My Internet Mea Culpa
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I feel like the Internet, and social media in particular, are going through the same period. What was once exotic and a privilege, is now instantly-available, algorithmically-optimized junk food. And it's not healthy to use it as your main source of nutrition.
The good news is that, just like McDonald's didn't kill good, healthy restaurants, so has social media not killed good, healthy sources of information. Most of the blogs I followed growing up are still active and rediscovering them - and setting up an RSS reader again - has been a great feeling. News sources that give you thoughtful context, instead of a dopamine feed, like The Economist and The New Yorker, are also thriving. Replacing podcasts with audiobooks on my dog walk listen has also gave me pause and perspective.
So my New Year's resolution is every time I open Twitter or Facebook, to ask myself whether I would eat at a McDonald's today.
This is especially important. Twitter has desensitized its users to the point where thousands of people bullying someone into committing suicide doesn't upset anybody. All that recently happened, and it was a wake-up call for me; looking around, nobody actually cared that someone had died, they had all moved on to whatever short-lived meme had taken over.
Leaving Twitter and going to HN, google News, and RSS has definitely been challenging (albeit pretty interesting). It's a lot harder to actually get myself to read articles instead of just headlines, and I've been realizing how short my attention span is because of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I wish more people would leave and start using actual news sources again instead of just reading headlines.
Some of us have had a lifelong passion for technology and are actually happy and excited about the current state of the industry (and always have been).
If you don’t like people disagreeing with you on Twitter, just turn it off. Don’t claim that it’s part of some apparatus (that the author feels he helped invent) that somehow brought out the worst in humanity. He should feel happy he can now get exposed to views outside of his bubble.
agreed... article felt like maximum ego-stroking, minimal thinking.
to my mind, the conversation about where "the web" went off the rails ends with the dopamine-hook. I worked with a team building game experiences 5 years ago, it was all we could think about. good examples of it were everything we wanted to emulate. it was disgusting...
mea culpa.
for the children growing up today, whose parents put their baby photos on blast all day... there will be a reckoning.
i wonder what that will look like.
But I don't think even _that's_ the right question. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have built so much trust in algorithm and API and machine learning, and no one stopped to ask how careful they needed to be with turning over so much power to a computer program that can and will be gamed by malicious actors. Hate speech and conspiracy theories and fraud can now be amplified a millionfold, and the vehicles by which it's happening were not prepared to deal with the implications. And they continue to double-down on the "more machine learning will fix it" self-delusion.
No, it’s 100% about this. You do know that violent crime is at an all time low, right (at least in the US)? There is no problem other than the audience for technology is using it in a way not approved of by some if its creators (the OP, not me for instance).
If you’re not unhappy with the state of the industry, these think pieces lamenting it read as really self-centered and out of touch.
This is incorrect, it's been rising the past couple years: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-c...
> While crime over all and violent crime remain well below their levels of the 1980s and 1990s, last year was the first time violent crime increased in consecutive years since 2005 and 2006
This is just the age old question of free will. Everyone could be locked in a metal cage and there would be no murder but would this be the best state for humanity? You have to take the good with the bad...
The Internet has made it trivial for people to cause damage, possibly serious damage (SWATting and other such things) to people large distances away where it’s nearly impossible to figure out who was actually behind it.
All existing message we had to deal with people seem to fail to deal with these issues, but no one ever took that into account. They just pushed ahead assuming that either it wouldn’t be a problem or eventually the laws would “fix” the issues. But in the time between serious damage is being done to people/companies/governments.
I think these are all very good questions for people to ask themselves. I don’t think he’s arguing that technology is bad or that we should’ve all run away from it. But I think the happy unicorn “everything is better with technology“ view that many people seem to blindly apply to large social change may not be a good idea.
To take one example, harassment is not a new thing on Twitter. Harassment on social forums has existed as long as social forums have existed on computers. Same with many of the issues Reddit faces.
