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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam, malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things. Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the internet. I can work for anyone over the internet and make money for myself and my family. I can communicate with family members and friends across continents. With all the hate social media gets for example, imagine a life without them again. I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse or outdated.

So Thank you for creating the internet all you tremendous people. I personally wouldn't trade it. Can we fix a few things ? Sure we can. But it has not gone wrong. It has changed lives, mine included for the better.

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I don't understand your theory of how the internet has "lifted so many people out of poverty".

I'm not saying I disagree with it necessarily, I don't even understand what you're suggesting enough to disagree or agree with it. It's definitely not _obvious_ to me that the internet has somehow lifted so many people out of poverty, I just don't understand what you mean.

I am one of those people. I was a poor boy in a remote village in a third world country. The Internet brought me opportunities to know and connect to people far far away. The Internet has shaped my thought process, education, job opportunities. Just about everything I have today was due to the advance of computers and the Internet.

I agree. On a tech forum the bias is to consider the internet a panacea.

Look at the US. We went from ~0% internet penetration in 1990 to 75% in 2017. How much have real wages changed since then?

We fantasize about an impoverished person learning a new skill, but it's not the reality.

Created jobs, increased global trade, allowed for people to teach themselves, new types of products available, higher awareness about what is going on around you, technology share, open source, free products etc.

OK. Except for possibly "created jobs", it's not obvious to me most of those things lead to "lifting so many people out of poverty." (For instance, I suspect very strongly that "new types of products available" has nothing to do with lifting people out of poverty).

I am gonna want some analysis based on actual numbers of some kind that shows the internet did those things, and it lifted so many people out of poverty.

(For starters, I don't even know if fewer people are "in poverty" now than pre-internet or not!)

> I suspect very strongly that "new types of products available" has nothing to do with lifting people out of poverty

Your suspicion is wrong. GDP per capita has increased significantly in emerging markets where cheap labor creates these "new types of products", with China being the prominent example

> I don't even know if fewer people are "in poverty" now than pre-internet or not!

That is a well known fact, you'll just have to google it.

> I am gonna want some analysis based on actual numbers of some kind that shows the internet did those things

There are countless analyses on the benefits of globalization which was enabled in part by the advance of near-instantaneous telecommunication

Increasing global trade leads to better outcomes for those producing those goods. The greatest alleviation of poverty and creation of the largest middle class in the history of humanity happened in China starting the early 90s and that was fuelled by increased global trade made possible partly by the Internet.

The invention of how to create fire or the wheel also created a bunch of jobs but also allow warmongers and thieves and murdering pyros to do their evil deeds.

Every innovation has consequences short and long term.

These jobs are shrinking as low level apps get dumbed down... The process of creating a simple web site has gotten much much more complex as scripting languages have changed. I still can't believe we're compiling code for simple phone and web sites and apps.

Corporations have lobbied to take away Net Neutrality, and to institute throttling and make running a personal web site much more expensive. Social media sites de-prioritize regular users under corporate (paid) marketing posts...

These days you have to pay to be seen, the Internet was originally based on having everyone on an equal playing field, and now everything is being based around the new rules to prevent us from going back.

The Internet is becoming less effective because it's no longer an equal playing field. Its becoming much more expensive and complex over time to run an independent web presence, when in the past it was simple and inexpensive, I think that's the major issue.

The Internet is changing because people who use it are changing it. This is what happens with tools. The Internet’s current state is a reflection of our societal values, which I think is what you’re really decrying.

> The Internet’s current state is a reflection of our societal values, which I think is what you’re really decrying.

I wish that were true. It feels more like the internet is a reflection of a very small number of greedy, amoral people from the bay area.

> The process of creating a simple web site has gotten much much more complex as scripting languages have changed.

If your site requires any scripting at all, it's not a "simple web site".

It's actually very easy to make websites and apps now IMO, never worrying about hosting and network intrusion and things like that, but you sell out to the centralized, pervasively monitored model of the web in doing so.

I meant in terms of being able to totally own and control your design, presentation, and content...

If you want to use a platform like WIX, sure it's easy, but the minute they run broke and need to shut down you're screwed. Also having your own (independent) domain pointing to a web site that you made is very costly to a layman without an enterprise account...

Corporations have lobbied to take away Net Neutrality, and to institute throttling and make running a personal web site much more expensive.

There is literally no impact on personal web sites. You neither pay more, nor are you throttled.

