Hacker News Reader

Comment by doggodaddo78 | Hacker News Reader

Screen addiction, phony social networks, and virtual interactions: all leading to the atomization and isolation of people from one another. People once had to communicate with each other mostly in-person and had to develop an ability to socialize. The internet snatched civilization destruction from the jaws of progress. I don't see how wishing a double-edged sword that cuts off more humanity than it brings is necessarily something to eagerly foist and bestow on everyone.

Magical realism and kids inventing their own play games in remote or poor villages is what happens when they don't have the internet to destroy creativity and distract people from using their imaginations.

View on HN

> The internet snatched civilization destruction from the jaws of progress.

Remarkable how someone can post this bad take on the internet on the internet forum for the most internet-connected people who work on the internet.

I'm old enough to remember when the internet was a liberatory technology. Even facebook/twitter were getting praised as recently as 2011 for the Arab Spring. And of course, even today, "cut off internet access" is a key checklist item for repressive governments.

That doesn't mean there aren't severe problems being caused by social networks, but we should be specific about what they are and targeted in our solutions.

Remember also that the arab spring featured some coups, G was found to be shaping traffic during some of the re-elections to shift voting. Internet is not inherently good or neutral.

Totally agree those actions would be an abuse of power, but Google is not the internet. Google is among the most powerful entities on the internet. I worry that it wields the power of a nation state without the checks and obligations that constrain actual nations. But I can imagine a post-Google world where the internet persists. I think the internet is neutral. We users are not.

> I worry that it wields the power of a nation state without the checks and obligations that constrain actual nations.

The power of a nation state is based on its ability to maintain and control property, levy taxes and enforce compliance with its authority through a monopoly on violence. The premise that Google or any web platform has anything near the power of a nation state is ridiculous.

Also, Google isn't an independent state, they're a corporation and as such are subject to the laws of the nation(s) in which they operate. They do what they do because governments allow them to, not because they have the power to defy governments at will.

In my opinion, Google is more of a monitoring station for governments, [1] as is Facebook [2]. I agree that they do not hold the power to directly levy taxes or enforce compliance on their own accord. They can probably influence voting and other aspects of public perception. Netflix has a show called "The Great Hack" [3] that starts to go down this rabbit hole as well.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbKxUYl3WSE

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shpiVm1qpnw

[3] - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4736550/

Very nice, krapp. Despite the downvotes, you've given me some things to think about this weekend. I will concede I was hyperbolic in equating Google with a nation. I've picked that up from sci fi and futurist stuff, but I'll have to think about how it would work in reality, for a corporation to gain that kind of authority.

> Technology is not inherently good or neutral.

FTFY

> Internet is not inherently good or neutral.

I agree! But, given that it exists, acting against it is hardly neutral either. I would argue - and this is deliberately a separate post from the top of thread - that many of the problems come from techno-libertarianism mistaking neutrality for impartiality, and assuming that a technology that doesn't explicitly mention politics is apolitical.

The internet allows true information to circumvent censors and permit the organisation of dissident groups against repression. It also permits the circulation of false or misleading information which has the effect of promoting violence and repression. Trying to distil this down to "internet good" or "internet bad" without having a clearly articulated politics is silly.

Do you have a source for Google shaping traffic during some re-elections to shift voting? I ask as I have never heard this, it's a big deal if true, and sounds like a conspiracy theory (nb: how it sounds does not make it false).

See @linuxbender's reply, The Great Hack was where I heard about it first.

I grew up on the Internet, made a living with it for a long time, and still spend a good portion of time online. Making things for the Web is one of my favorite things to do ever.

I was one of the early "adopters" of attached life, often neglecting "meatspace" pursuits in its favor.

We have created some huge problems for ourselves and for others, and we have to work hard on solving them.

Boredom is good for you but it's damn boring

Such an easy thing to say from a privileged position in (probably) the richest country on Earth. I was lucky enough to be born in one of those "remote locations", which you could not find on the map if your life depended on it. The internet connection I now have _enables_ my creativity, however limited. It allows me to learn and use technologies I wouldn't even know existed. I'd rather off myself than go back to ye olden times when the only thing I had to entertain myself was a limited collection of 40-year old books from a local library.

> The internet connection I now have _enables_ my creativity, however limited. It allows me to learn and use technologies I wouldn't even know existed

100% agree. The internet provides knowledge right at your fingertips. It is amazing and sad at the same time that most people don't take full advantage of this.

> I'd rather off myself than go back to ye olden times

However, I have 99.999% confidence that you or most of us wouldn't do this. Human beings are extremely adaptable.

