My Internet Mea Culpa

https://shift.newco.co/my-internet-mea-culpa-f3ba77ac3eed

by pixelcort • 9 years ago

99 81 9 years ago

shift.newco.co

The Internet was how I really learned what people really thought about others, and it wasn't a nice thing to realize but it was necessary. My whole life I was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc. It was easy when no one would say to your face that they judged you on these things. It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity.

We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened. We forgot that the traditional barriers to intercultural understanding are still there: language, tribal sentiment, political and economic power structures, etc. At the end of the day, in a democracy the majority can do anything it wants, even if what it wants is to punish the minority. The Internet has had all the failings of a total democracy in that sense.

I also love the point the author makes at the end. Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence. It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong...

neveroffensive3• 9 years ago

It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong...

I don't really understand this sentiment. If we admit that we all hold beliefs that could be wrong, isn't the ultimate conclusion radical freedom? The radical freedom of the internet isn't a result of a set of beliefs, it's the result of evicting belief and allowing all ideas to stand on their own merit.

We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened.

I think you're wrong here. The world is becoming an exponentially more peaceful and tolerant place in my experience. There is still a vocal minority which gets attention thanks to the open platform, but the overall result of this openness seems to be growing disdain for beliefs which we now know are founded in hate, not logic or science. Do you really feel that the world is in a worse place than it was in the 70's or even in 2010? In what ways?

It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity.

Genuine question, what percentage of 4chan do you believe is racist? Do you feel that racist memes genuinely come from a place of racism? What large anonymous groups do you believe consist of genuine racists? Do you consider me a racist if I make the statement, "more crime in America is committed by people with dark skin, relatively", even if I make no attempt to suggest a correlation or reason for this statistic?

denom• 9 years ago

1) Yes to ideas on the own merits, but not if those ideas ingratiate themselves vis an unwholesome, saccharine, aptitude that pits human nature against itself.

2) this is debatable, but instability is present in our political system from top to bottom which I believe is due to these transformative tech movements. We should not assume that the sun will rise tomorrow (as in some occasions it will not).

3) your discussion about 4chan lacks some precept or basis of intelligibility. Imagine a similar question as being “what percentage of a psychotic mood is racist”. It’s a non sequitor and doesn’t address the substance of the problem. Similarly, your posited question about ‘dark skin’ lacks traction for similar reasons and illustrates the baseless nature of the internet meme-culture.

AgentME• 9 years ago

Genuine question, what percentage of 4chan do you believe is racist? Do you feel that racist memes genuinely come from a place of racism?

Five years ago, I'd say a small fraction and "No", but I no longer believe either of those. The amount of vocal support for possible racist policies, celebration of politicians' racist dog-whistling, and worship of neo-Nazi figures since then was way higher than I ever expected. When it was just jokes and memes, it was easy to write off as ironic, and maybe much of it was, but real support can't be written off as ironic. Maybe the people changed over the years, or maybe it's just different people. (Maybe ironic memes drew in people that liked them unironically: "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.") Or maybe it's largely the same people, but the relationship between the internet and politics has changed since then, with people more willing to fully discuss their political ideas (including racist ones) now online.

abusoufiyan3• 9 years ago

isn't the ultimate conclusion radical freedom?

No. The belief that allowing all ideas to stand on their own merit would be inherently good is the sentiment we are questioning. Is it? Is a radically free market in terms of goods and supplies the best idea? If not, why did we think it would apply to speech and ideas? As much as we love to live in the fantasy where good speech will counter bad speech, our history of research into markets and behavioral economics should show us that marketing, the ability to control outlets of speech, etc. make it unlikely that good speech always gets an equal (or even similar) opportunity to counter bad speech).

the overall result of this openness seems to be growing disdain for beliefs which we now know are founded in hate, not logic or science.

All beliefs have some kind of fundamental assumption taken on faith, even the ones you will claim are founded on logic and science. Even the idea of science as definitive proof is based on the fundamental belief that the peer review method of scientific correction and checking cannot be coopted or subverted (and yet examples show that it can).

Do you really feel that the world is in a worse place than it was in the 70's or even in 2010?

No but why does this matter? It doesn't mean every choice we made in the past was right. If we had chosen a centrally controlled, heavily censored Internet rather than the radically free and open model we live with now, still the world would be a better place than in the 70s.

kbenson• 9 years ago

Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence.