I would wager these unflintchingly ethical telcos are bideing their time on this one. The beancounters are probably salivating about ideas such as this one from a few years ago:

"In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages," he wrote. "A huge advantage for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in front of people which stifles innovation. This is what's at stake, and that's why we have to save net neutrality."[1]

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/net-neutrality-portugal-how-...

Why do we need to look at Portugal? Net Neutrality was only in effect from 2015-2017. We have decades of experience in the US without net neutrality, and it has been fine for small publishers. Do you really think the beancounters care about Mommy Bloggers, or Bob's Keto Korner? If anything, they are looking at big dogs with lots of cash that use lots of bandwidth like Netflix and upstart startups like Disney.

Well, you're right that the internet has not yet turned into Cable TV style bundling, and you're double-right that they could hardly care less about Kombucha Korner.com.

The crappy swings at CaTV-style service bundling that the telcos have whiffed so far such as Uverse failed to grab enough momentum to jack any of the internet streaming video limelight from youtube, netflix, or really anything from anything else at all. Who really uses Comcast's, or even Verizon FIOS' bundled voice service? A gas station before they get fed up?

Also, please consider Verizon's NXDOMAIN[0]: Purposefully hijacking RFC behavior in order to slurp in a few extra ad clicks off of granny. And if that doesn't just scream "Corporate Governance", I've heard they know which porn I visit. I mean, no surprise here, but my point is that while I really like my car insurance and recommend it to my friends, boy howdy, I have never enjoyed interacting with any telco for any reason, ever.

But, I wonder--if the FCC had never bothered with regulating away the gale-force of swarming telcos voraciously borging away at the PCS spectrum in the 1990s, would MVNE services even be available today? And if they weren't, or were just really shabby, How would The Bell Collective choose to market its services to the low end of the cube market? I mean would they program customers to remit extra currency units for a special Verizon speed-charge port for your alcove or something? Their service couldn't possibly be that bad. Everybody here would be out of the job.

Nowadays, AT&T Uverse keeps putting on for some reason, meanwhile at Comcast and Verizon, their top lobbyists have miraculously cured their chronic internet content aversion syndrome, commence with bundling Netflix. On the other side of the cubefarm, just past that one weird closet nobody ever goes into, Verizon Wireless is slowing some of its MVNO customers.[1] This is fair play too, since two years ago I'd say. Who is to blame them for propping up their own quality of service at their competitors expense if there is no regulatory recourse?

I realize that Verizon Wireless and Verizon Verizon are not the same Verizon, for some Verizon, even though they're both owned by Verizon. Regarding Verizon, I have met many former and current Verizon customers. I assure you, we are very certain that neither Verizon nor Verizon Verizon would deign to charge you any less out of the goodness of its heart.

Helpfully, they seem quite eager to itemize regulatory fees and taxes.

So I'd say you're triple-right about looking at Verizon-er, uh, I mean Portugal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking#Manipulation_by_...

[1] How MVNOs compare to Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint: https://www.tutela.com/blog/best-mvno-us-2018-consumer-cellu...

Creating jobs isn't good by itself if the work being done is to a bad end. Despite how much promise the internet has for free information, lots of people have been paid to pollute it with garbage that is the opposite of helpful. Or to spy on people so that knowledge can be used against them. The internet is a great thing technology wise, but it has enabled bad actors as much as enabling humble and well intentioned people.

>Creating jobs isn't good by itself if the work being done is to a bad end. Lots of people have been paid to pollute it with garbage that is the opposite of helpful. Or to spy on people so that knowledge can be used against them.

I wish more people internalised this fact.

I answered a specific question which was about pulling people out of poverty.

Everything has consequences. I am pretty sure you would prefer the life you live now than what even kings live 300 years ago.

The number of people in extreme poverty globally have dropped roughly 650m since 1990. Some part of that is probably due to the internet though I'm not sure you could say how much exactly. (Our World in Data graph https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/04/Extreme-Poverty-p...)

https://ourworldindata.org/internet

Almost none of the desperately poor had internet between 1990-2000, yet poverty fell steeply.

Yeah there are a number of factors in play. I doubt though that China say would be turning out tech in the way they are for example without being able to look stuff up and order stuff on the web. And I think it will kick in in Africa too.

The often-repeated trope, touted as an achievement of capitalism, relies on defining "not poor" as earning 2$ PPP per day, or 60 bucks a month, or 700$ = 0.7k per year.

Not to mention, ignoring any other measures of quality of life or progress besides raw dollars. It's judging capitalism via a metric internal to capitalism. Pure circular reasoning. E.g. subsistence farmers in rural areas made 0$ and were "poor" by that metric, now they work 14h a day at factories for 2$ a day and are "not in poverty" anymore. Congratulatory handshakes all around!

