Better put, because everyone is on the internet now, the real world's problems are now the internet's problems. It used to serve as an escape, true. It has made the world a smaller place, where problems from a distant state or country can reach me and I can't help but be aware of them. I may even be affected by them.
Is that good or bad, for us as individuals or as global citizens? That's heavy stuff.
From day one, life has been about letting in certain elements, and keeping out others. Without this selection, development and differentiation are impossible. Similarly we don't (and shouldn't) let every person into our homes, or our countries, or our servers. Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Internet, without ever being able to remove them?
For the same reason it's seen as an obvious truth that everyone should be allowed to use a telephone, or send a letter in the mail. The internet is a communications platform, by definition it belongs to anyone who wants to use it.
The internet being used by everyone no more makes the development or differentiation between cultures impossible than the planet Earth being used by everyone does.
Also, because the anarchist hacker ethos that led to the internet was about liberating humanity from the constraints of gatekeepers - the systems of governance and proprietary control over access to information and freedom of expression that divided the world between the elite and the serf.
What we're seeing now is not that model breaking down, but only beginning to come into its true potential.
Yes, there may be negative effects to the ability of the internet to remove the barriers between cultures and communities, even states, but the world would be a lot worse still if it had never left the confines of a few universities simply to keep the normies out. The value of the transformative nature of the internet on civilization itself is greater than the value of the internet monoculture whose relevance it no longer recognizes.
With respect to ownership, I assume you’re referring to a “right of use” rather than ownership of the underlying physical assets and services. Rights however, derive from somewhere and most rights carry an implicit purpose defining or otherwise informing the scope of the right. For example, the second amendment (right to bear arms) is not a free pass to commit murder or to otherwise use those arms to infringe on the legitimate rights of others. (Note, I’m not mentioning this in order to start a flame war. I’m making no statement regarding gun rights or related topic). Therefore I’d question where or how you believe this “ownership/use” right has arisen.
With respect to the “anarchist hacker ethos” leading to the internet (and as someone old enough to have mostly been there), I’d suggest that no such thing occurred. You are assuming a single philosophy on the part of a great many people and organisations (such as the military) who contributed to the key infrastructure of the internet. What exactly is this hacker ethos? My definition likely differs significantly from ESR’s which may or may not differ from yours. Nevertheless you state a purpose, “liberating humanity from the constraints of gatekeepers”. I’d humbly suggest that the vast majority of users of these commons are not even aware that this is the intent, let alone agree with it, other than that their own ability to use this commons as they wish, even to the detriment of others, be uninfringed.
Historically, gatekeepers have been few. On the internet however, much like in lawless towns past, the good burghers are forming posses of their own to protect the use of their little patch of the internet, via mechanisms such as moderating, rating, voting and karma based systems. Irrespective of the efficacy of such approaches, online communities are increasingly adopting them to filter out or limit the actions of bad citizens. Effectively, communities themselves are becoming the gatekeepers. And from my perspective, good on them. Because however imperfect these attempts might be, I’d much rather HN with its voting system than without (for example).
I don’t support keeping the “normies” out, but I do support the right of each community to decide for itself whether and how they want to keep the arseholes out.
[That's not the kind of gatekeeping I meant, but to your statement...] According to whom? That's one social philosophy, I suppose, but I'd call it more anti-social.
From day one, [human] life has been about sticking together to accomplish more than the sum of our parts. Outcasts aside, the idea that we have to keep others out to continue our way of life is dangerous and wrong, morally and practically.
From day-one, humans have had to deal with the very real threat of other humans trying to kill them. Unless you subscribe to a social-Darwinist belief that the strongest tribe can rightfully wipe out or absorb every one of its enemies -- and the weaker tribes deserve to go -- your morality must reckon with the real problem of inter-tribal agression.
Perhaps this is what you meant by "Outcasts aside, ..." But if so, then your argument reduces to "we shouldn't keep people out, except for those that we should."
Obviously, we should keep people out that want to end our way of life, but that isn't where this conversation should be going. The original comment was talking about the privilege of early internet usage and escapism. And so to bring it back around, I can understand the nostalgia but I think wishing that the "rest" of the world would stop messing up "our" internet is a terrible thing to wish.
