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Comment by Chiba-City | Hacker News Reader

Never forget the nightmare of broadcast "Hogan's Heroes" and "I Dream Of Genie." Imperfection looks good from here. Scale information insecurity will remain a real and costly problem. But 1-way broadcast funnels were structurally only problems. Graphs of us are mostly better.

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Are... are you a bot?

Parent comment is expressing that a web of (sometimes? often?) bullshit is better than inescapable authority telling you how or what to think.

It's not a non sequitir it's just written in shorthand.

I'm not 100% sure I agree with the sentiment (choose your artisanally crafted, perfectly engineered filter bubble versus just media is crap) but it seems to me a valid opinion among the spectrum of possible opinions to have about this.

That web of bullshit still informs you what to think, and being bullshit, it's abusive. It has all the drawbacks of oppressive authority, without a clear oppressor to resist. That's even before it being a veritable playground for all sorts of people big and small behind curtains.

That's consensus narrative not subject to "event horizon" nature of the scheduled TV cat pointer. The business press is very different. There they schedule quarterly financial reports, industry metric measures and product roadmaps on schedules. They interrupt overtly ongoing daily grinds of industry. Popular press is more sensationalist.

The grip of consensus measures is not suffocating. You have to surf them with feature detection. Contests are staged and sometimes usefully to draw attention. But we have good Webs of real news around newer consensus narratives more powerful than ads or fake news. We even have Snopes where we doubts remain.

Life is not much of a debate. Contests and debates are most of the bullshit that walks. Programmatic operations around design realizations talks and walks.

I am a real person. I was presuming people read the article. I am 51 and caught the tail end of old TV and newsreel culture. People read more of far less but were mostly denied any access to contextual data. When I arrived in DC tons of people "front ran" releases of government data sets only available on tape. I had to go to Library of Congress to read paywalled academic papers. Many aspects of modern Net lives are far superior and more efficient. Social ennui and deception were alive and well long before the Net. I studied philosophy of language so these considerations are my Petri dishes of endless fascination. I am not a bot. I can answer real questions just fine.

I concur with your point, which I think is this: we've always had despotism and tyranny at the door - its just that pre-Web, the door had a small group of guards that would grant entrance only on condition of servitude. Now, we have many doors - but they all lead to the same place as before: servitude. The tyranny of choice.

FWIW, the prizes closer to the top are neurotic sons and daughters of legacy post-Colonial industrial screw ups around constant crises manufactured on high. I enjoy "high culture" locally fed city living, but white flight we inherited relegates that to "society luxury" or even "tourist" status in most cities. Receptive folks who like our subsidized outdoors, cars, TV, booze and factory food seem happiest here. I can't change that.

"Servitude" for good operations in good ecosystems with good outcomes is better than fine. The "in charge" positional goods are rare by definition. But rot at our tops and even collusion in industrial felonies (Enron? Wells Fargo?...) is mostly preordained by an accidental empire in decline.

The Santa Fe Institute folks narrate our history and recent dog-eat-dog challenges pretty credibly at different comparative and resource accounting resolutions. Fixing our very specific post-WW2 population Boom and short lived apartheid empire is not possible by grand gesture. Culture, know how, will, patience and trust do not grow on trees. Even trees grow slowly. Interesting times to be a human and learn how we got here.

This most certainly looks like "bot-nonsense".

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