Utopias are always fantasies. All of them. There is no such thing and never will be. Solve problems and more problems present themselves, often harder ones since we are always swimming against entropy.
That’s life. Life is war against entropy and for the individual at least entropy always wins. We die.
The Internet made countless things better and a few things worse. We notice the things it made worse because humans have a powerful negativity bias, probably because this was adaptive. “Mistake a bush for a lion and you’re fine, but mistake a lion for a bush and you’re dead.” Your ancestors were paranoid enough to survive.
Edit: I do want to add one point on which I am sympathetic. Unfortunately it seems as if politics is a thing the Internet made worse. That’s dangerous because governments have a monopoly on force. Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse is probably an existential problem.
Liberalism doesn’t try, and shouldn’t, because it takes the position that human beings should be free to seek their own goals rather than have them imposed.
The alternative is to have a vision imposed by the state. History has shown this usually doesn’t work very well and often results in horrors. The horrors come when reality inevitably conflicts with the vision and the political leadership grabs a mallet to bash that square peg into the hole. See: communism, fascism, theocratic regimes, imperial adventures, etc.
Star Trek is fantasy. In reality I’m not convinced that society would be so pleasant. Even in fiction trying to portray utopia you sometimes see glimpses. Why do they all listen to classical music? Why, because there is no culture of course. Nothing new has happened culturally since our era. I wonder what happens if you try to deviate in that culture? Where are those people? It’s never discussed. Maybe all record of them is just deleted silently and everyone forgets.
> Why do they all listen to classical music? Why, because there is no culture of course. Nothing new has happened culturally since our era.
That's an interesting read on it, but the most likely reason is simply because the writers had a high regard for classical music.
But nevertheless I'm reminded of the Zentraedi from Macross, who were created as a warrior underclass to protect the interests of the spacefaring Protoculture (ancient precursor beings; it's implied that humans are descendants of a stranded Protoculture colony). They are genetically engineered and raised with enough knowledge to fight interstellar battles, but not really do anything else. They know how to use their battleships and mechs and stuff, but not how to repair them. Even their language is a restricted, Newspeak-like version of Protoculture language with plenty of words suitable for battle but a dearth of words for other purposes (there is no word for "friendship" or "love"; there is only "ally" and "not-ally"). They have no culture to speak of.
So the first love song they hear causes them to utterly go to pieces. It's what wins the war for the humans, as sure as our germs did against the Martians in War of the Worlds.
This also calls to mind one of our real attempts at utopia -- the Soviet Union, whose citizens smuggled in Western music and fashion because their own culture had stagnated.
> Liberalism doesn’t try, and shouldn’t, because it takes the position that human beings should be free to seek their own goals rather than have them imposed.
Ok, but then you're stuck with today's clusterfuck where nobody's goals can be realized because people refuse to work together and openly exploit each other. That sucks ass. We've got to be capable of more and can't realize that without imagining a society where we're capable of doing more than giving up.
When there aren't many problems people seem to invent them. I think people in the US don't realize how unbelievably lucky they are. No- we need a shakeup!
> Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse
I don't think it's just a systems problem. Sure, systems can help, but education is even more important. Recognizing it's terrible is valuable too (I hope most people have recognized that...).
I recommend Julia Galef's Scout Mindset[1] as an inspiration for the kind of change that I believe is needed. (perhaps the most book of the 3rd millenium? :P ) We need to boost our immunity against fake news and extreme discourse. Information now is what is decisive, and viral (and wrong, misleading, hateful, etc.) information can spread very quickly.
Apart from that, more compassion in general. We're very good at teaching kids about "productive" things they are interested in, but very poor about ethics and meta things, like compassion for fellow beings, the importance of a peaceful and kind discourse to the survival of civilization.
Historically utopia had this association. But I think if an utopia is impossible, then it's less interesting. There has to be something achievable that's worth striving for. It's not going to be perfect of course, but I'm confident it exists somehow.
I also think Utopia is as much as about the small as the big. Tolkien famously had his utopia in the Hobbit way of living, with a simple, relatively wealthy, relatively peaceful society -- but with great interpersonal relationships and all the little things (literally :) ).
People definitely latch on to the negatives, and that is in itself a big part of the problem of social media type platforms today.
Sure there's misinformation etc, but I'd much rather what we have today - it's not perfect, but it is so much easier to learn topics, so many more resources, and no not everything is free, but a lot of it is, and at least the paid resources exist!
I'm also glad that we do have people raging and seeing the negatives too. We need these people as a way of finding balance, and I'm sure as a system we'll regress to a mean and everything will be ok.
It definitely brought about a lot of positive changes. It's fair to be disappointed that some of the things we hoped for didn't materialize, and that a lot of negatives were even worse than expected.
The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls. But we never can predict in advance how far the improvements will go. We do feel that there was a lot left on the table.
> Americans surprised when their economic and political system worked exactly in line with historical trends.
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
I'm not sure about that. Very little was digital back then. It was far easier to claim lack of earnings back then than it is now, even with the high rates
The political philosophy guided by neoclassical economics; the political economic philosophy that has governed most public discourse since the early 80s.
Investopedia seems to agree with you: "Neoclassical economics theories underlie modern-day economics, along with the tenets of Keynesian economics. Although the neoclassical approach is the most widely taught theory of economics, it has its detractors."
According to https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/5wdup7/are_ec..., however: "The vast majority of all economists today work in the New neoclassical synthesis. This paradigm is essentially a combination of the best ideas from the New Keynesian and neoclassical trains of thought. The idea of separate schools isn't nearly as relevant as it used to be - these days ideas that work get added to the synthesis regardless of where they come from."
There's not much in so called "New Keynesianism" that Keynes would acknowledge as being consistent with his theories.
Be very wary of anything you read on /r/AskEconomics; contributors are regularly banned for asking challenging questions that point out deficiencies with the orthodoxy. It's essentially an echo chamber with the top level replies carefully vetted. What it highlights through that is the deep (and justified) insecurity that permeates the economic orthodoxy.
The Neoclassical school is laughably simplistic in its model of the world. To reduce an entire economy, with all its diversity and irrationality, to a handful of variables connected by simple relationships is frankly absurd [1], and really a reflection of economics' physics envy. They make strong claims about how the models are built robustly from micro-foundations whilst ignoring fundamentals such as irrational agents and missing variables, and blithely ignoring important problems such as the SMD result [2] which basically means only a single representative agent and a single representative commodity can be considered (I've seen models that claim much more than this, but practically the higher dimensions are immediately integrated out). That St. Louis fed model is considered advanced because they have 2 representative agents!
Moreover, the models don't maintain important invariants, such as stock-flow consistency, that absolutely must be true as a matter of accounting.
One might give some allowances for all these theoretical problems if the models validated and made reliable predictions, but when it comes to anything of importance, they're little better than a first order Markov model. It's frankly absurd, and a testament to the power of rhetoric and vested interests, that we've built so much of our political economics on such shaky foundations.
There's basically no alternative being seriously entertained in mainstream politics, even on the left, to what amounts to an academic justification for inequality, and that is why we are in the mess we are in, Trump and all.
So we just need a nice all encompassing global conflict again that largely leaves the American industrial base alone and then when it is the only one standing there can be another growth in the American middle class.
In all of these cases real incomes grew enormously. Yes, a big part of that was starting from a low base after the destruction of WWII. But I'd argue it was also a strong consequence of the technology of the time: the was an explosion in consumer goods enabled by new tech, but companies still needed lots of employees to create these products. In the past ~25 years I believe tech has instead allowed more wealth to accrue to a smaller and smaller subset of people.
Yes, all fueled by ridiculously abundant/cheap oil. This is something that might not happen in Earth's history ever again, not to mention the climate change issues (which at least weren't clear until much later, 80s rather than 50s for oil depletion issues).
Yeah, I'm personally of the opinion that the 50s-60s economical benefits are not generally sustainable. Similar to China's rise up until now, it's the result of a one time boom often as a zero-sum game with other parts of the world. The humans on the planet are definitely getting a more comfortable life over time, but any individual state with our current political systems I don't feel ever leads to that 50s-60s level of purchasing power for a long time.
If you were alive back then: yeah, pretty much? The expectation was that merely getting a tech education would seamlessly and immediately roll you into a six figure job no matter which industry you were interested in, because much like AI today, tech was literally seen as the magic ingredient that had been missing all this time.
Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.
In the year 2000, Google was fresh, the Internet was becoming a normal thing for people to use and it was supposed to get rid of the old power structures and bring about a new age of egalitarianism and meritocracy. Plus I was younger and much more idealistic. And to be fair, it has caused revolutions and caused new power structures to be established, and torn down old ones. But as the old adage goes, it turns out that power corrupts. So meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I'd like to pretend I'd do better with my money if I'd invented PageRank back in the 90's, but having seen how money corrupts people, I'm not convinced that I would.
Kind of, yeah. I remember being a teenager in the 90's and it really felt like things were going to be radically different, and better. The cold war was over (well, we thought it was), anybody could talk to anybody else anywhere, anybody could publish anything, and surely this would mean regular people would be more empowered than ever before, right?
It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk and they had figured out how to do cool amazing things and make money and not be evil.
Sadly, it was not to be. But maybe I was just a naive teenager.
I don't know how much the internet changed or I changed. Finding some niche forums on Prodigy (so not even the internet) and talking to a small group of people felt a lot different than just going to reddit and finding a forum for whatever random thing I'm looking up.
Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.
I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well before 2015/2016.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
Everyone's different but I think I felt like the increasing polish and commercialization of the web killed it slowly. And that makes sense to an extent, as there was money to be made people would invest more (and have entire teams) in making ad-optimised content instead of just having one person cranking out homestarrunner or thebestpageintheuniverse or what have you.
Also, the closing of open systems. This whole idea of "whatsapp me or slack me or discord me" - that's ridiculous! It's _obvious_ that I should be able to use whatever client I like to talk to people, just like I did with gaim and AIM and MSN messenger and ICQ etc. etc. Now we're perilously close to the point where websites will just block you if you're not logged in (conveniently via Google using their browser, of course! Firefox users can get lost.) I can even get the need for it as AI makes bots increasingly good, but it sucks.
Edit: Also re: open systems - we went from default-open with desktop computers to default-closed on phones. Now you and your work exist at the pleasure of and for the purpose of enriching Apple and Google. Android SHOULD be something you can run and do with as you please, but of course you can't if you want to be able to do things like use your banking app.
Years before 2015 “the internet” for most people had been replaced by “social media” and its was pretty well understood that big tech companies now had a means and motivation to monetize our most toxic traits.
The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.
Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.
For me and my cohort (I'm in my early 50s now), yes, absolutely. Again, from my point of view, things got even worse post 2008, with the rise of mobile and social media. The tech world specifically evolved in directions dramatically opposed to the pro-human mood of the 90's towards a much more predatory stance.
Interesting, based on the replies here, maybe it's a somewhat generational thing. I was born in 89, so I remember 9/11 when it happened and the wars that followed, but it wasn't something that I put that much thought into. Similarly, I was barely out of high school and into college in 2008. My main concern was playing video games with my friends and trying to come up with excuses to skip my Minnesota History class.
I'm sure generational differences are a big part of it. I was already in the workforce by the mid 90's, and honestly, it was such an optimistic time, for everyone. Lots of hope for the future. I wish I could share what it was like. It was a remarkable, special time, and even though we thought we knew it, we didn't really appreciate what the actual special aspects were until long after the fact.
I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.
90s scifi had some penetrating foresight tho... I feel like we're inching closer to Neuromancer's universe as the war festers on in Ukraine, Japan keeps on roboticizing and somehow a mixture of corporate and populist right wing captures the electorates worldwide.
Naive twenty something (back then) here. The latter half of the 1900s changed so drastically that yeah... a Star Trek like utopia seemed plausible, if not inevitable.
It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend.
We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants.
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Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will.
For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction.
One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all this together for developers would be a big enabler. Think it would need to be sponsored as it won't be sustainable on its own.
"It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse"
I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles).
Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).
The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.
not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.
Ok, but I think the gravity of normal folks bends the industry whether we techies like it or not.
To further subdivide the techie contingent, lots of them have no problem using Windows even though Linux/FLOSS has been viable for a decade or two. So even most techies don't care about the problem.