But no one seems to of looked into the lessons of how people trying to deal with it on BBSs, USENET, and other places. “We can just think about that later“ where later is defined as some number billion users.
But people got hurt in the meantime.
It amazes me that nobody seems to take much of an issue with that. We've seen several instances of people having their lives ruined and/or killing themselves because of things that happened on the internet just this year alone. Whenever I bring any of these up, it's met with indifference, as if that's just the price we pay for the internet. It's really concerning that people just accept all of this online suffering as a necessary evil, like it's just something that comes with society being able to use the internet.
That's exactly what it is. Whether or not we as a society decide that cost is worth paying is another matter, but yes, the price we pay for the internet is that it acts as a force multiplier for all collective human intent, good and evil. And let's be fair - as much as we're focusing in this thread on the harm the internet has done, I don't think that harm outweighs the benefit to society.
I disagree, I think that we can (and should) do everything we can to mitigate that evil. If Tumblr and Twitter didn't half-ass their ToS, we wouldn't have kids killing themselves because they got doxed and sent death threats. Websites don't need to be complete anarchist societies; I think many social media sites are morally obligated to follow up on their ToS and not just let everything go to shit because their AI thought what is clearly a credible terrorist threat is perfectly fine (this has actually happened to me on Facebook).
We have platforms where people can cause harm, but we also have the ability to properly moderate these platforms, the internet doesn't just have to be a bunch of thinly veiled 4chan-esque shitholes, we have the responsibility to make sure these extremely popular platforms aren't just letting people ruin each other's lives.
That's true, and individual sites have the right to enforce whatever rules they like, but that doesn't extend to the platform as a whole, because the internet can't be made to conform to any specific moral or legal ideal. Wherever you have freedom of speech and freedom to communicate, you also have freedom to conspire. And, as connections on the internet are necessarily nonlocal, someone without an account on a heavily moderated platform can still threaten you depending on the information you leave publicly available.
It was once said that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. This turns out not to be as true as once assumed, because of the network effect of social media sites, but it is still true enough, where "censorship" is considered as a politically, socially and morally agnostic term. Push the racists and trolls off of Twitter, they'll just go somewhere else. That's intended to be a feature, but only because it applies to everyone.
Because the person I followed tweeted a joke.
That was YEARS ago. Obviously it’s left and indelible mark on how I think about these things.
I’m with you. It continues to amaze me that people seem to see this stuff as acceptable status quo. I don’t know if it’s because they were in a group that isn’t being attacked, or they haven’t had friends attacked, or they think they’re safer whatever reason.
What goes on… just the worst of it not even the ‘basic’ racist insults and such… is rather horrifying.
But in even the most obvious cases Twitter and others refuse to do anything. I’d say the courts are our only hope but I don’t see them being able to catch up. By the time you track someone down and prosecute them it’s been far too many years and the problematic behaviors have continued from that person and others.
It does feel a lot like a Pandora’s box.
Some of the "safest" sites really are incredibly dangerous in ways people think only apply to things on the dark net. The internet is an absolute nightmare in an incredible state of disarray. Social media giants use horrible tactics to create addictions, and then let their sites turn into anarchy because they don't moderate anything. The internet's interactivity really is awful sometimes, I've moved to just passive consumption of content, I won't even use certain sites without being behind Tor or a proxy.
>It does feel a lot like a Pandora’s box.
I feel like it's worse. Pandora's box was filled with nothing but evil, but the internet didn't start that way, we just let it get like this because nobody cared enough to stop it. To me, that's a lot more upsetting than something that was evil from the start.
I meant it in a “it’s too late and we can’t go back“ way.
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that pandora’s box was meant to be evil and the Internet was meant to be neutral/good.
I agree with you.
And once you've made the jump from "speech should be free" to "speech (that I condone) should be free", you've made a big step towards fascism.
Another important note is that promotion is hardly the same as allowing.
