Technorealism, Alvin Toffler, and the Forgotten Third Wave
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The gist of the concept seems to be that a utopian future predicted long ago never came to pass, and despite globalization, fast communication, and free movement of goods and sometimes individuals, people devolved into narrowly scoped groups instead. There's contention about control of institutions, control of capital, fruits to the gains of economic activity, so these groups are often at odds, and traditional solutions to their conflict are either too ineffective (government, compromise) or too drastic (protests, unrest, warfare), creating an awkward passive-aggressive state of pervasive discontent no one is happy with.
And all of the author's quote-mining seems to be a response to another overwrought essay that noted that tools like protests, angry mobs, identity politics, and the Internet, that were used by progressives to further their causes, did real damage to the credibility of institutions, and both the tools and that mistrust are now being repurposed by nationalists and fascists. This seems like non-news, and is completely to be expected, but somehow the author implies they find issue with the thesis, yet arrives at a very similar conclusion.
All these are too many words to say people will opportunistically group together and machinate towards a local betterment for their in-group above most others. Technology has generally lowered the cost and drawbacks of this opportunistic behavior, and free discourse and free assembly laws enable much of this in parts of the world, even when for-profit surveillance is prevalent. In other places, authorities have cracked down on dissent against the regime, so people who have more to lose than gain are too afraid to make waves online. But the factor limiting unrest is their desperation, which has little to do with technology.
To me, all of the author's points seem closer to realism, than technorealism. Technorealism tries to have a nuanced conversation about the things that change and the things that stay the same while living in an Internet-connected world, while this writing raves a lot about the decline of society itself and the supposed fault of a loose mob of electing a demagogue for the laughs. It's hardly deserving of the attention it's getting.
What's going on is not just in-groups operating towards local betterment. It's a disintegration of national consensus from the decline of mass (industrial) media. Democracy can't work without at least a rough consensus on what the truth is. The filter bubbles we increasingly inhabit lack conflict resolution and the bubbles drift further apart. We end up with factionalism, leading to balkanization, and unless we find a way to resolve the underlying tension, we're on the way to violence, IMO.
Mostly the lesson over time has been that people don’t want to agree about anything with their rivals until absolutely forced to. The content of the argument is less important than the medium of argument.
Network TV didn’t create a realm of common facts exactly but a single forcing factor that compelled resolution because the system could not sustain a lot of competing ideas.
Of course this meant that better ideas would survive, and that very often meant good ideas that worked in reality—-though not always.
Now you have to show an idea is better by implementing it at a smaller scale and growing it rather than winning all at once at a national level.
It’s all doable but it is harder and takes longer. It is possibly lower risk and more dynamic.
But it wasn't felt.
Before TV and radio, the main method of communication was print and conversation, so that a random person picked out of a population might come in contact with only a few political or cultural opinions in a given day. This continued into the age of TV and radio because only a few such opinions were permitted by those controlling the broadcasts.
Now that people might easily come into conflict culturally or politically hundreds of times a day, the real diversity of opinion across a large population is apparent to a given member of that population, in a way that it wasn't before, even if we assume that the differences were really there.
That constant conflict is a few clicks away at any moment leads many people to internalize that they are constantly fighting for their ability to hold their political beliefs and perform their culture, and/or to shut out most large differences to the extent they can, while conforming themselves to minor differences.
The only people who experienced this kind of constant churn in the past were travelers, and mostly only while traveling. We are all travelers now.
To be fair to Toffler, I don’t know if this could be obvious except after the fact. To be less fair, I am not sure I ever saw the value of vaguely trying to predict the future with overly broad linguistics.
Better I think would be to have a slightly ambitious and more humanitarian view of the future and figure out how to get their as fast as possible. Baby steps.
Such an approach is accountable and has goals which can be reasonably achieved. Anything else, IMHO, is just sci fi.
Interesting to see if most of the violence will occur in digital space. It might already be going on in multiple forms
I'm curious, where do people like yourself linger? What made you into a person who can respond as such? Are you an engineer who reads a lot? An academic?
Pardon me if that's direct, I just feel like understanding that may lead to an understanding of how to promote more level-headed discussion.