>It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk
I think that's very much an insider's view, the sentence is in particular funny because "cyberpunk" is not exactly a term of endearment. Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson are hardly disenchanted Zoomers or Millennials. I think Google still does seem a bit cyberpunk, and I don't mean it as a compliment.
I think the John Barlow, cyberlibertarian school of thought had always more to do with what's later been dubbed the "Californian Ideology" rather than technology per se. I don't think it was ever a mainstream view.
Well, maybe it's because I'm Californian. I don't think I'd call myself an insider, I never worked at Google and I'm from Sacramento (which felt painfully un-cool back then!). And the Google I'm talking about would be staffed by Gen X'ers/Xennials at the time mostly - Someone who's 25 in 2001 was born in 1976.
I don't think an embrace of cyberpunk ideas, whatever those are, was entirely mainstream, but the idea that the world was opening up, the internet interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it, and it would help bring down dictatorships, was definitely in the ether.
I can't remember exactly when, but like 8 or so years ago a british guy had a post on HN that questioned all of this and everyone, I mean EVERYONE here basically lambasted him. It was the first time I kinda turned my head and started saying that all this stuff is fake. All these "save the world" job posts, etc.. etc.. it was all bullshit. I think everyone knew that then - but were not willing to admit it outloud.
That's totally a human thing. Digital window dressing (or in this case, defensive tribalistic behavior) is just another projection of how human beings do social things.
Generally speaking, if you place anything under close scrutiny, you will catch yourself (assuming you're human) like the ouroboros - the serpent consuming its own tail. You can't escape the flaws of your own perception and your nature.
All other things, including praising technology and envisioning a better future, are just the tip of the iceberg. People will never find solace outwards unless they turn their focus in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, this is impossible for society in our capitalist, highly materialistic world.
Us humans do have noble goals which some literally willing to die for and we also produce world class villains and everything in between. Tech does nothing but amplifies what we can do to achieve our goals. It enable all the good things we have dreamed about and it also fucks everything up.
Well it also absorbs a lot of resources. We could have largely the same benefits from tech at a fraction of the cost. But that doesn't produce maximum growth! Or at least, not in terms of GDP.
This sort of thinking is what leads you down the “guns don't kill people” route. Each piece of technology has, in it's design, a set of biases. To someone with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The tools you have affect how you view the world.
It's not that simple. If all I have is a hammer, I don't view everything as a nail; I see first what other uses my hammer can have, then if a hammer won't do the job I seek or create another tool that will.
I am still really happy about what tech has brought us and how comfortable life is in this day. OP brought out all sorts of negative examples, but so could I bring out equal amount or more of positive examples on what the tech has brought us.
I'm excited for what the future brings, and I'm still amazed by how sudden jump there was of ability of LLMs. It's still crazy to me.
My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.
In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.
I don’t fully disagree with what you say. I think social media also has some positives. The amount of transparency over government and exchange of knowledge and ability to learn is greater now than ever before. Hopefully we will swing back to a balanced lifestyle where phones and social media are just tools that people use in a limited way instead of being addicted to it.
My bigger fear of tech is how it’ll marginalize people economically and centralize power. We see it already with companies like Amazon. But the coming wave of automation over everything - manufacturing, entertainment, etc - may be far more damaging than even social media. Unfortunately right now it seems our political and economic systems are completely inadequate in preparing for this.
Mainly that people have a place to share things that are happening, spread them, etc. There is just far greater awareness. For example locally there are people who attend council meetings or other such events and report on things that the newspaper doesn’t. I don’t mean that the government itself is more transparent voluntarily - although I guess they do share some basic things like public notices via social media channels.
> My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.
Ok so I'm curious about this.
In the broad strokes, did you think tech would be a major facilitator to things like unionization drives, campaigns to fight for and protect civil liberties, everyday citizens organizing together to gain a greater representation in their local government, etc.?
Or, again in the broad strokes, did you think tech would largely replace the need for these kinds of activities?
Our actions certainly are, and if we think we have free will, we ought to be able to control those. And I think it is possible for us to do so.
But on the other hand, this isn't about me trying to persuade you, or you trying to persuade me. This is about a corporation (pick one) with a revenue base that matches many countries, spending a good chunk of that revenue on the best persuasive techniques and technologies the human race can produce, microtargeting each one of us to click the link, and draw from our eyeballs seconds of our time. The cost to us is small, that the side-effect is warping our perceptions of the world is something the corporation doesn't care about.
We're living in that shadow of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - vast, inhuman things that reshape us and our world without any care or understanding.
This is my sentiment too. It feels like the world is entering a dark period like it has many times before in history. I don't consider tech to be the cause, but it does seem to accelerate and amplify things.
I'm not genX but I felt the same. Even as late as the late 00s there was still widespread optimism about what the internet would bring. By the late 10s that feeling was completely gone.
None of this has anything to do with technology itself, though. All tools used by humans will be put to the purposes that those humans bear.
The positive power we were attributing to the technology itself back in the '90s was really just the expression of the intentions and worldviews of the people who were using it back then, which was a self-selected and decisively non-representative sample of humanity.
After a couple of decades of tech usage expanding more and more broadly, we've seen a regression to the mean that puts Eternal September to shame, and we've discovered that the mean really is quite mean.
A lot of people disillusioned by this are unfortunately not disillusioned enough, and instead of taking things to their logical conclusion (that utopianism applied to the world at large is not just unattainable, but destructive, and improvement only comes from fostering a great plurality of local contexts so that at least some of them can diverge positively from the global mean) they want to transfer their utopian aspirations to some other global project.
Unfortunately, that other project is often politics, and if you think that failed utopianism in the tech world has had a bad result, just wait until you see the level of havoc that failed utopianism in the political sphere can wreak! Well, we don't have to wait for it -- the past hundred years of history provide copious evidence.
After having read about some arrests relating to an underground network of people who purchase and view videos of monkeys being tortured and killed, for pleasure, and those who shoot and provide these videos... I'm beginning to wonder whether the internet itself was a good idea.
It would still happen with or without the internet, so long as there are video cameras. First is back-alley vhs or cd's then dvd's. Take video cameras aways and you have secret handshake underground viewing parties. I've finally come to terms with the idea that: humans are gonna human. And it allows me to focus on the more positive things that have also come from the internet, because then you get to find the positive, kind ways that humans are gonna human.
One of the unpleasant side effects of the Second Amendment is that it has put firearms within easy reach of... well, just about everybody. Despite tighter controls over gun purchases, the gun used in the Sandy Hook shooting, for instance, was legally purchased, and not through some gun-show loophole. It belonged to the shooter's mother. She never suffered from any mental-health issues and, except for autism and anxiety, neither did he, nor did he have a criminal record.
He just... snapped, and there were guns within reach, so he used them. Were the guns not so easy to acquire and use, he might not have committed so many murders (or any at all), simply because they would have been too much work and risk. This, by the way, is why I'm in favor of repealing the Second and enacting comprehensive gun bans and mandatory licensing and registration of firearms -- you know, like civilized countries do.
Now as to how this relates to the monkey torture videos. Yes, there might have been people who sought this material out in the past, but the internet put it within easy reach. The videos were shot in Indonesia and made available to Western clients through brokers in the UK (two of whose arrest was described in the article I read). Before the internet, this kind of international coordination in order to satisfy someone's sick deranged urge would have been prohibitively expensive and difficult. Only very wealthy, dedicated perverts would have been able to even contemplate arranging it. And maybe some of those would have been dissuaded because the slow, risky communications put them at greater risk of getting caught. Maybe monkey-torture fetish was such a niche interest before the internet that it would have been difficult to find other monkey-torture fetishists, and hence put together a large enough market to justify producing these videos in the first place. But with the internet, it's easier than ever to find like-minded monkey-torture fetishists, form discussion groups and the like, and associate with each other in sufficient density that there's a market large enough to justify going into business producing and selling monkey-torture videos into that market.
It would be important to know what they would be doing without the Internet. Are those desires as such that if they don't get outlet, they explode and so something worse in real life, or does being able to consume it on the Internet normalize it for them, pushing to seek for more.
Being optimistic and positive on tech in the first place is the root issue here. This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient. Being overly optimistic about an industry or field is in my view a worldview error, and a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
> This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient.
That sounds like a story of its own. Would you care to share the story about the corruption she saw? We so often hear the stories about companies hiking prices for lifesaving medicine fo no apparent reason other than profit, but it would be interesting to hear what she saw from the inside?
Personal financial payments to physicians are a common marketing strategy used by the pharmaceutical industry. These payments include both cash (typically for consulting services or invited lectures) and in-kind gifts such as meals.
Someone who's in medical school (or finishes and goes into medicine) isn't really "inside" the pharmaceutical industry and typically has a very, very poor understanding of how pharmaceuticals are developed and brought to market.
The most substantial corruption in the health/life sciences/medicine world is simple profit motive at hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and insurers, and especially when those three entities combine into mega "pay-vidors" like UHG.
Tiny anecdote: I worked on the campus of a children's hospital. The pharma reps had parking right by the main entrance. The parents of sick children? Expensive, paid parking a mile away.
Here's a fun one that just happened recently. A doctor I know works for a giant conglomerate as a general practitioner. Recently the business development team realized that insurance will pay them to take pee samples for diabetes tests for every patient. Now every single time someone comes in the medical assistants are made to get a piss sample for a test that is totally worthless for most of these people as they have little risk of diabetes(far high chance of false positive than true positive). When the doctor told the medical assistants to stop he received an angry email from an MBA which became a huge pain in the ass. At the end of the day we have to remember that the only goal of a business is to make money and even if everyone inside that business is trying to do good the banality of evil tends to rear its ugly face. The MBA actually believed the policy was helping people here believe it or not.
> Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
This sounds like it's better to work within the system rather than try to overthrow it. You need more than a little angst to completely reset cultural norms. Maybe you're optimizing for a local maxima instead of realizing the true potential of saying "fuck everything" and replacing it.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, not saying the correct response to all adversity is to plot a revolution. But my point is sincere - sometimes it is the best thing to burn it to the ground and start over. Private healthcare seems like a pretty good example of a system that should be abolished rather than massaged (assuming your goal is better healthcare at a more affordable price) and we have decades of data from our own country and others to corroborate that.
I think what you are saying is orthogonal to what they are saying.
You can be positive and optimistic about big scale societal changes that throw out all the established notions. Likewise, you can also be cynical and jaded about small scale changes that just aim to incrementally improve things.
Aiming for big changes doesn't necessarily imply you have to be cynical. In fact I think you're more likely to be able to achieve big changes if you're optimistic about them.
If you're willing to accept small changes as a win in a fundamentally broken system (in the sense the incentives aren't aligned and there is no real accountability feedback mechanism) then the problem is you aren't cynical enough to attempt something drastic. I'd actually go even further and argue it's a form of being brainwashed, usually as a byproduct of effective propaganda. Going back to the example of private healthcare - I don't fucking care about small incremental changes when the system itself is still structurally broken. We need more cynicism about the status quo so people say "fuck this" and replace it with something better. And it's not even a complicated or abstract idea - literally every other 1st world country has solved this problem and laugh about how broken healthcare is in the USA.
The point is: what are you going to do if single-payer healthcare does not materialize in the US? You have many options; plotting a revolution, working for reform inside the system or impotently complaining on social media. What is actually workable for you?
The same goes for the article's author. Sounds like they're shocked—SHOCKED—that private companies are just out to make money, and don't actually have our best interests at heart. The real issue is that they bought into the fantasy in the first place. But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world? If it will have no effect, why let it get you worked up at all? If it will have an effect, go out and do it.
> But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world?
As the author said:
> Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
It's not changing the world, but I just do what I can to not contribute to it. And if any alternatives do pop up I do try to support them, sometimes financially.
The internet's outskirts are emptier than ever with this centralization, but I have made the active choice to de-activate pretty much all the mainstream stuff and use extensions to minimize their ability to track me. So knowing this did change my behavior on how I interact with the internet.
I think people tend to think too much in terms of black and white. Jaded cynicism is sometimes a good response, and sometimes less so, and other times won't make too much of a difference or can go either way. The trick is to know how to balance it all.
Same story with "tear it all down" vs. "work within the system".
> it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit
I continue to be fascinated by how easy people priorities profit over doing the right thing. Sometimes they don't even stand to personally gain all that much, they do it for the benefit of some soulless company.
