Neal Stephenson Explains His Vision of the Digital Afterlife

https://www.pcmag.com/news/368417/neal-stephenson-explains-his-vision-of-the-digital-afterlife

by MilnerRoute • 7 years ago

152 53 7 years ago

pcmag.com

justin66• 7 years ago

The actual article:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/368417/neal-stephenson-explains-h...

drivers99• 7 years ago

Also, title should be fixed to say "Neal" instead of "Neil".

parrellel• 7 years ago

I'm vaguely interested in the article, which this wasn't, but wow Slashdot's gotten really scummy since I last visited.

ddingus4• 7 years ago

I would agree. I used to really enjoy that community. But it's gone downhill. I think the moderation rules were brilliant. And effective. The problem is, there needs to be a core set of user setting good norms, and they've all left. What's there now is kind of a mess.

Lendal• 7 years ago

What's interesting is that your observation directly relates to the article. "We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have [paid] humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they're not scalable and if they're not scalable they can't make tons and tons of money."

maxerickson• 7 years ago

There were always trolls and lots of people that weren't quite trolling but weren't contributing much.

(I have a lower 5 digit account over there)

klyrs• 7 years ago

The commitment to "no comments deleted ever" was great 'til racist trash became the most common theme in comments. Nowadays their moderation system just doesn't scale, and IMO the page would be significantly improved by a filter on the n-word

isostatic• 7 years ago

I left ahortly after Malda, tr days of conversations with Bruce Perens and Wil Wheaton are long gone, it’s mainly Infowars fans now.

neilv• 7 years ago

Too bad Malda sold it before the social media valuations like of Facebook.

Slashdot had some commercial awareness (e.g., there was a lot of predictable "take my money!" meme about products), but wasn't thinking along the most profitable lines, and maybe never could've. (I've been wondering how much/often dotcom founders of successful startups reshape the world in their image, and I doubt that Malda saw the world with a Zuckerberg eye, for example.)

Another big property that was bought by the same people was SourceForge. Which didn't fetch anywhere near the price of GitHub.

hprotagonist• 7 years ago

That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do both; the first one obliterates the second.

Krasnol• 7 years ago

But his books are quite mediocre too (besides those wikipedia articles he adds to them) so what does it make his speeches?

rapind• 7 years ago

I love his books...

apo• 7 years ago

Q: How would you describe the current state of the internet? Just in a general sense of its role in our daily lives, and where that concept of the Miasma came from for you.
Neal Stephenson: I ended up having a pretty dark view of it, as you can kind of tell from the book. I saw someone recently describe social media in its current state as a doomsday machine, and I think that's not far off. We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they're not scalable and if they're not scalable they can't make tons and tons of money.

How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?

This line about perception of reality somehow being different today than it was, say, in the 1980s keeps coming up. The main shift is that the number of (dis)information sources has risen sharply and they've become much more efficient. Secondarily, entire media channels (newspapers and TV) have lost relevance to all but the older generation. Increasingly, those news outlets just track social media, which may be the oddest development of all.

In this context, the effective discontinuation of the White House press conference was inevitable. For better or worse, the president talks directly, unfiltered, to everyone. That's the real doomsday machine if put into the wrong hands.

paganel• 7 years ago

How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?

Because size matters, and in this case social media is a lot more pervasive (I'd say at least an order of magnitude more) compared to TV news of the 1980s or to newspapers. I knew of lots and lots of people who to didn't read newspapers 30 years ago, also the majority of the people around me didn't give that much thought on what was presented as "news" on TV because we knew they were mostly lies anyway (I grew in an Eastern-European country located on the wrong side of the Wall), but nowadays even the remotest shepherd has a cheap Android phone with an Internet connection which he mostly uses for Facebook and Whatsapp.

In other words social media is a quantitative change (billions of people are using it) which has transformed into a qualitative one (because billions of people are using social media things are different this time).

Torwald2• 7 years ago

He later relativizes that with:

So that means that access to that kind of higher-quality view of the world becomes a class-based situation where people who've got the money to pay for or partially pay for human editors and curators are getting higher-quality info, which I think is just a slight kind of magnification or intensification of the way things are now anyway.

I repeat:

…intensification of the way things are now anyway.

Now, here I disagree with Mr. Stephenson, these things were much more intense in prior times.

What he observes seems to be the development in the U.S. in terms of tonality of political discussions.

If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such "intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not go online without FB or other easy ways. Operating keyword here is easy. For many people, who just made the jump into being alphabetised, or being the first in their family to be so, many SN outlets are a somewhat more comprehensible access point to info, then "Google Fu".

Barrin922• 7 years ago

If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such "intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not go online without FB or other easy ways.

That's hardly an argument in favour of social media. The US is a democracy where people used to have civic debates around a shared reality.

