Turning the Internet Off | Hacker News Reader

Turning the Internet Off

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I don't understand articles like this, they seem to be attacking some nonexistent strawman that says using Facebook and Twitter for dissent is enough for a revolution. Those tools aren't revolutionary, but the people are, and the Internet acts as a catalyst. Using the tools as they do is more revolutionary than just watching CNN, because the Internet is a read/write medium.

And then the blog post ends with "So if you want to create change, in 2011 and beyond, at least some of your time is going to have to be spent off the grid.", which is obviously true, but not the same as saying we have to turn the Internet off if we want to take to the streets.

It's just as arguable to say that at least some of your time is going to have to be spent online.

Very true.

Its quite unfortunate that Dave Winer's career has devolved into one where all he does anymore is blog like this.

"But also don't delude yourself into thinking that tweeting and facebooking are revolutionary acts. They're about as revolutionary as watching CNN. "

I totally disagree. Spreading knowledge is always better than simply receiving it. Actually doing something is better yet, but let's face it: Most of us can't do more than stand in traffic and get noticed. Getting other people to notice is the point, and spreading the message on the internet does that just as well.

I can't count the number of things in the past year that I've told my parents about (avid news watchers) and they had never heard a peep of it.

> I can't count the number of things in the past year that I've told my parents about (avid news watchers) and they had never heard a peep of it.

And what were the results?

A friend from HN (whom I'll leave anonymous, simply because I don't know if he wants his part in this to be known or not) was sharing information about what was going on in Libya with another friend, and mentioned that a virus was spreading through the opposition chat rooms. The virus made its way over to me for analysis, since its first stage was .NET (which I've got a good bit of experience dealing with). I broke the protections, wrote an antivirus, and within 48 hours or so, we had a detector/removal tool spreading throughout the opposition.

That is what spreading information is for. It's connecting the right people to the right problem.

Edit: I left out one key piece of information. The virus was explicitly written not to cause damage, or join a botnet, or anything of the sort; its sole purpose was to gather usernames, real names, and as much contact information as possible for the user hit with the virus. While we don't know who created this virus, it's entirely possible that it was created with the express purpose of identifying/locating certain members of the opposition.

Nothing, because they didn't have any influence in those realms, either... But if I'd said nothing, I could have guaranteed that nothing would happen. At least this way, there was a chance.

And what did your parents hear, from numerous sources other than you?

The problem is that it is not enough to hear the truth. One must also fail to hear the falsehoods. When those falsehoods are cheap to create, and cheap to distribute, and the people pushing them have more resources, it's pretty difficult to consistently tune them out.

And that somehow makes it better for me to shut up about the truth? No. Being 1 more voice speaking the truth is always worthwhile.

The internet makes it harder to determine the truth. If not careful, then anyone can start spreading falsehoods against their best intentions. Nobody wants you to shut up about the truth, but your ability to judge what is "true" is greatly impaired by the cheap (and legal) proliferation of falsehoods.

I am impatient with this type of argument. Falsehoods proliferated just fine before the Internet; truth seems a more fragile flower. I think we've got a net positive.

Unfortunately it seems that sometimes too much information leads to apathy, if we know all the problems of the world our ability to affect change in any single one seems diminished. Maybe it would be better to know less and focus on that instead.

This is the wrong conclusion. Yes, there's a lot more information out there now. It's a noisier environment. Yes, that can lead to information overload, which can lead to apathy and short-termism.

But the challenge isn't in knowing which sources to "turn off." It's in knowing which sources to trust and to emphasize over the others. It's in separating the signal from the noise. But on the balance, it's generally a good thing that we've got more information rather than less.

That it makes you better-informed than your parents is just saying the Internet is useful -- it is!

So is CNN, and it was pretty amazing in its day, which I remember. (The first gulf war.)

It's just neither is the place for revolutions.

If there's something after the Internet, that may possibly be subversive.

The revolution which CNN televised was Tiananmen. Just about everything since has been pretty much a production, Desert Shield and Desert Storm spectacularly so (e.g. very little in depth coverage of carnage on the Highway of Death, and lots of guncamera footage of smart bombs over Baghdad).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_death

I think that at issue is not the intentions involved, but the side effects. What many people are actually doing when they think they are "spreading knowledge" is just glorified gossip[1]. Not because people intend to, but because it's just as easy to do so as to spread more important information. The network won't stop you. The people won't stop you. If your intent is to do something more or other than gossip, you have to stop yourself. (As with any number of other things.)

That is, if you care to. I don't think anybody should feel obligated to care at all about any given issue. But it seems like a lot of people feel trapped between feeling bad about not caring and feeling bad about not doing anything, and squeeze out of that by feeling good about talking about it a lot on the internet. It's one thing to be informed, and to make informed decisions--to do some verb with that information--but if you consider echoing or spreading to be a valid verb for a given kind of information, then you will never have enough. At that point you're just a memetic router somewhere between Maine and Texas[2], busy being idle.