If you aren't actively making things worse for the general public I'll even let the sole focus on profit slide, but how can you justify to yourself going out and actively causing suffering.
Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.
It's easy for people who face no real threat themselves to pretend to take the moral high road by refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers. Not everyone has that luxury.
> Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.
Not to mention, their justifications are much more legitimate than anything advertising industry could come up with, and yet, marketing is a respectable occupation these days for some reason, and ad industry funds everything.
>a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
Easy to say this, but these two aspects contradict each other. You become jaded and cynical precisely because your potential to better humanity is locked down in beauracracy that has the opposite interest. One can only fight back so much against the tidal wave that was setup decades before you were born.
I'd even go so far to say that the ones who do rise to the challenge need to be jaded, and channel that into overcoming the wave. Being cynical means understanding a need to deeply understand every little action, no matter how simple and otherwise "objectively good" it is in the short run.
It's how you use that cynicism that matters, not the state of being cynical.
You've got to separate the tech from human nature. Penicillin, modern medicine, travel, communication etc. are good. Greed corruption and self interest are a human thing irrespective of whether you have high tech or not. We may make some progress there but it's not really a tech issue.
Sadly there is an element of mass advantage in any commercial entity. Think of GE in the 1980's and 1990's. This is the effect of a less than perfect capitalism, but it is what we have and requires huge investment to solve humanities problems - who else can do that? Today's armchair philosophers, especially those on LinkedIn and Twitter who spout doom about techno-optimism without looking at the evidence around them?
This seems very negative and pessimistic to me. My tech utopia fantasies are alive and well.
One key mistake the author makes is misjudging the average person
>They are people who need to game the attention economy by increasingly disrespectful and shocking content, gore, rage bait, dehumanizing pranks17, extreme consumerism like huge shopping hauls, sloppy large mukbangs, shredding lamborghinis18, gambling streams and websites19, game shows20 and more
If your tastes are more sophisticated, you may see the profusion of relatively puerile content on the internet as "gaming the attention economy" - but how do you know the average person doesn't just like watching mukbangs? And why shouldn't they?
In my view - you should get comfortable with the fact that people have different preferences to yours and judge based on outcomes rather than aesthetics.
The author complains about racism. Maybe it's easier to be racist nowadays. On the other hand, in the decades before the internet we had more race related shootings, bombings, etc. Maybe, net net, it's a good thing if the people who would've been forming a militia in the woods 30 years ago are instead posting racist memes on X.
Likewise it's harder to make a blog or your own website today. But, much easier to blow up on X, TikTok, YouTube etc. I just don't see the issue here. We have far more content creators and similar now than in the past.
None of the complaints seem that meaningful to me. Technology improves. Things aren't perfect (yet) - but they might be in the future. We have greater access to information, communication, and intelligence every year. If these trends persist we will use the improvements to enhance all other aspects of life (as we are already doing). The future where power comes from solar, nuclear, or fusion, physical labor comes from machines, cognitive labor comes from AI, material comes from space travel, advances in biology/physics/chemistry radically extend our life and health spans is not only possible, it is visibly approaching.
I hope the stuff you talk about at the end of your comment come to fruition, but I think you’re very wrong about the attention economy. The issue is simply that these platforms are companies that need to optimize their user retention, so their algorithms have learned to prioritize the most gutturally stimulating material, whether mukbangs or drama, implicitly at the expense of everything else.
I think it's simply evolution - things that get attention will have the most attention, by definition. People copy and vary the things that get attention and hit upon new and better attention getting strategies. Mukbangs and prank videos are the natural state of social media - in other words. Social media companies could do work to suppress intellectually unstimulating content - and then they would be replaced by social media companies that did not.
I just don't see what the issue is. If you turn off mukbangs it's not like the viewers are going to read Dostoevsky or invent a cure for cancer or something. They are going to do their next most preferred activity - watch reality TV until you turn that off, gossip with their friends, etc.
Some people like to do the class of activity that mukbangs are a member of. Rather than try to "cure" them we should make sure they have access to an unlimited stream of mukbangs - cause why not? In the short term they'll be satisfied, we'll be rich, and technological advancement will continue - until we're all in a VR heaven on a server in the Dyson Sphere in the sky.
Look I would love for that to be true, but that’s not how it works. The “natural state” of social media would be that observed without any interference, but things on social media get attention because they get recommended by algorithms. This constitutes interference in that “natural evolution,” interference which selects the thing being optimized for by the process of evolution. It’s not just attention grabbing, it’s attention holding, engagement maximizing, etc. That’s why tiktok slop is both highly stimulating and not highly stimulating enough to drive users off the platform. It has evolved to maximize what the company wants. There’s nothing natural about this process.
There are several classes of problems that corporations are not well-designed to solve. Corporations couldn't and didn't end slavery, they couldn't and didn't end child labor, they couldn't and didn't create the 40 hour work week, they couldn't and didn't prevent our rivers from turning into toxic sludge, they couldn't and didn't prevent our air from turning into unbreathable smog, etc. etc.
> “ The companies themselves and the VC’s they take money from are supporting values and governments that do not act in your best interest and do not even align with their marketing image.”
Anyone who thinks ANY publicly traded company acts in YOUR best interest (unless YOU are serious shareholder) is in the words of my 11-year old kid - delulu :)
I'll ask my delulu question here but: where are the angel vestors who DO in fact what to help humanity. Do they exist and are just working "underground"? Or do you just get absorbed into the system once your net worth is past $X million dollars?
unironically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried. He gave hundreds of millions to charity-start ups, even if you disagree with his definition of "help humanity" he certainly put some money behind it.
In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends, and overwhelm the incumbent minority. Once you could use a sleek, trendy iPhone instead of a clunky desktop computer to get online, the writing was on the wall.
I think back to all of those people talking breathlessly of really free speech and me nodding along just as convinced. Yikes.
I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.
I don’t think it was about stupidity it was about desire, they would not want to come here because it’s just talking to other nerds on bbs. But bandwidth increased and porn and flash games opened the floodgates.
I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.
I do not think that porn and flash games were the reason the internet became trendy and stupid. I blame social media, like tuenti, facebook, fotolog, hi5, even myspace.
The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
I’m old enough to have been there, the internet became popular long before modern social media became a thing. Think Geocities -> MySpace —> Facebook etc.
Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.
Well we made it “idiot proof” didn’t we, and all the idiots came. We need a sort of Dark Web with low crime, and mostly that’s things like HN and people running private Slack instances.
I was thinking about a Twitter clone where your account goes through an approval process where you provide a short essay and your Hacker News username. Client has no tracking, and uses no JavaScript.
In a way it kind of exists, you have Gopher and Gemini. The main links I know of.
gopher://sdf.org
gemini://sdf.org and gemini://gem.sdf.org
I already moved my personal WEB Site there, and there is interesting content there. Maybe "we" should migrate there and leave the LOL cats to the WEB :)
So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Fidonet... Woe unto them, for they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind. Their troubles shall multiply as bugs and glitches in their software.
Well the other issue is that many of 90s nerds turned out to be just as fascistic and bullying and horribly un-empathic themselves -just look at Musk as an example.
I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone.
Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech.
Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture
These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
I encourage you to listen to the 4 part series Elon Musk Unmasked [1] from Tech won't save us.
His motivations are definitely not for the betterment of the average person.
But I'm not sure I can relate to the criticism you're levying here, because I don't expect that anyone's motivations would ever be "for the betterment of the average person", nor trust anyone who pretended to be so motivated.
Society improves when people create positive externalities for others as they pursue their own benefit -- those who deliberately apply their own subjective notion of "benefit" onto strangers they don't know and to whom they aren't accountable will often do much more harm than good.
I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person." (Not really take offense, more like armchair take offense, but you know what I mean.)
My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people. I wrote a few books motivated by this, and then when I became a software engineer I build a few projects motivated by the same.
Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Not saying that they did the job - but that won't stop me from trying. Why I do it is a whole other discussion, but if I'm motivated by this, then there must be others, since I can't be THAT unique.
One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
> I take offense to the idea that you wouldn't trust anyone who said they were motivated by "the betterment of the average person."
I'm afraid no offense is on offer (and it's rude to take things that aren't offered to you).
But to the point, anyone who said such a thing is either (a) lying, or (b) is projecting their own notion of what's better/best onto other people without those other people's involvement. Neither case reflects a trustworthy individual -- the first is motivated by malice, and the second is motivated by arrogance.
> My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people.
Would you stop working on those projects if you were convinced they wouldn't improve the world for the greatest number of people, but were still interesting and useful to you?
If the people who you thought they were going to benefit didn't agree with you, and didn't want to use what you were offering them, would you accept that, or would you resent them and begin contriving ways to get them using it anyway?
Do you acknowledge that there's at least a little bit of arrogance inherent in having any beliefs about what's better for other people without those other people's own input?
> Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Again meaning no offense, but I'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I find all of these to be more than a little bit bizarre and creepy, and I think there's a great deal of hubris involved in presenting your LLM chatbot as unironically messianic.
> One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
A lot of us did that. The OP article is precisely about how those exact intentions of a couple of decades ago have had quite different outcomes to what was intended.
Just wait and see what he'll do to the federal workers, before he gets to screw up Mars for good. Maybe replace them with AI, since that's the current hype train. Think of full self driving but for government.
Hmmmm, I can't quite put my finger on what it is but I suspect there are some fundamental differences between firing a bunch of bureaucrats from the federal government vs. Hitler's purge of the SA or Stalin's purge of the Soviet officer corps.
"Musk can't highlight specific examples of the federal government pissing our tax money down the drain because of how other people who see it might react."
It is completely legitimate to argue about the use of taxpayer money.
It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.
>It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.
Which Musk didn't do? Are all the people who said "Trump is a threat to democracy" and similar statements responsible for the multiple assassination attempts against him?
Except he can't be banned from TwitterX like Trump. Imagine Musk as a future Republican candidate with a social network. This DODGE thing is a political ramp for him. The other potential candidate is Zuckerberg with his fascination with ancient Rome. Both are hardly the types to retreat silently and open a charitable foundation like Bill Gates.
In 1944, before the actual universally agreed upon to be fascist powers were defeated in WW2, George Orwell wrote about how the word had been applied to just about every group imaginable and had already lost any real meaning it might have had:
"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
"Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come."
"But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."
What makes it the "best" in your opinion? Looking at the list, several of the points could be applied to just about every modern nation-state, several easily apply to communist states just as easily as fascist states, and there are several that don't apply to many states that most people would argue are fascist. For example, Salazar's Portugal is widely regarded as fascist but points 9, 10, 11, and 13 (and maybe more) don't really apply to it.
It strikes me more as someone trying to give fascism a formal definition as a way to use it as an ideological cudgel in arguments than any attempt to define it based pn observation of multiple actual fascist states and political movements.
Firing Federal workers so that ultra-rich people can do whatever they want without any oversight, while at the same time undermining the rule of law, and creating a scapegoat ("illegal immigrants") at the same time - that's literally fascism.
I think the word for what is about to happen is not yet invented. It will be something else, something with dire consequences but of a different kind. Something that leaves everyone but a thin elite completely behind. Some may say it has been like this a long time, but I think it will evolve/level up to something we have never seen before.
Some call what they fear to come is fascism, but I think it will be inaccurate. Oligarchism maybe. Or something new.
On a spectrum he is definitely in that direction. There are many examples but a few:
a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.
b) Has constantly promoted false stories about immigrants, black people, trans people, women etc. The narrative being that the US is a zero sum game where in order for non-white males to succeed white-males must lose.
c) I run Twitter business accounts which are post-only and every single one shifted hard towards showing ultra-right wing political content in the For You feed. There is no doubt that the platform was used as a propaganda tool during the last election.
>a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.
Hmm, you must have missed when the Department of Justice sent protestors to Florida to pressure a local district attorney into pressing charges against a very clearly innocent man. And if you disagree with the very clearly innocent part then you definitely didn't watch the trial and missed the eyewitness reports and the medical reports.
Just that they provided support to those protests which is part of their remit i.e. to reduce conflict by encouraging dialog, mediation as opposed to protesting etc: https://www.justice.gov/crs
Yes, yes, we all know it - Elon Musk eats babies and Tesla batteries set Rome on fire.
Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.
"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.
Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.
For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).
> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.