The biggest problem I've found with people that purport to be rationalists (and I include myself) is the propensity to believe they have enough inputs to make definitive statements, when in truth they are just discounting the unknown unknowns. When dealing with people, even on the individual level but it's much worse in groups, the complex motivations and constraints make every statement along the lines of "a rational person would do X" sound hopelessly naive.

That some core beliefs are not examined or are believed to be the truth without evidence does not surprise me, even if it still makes me sad.

opportune• 9 years ago

I was thinking about this today. It is sad how far people will go to rationalize beliefs for the sake of simplicity. It seems people prefer simplicity because it makes the world make sense: people are uncomfortable with nuance because it makes the world so complex and uncertain, and in a way, scary.

I think it's the same line of reasoning that draws people towards certain conspiracies (e.g. lizard people, Jews controlling the world). People want to feel like the world can be explained in just a few sentences. Otherwise, I think people feel utterly helpless.

l33tbro2• 9 years ago

I think you may be subject to a cognitive bias where you overestimate how representative racist, sexist, etc people are of the larger population.

Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors.

This isn't to say there are not depressingly high numbers of these kinds of people, but the conclusion you've arrived at comes from a typical group attribution error.

abusoufiyan3• 9 years ago

My saying "It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity." does not mean I am overestimating how many people this online group represents in the real world. Even if I underestimated it, it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever.

"Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors."

Why then, was this not something realized by the "prophets" of the Internet 2.0? That's what the author is asking. What conclusion did I arrive at which came from error? Please kindly point that out to me.

jhiska2• 9 years ago

My whole life I was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc.

As usual in American discussions, class is forgotten.

A heterosexual, "white", cisman can also be working class or bourgeois, but for some reason -- probably because of the annihilation of Marxism in the US -- it's never brought up and this despite its modern relevance screaming at us.

Without class, one can't understand why Trump got the vote of so many working class people. Ethnicity (Caucasians are ethnic people from the Caucus region; modern biology only accepts one race and that is the human race; "white" is a culture, not a "race" or ethnicity, since Middle-Eastern Caucasians aren't considered "white"; "white" is better defined as a Caucasian of European origin that accepts Western culture), sexuality, sex and gender, religion... None of these explain the working class animosity towards the "ultra-wealthy elites" that are "out of touch with the common person" or why the promise of bringing back working class jobs was so tempting. Trump, while being a liar and actually damaging to the working class, played to their class heartstrings.

Social justice without class consciousness creates injustice, and that injustice is being exploited by the extreme alt-right.

One can't also understand why Bernie Sanders was as appealing as Trump unless one understands that both Bernie and Trump appealed to anti-bourgeois sentiment and both promised to help the working class. It was class rebellion, and unfortunately it turned out as badly as it did because Bernie was never put on the voting ballots.

malvosenior4• 9 years ago

I don’t think this author speaks for a lot of people in tech. His viewpoint seems to be from a very narrow subculture, mainly Web 2.0 era social networking.

Some of us have had a lifelong passion for technology and are actually happy and excited about the current state of the industry (and always have been).

If you don’t like people disagreeing with you on Twitter, just turn it off. Don’t claim that it’s part of some apparatus (that the author feels he helped invent) that somehow brought out the worst in humanity. He should feel happy he can now get exposed to views outside of his bubble.

QAPereo2• 9 years ago

Are you really arguing that social media isn’t optimized to create bubbles?

notacoward• 9 years ago

Social media are optimized for maximum engagement. If people engage more in bubbles, they'll get bubbles. If people engage more by reaching out and exploring beyond their bubbles, the platforms will facilitate that instead. Don't blame the mirror.

mr_spothawk• 9 years ago

(that the author feels he helped invent)

agreed... article felt like maximum ego-stroking, minimal thinking.

to my mind, the conversation about where "the web" went off the rails ends with the dopamine-hook. I worked with a team building game experiences 5 years ago, it was all we could think about. good examples of it were everything we wanted to emulate. it was disgusting...

mea culpa.

for the children growing up today, whose parents put their baby photos on blast all day... there will be a reckoning.

i wonder what that will look like.

dgreensp• 9 years ago

It's not Web 2.0-era social networking, it's a kind of tech utopianism that's been around for decades. I agree that the article doesn't make a lot of sense if you never believed that the Internet was going to automatically bring about (or be) a utopia. It's also reasonable to argue that the Internet, for all its flaws, succeeds at being an agent of social progress.

skywhopper• 9 years ago

It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on Twitter?" It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech?"

