I Blame the Babel Fish | Hacker News Reader

I Blame the Babel Fish

jacquesmattheij.com

75 pointsdarwhy53 comments

Sorry, but I just don't buy it.

We've fought countless wars throughout our past with surprising frequency. It diminished in Europe as they consolidated from a loose collection of warring states to nation states with foreign policies and alliances (not to mention the printing press). The only big change was in the brutality of war as the participants changed from a professional army to a conscripted army starting with the French revolution, but that has little to do with the ease of expressing ideas (unless you count the spreading of the idea of a conscripted army).

Since that time, the frequency of wars has steadily decreased, especially after the Vietnam war (due to the dissemination of inconvenient information).

People have listened to far-left and far-right broadcasts ever since broadcasting became a thing. Internet echo chambers are nothing new. Before that it was pamphlets and newspapers, and before that, street criers and public houses.

The world is steadily becoming a safer place. The only difference is that as we become safer, our perception of "safety" becomes further and further warped. Things that would have been shrugged off even 50 years ago are looked upon with horror and fear today.

Is it really causing polarization, or is it causing more groups of people who were previously separated to become less separated and thus bringing the already-existing differences into a context where they can't be ignored?

I think if you ground yourself in history, and look around the world, you will see that there were plenty of very real differences between people and groups of people in both spatial and temporal directions, and anybody who had the idea that "everybody in the world is mostly the same and generally agrees with each other (and me)" was simply unaware of how deeply false that has always been.

If you look at it that way, a reflexive closing of the ranks after these decades of increasing contact with others is quite predictable, and I'm pretty sure you can expect it to continue apace for the next couple of decades at a minimum, and there's basically nothing you can do about it except somehow manage to restore the communication environment back to around the 1950s or earlier.

(After that, I expect another wave of internationalism similar to the one that currently exists (albeit sputtering and fading) between the elites of the US and the EU, but much more widely spread. But before that can happen, a lot more countries need to get much, much wealthier.)

Isn't one pretty much the other?

I look at the overall dynamic as epidemiological. You need both the disease agent and the transmission vector. But if you've got a latent agent, and a suitable host, then providing the vector will trigger the pandemic.

If you look back at history, you can view the Inquisition and 30 Years War both as attempts to retain ideological purity in an environment where the spread of undesireable agents (ideologies) was promoted by a new reproduction and transmission system (mostly: printing, also increasing literacy rates).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_years_war

"Isn't one pretty much the other?"

In terms of the "polarization", no. Either it was mostly pre-existing and unrealized, or increased communication created the polarization. I'm saying that the communication revealed already-existing polarization rather than is creating it. Give people 1000 years ago a sudden total Facebook and I have no reason whatsoever to believe that they'd all discover their one true unity of belief; I daresay they'd find even greater polarization.

Of course it isn't 100% one or the other, and theoretically some sort of 50/50 situation could be the case, but I'm not particularly convinced the Internet is creating polarization to speak of. As I said, I think the idea that people were non-polarized and basically agreed with each other has always been false, even in something as specific as the US. Parents have voted Republican while their children have voted Democrat for a long time.

Which also means, don't expect it to stop anytime soon. Generally when people say they want the polarization to decrease, they really mean "I want everybody to acknowledge the intrinsic and obvious rightness of my position and agree to share it"; I mean, nobody who decries polarization ever seems to volunteer to switch their personal beliefs that I've seen. But it turns out that while that was always a fantasy, we can now all see up close and personal just how much that's a total fantasy that isn't going to happen.

If you change one element of a system and the result of that change is a sudden and significant change in system dynamics, I'd say you're splitting hairs in allocating causality.

Communications created manifested polarisation, if you will. The previous state didn't have that. Comms created the new situation.

But I'd say in return that's a serious goal-post hike. When people write these sorts of articles and decry modern social media for "polarization", they are clearly claiming that it is creating it where it didn't exist before. It is a totally different problem if it is revealing something that has always existed in a way that is harder to ignore. The moral responsibility for Facebook et al creating polarization is much greater than for Facebook discovering the already-existing polarization.