There's plenty of ignorance to go around on HN, but this is shockingly so. Global poverty statistics don't count subsistence farming as zero income, which would render the entire exercise meaningless. Two dollars a day isn't an objectively high number, but the point is that passing that bar is a threshold that means you're not _below_ $2/day. The kind of poor we're talking about deal with starvation, easily-preventable diseases, dying from indoor wood burning for lack of better heating systems,etc. Projecting your privileged, first-world notion that none of that matters because they aren't self-actualized and the resource level that helps you avoid that "isn't that much" is just sheer idiocy.

The international poverty line does take into account of subsidence farmers [1]. Dollars is just used as a standard, so that there can be a tangible value.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-home-production-and-consu...

That's not how subsistence farming is counted in GDP and poverty statistics. The value of home production is still counted. If you are eating only $2 worth of rice per day, you are counted as poor whether you buy it or grow it.

Even though the facts appear wrong, I think this comment does raise the interesting question of whether money is a metric that is internal to capitalism, or if capitalism is the natural consequence of using only money as a metric.

I guess money is a capitalist metric but there are others you can look at too like life expectancy or literacy that show similar improvements.

It is a fair question. I assumed based on my own experience that this is very clear but let me clarify. I am privileged to be living in the United States (richest country in the world) but I am originally an immigrant even though that was 20+ years ago. I hire people from all over the world as freelancers from time to time. Internet allows me to hire some random person from a random part of the world and in many cases from a very poor country. I am more than sure that if they didn't have internet, they wouldn't be able to get those freelance jobs and make a living since their home country does not provide a whole lot of options.

So I don't have exact data and technically I am guessing the impact but considering how many people live in countries like India, China, African countries, I would assume internet has helped millions out of poverty because without internet, they would not be able to do things to make a living that they do today. Go to upwork.com for example and see ppl from all over the world making a decent living for themselves even if it is low wages for rich countries.

Seems like you only look at one side. I thought by now we have mostly understood that unlimited globalization also has dark sides, especially for the broader local population in richer countries.

To me the sentiment of GPs post felt like "internet makes it better on average for all of us". You're "now I very easy can find even cheaper workers" doesn't support that, even though it certainly is an improvement to a select few at the very bottom.

I focussed mostly on the jobs thing. But Internet has brought many other great things to the world so I think it is a bit myopic to just focus on the "hire cheaper workers" thing. Just the fact that you can communicate your opinions to me while we both are sitting somewhere totally different is the power of internet. It brings plenty of good. Some bad, sure. If not for internet, I would probably never talk to you and not exchange our different perspectives.

> even though it certainly is an improvement to a select few at the very bottom

1. "a select few" is disingenuous. A lot of people have benefited from it.

2. One could say that morally, the people "at the very bottom" deserve more help than "the broader local population in richer countries".

1. I admit "select few" being hyperbole. The intended sentiment was it helping fewer people than it is screwing over.

2. Its nice you want to help the people who have it the worst. But you better be ready for the consequences, like a fascist getting 23% of votes a few days ago in a local german election. What people feel is important. Yes, the policy might be raising living standards of everyone. But if it predominantly helps those at the top of the capitalist system and some "few" people far away, then people will feel screwed over and demand change. Though by now we seem to get closer to "revolution". I'd prefer not to live through a revolution.

Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?

Maybe this can count as more of a smartphone thing an internet thing.. but it's still largely an internet thing that would allow someone in a rough spot to still be able to connect with people online and look/apply for jobs.

> Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?

Do they? How?

Are you suggesting that online jobs website make it easier to find a job? A homeless person with a smartphone isn't the only one with access to the jobs website. Nor does the existence of such a website intrinsically create the jobs behind the ads on it.

A sibling commenter talks about the existence of the internet facilitating job creation through other means, but I don't think homeless people having smartphones has much bearing on this.

It's worth noting that income inequality has steadily increased in the last ~40 years at leastm (in the US), so talk of the internet lifting people out of poverty has to be considered in that context.

A homeless person desiring to gain some employable skills has an easier time doing such with the Internet and an access device, such as a phone - even if the phone has no cell service but can use free WiFi- than prior to the existence of the Internet and those devices.

There is a silent class of homeless people whom I am not clear you are including when you state "homeless", and that is people living on cars and/or "couch-surfing". On the occasion I've seen it mentioned in articles, it seems that it is nearly impossible to come up with reliable numbers on the actual population of homeless people living under such conditions due to their transitory nature.