A thorough and well thought out treatise on why the Holocaust didn't actually happen, exists in a different class of objectionable compared to a single anti-semitic tweet, which is different to credible threats of bodily harm or death against a specific individual (including street address and phone number). Different still is claims that the Earth is flat or 6000 years old.
Expressing like or dislike of current political leaders belongs to yet another class, and the various different kinds of sales pitches could be divided into a few more, as well.
One theory I've heard is that the nation state is over, and the Internet killed it. Demos, the shared group of people that makes up a voting democracy and validates democratic choice as a group will, is breaking down. People are starting to identity at global levels by social class, education and political outlook, rather than national identity. People no longer participate in the same national narrative. I think this would have happened eventually if we only had newsgroups and chain emails, it's just happened faster because we have easier to use software.
I don't think some unholy union of state and corporate control of free speech is the answer. If anything, it's a path to civil war, eventually.
We thought people were better, that with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government put on our heads. We never imagined people would deliberately poison our watering hole.
> with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government
It seems like this is happening. It’s just not aligning with the politics of those in power. Neither the government nor mass media wanted Trump to get elected yet it happened anyway, for instance.
His election was the opposite of truth and debate flowing freely and a textbook example of malicious actors poisoning the watering hole.
I see Trump as the Internet’s first president. Every other avenue was strongly against him but ultimately couldn’t shout down the “truth” of his popularity because he had internet based communication channels that mass media didn’t control.
Structurally speaking, Trump was a major victory for alternatives to mainstream media and politics. That’s why the defeated parties are desperately grasping at the “malicious actors” fabrications. They can’t handle the loss of control.
I have had a lifelong passion for technology, and I am not happy or excited about the current state of the industry, nor am I doom and gloom pessimistic and advocating a Neo Luddite approach.
The author is talking about Nazis. Not just people who disagree with you. You are wrong, and I hope, as Alexis Ohanian did, that you admit the error of your ways.
No you are wrong. Nasty people exist, you are blaming X technology for making it worse, what about mobile phones, cars, microwave ovens, shoes... where does it end, nasty people exist, stop fucking blaming technology and try to understand why they are nasty if you care.
Microwaves don’t make it easy for someone to send harassing messages to 40,000 people.
Shoes don’t make it possible for someone across the globe to send a SWAT team into your living room.
Those aren’t communication methods. That’s like asking why the waffle maker didn’t solve tuberculosis.
You have to compare communication methods, like the telephone and the post office. And notice that we have lots of rules about how and who can contact you and trying to enforce accountability. If you start sending threatening letters to the post office, they’ll work to find you. If you start making dirty calls to random strangers, you’ll be tracked down.
But Twitter and Reddit and a great many other things on the Internet don’t seem to think that’s necessary… or at least didn’t early on. They chose to ignore (or didn’t know of) how previous communication methods tried to deal with these issues.
You can only make one phone call at a time. For a VERY long time you might not have been able to call across the country let alone overseas. It would’ve cost you a lot of money to do either one. It took time to physically mail envelopes or postcards and you had to pay a fee for each one.
The Internet has removed all those barriers. It’s made harassment trivial. Without something else to keep a lid on the issue the obvious has happened: harassment has exploded compared to other media.
I’m not trying to touch the more complex and problematic issues of how social media is changing democracy in my comments here. I don’t know how we’re ever supposed to get a handle on that if we can’t even keep people vaguely safe.
I do try to understand why individual humans at work and in my neighborhood sometimes lash out with nasty remarks. I try to empathize, and give them the benefit of the doubt, as long as they aren't becoming clearly abusive.
I do not, however, tolerate Nazi sympathizers. They can go take a flying fuck at the moooooon!
Look what high frequency trading has done to "Main Street. In fact look what Amazon is doing to Main Street. Then there is the Dark web... How do you think the opioid crisis which has lowered life expectancy in the US for two years in a row got that lethal? It's not by by street dealers on a corner but rather through online purchasing.
Yes tech is mad, phat, awesome but the consequences are catching up with it.