My catchphrase for a while has been "business ruins everything it touches." And before someone swoops in to try and convince me otherwise, save your breath. I'm not interested in hearing the positives of business, I will ignore outright anything pointing to "you wouldn't have THIS without business!"-type replies, and I don't want to reduce this thought further.
From my perspective, business ruins everything it touches, whether right away or slowly over time through enshittification.
I get your point, though to me, there's way too many babies per cubic meter of that bathwater of yours.
My own general explanation of why everything sucks is more like this: we don't know how to stop. The market can't stop itself from over-optimizing, over-exploiting.
The evolution of any product, service, company or technology, can be to a first approximation plotted as a bell curve:
total value provided to society
^
| ....
| .. ..
| ... ...
| .... ....
| ..... .....
------------------------------------> time
(Total value includes not just direct benefit to customers/users, but also how it enables others to build new products/science/businesses/etc. on it.)
The market always goes all the way to the right. What it should do, what we need it to do, is to stop at the peak of the bell curve. Alas, there is no mechanism that would get people to say, "yeah, this is the best it could be, let's go do something else"; the market demands they move to the right, all the way to diminishing returns.
Nerds needed support in the nineties, and they need support today. Our error was in accepting the success and fame of a few representative nerds as evidence that nerds were overcoming these challenges collectively. We allowed in people who never faced the challenges nerds face to identify as nerds— why turn down a friend?— and they've now made society worse for everyone, in our name. In a single blow they've amplified anti-intellectualism and squandered the faith people thought they were investing in us.
The old Internet was definitely my support network, I met a lot of people I could relate to back then, totally different from "IRL people". The Internet is the opposite of that for me now. Where did all the weirdo super-introvert nerds go? Do they all feel as lonely as I do?
Niche forums and gaming communities? HN? They've grown up, some have become braiwashed by corporate culture, some have wives, kids, dogs, cats, mortgages.
> adults don't have time for following a Discord per every topic they're interested in.
Funny, I do just that, despite having a bunch of pets and a full-time job - I follow at least 30 game-specific discords. You must be thinking of people compulsively checking notifications like a social media addict?
I feel sorry for anyone who uses Discord like that. Thankfully, you don't have to since many communities now have mini-wikis inside of the Discord to organize the FAQ/common knowledge.
I run a small network, but this might come across as advertising. It’s been running for 20 years now.
People come and go, but its wild how the community spirit largely remains, even with significant changes in the lifestyle of the people that have been frequenting the network for a large segment of that time.
As others mentioned, there are Discord and IRC pockets. I'm in a Fediverse community with a bunch of nerds, and many of us just met in person at this week's Handmade conference.
You can watch the entire conference here. I want to disclaim that not every attendee and talk is nerdy. It's more that this is a space where nerds are thriving.
1. Fear and embarrassment. Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous, today you constantly hear about doxxing. People were also less aware of the consequences.Even if it's unlikely for some random person, that doesn't help introverts.
2. Outnumbered. Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird. Today, "new" and "random" are filled with spam, and "popular" is filled with posts upvoted by "normies". Weird posts and posters are still here, but they're obscured by the noise.
3. Feedback. People imitate what they see, and feel more comfortable following trends. When "normal" people see weird posts, they become weird and make weird posts. When weird people see weird posts, they feel safer and make weird posts. When normal people see non-weird posts, they make non-weird posts. When weird people don't see weird posts, they feel embarrassed making weird posts, so post non-weird or not at all.
I think 3 is the biggest factor, caused by 2. As other people mentioned, "weird" people are still on servers that are private or otherwise hidden from the mainstream (preventing 2 and 3). 1 is probably not a big factor, instead it explains why less people show their face or post identifying details.
> Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous [...] Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird.
What years are you referring to when you say "back then"? In the early 90s, which was "the old Internet" for me, the best contributors to discussions on the newsgroups I followed (comp.lang.c, etc.) weren't anonymous; they were well-educated people who used their real names, including academics whose signatures included URLs like http://example.edu/~jsmith. And their posts weren't weird, at least not on the newsgroups I followed.
The cohort immediately after you described - those geeks grew up along with growth of videogame market, IMs, and birth of multi-player gaming on the Internet. People who were still geeks, and learned from all those academics and realname adults, but who also had to come up with nicknames early on, and got used to pseudonymity this way.
"weird" isn't a good description. Specifically, most people on the internet back then were well-educated computer nerds, so the typical post would be more relatable to those on HN and arguably (according to those on HN) "higher quality".
These people aren't "weird" in a bad way, but in a "different than the average (less-educated, less tech-oriented) person" way.
The anonymity part probably isn't correct. But I get the impression people back then were a lot more open, at least hearing about dating sites, chat-roulette, old YouTube channels, and internet friends who met IRL in the 90s/2000s. Although I know a lot of people post on Facebook and Twitter, so maybe that hasn't changed either.
My dad had a simpler take: The early Internet was filtered essentially by wealth and intelligence. You had to have a (relatively) expensive setup, and you had to be the type to be "on the bleeding edge" of technology. That didn't necessarily mean you were a "nerd" or "weird". This group included researchers at government labs, university professors, military, etc... Anywhere where the Internet had early adoption was over-represented. I remember NASA and CERN as significant fractions of the entire Internet in the earliest days!
I remember debates on the talk.origins usenet newsgroup with very highly educated priests, some at the highest levels of the church. These people wouldn't give me the time of day now!
In some sense it's the same filter that a University admissions process applies, and companies like Google try to reproduce.
I don't think that struggle is really the defining feature here. If anything, many of the most toxic people I can think of in geeky circles are precisely the people who still have a chip on their shoulder about something that happened in middle school.
I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.
Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.
> Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable
For me it was tech in the 90’s and 00’s so I think the real explanation is even simpler: we grew up.
It’s very easy to be pure of intention and intellectual curiosity when mom fills the fridge.
A lot of the people I recall interacting with on Usenet in the mid 1990s were very much grown up, graduated, far away from “mom”, and employed as developers or uni staff somewhere. However, they still enjoyed hacking, either out of pure fun or FOSS idealism, and without monetary reward very much in mind. I think that the OP is on to something when he says that the economic environment changed, and this led to nerd things being seen through a much more mercenary lens.
Even the major “news for nerds” site in the early years of the new millennium, Slashdot, where there was awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
> awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
I don't think it was a change. Both things existed in parallel, with a little bit of crossover. The startup/VC/megacorp thing just won out, that's all. And nobody ever really doubted that it would, once it was visible.
My take while reading OP was that the author simply grew up. When young and idealistic it's easy to believe the utopian marketing. In reality, business is the same as it's always been.
I do think politics has gotten worse in the "post-truth era". And tech certainly enabled that. It's hard to blame anyone in particular, though. One thing we see in the show "Connections" is that it's always hard to predict the consequences of new technology. Even seeing it coming, it's not fair to believe tech workers should have saved us from the rightward swing.
I feel like "business is the same as it's always been [so things aren't getting worse]" is kind of like saying "I'm smoking exactly as much as I have for the past 20 years, how can I only just have cancer now?" It's not that the problem is new, it's that the disease is degenerative.
>Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
I don't think that was the case. Go and read the stories of the founders of companies like Apple, Atari, Adobe and others from that era and you will find they all took investments to get started.
They've needed support since antiquity. I recall Tycho Brahe getting into an argument with his serfs after he was made a lord that eventually went to court. What's changed is that it no longer requires extravagant wealth to produce one.
I mean, when there's enough financial incentive, all the gatekeeping in the world won't stop the wave of people hoping to get rich. They'll pay off many of the nerds who were thought to be resistant to such means.
The fact is, it not the Internet that failed us, but education. Education quality in the US has declined a lot since the 60s. Now education is only used to create bio-robots, not people who can still think critically.
In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything.
A slightly different take on this was a school I attended in Mississippi --- classes were divided between academic and social --- academic classes (science, math, languages) were attended at one's ability level (w/ a four grade cap for students through 4th grade, so a 4th grader couldn't take higher than 8th grade classes), while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were taken at one's grade level.
Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
It will be interesting to see (as someone without skin in the game 'cause I live in Sweden but having seen a similar type of downward development towards 'equity' here) whether the incoming government will make good on its promise to abolish the department of education which was put in place by Carter in 1979. While the press is doing its best to portray this as a terrible idea which will create mayhem and lead to the quality of education to fall even further it is a fact that the quality of education has markedly deteriorated since its inception while its mission is supposed to be the opposite [1]. Most of the news I've seen regarding education in the USA has trended towards the negative: programs for gifted pupils are shut down because they lead to a decrease in 'equity' where some pupils gain advantages over others, the debacle around extended school closures during the SARS2 unpleasantness, the oversized influence of the (extremely politically biased) teachers' unions, the lack of school choice in many places combined with the influence of districting - where you live decided which school you attend - and more. To me it seems clear the department has failed in its mission and with that needs to be either closed down or overhauled. Given that it is a relatively young department and that educational outcomes were better before it was created - keeping in mind that this does not necessarily indicate a causal relation - it makes sense to abolish this department and relegate essential tasks back to where they were before it was created.
Sounds like a great argument for someone with a special interest to make private schools more appealing (not that I think you have that. Just people who can tell public schools not to be too good).
> There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.
I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.
The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.
There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.
Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.
> statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
My bad, I'm not looking to contest that part, there are definitely serious issues with the school system. I just don't think very much if any of it boils down to "there was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are heroes" as if the kids are intentionally being dumb because it's cool / peer pressure. It's easy to be dumb - especially when we have so many distractions available to us - but I wouldn't call it cool or pin it on some kind of peer pressure thing.
But yes I agree with you, the school system has its troubles (the stats obviously speak for themselves). Funding and teacher pay are probably the biggest factor, though I'd also include classroom distractions (phones, basically), a lack of ability to enforce order in the classroom, and probably parental support as well, off the top of my head.
well, "cool" is too subjective to really say much, especially when only thinking on a micro level. I think a better phrasing of that is that "dumbness" is being more mainstream today (in the US) than before. Some states are back to banning more books than ever in schools, the country was split over something as basic as medicine ( a few choosing horse de-wormer over a professionally approved vaccine), etc.
There was always such conspiracy, but never talked about at such a scale. But not too much of this has to do with techies outside of "tech made it easy for conspirators to gather".
The U.S. placed 16th out of 81 countries in science when testing was last administered in 2022.
The top five math-scoring countries in 2022 were all in Asia.
U.S. students' math scores have remained steady since 2003.
Their science scores have been about the same since 2006.
The IMD World Competitiveness Center reports that the U.S. ranked 12th in its 2024 Competitiveness Report after ranking first in 2018.
I'd say 16th (<20th percentile) is really bad when the US is 2nd in spending (behind Luxemburg, apparently) per student in the world. especially if science is the best statistic to show to begin with.
falling from 1st to 12th in 6 years in competitiveness is even more concerning. Maybe COVID really did ruin attention span.
If you removed the reference to the 70s, This comment could have been stated at any time from 1750 to today and only by grammar would you be able to pick out when it was made.
Some of the most bullying behavior I have seen online is by nerds, sometimes nerds old enough to have come out of the 1990s internet. It’s not only that non-nerd bullies, too, got access to the internet, it is that modern society (both outside social factors, as well as internet-related developments like the rise of microblogging that doesn’t encourage nuance and rewards partisan performativity) can lead nerds to act harmfully.
In my opinion where this behavior really began to run rampant was with the popularization of quippy “dunk" quote-tweets (though this may have earlier precedent, perhaps on tumblr). It’s a deeply antisocial action that just about every internet connected demographic has come to partake in.
Also the nerds bully in the most lazy and untalented ways. They think they "own" somebody by writing lol or lmao with their takes.
Real bullies knew how to make it fun for everybody, so that even the person being bullied had to laugh at it. Nerd bullies are just anti-social and boring.
"In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends"
Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people?
Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power?
Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all.
So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.
It is indeed a human flaw, and a futuristic society would be designed to take this into account instead of blindly relying on faith and acting surprised, repeatedly, when it fails.
Capitalism increasingly incentivizes (and normalizes) deception as it struggles to squeeze the remaining profits, since the rest have trended toward zero as Marx warned they would. From this stems "enshitification" and other perverse incentives like influencer culture, etc.
An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available. All structures of organization would be transparent, and commonly agreed upon goals would take precedence above all else, instead of the goals dictated by the .01 or .001 percent.
"An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available."
Total surveillance?
Or only all technical information?