Internet makes the smart smarter and the dumb dumber. Its an amplifier. Same thing with Twitter, you can find amazing independent content or you can end up with commenting and dunking the outrage story of the day.

This is a mis-understanding of the OP. The internet is inherently a very __useful__ tool. The problem is that social-media companies have turned the need for social interaction into a crack-like addiction (by design) where peoples attention-spans are being sold piecemeal.

Social media is often a junk-food version of social interactions designed to sell ads to people. This leads to short attention spans and social anxieties. How many dinner tables have you sat at where couples sit there on their phones, and scarcely talk? This seems commonplace now...

I take those dinner table situations as a challenge; in invitation to making that moment more interesting than their phones.

>when they don't have the internet to destroy creativity and distract people from using their imaginations.

There is no way that the internet is solely to blame for a child's creativity and imagination dying. Think about the billions and billions of creative projects on the internet.

I'm afraid that what you've done with that line is sort of romanticize some fictional past where kids were kids and men were men and women were women. There was always something that people tried to blame the death of creativity on - when I was a kid it was TV. When my grandfather was a kid, it was reading and books.

While I agree that "social" media is destroying many social conventions, I absolutely disagree that the internet is to blame for killing childhood creativity.

yeah it just looks different. Instead of watercolors they're spending more time in minecraft and roblox. Are those worse for kids? It's too early to tell but I certainly doubt it.

In my experience kids still love doing watercolors too.

My daughter does art daily. She also builds intricate cities in Minecraft. It blows my mind how detailed a 7 year old could get.

I suspect building in 3D is going to provide some spatial benefits that drawing doesn't.

You have to view things from a bigger timeline. The Internet is only about 25 years old. In the grand span of human history, that is nothing. It's so insignificant that making final pronouncements about it is really nonsensical.

I always go back to the printing press analogy. It took about 50 to 100 years after its invention for serious societal change to start happening: The Reformation, Counter-Reformation, birth of Protestantism, etc.

Give it time. Networked communication is just getting started.

How does the rate of spread of the Internet compare to that of the printing press? I think the ubiquity of the internet is what makes people comfortable to judge it as if it is mature.

By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes.

It took roughly 30 or 40 years for the press to be widely distributed around Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_...

> I think the ubiquity of the internet is what makes people comfortable to judge it as if it is mature.

Technology isn't going to stay exactly the same indefinitely. It just seems like a complete lack of imagination about the future to me.

Proliferation of the Internet is much faster than that of the printing press, because vast majority of the population is now able to read and write. In the late 1400s, reading books was a fringe activity of a few educated people, mostly priests.

People under 30 do not remember the world without Internet anymore; 25 years is a generation. That said, it is really too soon to proclaim any final judgments.

I’m just saying, Bitcoin barely existed a decade ago. YouTube barely existed 15 years ago. Google barely existed 20 years ago. A lot has happened in a very short period of time. It might take awhile to unravel these things.

The iPhone isn’t even 15 years old. People have cats older than that.

My work was talking about a 10 year plan yesterday. In the back of my mind I couldn't help but realise that the majority of the population was just getting smart phones 10-11 years ago.

My parents didn't know what WiFi was, internet culture was still largely for nerds, etc.

While I agree with other replies to your comment that the internet became prolific/mainstream much faster than the printing press, I think your point still stands when looking at things from the perspective of a human life or culture. We're still the same humans that we were back when things perhaps didn't change as rapidly.

Sure, the internet was a lot faster at becoming ubiquitous, but humans are still humans. Our society still needs time to adapt to internet, because 25 years old, as you point out, is really not that much on the scale of a human life or an institution or society.

Is the internet really to blame though? It can be a great way to meet new people and establish local groups.

I think the bigger issue has been the lengthening of working hours (imagine working just 9 to 5), and recently of course, the lockdowns.

My take is that we're still adapting to and experimenting with how to live with the internet, given how it fundamentally changes so much and the transition is still very much ongoing.

Every revolutionary technology probably generated similar amounts of hysteria about the end of civilization - think about the printing press, industrialization (luddites), TVs, etc.

Eventually things should find a happy equilibrium, it just doesn't happen immediately. But it's assuming too much to think no solution today = no solution forever.

It's handing out heroin to anyone who wants it rather than handing out clean needles.

>Is the internet really to blame though?

You think kids are going to use the internet for homework and research?

I wonder what the age distribution of porn discovery looks like. Back in my day, I had to put-up with one of my neighbor friend's dad's Danish spank mags where you couldn't see anything due to follicular foliage in the way.

I found my first pornography in a makeshift treehouse in the middle of a paddock next to a church, the irony was lost on a younger me. An almost wholesome experience compared to the firehose of pornography available for free now.

