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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The perspective this site offers is valuable; but they suffer from not having a baseline.

One that stuck out to me is "Technology integrates and often amplifies racism, sexism, ableism and homophobia". This seems unreasonable - all of these things were substantially worse before technology got involved. Technology seems to blunting the sting, enabling more effective organisation among minorities and promoting a better understanding of the problem.

It seems likely that many of these problems were much worse before the big social media companies too.

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> This seems unreasonable - all of these things were substantially worse before technology got involved.

I'd agree -- the OP ledger, despite seeming well-intentioned, seems completely imbued with the current on-campus value system, wherein something isn't defined as really bad unless it harms BIPOC and LBGTQIA people more than it harms others.

If we define the arrival of the internet as roughly the early/mid 1990's, America as a country has gotten extraordinarily less racist and homophobic since then. For example, 33% of white people in the South approved of interracial marriage in 1991; today that figure stands at 93%[0]. Similarly, gay marriage was completely eschewed by political leaders, including Democrats, until the early 2010s (e.g., Obama was firmly against gay marriage, at least on paper, when he first ran for President).

None of the above is to say that we now live in a colorblind or non-homophobic society, I just find it odd that they're claiming that tech is making people more bigoted, when the opposite has happened since the Internet has been a thing -- but this is somewhat understandable given that their target audience has been conditioned to see stamping out bigotry as humanity's highest calling.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/09/10/record-hig...

There’s obviously good things provided by tech (otherwise folks wouldn’t have started using it). A social network is a good thing in theory.

The problem is not the technological concept itself but where and how we consume it (e.g every 30 seconds). Keep in mind Facebook started when mobiles were somewhat limited and children had flip phones if at all. And on those, “background apps” were scarcely a thing.

Nowadays, people are like zombies—and more time is spend wasting away in front of multimédia than providing value to the world.

> There’s obviously good things provided by tech (otherwise folks wouldn’t have started using it)

The "good" doesn't have to be significant for us to become addicted. There are some upsides to smoking cigarettes and other self-destructive behaviors, I'm sure.

Hmm come to think of it cigarettes are actually a social network of sorts. At least in the beginning :)

they create the need for breaks from anything from work to recreational activites, and provide opportunities for interaction with like-minded humans. I'd say that qualifies, and although I never liked smoking and am grateful to have dodged that bullet, I always envied the natural icebreakers that smokers had when stepping outside of a place to smoke with random others.

I started smoking for this reason and considered it a benefit at the time. But after quitting you come to realize that the camaraderie is covering up the fact that you're all out there killing yourselves instead of doing something better with your time; and you need to find other smokers because everyone else can't stand the way you smell.

Replace that spot where you go to smoke with a foursquare court and dare your boss to tell you you can't take as many foursquare breaks as the smokers get. Foursquare is fun and you and your group will invent your own rules and it'll turn into your own game that's way more fun than smoking cigarettes. Most places now, you can smoke a joint or a weed pen if you really need the physical act.

There's this idea that if you smoke you get extra breaks - bring it up in a reasonable way with any manager and you can have those breaks, too. And thank the few folks sacrificing themselves so that the rest of us can say we get as many breaks as they do.

Edit: a benefit I miss is excusing myself from an uncomfortable situation because I "need" a cigarette. But, without that crutch, I developed better GTFO strategies.

> all of these things were substantially worse before technology got involved

I'm not really sure that they were. Between the late 60s and the early 2000s they seemed to go way down in western society. In the 2010's they started to pick up again with the rise of smartphones and social media.

If that were true, then the rise of overt racism/sexism coincides with the rise of identity politics? If so, do we know which is driving the other?

I have always operated under the assumption that the amount of (latent) allophobia in a given population is pretty much constant (or rather, a sawtooth wave around a hardly-changing trendline). The reason that we don't have violent clashes every week is because society is big enough that the oppositional groups don't come into direct contact that often. It seems that social media facilitates that direct contact (and algorithms actually drive it, because engagement), so we see more of the ugliness. But I'm not convinced that more overt allophobia automatically implies that there's more allophobia in total, just that it's more readily expressed.

But I realize that this is all conjecture, because there is no way to accurately measure latent allophobia anyway. It's just my personal interpretation of complex societies.

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