that. Someone invented the typewriter and it got a teaching subject at schools because offices needed people who were able to type. We failed to do the same for how to actually use a computer to solve problems. Sure, there are benefits to hand writing, but given that in 2023 much of the correspondence and work happens digitally, surprisingly little thought goes into how to translate this into an adequate education on a big scale.
Decentralization is just the tech equivalent of HOAs.
It’s like saying “Less sugar is over hyped. People think they want less sugar, but they really don’t.”
Both statements are actually true. My body craves sugar. It’s in my biology. It would eat itself to death if I let it. But the larger system that is me does want less sugar. And to live in a world, where gods producers didn’t operate under the inevitable “if you add sugar they’ll eat more of it.”
There's no reason we have to entrust all our emails/photos/media to big companies that actively spy on us, mine us for more data and in general act against our interests.
If things are convenient enough (i.e.. "just plug in this box into your router and use this address to access your own everything without fiddling with manual backups, network configuration, security, ddos, power outages, spam etc.." ), I genuinely believe that people would prefer that to "trusting big tech with all our data".
I mean i still remember how people made fun of Google for scanning through our emails to show us ads. The price we have paid for convenience is very high imo.
What I meant to say was that... everyone wants decentralization but few are willing to take the responsibility if/when something goes wrong because of their own fault.
I wish I had more time right now to contribute to this discussion but regardless of what arguments I present, this debate cannot be solved. It's like a debate on pros/cons of social security. I trust myself to handle my retirement and I wish I could opt out of SS contributions. But no...
We don't need 4 billion little companies doing the same thing, but we need more than 1 or 2.
For example: We don't need everybody running a mail server (although at least the ability would be nice). But we need somebody to break up Google's and Microsoft's duopoly over this.
I distinctly remember a period when the iPhone came out and the high score leaderboards for certain apps went from like a couple thousand to tens of thousands to like a million. I realized this kind of connectivity is going to select for a tiny percentage of hyper competitive winners. Those people are mixed in with billions of people not used to operating in that kind of a space. More and more people are being forced into a competition they don't really want to be a part of. The rooms are way too big and way too flat to allow for proper self selection and sorting into like minded peer groups at similar levels. They make 99% of people miserable, including many of those at the top who need to work ungodly hard to maintain positions that used to be more secure due to less global exposure.
What you can do is create a village of about 200 people and their networks with a much more interesting and larger set of like minded people than what your geography limits you to, and self select and bypass gatekeepers to create new and emergent communities beyond anything people might have dreamed or expected. But that requires a kind of community maintenance and segmentation that we haven't figured out how to do yet.
All the incentives of our society, are aligned to give us a lot more of the latter sort of products, and not much of the former. Imagine if the wheel were invented today; how many times will a dozen companies have reinvented it in ten years time trying to get around the patent, each with their own patentable twists to the idea? I don't believe this sort of thinking can be sustainable for long.
And as it grew, it became a more attractive target for zealots, propagandists, and trolls. And as it became a larger community, it became - to some degree - a diluted one.
Metcalf's Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. V = k N^2.
AnimalMuppet's Law, which takes into account the greater attractiveness of larger networks to those whose activities destroy value, says that you must subtract a term proportional to the fourth power of the number of users: V = k N^2 - K N^4. Depending on the values of k and K, there will be some optimal number N of users, beyond which the value stops growing - or, beyond which the value to each user stops growing.
If that’s what we take that phrase for, then anything goes - both mildly irritated comments and aimless rambling pieces. Moderation too.
Long-form articles rarely do that.
If you're reading an established author that you know to be interesting, maybe. For a random internet article, I want to know what it's about. I don't know why more people don't include abstracts or summaries at the start
But A/B testing proves that sort of content has the highest engagement stats! /s
(Maybe they should be measuring how often someone comes back afterwards instead)
I think you get it. The nature of the medium itself changes people, not just the sort of content that is being delivered through that medium. TV puts people into couch potato trances. Karma-oriented commenting systems have people alter their beliefs to align with the popular majority. Anonymous commenting systems have people act bolder and ruder, etc.
SEO has worked this way for years. It helps nobody.
This can be an example of how social media incentive structure can be iterated on.
The main problem is that social media gets very few iterations on the fundamental stuff because you have to build a new audience for each attempt, or risk loosing the one that has already bought into your existing algorithm.
What if a social media platform could be built where "the algorithms" were user created plug-ins that users could subscribe to? Each "subreddit" with their own set of algorithms.
With that, single-issue voters, preferably in a form of gangs, get the most power.
I like the idea of iterating on algorithms within small social media niches / segments, like subreddits. The key is that it can be opt-in this way.
But who is going to work on implementing all that, and why? Developer time costs a lot :(
[0] https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/index.html
If I upvote what you upvoted then your votes get more weight for me.
This incentivizes each user to upvote what they truly found useful for themselves as opposed to the current incentives of social media which makes you upvote/like the stuff you want others to see.
Details of the algorithm: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288
I think this goes too broad, like asking "what if we there was one tool that could be turned into any tool?" Well, it wouldn't really be good at any of them.
We have enough data now to understand how different social media designs affect behavior, we should be able to propose changes to disincentivize certain ones. For example, reputation systems tilt towards well-mannered behavior. It's not perfect, but it's about nudges and pokes to subtly shape culture.
One of the most egregious offenders is still Facebook, whose comment and reply system actively boosts toxic content since the platform is only capable of measuring "engagement." Tons of angry reacts? Straight to the top! And the lack of proper comment threading means that everyone just kind of yells in each other's general direction, with no way to follow anyone's conversation.
That's called Slashdot.