We (technologists) all get very excited about the possible future (Internet, Social Media, cryptocurrencies) without being honest with the problems with these new worlds at scale.
The way it works right now:
1. Get angry about state of current world (at different times: IBM, Microsoft, Facebook - or current trends like social media)
2. Evangelize how new trend will make everything better (today, decentralization and cryptocurrencies)
3. Realize that new world has its own set of issues as it grows larger, and external elements co-opt it for their own needs
I wish that we had more thoughtful debates about the tradeoffs, rather than seeing new technologies as a panacea.
Entrepreneurs who help grow new industries need the self awareness to realize the potential problems with the world they help create. As engineers, we're very attuned to potential ways our system can be technically hacked, but for some reason forget to think about the other ways these systems can be "hacked".
For anyone interested, you should read Tim Wu's The Master Switch. It's a unique window into the idealism of past eras (radio vs telephone, telephone vs telegraph) - and often disappointment that the early evangelists eventually feel.
If the book had been written in 1996, it would have been cute. Unfortunately it was written/released in 2016; the level of naivety displayed was shocking. Page after page of techno-utopian stream-of-consciousness futurist masterbation, without so much as a fleeting thought given to social or political repercussions.
As a writer, he struck me as either a deeply cynical person, or as someone with no understanding of humanity at all.
The internet has helped humanity in many ways and, frankly, the notion of an individual apologizing for it is absurd.
I do feel like there are certain cultural assumptions that have not proven themselves out. Those will need to be addressed if we want to maximize the value of our shared internet for all of us.
Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used for good or bad.
The author lost me when they said "Massive amounts of data is still hidden behind firewalls or not online at all."
Except: Sci-hub, pirate bay, project Gutenberg, wikipedia, IMDB and even here on hacker news (I could go on but these are big ones).
Technology (in all forms) doesn't change humanity, technology enables humanity to change. It is just a tool and we have to decide what to do with it.
If for every Peter Theil we get one Ellon Musk, one space x one step toward progress then by all means I consider it a victory. This is progress, and compared to previous generations the price has been fairly low.
I see this meme everywhere, and I just can't fathom it. Not all tech is perfectly neutral, just because it's "technology". An iron maiden and a wheelchair sit on different places in the good - evil spectrum.
No they don't. They are both just objects, people are the reason the iron maiden has the connotation it dose. The iron maiden could have been a single art piece in a modern art gallery somewhere meant to symbolize the pain of heartbreak. Wheelchairs could have been devices used to intentionally cripple children by preventing them from using their legs.
We need to stop living in this fantasy land where people aren't responsible for their actions. I'm comfortable making the assertion that it is an absolute fact that guns, the internet, and all technology are neutral until applied/activated by a thinking being (AI would count as a thinking being, IMHO). What if no human had ever died from a gunshot? What if we only used them to kill cows for consumption, would guns still be inherently evil (bare with me if your vegan)? Is it not humans who first choose to point guns at eachother?
We can't let personal responsibility die. We just can't... Otherwise all tech may as well be evil. You don't think there is an evil way to use a heart bypass machine? I bet I can find one. Give me any piece of tech and I can find a way to use it for evil, and a way to use it for good.
Even nuclear bombs could be used to save the planet from an out of control asteroid without doing anything evil. Or you could blow up a city of people. Where dose the difference lie? With the person whose fingers on the button.
The underlying technology (metallurgy, ironworking) used in the iron maiden is the foundation for innumerable instruments of a constructive nature, as I'm sure the lightweight steel and rubberized wheels that made modern wheelchairs possible have found plenty of applications in military hardware or other "evil" devices.
Maybe using a gun as an example was a poor choice for this "meme", as it's hard to put a positive spin on a killing tool. But I believe the message is that inventions, with respect to humanity, can be wonderful or terrible, but "technology" is no more good or evil than the physical laws of the universe. Hope that's a little more fathomable.
