AI is gonna shake things up big time, and people are gonna feel the need to get real. With all the tech stuff taking over, we'll prob wanna find something genuine that's not just on a screen… We'll be looking for real-life moments and connections that make us feel alive. Lot of people still keep covid regimen, replacing meetings with zoom calls and consuming news instead of looking after each other
The cheerful and polite writing of AI in sync with marketing and corpo-speak will push real humans to adopt minimalized and bitter communication to differentiate from the fake one.
Worse, many may end up looking for something to fill the void left by lack of social interaction and not know what it is they're looking for. Others may not know how to socialize if they do know they need it, and may struggle as a result.
I think it's even worse than that. AI will claim it is socialisation, and people will believe it. Chatbots and their enthusiasts will claim they're just as meaningful and valid as in-person human socialisation, and will actually make every much, much worse.
But as a former secondary school teacher, I can already tell you a lot of these kids don't know how to socialise. They have no concept of empathy or of there being real people out there. All their socialisation is pretty much done only through their phones, and it's not good for them at all. I was like that myself - very shut-in type guy from about 13-16 even though I did have friends and school to help, and I still find myself struggling with a lot of social cues and stuff that I should've been developing then.
I am pro-ai but it needs to be regulated. I know we always talk about the dangers of technology and in the end it turns to be good, but this time there are different components to the equation, that to me seems dangerous.
Some of the parts for me are:
- This things are coming in the worst moment possible to the economy.
- it is majorly controlled by small minorities who are infringing copyright and other licenses and nobody is really doing something about it.
- the current AI are not as spectacular as people think, but still super powerful. It will take many white and blue collar jobs but these people are already struggling to keep up to pay for education and they are getting doomed to a worst future not only for them but for their kids.
For me a way to solve that is to tax specific types of AI with decreasing taxes.
Let's say it starts at 70% and descrease 2% a year.
This would allow for some population to go down enough so we need this solution and it would allow people to find the next thing to do while not being prohibitively for research and special use cases.
> what you see in social media is typically so exaggerated and distorted
There you have the answer.
Exaggerated emotions bring clicks and profit. Wonder why so many video thumbnails now show a large face with some vivid emotion on it? Or "XXX reacts to YYY"? Drives revenue.
It's like we're all in a non-stop "Got talent" show where talent performance is less important than judges' reactions.
Outside of twitter, things are pretty uneventful for the most part. Every small occurrence of unrest is amplified by the always-on media, and then the memory of which is kept alive in perpetuity by the chattering class online , long after most people forgot or stopped caring.
I’d say it’s easier to make low effort, nearly worthless posts, which always tend to sound obnoxious if not downright noxious. This is a consequence of social media just being so accessible, and in fact the successful sites cultivate it because clicks are revenue. There are levels of low quality drivel, from the endless topquoting that started on Pinterest, to the know-it-all know-nothing of Twitter, the no-life simulator that is Reddit, and many more styles I’ve noticed. Even HN gets some boring phoned in paycheck comments. Being angry makes you see it more. It makes a reader feel devalued, which perpetuates the anger. The trick as far as I can see is to ignore stupid comments.
So, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment, but not aware of any meaningful measure of the state of world. Everything is to me ultimately relative. For example, pretty easy to image world being way better or worse, or for that matter, thing’s specific to yourself.
Seen author post before, so that added to this post to me adds up to saying — reminder: make meaningful positive connections in the present.
I do think specific to author they’ve invested a lot of time building of search service and now future of search for first time in long, long time is uncertain. I personally find that exciting, but easily see how it might be overwhelming too.
>Not that there aren't bad things happening in the world, that's the way it has always been, but your phone will have you believe that they are more frequent and much closer than they actually are.
Unless of course you're in Pakistan, where a third of the country was flooded last year, you're currently experiencing the largest land war in Europe's post-war history etc.
People aren't okay because the world isn't. Bruno Latour in one of his lectures he gave a few years ago pointed out that we, without doing anything, essentially lost a war to climate change. We can't even imagine that it was completely possible for people two generations ago to have transformed our ways of life, modes of production and so on, so that we could, theoretically now look at the past and see it as a problem behind us. We could literally be walking through a "great climate change war" museum, the way we visit a WW II museum. Instead we're essentially negotiating how fast we drive the titanic into the iceberg.
So the question is honestly not why people are concerned but why they're not more panicked, why we're still sleepwalking. If we had sirens in our cities going off given our ecological situation alone, not to mention all others, we'd be running for the shelters like people did during the Blitz. Something that could have been a passing problem in the past has transformed, through inaction and lack of attention into something that threatens entire civilizations.
Apocalyptic thinking does not help even if it has a good chance of being correct. This is similar to how a panic attack can dramatically worsen your situation even if it is potentially in response to a real threat. Are we doomed? Very possibly. Is adopting an attitude of 'we're just selecting the speed at which we drive the Titanic into an iceberg' healthy or helpful? No.
One factor might be the increase in binge drinking during the pandemic, which I suspect fuels at least a certain fraction of anger and bitterness, along with the post-alcohol depression effect, in conjunction with economic and related stresses:
> "Using data from a national survey of U.S. adults on their drinking habits that found that excessive drinking (such as binge drinking) increased by 21 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic..."
Even moderate drinking has significant lasting physiological effects like elevated heart rate as well as reduced sleep quality and emotional disquiet. It’s just if you drink regularly that all starts to feel normal.
I do drink by the way, although very infrequently. I judge that the pleasure I can get from a top shelf bourbon on rare occasions is worth the harm. But when you don’t drink regularly if you’re at all in tune with your body the effects are quite noticeable.
> Go outside and it's more or less the same as it has always been.
not true. many more outdoor billboards and LED billboards everywhere you go. giant screens held up in the air making 'IRL' feel like one big ad without the ability to uBlock it. very trashy and hard to get away from depending on where you live.
How much is selection effects and negative feedback? As online discourse gets worse, calm and sane people are more likely to drop out, leaving the extreme people to argue online, making the discourse worse …
Even for the calm/sane, they too gravitate towards negative content. It's entertaining, it can make them feel better about themselves temporarily, they can use it for cheap content for validation. Social feeds reinforce all of these layers.
We as humans also exaggerate negativity, you can read 100 positive comments, they will never have as much impact as that 1 negative one. This is a core component as to why negativity fuels itself.
There isn't a lack of positivity online, you can find it very easily in huge abundance, it's just not as viral.
Yeah, I pretty much dropped of a number of platforms, like Reddit, because they have become overrun by people with depression (or supposed depressions) who will use any type of online input field as a way to offload on random stranger. I get that it's because many of them can't afford professional help, but damn that's asking a lot of someone who is just trying to debate the fine points of asian cooking or watch a silly take on yesterdays news.
Mornings that I spend outside experiencing my five senses and staying in my body leave me feeling refreshed, grounded, and energized[1]. From this place I tend to have more attention and patience. I seem to have better access to empathy.
Mornings that I spend from the minute I open my eyes glued to my phone screen leave me feeling basically the opposite. My attention is completely fractured. My general sense that I'm okay is harder to access and instead I often feel baseline anxiety and uneasiness. I feel less patient and more judgemental.
I can't claim that this causes me to be more caustic online (and offline) with people that I disagree with, but I certainly can see why that might be true. Especially when I'm bombarding my mind with divisive, provocative news headlines that are designed to get a rise out of me.
[1] I've started doing this more since listening to the Huberman Lab podcast about the health benefits of exposing yourself to morning light. Here's the first Google result going over this info: https://medium.com/@podclips/andrew-hubermans-light-sun-expo...
In the summer, I go have tea on the balcony. I only bring my iPad, which is a glorified notebook and book.
It's nice to start the day slowly without a hard dose of internet. I feel like it completely changes the direction my day takes, because I only open the computer once I know what I'll be doing.
I'm on a forum that's supposed to be the opposite of toxic social media and it's tearing itself apart right now. Actually, two forums are, and one of them is just a place to politely get some software help. People are having trouble discerning individuals in the collective activity, which leads to angry/snippy posts about what the site itself believes and is doing, which leads to individuals who don't ascribe to that, or see something different in the shadow, fighting with them, which leads to genuine acrimony and enmity between individuals, and so on. And these groups are almost entirely composed of people who hate social media and think Instagram/Twitter/Tiktok is destroying society!
