Technorealism (1998)
technorealism.org
technorealism.org
It's true that cyberspace and other recent developments are challenging our copyright laws and frameworks for protecting intellectual property. The answer, though, is not to scrap existing statutes and principles. Instead, we must update old laws and interpretations so that information receives roughly the same protection it did in the context of old media. The goal is the same: to give authors sufficient control over their work so that they have an incentive to create, while maintaining the right of the public to make fair use of that information. In neither context does information want "to be free." Rather, it needs to be protected.
What I think this misses is that the progress of technology has it made impossible to go back to the status quo 40 years ago. Copyright seems like a reasonable middle-ground if works are mostly published on physical media which you can own, play whenever you want or even sell of give away - but which are relatively rarely copied.
In today's world, that option is gone - instead, we have two opposite extremes:
One is anarchy, in which a popular work will almost instantly be pirated and distributed all across the world
The other is DRM and complete control, in which the consumer does not own anything except an ephemeral license to consume a work. But the rights-holder can suddenly control exactly who may consume the work, when, how often, under which circumstances, what the may or may not otherwise do with the work, etc - and all those circumstances may change at a moment's notice. In extreme cases, the rights-holder may even revoke the license and effectively erase all copies of their work at once.
- The present effective gate to the Internet is online service providers and mobile telephony / data providers.
- A combination of UBI (sufficient to support authors, musicians, and other creators) and reputation / merit-based compensation (for works of more substantial effort, notably jouranlism, investigation, and research) should be able to support creatives. Note that this is more a career than strictly performance ("units moved") basis. People don't turn out substantial work consistently, and much of what's turned out on a consistent basis ... is less than substantial.
- The "free Internet" already costs ~$800 billion/year, which divided amongst the roughly 1 billion inhabitants of North America and Europe (we'll include Japan and Australia by proxy) works out to ... $800/head, or $3,200 for a family of four, per year. That's the global advertising bill. And yes, it largely makes sense to allocate that amongst the OECD, the world's richest billion.
- A small fraction of that would support all existing journalism, music, and publishing handsomly, as well as much television and video production.
It's quite possible that there'd be some reallocation of compensation from the present mix. That might not be all bad.
I've suggested this a few times:
Much of what's freely-available is low-quality at best, propaganda (or worse) in the worst case.
Curation itself has value, and yet is constrained. This is in fact a major theme of Andrew Shapiro's The Control Revolution, and one of the tired arguments still encountered frequently today which was entirely anticipated over two decades ago.
What is one’s fair share of what another has worked to produce?
Anyone can, for vanishingly low cost, distribute or access nearly any information they like. Yes, curation is important - and, like other work, has value worth trading for calories.
Why the insistence on devaluing work, insisting the caloric cost of productivity not be compensated per its value to others?
"Calories" and "caloric cost" is a funny measure of value. Especially ironic given that from a nutritional perspective, they're what the poor get too much of and the rich do their best to avoid.
In the information-nutritional world, dross ("empty calories") is what FAANG throws at the plebeians to milk them of their money ("caloric value"?). So yeah, now it makes sense: You've got your "valuable" and "not valuable" bass-ackwards; what you come off as valuing highly is the offal that the rich throw to the poor.
I believe the absurdity is self-apparent.
If that's not their argument ... then what they're trying to state is less than clear.
My initial comment in the thread addressed specifically that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29573768
Your own first comment rejected the claim that access to information was a problem, I addressed the additional concern that informational quality and relevance matter.
Compensation for that role still falls under my first comment, linked above.
Do you expect the money to go to people that need it? I see administration costs taking most of it for themselves, the US department of education is spent mostly on administrative matters that do not go to teachers students or anything that helps education.
The two solutions are about accountability and prevent bloat. One idea is a cryptocurrency or other ledger that prevents skimming.
My favored solution is a negative income tax, making below a certain amount entitled you to recieve cash when you file taxes. It doesn’t go through the cycle of government workers slicing the pie before expecting them to give it back but with more money, it keeps it in your pockets, rewards tax filing and will help the neediest people, creative or not, and also anyone who is down on their luck.
https://cepr.net/report/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-interne...
