Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

I used to take Kelly seriously. Back in the 90s he was boosting a glorious connected utopia of free education, explosive creativity and endless opportunity.

What we got was personal surveillance by huge monopolies, a toxic culture of disinformation and social media driven by "engagement", and the fathomless banality of an IT economy devoted largely to ad tech.

And none of the real problems - climate change, wealth distribution, democratic stability - are any closer to being solved.

I'm out of patience. He's always been a prophet of comforting nonsense, and this is another meaningless sermon from the top of Happy Clappy Mountain.

View on HN

> free education

Many top universities release entire courses for free. YouTube is an incredible resource for learning. Khan academy, Wikipedia, sci-hub, library genesis, all free. I can confidently say I’ve learned more from the internet than I have from books and university combined.

> explosive creativity

The internet is nothing if not novel. That’s precisely why it holds our attention so well - it’s an endless source of creativity and new things.

> endless opportunity

Again, surely this has come to pass? My job certainly wouldn’t be possible without the internet. There are tens of not hundreds of millions who make a living purely online.

No doubt it has caused all the negative things in your comment too, but they’re in addition to the positives not instead of them.

All we got was the entirety of human knowledge in our pockets, functionally for free.

I don’t like ad tech and I’m not dismissing that modern software has problems, but I think there’s a lot to be optimistic about.

On most metrics (infant mortality, poverty, violence) - things are massively better than they were thirty years ago.

Metrics metrics. The only metric I care about is happiness. I rather die when I am 50 than living in a cage till I am 80.

I really don't think happiness is a good single metric to judge your life by. If pure happiness is all that matters, should you just quit everything and do heroin all day? You would feel really happy.

Life is about many things, and happiness is only one part.

> should you just quit everything and do heroin all day? You would feel really happy.

No he wouldn't. He would become addicted very fast and eventually live on the streets, Heroin addicts are as miserable as can be. If there was an actual happy pill that worked I don't see why we shouldn't take it, there isn't one.

>If there was an actual happy pill that worked I don't see why we shouldn't take it

Like the Soma from Brave New World. When I reread that book last year I realized how useful and good that drug would be.

I really tried reading it few months ago. The English was too much for me, its ancient or something. I had to fight with every sentence. Too bad.

Soma wasn't meant by Huxley to be a positive thing. It's a way of controlling the population. Brave New World is dystopian.

I understand that, but I don't know, maybe I'm just too different from Huxley to feel it? Like, everyone in the Society is happy, and the few people who aren't happy are sent to live somewhere they can be happy.

Wait till you are 50, see if you feel the same - assuming you aren't 50. There are other cages in life, family, job, spouse, expectations, that prevent all of us from being "free". Maybe you have a sick spouse or kid that needs constant care. I'm willing to be there for them even if I can't be free in the last third of my life.

>All we got was the entirety of human knowledge in our pockets, functionally for free.

No. What you got was a subset of knowledge, that which can be articulated and is transmissible via audio, video or text. The overwhelming amount of human knowledge is tacit, that is to say it is embedded in practices, cultures, crafts, traditions, institutions, and so on. Which is why there are still billions of people living in poverty despite the fact that you have wikipedia on your phone.

>On most metrics (infant mortality, poverty, violence) - things are massively better than they were thirty years ago.

There are countless of points in time at which things are better than before, this is virtually a truism. Things in the 1920s were perceived to be better than in the 1890s, yet in the 1930s, they were not. This strange belief in some sort of fatalistic progress is just bad Whig history.

You know, I wonder how much ad tech stifles innovation in alternate models. If ad tech disappeared would we all be paying tiny fees for everything online? Would smaller businesses be more successful?

Yes.

There's tons of free education, creativity and opportunity on the internet alongside the darker stuff. Being pessimistic means only seeing the problems and not the progress.

People like Kelly (and there's loads of them) are so insulated from normality that one can't possibly see them as anything but useful idiots to the techonomic powers that be. Their delusional optimism acts as a constant counterweight to people beginning to ACT in the real world in order to effect change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com