But I don't think even _that's_ the right question. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have built so much trust in algorithm and API and machine learning, and no one stopped to ask how careful they needed to be with turning over so much power to a computer program that can and will be gamed by malicious actors. Hate speech and conspiracy theories and fraud can now be amplified a millionfold, and the vehicles by which it's happening were not prepared to deal with the implications. And they continue to double-down on the "more machine learning will fix it" self-delusion.

malvosenior4• 9 years ago

It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on Twitter?"

No, it’s 100% about this. You do know that violent crime is at an all time low, right (at least in the US)? There is no problem other than the audience for technology is using it in a way not approved of by some if its creators (the OP, not me for instance).

If you’re not unhappy with the state of the industry, these think pieces lamenting it read as really self-centered and out of touch.

nautilus122• 9 years ago

>how much real-world badness has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically

This is just the age old question of free will. Everyone could be locked in a metal cage and there would be no murder but would this be the best state for humanity? You have to take the good with the bad...

taneq2• 9 years ago

It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech?"

And once you've made the jump from "speech should be free" to "speech (that I condone) should be free", you've made a big step towards fascism.

barrkel5• 9 years ago

I'm afraid I suspect that it's revealing a bunch of latent biases as the web has grown to reach people from different socio-economic layers and cultural milieus. These people were always there; we just didn't hear them, because we had a pyramidal media structure controlled by elites.

One theory I've heard is that the nation state is over, and the Internet killed it. Demos, the shared group of people that makes up a voting democracy and validates democratic choice as a group will, is breaking down. People are starting to identity at global levels by social class, education and political outlook, rather than national identity. People no longer participate in the same national narrative. I think this would have happened eventually if we only had newsgroups and chain emails, it's just happened faster because we have easier to use software.

I don't think some unholy union of state and corporate control of free speech is the answer. If anything, it's a path to civil war, eventually.

rbanffy2• 9 years ago

we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech

We thought people were better, that with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government put on our heads. We never imagined people would deliberately poison our watering hole.

dvanduzer2• 9 years ago

I think this author is pretty clear about what it means to be culpable, and why a "lifelong passion for technology" is no substitute for ethical analysis, and introspective skepticism of our enthusiasm.

I have had a lifelong passion for technology, and I am not happy or excited about the current state of the industry, nor am I doom and gloom pessimistic and advocating a Neo Luddite approach.

The author is talking about Nazis. Not just people who disagree with you. You are wrong, and I hope, as Alexis Ohanian did, that you admit the error of your ways.

tomxor• 9 years ago

The author is talking about Nazis. Not just people who disagree with you. You are wrong, and I hope, as Alexis Ohanian did, that you admit the error of your ways.

No you are wrong. Nasty people exist, you are blaming X technology for making it worse, what about mobile phones, cars, microwave ovens, shoes... where does it end, nasty people exist, stop fucking blaming technology and try to understand why they are nasty if you care.

SCAQTony• 9 years ago

With great advantages come equal disadvantages. I agree, the author does not speak for a lot of people in tech and there lies the problem. The fact that some people who work in tech are thoroughly excited by disruption and automation is disturbing. It certainly does not excite photographers, musicians, gallerists, truck-drivers, customer service workers, industrial workers and 50% of the public who does not have the IQ to work in tech.

Look what high frequency trading has done to "Main Street. In fact look what Amazon is doing to Main Street. Then there is the Dark web... How do you think the opioid crisis which has lowered life expectancy in the US for two years in a row got that lethal? It's not by by street dealers on a corner but rather through online purchasing.

Yes tech is mad, phat, awesome but the consequences are catching up with it.

darkr• 9 years ago

I enjoyed this article, particularly as someone who tried and failed to complete Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable” this year.

If the book had been written in 1996, it would have been cute. Unfortunately it was written/released in 2016; the level of naivety displayed was shocking. Page after page of techno-utopian stream-of-consciousness futurist masterbation, without so much as a fleeting thought given to social or political repercussions.

As a writer, he struck me as either a deeply cynical person, or as someone with no understanding of humanity at all.

ep103• 9 years ago

I think you could make an argument for the exact opposite. No, we have not reached the gifts my father or grandfather thought the internet would bring to society. For every hope that widespread communication would bring understanding among the populace and bring power to people instead of the elite, we now have a bot army or fake news infrastructure working to oppose those ideals.