It's very hard to productively discuss and troubleshoot, and even the best advice (less Internet for awhile) sounds like a personal attack.
>Go outside and it's more or less the same as it has always been
That's because the author is living in a bubble.
And also because, go figure, your cashier's depression isn't visible when they're forced to smile at you, and people with crippling depression are more likely to not get out of home at all (unless it's for work, if they have it and it's not remote).
And because people mask their symptoms of anxiety, but (go figure!) would be more willing to be open about it online, where they're anonymous and won't be judged by people who don't understand what the problem is because things are the same as they ever were.
Real estate crisis, wage stagnation, ballooning college debt (and a degree required for barely-middle-class living), increasing wealth gap, increasingly unaffordable healthcare, a full frontal attack on civil rights (abortion is just one example), militarization of police and impunity when they break the law, ultra-right (aka fascist) groups taking over the conservative party on a platform of division and hurting "the other side", COVID-19 also being a mental health crisis (while mental healthcare is still out of reach), expectation of constant availability by employers, deteriorating worker's rights (what's a union?), lack of public transportation infrastructure (hello, 3 hour commute!), ...
That's to start.
Maybe be that girl posting a picture of her latte on Instagram isn't the primary cause of everyone being on the edge.
Most of those have happened before, and within the last ~100/120 years or so (indeed, lots around the 1920s) - Jim Crow laws, WW1, Spanish Flu, WW2, the Great Depression, the Red Scare / McCarthyism, the Civil Rights movement, etc, etc
I think the point is is there something different this time, perhaps because of the internet or social media? Or is it just that a lot of these things are overlapping?
Because where everything you mention is a serious problem, most of them are smaller versions of problems that we've been through already.
One of the things that helps me stay sane (to the extent that I can be said to be "sane". Now STFU, peanut gallery!) is... wait for it... fishing. Wait, what? I know, I know. But hear me out.
There's a spot where I go to fish a lot, because it's very convenient to access. Because it's very convenient to access, everybody and their cousin fishes there. Due to the fishing pressure, the fishing at this spot isn't really great, at least not for largemouth bass, which is usually what I'm targeting. But still I go. And you know what? The point isn't really the fish. It's about being outside, being near the water, having other people around but mostly not having to interact with them unless I choose to, having the ability to fish right up until dark, then start a little campfire and sit back for a while and listen to the fire crackle and pop while watching the stars come out, etc. It all helps me stay grounded.
Even more, another aspect of hanging out here is that it's such a "community hole" kind of place, that you get a really diverse crowd. You get white guys (me), black guys, hispanic guys, black women, hispanic women, old guys, young guys, little kids, asian guys, etc., etc. And out here, I've never so much as once seen race, gender, or age matter to anybody. We all fish, we talk about fishing inasmuch as we talk ("Hey, anybody seen any white bass starting to show up yet? The spawning run should be starting about now?" or "You catching anything today?", or "What bait are you using?", etc.) and that's it. Some people are out there fishing for food, some are there just fishing for sport, some were born and raised in the US and are college educated, some barely speak any English at all and are possibly undocumented migrant workers, but yet at the end of the day we're all just a bunch of people hanging out on a dam by a spillway, trying to catch a fish.
It's good to be reminded that there are times and situations where you can throw a bunch of people together in a (relatively) small area who probably have very little in common in many ways, but yet they can be united by their humanity and by a simple common interest.
The moral of this story? Take up fishing, I guess. :-) Or if not fishing, at least something to get you outside, away from computers and social media and "tech stuff" for a few hours here and there.
I have to agree with this notion. Fishing seems to be a community building shared relaxation space, one of my favorite activities to fill my increasingly limited free time. It's very offline and accessible to all, regardless of socioeconomic status.
My go-to is trail running (or walking), though this is less social as it tends to mainly be me on my own occasionally passing or being passed by a hiker, dog walker, or another runner, unless I'm on a paid trail event when there are tens or one-or-two hundred other runners out on the route.
The key similarities between your escape method and mine are, I think, getting away from the Internet & other bits of our daily stress, and getting out into the countryside a bit.
I like going to the shooting range. It gives me something to look forward to. The range I go to is outdoor, so I get some fresh air too. I walk 100-200 yards and back to place my targets, then again every time I need a fresh one. I also shoot clays sometimes, which is a blast (pun intended).
When I'm really feeling bad, mild exercise seems to do wonders. I'll walk briskly for 30 minutes usually and feel better afterwords, at least for a short while.
Was going to say this is what I do. Shooting and fishing are very similar. Outdoor range, mixed cultural group every time. Mostly paper punching with rifles, like you, but also obliterating clays a few times per year.
It's a bit harder because the fish tend to be larger, but I've always had way more luck with proper catches and developed quite a preference for fishing on ocean as long as there's access to that.
I learned from a professional fisherman how to catch fish without a rod - Hook, line, sinker, and a piece of wood to wrap the line around, attached with a decent amount of line anchoring it in place, along with something like a garden glove guarding your hand as you wrap it to pull the catch in are all you need, you can sling out a line far enough into the ocean as long as you're careful enough to use the right technique and not get it tangled on anything like your head. You won't be catching the largest fish this way but if you know you're not in for anything too crazy it's incredibly effective.
Community building is excellent way to deter a lot of what is referenced in the blog, but I worry people are taking it too extreme. Infantilizing themselves into only being "positive" where nothing but small talk can occur.
You cannot build a community without understanding one another, through darkest or disagreeable days. Now there's a time and place for everything, you don't have to bring up your divorce at the fishing spot or anything like that. I just don't believe people are building the communities they really want, the profound relationships they really desire, and it's killing them from the inside.
Which in turn leads them to the internet. Hopefully you see where I'm going now ;)
This is also true of baseball games. Everyone talks to everyone, even if they're rooting for the other team. All good vibes.
I happened to be at Dodger Stadium when Jake Arrieta of the Cubs was throwing a no-hitter against the Dodgers. Still, in the 9th inning, everyone was standing and rooting for him.
We are in one giant tech-accelerated feedback loop, which exploits human attention. The limbic system is fastest, so fear, provocation, hatred, outrage, etc. drive clicks. The news media exploits this. Social media exploits this. Politicians play exclusively to their base and exploit this by tossing them red meat in the form of vice signaling.
It's all just human attention harvesting, with zero concern for the psychological cost.
Social media makes me feel bad, especially when I start my day with it. I will never touch TikTok because I think it's cancer for the human attention span. I deleted my Facebook a long time ago and never looked back. I don't give a shit about Instagram. I wish I didn't use Reddit, but am finding it increasingly cynical and tiresome.
May the gods have mercy on our souls if we ever train an LLM on toxic Twitter and Reddit comments and it becomes superintelligent.
I think semi-private communities will be the way forward. Open ended forums just don't work. I play Magic The Gathering, the public Discord and Reddits are awful. Twitter even worse. There's then a subset of Discord servers that are great to hang out in, and since most people get to know eachother it also makes everyone nicer.
Similar thing for a dev tools builders Discord I moderate, it's invite-only and the discussion is very good and non-extreme. The cynics self-select themselves out quickly as there's no likes to be earned.
This is doomed to failure. More of something that hasn't previously worked doesn't solve anything. There's a saying, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
The main issues revolve around two things, lack of education about malign influence campaigns and their tactics and targeted blindspots, and structural issues that allow a many to one communication while giving the illusion that its one to one (i.e. bot accounts posing as people to amplify or de-amplify). A large portion of our identities are developed through reflected appraisal, and when you interfere with core identity, and you see it everywhere, this becomes distorted, and can induce demoralized psychological states that include both radically violent states, as well as unresponsive states. Now if you have a destabilizing event, very few resources are actually needed to topple governments as was seen in 1953 with the Shah coup.
People generally act and do crazy things when they are isolated and marginalized, its illegal to treat animals that way, and that hasn't stopped technology which allows the perfect weapon to do just that to people, often without their knowledge.