That social media isn't going to ruin the debate climate in corporate-governmental societies where civilians don't have any input anyway doesn't really calm my nerves. In fact it frightens me. If the future of the internet is a cluster of entertainment bubbles with business and government bending reality to their will, and China is an example of the future, I'm not really keen on duplicating it. It's actually a very prescient observation: There seems to be a strong correlation between societies with high technological development but no democratic tradition, and the demise of traditional channels of media in favour of social media.

theoh• 7 years ago

He is referring to increasing economic inequality. This information inequality helps the rich get richer.

addicted2• 7 years ago

This is a highly questionable idea.

If anything, social media is worse in Asian countries, being used for massive scams, for genocides, for vigilante justice (which often targets completely innocent people), massive amounts of fake news, etc.

devoply• 7 years ago

Human beings have always been mythological beings. It's just that the myths that they now believe are amplifications of their own beliefs, or what they want to believe, rather than the collective beliefs of their societies, elites, thought leaders, and media masters. So yeah that's doomsday for society, in that there are no longer any shared myths holding everyone together. Those myths were never really true... they were just a tool of control, maybe even self-control of society. Without them the chaos amplifies.

Heck even without social media it seems like there was a progression in politics where things were becoming unhinged. Things were becoming more and more polarized and what is/was considered progress was more further and further from many people's ideas of progress. So there is a series of issues that are coalescing together in our time with a background in the century of self, identity politics, etc.

hi5eyes• 7 years ago

its actually terrifying how accurate this is. most people live extremely mundane lives so they latch onto some lore whether its a book or their twitter feed. just the recent game of thrones petition/outrage shitstorm, the show gave people something to war over twitter about, with their coworkers, their family

its definitely why politics now is incredibly toxic and i dont really understand why anyone contributes or even cares about political twitter dunking, its definitely not healthy

a community in chaos, full of micro tribes following their own lore used to be cause for war and now we have it, in extremely quick replies at all times anywhere

coldtea• 7 years ago

How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?

In the sense that having some hot oil spill on your hands while frying something is not the same as being submerged in burning oil as a medieval punishment.

Network and scale effects affect the impact of technological innovations. Even quantitative increase, over time, leads to different qualitative impact. But here we also have qualitative differences (e.g. TV networks didn't know shit about you, social networks know everything about your preferences, searches, friends, and so on).

jdietrich• 7 years ago

How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?

Accountability. Someone is ultimately responsible for every newspaper article and every TV program. If a national newspaper decided to publish a piece of paid foreign propaganda, someone would have a lot of explaining to do, possibly in a court of law.

There's no such accountability for algorithmically-driven systems. It's not our fault that our platform keeps promoting propaganda, it's just a quirk of the algorithm; we don't really know why our algorithm is doing this and we're not going to let you review the source code.

I don't know what the possible solutions might be, but there's clearly a problem. Social media companies have largely abnegated responsibility for what goes on their platform and their platforms can't function without that abnegation of responsibility.

CM30• 7 years ago

In this context, the effective discontinuation of the White House press conference was inevitable. For better or worse, the president talks directly, unfiltered, to everyone. That's the real doomsday machine if put into the wrong hands.

Interestingly, that shift seems to have happened everywhere, not just in politics. Many companies have also realised that they don't need to go through the media/journalists any more, and started advertising directly to their customers/users/fans too.

Wonder if there's a term for that sort of social shift?

doctorless• 7 years ago

Decentralization. Although this term does not yet apply to the avenues through which this outreach occurs, but give it ten to twenty years and that too will change.

bassman9000• 7 years ago

How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?

This is like saying why being scared of atom bombs when we already had swords.

addicted2• 7 years ago

Newspapers and TV couldn't (a) Collect as much, if any, individual data (b) They couldnt tailor their content on an individual basis (c) There were not as many sources of data tracking your likes, location, buying patterns, eating patterns, entertainment patterns, writing patterns, voting patterns, reading patterns, etc. (d) Those sources of data could not be collated together

I think fundamentally the issue is that too much personal data is being collected, and put together, making profiles on people that can be used and abused. Social media is the first major area where that data is being employed and often being deployed irresponsibly (although I question the idea that so much personal information could ever be deployed responsibly).

0x8BADF00D2• 7 years ago

Part of the problem is the participation trophy and helicopter parent mentality.

Who are you to tell me my beliefs are wrong? I can be anything I want, I am qualified to be an expert on something because I want to be. The Earth is flat, who are you to tell me otherwise?

The lack of humility is the real doomsday machine.

RandomTisk• 7 years ago

Funny you mention flat earthers, I think it's because of social media that the number of times they're mentioned dwarfs the actual number of flat earthers alive today by something like a few hundred thousand to one. Just one example where something gets blown way out of proportion.

jsemrau• 7 years ago

I would assume the same holds true for the AntiVax movements. While I constantly hear about it online, I don't know a single parent with that mindset.

natrik• 7 years ago

https://www.nbcsports.com/washington/washington-wizards/kyri...