The difference between science and technology is the physical reification: i.e., metallurgy as a body of knowledge vs. a functioning smelter. The fact remains that whenever humans choose to bring artifacts of technology into existence, they imbue intent, which is varyingly good or evil. The less particular the intended purpose of the tool, the fuzzier the morality, until you get to very general technology such as "wheels" and "fulcrums", or retreat into science, as you have done with your examples of "metallurgy" or "ironworking".
I still think it's nonsense to call all technology perfectly neutral, while I agree that science can be.
> "technology" is no more good or evil than the physical laws of the universe.
This is utter bullshit.
Technology differs from the laws of the universe precisely because it embodies the intentions of humans to harness said laws for their purposes, good or bad. That is what functionally distinguishes technology from random complexity.
If we are tech enthusiasts, the discussion shouldn't be about what the causal effect is (because every problem can be reduced to human nature, and how useful is it to stop there?) but rather the discussion should be how we can improve the world wide web, and its empowerment of humanity and its amplification of our varied opinions, so as to better human interactions.
To give an analogy, to stop at human nature would be to, I admit, correctly blame humans for car accidents, but, and here's my point, it would fail to make any further vehicle improvements (ie self driving vehicles) to reduce the amount of people dying each year from car accidents. Yes, humanity is at fault, but are we going to change humanity to fit cars, or change cars to fit humanity?
Additionally, there are in fact massive amount of quality data, ie scientific journals, that are behind massive paywalls/"academia walls" and not in anyway freely available. This is the "data" that matters most, not IMDB or piratebay to rip movies and applications illegally.
But I think these problems, and the problems the author points to, are the result of the current, pre-internet world order attempting to impose itself on the modern web, not the other way around.
We've already seen the massive effects of the internet on the populace over the last 15 years or so, and I think a lot of those changes have been both quiet, and genuinely good for people (How many things are common knowledge now, that were never reported on the news, as a quick example?). What we're seeing now is the empire strikes back, as established organizations attempt to impose themselves back on this newly connected world before they go the way of the music industry. Whether this is done by manipulating people online, walling off sections of the internet, flooding the internet with propaganda/tracking/advertising, or simply removing the open nature of the internet in entirety (Net Neutrality), the drive appears to always be the same: large pre-internet organizations imposing traditional order on a new medium. And I think it is these efforts that are responsible for the majority of issues the author raises.
Though that's not to say the internet itself doesn't have a fair share of problems. But even where the internet seems at its worst, I think the problems still primarily come from traditional societal organizations, and it is they, not the internet, that should take the blame and be the focus of change. Let's take the surprisingly large influence of racism and fascism that appears to exist online as an example, easily one of the worst aspects of the internet.
I think prevalence of hate speech online exists for two major reasons. The first and largest driving force, is that the internet has revealed that outside of the internet, there are essentially no actually truly-free, anonymous, free speech places in a person's life. Even online, the number of places where one can state whatever they would like, to their hearts content, without having those thoughts potentially affect their daily life, are extremely rare and need to be sought out. Is it any surprise, then, that the people who seek out such forums are often those who are upset at the end of the day, and feel a need to spit some vitriol? Or that the users of such forums specifically focus saying things they know they could not say in any other aspect of their life?
I fail to see this as a shortcoming of the internet, and see it more as an indictment of society at large. Perhaps if there were more places where one can truly speak out at the end of a day, and be heard but not judged or discriminated against, less people would be willing to rage alone against an empty screen. But even if you reject this idea, then the alternative to me seems worse. Because the alternative is that we have to accept that the average person is not capable, or should not be allowed, to navigate accountability-free communication, and society will need to be built accordingly going forward. Hopefully I don't need to point out the obvious downside to embracing such a philosophy.