But transparency of all the organisations, so all the police information as well?
So the murder suspects knows, where the police is looking for them? (Or won't there be a need for a police like organisations because murder is also somehow solved?)
My point is, devil is in the details. And Marx is not someone I would go for inspiration. Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Also, I really don't believe that the problem is a human flaw. I don't want to change humans. (It happens naturally anyway).
But I do believe, that we can create better societies, that serves us better, the way we are.
It is just hard, to create them from scratch for various reasons, but many people are trying and some quite succesful.
Crime would be a fraction of what it is now due to a massive shifting in incentives and societal landscape, and probably dealt with very differently when it does occur instead of turning it into its own for-profit industry (with some of the lowest paid labor among prisoners). Knee jerk reactionary notions of "justice" begin to look very primitive through a materialist lens.
> Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Marxism offers a timeless framework and does not require subscriptions or other grifts. That the latter exists does not invalidate the former. It's just example 100539 of what my previous reply was getting at.
> I don't want to change humans.
Humans deserve better opportunities than most presently have, and than most will seemingly have on our current trajectory into late stage capitalist madness. We should acknowledge/embrace our flaws to see commonality (which is different than being ashamed, proud of, or profiting off of them).
"Marxism offers a timeless framework and does not require subscriptions or other grifts."
Just like the bible, a holy work of truth, you just have to believe in?
"Crime would be a fraction of what it is now due to a massive shifting in incentives and societal landscape"
Because as far as I know, all the marxist experiments did not result in less crime, or corruption, rather the opposite. So why should I believe, that the next marxist experiments will work out any better?
Was there a major update recently, that fixed the flaws?
(To clarify, to me the choice is not at all between capitalism and marxism, humans are capable of a bit more flexibility)
> Just like the bible, a holy work of truth, you just have to believe in?
In ways which are commonly agreed upon as useful, yes. In the case of the bible it cannot be interpreted literally. But abstract concepts, like that every human contains the capacity for good and evil, absolutely. In fact that's what we're discussing.
> Because as far as I know, all the marxist experiments did not result in less crime, or corruption, rather the opposite. So why should I believe, that the next marxist experiments will work out any better? Was there a major update recently, that fixed the flaws?
Assuming you aren't drinking the sinophobia Kool Aide, which is an admittedly big assumption, have you looked at what China has been able to accomplish in recent decades? Not perfect obviously, nothing is, but they're in different league compared to the crumbling empire of the US.
"But abstract concepts, like that every human contains the capacity for good and evil, absolutely. In fact that's what we're discussing."
I see. Well, I strongly disagree to the arbitary dividing of the world in good and evil. In fact, the whole "capitalism is the root of all evil" reminds me strongly of what was the devils doing before. All the bad just happens, because there is this evil force.
In my opinion, this is good ideology for controlling people - we are the good side - they are evil ones. And don't you dare question our side - then you are evil.
Still a surprise, that you see china as a positive force here.
> Well, I strongly disagree to the arbitary dividing of the world in good and evil.
That's not what I said though. It's dividing chunks of time within an individual. There is no purely good or evil person. Humans contain the capacity for both, and how it manifests is mostly a function of their environment at any point in time combined with the historical context that got them to that point. Look up dialectical/historical materialism to understand how this comes to be.
> Still a surprise, that you see china as a positive force here.
I cited it not as a "pure good" like you're attempting to coerce from my words. Instead I cited it as an example of a group of people with a Marxist background doing some things better than capitalism (and some things worse).
Pfff. Ironically, the ""walled garden"" on iOS protects users better than the anything-goes wild west on web browsers, where sites can run any code they want, change anything under your feet, and snoop on your other "apps" at will.
There was a subset of us “old” 90s nerds who failed to take certain elements among us who would be:
1. Enriched an empowered by having the right skillset at the right place and time to achieve fortunes (and by direct purchase) political power unrivaled since the Gilded Age and
2. Still traumatized by not being at the cool kids table in middle school, never emotionally progress past being 12 year old boys
We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.
> to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends
This.
There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around.
Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know.
Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.
Personally I think the iPhone was the turning point for much of the dystopian era.
Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better.
But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device.
People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing.
Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.
Clunky desktop computers connected to the internet in the 90s were already an easy mode. It's a weird point in time to pull the ladder up. I wonder if the people in the 70s shared the same sentiment.
I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
Maybe not in rich countries, but internet and smartphones in poorer countries were definitely viewed in a very positive light.
Specifically, "Digital Inclusion" was a term I remember from before smartphones became popular, and how important it was to get everyone on board. Well, smartphones were what brought internet to them, and this progress was celebrated.
With Social Media it was a bit more complicated, as it only became accessible to the general population of poorer countries at the same time it started receiving criticism internationally. They don't remember Myspace.
(EDIT: Maybe you're talking about the article in general, but the paragraph the text you quoted comes from is about smartphones, social media and internet)
They have absolutely no theory of power. It's just bad men trying to hurt everyone for fun, and the poor upper-middle class elites (who work for them) not being listened to enough when they speak in the name of black people. Life through the lens of superhero movies.
Hardly. Tech is built into the future of every industry in the United States. We still have a runaway advantage with regard to innovation thanks to our tech industry - it impacts at the GDP level. Until that changes, the party is still going.
From my experience mentoring junior designers Ive learned to set the utopian belief that "its all for the user" is a matter of perspective. A stakeholder is also a user and their utopia is different from any preconceived ideal user an upset designer might have. It can be more constructive to enable the continuation of and building up of new fantasies rather than see it as a doomsday scenario where the good times have ended. they never existed and they always existed its just how you look at it. solve problems and harmonize the multi-utopias :)
The lead designer for Homegrocer (Amazon Fresh but too early) was in my social circle, friend of my friends, and the part he didn’t like about his job was that you still had to push the high margin items that the grocery stores put in easy reach to get your visit to be profitable to them. So there’s a moral hazard for things like search filters and sorting. As a customer I’d love to sort by price per unit. But they don’t want that (look at how many items are priced per pound in one size and per ounce in another).
In this regard, I see a lot of projects aiming to "optimize user experience" that are actually optimizing for imaginary users at the expense of real ones.
GNOME is a great example of this -- they're constantly removing functionality over the objections of their actual userbase in order to implement features that fit the speculative needs they project onto people who don't -- and likely never will -- use the software.
I think this idea of “for the user” is a symptom of being trapped in a certain worldview. For some people, the only form of productive organization they can imagine is a company, which consists of an insular minority of producers, and a large majority of consumers. In such a structure, how can the minority of producers possibly know, anticipate, and retain concern for the interests of the consumers? They have to cross this huge gap between them and their users to do so. Eventually, the company grows larger and that gap between users and decision makers widens to the point where the company loses favor, and this process is inevitable so long as the structure of “company” is presumed necessary for the making of the product. I think open source communities demonstrate a potential alternative route.
I think it's worth recalling why that optimism, at least in part.
Information wanted to be free, for the first decade of the web's existence. Projects like Linux, Wikipedia, the www itself. These open, free ways of doing things were proving a case for optimism.
They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.
Meanwhile, online culture was very different. There was room for morons and blowhards, touts, spammers and occasional shill... but those people didn't run the show.
This is important, the reproducibility of information made the potential for endless bounty seem so prominent at first. I also don't think the antithesis is discussed here; copyright law, the DMCA, and all the ways in which IP helped make tech the dystopia it has become.
I think most people think of themselves as not the problem but some guy will post some Show HN and it will be all middlebrow dismissals. All those people are the people involved here. Lots of guys who “yeah, my GitHub is only empty because I’m a professional and don’t make it public” blah blah. But you know they spend all their time aligning stakeholders and have never written a line of code but have opinions.
well, we're not in the best economy to just "make stuff for fun and share free information". One thing we forget is that such a position is a privilege in and of itself. Either for the young who have guardians to provide for them, the well off who don't need to worry about next months' rent, or the obsessive who give everything in their life as their own.
My GitHub is very rusty, but I'm delaying Open source plans until I have a fully time job. It's just not worth it for me otherwise to try and be this FOSS advocate while I can't keep things stable in my own backyard.
The ability to have hobbies is available to pretty much everyone. Sure, "privilege" buys you more time for hobbies but everyone has some time to do with as they choose. Most use it to wath TV or other similar passive consumption.
Of course we were optimistic when the internet was young:
• All the world's people will effortlessly be able to communicate and collaborate together? Surely this will bring about an age of open-mindedness and harmony!
• The bulk of the world's information will go digital, and become accessible to anyone? Surely this will relegate ignorance and superstition to problems of the past!
I've never considered myself an optimist, but if someone back then had predicted the internet we have today, I would have written them off as a hopeless cynic.
> They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.
That was the first mistake.
Free products don't have a "competitive advantage". They destroy market segments. "Free" is the area denial tactical nuke[0] of business. "Free" is the singularity of business models - as price approaches 0, math starts to break out, and the local fabric of the market unravels. "Free" turns competition into a race for growth.
Being "open source" is optional here. Which is why it's not F/OSS that won on the general market, "free with ads" did. F/OSS is mostly used as a weapon to deny market segments to competitors, forcing them to either leave or play the same "free"/growth game. This is used both offensively, to break into existing market segments, as well as defensively, to "pull the ladder behind you".
This doesn’t make sense to me. People will always pay when there is value to them. Or at least perceived value. Libraries are free but people still pay for books and subscribe to audible.
But nobody is lending books for money, like people used to lend videotapes. Thar particular type of business has been salted by libraries.
People will pay when it gets them something they value, but the moment someone offers that for free, completion on price of that thing becomes impossible. Instead, competition moves to ancillary aspects of a thing, such as e.g. delivery, or integrations, or lifestyle marketing.
Case in point: neither Amazon nor Audible compete with libraries on just letting you read books - they compete on delivery (ease of access).
I don't know if you meant it (apologies if not) - but libraries, and CC, and FOSS software, and Wikipedia are all good things in humanity. We should aim for more such good things.
"Salted" or not -- it's up to supporters of free markets/capitalism to figure their shit out.
I very much agree that the things you mention are all good things. Condemning them in general is not what I meant, though I can see how my comments could be read that way.
No, my point is more specific: it's that those things play with the free market about as well as NaN plays with floating point math. That by itself isn't bad; the market isn't the best answer to everything. However, in case of F/OSS, I wish people acknowledged that, by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.
> ... by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.
Could you please elaborate on this or point me to a source where that exact mechanism is explained? Because this runs somewhat opposite to my experiences where FOSS was more of a desperate way to escape proprietary software, particularly OS like IBM with which you would have to wait for fixes from "the market" for days instead of being able to fix it yourself, like this article explains (in vastly superior English to mine): https://cacm.acm.org/practice/free-and-open-source-software-...
I am not the person you’re replying to, but I read their comment to be suggesting that earlier waves of technological development addressed those chores first—successfully! To the extent that the robots for both chores are utterly commoditized, and well within the economic means of pretty much all people living in modern economies (even if that means renting time on a machine via laundromat, it still beats a tub of water out back with a posser and a washing board).
Those mechanical techniques weren’t up to these more abstract tasks: why would it be reasonable to expect the new computational techniques to generalize immediately to these mechanical problems—much less that they’d immediately achieve better results than the time-tested incumbent techniques?
Although, of course, such work is very much underway, e.g. Physical Intelligence’s splashy promo ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098236 ; 14 days ago, 218 points, 189 comments)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadThat’s life. Life is war against entropy and for the individual at least entropy always wins. We die.
The Internet made countless things better and a few things worse. We notice the things it made worse because humans have a powerful negativity bias, probably because this was adaptive. “Mistake a bush for a lion and you’re fine, but mistake a lion for a bush and you’re dead.” Your ancestors were paranoid enough to survive.
Edit: I do want to add one point on which I am sympathetic. Unfortunately it seems as if politics is a thing the Internet made worse. That’s dangerous because governments have a monopoly on force. Restoring some kind of sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse is probably an existential problem.
The alternative is to have a vision imposed by the state. History has shown this usually doesn’t work very well and often results in horrors. The horrors come when reality inevitably conflicts with the vision and the political leadership grabs a mallet to bash that square peg into the hole. See: communism, fascism, theocratic regimes, imperial adventures, etc.
