My Internet Mea Culpa: I’m sorry I was wrong. We all were

>I don’t think anyone saw coming that we’d have to actually be explaining to American children why racism and fascism are bad in the 21st century.

For me, this is the most damning sentence in the whole piece.

Before Eternal September, there were exactly as many racists and fascists in America, it's just that the mainstream media had done a fairly good job of hiding them. If you lived in San Francisco or New York, you'd have to make a real effort to see the level of racism that was still prevalent in many parts of the US. The sort of people who built the internet didn't know what they'd unleash, because they had been born and raised in a bubble.

The internet hasn't fundamentally changed human nature, it has just exposed what already existed. The average person is pretty awful and half of them are worse than that. Timothy McVeigh wasn't radicalised by the internet - he was radicalised by photocopied zines, small-press books and conversations at gun shows. The internet may have accelerated that process, but it has also brought it to light. It has shown liberals that they have been utterly complacent, that for decades they contemptuously ignored most of America, that they lived in a fantasy of their own making.

A mea culpa from the pioneers of the internet is missing the point entirely. The problem isn't that we built a communications platform and learned that a lot of people held abhorrent views, it's that for decades we ignored the rot at the heart of American democracy.

This point makes me wonder whether Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other such sites are simply fundamentally unworkable ideas:

> We are biological organisms with thousands of years of evolution geared towards villages of 100, 150 people. What on earth made us think that in the span of a single generation, after a couple generations in cities with lots of people around us but wherein we still didn’t actually know that many people, that we could suddenly jump to a global community?

The reason so many problems occur on them (brigading, uneven rule enforcement, the feeling that Nazis/antifa/whoever aren't being banned, etc)comes from the fact they're a million communities built on a platform run by a single organisation, and attempt to have groups of people who simply can't work together use the same platform and interact with the same user accounts.

They're trying to be a 'global city' inhabited by millions or billions of people, and are encountering the same issues every country or organisation does at that scale. On the other hand, old school internet forums and separated communities were like human villages of a few hundred people, self contained instances that could be run according to their inhabitants wishes and meant that those that couldn't interact civily for some fundamental belief difference didn't have to.

That seems to be a case where Zuckerberg and co were wrong, and where that's caused huge amounts of people to numerous people.

I'm having trouble with this article... where is the lesson they learned? No offering of what the newest generation is pursuing with naive and reckless abandon? What about what they believe currently about how a global world can be structured? How would they have done it differently if they could do it again?

Sounds like they got relatively wealthy and powerful by building this internet they're disappointed in. If they feel guilty, are they working toward redemption?

I appreciate the willingness to admit when one has been wrong, but this sounds to me like the person who has too much to drink, spills their cup all over your floor and goes "whoops, my bad, watch out for that punch, it's strong stuff..." and then walks away to get another drink while their spilled one soaks through the rug.

I very much dislike the whole mindset of "we" as this single, uniform society. There are 7.6 billion humans in the world today, we're not all going to agree with everything all the time, and to say that "we" are generally unhappy because of things that "we" deem unsuitable for public discourse is rather arrogant, myopic and naive.

I agree with the author's realization that we probably won't all be able to get along. I think it's a harsh truth that you can either choose to accept or spend a long time trying to fight, and I think much of Silicon Valley falls into the latter. Because of the huge reach and influence of the internet, Silicon Valley (and other areas of large influence) have a bad habit of developing a messiah complex where they see themselves as world ambassadors of peace and justice, striving for an egalitarian world free of 'hatred'. The problem is that the people that get pushed out of this utopia don't just vanish; you end up with people inside the utopia and people outside the utopia. You now have two different groups. So much for the idea of a world of unity and singularity.

I've been going through this for maybe 5+ years, as regular readers may have noticed. What surprises me is that apparently mystified 'good' ideologies' don't automatically displace 'bad' ones. I'd have thought that someone with his experience and insight would have engaged with the science of group dynamics and so on.

As a leftie, I think part of the problem is that when the USSR went down to defeat, instead of the internet being developed as a tool of democracy it was developed as one of commerce instead, and much of the developed world reacted to the (apparent) failure of socialism by declaring victory and going shopping. Turns out that people find the idea of consumption as the end of society meaningless and unsatisfying.