It is likely true that the genuinely destitute homeless people, which is comprised in large part of people who suffer severe psychological and mental disorders, are only minimally aided by cell phones. I suspect the way they actually benefit is they carry on their persons a means for those trying aid them to find them as well as a life line they can tug, should they so choose.

"Inequality" is a divisive term with no genuine academic definition. Another correlation is that as "inequality" has risen, so has the greatest reduction in people living in subsistence farming and abject poverty in history of mankind, a conclusion that would suggest that "inequality" positively correlates with greater human flourishing, but the real purpose of my mentioning this is to demonstrate that "inequality" is a largely meaningless metric, by itself, used for manipulating people not familiar with broader understanding of what has occurred for so many billions of people on the planet.

> Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?

Not that I know the answer, but I would have to see a source on this. Why would a device that may increase access to job postings, but a non-homeless job candidate is much more likely to have than a homeless person, increase the chances of said homeless person in getting a job? I'm not even sure that the ability to access job postings is the main problem there.

I’ve worked with and volunteered with an org who among other things got smart phones to our local homeless.

Yes, it does help quite a bit. It’s a $50-100 setup and even without data they can go to any million places with free WiFi and get emails, call job listings, keep in touch with family members. It’s a pretty big deal to them.

I think you're comparing different things here.

1. Comparing the chances of a homeless person in the modern world with a smartphone, to a homeless person in the modern world without a smartphone.

2. Comparing the chances of a homeless person in the modern world with a smartphone, to a homeless person in a hypothetical internetless world (where noone can have a smartphone).

The org you volunteered with dealt with comparison #1 above. We're discussing comparison #2.

>>>> Well, a homeless person with a smartphone has a hell of a lot better chance of getting a job than they did pre-smartphone, right?

>>>Not that I know the answer, but I would have to see a source on this. Why would a device that may increase access to job postings, but a non-homeless job candidate is much more likely to have than a homeless person, increase the chances of said homeless person in getting a job? I'm not even sure that the ability to access job postings is the main problem there.

>> [My reply about first hand seeing it]

>We're discussing comparison #2.

I think whatever meaning you had in another thread hasn't been in the one I replied to.

I think both you and @lucideer are right at a certain level. I did mean in the absence of cellphones altogether, since I'm referring to the fact that the non-homeless population almost all have cell-phones now, so that's really just "table-stakes" in the job hunt market.

That said, your experience provides an important data point too. I would be curious to know whether it's the phone access or the "among other things" that you refer to, which I assume means other kinds of aid, training, and support, that provides most of the value in them finding a job.

The among other things is haircut, shave, cloths, boots, shower, shelter, sleeping bags, getting touch with family, basic medical, training, mental health evals, etc. stuff that actually helps today as opposed to the feel good “just build more housing and give it to people for “free”” ideas.

Is the phone worth more than the sleeping bag? Depends on the temperature. But, yes for the most part the phone is helpful. I would guess a lot get sold, but in those cases they are typically going to someone that does actually want it. Let’s be honest, a Samsung whatever 5 isn’t going to be traded for a 5th of whiskey and sold eventually to some highschooler, they wouldn’t be caught dead with that phone.

People have this impression that homeless are all 60-80 year old bums harassing you for change, there are a lot that have jobs, live in their cars, and could really use a phone, even with their families, or live in other people’s houses. The invisible homeless.

Not really?

Yes they could contact an employer, but

Can they show up reliably on-time? Public transit costs money -> Homeless -> no address, so can't use a bank, cashing of checks can be done, but only if there is credit offered by an employer, or through charity of others. So from the get go, there's a geographic limitation w.r.t body-here types of work.

What about mental/computer work? Assume a smartphone. Still homeless, so no address means no bank. Could send a check to a P.O. Box maybe; but if there is company hardware you need to be vested with, that may not work out well. BYOD is a thing, and can work out, this is truly a success in that regard, but again, lack of address complicates things.

I mean, you aren't totally wrong, but I'm just not convinced that the homeless jobless experience has been revolutionized to the point people in poverty have been uplifted by the billions. If anything, infrastructure automation has allowed more to be done with less in terms of previously manual jobs, and enabled more efficient fund extraction from the average consumer through economies of scale. Especially in terms of rent seeking. If you look at the number of contracts entered into over a lifetime as a metric, software/the Internet has allowed an explosion in terms of the "one-sided contract" and has led to a social tilt away from the original purpose of the construct which was to serve as a meeting of the minds between equals.

Essentially, it's allowed for the carve out of unethical contracts at massive scale, and consolidation of capital intensive workflows through automation and standardization.

