Internet for All
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What happens when the internet comprises mostly of individuals whose don't share those views? What when/if, for example, a vast majority of internet users believes that women shouldn't have sexual choices, that gays are abhorrent? As someone from South Asia, I like to imagine the internet of the Future when most of the internet users are those men who seem to have a pathological hate/fear of women and values seen as 'liberal'/'western'. Men are already aggressively violent against women when they are openly identified. I wonder how the dynamics change when they could get anonymous.
Even further, what if a large population of internet users deeply detests any other populations, and wants them dead.
I was watching the trailer for this new documentary on the genocide in Cambodia(?), and how people live in peace with their children's murderers as neighbors. With a constant barrage of reminders of terrible events from the internet, and the mutual massaging of strong emotions [REMEMBER what they did to our parents/kids! NEVER FORGET!, etc], I wonder if on the whole, the internet will make things a lot worse in a lot of places/the internet as a whole will significantly change form.
You could argue that the same could be said for any communication media. I remember reading about the role that Rwandan FM stations played in the Genocide: they would keep aflame the fires that were burning out, and constantly supply fodder for death and hate. Apparently it was only after the stations were closed that things began to get slightly under control (?). With the possibility of blimp-powered and satellite internet, the kind of communication that cannot be disrupted at all, I wonder how things would be.
I like to imagine a scene of outright violence and civil war -- say race riots and race-based violence in the US. Would the easy availability of the internet help or hinder peacekeeping efforts?
What would be the right response in such situations?
Nations on the internet are segregated by language. Learning the language of a country (or a few countries) usually means that you learn about their culture as well, so communicating won't be such a big shock.
> Nations on the internet are segregated by language.
This is true as far as it goes, but I don't really run into British, Australian, or even Canadian people either. Language may not be the primary factor.
How do you know you don't? It's not like we (I'm British) type with an accent.
There are two points here: (1), I don't interact with very many people on the internet. I certainly don't use it to meet new people. And (2), I don't look for content aimed at (e.g.) an English audience. I read a large number of different bloggers, but it seems to have worked out that they're American. (John Derbyshire is English, but has lived in the US for years, and as far as I know has no intention to leave. Does he count?)
For instance, in college in the early '80s for a number theory class I was taking at Caltech where we had to each do a presentation on some interesting topic, I wanted to do one on the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test, which had just recently been announced. So I wrote a letter to Adleman asking for a copy of the paper and explained why I wanted it. He sent a copy of the paper (or more likely told his secretary to send a copy). Turnaround time was something like a week or so.
Nowadays, they'd have a preliminary version of a paper up on Arxiv.org, or on their web pages at their universities.
Another example is lawyers. Here's a comment from a while back where I described how lawyers conducted legal research circa 1960 [2].
Nowadays, all that stuff is in online databases accessible via the internet.
Note that in both of the above examples the internet did not really enable us to accomplish tasks that we could not accomplish, but it let us do those tasks much more quickly and efficiently.
This is similar to what the printing press did--books could be copied before the printing press but it took a lot of manual labor, so there were few copies of any given book. After the printing press, books could be copies much more easily, quickly, and cheaply, and so copies could be made and distributed to many libraries.
For people who don't depend as much on information for their work, the internet brought things like personal email, photo sharing, online shopping, and expanded entertainment options. Again, people had ways to do these things but they were not as efficient. We wrote letters and mailed them. We invited people over with the promise of food and drink and then ambushed them with our slide projectors. We had mail order catalogs.
There is a third group of people for whom the internet had a much more profound effect. These are the people with fringe beliefs, or beliefs that are not social acceptable to most people in their area, or with extreme political positions. People like those who think vaccinations are really drugs to make us more compliant, or that building bike paths is part of a plan to force us into denser cities so the UN can more easily take control [3].
Before the internet, these kind of people were somewhat isolated. There would typically be a small number at most in any area, and they lacked critical mass to do any more than just make a bit of noise. Sometimes they would discover other like minded people in organizations like the John Birch Society, and organize a bit beyond locally via mail.
For these people the internet was much more transformative than the printing press. It was like the discovery of fire.
They could now easily find each other, set up websites devoted to their offbeat beliefs, set up forums, and get sufficient national support that they could reach critical mass and make enough noise that they could start getting tangible results.
[1] I'm going to assume that most HN readers are included in one of these classes of people.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8491076
[3] I wish I were joking here. Google with various combinations of terms like "agenda 21", "bike paths", "gun control" if you want details.
Initially? Probably regression to the mean.
As he rightly points out, in anthropological time-scale, violence has been declining and our circle of empathy has been expanding. We are now concerned about what is happening inside the country (and sometimes outside it) unlike previously when our line of sight was mostly restricted to the village, clan or the tribe.
Secondly, he points at we building better political and social structures. And the bedrock for this phenomenon is free access to information. Internet by its very nature is decentralized unlike traditional sources of media. Although poorly conceived regulations sometimes threaten its independence, it is still the best source of free speech. Disruptive technologies like printing press have had significant impact on 15th-16th century society by democratizing knowledge. And as some may argue, it may have created conditions for important movements such as renaissance and reformation.
It sounds to me like the coverage of such constellations would allow for a satilite phone to actually deliver on the promise of working anywhere around the globe.