This at its core is what political warfare is all about, winning at any cost without war, and there is a very detailed book which has been written and is available for free from US Marine Corp University's Publisher.
If you can't identify malign influence, then you are doomed to be a victim of it.
The Russian's have called it ideological subversion, the Chinese call it the destruction of national will. Its all the same, and because we value free speech it has been allowed to fester and poison for several generations.
You even have people pushing socialist policies now without even knowing its socialist themselves, and without any true understanding of the structural deficits inherent in what they are pushing, such as corruption, shortages, economic calculation problem, and a number of other areas that inevitably make it an unstable system over time.
This and other interference is what drives a lot of these issues. Its not rocket science.
There's a reason those countries are enemies. They have used malign influence to corrupt and subvert, targeting future generations to destroy our civilization. We as a country largely dismantled our political warfare machinery back in the 70s, at least according to multiple history books I've read, while they haven't stopped, and have in fact developed it even further in scale and scope.
How does your comment explain that smaller communities are doomed to failure? It seems you disagreed and went on a very wild tangent far away from the idea the GP brought up, and in fact may only reinforce it.
It should be fairly obvious that communities are dynamic, they either grow, or they shrink. When was the last time you saw a community stay the same... ever.
There are times of population accumulation, and distribution.
Growth leads to being a bigger target, once you have a certain population, it makes sense to target them. If you have a community with access to something, it may make even more sense at a smaller population size.
Shrinking eventually hits an unsustainable participation point where content becomes stale, and/or benefits erode.
This is the standard lifecycle of a community, you either grow, or you shrink, and bots are cheap and provide downward bias with a well resourced adversary.
As soon as it makes sense as a target, you then have disunity, chaos, toxic behavior, trolls, fake accounts, and bots often targeting those that contribute most because volunteer psychology says you stop volunteering when it starts costing you personally.
The agenda is as I previously mentioned and progresses from there. If you are too busy putting out fires, you're too busy to notice important targeted shifts.
Unbounded growth is a fundamental evil. Our system of corporate organization has been creating troll accounts for a lot longer than the Internet has been around (they just call it marketing, but a pig by any other name...).
Nationalism is anachronistic and hasn't been anything but an infected social appendix since the Internet.
I wonder why it is that at the same time, you're so seemingly rose tinted about the situation domestically as you are paranoid about the situation internationally. I don't mean to say that bots, trolls, and psyops don't exist; they do.. But we perform them on our own people anyway and it's not as if the goals of the government are aligned with the people in it anyhow.
The effectiveness of these campaigns is about on par with that of what journalism has unfortunately become - mostly bullshit and everyone knows it but what are ya gonna do? They keep putting it out and it's not like you're going to convince those still locked to the cycle that they're living in a cave.
I don't really have thoughts about this thread - though reading that book from the US Marine Corp could be interesting.
However, your comment made me think: we talk about "cycle breakers" in the context of inter-generational trauma, usually within a family or group. Are we now approaching a critical mass where we need an entire generation (or >50%) of cultural cycle breakers to actually progress social norms and political discourse?
From the history I've read, that number is much lower than 50%.
You only ever really need 1/3 pushing in the right direction at the right time.
Inevitably 1/3 will be passively content to go about their daily lives regardless as long as they remain comfortable, if you can incite 1/3 into various disunity campaigns so they preoccupy most of the attention, and cause destabilization, shifts can occur, and after a shift purges are not uncommon afterwards to solidify a new normal, leaving the remaining 2/3 majority.
Similar to what happened in Hue, Vietnam back in the 70s.
This is what having that 'harmless' information being collected enables. Its dark, but a lot of history is dark.
I'm not rose tinted about anything domestically, I think all the shennanigans with private bankers acting as a leg of government will likely end with us all dead, or at least a vast majority of us.
As for the international concerns, its very hard to not be concerned when you have the chinese with so much history going against them including their own documents, coupled with intentional acts to interfere for that purpose.
You don't run illicit police stations out of your embassy, spying sure, but domestic police forces internationally for shadow ops is another thing. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63671943)
Then there's other things like targeted blocking of access to accounts due to 'technical issues' when you try to sign up for continuing education (in the US).
For example, GeeTest is required to be used by all California Community Colleges to even be admitted. Of course if you just let it happen it just happens in the background, and there is some whitelisting, but you have CCCApply staff saying you have to run and send a intrusive fingerprint to china if you want to apply for college (in the US). Yeah its been reported to CISA.
Maybe you just don't work in a profession where you see these things on a day-to-day basis. Its pretty in your face everywhere you go, unless of course your living under a rock.
Unfortunately, you are wrong about the effectiveness of the campaigns, and with education you wouldn't have as many people locked into that cycle. The way the psychology works, if you know and can identify it critically, its less effective thanks to reversal.
> When was the last time you saw a community stay the same... ever.
I see it a lot . I see and am part of groups of friends (6-12 people) who have existed for decades. They're very stable. People do join and leave over time, but the "churn" rate is very close to zero.
I think this sort of thing is much more unlikely with communities that aren't small, though. The monkeysphere is a thing.
The answer then is maybe run like the Goretex model where once a business group gets much over 300 people in size you split in two and diverge.
Around 300 people seems to be where the ability to be personally familiar with everyone in the group starts to drop off.
Larger than that it is like another step down the scale: friends->acquaintances->friends of friends->lowlife from around the corner you've seen once or twice and that might have killed your cat.
Then, it is easier to do something with lower regard and care towards another person you don't really know that well and aren't likely to have to socialise or eat with in the future.
This shapes cults as well, there is a name for the number (I can't remember at 2am) and I have seen varying sizes from 200 to 450.
I would like to identify the malign influence you are pushing - free speech is not incompatible with propaganda machinery or as you put it warfare machinery, the concept that it is all about pushing politics or policies ignores the very real complicating factor of WHO is pushing this as you put it "technology which allows the perfect weapon to do just that to people, often without their knowledge".
I'm sure effect of foreign psyops warfare campaigns is non-neglible but I'm also fairly certain the US itself lead and produced the majority of these technical tools, and for various perverse reasons have employed them upon its own populous. The set of individuals who would have a reason to do so is not large, they stand to gain finance and power from this.
Don't confuse calls to remove the tyrant-techno-or-industry-kings with socialism - the "Republic" of America is precisely founded on unseating these complete bastards. Just happen to have grown a set of them at home.
I think you may need to be more clear in your communications.
Unless I've completely misread what you just said, under the logic you just followed you are saying if you speak out at all in public its a malign influence campaign.
I stuck mostly with what's been well documented, if you have a counterpoint feel free to insert that but if you haven't noticed, features in technology for reliable communications have been being removed relatively silently, and social credit systems currently in existence do just what I said they do. Its inspired both the "Last Generation", and the "Let It Rot" movements and saying otherwise lacks credibility.
As for that ideology that you put forth, that is completely irrational.
You can't have free thought without being rational, and free speech is fundamentally linked to freedom of thought, you can't have one without the other. There have been a number of studies that culminated in the formalization of the Whorfian Hypothesis which clarifies this link.
If you can't critically consider an alternate perspective and take what works, do you really have free thought? I don't mean just you, but in general any living cohort.
You casually point the finger at US companies, but are they really?
Sure they might be registered there initially but what of the people behind them with controlling interest.
If you look at the people behind the curtain, most companies have been sold from their initial startup phases, and the people who currently run them, I wonder how did they continue making their money after that, and their continued operation what is it dependent on? What policies are these people putting forward at their meetings like at Davos.
In almost all cases its dependent on cheap surplus labor. There's only really been one competitive option for the past few decades which appears largely by design, though is now changing.
The 'tyrant-techno-or-industry-kings', as you put it, for the most part want socialism, but they'll never say so publicly but that does not change the fact that they do so because its structurally advantageous for 'them' and only them.
They can make more profit, have less competitors, keep more of their gains, consolidate, concentrate, and accumulate more power and influence government as a form of un-elected shadow government. These are the benefits, the only benefit to not pushing for that is solidarity in the fact that they are principled people, and stability in the long view (which doesn't make a profit).