Or, widespread Internet use decreased the ability of the traditional gatekeepers of information to manipulate voters.
The internet is not some magical haven for information and knowledge. In its current form, it's comparable to information anarchy. It's not tenable.
In any case, I think we need a return to some sort of expertise or trusted authority system. Hopefully the internet allows for this to be independent of the political and corporate establishment.
It is still affected by bad actors, but has improved substantially from what it was by a growing community of oversight. Not a perfect model, but an interesting one in my opinion.
The same fact-checking that got Nixon and buried McGovern, or elected Raegan twice, or George Bush of CIA and Iran-Contra fame, or the war mongering Clinton and Bush Jr., or the more-of-the-same Obama?
You took events that transpired and then placed the blame on the system that allowed us to correct for these events in the first place (or at least attempt to). I'm sorry your criteria for a functioning and healthy media system is one that A) Never makes mistakes B) Can preemptively stop government officials from doing bad things.
I'd be interested to see you expound on the statements you made.
Hello thanks for reading.
Or, widespread internet used merely decentralized the means by which voters were manipulated, because voters were trained (in part by those traditional gatekeepers) to reject the mainstream and trust the fringe implicitly, rather than apply critical thinking skills to both.
I think the opposite is true. In the 2016 election, we saw people get trapped in information-bubbles. The internet allowed far-right/alt-right information sources such as Breitbart/Infowars to manipulate people and gain a wide audience.
Similarly, there has already been substantial evidence that the Russian government used a variety of techniques to spread false information through the internet.
To say that the internet decreased the amount of false information in the 2016 election is misleading and false.
I remember “liberal” and “conservative” media empires before the web...
I remember gerrymanderred 50/50 political races before the web...
That is not what is being said though, the amount of 'false information' increased for sure. The point is that the internet lets NEW actors manipulate minds outside of the standard 'mass media' channels. The 'mass media gatekeepers' did not have full control on the narrative at all times anymore. IOW 2016 made it clear that mass media is not in absolute control.
Now consider that these standard channels (tv, papers, etc) are used by everyone as the main means of transmitting messages from not only advertisers but also by interest groups pushing a cause and also government actors pushing an agenda (the 'buildup' to the iraq invasion springs immediately to mind). It should be no shock that everyone involved in these media channels is freaked the fuck out by the 2016 election. There is no longer any mass narrative. I think some actors realized this sooner than the actual media, which appears to have just woken up to it this year.
What the third wave is missing (right now at least) is functioning conflict resolution for (re)newly discovered gaps in the consensus, beyond litigation and guns, just as the article says. If we don't figure out a way to resolve conflicts in world views, and come to some kind of consensus on what is, there's a risk laws and force will be used instead.
I'd ask people to read articles sympathetically rather than keyword-trigger on their current bugbears, but it's pretty much impossible in political topics.
I too can not see how centralized government can survive without a centralized source of truth. But what to do about it? It should be possible through other means to arrange public services, public works, and other things required for civilization to survive.
Well, we could embrace epistemological humility and demand the reduction in the scope and scale of centralized government?
After reading that sentence unsympathetically, I think that you mean that democracy cannot survive without an official priestly class mediating truth for the masses. Is that too cynical?
citizen A thinks roglob is gree citizen B thinks roglob is purp
all citizens need to know what roglob is in order to function(live/make money/sleep/whatever) and to a certain extent have the same 'understanding' of roglob
So a "consensual consensus" means citizens A and B agree that in order to function(live/...) roglop starts with prue... the rest of the letters will be decided 'later', and that's enough for all citizens to function. (later being not fully specified out)
Implications are: A and B have to change the way they live, a bit, based on the "consensus" roglop.
And of course, it assumes that A and B accept to be 'a society' and accept that having a single roglop is good. (which, in itself, is another roglop,... it's roglops all the way down)
For that reason it's a mistake to assume that everyone on this website is evenly skilled just because you have the wherewithal to check whether the TLD is a web service or a private domain, or to intuit that the name in the footer might be a company and not a random string.
So while perhaps this person could check for themselves in the most literal sense, it's uncool to use a tone that implies their inferiority for not having done so.
When you make people feel bad for asking questions, you teach them not to try and get smarter, and that's a bad thing for everyone.