But I think these problems, and the problems the author points to, are the result of the current, pre-internet world order attempting to impose itself on the modern web, not the other way around.

We've already seen the massive effects of the internet on the populace over the last 15 years or so, and I think a lot of those changes have been both quiet, and genuinely good for people (How many things are common knowledge now, that were never reported on the news, as a quick example?). What we're seeing now is the empire strikes back, as established organizations attempt to impose themselves back on this newly connected world before they go the way of the music industry. Whether this is done by manipulating people online, walling off sections of the internet, flooding the internet with propaganda/tracking/advertising, or simply removing the open nature of the internet in entirety (Net Neutrality), the drive appears to always be the same: large pre-internet organizations imposing traditional order on a new medium. And I think it is these efforts that are responsible for the majority of issues the author raises.

Though that's not to say the internet itself doesn't have a fair share of problems. But even where the internet seems at its worst, I think the problems still primarily come from traditional societal organizations, and it is they, not the internet, that should take the blame and be the focus of change. Let's take the surprisingly large influence of racism and fascism that appears to exist online as an example, easily one of the worst aspects of the internet.

I think prevalence of hate speech online exists for two major reasons. The first and largest driving force, is that the internet has revealed that outside of the internet, there are essentially no actually truly-free, anonymous, free speech places in a person's life. Even online, the number of places where one can state whatever they would like, to their hearts content, without having those thoughts potentially affect their daily life, are extremely rare and need to be sought out. Is it any surprise, then, that the people who seek out such forums are often those who are upset at the end of the day, and feel a need to spit some vitriol? Or that the users of such forums specifically focus saying things they know they could not say in any other aspect of their life?

I fail to see this as a shortcoming of the internet, and see it more as an indictment of society at large. Perhaps if there were more places where one can truly speak out at the end of a day, and be heard but not judged or discriminated against, less people would be willing to rage alone against an empty screen. But even if you reject this idea, then the alternative to me seems worse. Because the alternative is that we have to accept that the average person is not capable, or should not be allowed, to navigate accountability-free communication, and society will need to be built accordingly going forward. Hopefully I don't need to point out the obvious downside to embracing such a philosophy.

That said, I think we did make, and are making one major design mistake, consistently online. And that is that we need to recognize that the way human society works, is that new ideas are shouted by individuals all the time, and then the silent masses judge them, mostly silently, and embrace them slowly into their day to day. On a webpage design level, this needs to be taken into account. If you are listing all comments on your webpage with equal weight, then we need to accept that you're going to get a pretty consistent distribution of comments ranging from insightful to hateful, and from thought-provoking to headache inducing. But if you allow the masses to weigh in, for example, by voting on comments, you'll find that most of the nauseating hate-filled ideas quickly fall off the radar, just like they do in real life. This is the difference between say, youtube comments and reddit comments. I would love to see websites start taking this a step further, and automatically start banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a certain threshold, just how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner after his first diatribe is found to be crazy.

neveroffensive3• 9 years ago

I would love to see websites start taking this a step further, and automatically start banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a certain threshold, just how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner after his first diatribe is found to be crazy.

Why even bother banning them. This just silences the opinion, which technically could still be valid. I'm sure at some points in history gay and civil rights activists would have been the ones getting banned.

I agree about the down-voting, but I truly feel we need to stop babying people in regard to controversial opinions. If you can't reject and ignore a blatantly racist and unfounded opinion, I'd argue you shouldn't be participating in discussions of any kind. This seems like a fundamental skill necessary to coexist in human society.

Edit:

I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to participate in discussion if you get angry and offended by an opinion. This is totally fine. However, if you need someone to step in and hold guns/ban hammers to peoples heads to exist, maybe the problem isn't with society, but with you.

thinkingemote• 9 years ago

As an early user of the Internet, I was taught "don't feed the troll". We also, once a troll was persistent and identified, banned them.

Do today's users feed them, have they not got the message I learnt, or is it that today's web tools allows a troll to be fed much easily?

I see the need for moderation, (4chan is actually heavily moderated as an example) and I also see the need for users to have the skills in identifying and not feeding trolls. Identifing trolls and actively not feeding takes effort. Perhaps todays web assumes users shouldn't expend effort and are overly moderated. Freedom Vs comfort?

empath752• 9 years ago

Do you really think that every time a minority gets on line they should just have to put up with racism directed at them? Your solution if they don’t like it is to just not go online? Do you see the environment that that creates?