I think its worth clarifying upfront, they cease to be free-market capitalists the moment they seek undue influence over the market such as towards monopoly or oligopoly.
> The "Republic" of America ...
You're mistaken about that.
America was founded on upholding property rights, unconstrained trade, division of labor, freedom of thought, communication, and agency, and as a means to an end unseating any bastards that represent an existential threat.
We have only started having systemic troubles after changes were made that constrained, degraded, or corrupted each of those areas.
Weird take on social policies, or maybe I misunderstand.
Giving basic food, shelter and health care is not socialism.
Thinking these basics are socialism is indeed the problem and why the US is destabilizing itself with now a good part of the population living like in a third world country.
It’s refusing to address the shortcomings of capitalism (exponential accumulation, wealth and GDP not representing good for society and happiness, externalities not priced in, irrationality of people easily exploited with money, finite resources…) that are known to destabilize society since the 19th century, with now even more data and environmental problems on a far larger scale, and an effective dictatorship in the form of oligarchy.
What was dismantled since the 70’s is seeing the corporations as a mean to serve society and not the opposite, and what prevented capitalism from self destruction. It’s not socialism either, it’s Adam Smith, notably the dangers of collusive businessmen conspiring against the public good.
Russian and Chinese influence online is only a bit of fuel to that fire.
> Giving basic food, shelter, and health care is not socialism.
If you believe that, then you are naively mistaken.
Those are forms of non-market socialism, or central planning, they've gone by many names in the past. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism), and I would have no problems with socialism except the people pushing it completely ignore the structural issues which inevitably cause massive amounts of death to those least able to prevent it, in a cyclical mechanic massive amounts of people die, and that's solidly backed historically.
If there is no self-sustaining market to begin with in an area, there's no problem with socialist structures there, but applying it to everything is just ignorant.
Mao caused something like 70 million people to die in only a few short years.
The economic calculation problem has been a longstanding issue, with no real solution in the absence of free-market mechanics. The impossibility of calculating how much you should be producing at a future date without any form of visibility (futuresight), you have to maintain an indefinite surplus and not make any mistakes at any level that can cascade.
Any centralized power structure suffers from corruption, in fact corruption is what makes it work efficiently in the absence of a division of labor. Its a fine balance of corruption though, and eventually corruption leads to shortages through either greed or incompetence since there is no possible self-moderation of corruption, and human psychology and physiology dictates serotonin production which is altered in those with more power, there are significant biases and trends towards this inevitable failure, and only a limited number of people oversee the process preventing corrections when it might be less costly. Failures lead to shortages which lead to death.
Inevitably, power structures get passed to the next generation, about every 20 years or so in a healthy functioning system. If those taking over are incompetent, or were not properly prepared, or ill suited to the task, then it leads to shortages which lead to death. Even if they were prepared, if something new (an out of context problem) occurs, shortages = death.
Worse they are likely to hide their failures until its too late to do anything because of the shame of it all. Its human nature.
Every single non-market socialist country today relies on a large group of the population for the means of production who have no upward mobility, merit, and are no better than serfs or slaves at least as far as I'm aware. Inevitably these people are mistreated, and they bear the brunt of the inadequacies of socialism, and eventually rise in revolt, or stop having children. In cases where the population has been culled repeatedly, the latter is far more likely, and predictable, slavery of indigenous people in the South Americas in the 1500s was so brutal the slaves that didn't die to the new diseases brought by Spain, took their own lives and the lives of their children rather than bear the brunt of the conditions. The decline was so stark that Spain at the time had to outlaw the practice.
You make the mistake of associating capitalism with accumulation in general or various aspects that are unchangeable in any system (including socialism variants), and yet that is not correct except in the most narrowly scoped definition, and the meaning (definition) of words is important when you talk about something specific or make an improper generalization.
You see oligopoly and monopoly, they happen in market and hybrid socialist countries more often than in capitalist countries with strong anti-trust law and enforcement.
When tech started making the only effective means of interaction and communication with them through online, they gave those influencers more than just fuel for the fire, they gave them bridges to every single person that could be burned and targeted at will. That's hardly just...
That's a lot of words to rebut in actuality a very tiny, perhaps completely insignificant, segment of the U.S. electorate. When most Americans speak hazily of "socialism" what they really want is not Marx but merely something closer to the Nordic model, or to Germany's social market economy (Rhine capitalism), or to the East Asian tigers, or to Britain, or to Australia, or even to that 'socialist' basket case, Canada.
I laid out the three main structural issues as I see it, and I've done a lot of research on the subject (as I'm sure you could tell).
> not Marx but merely something closer to the Nordic model
Perhaps you could clarify how the structural deficits in the systems you mention differ.
As far as I can see Economic planning with fiat currency systems inevitably run into the same fundamental issues as socialism over a longer term (but still inevitable).
Inevitably, new generations forget, and over time concentration of power and influence lead to corruption and fraud.
At some point they exceed the fine balance and the resulting shortfall in production causes money printing that lead to an eventual cascade failure, the failure is largely driven by the producers who no longer are willing to trade their labor for nothing. Once this happens in critical infrastructure such as transportation or energy then it becomes self-perpetuating.
Firms and individuals may be incentivized by subsidy in the short term, but how do you pay for that subsidy without fiat?
There are a lot of people that have not realized MMT for what it is. It ends up turning into another form of the economic calculation problem as special interests dominate and corrupt the people responsible for subsidizing, you can only deviate existing markets within a narrow range before you run into the same structural issues (over time), and the nature of economies does not lend itself to sudden structural changes so you end up in some of the same cyclical traps.
Though there is generally more flexibility at the individual level to avoid death with sufficient foresight and preparation.
The downside to money printing is once a currency fails, no one can trust there will be any credibility in any new institution.
Without incentives to produce, markets solely based on fiat collapse.
All of those systems have incentives to produce, none of them buy into MMT, you don't seem to be aware that your critiques do not apply to any real-world systems, as all of these are market-based economies no less than the U.S. Having social safety nets or just stronger worker protections do not require economic planning.
No, it appears you may have misread, or simply have a fundamental misunderstanding about how things work.
Let me see if I can't reframe this to be more palatable.
If you bought into unbacked fiat currency (and you do so when you trade time for work), you in essence buy into MMT, you don't realize it at first because you don't directly control when it changes, but it does eventually change as the value spent from printing exceeds the value produced over time, its part of any currency lifecycle.
I think the misunderstanding you may be having is you are looking at a narrow time horizon. You need to be looking at the entire cycle because it is cyclical.
MMT (https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588...), its not new, its money printing, and printing is not a new concept. The Mongol Yuan dynasty did it and overprinted back in (1200s), its been tried a number of times since, and failed, and most if not all economies today use fiat in the form of some reserve currency, so it does apply broadly.
Macro effects from a shortfall of value from productive efforts relative to printing start becoming noticeable at around a 3:1 liability to value ratio, and unwinding generally tends to usually take 1-3 years depending on the sector, but that's when there is no printing. Generally speaking direct good producers will force price increases to maintain value, and it trickles down through intermediates from there before showing up in governmental statistics as inflation. For more data oriented on this you may want to look at Ray Dalio/Bridgewater's report on Big Debt Crises series (Argentina,Zimbabwe). Its an excellent read.
Now, incentives are only incentives as long as the value not only meets costs but provides net profit of at least cost inflation for the following two to three years, depending on inflationary acceleration the cost may exceed what normal people have to spend so productive efforts may become wasted if left to spoil.
Compare two examples, you produce something with a 20% expected profit margin and fixed costs upfront, you lock in profits by contract (futures).
The end of the year comes around and you find out the inflation at the end of the year is 2% in the first case, and 400% in the second.
In the first case, its obviously an incentive because you make 16% profit that year, and the prices are stable so costs don't rise more than 2%.
In the latter case, you lose capital reserves. Its no longer an incentive or profitable, and because it changed so rapidly, you have to assume it will continue to do so for a time, markets collapse as less workers can buy the goods you sell.
When the medium store of value is no longer a store of value, factor and goods markets based on that medium of value crash. People won't sell you 1000 dollars of time/labor upfront and accept being paid 1$ in value and be unable to buy anything by the time you get to the market for your own goods.