Also, if one believes this is a problem to be solved, the solutions for "Facebook is creating polarization" and "Facebook is revealing already-existing polarization" are totally different. And wildly different in feasibility. There are absolutely real differences that emerge from the two possibilities. One situation could be solved by just basically shutting down the social Internet, albeit at great cost. (And other possibilities, but all at great cost.) The other... well... there hasn't been a lot of success at fundamentally changing human nature, and most serious attempts lately have caused more problems than they've solved.

In the case of FB, the question to me is whether or not the introduction of FB changes the dynamic.

If, say, phone and SMS-based activities simply shifted to FB, without any significant change in scope, scale, speed, use, or outcomes ... there's a case to be made for "the medium changed, but the behaviour didn't".

If the behaviour itself changes, in scope, scale, speed, use, adoption by specific groups, or outcomes, then that out becomes far smaller.

Put another way, if there's some extant potential, say a charge differential, or a water reservoir at elevation, and you provide a conductor or remove the barrier keeping it from flowing -- I'd call that a causal relationship.

Or are you saying that a dam failure resulting in a valley being flooded out is simple a realisation of the existing potential and polarisation of high and low elevations?

I'm not buying that.

Media enables. And if costs are reduced, it enables that which was simply not previously possible.

> I mean, nobody who decries polarization ever seems to volunteer to switch their personal beliefs that I've seen.

Yes totally agree.

I view it as everyone has their own inner religion.

I'm wondering in which millenia it will be when the Pope stands up and says that Buddha was right all along.

I particularly resonate with the 'exceptionally large echo chambers'. My parents whom I love dearly have surrounded themselves in the interwebs by people who present a message of hate clothed in the veneer of patriotism. As far as they are concerned "everyone" thinks that way, it is damaging indeed.

And what echo chamber would they say you've surrounded yourself with?

   > And what echo chamber would they say you've 
   > surrounded yourself with?

If they were being dismissive probably Pollyanna liberalism. Generally though, since we have a healthy relationship, we talk about the differences in the messaging we are exposed to and discuss the underpinnings of those messages. On many things we have a high degree of alignment in our views.

For example, we both agree strongly that our political institutions have become dysfunctional through partisan extremism. I tend to be idealistic in that I strongly believe the tools to "fix" that are built into the system itself (and can argue that point using the recent election as evidence to support that claim) but they feel strongly that structural changes to how the institutions are built is the best solution.

My extended family has a similar spread of opinion, and I'm glad we can discuss and accept the differences. I think it's important to identify and interact with people you respect who have opposing views.

If you can simply dismiss differences in opinion as based on ignorance, lack of insight, prejudice, echo chamber effects, etc., you don't have to evaluate your own opinions as much.

And repeated exposure to weak opposition to your opinion also serves to strengthen them, with a kind of meme-inoculation effect.

That's a perfectly reasonable question, actually. There's no reason you should have been downvoted.

Being as the whole point to echo chambers (and the key to their magical powers of endurance and efficacy) is that, by definition, those caught up in them tend not to see them as such.

Some thoughts on the internet from Adams' himself (1999)

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

Not found?

The requested URL /dna/19990901-00-a.html was not found on this server.

Apache/2.4.10 (Debian) Server at www.douglasadams.com Port 80

Would love to see what you were talking about, love Douglas Adams!

That's very strange, it works for me.

https://pastebin.com/5vYzF0rb

Hmmm, on my phone, can't think of why. A sibling post gave me an archive link.

I normally don't comment on broken anything, I assume it must be me... But, Douglas Adams, I had to see that!

It's not you. I got the archive link because I got a 404 in the first place (through https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/no-more-404s )

https://web.archive.org/web/20160923110912/http://www.dougla...

Thank you.

Thank you for that, I'll add the link to the article. I never knew he wrote this, it's eerie, and I wonder what he would write nearly two decades later. 49...

> ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’

There are not many people who I mourn for but DNA is one of them. I wish he were still around to make gentle fun of us all.

I go back and re-read DNA's HHGTTG series from the first book to the last one at least once every year or two. Upon each reading, it becomes less and less of a hilarious poke at the future possibilities, but rather a sad reflection of what we have become.

I remember the first time I read the books 3 decades ago, I yearned for such a device as the Guide. But now I have the very device that I carry with me everywhere (albeit with a shiny Apple logo on it, instead of the MaxiMegalon publishing corp.), and I can't help but wonder if it has made my life better or worse.