Social media and a real public square are completely different. A social media post is never going to be the same as public speaking in front of large groups of people. The latter acts as a huge filter on who is going to speak. The village idiot would be filtered out from tending to not want to be shown to be the village idiot in front of the crowd.
That to me is why social media is exactly doomed to fail. It is exactly giving voice to the village idiot who would be filtered out otherwise. To have large scale intelligent discussion most people need to be on mute.
To me, it is a very strange conflation between everyone's vote counting in elections and everyone's opinion about basically everything mattering. The latter is obviously ridiculous.
> was that the village idiots would also come along
An example of a village idiot would be someone with Down syndrome, I couldn't say I see it more or less than real life on TikTok. I think that's complex, we didn't handle that well in the past, we don't handle it well now but it's still orders of magnitude better.
TikTok is more human than anything else, unlike Instagram for instance, but it's still an escape from the real world. It's not fair to expect it to be reality, we have reality for that. Just be happy it's non-toxic.
If there are indeed "idots" in society in a sense that they have physical or mental problems, I think looking down on them is wrong.
But I really wonder if there are "idots" at all. What's most likely is that tech people are angry that non tech people have different tastes and preferences, and by virtue of being a larger group, have the market cater to them.
However, who's to say that for example teaching is more important than the NBA? TikTok success should be a cause of celebration, as it means people with different tastes that weren't served by the market, now have an offering that makes them happy.
If you don't like it, don't participate. I don't like cellphones, so I don't operate one. Yet the few times I've had a friend show me funny stuff from TikTok I've been legitimately happy for them.
"De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum".
EDIT: BTW I checked your other comments, you don't bother with the niceties and speak your mind. And you are a goldmine! I especially loved the great content you gather about IQ and theory of the mind on https://i.redd.it/i1ywg8dajac71.png
It made me think about how IQ may just be an estimation of the Kolmogorov complexity threshold of problems a human brain can compute.
It's certainly influenced by the environment and many other things: for a computer equivalent, the CPU is not all that matters: you need RAM (working memory, IIRC the human brain "stack" is on average 6 elements), SSD (memory of experiences) but it was thought provoking and I'm genuinely grateful to the shadowbanned poster for having exposed me to such interesting ideas!
Try AOL. Eternal September has the name it does for a reason.
Intelligent discourse is a losing proposition. In the social market, whatever captures people's interest _is_ definitionally speaking the most important social thing. If intelligent discourse isn't capturing social attention then it's not socially valuable.
This shouldn't be news to anyone familiar with Society of the Spectacle. If you want sorcery over the spectacle, there are much better ways than pining for intelligent discourse.
Hence the ability to play the meta game, to capture and direct mass attention, is what remains the most efficacious skill, as it has been for centuries, if not millennia. Sadly, it is rarely used to direct the social attention towards a more intelligent discourse.
And that there would be so many of them.
And yet, keeping an eye on your money and seeing where it flows is an incredible tool to adjust your spending and maybe save up where it matters and afford to step up your game.
Technology without education is borderline useless, the liberation will always lie in spreading knowledge.
Tech without education is worse than useless - it provides access to a non-stop dopamine drip which stops people from seeking education.
Now take a look at the multitude of fantasy books describing the problems of mere mortals which can't handle a magic artifact, and what happens when it falls into wrong hands.
Aristotle wrote about this inevitable path of democracy. It's happened before and we've wilfully ignored those lessons.
I've only started my exploration of Aristotle.
The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287603 - Jan 2023 (92 comments)
Also:
The Californian Ideology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991057 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29444538 - Dec 2021 (1 comment)
The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088216 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)
The Californian Ideology (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992151 - Dec 2017 (95 comments)
Why would politics ever be free of debate about what is best with centralised or decentralised human organisation?
Lets just say that those who think they know best about everything will be for centralisation at the extreme if they think they can succeed in dominating others or decentralisation in the extreme if they think they cannot.
Tinkering with machines was a lower-class thing; a son of a party official won't usually do that. A professor's son very likely would; still higher class than the working class.
Getting access to a computer in some kind of a club, or at a good school, was not an upper-class thing though, but more of how well-off the city / district was.
Nowhere, it's in the critic. (doesn't make much sense to me, either i'm misreading you or you are) To make it clear "tech liberation" here is the editorialized version of the so-called "californian ideology", which has been coined and attacked by OP, by saying among other things, that it is completely blind of any class-based vision of politics.
> And "tech" as a whole has only become more and more accessible over time to those who used to be broadly marginalized for economic or social reasons. Were computers in the socialist bloc really less inherently "classist" than in the West?
Ooh now i'm understanding your misunderstanding! You seem to have understood "class politics" as defamatory and that's why you thought i applied it to the thing being criticized. It's the opposite: any politic which is not based on class (ie by definition, the only (and all) materialistic criterion relevant socially) is imho based on bogus concepts. Now as is obvious from all my vocabulary the class i'm defending politically isn't the class of owners, but that's another thread. I would be happy already if people doing owner-class politics would publicly acknowledge doing so.
edit: If your not doing class-based politics what are you doing then? Religion-based? Racist? I'm not completely dismissing identity politics insofar that there is sense in fighting for specific rights in some circumstances, but my point is that identity is nowhere near being a working tool for general politics.
We should not assume the power that tech creates just magically diffuses among the plebes.
It's a interesting paradox that consumer surpluses are quite enormous: we live with enormous material wealth: electricity, telephone/mobile device, TV, internet, IoT.
(A poor person lives better than any Absolute Monarch from 100 years ago)
... and yet the same time power imbalances are still problematic and captial concentration is once again a problem.
Russia and China have vastly improved quality of life vis-a-vis 15 years ago and yet they have more limited power and freedoms.