Unrest and upheaval often occur as food /transportation becomes scarce.
Now back to those two points, the 2% and the 400% may be the same system, but at different times/stages, the first may be the first 20-30 years, the last may be 50-60 years from adoption or a 100 years, it all depends on how much printing occurs in relation to population growth and production.
Fiat like Ponzi schemes have stages where they look sound, externally, right up until a liquidity crisis. You can make a direct comparison between money printing and the expected rate of return on a Ponzi scheme. Its all fine until outflows exceed inflows above and beyond which inevitably happens when you print yourself out of that crisis (as a bailout). You may kick the can down the road a bit, maybe even to your children, but each time you use the lever for that printer more crises will follow until the underlying cause corrects.
> The cynics self-select themselves out quickly as there's no likes to be earned.
If these are invite-only communities do they actually self select out or do they get kicked out? My experience has generally been that small groups are often cliquish and won't tolerate significant dissent even when it's civil.
I've experienced surprisingly civil and insightful discussion in online spaces that were very nearly unmoderated. It's not for everyone and it's certainly a mixed bag but there's a lot more than just a public/private dichotomy going on in terms of social dynamics.
Even HN is a good example of a solidly public space where I've had countless constructive interactions over many years.
Some people want constructive interactions, some want lulz and flame wars. Many people want both at different stages in their lives, or even simultaneously on different forums. Just remember you are free not to read and free not to reply. Wish there were AI personal moderators to selectively ignore stuff.
AI moderators don't have to be personal. It would be enough to tag comments as constructive, lulz and flame and let users decide which type they want, or to which degree they want it. The technology of spam-detecting Markov chains should be enough since the users can easily correct the classification.
Since the feature is possible but not used, question remains why users don't need it.
If I were AI, I would remove any post not containing a link or a number. And remove any comment containing a sequence {capital I followed by a space}. Including this one :)
I participate of some invite-only communities for a while and you have a point, being a dissent it’s quite challenging and demands extra reasoning to express that.
On the other side, the real issue moderating any closed invite-only community is that the false positive cost is too high and it can fall apart the entire thing, e.g. 90% of the people stops to post/share/interact.
100% -- and that also manifests in our day to day interactions at work unfortunately as a lot of tech workers are in Reddit/Twitter. It's very unfortunate and put our society in a bad path.
It's not that bad. I mean , social media does at time showcase the worst of humanity and the most obnoxious of voices, but some good stuff there too. You have to curate it ..block, filter aggressively.
> Social media makes me feel bad, especially when I start my day with it. I will never touch TikTok because I think it's cancer for the human attention span. I deleted my Facebook a long time ago and never looked back. I don't give a shit about Instagram. I wish I didn't use Reddit, but am finding it increasingly cynical and tiresome.
Sorry to break it to you dude but HN is social media...
Not in the same way that most are. It doesn't (AFAIK) present different users with different information. All of us see the same front page, and so on.
HN doesn't depend on clickbait and attention harvesting, and the community does a pretty good job of self-policing toxicity, and not posting sensationalist and empty limbic tickling.
I think we need legislation on this one. Given that life is a series of experiences. And that experiences require attention. Stealing that attention is stealing life. And we are not wired to fight this theft. So we need something else.
> May the gods have mercy on our souls if we ever train an LLM on toxic Twitter and Reddit comments and it becomes superintelligent.
Some guy fine-tuned one of the big language models on all of 4chan. He made a YouTube video about it. I could go dig up a link, but really the preceding two sentences are all you'll need to find it.
It said the kind of things you'd expect. Weirdly, it scored better on some "honesty" metric -- maybe because it developed a blunt style, or maybe because ML metrics -- though papers are published over 1% improvements -- are often noisy as hell.
When all of the web traffic gradually moves into for-profit walled gardens, this happens.
Those places will seek to increase profits. They can do it by growing their members but that eventually stops working.
They need to make the "content" stickier, more addictive. Cute kitty pics are attractive but not as attractive as porn, but porn has a legally limited audience. Pleasing people brings recurring business, but angering them, angering them with "righteous outrage," that brings them back even more frequently - the A/B tests confirm it.
Some people here will blame capitalism, some will blame oligopoly, some will blame lack of regulation, and some will blame other people's meanness. Those are all factors. And then some.
This isn't the land of Angelfire and everyone's personal weblog anymore.
That is why, recently, I have been doing my absolute best to inject some comedic relief into all Internet discussions. Use comedy instead as a way to convey your opinions. At worst people will laugh, at best they'll laugh and think a bit about what you've said. Well I guess at worst actually they'll be offended, not able to take a joke, and continue on with their own miserable lives ;)
News flash - the internet is full of trolls. Unfortunately since this is now the dominant form of how people get their news it's quite hard to find anything of quality anymore. Everything is a competition for subscribers which leads to clickbait everywhere. sad really.
Internet has become a safe space. A place where people can yell at eachother with zero consequences. In human history the average Joe didn't have this. Before a decade ago, really only geeks were online so the convos were more nuanced, deep and just polite all around.
That era is over.
ProTip: Engage in face-to-face conversations, where empathy and nuance are easier to convey.
Interesting to call it a safe space. I'd say the internet is a very dangerous place for your mental health. It comes with how easily able someone can step away from it.
That's kinda the point, one man's safe space is another's hell. We either learn to live in harmony or will continue to yell at each other for eternity.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadWe’ll figure it out in time.
- https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-th...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34169051
"How did you know it was an imposter Jim??"
"He was too fucking nice, most Microsoft robots won't cuss to save themselves or others."
But as a former secondary school teacher, I can already tell you a lot of these kids don't know how to socialise. They have no concept of empathy or of there being real people out there. All their socialisation is pretty much done only through their phones, and it's not good for them at all. I was like that myself - very shut-in type guy from about 13-16 even though I did have friends and school to help, and I still find myself struggling with a lot of social cues and stuff that I should've been developing then.
Dollars to donuts, it's going to be AI waifus with a monthly subscription, if the Replika drama is anything to go by.
Some of the parts for me are: - This things are coming in the worst moment possible to the economy. - it is majorly controlled by small minorities who are infringing copyright and other licenses and nobody is really doing something about it. - the current AI are not as spectacular as people think, but still super powerful. It will take many white and blue collar jobs but these people are already struggling to keep up to pay for education and they are getting doomed to a worst future not only for them but for their kids.
For me a way to solve that is to tax specific types of AI with decreasing taxes. Let's say it starts at 70% and descrease 2% a year. This would allow for some population to go down enough so we need this solution and it would allow people to find the next thing to do while not being prohibitively for research and special use cases.
There you have the answer.
Exaggerated emotions bring clicks and profit. Wonder why so many video thumbnails now show a large face with some vivid emotion on it? Or "XXX reacts to YYY"? Drives revenue.
It's like we're all in a non-stop "Got talent" show where talent performance is less important than judges' reactions.
Growing things feels right. But I need $$ so I have to stay plugged in for now.
So, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment, but not aware of any meaningful measure of the state of world. Everything is to me ultimately relative. For example, pretty easy to image world being way better or worse, or for that matter, thing’s specific to yourself.
Seen author post before, so that added to this post to me adds up to saying — reminder: make meaningful positive connections in the present.
I do think specific to author they’ve invested a lot of time building of search service and now future of search for first time in long, long time is uncertain. I personally find that exciting, but easily see how it might be overwhelming too.
EDIT: “why touch grass when you can…”
https://youtube.com/shorts/iOCR73U8t6E
[0]: https://www.ruok.org.au/how-to-ask
Unless of course you're in Pakistan, where a third of the country was flooded last year, you're currently experiencing the largest land war in Europe's post-war history etc.
People aren't okay because the world isn't. Bruno Latour in one of his lectures he gave a few years ago pointed out that we, without doing anything, essentially lost a war to climate change. We can't even imagine that it was completely possible for people two generations ago to have transformed our ways of life, modes of production and so on, so that we could, theoretically now look at the past and see it as a problem behind us. We could literally be walking through a "great climate change war" museum, the way we visit a WW II museum. Instead we're essentially negotiating how fast we drive the titanic into the iceberg.