Star Trek is fantasy. In reality I’m not convinced that society would be so pleasant. Even in fiction trying to portray utopia you sometimes see glimpses. Why do they all listen to classical music? Why, because there is no culture of course. Nothing new has happened culturally since our era. I wonder what happens if you try to deviate in that culture? Where are those people? It’s never discussed. Maybe all record of them is just deleted silently and everyone forgets.
That's an interesting read on it, but the most likely reason is simply because the writers had a high regard for classical music.
But nevertheless I'm reminded of the Zentraedi from Macross, who were created as a warrior underclass to protect the interests of the spacefaring Protoculture (ancient precursor beings; it's implied that humans are descendants of a stranded Protoculture colony). They are genetically engineered and raised with enough knowledge to fight interstellar battles, but not really do anything else. They know how to use their battleships and mechs and stuff, but not how to repair them. Even their language is a restricted, Newspeak-like version of Protoculture language with plenty of words suitable for battle but a dearth of words for other purposes (there is no word for "friendship" or "love"; there is only "ally" and "not-ally"). They have no culture to speak of.
So the first love song they hear causes them to utterly go to pieces. It's what wins the war for the humans, as sure as our germs did against the Martians in War of the Worlds.
This also calls to mind one of our real attempts at utopia -- the Soviet Union, whose citizens smuggled in Western music and fashion because their own culture had stagnated.
Ok, but then you're stuck with today's clusterfuck where nobody's goals can be realized because people refuse to work together and openly exploit each other. That sucks ass. We've got to be capable of more and can't realize that without imagining a society where we're capable of doing more than giving up.
I don't think it's just a systems problem. Sure, systems can help, but education is even more important. Recognizing it's terrible is valuable too (I hope most people have recognized that...).
I recommend Julia Galef's Scout Mindset[1] as an inspiration for the kind of change that I believe is needed. (perhaps the most book of the 3rd millenium? :P ) We need to boost our immunity against fake news and extreme discourse. Information now is what is decisive, and viral (and wrong, misleading, hateful, etc.) information can spread very quickly.
Apart from that, more compassion in general. We're very good at teaching kids about "productive" things they are interested in, but very poor about ethics and meta things, like compassion for fellow beings, the importance of a peaceful and kind discourse to the survival of civilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scout_Mindset
> Utopias are always fantasies. All of them.
Historically utopia had this association. But I think if an utopia is impossible, then it's less interesting. There has to be something achievable that's worth striving for. It's not going to be perfect of course, but I'm confident it exists somehow.
I also think Utopia is as much as about the small as the big. Tolkien famously had his utopia in the Hobbit way of living, with a simple, relatively wealthy, relatively peaceful society -- but with great interpersonal relationships and all the little things (literally :) ).
People definitely latch on to the negatives, and that is in itself a big part of the problem of social media type platforms today.
Sure there's misinformation etc, but I'd much rather what we have today - it's not perfect, but it is so much easier to learn topics, so many more resources, and no not everything is free, but a lot of it is, and at least the paid resources exist!
I'm also glad that we do have people raging and seeing the negatives too. We need these people as a way of finding balance, and I'm sure as a system we'll regress to a mean and everything will be ok.
Polarization (as the word implies) is not outcome of the tech but side-effect of two-party system.
What did we expect? That the year 2000 was magically going to bring about a golden age?
The historical trend is for improvements followed by lulls. But we never can predict in advance how far the improvements will go. We do feel that there was a lot left on the table.
And regressions to the mean. Wealth inequality and fascism come to mind.
But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
Investopedia seems to agree with you: "Neoclassical economics theories underlie modern-day economics, along with the tenets of Keynesian economics. Although the neoclassical approach is the most widely taught theory of economics, it has its detractors."
This surprises me, as I thought Keynesian economics was the main view nowadays ("The central belief of Keynesian economics is that government intervention can stabilize the economy" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keynesianeconomics.asp#...).
According to https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/5wdup7/are_ec..., however: "The vast majority of all economists today work in the New neoclassical synthesis. This paradigm is essentially a combination of the best ideas from the New Keynesian and neoclassical trains of thought. The idea of separate schools isn't nearly as relevant as it used to be - these days ideas that work get added to the synthesis regardless of where they come from."
Be very wary of anything you read on /r/AskEconomics; contributors are regularly banned for asking challenging questions that point out deficiencies with the orthodoxy. It's essentially an echo chamber with the top level replies carefully vetted. What it highlights through that is the deep (and justified) insecurity that permeates the economic orthodoxy.
The Neoclassical school is laughably simplistic in its model of the world. To reduce an entire economy, with all its diversity and irrationality, to a handful of variables connected by simple relationships is frankly absurd [1], and really a reflection of economics' physics envy. They make strong claims about how the models are built robustly from micro-foundations whilst ignoring fundamentals such as irrational agents and missing variables, and blithely ignoring important problems such as the SMD result [2] which basically means only a single representative agent and a single representative commodity can be considered (I've seen models that claim much more than this, but practically the higher dimensions are immediately integrated out). That St. Louis fed model is considered advanced because they have 2 representative agents!
Moreover, the models don't maintain important invariants, such as stock-flow consistency, that absolutely must be true as a matter of accounting.
One might give some allowances for all these theoretical problems if the models validated and made reliable predictions, but when it comes to anything of importance, they're little better than a first order Markov model. It's frankly absurd, and a testament to the power of rhetoric and vested interests, that we've built so much of our political economics on such shaky foundations.
There's basically no alternative being seriously entertained in mainstream politics, even on the left, to what amounts to an academic justification for inequality, and that is why we are in the mess we are in, Trump and all.
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2024/2024-01...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%...
Italian Economic Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_economic_miracle
Japanese Economic Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_economic_miracle
Spanish Miracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_miracle
Miracle on the Rhine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
In all of these cases real incomes grew enormously. Yes, a big part of that was starting from a low base after the destruction of WWII. But I'd argue it was also a strong consequence of the technology of the time: the was an explosion in consumer goods enabled by new tech, but companies still needed lots of employees to create these products. In the past ~25 years I believe tech has instead allowed more wealth to accrue to a smaller and smaller subset of people.
Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
was not meant ironically.
It's hard to explain how _cool_ Google was circa 2000-2010 or so. How they genuinely seemed a bit cyberpunk and they had figured out how to do cool amazing things and make money and not be evil.
Sadly, it was not to be. But maybe I was just a naive teenager.
Unfortunately, that worldview died with 9/11.
I don't know how much the internet changed or I changed. Finding some niche forums on Prodigy (so not even the internet) and talking to a small group of people felt a lot different than just going to reddit and finding a forum for whatever random thing I'm looking up.
Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.
Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?
Also, the closing of open systems. This whole idea of "whatsapp me or slack me or discord me" - that's ridiculous! It's _obvious_ that I should be able to use whatever client I like to talk to people, just like I did with gaim and AIM and MSN messenger and ICQ etc. etc. Now we're perilously close to the point where websites will just block you if you're not logged in (conveniently via Google using their browser, of course! Firefox users can get lost.) I can even get the need for it as AI makes bots increasingly good, but it sucks.
We still have https://search.marginalia.nu/ at least.
Edit: Also re: open systems - we went from default-open with desktop computers to default-closed on phones. Now you and your work exist at the pleasure of and for the purpose of enriching Apple and Google. Android SHOULD be something you can run and do with as you please, but of course you can't if you want to be able to do things like use your banking app.
The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.
Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.
I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.
It wasn't until the post-9/11 mobile revolution and normies embracing the internet (late 2000s) that things took a hard turn for the worse. I was honestly surprised (shouldn't have been), and now sorry I didn't do anything to reverse the trend.
We need a well-capitalized organization to keep general-purpose computing alive, along with privacy, security, and autonomy. There are lots of little organizations of course, but they are unfocused and operate like ants in a realm dominated by BigTech giants.
---- Reply to below, I can no longer post for the next hour: ----
Right. Unfortunately I don't have the capital, but would love to work on the problem... even for free/cheap in my spare time. And will.
For example, been testing the new Starlite tablet with Phosh... and it is soooo close! I'm about to start learning how to develop for it. But it would go faster if say... starlabs, purism, system76, pine, riscv companies, FLOSS peeps would collaborate more effectively. They do to some extent, but don't often push in the same direction.
One major problem is the quality of documentation of interfaces. One of those boring things most don't want to do without a paycheck. Despite decades of experience with Linux I don't (yet) know where to start with wayland, dbus, gstreamer, gtk, etc. A book that pulled all this together for developers would be a big enabler. Think it would need to be sponsored as it won't be sustainable on its own.
I think this doesn't leave enough blame at more technical people embracing the same platforms as normies. After years of bulletin boards and forums where people built up small communities online, everyone migrated to behemoths that actively undercut any chance of that kind of community (examples including Facebook's restrictive interfaces and aggressive push to merge personal and online lives, Twitter's character limit, Reddit's tree-based ranked discussion structure or its obliteration of any iota of personalisation to profiles). Even with the current BlueSky boom it's wild that so many techies tried to persevere with Twitter in the last few years (the boosting of subscribers to the top of all replies should've been instant death).
The few forums I was on back then that actually survived that mass migration are _still_ around and some of the only fun parts of the internet.
not an expert at all but maybe if ipv6 was embraced it'd result in people returning to doing a lot more grassroots stuff and just by being fun it'd massively challenge the grimness of the last 10 or so years of an increasingly restrictive online experience.
To further subdivide the techie contingent, lots of them have no problem using Windows even though Linux/FLOSS has been viable for a decade or two. So even most techies don't care about the problem.
I think that's very much an insider's view, the sentence is in particular funny because "cyberpunk" is not exactly a term of endearment. Mike Pondsmith and William Gibson are hardly disenchanted Zoomers or Millennials. I think Google still does seem a bit cyberpunk, and I don't mean it as a compliment.
I think the John Barlow, cyberlibertarian school of thought had always more to do with what's later been dubbed the "Californian Ideology" rather than technology per se. I don't think it was ever a mainstream view.
I don't think an embrace of cyberpunk ideas, whatever those are, was entirely mainstream, but the idea that the world was opening up, the internet interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it, and it would help bring down dictatorships, was definitely in the ether.
Generally speaking, if you place anything under close scrutiny, you will catch yourself (assuming you're human) like the ouroboros - the serpent consuming its own tail. You can't escape the flaws of your own perception and your nature.
All other things, including praising technology and envisioning a better future, are just the tip of the iceberg. People will never find solace outwards unless they turn their focus in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, this is impossible for society in our capitalist, highly materialistic world.
Please spare me from this bullshit. You are free to go back to that cave.
I'm excited for what the future brings, and I'm still amazed by how sudden jump there was of ability of LLMs. It's still crazy to me.
In the 90s, while I didn't believe tech would bring about a "utopia", I did believe tech would be a very positive, powerful force in human society. The Internet was supposed to "bring us all together" when it made it easy for us to communicate without boundaries. It would cause the fall of authoritarian regimes as societies had freer access to knowledge.
In a major sense, though, the exact opposite has happened. Social media has torn us apart. Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism. And most importantly, from a personal perspective, I so often see tech not about improving the human condition, but how we can better addict people through dopamine scrolling, or insert yourself as a middleman in "winner take all" economics. In short, I've become intensely disillusioned about the positive power of tech, and that's a tough pill to swallow after dedicating the majority of my career to tech (and, transparently, I see the role I played as often part of the problem). I'm just very sad with how it all turned out.
My bigger fear of tech is how it’ll marginalize people economically and centralize power. We see it already with companies like Amazon. But the coming wave of automation over everything - manufacturing, entertainment, etc - may be far more damaging than even social media. Unfortunately right now it seems our political and economic systems are completely inadequate in preparing for this.
Can you describe how transparency over government has increased (by social media)?
Ok so I'm curious about this.
In the broad strokes, did you think tech would be a major facilitator to things like unionization drives, campaigns to fight for and protect civil liberties, everyday citizens organizing together to gain a greater representation in their local government, etc.?
Or, again in the broad strokes, did you think tech would largely replace the need for these kinds of activities?
From what I remember everything about that decade was full of unrealistic optimism (end of history etc)
I think this is blaming the outgroup. 'We' are the problem, too.
But on the other hand, this isn't about me trying to persuade you, or you trying to persuade me. This is about a corporation (pick one) with a revenue base that matches many countries, spending a good chunk of that revenue on the best persuasive techniques and technologies the human race can produce, microtargeting each one of us to click the link, and draw from our eyeballs seconds of our time. The cost to us is small, that the side-effect is warping our perceptions of the world is something the corporation doesn't care about.