We mustn't disregard that other people are applying the dangerous-tribe mentality to their reasoning about the Internet. There are extant fears of hackers and terrorists organizing and funding their operations online, right alongside the bake sales and peaceful marches. Some of those fears may be justified, and the actors may represent a danger to our way of life. But even if they were all boogeymen, the fear is real, and people act dangerously and irrationally when they are afraid. The existence of an open forum where even boogeymen can converse, itself, leads to a general unease and reactionist policy making.
Balance is needed in these discussions, but we can't achieve that without acknowledging that there may be a few Vandals in our midst who've already made it past the gates. If we pretend otherwise, we will be constantly talking past each other.
* You have to negotiate what cooperation means. And this essentially defines the boundaries of a community.
* It's disastrous if "cooperate" is your only approach, because even a fraction of defectors choosing a predatory approach can become a significant problem.
Please explain warring tribes and city states.
Because it is obvious. Everyone should be able to access the internet.
Now, do the various internet communities have a right to ban people they don't want around? Yes. Absolutely.
However, that's not "gate keeping", it's more accurately called Freedom of Association and the government is implicitly restricted from denying you such freedom via the First. (Provided you are in the US.) And, yes, Freedom of Association is wonderful. That's why we're not subjected to child porn, or nut jobs gunning down little old jewish and black ladies at worship, or 7 year old girls being disemboweled. Etc etc etc. If those people want to share their content, they can, they just need to do it in their own community where the rest of us don't have to see it. Because they are, mercifully for the rest of us, generally banned from our general communities.
I guess I'm just hoping that what you meant was that people should be able to remove others from their community. Not that people should be able to remove others from the internet. (Although a lot of that stuff, I mean, I wouldn't lose any sleep if it became unavailable tomorrow. I'd probably cheer in fact.)
But I'm not American... So I guess I'm just surprised. It's thankfully illegal where I'm at.
But yes, there are people in the US who post the video of their pet terrorists blowing away some old lady in a church or temple or mosque or what have you. It is not strictly speaking, illegal here. Neither are the death videos no matter how objectionable. To make matters worse, most of these low-lifes tend to congregate in the same well known places, which also host, you guessed it, child porn. So a community of real winners all around.
All I was saying was that people like that should be kicked out of communities that aspire to cater to regular people. But they should not be kicked off the internet. As disgusting as their proclivities may be, they do still have Freedom of Speech. I just don't want them speaking in the places I frequent, and thankfully, the proprietors of those places agree with me in that regard.
That's why Freedom of Association in a place like the US is extremely important. People and organizations have to be free not to be associated with that sort of content. It's as important as Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Expression actually.
All very well and good until one day society decides you are one of the people that needs to be removed.
For example, maybe everybody should be able to read the President's tweets.
But should Twitter necessarily be such that everybody can reply to the President's tweets? At this point in time, replies to the President, or to journalists, &c seem to be used to engage with other people reading the President's tweets, not with the President.
As a result, Twitter's design is that everybody can interact with each other, whether they like it or not.
I think there are many middle grounds between "Everybody can access the Internet," and, "Only some people can access the Internet." One such middle ground is, "Everybody can access the Internet, but not everybody has near-frictionless ability to engage with strangers."
The ability to directly and freely communicate with leaders (and for them to communicate with one another) is incredibly revolutionary. It is unfortunate that Twitter, of all places, a site whose entire purpose is top-of-mind contextless microblogging, is where this revolution is taking place, and that the President in question is basically a shitposting troll, but I suppose beggars can't be choosers.
I still kind of love that the President of the United States can say something stupid on Twitter, and a million people, including other world leaders, can respond with scathing criticism, rebuttals and stupid memes, and no one gets sent to the camps, or gets a nuke dropped on them.
> "Everybody can access the Internet, but not everybody has near-frictionless ability to engage with strangers."
That's something to be implemented by any particular site as it sees fit, not the entire platform. As far as the internet is concerned, everybody should have near-frictionless access to everything and everyone if they want it, and if someone provides a platform for it. Universality of access, both to ideas and to people, is kind of the entire point.
Regardless of medium, many-to-one communication using freeform text doesn't scale. If you structure it, it's basically a poll.
I agree with you, but why do you believe the discourse is so bad?
Twitter really isn't designed for discourse, and definitely not for complex discourse, but for immediate engagement and virality. The way the platform works almost encourages piling on and hostility. More than anything, I think the appearance of retweeted and replied-to content in your feed from people you don't even follow contributes to this.