[Edit: looking at submissions from that domain, I think the writing in a couple of the other articles seem very similar.]
It's a quick webpage creator, akin to pastebin with formatting[0], so that won't tell you much about the author.
The writing style is very early 2000s, which kind of narrows it down. Based on the content alone there is no obvious reason to publish this anonymously, so maybe someone caught up in #MeToo or similar?
Based on the writing style though it sounds clearly like it's from someone associated either with Technorealism, the Cluetrain Manifesto, the Berkman Klein center folks, the Data & Society folks, or the handful of other prominent early bloggers who aren't closely associated with any of those. No one less than 30 or older than 70 writes like this though.
The margin of election was small. A few tens of thousand of votes in a few states. Every factor that produced an effect that size can be said to be causal. And there were many, many factors that qualified.
Anybody who says that Trump's election had a single cause is, at best, selling something. And I'm not buying.
My esperience is teaching me that anyone with "the" answer/solution/cause is selling something either unwittingly or not.
I've yet to encounter any event above molecular physics that can be described accurately with this much simplicity.
This strikes me as particularly dubious. Trump won because of some decisions made before his grandfather came here? Sure, I guess, if you want. But it's not the only way to analyze it.
So yes tribalism can absolutely exist on facebook. It is a digital platform, not a supermarket. There is no guarantee you ever bump into someone you don't want to bump into, and completely isolated communities can be formed on the same base-structure. Reddit has made this sort of design explicit.
The author has lost the plot.
>It's pretty apparent that the reason Trump won wasn't Russian intervention (note the extremely Second Wave nature of the explanation: nations playing at geopolitics).
Ah yes, a nation pouring an immense amount of resources into propaganda targeting a specific subsection of american society and having close contact with the currently elected administration definitely wasn't the reason they got elected.
Let's Correct the Record (don't spritz all over your keyboard HN):
Russia abused Twitter/Facebook. But Twitter and Facebook aren't _the_ reason he got elected though. Facebook and the like are useful tools because you can post anything and have it reach a large, "odd"/targeted audience. But without that audience, without that sounding board, the information is nothing. Facebook and Twitter, and all the other social media platforms have significant design flaws with their raison d'etre: the spread of information across some social graph.
Assuming that the social graph is comprised of rational actors is a question that keeps getting begged in these discussions. There is no evidence for this being the case and all the evidence against that assumption. So we should correct for it. Just like the existing media platforms do (well, with the exception of one notable media giant who loves abusing that fact who's had a hand in creating the absurd situation we find ourselves in today).
We need to fix the problems we know about. That's all. It wouldn't hurt to remember why the media is structured the way it currently is (or was). In any system that gets re-implemented, there is always a duplication of efforts and lessons learned. These New Media systems will be no different.
The U.S. had a useful law for dealing with the problems of "today." And it's sad to say we've basically created problems where there never needed to be. Time to re implement the Fairness Doctrine -- across the board.
>But the core of the "brain-force economy" is politically retarded - it has a low political IQ and has not achieved political self-consciousness. The old smokestack barons and trade union leaders who dominated during the second wave are still running rings around you guys in Washington."
It's not so much as a new wave, but a new class of citizens who desperately need to become actively engaged in the political process. And understanding that the systems they're creating has lead to new power structures and information conduits, and with power comes responsibility. A responsibility to ensure the consumers of their platform are not unduly influenced by incorrect, false, and misleading information (Facebook tried doing this but was lambasted by the right, can't imagine why). A responsibility to support good governance and to support policies that provide a continued foundation for a functioning, healthy, productive, peaceful society.
The situation we're in isn't a technological problem. It's a social one.
Here are a few questions for you: Why did Russian ad-buys during the 2016 campaign fund both extremist sides of the political spectrum? For an example, why did they try to simultaneously organize pro- and anti-gay rallies in Kansas?^1 And just who is Vladislav Surkov?^2
>The U.S. had a useful law for dealing with the problems of "today." And it's sad to say we've basically created problems where there never needed to be. Time to re implement the Fairness Doctrine -- across the board.