Can people learn and share? Yes. Are people all uplifted equally? I'd say no, and certain populations in particular are likely worse off. I'm thinking Kenya's predatory debt crisis, China's maturing surveillance state, and even the United States and U.K. are getting uncomfortably close to that event horizon.

Marketers ruined everything. We just wanted to be able to learn stuff. They had to turn that around and take it to the unhealthy extreme in the name of targeted advertising.

I don't see a lot of homeless people with cellphones. How would they even charge them? Library Internet seems like a better solution.

Where there are public spaces that aren't actively policed, with public outlets, that's where they hang out. I used to live in a neighborhood next to a public library with a sheltered area and an outlet, and every night there'd be a couple of homeless people camping out there. They plugged their devices, had a smoke, and had shelter for the night.

Thankfully, the neighborhood itself was tolerant enough to let them be -- I never saw them being kicked out, and why should they be? They're not making trouble, and life's hard enough if you don't have an address to your name. Give them the small, quiet dignity of a place to stay dry from the rain and browse reddit.

>With all the hate social media gets for example, imagine a life without them again.

Easy, that's my life right now

>I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse or outdated.

That all fits in the original, "utopian" if you want, view of the internet espoused in the article. You can do that with email, IMs like IRC, personal webpages. Facebook-style social media, with its surveillance, addictiveness, toxic feedback loops, is irrelevant to this task.

Before the internet, many people only worried, economically, from people in their immediate sorrounding. Often only in their city.

Knowledge was much harder to ackuire and more valuable, and it was harder to compare prices.

That led to an environment where many, both business owners and employees could akuire some valuable competitive advantage, and make a decent living.

Now that's much harder. Significant competitive advantage(or significant bargaining power) rarely exists, for most.

Most have little economic power. And psychologically that's probably more important than relative wealth.

I won't go too heretic on internet, but I think it kicked the old structure too hard and too early.

> With all the hate social media gets for example, imagine a life without them again.

I can imagine that easily. I know others differ, but is all social media went away tomorrow, my life would be none the poorer for it.

Its almost like most of us still remember life without the internet let alone social media.

I just personally stopped. I use reddit sometimes but otherwise I have been much happier for it.

> surveillance

Just the tip of the iceberg, the security services facilitate the criminal underworld playing its part keep GDP up, lots of experiments being done on people individually right now, most of it messing with peoples belief systems which in extreme you see with muslim terrorists carrying out acts. I know I've had similar done to me.

Jimmy Saville was a state apparatus intelligence tool, nothing more nothing less and look at how the state labels him a pedo now!

If it weren’t for the internet I’d be back home making an average $20,000/year. Instead I’m in SF on an SF salary.

Hell, without the internet I wouldn’t even have known it’s possible to get here. Both physically and in mindset.

qed

I taught myself how to program through the internet, which is the only reason I have a job right now. The internet also let me discover cryptocurrencies which is the only reason I have a house at a young age. As far as I'm concerned it's an objective fact that the internet helps motivated people multiply their wealth in ways that were not possible prior to its creation.

What are the costs of living back home for you?

For instance, $20k/year is a very decent upper-middle class salary in Poland.

In Slovenia we have a joke:

A German and a Slovenian talk about life and work. The German says, "You know, life's pretty good. I make 5k a month, send my kids to school, put 2k in my mortgage, spend 1k on groceries, and there's plenty left over"

And the Slovenian says "Wow that's cool. What happens with the other 2k?"

"Oh we don't ask that in Germany. It's impolite"

So the SLovenian goes "Ah that's nice. We got it good in Slovenia too. I make 2k a month, send my kids to school, put 1.5k in my mortgage, 1k for groceries, and still got enough for a 500 payment on my Audi"

"Wait ... where's the extra 1k coming from?"

"We don't ask that in Slovenia. It's impolite"

Are you happy ?

I am in in the same situation and am very, very happy!

I was so depressed before I came to Silicon Valley...it took years of therapy to overcome that

Same story here but that alone doesn't mean anything. Just because it worked out well for me that doesn't mean anything. I watch as my Grandad gets told to go online to pay his bill by the gas company and he has no clue what to do, then he gets letters from debt collection agencies because it's too hard to figure out how to pay using another method. This kind of thing also happens to lower class poor people in the UK. Some level of phone or internet savvy is assumed for many services now.

Side note: I'm in a hotel room right now overlooking San Fran as the morning traffic starts to pick up. It really is a shit-hole city.

Capitalism creates jobs. The internet is just something Capitalism latched on to.

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