"The Internet" isn't to blame. The problem is advert funded media & technology and the 'free market' of eyeballs.

Competitive markets; our greatest engine of innovation and creation are racing to discover our biggest weaknesses and exploit them mercilessly.

This is inevitable — at its core ad-tech is a market in manipulation. There's no possible band-aid fix to square the circle: Markets innovate for their customers. Even google must constantly optimise to better manipulate the public or be beaten by those who will.*

We really need to get out from under this because machine learning makes it terrifying. We already have recovering addicts targetted to re-ignite their addictions. Eventually the technology will be good enough to make addicts of us all.

In my view the answer is to nationalize product discovery. Have a free to use government run product register. Let industries create open standards for product specifications and have real legal penalties for deception. Have product reviews with again real penalties for fraud.

Ban all paid promotion of products. Pay anyone selling adverts today 90% of last years revenue to run socially beneficial nonsense (call your gran, eat some veggies, go for a run). Until the whole thing is wound down.

* There's an interesting meta-possibility here where ad-tech platforms manipulate and bamboozle their real customers _the advertisers_. Facebook lying about video plays for example. This is probably the best outcome for society! Naturally the legal system punishes it sharply.

> I think the bigger issue has been the lengthening of working hours (imagine working just 9 to 5)

I'm pretty surprised to see this framed as if it's unrealistic. I have what you'd probably call a "very good" job, judging by my comp and the "coolness" of what I work on, and I work a hard 10-6. Based on the way people talk about it, I used to wonder when I'd hit the point in my career when I "arrived" and wasn't able to escape overworking, but I eventually accepted that this "common knowledge" is nonsense.

Work/life balance is ultimately a choice. Unless you're in dire poverty, you have degrees of freedom to trade off between work/life balance, comp, how engaging the work is, etc. I have a friend who makes 20% more than me, has 100x worse WLB and working environment, and has a less interesting job. I'm 100% sure I don't want his job... But I'm reasonably sure he wouldn't want mine (he's a workaholic and likes money a lot more than I do).

+ Attention atrophy (at a developmental stage, no less)

The major engagement-driven platforms are chasing metrics, to the detriment of the future.

Turns out, the world isn't quite as easy or quickly rewarding as Cookie Clicker.

Yep. And then you end up with hunched phone zombies almost getting run-over crossing a street because they can't quit looking at the next Tinder. When they finally do meet, they lack the social skills to do anything, and just camp on their phones like that Bansky work.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/262026482406-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

ProTip: if any humans manage to gather in large quantities in the future, all phones go into an unplugged microwave.

> if any humans manage to gather in large quantities in the future, all phones go into an unplugged microwave.

Or just gently enforce the norm that it's rude to look at your phone? I totally get that there are individual people who use their phone while socializing (in my experience, usually those who are dealing with some intense anxiety at the time), but most people understand that it's rude.

Is this just a cultural/class blindspot of mine? Do you really encounter social situations of 3+ people where everyone is on their phone at dinner?

This is an OK take that can be discussed on its own merits but I’m disappointed that this is top comment on a piece that discusses poverty and technology. People who are so poor they cannot buy a basic laptop or internet. Perhaps a reflection that all of us maybe out of touch.

> The internet snatched civilization destruction from the jaws of progress.

The commercialization of the internet snatched destruction from the jaws of progress.

Once companies realized there was tons of money to be made in engagement-by-any-means-necessary, the genie was out of the bottle.

But there are still delightful isolated corners of the internet filled with brilliant imaginative creative people. Progress is still happening, but the mainstream's doing its level best to counter it.

The commercialization of the internet isn't without it's many flaws but to say that it snatched it from the jaws of progress is absurd. It was exactly the commercialization of the internet that made it the colossal tool it is today for hundreds of millions of people worldwide for starting small businesses, finding ways of making a side income, creatively expressing and promoting themselves and finding sources of work online (even if they're not all well-paid U.S/Europe based programmers and devops like some of the snidely privileged, disdainful commentators here). That so many people on a site like HN of all fucking things could be so narrowly dismissive of the overall value of a the vast commercial internet of today (despite its flaws), which many of you helped build into what it is at considerable gain to yourselves, is funny at best and grotesquely arrogant at worst. Talk about naval gazing and missing the forest for some broken trees.

Absolutely perfect take. We are truly atomized and isolated, thanks to tech (and especially "social tech"). I know this may be controversial, but our (IMHO) huge over-reaction to Covid is just an indicator of the damage that has already been done.

As a side note, I have taken this opportunity recently to quit every social media account, and give up my smartphone.

Reading this felt like listening to an obese, wealthy American speaking jealously of a poor Ethiopian's thin physique.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com