Even if it's a miniscule amount, coupled with antivaxxer's, climate change deniers, etc. leads to pain points in society even having to prove them wrong takes a toll.

meruru• 7 years ago

I worry that the online coverage of things like flat earthers might feed the phenomenon. I used to think flat earthers was just some internet nonsense and that you'd be hard-pressed to find someone offline who believed that, but then I found out a long-time coworker does. One of my neighbors is also a climate change denier and it took a long time for us to hit that topic, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out more people I know who are like that.

thrower123• 7 years ago

All of the hot-button issues are massively blown out of proportion to the actual numbers. That's the salient thing you start to notice when you start drilling into the facts and disregard the rhetoric. We're wound to 11 at each other's throats fussing about the 0.1% issues.

earenndil• 7 years ago

Technologically, it seems to be pretty speculative and hand-wavy. Consider:

One thing we do know about quantum computers is that once we can get them to work, which is no small task, they will be unbelievably fast and increase available computing power by orders of magnitude compared to traditional computers
The near-future world of Fall is full of familiar buzzwords and concepts. Augmented reality headsets, next-gen wireless networks, self-driving vehicles, facial recognition, quantum computing, blockchain and distributed cryptography all feature prominently.

mxcrossb• 7 years ago

Why is social media the poster child for algoritmically driven content? If anything, social media response to scale hasn’t been to use algorithms to drive content from top down, but instead to crowd source that information. Yes Facebook might rearrange your newsfeed. But the information it shows is still driven by the likes and shares of your network. On places like reddit it is driven by upvotes, or hash tags and retweets on twitter. The algorithm is secondary to the user group.

Thus if we really are going to blame social media, it’s because we aren’t more selective about the social networks we embed ourselves in. But this of course is a problem that existed from the dawn of humanity.

detaro• 7 years ago

The problem is still that the algorithms cause problems. Social media is also a poster child because we could actually observe the transition in many cases: Early Twitter and Facebook as far as I know had entirely chronological timelines, and then changed that to "increase engagement", with all the side-effects that has. Just some examples:

- boosting things that are already popular increases their measured popularity even more, which both

a) over-emphasizes things that get reacted to quickly, which means e.g. quick outragous headlines get even more benefit over more in-depth coverage than they already do by human nature and

b) over-emphasizes popular sources over niche ones.

- Facebook actually does guesses at audiences, which means liking something can actually mean you decrease it's reach with the intended audience. (the "Facebook mom problem": if you post e.g. about your latest scientific paper and your mom likes it immediately, because that's what moms do, Facebook assumes it's family content and is less likely to show it to professional contacts that are the actual audience)

- for commercial content, Facebook intentionally limits reach among people who explicitly choose to follow you unless you pay for visibility

rasteau• 7 years ago

The algorithm is secondary to the user group.

Neither is secondary; both are essential to the socio-algorithmic evolutionary process.

The algorithms are intended to optimize toward some user group behaviour. As the user group's choices influence the behaviour of the algorithms, so too do the algorithms' choices influence the behaviour of the user group.

dang• 7 years ago

Url changed from https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/05/25/0117238/neal-stephe..., which points to this.

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

I'm not convinced that the impact of SM is much different from the impact of 3-network TV programming back in the 50s-60s.

'We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems ....' Like Nielson ratings?

We certainly weren't allowed to play a greater part then. Are we now, really? So, if once again we've allowed corporations to spoon-feed us, in return for watching advertising ... how's that any more of a doomsday than the first time around?

Stephenson's a remarkable story-teller but this comment is not helpful. If things look darker, that doesn't mean that they are. TV and Newspaper headlines were essentially algorithmically predictable. 'Darker' stuff wound up in magazines.

Today, anyone with the time can see it all ... unfiltered by news 'experts'. If it looks manipululated, it always was.

"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread." - John Swinton, 1880

netsec_burn• 7 years ago

Is this an ad for a book on HN?

mirimir• 7 years ago

PCMag: The first glimpse we get of Bitworld is this newly sentient virtual mind conceiving its surroundings, its being, and its ability to think and create and learn and adjust in the midst of endless chaos. It was fascinating stream-of-consciousness writing to encapsulate cognition. That must've been a really tricky part to write.

I'm looking forward to reading this, for sure.

But I gotta say that Greg Egan did a good job of this, at the beginning of "Diaspora". Which he published in 1998.

Also interesting is Kevin MacArdry's The Last Trumpet Project, which goes further. Read-only access to the past permits bringing everyone who ever lived into digital heavens. It came out in ~2010.

0x445442• 7 years ago

"My big picture view of this is that broad access to the facts is empowering to everyone who can get it. The broadening of that power base to include more people comes at the expense of the oligarchs of the world, who are always going to be able to reap power, wealth, and benefits from keeping everybody else in the dark."

This is a very interesting quote to me because it's the type of quote that "the oligarchy" uses to label those like Alex Jones wing nut conspiracy theorists.

Neal Stephenson Explains His Vision of the Digital Afterlife

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