[1]:Or scuttlebut, chit-chat, small talk, bull sessions, chatting around the water cooler, bar, or bong. It's a vital part of human social interaction, but as Winer says, not a revolutionary act.

[2]:http://www.bartleby.com/73/1540.html

Who owns the infrastucture will always have the ultimate control.

No matter how revolutionary your communication service is the guys with the cables can shut you off in a snap if needed. The Egyptian case is emblematic.

When a country is in chaos and internet and everything are still online it means that the government have control on much more than the infrastucture. And that is far more scaring than a shut down.

Modern economies cannot function without the internet. Too much commerce happens through it. Shutting off the internet is suicide.

I'm not so sure of that. A quick search put the figure at just 3.4% of GDP [1]. Even if a lot of sales do happen online, many of them could shift back to phone calls relatively easily.

Obviously there would be a significant impact, but I think the Internet is still a long way away from being something that simply can't be turned off.

[1] http://www.mckinsey.com/features/sizing_the_internet_economy...

I was more referring to credit card transactions at just about any store. Even if the store's processing machine uses dial-up, there's a good chance that the vendor's backend is dependent on an Internet connection.

I admit that this is biased towards the West, and it's possible that in places Egypt cash might be more popular than it is in the West.

That's just one small piece of the puzzle though. You also have to think about sales that take place through email communication. You have to think about stocks being bought/sold online. Not that some of these things can't be replaced by more primitive means, but that is an undeniable huge hit to an economy that has to suddenly adjust to do things by analog means.

Relevant: Slacktivism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism

That's not to say that doing things on the Internet are never useful activism, but often times they are used in place of actual action. Think "change your Facebook picture for the cause!" vs spreading information about a relatively unknown story.

Seems appropriate here to bring back Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece from October 2010, "Small Change: why the revolution will not be tweeted":

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_...

The revolution has been tweeted, as shown in Egypt.

But that whole statement is wrong. It's not whether the revolution will be tweeted. It's will it be tweeted, facebooked, shown on YouTube, blogs, TV news, radio, newspapers, recorded for Wikipedia, etc.... Twitter is just one part of the new global information system.

I should perhaps have left out the subheading the New Yorker gave the piece, because it does Gladwell's argument a disservice. His point was that the kind of networks that social media makes easy do not always translate well to the organisation, discipline and strategy necessary for significant social activism.

Bear in mind that the piece was published before the Arab Spring bubbled up. Media reports exaggerated the roles that Twitter played in earlier demonstrations in Iran and Moldova. Gladwell: "Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools."

I thought it was appropriate because it chimed with Dave Winer's idea that at some point, physical action has to replace virtual. Gladwell compares social media activism with the carefully planned civil rights protests in the 1960s: sit-ins, marches etc. Any sustained, significant physical action, he says, requires organisation.

I'm not saying Gladwell's argument has not suffered from the events of the Arab Spring. I still think, however, that his piece makes interesting accompanying reading, which is why I linked to it.

Saying 'as shown in Egypt' handwaves over the real story - the preparation that went into being ready for the moment when it arose.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_...

http://maidhcocathail.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/the-junk-bond...

Social media was used but it was tool in the hands of already prepared people who were willing to risk their lives.

>> And in some cases, they are using the Internet to disorganize the organizers.

Yes. That's what they did in Tunisia and it worked out well. People are not well educated and they can be easily mislead. They unleashed thousands of Internet Militia that started working on Facebook, groups, pages, forums, blogs... spreading a plethora of wrong information.

The internet is just a medium, and one of many. What I see is an arms race between "compliance professionals" (advertisers, election strategists, PR firms, et al) and the rest of us. Though the population is getting smarter and more media-savvy (good luck finding a millennial who'll fall for a political attack ad), the professionals keep getting smarter too, because they're paid immensely to get results by any means necessary. (Interestingly enough, the internet also gives them the rich data and feedback loops they need to evolve their tactics more quickly.)

Frankly, it's something that would take such a large cultural leap to change, that I'm not expecting it anytime soon.

Is there a "cranky old man tag"? The OP just seems to lack vision.

This post is along the lines of the old "everything that will be invented has been invented" saw. Social activity / interconnection of the twitter/facebook type is just in its early days. To say that we somehow fully understand everything that will arise from that, just 4-5 years in, is amazingly (if not link-baitingly) shortsighted.

Agreed. Using Facebook, Twitter or any service that can disseminate information quickly for the purpose of spreading knowledge is always a good thing. If done wisely or at least with enough propaganda it may even inspire others to act. However, that knowledge and/or inspiration should not be confused with the act that needs to follow that knowledge in order to effect a change.

Talking, by itself, is not revolutionary. It's when you talk about revolution that things change.

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