Jaron Lanier Interview on What Went Wrong with the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Jaron Lanier Interview on What Went Wrong with the Internet

nymag.com

72 pointswalterbell21 comments

What he calls "Digital Maoism" is an excellent critique and worth the read. The loss of voice is a substantial problem; the single voice being arbitrated by a for-profit cadre is worse.

I've followed his online works off and on for a while - he had some interesting ideas about coding and adaptive computations about 10+ years ago that I'd like to see followed up on. He seems to specialize in sort of being a public critic now (above interview seems to rehash his usual points well) & advocate for paid everything & DRM.

While the interview articulates several problems in need of solutions, it's not clear that Netflix-DRM-style TV business models are the answer.

It helps to know that Lanier is a part-time musician. He's from the era when musicians were a Big Deal. It bugs him that now they're just content generators for Spotify, SFX, and Ticketmaster.

He's managed to keep a high profile for a loooong time. I remember reading an article about him in 1983, about a game he made for the Commodore 64. The article spent more time talking about Lanier than talking about the game. This seemed a bit odd, because at that time, programmers frequently weren't even credited for their work.

Yes the solutions Lanier proposes will make the Internet worse, by his own measure.

And people still won't pay for his music.

While reading this article, I imagined an Eternal September writ large across the whole industry. Maybe in the beginning it was a few idealistic visionaries, who attracted other idealists who could get behind the vision. Then it succeeded wildly, and attracted everyone and thus became merely human. A mix of the worst and the best, and probably in proportion closer to 80/20 than 50/50. The vision became a game, one that need only be stable, but not optimal or humanist in its value system.

I would argue that it's even worse than that. The Eternal September scenario would at least let us off the hook, morally speaking -- it's not that the thing we built is bad, it's that people are bad, and so as people piled on to the thing we built it eventually became just as bad as they are. Which would be depressing, but at least not blameworthy.

But while people have their faults, I think it's closer to the truth here to say that we built something that took those bad people and made them worse. Chasing engagement and clicks, we built systems that rewarded bad behavior, with the inevitable result that the people who found the most success in our systems were the ones who behaved the worst. And since everybody wants to be successful in whatever environment they find themselves in, that drove people to be worse than they otherwise would have been as they chased after the same success for themselves.

I think the 2016 election was another Eternal September. Everything feels much more hostile and obnoxious since about the time of the last US presidential conventions.

I'm not sure what to call this phenomenon. Eternal 2016? Eternal November?

While reading this article, I imagined an Eternal September writ large across the whole industry.

That may be a side-effect to Lanier's singing the same song since around that time.

If you prefer your Jaron Lanier in audio form, this was a very similar interview he did for Ezra Klein's podcast: https://www.vox.com/2018/1/16/16897738/jaron-lanier-intervie...

Probably should have been titled "What Went Wrong with the Web". Aside from NAT, the network itself works as well as it ever did. The clusterfuck we send across it is another story.

Layers 8 & 9 are exhibiting troubling symptoms.

Thank you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8

The short-sighted arrogance of the headline really turns me off the article itself. Nothing "went wrong" with the internet. The internet is fine.

The culture of first world nations however, is completely fubar, has been since before all of us were born, and will probably continue to be long after we're all dead. (second and third world nations are also completely broken, but we expect that.)

It's the same kind of nonsense when people say "We've destroyed the planet!" No we haven't, we destroyed our own survivability in our own habitat, but the planet _is fine_, and will shake us all off some day without so much as a thought about it. The internet is equally indifferent and unaffected by our stupid capitalism problems.

I'm curious what you mean by "second world nations". The original Cold War definition was countries aligned with the Soviet Union. What's the second world today?

Well, third world countries are nations which are significantly behind the "First World" nations in terms of social, economic, and political development or progress. For example, much of the middle east still believes that an imaginary sky-fairy has given them the authority and permission to murder women with rocks anytime the men get upset about something, and they think simply being men gives them the right to rape women. These things basically makes them cave-men.

So "second world" countries are those which are not quite stone-age savage, but are still noticably behind.

So an example of a "Second world" nation would be the United Kingdom, which enjoys many of the modern luxuries of the first world, and much of the social freedoms and progress, and yet still suffers under a completely irrational monarchy and lacks essential freedoms such as the right to self defense. As citizens of the United Kingdom are completely forbidden from keeping arms for the sole purpose of defense of self, family, and property, they are essentially servants of the state. Such a nation cannot then be justly described as "first world", as real first world nations such as the United States have enjoyed these additional freedoms for many generations now.