So the question is honestly not why people are concerned but why they're not more panicked, why we're still sleepwalking. If we had sirens in our cities going off given our ecological situation alone, not to mention all others, we'd be running for the shelters like people did during the Blitz. Something that could have been a passing problem in the past has transformed, through inaction and lack of attention into something that threatens entire civilizations.
> "Using data from a national survey of U.S. adults on their drinking habits that found that excessive drinking (such as binge drinking) increased by 21 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic..."
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/covid-related...
Exercise and a healthy diet can benefit one's state of mind, in contrast.
I do drink by the way, although very infrequently. I judge that the pleasure I can get from a top shelf bourbon on rare occasions is worth the harm. But when you don’t drink regularly if you’re at all in tune with your body the effects are quite noticeable.
We get along better. We both exercise more. We are more constructive. Output more. Enjoy life more.
I could go on. I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to phase drinking out altogether. It’s just not worth the downside for a few hours of fun.
not true. many more outdoor billboards and LED billboards everywhere you go. giant screens held up in the air making 'IRL' feel like one big ad without the ability to uBlock it. very trashy and hard to get away from depending on where you live.
As Are drones at every non-national monument Awe Inspiring Place.
We as humans also exaggerate negativity, you can read 100 positive comments, they will never have as much impact as that 1 negative one. This is a core component as to why negativity fuels itself.
There isn't a lack of positivity online, you can find it very easily in huge abundance, it's just not as viral.
Mornings that I spend from the minute I open my eyes glued to my phone screen leave me feeling basically the opposite. My attention is completely fractured. My general sense that I'm okay is harder to access and instead I often feel baseline anxiety and uneasiness. I feel less patient and more judgemental.
I can't claim that this causes me to be more caustic online (and offline) with people that I disagree with, but I certainly can see why that might be true. Especially when I'm bombarding my mind with divisive, provocative news headlines that are designed to get a rise out of me.
[1] I've started doing this more since listening to the Huberman Lab podcast about the health benefits of exposing yourself to morning light. Here's the first Google result going over this info: https://medium.com/@podclips/andrew-hubermans-light-sun-expo...
In the summer, I go have tea on the balcony. I only bring my iPad, which is a glorified notebook and book.
It's nice to start the day slowly without a hard dose of internet. I feel like it completely changes the direction my day takes, because I only open the computer once I know what I'll be doing.
It's very hard to productively discuss and troubleshoot, and even the best advice (less Internet for awhile) sounds like a personal attack.
That's because the author is living in a bubble.
And also because, go figure, your cashier's depression isn't visible when they're forced to smile at you, and people with crippling depression are more likely to not get out of home at all (unless it's for work, if they have it and it's not remote).
And because people mask their symptoms of anxiety, but (go figure!) would be more willing to be open about it online, where they're anonymous and won't be judged by people who don't understand what the problem is because things are the same as they ever were.
They aren't, and we aren't.
That's to start.
Maybe be that girl posting a picture of her latte on Instagram isn't the primary cause of everyone being on the edge.
I think the point is is there something different this time, perhaps because of the internet or social media? Or is it just that a lot of these things are overlapping? Because where everything you mention is a serious problem, most of them are smaller versions of problems that we've been through already.
On the front page right now: (Nature paper: Negativity drives online news consumption - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4 )
There's a spot where I go to fish a lot, because it's very convenient to access. Because it's very convenient to access, everybody and their cousin fishes there. Due to the fishing pressure, the fishing at this spot isn't really great, at least not for largemouth bass, which is usually what I'm targeting. But still I go. And you know what? The point isn't really the fish. It's about being outside, being near the water, having other people around but mostly not having to interact with them unless I choose to, having the ability to fish right up until dark, then start a little campfire and sit back for a while and listen to the fire crackle and pop while watching the stars come out, etc. It all helps me stay grounded.
Even more, another aspect of hanging out here is that it's such a "community hole" kind of place, that you get a really diverse crowd. You get white guys (me), black guys, hispanic guys, black women, hispanic women, old guys, young guys, little kids, asian guys, etc., etc. And out here, I've never so much as once seen race, gender, or age matter to anybody. We all fish, we talk about fishing inasmuch as we talk ("Hey, anybody seen any white bass starting to show up yet? The spawning run should be starting about now?" or "You catching anything today?", or "What bait are you using?", etc.) and that's it. Some people are out there fishing for food, some are there just fishing for sport, some were born and raised in the US and are college educated, some barely speak any English at all and are possibly undocumented migrant workers, but yet at the end of the day we're all just a bunch of people hanging out on a dam by a spillway, trying to catch a fish.
It's good to be reminded that there are times and situations where you can throw a bunch of people together in a (relatively) small area who probably have very little in common in many ways, but yet they can be united by their humanity and by a simple common interest.
The moral of this story? Take up fishing, I guess. :-) Or if not fishing, at least something to get you outside, away from computers and social media and "tech stuff" for a few hours here and there.
The key similarities between your escape method and mine are, I think, getting away from the Internet & other bits of our daily stress, and getting out into the countryside a bit.
When I'm really feeling bad, mild exercise seems to do wonders. I'll walk briskly for 30 minutes usually and feel better afterwords, at least for a short while.
I learned from a professional fisherman how to catch fish without a rod - Hook, line, sinker, and a piece of wood to wrap the line around, attached with a decent amount of line anchoring it in place, along with something like a garden glove guarding your hand as you wrap it to pull the catch in are all you need, you can sling out a line far enough into the ocean as long as you're careful enough to use the right technique and not get it tangled on anything like your head. You won't be catching the largest fish this way but if you know you're not in for anything too crazy it's incredibly effective.
You cannot build a community without understanding one another, through darkest or disagreeable days. Now there's a time and place for everything, you don't have to bring up your divorce at the fishing spot or anything like that. I just don't believe people are building the communities they really want, the profound relationships they really desire, and it's killing them from the inside.
Which in turn leads them to the internet. Hopefully you see where I'm going now ;)
I happened to be at Dodger Stadium when Jake Arrieta of the Cubs was throwing a no-hitter against the Dodgers. Still, in the 9th inning, everyone was standing and rooting for him.
It's all just human attention harvesting, with zero concern for the psychological cost.
Social media makes me feel bad, especially when I start my day with it. I will never touch TikTok because I think it's cancer for the human attention span. I deleted my Facebook a long time ago and never looked back. I don't give a shit about Instagram. I wish I didn't use Reddit, but am finding it increasingly cynical and tiresome.
May the gods have mercy on our souls if we ever train an LLM on toxic Twitter and Reddit comments and it becomes superintelligent.
Similar thing for a dev tools builders Discord I moderate, it's invite-only and the discussion is very good and non-extreme. The cynics self-select themselves out quickly as there's no likes to be earned.
The main issues revolve around two things, lack of education about malign influence campaigns and their tactics and targeted blindspots, and structural issues that allow a many to one communication while giving the illusion that its one to one (i.e. bot accounts posing as people to amplify or de-amplify). A large portion of our identities are developed through reflected appraisal, and when you interfere with core identity, and you see it everywhere, this becomes distorted, and can induce demoralized psychological states that include both radically violent states, as well as unresponsive states. Now if you have a destabilizing event, very few resources are actually needed to topple governments as was seen in 1953 with the Shah coup.
People generally act and do crazy things when they are isolated and marginalized, its illegal to treat animals that way, and that hasn't stopped technology which allows the perfect weapon to do just that to people, often without their knowledge.
This at its core is what political warfare is all about, winning at any cost without war, and there is a very detailed book which has been written and is available for free from US Marine Corp University's Publisher.
If you can't identify malign influence, then you are doomed to be a victim of it.
The Russian's have called it ideological subversion, the Chinese call it the destruction of national will. Its all the same, and because we value free speech it has been allowed to fester and poison for several generations.
You even have people pushing socialist policies now without even knowing its socialist themselves, and without any true understanding of the structural deficits inherent in what they are pushing, such as corruption, shortages, economic calculation problem, and a number of other areas that inevitably make it an unstable system over time.