We're living in that shadow of H.P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones - vast, inhuman things that reshape us and our world without any care or understanding.
The positive power we were attributing to the technology itself back in the '90s was really just the expression of the intentions and worldviews of the people who were using it back then, which was a self-selected and decisively non-representative sample of humanity.
After a couple of decades of tech usage expanding more and more broadly, we've seen a regression to the mean that puts Eternal September to shame, and we've discovered that the mean really is quite mean.
A lot of people disillusioned by this are unfortunately not disillusioned enough, and instead of taking things to their logical conclusion (that utopianism applied to the world at large is not just unattainable, but destructive, and improvement only comes from fostering a great plurality of local contexts so that at least some of them can diverge positively from the global mean) they want to transfer their utopian aspirations to some other global project.
Unfortunately, that other project is often politics, and if you think that failed utopianism in the tech world has had a bad result, just wait until you see the level of havoc that failed utopianism in the political sphere can wreak! Well, we don't have to wait for it -- the past hundred years of history provide copious evidence.
The pieces are in place, it's just nobody has put them together.
AI /will/ be a net-benefit for humanity, even if it stopped progress as it currently is.
He just... snapped, and there were guns within reach, so he used them. Were the guns not so easy to acquire and use, he might not have committed so many murders (or any at all), simply because they would have been too much work and risk. This, by the way, is why I'm in favor of repealing the Second and enacting comprehensive gun bans and mandatory licensing and registration of firearms -- you know, like civilized countries do.
Now as to how this relates to the monkey torture videos. Yes, there might have been people who sought this material out in the past, but the internet put it within easy reach. The videos were shot in Indonesia and made available to Western clients through brokers in the UK (two of whose arrest was described in the article I read). Before the internet, this kind of international coordination in order to satisfy someone's sick deranged urge would have been prohibitively expensive and difficult. Only very wealthy, dedicated perverts would have been able to even contemplate arranging it. And maybe some of those would have been dissuaded because the slow, risky communications put them at greater risk of getting caught. Maybe monkey-torture fetish was such a niche interest before the internet that it would have been difficult to find other monkey-torture fetishists, and hence put together a large enough market to justify producing these videos in the first place. But with the internet, it's easier than ever to find like-minded monkey-torture fetishists, form discussion groups and the like, and associate with each other in sufficient density that there's a market large enough to justify going into business producing and selling monkey-torture videos into that market.
That sounds like a story of its own. Would you care to share the story about the corruption she saw? We so often hear the stories about companies hiking prices for lifesaving medicine fo no apparent reason other than profit, but it would be interesting to hear what she saw from the inside?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8315858/#:~:text=Pe....
The pharma and medical device companies sponsor the conferences that all our doctors attend every year.
The most substantial corruption in the health/life sciences/medicine world is simple profit motive at hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and insurers, and especially when those three entities combine into mega "pay-vidors" like UHG.
This sounds like it's better to work within the system rather than try to overthrow it. You need more than a little angst to completely reset cultural norms. Maybe you're optimizing for a local maxima instead of realizing the true potential of saying "fuck everything" and replacing it.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, not saying the correct response to all adversity is to plot a revolution. But my point is sincere - sometimes it is the best thing to burn it to the ground and start over. Private healthcare seems like a pretty good example of a system that should be abolished rather than massaged (assuming your goal is better healthcare at a more affordable price) and we have decades of data from our own country and others to corroborate that.
You can be positive and optimistic about big scale societal changes that throw out all the established notions. Likewise, you can also be cynical and jaded about small scale changes that just aim to incrementally improve things.
Aiming for big changes doesn't necessarily imply you have to be cynical. In fact I think you're more likely to be able to achieve big changes if you're optimistic about them.
The same goes for the article's author. Sounds like they're shocked—SHOCKED—that private companies are just out to make money, and don't actually have our best interests at heart. The real issue is that they bought into the fantasy in the first place. But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world? If it will have no effect, why let it get you worked up at all? If it will have an effect, go out and do it.
As the author said:
> Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
It's not changing the world, but I just do what I can to not contribute to it. And if any alternatives do pop up I do try to support them, sometimes financially.
The internet's outskirts are emptier than ever with this centralization, but I have made the active choice to de-activate pretty much all the mainstream stuff and use extensions to minimize their ability to track me. So knowing this did change my behavior on how I interact with the internet.
Same story with "tear it all down" vs. "work within the system".
I continue to be fascinated by how easy people priorities profit over doing the right thing. Sometimes they don't even stand to personally gain all that much, they do it for the benefit of some soulless company.
If you aren't actively making things worse for the general public I'll even let the sole focus on profit slide, but how can you justify to yourself going out and actively causing suffering.
Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.
Not to mention, their justifications are much more legitimate than anything advertising industry could come up with, and yet, marketing is a respectable occupation these days for some reason, and ad industry funds everything.
Easy to say this, but these two aspects contradict each other. You become jaded and cynical precisely because your potential to better humanity is locked down in beauracracy that has the opposite interest. One can only fight back so much against the tidal wave that was setup decades before you were born.
I'd even go so far to say that the ones who do rise to the challenge need to be jaded, and channel that into overcoming the wave. Being cynical means understanding a need to deeply understand every little action, no matter how simple and otherwise "objectively good" it is in the short run.
It's how you use that cynicism that matters, not the state of being cynical.
One key mistake the author makes is misjudging the average person
>They are people who need to game the attention economy by increasingly disrespectful and shocking content, gore, rage bait, dehumanizing pranks17, extreme consumerism like huge shopping hauls, sloppy large mukbangs, shredding lamborghinis18, gambling streams and websites19, game shows20 and more
If your tastes are more sophisticated, you may see the profusion of relatively puerile content on the internet as "gaming the attention economy" - but how do you know the average person doesn't just like watching mukbangs? And why shouldn't they?
In my view - you should get comfortable with the fact that people have different preferences to yours and judge based on outcomes rather than aesthetics.
The author complains about racism. Maybe it's easier to be racist nowadays. On the other hand, in the decades before the internet we had more race related shootings, bombings, etc. Maybe, net net, it's a good thing if the people who would've been forming a militia in the woods 30 years ago are instead posting racist memes on X.
Likewise it's harder to make a blog or your own website today. But, much easier to blow up on X, TikTok, YouTube etc. I just don't see the issue here. We have far more content creators and similar now than in the past.
None of the complaints seem that meaningful to me. Technology improves. Things aren't perfect (yet) - but they might be in the future. We have greater access to information, communication, and intelligence every year. If these trends persist we will use the improvements to enhance all other aspects of life (as we are already doing). The future where power comes from solar, nuclear, or fusion, physical labor comes from machines, cognitive labor comes from AI, material comes from space travel, advances in biology/physics/chemistry radically extend our life and health spans is not only possible, it is visibly approaching.
I just don't see what the issue is. If you turn off mukbangs it's not like the viewers are going to read Dostoevsky or invent a cure for cancer or something. They are going to do their next most preferred activity - watch reality TV until you turn that off, gossip with their friends, etc.
Some people like to do the class of activity that mukbangs are a member of. Rather than try to "cure" them we should make sure they have access to an unlimited stream of mukbangs - cause why not? In the short term they'll be satisfied, we'll be rich, and technological advancement will continue - until we're all in a VR heaven on a server in the Dyson Sphere in the sky.
Besides excuses.
Anyone who thinks ANY publicly traded company acts in YOUR best interest (unless YOU are serious shareholder) is in the words of my 11-year old kid - delulu :)
Technology changes, people don't.
I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.
I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.
The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.
Put a comment in the source to say you did it on purpose so you don’t scare them off immediately.
gopher://sdf.org
gemini://sdf.org and gemini://gem.sdf.org
I already moved my personal WEB Site there, and there is interesting content there. Maybe "we" should migrate there and leave the LOL cats to the WEB :)
I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone.
Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech.
Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture
These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
[1] - https://techwontsave.us/episode/189_elon_musk_unmasked_origi...
But I'm not sure I can relate to the criticism you're levying here, because I don't expect that anyone's motivations would ever be "for the betterment of the average person", nor trust anyone who pretended to be so motivated.
Society improves when people create positive externalities for others as they pursue their own benefit -- those who deliberately apply their own subjective notion of "benefit" onto strangers they don't know and to whom they aren't accountable will often do much more harm than good.
My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people. I wrote a few books motivated by this, and then when I became a software engineer I build a few projects motivated by the same.
Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Not saying that they did the job - but that won't stop me from trying. Why I do it is a whole other discussion, but if I'm motivated by this, then there must be others, since I can't be THAT unique.
One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
I'm afraid no offense is on offer (and it's rude to take things that aren't offered to you).
But to the point, anyone who said such a thing is either (a) lying, or (b) is projecting their own notion of what's better/best onto other people without those other people's involvement. Neither case reflects a trustworthy individual -- the first is motivated by malice, and the second is motivated by arrogance.
> My free time is dedicated to projects that I believe have the potential to improve the world for the greatest number of people.
Would you stop working on those projects if you were convinced they wouldn't improve the world for the greatest number of people, but were still interesting and useful to you?
If the people who you thought they were going to benefit didn't agree with you, and didn't want to use what you were offering them, would you accept that, or would you resent them and begin contriving ways to get them using it anyway?
Do you acknowledge that there's at least a little bit of arrogance inherent in having any beliefs about what's better for other people without those other people's own input?
> Examples include messaiah.ai, consciousness.social, multizoa.com, and dex.thesacred.xyz (though that one may not be functional anymore)
Again meaning no offense, but I'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I find all of these to be more than a little bit bizarre and creepy, and I think there's a great deal of hubris involved in presenting your LLM chatbot as unironically messianic.
> One of the reasons why I became a software engineer was to be able to bring to life projects that I believe have the potential to lead to "betterment for the average person," so...joke's on you :p
A lot of us did that. The OP article is precisely about how those exact intentions of a couple of decades ago have had quite different outcomes to what was intended.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
He can just direct his supporters to violently attack opposition:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
You ever heard of a Heckler's Veto?
It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.
Which Musk didn't do? Are all the people who said "Trump is a threat to democracy" and similar statements responsible for the multiple assassination attempts against him?
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
"Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come."
"But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."
It strikes me more as someone trying to give fascism a formal definition as a way to use it as an ideological cudgel in arguments than any attempt to define it based pn observation of multiple actual fascist states and political movements.
Some call what they fear to come is fascism, but I think it will be inaccurate. Oligarchism maybe. Or something new.
a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.
b) Has constantly promoted false stories about immigrants, black people, trans people, women etc. The narrative being that the US is a zero sum game where in order for non-white males to succeed white-males must lose.
c) I run Twitter business accounts which are post-only and every single one shifted hard towards showing ultra-right wing political content in the For You feed. There is no doubt that the platform was used as a propaganda tool during the last election.
Hmm, you must have missed when the Department of Justice sent protestors to Florida to pressure a local district attorney into pressing charges against a very clearly innocent man. And if you disagree with the very clearly innocent part then you definitely didn't watch the trial and missed the eyewitness reports and the medical reports.
https://theweek.com/articles/462236/did-justice-department-i...
Just that they provided support to those protests which is part of their remit i.e. to reduce conflict by encouraging dialog, mediation as opposed to protesting etc: https://www.justice.gov/crs
Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.
"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.
Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.
For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).
> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.
From my perspective, business ruins everything it touches, whether right away or slowly over time through enshittification.
My own general explanation of why everything sucks is more like this: we don't know how to stop. The market can't stop itself from over-optimizing, over-exploiting.
The evolution of any product, service, company or technology, can be to a first approximation plotted as a bell curve:
(Total value includes not just direct benefit to customers/users, but also how it enables others to build new products/science/businesses/etc. on it.)The market always goes all the way to the right. What it should do, what we need it to do, is to stop at the peak of the bell curve. Alas, there is no mechanism that would get people to say, "yeah, this is the best it could be, let's go do something else"; the market demands they move to the right, all the way to diminishing returns.
The 90s nerds were fucking malevolent. They’re the ones that built the dystopia we are currently experiencing.
I know, I was one of them and I had a first row seat for a lot of this stuff.
Related: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556
Private discords, away from the normies.
Then again, adult life has a way of sucking nerdiness out of people, so maybe OP's right in a way.