CaptSpify2• 9 years ago

Yup. One of the problems we have is that we've given up on making useful tools to let people filter out what they don't want to see. We've given up on client-side filters and are telling everyone that we know what is best for them, and they should only see the comments we want them to see.

The internet absolutely needs to be filtered, but by the users themselves, not companies who are just "innocently" doing it for them. Let people decide for themselves if they want to see something or not.

zer00eyz• 9 years ago

Sigh,

Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used for good or bad.

The author lost me when they said "Massive amounts of data is still hidden behind firewalls or not online at all."

Except: Sci-hub, pirate bay, project Gutenberg, wikipedia, IMDB and even here on hacker news (I could go on but these are big ones).

Technology (in all forms) doesn't change humanity, technology enables humanity to change. It is just a tool and we have to decide what to do with it.

If for every Peter Theil we get one Ellon Musk, one space x one step toward progress then by all means I consider it a victory. This is progress, and compared to previous generations the price has been fairly low.

sooheon2• 9 years ago

Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used for good or bad.

I see this meme everywhere, and I just can't fathom it. Not all tech is perfectly neutral, just because it's "technology". An iron maiden and a wheelchair sit on different places in the good - evil spectrum.

neveroffensive22• 9 years ago

An iron maiden and a wheelchair sit on different places in the good - evil spectrum.

No they don't. They are both just objects, people are the reason the iron maiden has the connotation it dose. The iron maiden could have been a single art piece in a modern art gallery somewhere meant to symbolize the pain of heartbreak. Wheelchairs could have been devices used to intentionally cripple children by preventing them from using their legs.

We need to stop living in this fantasy land where people aren't responsible for their actions. I'm comfortable making the assertion that it is an absolute fact that guns, the internet, and all technology are neutral until applied/activated by a thinking being (AI would count as a thinking being, IMHO). What if no human had ever died from a gunshot? What if we only used them to kill cows for consumption, would guns still be inherently evil (bare with me if your vegan)? Is it not humans who first choose to point guns at eachother?

We can't let personal responsibility die. We just can't... Otherwise all tech may as well be evil. You don't think there is an evil way to use a heart bypass machine? I bet I can find one. Give me any piece of tech and I can find a way to use it for evil, and a way to use it for good.

Even nuclear bombs could be used to save the planet from an out of control asteroid without doing anything evil. Or you could blow up a city of people. Where dose the difference lie? With the person whose fingers on the button.

MAJESJIC• 9 years ago

I think you are mistaking "technology" as a principle for "technology" as tools and objects. Technology, as referred to in this "meme" is merely "the science of craft" and has no moral component on its own. An iron maiden or a wheelchair may have been made possible by advances in technology as a whole, but came into being through the imagination of an individual, or individuals, who created a tool to fulfill a (moral or immoral / good or bad) purpose.

The underlying technology (metallurgy, ironworking) used in the iron maiden is the foundation for innumerable instruments of a constructive nature, as I'm sure the lightweight steel and rubberized wheels that made modern wheelchairs possible have found plenty of applications in military hardware or other "evil" devices.

Maybe using a gun as an example was a poor choice for this "meme", as it's hard to put a positive spin on a killing tool. But I believe the message is that inventions, with respect to humanity, can be wonderful or terrible, but "technology" is no more good or evil than the physical laws of the universe. Hope that's a little more fathomable.

reedx8• 9 years ago

I agree with your high sentiments regarding Elon Musk (however technology is in fact causing a huge toll, see climate change. In fact the very reason why we look at Elon the way we do is because technology's "price" as you put it is in fact not "fairly low".), but your central premise, essentially that human behavior is what's most responsible, not the tool (ie "guns dont kill people, people kill people") misses the the realization that if we can't critique the tool, we can't change it.

If we are tech enthusiasts, the discussion shouldn't be about what the causal effect is (because every problem can be reduced to human nature, and how useful is it to stop there?) but rather the discussion should be how we can improve the world wide web, and its empowerment of humanity and its amplification of our varied opinions, so as to better human interactions.

To give an analogy, to stop at human nature would be to, I admit, correctly blame humans for car accidents, but, and here's my point, it would fail to make any further vehicle improvements (ie self driving vehicles) to reduce the amount of people dying each year from car accidents. Yes, humanity is at fault, but are we going to change humanity to fit cars, or change cars to fit humanity?