That said, I think we did make, and are making one major design mistake, consistently online. And that is that we need to recognize that the way human society works, is that new ideas are shouted by individuals all the time, and then the silent masses judge them, mostly silently, and embrace them slowly into their day to day. On a webpage design level, this needs to be taken into account. If you are listing all comments on your webpage with equal weight, then we need to accept that you're going to get a pretty consistent distribution of comments ranging from insightful to hateful, and from thought-provoking to headache inducing. But if you allow the masses to weigh in, for example, by voting on comments, you'll find that most of the nauseating hate-filled ideas quickly fall off the radar, just like they do in real life. This is the difference between say, youtube comments and reddit comments. I would love to see websites start taking this a step further, and automatically start banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a certain threshold, just how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner after his first diatribe is found to be crazy.
Why even bother banning them. This just silences the opinion, which technically could still be valid. I'm sure at some points in history gay and civil rights activists would have been the ones getting banned.
I agree about the down-voting, but I truly feel we need to stop babying people in regard to controversial opinions. If you can't reject and ignore a blatantly racist and unfounded opinion, I'd argue you shouldn't be participating in discussions of any kind. This seems like a fundamental skill necessary to coexist in human society.
Edit:
I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to participate in discussion if you get angry and offended by an opinion. This is totally fine. However, if you need someone to step in and hold guns/ban hammers to peoples heads to exist, maybe the problem isn't with society, but with you.
Do today's users feed them, have they not got the message I learnt, or is it that today's web tools allows a troll to be fed much easily?
I see the need for moderation, (4chan is actually heavily moderated as an example) and I also see the need for users to have the skills in identifying and not feeding trolls. Identifing trolls and actively not feeding takes effort. Perhaps todays web assumes users shouldn't expend effort and are overly moderated. Freedom Vs comfort?
Trolls are also getting increasingly more adept at not appearing like trolls - their entire goal is to draw you in, if it's too easy to spot then it doesn't work. They adapt and evolve just like the rest of us.
Yes I do see the environment it `could` create. That's the problem with a world without fascism/authoritarianism, people will always be subject to potential emotional trauma.
The only way to stop it is to assert your subjective view of reality on the world.
The internet absolutely needs to be filtered, but by the users themselves, not companies who are just "innocently" doing it for them. Let people decide for themselves if they want to see something or not.
We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened. We forgot that the traditional barriers to intercultural understanding are still there: language, tribal sentiment, political and economic power structures, etc. At the end of the day, in a democracy the majority can do anything it wants, even if what it wants is to punish the minority. The Internet has had all the failings of a total democracy in that sense.
I also love the point the author makes at the end. Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence. It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong...
I don't really understand this sentiment. If we admit that we all hold beliefs that could be wrong, isn't the ultimate conclusion radical freedom? The radical freedom of the internet isn't a result of a set of beliefs, it's the result of evicting belief and allowing all ideas to stand on their own merit.
> We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened.
I think you're wrong here. The world is becoming an exponentially more peaceful and tolerant place in my experience. There is still a vocal minority which gets attention thanks to the open platform, but the overall result of this openness seems to be growing disdain for beliefs which we now know are founded in hate, not logic or science. Do you really feel that the world is in a worse place than it was in the 70's or even in 2010? In what ways?
> It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity.
Genuine question, what percentage of 4chan do you believe is racist? Do you feel that racist memes genuinely come from a place of racism? What large anonymous groups do you believe consist of genuine racists? Do you consider me a racist if I make the statement, "more crime in America is committed by people with dark skin, relatively", even if I make no attempt to suggest a correlation or reason for this statistic?
2) this is debatable, but instability is present in our political system from top to bottom which I believe is due to these transformative tech movements. We should not assume that the sun will rise tomorrow (as in some occasions it will not).
3) your discussion about 4chan lacks some precept or basis of intelligibility. Imagine a similar question as being “what percentage of a psychotic mood is racist”. It’s a non sequitor and doesn’t address the substance of the problem. Similarly, your posited question about ‘dark skin’ lacks traction for similar reasons and illustrates the baseless nature of the internet meme-culture.
The poster clearly feels there are large groups of racists on the internet. I'm trying to ascertain where they think these groups are, and exactly what they feel these groups believe. The 4chan mention was a guess.
