> They’re afraid the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us.
This is gold!
But it's also curious coming from a journalist who played cheerleader for them for so many years: are journalists also afraid that AI will propagandize us better than journalists managed to?
He's very much out there saying that he was wrong about many things. I have been aware of him and not a fan for as long as he's been publishing, but I kinda became a fan in the last couple weeks.
I was guilty of the same optimism in the 90s, but 2016 was the last lesson I needed. Took him a bit longer.
Nah, that gave us quite a lot of good actually. Neither he nor I are calling for some sort of Year Zero backlash.
I got on the internet in 93 and I enjoyed about ten pretty great years of it. That internet never went away, people just stopped participating, for many reasons, including spammers laying waste to the infrastructure (usenet), but mostly because our nontechnical friends and family showed up and we mostly preferred to interact with them on the platforms than the weird collection of freaks we interacted with before. I have no idea where most of my old IRC channel are, and these were my daily friends for a decade or more (many of them go back to BBS days in the 80s). On the other hand, I miss the folks from alt.music.ween and I want usenet back, but I have little hope that that could happen.
But if you mean, "get the large corporate platforms whose purpose is to extract money from attention off the internet and replace them with systems that work like the internet worked in the 90s, ie protocols" then you are correct. That's Rushkoff's message these days too - places like neocities get a lot of heat around here and it's for a reason, a lot of us remember that there used to be a good internet, and that internet did not have the purpose of making money, its purpose was to enable communication under any kind of duress, up to and including a nuclear attack.
We need to get back to using this for its actual purpose, and kick off the people trying to use it to make money. If there is a service that we collectively want or need, we should either pay for it on an individual basis, or we should pay for it with taxes.
America may give Silicon valley a blank check to do whatever they want but China keeps a tight control and the EU loves to bully them with regulations.
The State always wins.
The Achilles heel is that nobody actually fucking LIKES these "tech barons" and nobody would vote for them if they ran for office. He's right that they are removed from the real world. Even a C level politician would demolish them in town hall meeting.
The risk of communism and fascism feels really important here. Whether the state capture industry out the other way around, industry leaders end up with all the power of the state with none of the democratic guardrails of elections and accountability.
> Even a C level politician would demolish then in a town hall meeting.
There might be an interesting u-shaped curve here. I totally agree I'd expect a half decent politician to call BS very easily, if that politician is actually interested in representing his constituents. Congress seems to enjoy the horse and pony show, inviting tech leaders for hearing while the goal is just to win political points and pander to voters . Love them or hate them, except for an occasional fluke anyone getting to the highest levels of federal office are A level political that should be able to demolish leaders in these hearings if they actually cared.
The resentment coming from media towards tech has been there for years now.
The thing that always gets me is that they pretend to offer the insider view (rubbing shoulders with billionaires), but actually it's them fixing on these handful of figures and companies, ignoring 99.9% of the industry.
I also find it difficult to take seriously anyone who holds up 2016 as some kind of milestone in internet manipulation and propaganda... because the Obama campaign already bragged in 2012 how they used social media to win. They harvested data from Facebook, just like Cambridge Analytica would do, but Facebook looked away, and the press spun it as tech savvy democrats leaving republican dinosaurs in the dust.
There are no principles in this area, just people fighting for a team.
He gained notoriety in the 90s cyberpunk time but from NYC.
The fact he sounds weird is interesting because it is really the degree that everything has become dominated by the culture of San Francisco.
It is the degree that Silicon Valley beat Silicon Alley. He is expressing the side that lost the culture but it could have gone the opposite way. Wallstreet money didn't have to go very far to get to Silicon Alley.
Pseudo.com was basically doing real audio/video podcasts from Silicon Alley in the late 90s. I don't think that whole scene really recovered from the dot com bust though.
The problem for Google seems hard to me. They scrape original content then find ways to present the best parts of it without sending you to the content creators site.
Now they will have a harder time finding human generated content. So AI will start training itself on AI generated data. Which sounds like a loop that leads downward in quality.