Excuse me, I am just going to go outside and wait for Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged to show up and insult me...

You..., I've had you before, haven't I?

One of the few good things my father did was to record the original radio play broadcasts onto compact cassettes. They're long since overplayed and stretched, and I don't have a player, but I listened to them over and over again in the 80s and 90s

Eventually they were released on CD.

Yes - we had the radio play CD's on continuous play as our office 'music on hold' system many many years ago. Half our customers would come off hold asking us what the hell they were listening to, and the other half would ask to be put back on hold so they could finish listening to the episode playing that day.

Sadly, we had some hooligans break into our office one day and about the only thing they stole was the CD player sitting next to the phone main console behind the receptionist desk which was playing the on hold CD's, PLUS the CD collection of HHGTTG. We found both at the bottom of the office building stairwell, smashed to pieces...

Hmmm $160 on amazon.com and £45 on amazon.co.uk — good job I'll be in the uk this summer

Also the best theme tune ever!

"Journey of the Sorcerer" - written by The Eagles, no less!

I'll have to go to eBay and try and find another CD set (see my other story in this thread). One of my most treasured possessions is my book of the original radio scripts for series, complete with all the edits and omitted scenes.

My introduction to HHGTTG was: (1) the radio series (2) the first 3 books (3) the TV series then much later (4) the other 2 books (5) the movie (6) the sixth ghost written book.

Interesting to see the difference in storylines on each medium over time, but the radio, books and original TV series will always be my all time favourites.

This is a very timely post for me, since I was discussing this idea with a friend just a few weeks ago. I left that conversation thinking that on the whole, maybe, just maybe, the internet is becoming a net negative force on society.

Yes, lots of good has been done--Wikipedia, other outlets of free culture, email and its decentralized model, etc.--but on the whole, I think that just maybe it's poised to do more bad than good. As this post mentions, the internet and its promise of a free and instant global megaphone for any idea whatsoever is a powerful tool for manipulation, deceit, and power struggle on a grand scale. The human psyche isn't yet ready for this kind of instant firehose communication, but it seems to crave it, and our darling internet megacorporations are happy and eager to provide it, carefully tuned to be as addictive as possible.

Furthermore the human population on a grand scale doesn't have the critical thinking and reasoning skills necessary to filter this firehose: huge swaths of people in the world don't have good access to education, and in the US at least, with our high schools already at the bottom of the barrel and our universities increasingly becoming diploma mills/expensive trade schools, I don't see the education situation improving. But critical thinking and reasoning skills, which are the foundation of a good education, are exactly what we need to combat this.

I grew up in the Bay Area, and my entire life has been centered around computers, the internet, and the good they can do. It was really saddening for me to reach this conclusion. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope we can do something to remedy things. But these problems are largely cultural/human nature problems, not technology problems.

I think that everyone is collectively exhausting all of the cultural poignancy to the old ideas, and that soon something truly new will arrive.

This isn't the first time it's happened. The printing press and radio both were followed by waves of "fake news", conspiracy and the like.

But ultimately people stop buying the National Enquirer. The FCC shows up to enforce some basic rules about truth telling and libel.

And... Facebook changes their algorithms to stop allowing crap to bubble up? Twitter decides to actually clean up their platform at least a bit?

Places like /pol/ can exist without them being mainstream, but when mainstream platforms host fringe views because '1st ammendment lol', then you start having issues.

In "the old internet", if people were being toxic, you'd just kick them off the forum, out of the chat.

I don't disagree, but the difference with the internet is that it's so easy to be anonymous, or at least hard enough to unmask that it's not worth it, and the cost is almost nothing.

With a printing press, you have to procure materials, a printer, wide distribution of physical items, etc., and all of those contacts mean that someone somewhere can probably point fingers if the law wants to find you. But try finding the people behind the 10,000 anonymous Reddit throwaway accounts, half in foreign countries. Or the guy writing fake news articles that get picked up by Twitter, who paid for his hosting account in Bitcoin and lives in Thailand. Radio is more anonymous, but can't be instantly shared in the same way things can online. A friend would have to tell you the frequency, you'd have to make time in your day to tune in and listen, and if a pirate station gets shut down there's not always another one lined up to take over instantly.

