The side effects of an unfinished internet | Hacker News Reader

The side effects of an unfinished internet

neilpatil.me

81 pointspatil21522 comments

For a few years there we talked and talked about how GDP can’t continue to grow forever. Or at least not as long as we are a single planet civilization. Higher growth means higher consumption until everything is gone.

Just as other tech has delayed Peak Oil for decades by finding more, and using what we find more efficiently, I think virtual goods should be able to reduce the resource burden of goods and services. Whether that has happened I am not equipped to say.

Higher growth does not necessarily mean more materials consumed. For example, if you could invent a gas engine that got 120 miles per gallon, it likely wouldn't take much more physical materials to produce, and it would decrease demand for gas. Likewise if you can increase crop yields, or food produced per acre, the end result will be less farm land necessary to feed the population. Productivity is all about doing more with less.

The thing we see though is that demand grows to fill most of the new supply. And many of he advanced in agriculture have only increased energy intensity.

Not always. There's only so much food people can consume, and richer countries are producing less children than poor ones are, so there's an asymptote to a lot of consumption.

> richer countries are producing less children than poor ones are, so there's an asymptote to a lot of consumption

The theory of evolution guarantees that no asymptote based on this mechanism can persist over time. Populations that voluntarily extinguish themselves are replaced by other populations that don't.

> For example, if you could invent a gas engine that got 120 miles per gallon, it likely wouldn't take much more physical materials to produce, and it would decrease demand for gas.

This is not true in general. Much higher gas efficiency lowers the amount of gas that existing uses need. (Sending one cruise ship to the Azores takes less gas!) That reduced requirement means reduced demand. But it also raises the value of gas. (One gallon of gas does much more work than it used to!) That increased value means increased demand. Maybe we should start sending more cruise ships to the Azores!

The government could tax it to prevent that.

There's growth and there's growth. We're probably starting to bump up against ecological limits to the number of humans we can have on this planet ("carrying capacity"), though we might have yet another agricultural revolution get us past that limit. Until then I do think we're near peak population (and indeed, projections already bear this out, and in many countries so does current data).

But we're probably quite far from hitting limits to economic activity. Even when we hit limits for physical economic activity, as you note, there will be virtual economic activity. So I think as far as economic growth goes, we're probably very far from hitting a maximum.

Most humans wouldn't recognize --nor like-- their lives at carrying capacity.

We're likely closer to K/2 than K. Which is a good thing. But as the slow down to K happens (inevitably) things will get interesting.

I don’t think the internet has had the dematerializing effect that many people thought it would. Consumer spending hasn’t exactly decreased. If anything, the internet has made it easier to purchase material goods and services.

The assumption that there are limits to the growth of the material economy is only true if we think of Earth as a closed system. It doesn’t have to be that way.

In fact, even if material growth stopped in its tracks this very day and never resumed, our current economic activity is more than enough to destroy the biosphere given enough time.

We have to either put growth into reverse (which won’t happen—people won’t give up a modern lifestyle, and they’ll guillotine you if you try to make them) or we have to open up the closed system before it’s too late.

How many businesses started in what America calls the third world that feed products and services into the first?

I think this article misses the massive amount of real world growth that has occurred were Twitter users cant see it.

As the author says, you could argue both ways - either that the internet is a great tool with a net positive effect on people (those who know how to use it and can ignore the noise) or that we have adopted it so quickly and blindly that the internet hasn't caught up with humanity, causing these harmful side effects. Sometimes I think the internet was actually better 15 years ago, all things considered.

However if we expect it to become our sixth sense, we better a) evolve faster as a species to increase our bandwidth, and/or b) humanise the internet, educate ourselves to use it better, and consume information in a more natural way. Since the former is nowhere near, I'd like to see a Richard Hendricks appear and introduce Internet 2.0 for humans. But just like the author I don't know what that "better version" really means, or what it would look like...

I find it hard to have discussions at a higher level on the internet (http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2559/). Everything is a beginner JavaScript tutorial catered to noobs but it never goes beyond that because going beyond that noob-stuff is difficult and the audience is smaller. So I end up digging deeper and deeper into the internet which wastes more and more of my time. And probably the worse thing about the new internet is that if you point this out the defenders of internet will attack you for being negative and looking beyond the curtain of low hanging fruit which they constantly postulate about. I agree wholeheartedly with the article but I do not see how it can be fixed. There are just 2 internets and if you want to be creative you should just avoid the new internet altogether because it consumes everyone it touches.

> This issue [with a recently trendy Javascript framework] was posted 5 months ago. why has no one responded?

...

> It would seem to me that no one wants to tackle the hard problems. The difficult-physics breaking walls. This is probably why we still do not have flying cars or floating cities.

I don't know whether to be impressed or appalled by the rapid extrapolation from "nobody cares about this React.js rendering glitch" to "this is why we can't solve Hard Problems in physics."

A lot of the new businesses and associated jobs and growth that the Internet could have enabled have been made illegal, often by people too scared and short-sighted (or greedy) to envision a world very much different than the one before the internet.

Just look what happened with Uber, with that broadcast TV re-streaming service, with internet radio, with online banking and microlending, and especially with cryptocurrencies, for a few examples. Billions upon billions of opportunity and new wealth creation strangled in the crib. Pretty much wherever there is a big new opportunity, there are new heavy-duty restrictions on what you are allowed to do with this new communications tech.

People don’t give up wealth-creating income streams and associated power in society without a dirty fight.

Try starting an ISP or a telco to see how much of the promise of the future has been robbed from us by government overzealous to protect existing greedy and inefficient businesses.

Even the ones they thought safe to let roam free that wouldn’t affect them, social media, are now in danger of getting the hammer brought down on them because it turns out that anyone being able to talk to anyone is insanely powerful and disruptive, and they’re going to start regulating the kind of communications you are allowed to have there; either directly via public policy, or by veiled threats that cause the resulting winners (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) to self-censor to be allowed to continue to exist.

Oh, I forgot the granddaddy: AT&T had to be sued to allow people to connect their own phones to a phone jack, instead of perpetually renting them from the Phone Company.

There is a long and consistent history of dirty, dirty incumbent moat defense in telecommunications in the US.

it is often the case with these "new internet" businesses that they are parasitic on top of well established legacy businesses. offer convenience with no guarantees and provide no fallback except for the business they feed upon. if your bread start-up runs out of bread the local baker is your fallback. As the bread startup grows it does so on the backs of the local bakers who lose direct business because the start up is more convenient. the local bakers start to complain which creates a pushback against the startup.

> parasitic on top of well established legacy businesses

That’s how business works. You aren’t entitled to your customers. Either they come to you, or they go to someone else. Ultimately, it’s their choice.

You say it’s parasitic, but really all it is is customers making a different choice. The whole concept of the status quo is an abstraction. A customer that bought from you yesterday is not “your customer”. She may make a different choice tomorrow.

> As the bread startup grows it does so on the backs of the local bakers who lose direct business because the start up is more convenient.

If you aren’t constantly working to make life easier for your customers and deliver more value, someone else is going to. You can’t just wake up and bake bread the same way for 30 years and expect it to yield you the same amount of revenue it did years earlier. The world is changing and people participating in it need to adapt and grow, or get left behind.

Everyone in a market needs to actively level up or get out of the way of those who are. It’s always day one.

That is going to be a hard business strategy for the people doing business in the real physical world

It is disingenuous to claim that social media is merely "everyone talking to everyone". There is aways a third party involved: the social network itself with its feed algorithms and like counts, and that is where so many of the negative impacts stem from.

Thank you very much sharing a very helpful article and the thing controlled like boom.

"Twitter is magical"?

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