> Imagine a similar question as being “what percentage of a psychotic mood is racist”. It’s a non sequitor and doesn’t address the substance of the problem.
I stand by my question. I think the poster has misconceptions about internet culture, and wish to reach the root of them to either correct them, or my own misconceptions. You're assertion here dose not make sense to me.
> Similarly, your posited question about ‘dark skin’ lacks traction for similar reasons and illustrates the baseless nature of the internet meme-culture.
Once again, I'm trying to understand how the poster conceptualizes racism both within the context of the internet, and society as a whole.
Forgive me, but if someone is seeing pervasive racism in society I want to know where and why. I fail to see how this is me parroting a baseless meme-culture. I'm sorry if talking about skin color and crime offends you, but that is no excuse to disregard me as some sort of troll. I have a genuine desire to engage with the poster on their opinions about the nature of the internet/racism/social progress, and being dismissed in such a pedantic manner seems uncalled for.
Edit:
My larger point here is, in my experience racists are a dwindling minority. However, people have begun to conflate certain types of discussion, and forms of comedy (namely absurdist), with genuine racism. These misconceptions are leading them to feel that the internet is somehow heavily racist. True racism is a serious issue, and deserves a heavy handed response. We need to be careful that the racism we point out is true racism, not just an opinion we disagree with, or a joke we don't find funny.
Five years ago, I'd say a small fraction and "No", but I no longer believe either of those. The amount of vocal support for possible racist policies, celebration of politicians' racist dog-whistling, and worship of neo-Nazi figures since then was way higher than I ever expected. When it was just jokes and memes, it was easy to write off as ironic, and maybe much of it was, but real support can't be written off as ironic. Maybe the people changed over the years, or maybe it's just different people. (Maybe ironic memes drew in people that liked them unironically: "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.") Or maybe it's largely the same people, but the relationship between the internet and politics has changed since then, with people more willing to fully discuss their political ideas (including racist ones) now online.
By giving these people a voice, we now know that they exist, and what they really believe. You never would have gotten that out of them by just talking to them on the street.
Do certain parts of internet culture encourage that behavior? Absolutely, and it's terrible, and we need to find ways to fix it. But to fix that problem, we need to understand it first.
Now people are far more aware how many racists are in the US. And many of them have taken that as proof that there’s nothing wrong with their way of thinking and are censoring themselves less. They are discussing their beliefs and pushing their agendas stronger than they have in a long time.
Is that an actual improvement? Before all but some of the most hard-core we’re effectively incentivized to be more accepting. Now they’ve learned not only do they not have to do that, they can STRENGTHEN their position knowing there are others like them.
Given the level of backlash they’ve faced, I don’t think it’s an improvement.
American society had an excuse, before. Racists weren't tolerated, but also weren't confronted. They were allowed to gather power so long as they did so quietly, and decent people could pretend that there wasn't a problem. Now, at least, the internet has made the problem impossible to ignore. A disease which is never diagnosed can never be treated.
Unless something big changes in the next year or two I’m having a hard time seeing it as any sort of progress.
After all the GOP had decided to be much more inclusive and welcoming after getting trounced in 2012. Last year America taught them that was the wrong lesson.
I really hope this is a “last gasp“ kind of thing but my pessimism says it isn’t.
But, the embrace of racism, anti-Semitism, historical revisionism, anti-scientific and neo-fascist ideologies seem to be both an expression of generational counterculture rejecting the status quo of "liberal" and "politically correct" thought, and a reactionary movement by the right-wing political establishment trying to maintain relevance in the face of changing ethnic, religious and gender dynamics in the US. I suspect real societal change will take much more than a year or two, or even a swing of the political pendulum from Red Team back to Blue Team. It might take generations, maybe long enough for children to reject the ideals of their alt-right and neoreactionary parents, the way the yuppies rejected the hippies, and the hippies rejected the beatniks.