There's other related issues too, though. Like, the incentive to publish "good stuff" goes down, as there's much less quid-pro-quo traffic from Google to reward the work. You're right in that I'm guessing, but Google does seem to be headed down a road of eating itself.
"Definition 3.1 (Model Dementia). Model Dementia is a degenerative process affecting generations of learned generative models, where generated data end up polluting the training set of the next generation of models; being trained on polluted data, they then mis-perceive reality. "
Ah, it has a name even, so I'm at least not alone in thinking it's an issue.
18 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadThis is gold!
But it's also curious coming from a journalist who played cheerleader for them for so many years: are journalists also afraid that AI will propagandize us better than journalists managed to?
I was guilty of the same optimism in the 90s, but 2016 was the last lesson I needed. Took him a bit longer.
It seems to me that it's really the social media era that needs to end for us to start making cool things again.
I got on the internet in 93 and I enjoyed about ten pretty great years of it. That internet never went away, people just stopped participating, for many reasons, including spammers laying waste to the infrastructure (usenet), but mostly because our nontechnical friends and family showed up and we mostly preferred to interact with them on the platforms than the weird collection of freaks we interacted with before. I have no idea where most of my old IRC channel are, and these were my daily friends for a decade or more (many of them go back to BBS days in the 80s). On the other hand, I miss the folks from alt.music.ween and I want usenet back, but I have little hope that that could happen.
But if you mean, "get the large corporate platforms whose purpose is to extract money from attention off the internet and replace them with systems that work like the internet worked in the 90s, ie protocols" then you are correct. That's Rushkoff's message these days too - places like neocities get a lot of heat around here and it's for a reason, a lot of us remember that there used to be a good internet, and that internet did not have the purpose of making money, its purpose was to enable communication under any kind of duress, up to and including a nuclear attack.
We need to get back to using this for its actual purpose, and kick off the people trying to use it to make money. If there is a service that we collectively want or need, we should either pay for it on an individual basis, or we should pay for it with taxes.
The Achilles heel is that nobody actually fucking LIKES these "tech barons" and nobody would vote for them if they ran for office. He's right that they are removed from the real world. Even a C level politician would demolish them in town hall meeting.
> Even a C level politician would demolish then in a town hall meeting.
There might be an interesting u-shaped curve here. I totally agree I'd expect a half decent politician to call BS very easily, if that politician is actually interested in representing his constituents. Congress seems to enjoy the horse and pony show, inviting tech leaders for hearing while the goal is just to win political points and pander to voters . Love them or hate them, except for an occasional fluke anyone getting to the highest levels of federal office are A level political that should be able to demolish leaders in these hearings if they actually cared.
>They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see.
This guy seems ok albeit a bit out there.
Edit: Re-read the article, he seems about the sanest out of all people talking on the subject lately.
Sociopaths.
The thing that always gets me is that they pretend to offer the insider view (rubbing shoulders with billionaires), but actually it's them fixing on these handful of figures and companies, ignoring 99.9% of the industry.
I also find it difficult to take seriously anyone who holds up 2016 as some kind of milestone in internet manipulation and propaganda... because the Obama campaign already bragged in 2012 how they used social media to win. They harvested data from Facebook, just like Cambridge Analytica would do, but Facebook looked away, and the press spun it as tech savvy democrats leaving republican dinosaurs in the dust.
There are no principles in this area, just people fighting for a team.
The fact he sounds weird is interesting because it is really the degree that everything has become dominated by the culture of San Francisco.
It is the degree that Silicon Valley beat Silicon Alley. He is expressing the side that lost the culture but it could have gone the opposite way. Wallstreet money didn't have to go very far to get to Silicon Alley.
Pseudo.com was basically doing real audio/video podcasts from Silicon Alley in the late 90s. I don't think that whole scene really recovered from the dot com bust though.
It’s funny because there was a whole New York start up scene and basically none of them made it and all the big stuff that lived was west coast.
Now they will have a harder time finding human generated content. So AI will start training itself on AI generated data. Which sounds like a loop that leads downward in quality.
As another commenter here said a while back, pre-2021 web crawls will be like the low background steel of the web.
Ah, it has a name even, so I'm at least not alone in thinking it's an issue.