Funny, I do just that, despite having a bunch of pets and a full-time job - I follow at least 30 game-specific discords. You must be thinking of people compulsively checking notifications like a social media addict?
I feel sorry for anyone who uses Discord like that. Thankfully, you don't have to since many communities now have mini-wikis inside of the Discord to organize the FAQ/common knowledge.
People come and go, but its wild how the community spirit largely remains, even with significant changes in the lifestyle of the people that have been frequenting the network for a large segment of that time.
anyway, the network is:
* ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/darkscience
* https://darkscience.net
* https://www.darkscience.net/webirc/
You can watch the entire conference here. I want to disclaim that not every attendee and talk is nerdy. It's more that this is a space where nerds are thriving.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2306676590 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2307512869
Ah, discord, the proprietary service that demands a phone number just to be able to read anything (so I've never been able to).
Basically the exact opposite of IRC.
1. Fear and embarrassment. Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous, today you constantly hear about doxxing. People were also less aware of the consequences.Even if it's unlikely for some random person, that doesn't help introverts.
2. Outnumbered. Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird. Today, "new" and "random" are filled with spam, and "popular" is filled with posts upvoted by "normies". Weird posts and posters are still here, but they're obscured by the noise.
3. Feedback. People imitate what they see, and feel more comfortable following trends. When "normal" people see weird posts, they become weird and make weird posts. When weird people see weird posts, they feel safer and make weird posts. When normal people see non-weird posts, they make non-weird posts. When weird people don't see weird posts, they feel embarrassed making weird posts, so post non-weird or not at all.
I think 3 is the biggest factor, caused by 2. As other people mentioned, "weird" people are still on servers that are private or otherwise hidden from the mainstream (preventing 2 and 3). 1 is probably not a big factor, instead it explains why less people show their face or post identifying details.
What years are you referring to when you say "back then"? In the early 90s, which was "the old Internet" for me, the best contributors to discussions on the newsgroups I followed (comp.lang.c, etc.) weren't anonymous; they were well-educated people who used their real names, including academics whose signatures included URLs like http://example.edu/~jsmith. And their posts weren't weird, at least not on the newsgroups I followed.
These people aren't "weird" in a bad way, but in a "different than the average (less-educated, less tech-oriented) person" way.
The anonymity part probably isn't correct. But I get the impression people back then were a lot more open, at least hearing about dating sites, chat-roulette, old YouTube channels, and internet friends who met IRL in the 90s/2000s. Although I know a lot of people post on Facebook and Twitter, so maybe that hasn't changed either.
I remember debates on the talk.origins usenet newsgroup with very highly educated priests, some at the highest levels of the church. These people wouldn't give me the time of day now!
In some sense it's the same filter that a University admissions process applies, and companies like Google try to reproduce.
I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.
Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.
> Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable
For me it was tech in the 90’s and 00’s so I think the real explanation is even simpler: we grew up.
It’s very easy to be pure of intention and intellectual curiosity when mom fills the fridge.
Even the major “news for nerds” site in the early years of the new millennium, Slashdot, where there was awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
I don't think it was a change. Both things existed in parallel, with a little bit of crossover. The startup/VC/megacorp thing just won out, that's all. And nobody ever really doubted that it would, once it was visible.
I do think politics has gotten worse in the "post-truth era". And tech certainly enabled that. It's hard to blame anyone in particular, though. One thing we see in the show "Connections" is that it's always hard to predict the consequences of new technology. Even seeing it coming, it's not fair to believe tech workers should have saved us from the rightward swing.
I don't think that was the case. Go and read the stories of the founders of companies like Apple, Atari, Adobe and others from that era and you will find they all took investments to get started.
In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything.
So here we are.
Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
Waiting for them to go after the entire private school system. Any day now...
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/US-Department-of-Education
Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.
I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.
The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.
There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.
Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.
My bad, I'm not looking to contest that part, there are definitely serious issues with the school system. I just don't think very much if any of it boils down to "there was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are heroes" as if the kids are intentionally being dumb because it's cool / peer pressure. It's easy to be dumb - especially when we have so many distractions available to us - but I wouldn't call it cool or pin it on some kind of peer pressure thing.
But yes I agree with you, the school system has its troubles (the stats obviously speak for themselves). Funding and teacher pay are probably the biggest factor, though I'd also include classroom distractions (phones, basically), a lack of ability to enforce order in the classroom, and probably parental support as well, off the top of my head.
There was always such conspiracy, but never talked about at such a scale. But not too much of this has to do with techies outside of "tech made it easy for conspirators to gather".
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/the-u-s-is-losing-its-compet...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/most-amer...falling from 1st to 12th in 6 years in competitiveness is even more concerning. Maybe COVID really did ruin attention span.
Some nerds were autocrats and sleazebags but they just needed to gain dominance for those traits to appear.
Real bullies knew how to make it fun for everybody, so that even the person being bullied had to laugh at it. Nerd bullies are just anti-social and boring.
Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people?
Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power?
Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all.
So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.
Capitalism increasingly incentivizes (and normalizes) deception as it struggles to squeeze the remaining profits, since the rest have trended toward zero as Marx warned they would. From this stems "enshitification" and other perverse incentives like influencer culture, etc.
An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available. All structures of organization would be transparent, and commonly agreed upon goals would take precedence above all else, instead of the goals dictated by the .01 or .001 percent.
https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
Total surveillance?
Or only all technical information?
But transparency of all the organisations, so all the police information as well?
So the murder suspects knows, where the police is looking for them? (Or won't there be a need for a police like organisations because murder is also somehow solved?)
My point is, devil is in the details. And Marx is not someone I would go for inspiration. Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Also, I really don't believe that the problem is a human flaw. I don't want to change humans. (It happens naturally anyway).
But I do believe, that we can create better societies, that serves us better, the way we are.
It is just hard, to create them from scratch for various reasons, but many people are trying and some quite succesful.
> Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Marxism offers a timeless framework and does not require subscriptions or other grifts. That the latter exists does not invalidate the former. It's just example 100539 of what my previous reply was getting at.
> I don't want to change humans.
Humans deserve better opportunities than most presently have, and than most will seemingly have on our current trajectory into late stage capitalist madness. We should acknowledge/embrace our flaws to see commonality (which is different than being ashamed, proud of, or profiting off of them).
Just like the bible, a holy work of truth, you just have to believe in?
"Crime would be a fraction of what it is now due to a massive shifting in incentives and societal landscape"
Because as far as I know, all the marxist experiments did not result in less crime, or corruption, rather the opposite. So why should I believe, that the next marxist experiments will work out any better? Was there a major update recently, that fixed the flaws?
(To clarify, to me the choice is not at all between capitalism and marxism, humans are capable of a bit more flexibility)
In ways which are commonly agreed upon as useful, yes. In the case of the bible it cannot be interpreted literally. But abstract concepts, like that every human contains the capacity for good and evil, absolutely. In fact that's what we're discussing.
> Because as far as I know, all the marxist experiments did not result in less crime, or corruption, rather the opposite. So why should I believe, that the next marxist experiments will work out any better? Was there a major update recently, that fixed the flaws?
Assuming you aren't drinking the sinophobia Kool Aide, which is an admittedly big assumption, have you looked at what China has been able to accomplish in recent decades? Not perfect obviously, nothing is, but they're in different league compared to the crumbling empire of the US.
I see. Well, I strongly disagree to the arbitary dividing of the world in good and evil. In fact, the whole "capitalism is the root of all evil" reminds me strongly of what was the devils doing before. All the bad just happens, because there is this evil force.
In my opinion, this is good ideology for controlling people - we are the good side - they are evil ones. And don't you dare question our side - then you are evil.
Still a surprise, that you see china as a positive force here.
That's not what I said though. It's dividing chunks of time within an individual. There is no purely good or evil person. Humans contain the capacity for both, and how it manifests is mostly a function of their environment at any point in time combined with the historical context that got them to that point. Look up dialectical/historical materialism to understand how this comes to be.
> Still a surprise, that you see china as a positive force here.
I cited it not as a "pure good" like you're attempting to coerce from my words. Instead I cited it as an example of a group of people with a Marxist background doing some things better than capitalism (and some things worse).
Those nerds from 90s became autocrats and sleezbags of today.
Well yeah nerds that did not get shitloads of money like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezps did not turn into autocrats ;) but yeah money change people.
We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.
This.
There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around.
Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know.
Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.
Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better.
But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device.
People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing.
Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.
I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
Never had this. Maybe a little bit about GNU and Linux; that's about it. Good to see someone sobering up.
OSS is founded as much on what it rejects as what it embraces.
Specifically, "Digital Inclusion" was a term I remember from before smartphones became popular, and how important it was to get everyone on board. Well, smartphones were what brought internet to them, and this progress was celebrated.
With Social Media it was a bit more complicated, as it only became accessible to the general population of poorer countries at the same time it started receiving criticism internationally. They don't remember Myspace.
(EDIT: Maybe you're talking about the article in general, but the paragraph the text you quoted comes from is about smartphones, social media and internet)
That is why saner countries have real consumer protection laws that make sure prices can be compared without a calculator.
GNOME is a great example of this -- they're constantly removing functionality over the objections of their actual userbase in order to implement features that fit the speculative needs they project onto people who don't -- and likely never will -- use the software.
Information wanted to be free, for the first decade of the web's existence. Projects like Linux, Wikipedia, the www itself. These open, free ways of doing things were proving a case for optimism.
They were so much faster & better than corporate alternatives that you couldn't help but expecting that open projects had the competitive advantage.
Meanwhile, online culture was very different. There was room for morons and blowhards, touts, spammers and occasional shill... but those people didn't run the show.
My GitHub is very rusty, but I'm delaying Open source plans until I have a fully time job. It's just not worth it for me otherwise to try and be this FOSS advocate while I can't keep things stable in my own backyard.
What if it's empty because you don't want to feed even more code into the deep learning grinder?
Hell, what if it's empty simply because you're selfish and you don't like sharing?
• All the world's people will effortlessly be able to communicate and collaborate together? Surely this will bring about an age of open-mindedness and harmony!
• The bulk of the world's information will go digital, and become accessible to anyone? Surely this will relegate ignorance and superstition to problems of the past!
I've never considered myself an optimist, but if someone back then had predicted the internet we have today, I would have written them off as a hopeless cynic.
That was the first mistake.
Free products don't have a "competitive advantage". They destroy market segments. "Free" is the area denial tactical nuke[0] of business. "Free" is the singularity of business models - as price approaches 0, math starts to break out, and the local fabric of the market unravels. "Free" turns competition into a race for growth.
Being "open source" is optional here. Which is why it's not F/OSS that won on the general market, "free with ads" did. F/OSS is mostly used as a weapon to deny market segments to competitors, forcing them to either leave or play the same "free"/growth game. This is used both offensively, to break into existing market segments, as well as defensively, to "pull the ladder behind you".
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salted_bomb
People will pay when it gets them something they value, but the moment someone offers that for free, completion on price of that thing becomes impossible. Instead, competition moves to ancillary aspects of a thing, such as e.g. delivery, or integrations, or lifestyle marketing.
Case in point: neither Amazon nor Audible compete with libraries on just letting you read books - they compete on delivery (ease of access).
"Salted" or not -- it's up to supporters of free markets/capitalism to figure their shit out.
No, my point is more specific: it's that those things play with the free market about as well as NaN plays with floating point math. That by itself isn't bad; the market isn't the best answer to everything. However, in case of F/OSS, I wish people acknowledged that, by destroying the ability to just sell software on a free market (including software components), it's in big part responsible for today's SaaS-ified software reality.
Could you please elaborate on this or point me to a source where that exact mechanism is explained? Because this runs somewhat opposite to my experiences where FOSS was more of a desperate way to escape proprietary software, particularly OS like IBM with which you would have to wait for fixes from "the market" for days instead of being able to fix it yourself, like this article explains (in vastly superior English to mine): https://cacm.acm.org/practice/free-and-open-source-software-...
Buy a dishwasher and a washing machine.
Those mechanical techniques weren’t up to these more abstract tasks: why would it be reasonable to expect the new computational techniques to generalize immediately to these mechanical problems—much less that they’d immediately achieve better results than the time-tested incumbent techniques?
Although, of course, such work is very much underway, e.g. Physical Intelligence’s splashy promo ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098236 ; 14 days ago, 218 points, 189 comments)