The alternative to kicking racists and facists off of reddit is not, "racists and facists no longer exist." It's, "a massive swath of the population feels manipulated and ostracised," and "we further cement population divides in the country because we've prevented people from opposite sides of the issue from seeing each other." Imagine the backlash when that situation resolves.

I feel like the author is suffering from the one sided fallacy (I'm sure there's a better name for it). We had two choices, we choose one and now we're grappling with the consequences of it. But that doesn't mean that the other option doesn't have consequences just as bad or worse. This is a classic case where, as a society, we're forced to make a major decision with very little hard data. Based on what I know of history, I'm more willing to err on the side of more speech rather than less speech. We have very recent examples in the US where a desire for sanitized civil discourse led to an inappropriate application of the "Safe Spaces" concept, and repeated instances of internet lynch mobs thought policing in an effort to make sure people are only engaged in good speak.

Trump did not create racism. Trump has simply taken advantage of a problem that has been festering for a while. Banning them from the internet doesn't get rid of the problem, it only makes it fester worse. The quiet problems have now become loud and that's a good thing. With these issues in the open, it lets us address them instead of bury them. Blaming the internet for racism is like blaming camera phones for police brutality. The problem has been there all along, and now we see it in ugly detail.

The author is arguing that there should be an end to history. That there just has to be a time when racism is dead and we can stop talking about it. This is baloney. The very definition of racism changes as our culture evolves and that changing definition will always be a point of contention. Worse yet, racism is almost certainly something that is biologically ingrained in people. We are a deeply tribalistic species and we're always looking to associate ourselves with those most similar to us. The war against racism is a war against our own biology and it's a war we can win. Childhood is all about training children to appropriately manage their biological impulses, maybe someday we'll treat racism like we treat potty training; a phase that every child goes through while raising them.

Yes, there are wayward children who need an education about fascism. But not because they are in some vacuum of senae. What has also happened since WWII is there are now wayward adults who are labeling things fascist that aren’t. So children are confused because there are some legitimate points of confusion. “Anti-fascism means burning cars?” “Voting for Trump means someone is a fascist?” These are not trivial ideas that appear neatly resolved to the mind of a child. They are things we must give children space to understand.

And the existence of those conversations on the internet with innocent children taking either side is not a sign of the downfall of civilization—or even the downfall of the internet. It’s the kids racing ahead through Hegelian dialectics, deconstructing ideas that many adults are either too smart or too afraid to deconstruct.

But the internet is deconstructing everything, fractally painting and repainting the universe inside every idea. A whole universe inside My Little Pony. A whole universe inside Planetary physics. And yes, a whole universe within facism. With fascist candy canes. It is splintering and cataloging all of human consciousness, and then every idea will be animated in AI form.

That should terrify you, but not because fascism will be back. It should terrify you because all culture will be detached from its embodiment like a crab from its shell.

Silicon Valley is trapped. Its narrative has basically moved from - why are ppl criticizing our magic, to telling regulators right now as we speak - yup we screwed up, but if we make the fixes for all these unintended consequences playing out -

1. We loose revenue.

2. Somebody in China or Russia or wherever will step in with alternatives

So guess what shitheads - we are too big to fail. Silicon Valley is not going to fix jack until regulators protect them.

So expect things to get worse.

if you listen closely you will hear the world's tiniest violin as musical accompaniment... the internet is more than the media companies that are currently dominating people's attention, it is up to each person to tune that out and pursue their own interests and contribute to their own community.

"What if we were fundamentally wrong?"

It's never a good sign when you've gone this long without questioning your own beliefs. Yes, it's possible to be wrong.

I dont like how he dodges the money question.

We have let financial concerns warp our utopian into a money driven ad dopamine hacking dystopia for a money.

Theoretically there is a contradiction at the core of the issue. How does a tolerant society deal with intolerance? Tolerance of intolerance clearly won't work, but then what?

Practically, by default people ought to be able to do as they wish except as proscribed by law. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms takes a pretty good stab at setting the boundaries.

If the Internet, unbeknownst to most of us, is actually supposed to bring about a uniform world culture, or world peace, or no more secrets/privacy... well, who’s to say it isn’t succeeding? You wanted your idea of utopia on your schedule?