Additionally, there are in fact massive amount of quality data, ie scientific journals, that are behind massive paywalls/"academia walls" and not in anyway freely available. This is the "data" that matters most, not IMDB or piratebay to rip movies and applications illegally.

chasing• 9 years ago

This feels overdramatic.

The internet has helped humanity in many ways and, frankly, the notion of an individual apologizing for it is absurd.

I do feel like there are certain cultural assumptions that have not proven themselves out. Those will need to be addressed if we want to maximize the value of our shared internet for all of us.

jhiska2• 9 years ago

Too little, too late.

At this irreversible point it's not actual actionable regret, but a merely symbolic act meant to save their conscience from hellish guilt.

Besides, the blame for the Facebook-surveillance state and "alternative" facts is dispersed over hundreds of thousands of people. No single individual is responsible. It's an out-sized ego with out-sized guilt that motivates him to write the article.

nemild• 9 years ago

While this is a start, we need a more rational debate about technological trends and their impact.

We (technologists) all get very excited about the possible future (Internet, Social Media, cryptocurrencies) without being honest with the problems with these new worlds at scale.

The way it works right now:

1. Get angry about state of current world (at different times: IBM, Microsoft, Facebook - or current trends like social media)

2. Evangelize how new trend will make everything better (today, decentralization and cryptocurrencies)

3. Realize that new world has its own set of issues as it grows larger, and external elements co-opt it for their own needs

I wish that we had more thoughtful debates about the tradeoffs, rather than seeing new technologies as a panacea.

Entrepreneurs who help grow new industries need the self awareness to realize the potential problems with the world they help create. As engineers, we're very attuned to potential ways our system can be technically hacked, but for some reason forget to think about the other ways these systems can be "hacked".

For anyone interested, you should read Tim Wu's The Master Switch. It's a unique window into the idealism of past eras (radio vs telephone, telephone vs telegraph) - and often disappointment that the early evangelists eventually feel.

blfr• 9 years ago

If I understand correctly, OP is suggesting that these are not problems of scale but rather that scale itself is the problem in the sense that it's untenable for humans.

tw1010• 9 years ago

Funny how Medium started out being branded as the one clean template alternative to all the others, and has now devolved into just as cluttered as all the rest.

CodinM• 9 years ago

I just want to take the time to tell the author that he's not that important and I couldn't give a flying rat about him and his egotistical opinion.

andr• 9 years ago

I grew up in an ex-socialist country and we got our first McDonald's in the mid 90s. It was an exciting new thing, a new taste, a new model of restaurants and consumption. My family took us on multiple road trips to the McDonald's, which was in a different city. Nobody thought about whether it's healthy, because eating there was a privilege. 20 years later, fast food chains are everywhere, and if my attitude hadn't changed from the 90s, I'd have a serious health issue.

I feel like the Internet, and social media in particular, are going through the same period. What was once exotic and a privilege, is now instantly-available, algorithmically-optimized junk food. And it's not healthy to use it as your main source of nutrition.

The good news is that, just like McDonald's didn't kill good, healthy restaurants, so has social media not killed good, healthy sources of information. Most of the blogs I followed growing up are still active and rediscovering them - and setting up an RSS reader again - has been a great feeling. News sources that give you thoughtful context, instead of a dopamine feed, like The Economist and The New Yorker, are also thriving. Replacing podcasts with audiobooks on my dog walk listen has also gave me pause and perspective.

So my New Year's resolution is every time I open Twitter or Facebook, to ask myself whether I would eat at a McDonald's today.

taneq2• 9 years ago

Every time I find myself scrolling through Facebook, I ask myself "am I here for me, because I really want to be, or am I here for Facebook because they've reward-hacked my motivation subsystem?" That thought in itself is usually enough for me to shrug and close the window.

PrimHelios4• 9 years ago

And it's not healthy to use it as your main source of nutrition.

This is especially important. Twitter has desensitized its users to the point where thousands of people bullying someone into committing suicide doesn't upset anybody. All that recently happened, and it was a wake-up call for me; looking around, nobody actually cared that someone had died, they had all moved on to whatever short-lived meme had taken over.

Leaving Twitter and going to HN, google News, and RSS has definitely been challenging (albeit pretty interesting). It's a lot harder to actually get myself to read articles instead of just headlines, and I've been realizing how short my attention span is because of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I wish more people would leave and start using actual news sources again instead of just reading headlines.

gc90• 9 years ago

So, any recommend blog?

My Internet Mea Culpa

Related Stories