And I'm trying to put this in as non-partisan a way as I can... Trump's personality, his addiction to the platform, the polarizing nature of his Presidency and his loose relationship with the truth just adds fuel to the fire. I suspect this is just what mainstream political discourse looks like when a lot of people are genuinely angry about the state they find the country in. It provides a catharsis, if nothing else.
I like the idea of citizens communicating with their representatives, but that isn’t what happens when people reply to Trump, or Kamala Harris, or whomever.
We all see those replies, so the incentive is to basically spam those Tweets with stuff that people want amplified on DJT’s coattails.
I’d be delighted if Twitter hid replies from people I don’t follow, but that’s not how it works, and it’s not how they want it to work.
And in my opinion, it doesn’t work. JM2C.
[1] He'd probably get banned very quickly. And the limited number of downvotes before a comment gets killed would be a hindrance. Still, the idea has a lot of charm...
Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Earth, without ever being able to remove them?
What you speak about is tribalism and is a genetic trait that used to help us survive. But we can rise above our animal instincts and be better.
Anecdotally, an example is ladies tea events in social circles. If you ask women who are in to this, there is a different atmosphere by having only women present.
Do guys want to join? Sure, but that's too bad. Not everything has to be for everyone.
What does it mean to deny someone?
If an OS provider, browser provider, internet provider, and website all agree to give someone the tools necessary to access a given website, why should you get involved?
At the same time, if you want to run your own site who limits who can join, you should be free to do so. Many communities I'm a part of do this already (normally by limiting behavior, for example a forum for a given game only allows discussions related to that game, someone who keeps bringing up unrelated topics will find themselves under a series of increasing lengthy bans).
If you want to build your own protocol and only let those you deem the cool kids use it, then you are free to do so.
>Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Internet, without ever being able to remove them?
Put simply, we never had the choice because we didn't build the internet. The ones who did have the choice choose to open it up as wide a technically feasible. We don't get a say in this case, but we are free to make our own case where we can have a say.
> “The internet wouldn’t have been created by people like Mark Zuckerberg, or any of the sort of corporate executives in Silicon Valley today,” he said. “They wouldn’t be capable, they don’t have the temperament, they’re too controlling. They don’t understand the whole idea of bottom up.”
I think the only people who want to use the internet in a decentralized, bottom-up way are engineers. The vast majority of people need a simple experience that doesn't require them to learn anything new or to make too many choices. That's not exactly the opposite of bottom-up, of course, and it's possible to have both sometimes. But optimizing for bottom-up vs optimizing for simplicity leads to very different outcomes. Sometimes when I hear engineers talk about how much they hate how popular websites like Facebook and Twitter work, it sounds like they don't care very much about whether their ideal internet would be useful for normal people.
I even think there's some of this going on in the privacy debate. Yes, normal people care about privacy a lot. But they mostly care about it when it impacts their life directly in ways they can understand, like traffic cameras or identity theft. It's hard for a normal person to engage in the debates about the Snowden leaks or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, because the details are technical, and the impact on most people's lives is indirect. Now, of course it's normal for people with a technical background to make decisions and judgment calls in their area of expertise, for the benefit of the public, without waiting for an informed public debate about all the little details. The world is complicated, and that's how everything works. But I think a lot of humility is called for in those situations, because you're mixing together questions of what people would value with questions of what they should value or of what you personally value. I worry about this when I hear engineers say things like "abolish Facebook". Like yes, many engineers would rather starve than give up their data privacy. But that really isn't how most people feel, and if you waved a magic wand and made everyone in the world an expert on cookies and IP addresses and databases, it's not at all clear to me that they'd feel the same hate for Facebook that many engineers do.
Why is gatekeeping something that one can be dangerously close to?
I gatekeep who my friends are. We gatekeep who our employers are. We gatekeep what actions we find acceptable from our children.
Gatekeeping is a form of discrimination, and while that has become a four letter word due to specific forms of discrimination that have caused massive amounts of harm, every day we engage in extremely reasonable forms of discriminating. Every day we make value judgments based on the information provided. Every day we use stereotypes that were built off of incomplete data but work well enough.
When I'm picking up cookies at the cookie store, I don't judge the individual cookie on its own merits. I stereotype it based on who produced it. Yes, this current batch could be horrendous, but without the ability to sample that batch directly there isn't any better information than judging it based on past experiences of similarly branded cookies from the same bakery.