If my definition is not "official" then I apologize, nobody ever really explained the meaning of the phrases to me and my understanding is simply based on 3 decades of contextual usage. The implication is that there is a single path of progress which all nations are basically following. The first world is setting the example, and the rest are following our lead.

('that we still have such a long way to go is one of the reasons it's so amazing we haven't nuked ourselves to extinction yet :)')

This breaks the site guidelines. We don't want ideological, religious, or national flamewar on HN.

Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this again?

I apologize for that, I do try to keep my comments in line... however..

Do we not have an _obligation_ as participants in this world society to speak up about horrors? Inaction leads to more suffering. If the discussion is only happening on HN, how can we justify our inaction to ourselves in the name of adhering to some arbitrary guidelines? "First they came for the..."

I understand why the guidelines exist. I even agree with them, mostly. However, I don't see the harm in tolerating necessary discussions about social awareness. This is where the adult conversations are happening. They aren't happening anywhere else. I am genuinely afraid of the social consequences of this policy.

Also, there is some confusion regarding where the violation occurs. Was it my original comment? Because I don't see a violation in my original comment. The comment you replied to was simply trying to clarify my statements for someone who asked for a clarification. Is clarification a violation? If so, this looks like "thought-crime" right? I would be grateful if you can clarify this for me.

The problem is that, like flames, they consume everything if you let them. Therefore we can't let them.

Hacker News is just one kind of website, not every kind. To survive, it needs to stay focused on its mandate, the gratification of intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). We've learned a lot over the years about what serves that spirit vs. what kills it. Comments like what you've been posting are among the most toxic to it. I'm sure there are many other places where they'd be fine, but here they're off topic, and encourage worse.

People frequently want to use HN for other things, such as political and ideological battle, but that would soon kill the site. Are those matters important? Yes they are. But does a forum dedicated to other, less important things, also have a right to exist? I think it does.

In terms of the comment I replied to, you crossed into religious flamewar, national flamewar, and ideological battle, all of which are things we don't want here. For this kind of discussion, you need to find another website, or perhaps create one. There is room for many more communities online.

I understand everything you're saying and you aren't going to get an argument from me on these points, however I still think there is a dangerous social concern here. HN isn't obligated to save the world, but there's an opportunity for improvement of this model isn't there?

The current system of hell-banning repeat offenders doesn't actually prevent the savvier users from seeing their content. Instead of that, what if comments could be split into two sections, threads about social ramifications and similar humanitarian concerns, and threads about intellectual curiosities and technology specific discussions?

Users could opt-in/out of each type of conversation, perhaps the social threads could be opt-out by default.

I understand what the site is trying to do. I also understand that there aren't really "other websites", because as I said this is where the real adult conversations are happening. HN is the only legitimate major source of news on the planet today in 2018, thanks in no small part to community participation. Everywhere else is garbage news and flame-wars as you've stated. I don't think "flame-wars" are a product of having grown up conversations about important topics, they're a product of having a lot of non-grown-ups participating in grown-up conversations. The up/down voting system does a great job already of filtering worthwhile content, it should not also be necessary to censor people.

_this_ conversation is, in my humble opinion, extremely interesting. What is the social responsibility of a website like HN which starts small but grows into something much larger? Look at what happened with Facebook when they ignored their social responsibilities in favor of their preferred direction. That's a conversation which should probably be had. And if we're being honest, and let's be honest, the best way to have it would be an Ask HN, and you and I both know that'd be flagged right away. My concern is: history has repeatedly taught us the severe consequences of that.

This seems like one of those situations where everyone knows it's broken and everyone wants it to be better, but strict adherence to "regulations" prevents otherwise free-willed people from doing what they know should be done. And then after the inevitable tragedies that result, people look back in hindsight thinking "why were we such fools". Often in the form of hollywood dramatizations ;)

I appreciate you taking time to hear me out, anyway.

"So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, and it’s absurd." "But in fact, we’re in a period of time of extreme concentration of wealth and power, and it’s precisely around those who run the biggest computers. So the truth and the effect is just the opposite of what the rhetoric is and the immediate experience." "My feeling is that if the theory is correct that we got into this by trying to be socialist and libertarian at the same time, and getting the worst of both worlds, then we have to choose." "The other option is to monetize it (facebook). And that’s the one that I’m personally more interested in. And what that would look like is, we’d ask those who can afford to — which would be a lot of people in the world, certainly most people in the West — to start paying for it. And then we’d also pay people who provide data into it that’s exceptionally valuable to the network, and it would become a source of economic growth. And we would outlaw advertising on it. There would no longer be third parties paying to influence you."

Sounds like Jaron has Chosen poorly.

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