That's the problem here--nearly free, instantaneous, global, mostly anonymous communication, that friends and family can share into your inbox instantly and effortlessly. Firehose after firehose turned on, aimed directly at you, by people wearing masks. That's why this situation is different from the printing press or the radio.

Ah good one, I totally missed out on the anonymous angle. Will update the post.

my theory has always been that 95% of the issues are generated by people not _that_ motivated. Like if you get banned from twitter a couple of times then you'll just kinda give up.

Or you'll just say "twitter ain't for me, gonna go for nazi mastodon".

Infowars exists, there's always going to be a platform for these people, but it's more about making their efforts less worthwhile in other parts of the net.

"Why is the world moving towards a more authoritarian kind of rule all of a sudden, and why is this happening now."

Is it really all of a sudden? Counting communism as authoritarian (as it always ends in dictatorship), strong moves towards authoritarianism have been happening for over 100 years? I guess they have happened since the US proclamation of independence and the French Revolution, and before that the world was already authoritarian because there were churches and kings.

Perhaps US independence and French Revolution were flukes, and people (or at least rulers) craving for authoritarianism is the norm.

Perhaps it is simply the herd nature of humans that is to blame? They either want to be leaders or have a leader to look up to?

We seem to need some time to react, time to grow some thicker skin lest we’re overly vulnerable and allow ourselves to be goaded into making big mistakes, such as accidentally empowering authoritarian regimes, which tend to be very capable when it comes to using communications systems for propaganda purposes.

Or, perhaps the move towards authoritarian regimes is, itself, a reaction to that sense of vulnerability. I have read that during times of crisis in tribal cultures, the men in charge close ranks and get a lot more controlling generally. I think that bit came from some psychology class I had.

In other words, if this feels out of control, some people will react by wanting to be controlling. That can go bad places.

> Douglas Adams totally nailed it when he wrote that removing barriers to communication could become the cause of conflict.

Where are all the really big wars since the advent of mass media? There's a large amount of forest-for-the-trees-ing here. In our domestic politics, we've grown more polarised, but our societies in general are more harmonious, more integrated. One of the problems the globe is facing is that the lack of wars has removed one throttle on human population growth. Removing barriers to communication has significantly improved civil rights as well.

I guess my point is that just because things aren't perfect now, doesn't mean that they're worse than they were previously.

I think you could easily make the case that without mass propaganda World War II would have turned out completely different. There are some serious echoes of the past in the present.

WWII's mass propaganda did not have the 'zero bar' suggested in your article. It was state propaganda, not 'the babel fish'.

It's also not like WWII Europe was a 'harmonious group' (or Europe of almost any era). I think that's a core error in the article; that before the babel-fishing internet our societies were harmonious.

The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Russian Revolution, World War II, the Chinese Revolution, the Cold War (which to a large extent was prosecuted as a propaganda / media war). And the current propaganda wars by Russia against the United States, UK, France, Germany, Qatar, and others.

I've listed to bibliographies / references elsewhere in this thread addressing several of these examples, others are quite easy to find.

One of my all time favorite books. If you have not see the BBC TV series of it I highly recommend it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

So this is an interesting read you have here. I think the largest issues is that because of our technology we have allowed everyone to only hear their option. If you are in the US and you are conservative you watch Fox, if you are liberal you watch MSNBC and if you are in the middle CNN. It was not always this way. You came home and turned on ABC, CBS or NBC news and the news was delivered in a non-partisan fact based method. Then you could debt it with your family. You did not get force feed view points.

Today you never have to hear anything you do not like which leads to a closed minded view of everything.

"You came home and turned on ABC, CBS or NBC news and the news was delivered in a non-partisan fact based method"

Getting news from only one partisan viewpoint is not the same thing as getting "non-partisan news".

You are splitting hairs. The point was there was no "tailored" view of the news. There where 3 and they had standards that they all followed. We do not have that anymore, we have infotainment, not the news.

Really? What about tabloids? What about Rush Limbaugh? What about Bill O'Reilly? A shitload of people consumed primarily absurdly terrible news sources before they were on the Internet.