This and other interference is what drives a lot of these issues. Its not rocket science.
There's a reason those countries are enemies. They have used malign influence to corrupt and subvert, targeting future generations to destroy our civilization. We as a country largely dismantled our political warfare machinery back in the 70s, at least according to multiple history books I've read, while they haven't stopped, and have in fact developed it even further in scale and scope.
There are times of population accumulation, and distribution.
Growth leads to being a bigger target, once you have a certain population, it makes sense to target them. If you have a community with access to something, it may make even more sense at a smaller population size.
Shrinking eventually hits an unsustainable participation point where content becomes stale, and/or benefits erode.
This is the standard lifecycle of a community, you either grow, or you shrink, and bots are cheap and provide downward bias with a well resourced adversary.
As soon as it makes sense as a target, you then have disunity, chaos, toxic behavior, trolls, fake accounts, and bots often targeting those that contribute most because volunteer psychology says you stop volunteering when it starts costing you personally.
The agenda is as I previously mentioned and progresses from there. If you are too busy putting out fires, you're too busy to notice important targeted shifts.
Nationalism is anachronistic and hasn't been anything but an infected social appendix since the Internet.
I wonder why it is that at the same time, you're so seemingly rose tinted about the situation domestically as you are paranoid about the situation internationally. I don't mean to say that bots, trolls, and psyops don't exist; they do.. But we perform them on our own people anyway and it's not as if the goals of the government are aligned with the people in it anyhow.
The effectiveness of these campaigns is about on par with that of what journalism has unfortunately become - mostly bullshit and everyone knows it but what are ya gonna do? They keep putting it out and it's not like you're going to convince those still locked to the cycle that they're living in a cave.
I think size is a major part of the problem.
However, your comment made me think: we talk about "cycle breakers" in the context of inter-generational trauma, usually within a family or group. Are we now approaching a critical mass where we need an entire generation (or >50%) of cultural cycle breakers to actually progress social norms and political discourse?
You only ever really need 1/3 pushing in the right direction at the right time.
Inevitably 1/3 will be passively content to go about their daily lives regardless as long as they remain comfortable, if you can incite 1/3 into various disunity campaigns so they preoccupy most of the attention, and cause destabilization, shifts can occur, and after a shift purges are not uncommon afterwards to solidify a new normal, leaving the remaining 2/3 majority.
Similar to what happened in Hue, Vietnam back in the 70s.
This is what having that 'harmless' information being collected enables. Its dark, but a lot of history is dark.
As for the international concerns, its very hard to not be concerned when you have the chinese with so much history going against them including their own documents, coupled with intentional acts to interfere for that purpose.
You don't run illicit police stations out of your embassy, spying sure, but domestic police forces internationally for shadow ops is another thing. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63671943)
Then there's other things like targeted blocking of access to accounts due to 'technical issues' when you try to sign up for continuing education (in the US).
For example, GeeTest is required to be used by all California Community Colleges to even be admitted. Of course if you just let it happen it just happens in the background, and there is some whitelisting, but you have CCCApply staff saying you have to run and send a intrusive fingerprint to china if you want to apply for college (in the US). Yeah its been reported to CISA.
Maybe you just don't work in a profession where you see these things on a day-to-day basis. Its pretty in your face everywhere you go, unless of course your living under a rock.
Unfortunately, you are wrong about the effectiveness of the campaigns, and with education you wouldn't have as many people locked into that cycle. The way the psychology works, if you know and can identify it critically, its less effective thanks to reversal.
I see it a lot . I see and am part of groups of friends (6-12 people) who have existed for decades. They're very stable. People do join and leave over time, but the "churn" rate is very close to zero.
I think this sort of thing is much more unlikely with communities that aren't small, though. The monkeysphere is a thing.
Around 300 people seems to be where the ability to be personally familiar with everyone in the group starts to drop off.
Larger than that it is like another step down the scale: friends->acquaintances->friends of friends->lowlife from around the corner you've seen once or twice and that might have killed your cat.
Then, it is easier to do something with lower regard and care towards another person you don't really know that well and aren't likely to have to socialise or eat with in the future.
This shapes cults as well, there is a name for the number (I can't remember at 2am) and I have seen varying sizes from 200 to 450.
I'm sure effect of foreign psyops warfare campaigns is non-neglible but I'm also fairly certain the US itself lead and produced the majority of these technical tools, and for various perverse reasons have employed them upon its own populous. The set of individuals who would have a reason to do so is not large, they stand to gain finance and power from this.
Don't confuse calls to remove the tyrant-techno-or-industry-kings with socialism - the "Republic" of America is precisely founded on unseating these complete bastards. Just happen to have grown a set of them at home.
Unless I've completely misread what you just said, under the logic you just followed you are saying if you speak out at all in public its a malign influence campaign.
I stuck mostly with what's been well documented, if you have a counterpoint feel free to insert that but if you haven't noticed, features in technology for reliable communications have been being removed relatively silently, and social credit systems currently in existence do just what I said they do. Its inspired both the "Last Generation", and the "Let It Rot" movements and saying otherwise lacks credibility.
As for that ideology that you put forth, that is completely irrational.
You can't have free thought without being rational, and free speech is fundamentally linked to freedom of thought, you can't have one without the other. There have been a number of studies that culminated in the formalization of the Whorfian Hypothesis which clarifies this link.
If you can't critically consider an alternate perspective and take what works, do you really have free thought? I don't mean just you, but in general any living cohort.
You casually point the finger at US companies, but are they really?
Sure they might be registered there initially but what of the people behind them with controlling interest.
If you look at the people behind the curtain, most companies have been sold from their initial startup phases, and the people who currently run them, I wonder how did they continue making their money after that, and their continued operation what is it dependent on? What policies are these people putting forward at their meetings like at Davos.
In almost all cases its dependent on cheap surplus labor. There's only really been one competitive option for the past few decades which appears largely by design, though is now changing.
The 'tyrant-techno-or-industry-kings', as you put it, for the most part want socialism, but they'll never say so publicly but that does not change the fact that they do so because its structurally advantageous for 'them' and only them.
They can make more profit, have less competitors, keep more of their gains, consolidate, concentrate, and accumulate more power and influence government as a form of un-elected shadow government. These are the benefits, the only benefit to not pushing for that is solidarity in the fact that they are principled people, and stability in the long view (which doesn't make a profit).
I think its worth clarifying upfront, they cease to be free-market capitalists the moment they seek undue influence over the market such as towards monopoly or oligopoly.
> The "Republic" of America ...
You're mistaken about that.
America was founded on upholding property rights, unconstrained trade, division of labor, freedom of thought, communication, and agency, and as a means to an end unseating any bastards that represent an existential threat.
We have only started having systemic troubles after changes were made that constrained, degraded, or corrupted each of those areas.
Giving basic food, shelter and health care is not socialism.
Thinking these basics are socialism is indeed the problem and why the US is destabilizing itself with now a good part of the population living like in a third world country.
It’s refusing to address the shortcomings of capitalism (exponential accumulation, wealth and GDP not representing good for society and happiness, externalities not priced in, irrationality of people easily exploited with money, finite resources…) that are known to destabilize society since the 19th century, with now even more data and environmental problems on a far larger scale, and an effective dictatorship in the form of oligarchy.
What was dismantled since the 70’s is seeing the corporations as a mean to serve society and not the opposite, and what prevented capitalism from self destruction. It’s not socialism either, it’s Adam Smith, notably the dangers of collusive businessmen conspiring against the public good.
Russian and Chinese influence online is only a bit of fuel to that fire.
If you believe that, then you are naively mistaken.
Those are forms of non-market socialism, or central planning, they've gone by many names in the past. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism), and I would have no problems with socialism except the people pushing it completely ignore the structural issues which inevitably cause massive amounts of death to those least able to prevent it, in a cyclical mechanic massive amounts of people die, and that's solidly backed historically.
If there is no self-sustaining market to begin with in an area, there's no problem with socialist structures there, but applying it to everything is just ignorant.
Mao caused something like 70 million people to die in only a few short years.