I think when we see racists claiming their voice on the internet, we remember, "Oh, yeah — those people who are shamed, isolated, and oppressed in the real world, who find their voice on the internet, some of them are the people we're shaming and isolating for a good reason!"

But we should also remember that the mechanisms of shaming and silencing that we apply to racists are exactly the same mechanisms that have been used to silence people we think deserve a voice and a refuge. The mechanisms are the same. The motivations are the same. The difference is who is right and that isn't something technology can detect.

When we lament our inability to shut up racists, what we're rooting for is more effective mechanisms of control. We wish for ourselves to have the power to decide who can speak and who cannot. But do we really want such effective mechanisms to exist in the world? Do we want each society's elite to have complete ideological control over its citizens? How do ideas spread, then? By violent revolution? By one society overpowering another and assuming ideological control over its citizens? If ideas can only spread by violence, then violence is the inevitable result.

The alternative is to keep engaging with our fellow humans and trust the direction that history has taken. It's funny: we were a hair's breadth from a reality in which progressives would eagerly assent to this suggestion. An ever-so-slightly-different chain of events would have put Hillary Clinton in the White House, and instead of chastising ourselves for not being sufficiently aggressive and effective censors, we would be celebrating the inevitable progress of tolerance and equality in an open society. Such a huge difference in attitude, and it comes down to a slim and strange victory. Donald Trump and his supporters are a real phenomenon. However, he won the presidency with 46% of the vote, less than John Kerry got when he lost in 2004, less than Al Gore got when he lost in 2008, just 0.4% more than Michael Dukakis got when he got trounced in 1988. The last time a Democratic presidential candidate got less than 47% was in 1992 when Bill Clinton won a three-way race. Also, a lot of the erosion of Hillary Clinton's support came from the left, not only because of her connections to Wall Street but also because even before #MeToo people were starting to realize how awful it was that the establishment Democratic machine, including Hillary Clinton, rallied around Bill Clinton to shame and discredit the women he victimized. (I voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the primary and Donald Trump in the general election. My point is only that her support was eroded from both sides, not by an overall shift rightward.)

I think we're thinking about the visibility of racism and misogyny online all wrong. Racist and misogynistic Twitter trolls are functioning like cell phone videos of police brutality. You can't address a problem when it's plausible to deny that it even exists. Decades ago it was possible for people of good faith to question whether there even existed a significant number of avowed racists in the United States, just like it was possible to believe that police didn't really treat black people differently. Now we know. What Twitter has done is turned on the lights in the GOP kitchen at 2am and proved that yes, there is a cockroach problem. Yes, if you leave that racist garbage in the sink until tomorrow, you are feeding avowed racists.

It's counterintuitive to equate open racism and misogyny on Twitter with cell phone videos of police violence against people of color. One is proudly broadcast. The other is a furtive activity revealed against its will. Their eruption into the public eye functions the same way, though. Twitter racists, by their inability to stay quiet and work in the shadows, are bringing unwelcome scrutiny to a phenomenon that has escaped scrutiny for decades. We can use them just like we use cell phone videos of cops beating black motorists. Now that it's impossible to deny that this stuff exists, people are forced to take sides in a way that they haven't had to take sides in a long, long time.

This is a sobering article. We definitely aren't where I thought we would be. Especially on the social justice front. Some websites you aren't even allowed to talk about it, such as HN.

Still not sure what he thinks "we" were wrong about. Reading between the lines, since I missed it if he ever said outright what he means, it seems like he means "we" were wrong about a free exchange of ideas on the Internet necessarily leading to only positive developments.

I'm not sure he can speak for Brand and Kelly and others on this. Perhaps they realized, unlike him apparently, that things will be a little messy along the way, a kind of imperfect muddling toward maturity for society. That doesn't make their cheerleading for it something to apologize for.

>I don’t think anyone saw coming that...

Any article that says any statement of this form immediately loses a lot of credibility in my book.

Plenty of people saw plenty of things coming.

You (the writer) really have no way of knowing what other people have seen coming. Perhaps if the only people you pay attention to are the famous rock stars of whatever area you're talking about, you could think you know. But even then, you don't know what private thoughts they are having.