Okay, now where is the threshhold to qualify for consideration in the Fairness Doctrine, particular in a society with manifold subcultures? Is it party members? Is it adherents? Is it hashtags? Who gets to be on the Fairness Board? How are violations handled? Who gets to determine what speech is acceptable (because clearly revolutionary parties exist)? When is a platform accountable? Are foreign platforms accountable? Are personal servers broadcasting or narrowcasting?
>It's not so much as a new wave, but a new class of citizens who desperately need to become actively engaged in the political process. And understanding that the systems they're creating has lead to new power structures and information conduits, and with power comes responsibility. A responsibility to ensure the consumers of their platform are not unduly influenced by incorrect, false, and misleading information (Facebook tried doing this but was lambasted by the right, can't imagine why). A responsibility to support good governance and to support policies that provide a continued foundation for a functioning, healthy, productive, peaceful society.
In so many words, you're advocating for fixed fortifications in an age of Blitzkrieg.^3 Or to paraphrase Toffler, instead of automobiles, we need to just make stronger and faster horses.
>The situation we're in isn't a technological problem. It's a social one.
The notion that it's a monocausal issue of social policy has been addressed thoroughly for decades by luminaries such as Marhsall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul. The Medium is the Message. For a more up to date take, I strongly recommend that you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death.
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[1] https://www.advocate.com/media/2017/11/03/why-did-russia-pro...
I'm sorry, there is nothing to respond to here if you're going to make that kind of equivocation. Reread my post and respond in a non-disingenuous manner.
I know it's hard for tech people -- who generally have no kind of appreciable liberal education -- to appreciate social systems (even though people on "hacker" news should definitely be intimately knowledgeable and interested in how these systems act). Asimov was right, technology is moving faster than our social practices and wisdom know how to handle.
> that you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death.
I have, and your post makes no use of your superficial use of this source. Your entire post is basically responding to a straw man. Try something substantive.
http://www.criticalthink.info/Phil1301/Wave3lec.htm
In order to remain in the Second Wave (industrial age), the following would need to happen:
9. Families will become non-nuclear.
Many say the family is falling apart today. They define the family as a husband-breadwinner, mother-housekeeper, and a numebr of children. This is the "nuclear family" which was created and idealized by the Second Wave. It is falling apart, because the Second Wave industrial complex system is falling apart.
If we really want to maintain the nuclear family, here's what we would have to do:
* Freeze all technology in its Second Wave stage to maintain a factory-based, mass-production society.
* Block the rise of the service and professional sectors in the economy. White-collar, professional, and technical workers are less traditional, less family-oriented, more intellectually and psychologically mobile than blue- collar workers.
* "Solve" the energy crisis by applying nuclear and other highly centralized energy processes. The nuclear family survives better in a centralized society.
* Return to mass media, and ban cable television, cassettes, local and regional magazines and radio programs. Nuclear families work best where there is a national consensus on information and values, not in a society based on high diversity.
* Forcibly drive women back into the kitchen. Reduce wages for those who insist on working. The nuclear family has no nucleus when there are no adults left at home.
* Slash the wages of young workers to make them more dependent, for a longer time, on their families.
* Ban contraception. This makes for independence of women and for extramarital sex, a notorious lossener of nuclear ties.
* Cut the standard of living of the entire society to pre-1955 levels, since affluence makes it possible for single people, divorced people, working women, and other unattached individuals to "make it" economically on their own.
* Resist all changes in our society which lead toward diversity, freedom of movement and ideas, or individuality. The nuclear family remains dominant only in a mass society.
The great tragedy of it though is an inability to imagine something akin to the nuclear family in a post-industrial society. They don't imagine a coal miner doing subsurface work on the moon. This is why I think that the current hardline focus on escaping the reality of a changing world is going to be short-lived. At some point, as traditionalists get more of what they want, the idealists of the world will pull away to such an extent that their new normal will have the wholesome things manifested rather than just shadows of what once was.
I think that a sustainable Third Wave culture akin to the Federation on Star Trek that embraces true technology that improves lives (as opposed to the distractionary and zero-sum vulture capitalism that we have now) will feel tangibly real in a way that authoritarianism can never be. Like how the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it but in a physical reality where everyone has renewable energy and makerbots.