Yes, sometimes our stereotypes and judgments we make based on incomplete information hurt others. We need to be guarded against it to ensure we don't cause others undue harm. But if I and others want to form a small community where only people who understand the joke "There is no place like 127.0.0.1." can join, is there really a problem with that?
The new internet does this as well, but along with it is the modern scarlet letter: the plague of judgement, outrage, and moral hysteria. It's a technological "Scarlet Letter" or "Rape of the Lock." Importantly, it's not just that I personally might want to escape these things, it's that society as a whole is being transformed by them. Is it good that people can apparently easily be manipulated in Burma by Facebook groups? For sure, there is some good with the bad. I'm not suggesting that the modern internet doesn't do any good for people. But, it brings with it all the problems of society.
The big change was that after 2008 advertising on the Internet slowly emerged as a real thing. It’s the ad driven models that made the Internet hell.
Yes it is, but maybe its an example of the effect of the economical system we are in. Most of the negative stuff that pop up are driven by money making. Even filter bubbles could be classified as a vector for making money.
Personally I try to avoid all the shitty parts that come with modern internet and reap the benefits of it.
It's probably much the same online. Those ads blaring someone else's name, even in what is "kinda" your own personal lawn/profile/whatever, does a lot to remove a sense of ownership. Likewise in hope of getting more engagement, what would be a smaller conversation is likely to end up massively broadcasted for those ad views.
I think we made a big mistake trying to convince everyone that the digital life is like real. E.g. you can have real conversations etc. (they are real but not the same, maybe our discussions online are too real idk), please bear with me ...
IMO there has been a huge interest by Tech to make everyone believe that Online life is very much like real life, for some of us it even did become so (SecondLife, gaming, etc). And there are many calls to enforce real-name policies and to outlaw anonymity in Tech. The theory is that this will improve authenticity, get rid of trolls ("if only we could back this with more security, root of trust", etc).
But when I just judge from myself, how I use the web ... I am not actually "really me" in the same sense. Even posting under my real name I often catch myself having provided some kind of snapshot of my inner state of mind or general feeling, and which to my horror shouldn't be taken at face value (yet it is because I said it and it is written).
When speaking pseudonymously it allows me to air half-baked thoughts and feelings so that I can get feedback (in a safe way) and then allows to improve my thinking on the subject.
I wonder would I say the same things under my real identity ? and the scary answer is sometimes I accidentally do. And I guess others also make these mistakes. Compartmentalizing is really hard and once I said shit the cat is out of the bag ... what was written may haunt me forever.
Getting judged by a prospective employer wading through our social media footprint is already reality, and before entering some countries I have to unlock my phone now. None of this is supposed to be like that IMO because we humans don't compartmentalize our thoughts the same way when we are online as we do when we have a conversation IRL
What tricks us into thinking that "just because we say it we should stick to it", because we use the written form. By saying it in our head and WRITING IT DOWN, it becomes very hard to take a step back and retract our position. Writing things down is one of the keys in how we commit to something according to Robert Caldini[1]. And because we usually write online our not well thought out positions (spitballing), we end up making these spitballs our personal hills to die on. This is something we haven't yet realized: ONLINE != IRL, yet we want to force people to believe it is the same.
[1] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Rober...
I use forums like these as a way to pressure-test crazy ideas, or ways I tell a story. My post history is probably full of crazy shit as a result. In no way will I ever link this account to my real name; in fact I’ll probably abandon it in a few months and start another.
As a result, I also tend to take online argumentation to be more of an academic exercise than one capable of changing opinions. You can also argue the opposing side of an issue to understand the nuance there.
But the net takeaway is that the online world does not represent reality; it represents all the possibilities of reality — which can sometimes be horrifying.
Things that are written may not just haunt us forever, but things that we read may as well. Mental health is something culturally we don't have strong controls on, and yet evidence backs that our physical health is strongly correlated to our mental health.
I think the thing we haven't yet realized is not just that online != "real life" but that online is worse than real life: it's a Fairy space. Anything we can imagine can become real enough online that it affects our real life (health, wealth, etc). On the surface it is shiny and whimsical, and underneath it is full of monsters (of our own creation, most likely). We exist in a time where nearly everyone has a magic mirror to a fairy space in their pocket, and old fairytales tell us we should be frightened and proceed with huge amounts of caution.
But you are confusing nostalgia with genuine concerns Such as privacy and addiction fed and perfected by ml and massive amounts of personal data.
That seems to be what the kids are into nowadays.