That's absolutely true but the horizontal peer-to-peer connection wasn't made it was mostly one-way.

The news was exceedingly highly tailored. It's just that the tailors agreed on their cuts.

Noam Chomsky, Marshall McLuhan, Jerry Mander, Niel Postman, and Robert W. McChesney all address this, as do many, many others.

If you'd like it from the horse's mouth, here's Edward R. Murrow's 1958 "Wires and Lights in a Box" speech:

http://www.rtdna.org/content/edward_r_murrow_s_1958_wires_li...

Yes, it was absolutely tailored. The fact that there was no competition does not imply that it was not tailored.

Pick your favorite news story of that era. Dig deeper into it. Read the after-the-fact analyses and behind-the-scenes exposes. I guarantee you you will be shocked at the disparity between what was reported and what was most likely the truth. Yellow journalism never stopped, it just put on a suit and tie.

It is true that we get more highly-focused infotainment now, in a much more viciously competitive environment. It is not at all clear to me that the actual quality of the reporting has gone down all that much, though, on the grounds that it was nowhere near as high as the mythos says it was.

I can't count the number of times I've quoted this exact passage from Hitchhiker's Guide when bemoaning the current state of things. I'm not sure if Adams knew how prescient his words were, but it appears to be true (at least for humans) and is profoundly sad.

An interesting historical analogy -- in the decades leading up to the Great War, telegraph use exploded, transoceanic cables were laid, suddenly everyone could talk to everyone. Communications technology moved faster than political organization. War followed.

There's a ton of truth to this, and it's something I've come to realise, strongly, especially over the course of past U.S. election cycle and subsequent developments.

Media are how society communicates, and if you change the messaging and control elements of a system, you're going to change its function, tremendously.

Mind, that's not a new concept, just one that I've finally grokked.

I've just run across Darnton and Ross's Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/09/books/after-the-revolution...

Earlier, there's Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-...

(The 1968 article inspiring this is a shorter synopsis of the concept: http://www.worldcat.org/title/some-conjectures-about-the-imp...)

Eisenstein worked significantly from McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy http://www.worldcat.org/title/gutenberg-galaxy/oclc/98079330...

Clay Shirky's formulation is "I study people on the Internet, which is to say, I watch people argue". His view is that the more people can communicate with one another, the more you can find someone you disagree with. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CEN4XNth61o (starting at ~2m)

https://www.xkcd.com/386

So:

1. This stuff matters. Tremendously.

2. The responses to technology are not uniformly good.

3. Media revolutions change societies. It's not a question of "how do we get back to status quo ante?", it's "what will be the new status quo".

4. See #2: #3's implications need not be an improvement.

5. This stuff is covered, in excruciating but vitally significant detail, in a massive amount of literature dating to the Ancient Greeks and before. All those Communications Studies majors you (and I) laughed at at Uni? There's actually a there there. (And if you want to catch up a bit: MOOC ICS (if you can find the series link): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NhbHHpKPQL4

6. This isn't, as some of the kids today are claiming, just old people getting old. It's kind of a big deal. It's not the first big deal, but it also helps put in perspective how earlier big deals were big deals. Like what happens, say, when net literacy increases from about 25% to upwards of 90%? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

7. Demagoguery and Fascism. The role of mass media in the spread of both is profound. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230800939_5

8. The power and draw of epistemic systems. As my friend Woozle pointed out: as communications gain in users and influence, they attract those who would seek to use them to personal, financial, or political advantage. There's almost an evolutionary cycle of this. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...

________________________________

More by way of a bibliography:

James Gleick, The Information.

Marshal McLuhan. Various.

MacKay, Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everyone

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

Jeremy Norman, The History of Information. A simply amazing website I've just stumbled across. The past 2.8 million years of information and media. Some 4,000+ articles, and 92 themes. Bernays, Propaganda and Public Relations http://historyofinformation.com

Popper, The Great Transformation and others.

J.S. Mill, several.

Charles Perrow, Ordinary Accidents and Making America (I think).

Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution.

I've been trying to organise my own thoughts on this, the best effort (a stream-of-consciousness rant some months back) to date -- not good, mind: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/t7qwp_va18sogdmm_xsslg

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