The economic calculation problem has been a longstanding issue, with no real solution in the absence of free-market mechanics. The impossibility of calculating how much you should be producing at a future date without any form of visibility (futuresight), you have to maintain an indefinite surplus and not make any mistakes at any level that can cascade.
Any centralized power structure suffers from corruption, in fact corruption is what makes it work efficiently in the absence of a division of labor. Its a fine balance of corruption though, and eventually corruption leads to shortages through either greed or incompetence since there is no possible self-moderation of corruption, and human psychology and physiology dictates serotonin production which is altered in those with more power, there are significant biases and trends towards this inevitable failure, and only a limited number of people oversee the process preventing corrections when it might be less costly. Failures lead to shortages which lead to death.
Inevitably, power structures get passed to the next generation, about every 20 years or so in a healthy functioning system. If those taking over are incompetent, or were not properly prepared, or ill suited to the task, then it leads to shortages which lead to death. Even if they were prepared, if something new (an out of context problem) occurs, shortages = death.
Worse they are likely to hide their failures until its too late to do anything because of the shame of it all. Its human nature.
Every single non-market socialist country today relies on a large group of the population for the means of production who have no upward mobility, merit, and are no better than serfs or slaves at least as far as I'm aware. Inevitably these people are mistreated, and they bear the brunt of the inadequacies of socialism, and eventually rise in revolt, or stop having children. In cases where the population has been culled repeatedly, the latter is far more likely, and predictable, slavery of indigenous people in the South Americas in the 1500s was so brutal the slaves that didn't die to the new diseases brought by Spain, took their own lives and the lives of their children rather than bear the brunt of the conditions. The decline was so stark that Spain at the time had to outlaw the practice.
You make the mistake of associating capitalism with accumulation in general or various aspects that are unchangeable in any system (including socialism variants), and yet that is not correct except in the most narrowly scoped definition, and the meaning (definition) of words is important when you talk about something specific or make an improper generalization.
You see oligopoly and monopoly, they happen in market and hybrid socialist countries more often than in capitalist countries with strong anti-trust law and enforcement.
When tech started making the only effective means of interaction and communication with them through online, they gave those influencers more than just fuel for the fire, they gave them bridges to every single person that could be burned and targeted at will. That's hardly just...
> not Marx but merely something closer to the Nordic model
Perhaps you could clarify how the structural deficits in the systems you mention differ.
As far as I can see Economic planning with fiat currency systems inevitably run into the same fundamental issues as socialism over a longer term (but still inevitable).
Inevitably, new generations forget, and over time concentration of power and influence lead to corruption and fraud.
At some point they exceed the fine balance and the resulting shortfall in production causes money printing that lead to an eventual cascade failure, the failure is largely driven by the producers who no longer are willing to trade their labor for nothing. Once this happens in critical infrastructure such as transportation or energy then it becomes self-perpetuating.
Firms and individuals may be incentivized by subsidy in the short term, but how do you pay for that subsidy without fiat?
There are a lot of people that have not realized MMT for what it is. It ends up turning into another form of the economic calculation problem as special interests dominate and corrupt the people responsible for subsidizing, you can only deviate existing markets within a narrow range before you run into the same structural issues (over time), and the nature of economies does not lend itself to sudden structural changes so you end up in some of the same cyclical traps.
Though there is generally more flexibility at the individual level to avoid death with sufficient foresight and preparation.
The downside to money printing is once a currency fails, no one can trust there will be any credibility in any new institution.
Without incentives to produce, markets solely based on fiat collapse.
Let me see if I can't reframe this to be more palatable.
If you bought into unbacked fiat currency (and you do so when you trade time for work), you in essence buy into MMT, you don't realize it at first because you don't directly control when it changes, but it does eventually change as the value spent from printing exceeds the value produced over time, its part of any currency lifecycle.
I think the misunderstanding you may be having is you are looking at a narrow time horizon. You need to be looking at the entire cycle because it is cyclical.
MMT (https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588...), its not new, its money printing, and printing is not a new concept. The Mongol Yuan dynasty did it and overprinted back in (1200s), its been tried a number of times since, and failed, and most if not all economies today use fiat in the form of some reserve currency, so it does apply broadly.
Macro effects from a shortfall of value from productive efforts relative to printing start becoming noticeable at around a 3:1 liability to value ratio, and unwinding generally tends to usually take 1-3 years depending on the sector, but that's when there is no printing. Generally speaking direct good producers will force price increases to maintain value, and it trickles down through intermediates from there before showing up in governmental statistics as inflation. For more data oriented on this you may want to look at Ray Dalio/Bridgewater's report on Big Debt Crises series (Argentina,Zimbabwe). Its an excellent read.
Now, incentives are only incentives as long as the value not only meets costs but provides net profit of at least cost inflation for the following two to three years, depending on inflationary acceleration the cost may exceed what normal people have to spend so productive efforts may become wasted if left to spoil.
Compare two examples, you produce something with a 20% expected profit margin and fixed costs upfront, you lock in profits by contract (futures).
The end of the year comes around and you find out the inflation at the end of the year is 2% in the first case, and 400% in the second.
In the first case, its obviously an incentive because you make 16% profit that year, and the prices are stable so costs don't rise more than 2%.
In the latter case, you lose capital reserves. Its no longer an incentive or profitable, and because it changed so rapidly, you have to assume it will continue to do so for a time, markets collapse as less workers can buy the goods you sell.
When the medium store of value is no longer a store of value, factor and goods markets based on that medium of value crash. People won't sell you 1000 dollars of time/labor upfront and accept being paid 1$ in value and be unable to buy anything by the time you get to the market for your own goods.
Unrest and upheaval often occur as food /transportation becomes scarce.
Now back to those two points, the 2% and the 400% may be the same system, but at different times/stages, the first may be the first 20-30 years, the last may be 50-60 years from adoption or a 100 years, it all depends on how much printing occurs in relation to population growth and production.
Fiat like Ponzi schemes have stages where they look sound, externally, right up until a liquidity crisis. You can make a direct comparison between money printing and the expected rate of return on a Ponzi scheme. Its all fine until outflows exceed inflows above and beyond which inevitably happens when you print yourself out of that crisis (as a bailout). You may kick the can down the road a bit, maybe even to your children, but each time you use the lever for that printer more crises will follow until the underlying cause corrects.
This continues up until a point where the ex...
If these are invite-only communities do they actually self select out or do they get kicked out? My experience has generally been that small groups are often cliquish and won't tolerate significant dissent even when it's civil.
I've experienced surprisingly civil and insightful discussion in online spaces that were very nearly unmoderated. It's not for everyone and it's certainly a mixed bag but there's a lot more than just a public/private dichotomy going on in terms of social dynamics.
Even HN is a good example of a solidly public space where I've had countless constructive interactions over many years.
Since the feature is possible but not used, question remains why users don't need it.
On the other side, the real issue moderating any closed invite-only community is that the false positive cost is too high and it can fall apart the entire thing, e.g. 90% of the people stops to post/share/interact.
Cyber Hitler 3.11 For Workgroups 1x9 25gbps.
Sorry to break it to you dude but HN is social media...
Some guy fine-tuned one of the big language models on all of 4chan. He made a YouTube video about it. I could go dig up a link, but really the preceding two sentences are all you'll need to find it.
It said the kind of things you'd expect. Weirdly, it scored better on some "honesty" metric -- maybe because it developed a blunt style, or maybe because ML metrics -- though papers are published over 1% improvements -- are often noisy as hell.
Those places will seek to increase profits. They can do it by growing their members but that eventually stops working.
They need to make the "content" stickier, more addictive. Cute kitty pics are attractive but not as attractive as porn, but porn has a legally limited audience. Pleasing people brings recurring business, but angering them, angering them with "righteous outrage," that brings them back even more frequently - the A/B tests confirm it.
Some people here will blame capitalism, some will blame oligopoly, some will blame lack of regulation, and some will blame other people's meanness. Those are all factors. And then some.
This isn't the land of Angelfire and everyone's personal weblog anymore.
That era is over.
ProTip: Engage in face-to-face conversations, where empathy and nuance are easier to convey.