The Internet Is a Series of Lead Tubes | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Is a Series of Lead Tubes

lastwordonnothing.com

38 pointsfredfoobar4223 comments

The lead pipes are highways. Not "information highways"; literal, people-bearing transportation systems. For a relatively short period in human history, it has been easily possible for just about anyone with a small amount of wealth to leave the place of their birth, to escape those pesky social problems that always crop up in groups, and to do so without a great deal of risk.

...And now the 'net is making the world small again and an awful lot of folks are realizing that they don't like being part of their society any more than their ancestors did. We got our scarlet letters and our witch hunts and our untouchables and our religious wars and it's all ruining our ability to laugh at the ancients because more and more we look at ourselves and see the same failings.

This actually is a pretty good analogy given that highways have been a key contributor to climate change.

The human platform is inherently flawed. We need to build something better.

Even without the internet, the status quo in the western world for several decades has been to spend five hours a day eating Hot Pockets in front of the television. Hopefully future generations will remember that when they're criticizing us for looking at too much Facebook.

When you factor in the number of people who are going out biking/hiking/vacationing/etc. so they have something to show off to their friends, I think Facebook probably has a positive effect on our collective health. (Present company excepted of course -- we all just love to get outdoors.)

"I love the access it gives me to all sorts of information, and how it connects me with people I would have never been able to hear from before. I hate how it also contains spaces for people to easily gather to abuse and harass people." -- ie. the good thing for him is that people he likes are able to find each other, the bad thing is that people he doesn't like are able to find each other. Sounds rather hypocritical to me.

>online harassment

I don't think this is reason enough for most people. I've gotten death threat once. I just didn't chat with neo-nazis after that. People will learn to not attract that stuff.

Personally I find internet consuming because I get this feeling of being social, but I never get my need of socializing satisfied. I can "talk" here sure. But going for a walk with a friend and not talking much feels better afterwards.

But this neither might not matter for the majority of internet browsing people. About 50% of population are extroverst like me.[1] The remainder is introvers. It's likely that majority of internet users are introverts, who have lot smaller need for socializing in the first place.

[1]http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/my-mbti-...

Only one death threat? That might actually be enough to drive some people away, but I think the article was talking about people who get death threats on a regular basis. Sometimes just being who you are is enough to "attract that stuff".

The most vulnerable are the ones who don't have friends or a support system nearby. Their only options are to put up with being constantly harassed, or cut themselves off from their community entirely.

https://amazon.com/The-Internet-Garbage-Sarah-Jeong-ebook/dp...

Most people are not idiots enough to hang at notoriously neo-nazi filled irc channel and argue with them. Most people don't get death threats at internet.

So internet is not lead plumbing. It's more like early electric grid, where lightning could burn a house nearby. It's not going away, it will just get better.

That being said internet harassment is a genuine problem. And I don't have solution for it.

Death threats aren't the only kind of harassment. Check out the comments on any popular Youtube video, or most news sites that have comment sections. There aren't many of those left actually, because they tend to fill up with ridiculously high levels of harassing and even threatening remarks. Twitter users had to roll their own group-blocking solution (and Twitter has built-in some of these features recently) so communities can collectively compile ban lists. There's just too much shit out there for any one person to deal with.

I agree that it's major problem. But I still don't think it's existential problem for internet itself. If some person has to delete twitter account, that doesn't really justify who someone else could not order pizza via internet.

Twitter users are about 10% of internet users. And the problem looks lot worse than it is. Popular users are lot more likely to be harassed, and we are more likely to hear stuff from popular users. Most are probably like me, followed by my mom and one real life friend.

I disagree. Twitter, Facebook, email, and other messaging systems are how most people communicate privately and participate in culture. Ordering a pizza slightly more conveniently does not outweigh isolating someone.

You're more likely to hear about harassment from popular users, but that doesn't mean lots of regular people aren't harassed too.

Different people have different experiences, and it's not so simple as "don't chat with neo-nazis". Women, particularly, tend to get a lot more harassment than men do.

It's more accurate to say they experience different types (both in classification and severity) of harassment than men.

Pretty interesting study:

http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/

The analogy is a bit strained. It's not really the Internet that's harmful, but rather some subset of the humans attached to it. We could cure some of that problem by mandating the abandonment of all online anonymity, but that cure is probably worse than the disease.

The author seems a bit focused on trolls and general obnoxiousness, but for me the real problem with such widespread, constant communication is something else. That lends itself to two of the most dominant features of current human culture: the suffocating smallness (or, more properly, sameness) with which it imbues our world, leaving the probably accurate sense that there's nowhere to run to or hide if you don't like what you see, and the vicious "outrage cycle" that reinforces a particular and very narrow ideology. If you don't happen to agree with that ideology, and there's nowhere you could go instead that's any different (and certainly not any that's better), what's left to you?

It's not entirely fair to blame "the Internet" for this; as Tom Standage has described, earlier forms of communication started these trends. But it really hasn't been until the last 30 or 40 years that communication has been both universal and instantaneous, and those attributes are essential to the kind of feedback loop that creates what we have now. And the worst part of it is that checking out of it yourself doesn't help. The author of this article is absolutely correct on one thing at least: the abandonment will have to occur en masse to make much of a difference.

There has always been deviants, and there have always been two kind of deviants: the ones that figure out how to blend with the masses while retaining their identity, and the ones that meet sad ends at the wrong side of a pitchfork.

There's always been the third kind, those that would take action to change their surroundings -- either directly, or by surrounding themselves with like-minded people. At least the second method seems to have become much easier with the advent of the internet (first probably too, but that's a whole other subject).

Right, I'd considered those to be part of the first group, but the differences are too obvious to not grant a cathegory of their own.

At the end of day, though, it all boils down to claiming a niche in society. If you fill a niche, your excentricities will be tolerated, otherwise you will be labeled as "other" and ostracized.

There are all kinds of ideologies on the internet; the outrage cycle is annoying but I'm not sure it's consequential -- after all, it only matters for those who care about the opinion of the currently outraged or are otherwise affected by it. Feeling of not fitting in your environment is nothing new; and the most effective solution to that -- changing your environment to one that suits you more -- is much easier online than offline. So if anything, internet has improved things in this regard.

> by mandating the abandonment of all online anonymity

So instead of "Troll 001", you have "John Smith" or any number of a million other common names shared among millions of people. When you're talking to folks who don't live near you, there's no real accountability.

Abandoning anonymity has another side effect - it makes the minorities with defining names easier to pick out and harass. Jessica, Abdul, Monique, Bo and Priyanka would love to have their identities immediately made available to the masses.

If you abandon anonymity, you open up despised minorities to real-world harassment any time they reveal that they are in such a group online.

Now, you may not care about this. You may think some despised minorities should be despised and harassed and so on. However, how do you know you're not in such a minority group?

I liked the article. Slowly more and more reach that point on the on-line adoption curve to start realizing some sort of shark jump point exists. In my older age, I've learned its called "boredom", and it's a way of your conscience telling you there is more to life.

Also, gray text on white background promotes illiteracy. Just learn to say no. It's very paux west coast.

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