Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

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It's quite funny how stereotypical American Ben's blog is. The most important idea that is made explicit in the post (but not justified) is that of the marketplate of ideas, or that 'connecting people' (Zuckerberg) provides meaning, and that speech and an increase in information is a means to mount resistance against the powers that be.

one alternative view was presented by Baudrillard in 1985, talking about the 'uncertainty of reality'.

>"[It] results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information. It is information itself which produces uncertainty, and so this uncertainty, unlike the traditional uncertainty which could always be resolved, is irreparable. … Overinformed, it [the masses] develops ingrowing obesity. For everything which loses its scene (like the obese body) becomes for that very reason ob-scene.

The silence of the masses is also in a sense obscene. For the masses are also made of this useless hyper-information which claims to enlighten them, when all it does is clutter up the space of the representable and annul itself in a silent equivalence. And we cannot do much against this obscene circularity of the masses and of information. The two phenomena fit one another: the masses have no opinion and information does not inform them"

His point being that it is not a lack of discourse but precisely our constant rehashed and fractured discourse and feedback loops between what is real and representations of the real that make either indistinguishable from another. Viewed through this lens speech is not liberation, it's merely participating and destabilizing truth and feeding the very system that it is supposed to criticize. Autocratic lone empires without resistance always fall down, real systems of control allow for their antagonists to persist within them, without of course ever accomplishing anything other than simulating resistance. Think of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial.

This sort of bullshit is exactly why people despise post-modernism. Because most speech doesn't accomplish anything, it's ok if people aren't allowed to speak at all?

That's not what that means. But ironically, you appear to be demonstrating its truth.

That's a of an odd reading of an article that is going out of it's way to point out that the "marketplace of ideas" idea was (1) not the justification for the 1st Amendment and (2) that Ben doesn't view it as the justification for Facebook's move either.

> In fact, I would go further: Facebook’s stance is an essential expression of what makes American tech unique. Don Valentine, the legendary founder of Sequoia Capital who passed away last week, once said:

>> The world of technology thrives best when individuals are left alone to be different, creative, and disobedient.

> This is not a statement about participating in the marketplace of ideas, winning others over by the power of your argument. It is, rather, an affirmation of the absence of tyranny. Only when individuals are able to think for themselves can something truly new to the world be created, and the proof will be the success in the market for tech products and services.

A literal, and not uncharitable reading of your argument is that you arguing this point, on this forum, on the internet, is merely a participation and destabilization of truth.

Some of the details around how best to protect freedom of speech seem complex. That it is either an absolute ideal or near enough, seems rather obvious to many.

One thing you can always count on is some portion of people who, when their ideas and values are status quo, will argue for undermining speech in some way. I suppose it's a natural enough of a thought. Some people, it seems, would much prefer a world where they constantly preach to the choir (regardless of how mind-numbing that would be).

Oh yes, playing the game risks making it worse. But you can't not play, because otherwise others - you know, the people who are wrong on the internet - get to drown everyone in their information instead.

It's an interesting observation (and one which predates social media) but I'm struggling to see grasp whether you are suggesting that there is a practical implication for this debate. Is there a justification for censorship?

I don't think people who advocate for a market place of ideas are denying that there is often a low signal-to-noise ratio in such an environment. The point is that sometimes that chaos is the only way for the signal to be heard at all.

You're right that the marketplace of ideas is the weak point in the article. Because it's not a marketplace; it's many marketplaces, and different ideas have found their purchase in each places. Microtargeting, in other words.

The press, owing to its capital investment, was necessarily more unifying, more focal, than the media of today. Now, one can be bombarded with information from all angles, and if you're not travelling between marketplaces, you can get an odd idea of what the going rate for truth is. Information truly obfuscates, just like choice is fatiguing.

Well that is a rather fatalistic attitude that brooks no solutions.

"We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. . . . We lack resistance to the present" - Gilles Deleuze, 1994

>> It is information itself which produces uncertainty

I would argue, information is uncertainty. That is basically baked into its definition. Something that is lost on almost all of us about the information technology paradigm.

So, you have the paradox of the act of "connecting people" leads to people growing further away.

Or the Architect's speech in the Matrix correct? Where he reveals that the One is an accepted anomaly accounted for in the system.

I generally like Randall Munroe, and one thing he said was (essentially) "It's the conspiracy theorists who are the real optimists, because they are the ones who think there's someone in charge that actually has a plan and knows what they are doing".

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