No. The belief that allowing all ideas to stand on their own merit would be inherently good is the sentiment we are questioning. Is it? Is a radically free market in terms of goods and supplies the best idea? If not, why did we think it would apply to speech and ideas? As much as we love to live in the fantasy where good speech will counter bad speech, our history of research into markets and behavioral economics should show us that marketing, the ability to control outlets of speech, etc. make it unlikely that good speech always gets an equal (or even similar) opportunity to counter bad speech).
>the overall result of this openness seems to be growing disdain for beliefs which we now know are founded in hate, not logic or science.
All beliefs have some kind of fundamental assumption taken on faith, even the ones you will claim are founded on logic and science. Even the idea of science as definitive proof is based on the fundamental belief that the peer review method of scientific correction and checking cannot be coopted or subverted (and yet examples show that it can).
>Do you really feel that the world is in a worse place than it was in the 70's or even in 2010?
No but why does this matter? It doesn't mean every choice we made in the past was right. If we had chosen a centrally controlled, heavily censored Internet rather than the radically free and open model we live with now, still the world would be a better place than in the 70s.
The biggest problem I've found with people that purport to be rationalists (and I include myself) is the propensity to believe they have enough inputs to make definitive statements, when in truth they are just discounting the unknown unknowns. When dealing with people, even on the individual level but it's much worse in groups, the complex motivations and constraints make every statement along the lines of "a rational person would do X" sound hopelessly naive.
That some core beliefs are not examined or are believed to be the truth without evidence does not surprise me, even if it still makes me sad.
I think it's the same line of reasoning that draws people towards certain conspiracies (e.g. lizard people, Jews controlling the world). People want to feel like the world can be explained in just a few sentences. Otherwise, I think people feel utterly helpless.
Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors.
This isn't to say there are not depressingly high numbers of these kinds of people, but the conclusion you've arrived at comes from a typical group attribution error.
"Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors."
Why then, was this not something realized by the "prophets" of the Internet 2.0? That's what the author is asking. What conclusion did I arrive at which came from error? Please kindly point that out to me.
As for the prophets of Internet 2.0 (not sure why you're adding 2.0 here, we're discussing Brand and Kelly who were prophets of the intial web), I'd hazard a guess that their blindness came from a combination of good old-fashioned wishful thinking mixed with 'the shock of the new' that the web had in spades back then, galvanising them into becoming the 'egg-meet-face' cyber-utopianist proselytizers that the author of this article is deriding.
As usual in American discussions, class is forgotten.
A heterosexual, "white", cisman can also be working class or bourgeois, but for some reason -- probably because of the annihilation of Marxism in the US -- it's never brought up and this despite its modern relevance screaming at us.
Without class, one can't understand why Trump got the vote of so many working class people. Ethnicity (Caucasians are ethnic people from the Caucus region; modern biology only accepts one race and that is the human race; "white" is a culture, not a "race" or ethnicity, since Middle-Eastern Caucasians aren't considered "white"; "white" is better defined as a Caucasian of European origin that accepts Western culture), sexuality, sex and gender, religion... None of these explain the working class animosity towards the "ultra-wealthy elites" that are "out of touch with the common person" or why the promise of bringing back working class jobs was so tempting. Trump, while being a liar and actually damaging to the working class, played to their class heartstrings.
Social justice without class consciousness creates injustice, and that injustice is being exploited by the extreme alt-right.
One can't also understand why Bernie Sanders was as appealing as Trump unless one understands that both Bernie and Trump appealed to anti-bourgeois sentiment and both promised to help the working class. It was class rebellion, and unfortunately it turned out as badly as it did because Bernie was never put on the voting ballots.
At this irreversible point it's not actual actionable regret, but a merely symbolic act meant to save their conscience from hellish guilt.
Besides, the blame for the Facebook-surveillance state and "alternative" facts is dispersed over hundreds of thousands of people. No single individual is responsible. It's an out-sized ego with out-sized guilt that motivates him to write the article.