Hacker News Reader

A lot of people--authors, technologists, public intellectuals, and others in what was the broad spectrum of 'nerd culture' at the time--saw this crap coming decades ago but lost the fight to stop it.

The writing has been on the wall about the dangers of social media for a very long time. It's just taken this long for people with the power to even consider doing anything about the dangers to start taking it seriously.

View on HN

Do you have any recommended reading on this topic?

I'm speaking from remembering things I read over the past few decades on Usenet (yes, that far back) and on blogs. I'd be amazed if any of this is still online.

Going back even further than that, however, James Burke's Connections warned of the risks of weaponized data mining in 1978, decades before Facebook commercialized the use of data mining to sell behavior modification as a service.

Dystopian futures aren't hard to predict. The hard part is getting enough people to listen to the predictions to prevent them from coming to fruition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com