Everyone gets money to spend as patrons for people contributing to the commons.
The copyright system allows artificial scarcity to help fund things by restricting copies. But it doesn't have to be done that way.
Asia did not have patents and Europeans did. If my ideas aren’t my own and anyone can copy it, I wouldn’t want to put efforts into something others will clone.
I think patents are a necessary evil at least enough of it to make innovations, but foreign copycats and bootlegs serve this market well.
And yet, the FOSS movement persists.
> (...) It is important for each of us to consider the biases of various technologies _and to seek out those that reflect our values and aspirations._
(emphasis added)
This couldn't have aged better. I'd argue the issue is with finding anything that doesn't reflect your ML-inferred "values and aspirations", at least when lurking on the big platforms.
> 4. Information is not knowledge.
> We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom.
This is very important, and I wish I had learned this much sooner. Chul-Han, who was featured around here a few days ago, devotes a lot of attention to this point in several books. I wish I had grasped this earlier TBH.
information is knowledge packaged for transport. converting information into knowledge is just called learning when humans do it. spreading information you don't understand is a service or a disservice depending on your intent.
Simple example, a gazillion string long DNA segment holds information, but without actual understanding and organization in some context (which importantly differs depending on who interprets it for what purpose) it holds no meaning.
Saying that this process of creating knowledge is "just" learning might be the most loaded "just" in history because that process is probably the most complicated, mysterious and least understood thing on earth.
nah I can do better. DNA is just data, you can say it "holds information" the way a footprint holds information but that's just an idiom.
knowing is just a perception. you can think you know something and be wrong.
equating information with data outside the context of information theory is precisely wrong and definitely not the same information being discussed in tfa. bits do not comprise information, you could say data reduces to bits. data != information. data is objective by definition. information must be able to inform/influence the metaphorical ledger backing ones ability to know, transferring knowledge. not all knowledge can become information and not all information can become data.
> That said, the proliferation of data is also a serious challenge, requiring new measures of human discipline and skepticism. We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom.
Incredibly true, and since the web2.0 we have our nose into that problem on a daily basis.
https://web.archive.org/web/19981212033307/https://www.techn...
The bullet points are exactly the same 24 years later, but I didn't check to confirm that the text under the bullet points is the same.
> The Internet is revolutionary, but not Utopian.
Yes and: This isn't quite right.
In political science terms, I want an adjective stronger than "revolutionary", in the same direction. "Radical" has more punch, but wrong direction.
The Internet accelerated consolidation, not challenge it.
Back in 1998, I had no awareness of "preferential attachment" and "winner takes all". I currently believe that reducing transaction costs accelerates consolidation and therefore inequity.
Many technotopians thought the Internet would be the great liberator, toppling the gatekeepers and elites. Disintermediation! That certainly happened.
But what happened was gatekeepers killed off the old guard, feasted on their corpses. The larger trend was a massive consolidation, an unprecedented power grab, and ridiculous transfer of wealth. And previously inconceivable command of our collective attention. Masquerading as personalization, mass customization.
Also true is that more heterodoxy is sneaking into the zeitgeist (popular awareness) than ever before.
Paradox. How can both phenomenon be simultaneously true?
David Graeber in The Democracy Project might have the crucial insight. He's the "We are the %1" guy. He rejects revolution and advocates opportunistically sneaking in reforms in the margins, beyond the awareness and control of the power elites. He claims that authorities cannot control all uses of their mediums. That the very levers of power become the means of dissent.
The only metaphor I have for this paradoxical situation is the hands of power trying to grasp fistfuls of sand. The tighter the grip, the more sand leaks out. (Thanks Princess Leia!)
> But what happened was gatekeepers killed off the old guard, feasted on their corpses. The larger trend was a massive consolidation, an unprecedented power grab, and ridiculous transfer of wealth.
So, yes and no: Disintermediation happened, but the erstwhile disintermediators turned out to be / became the new gatekeeper elite.
(Also, to some extent, they were probably the exact same old gatekeeper elites who just adapted to a new role.)
The best notion I've come up with is reapplying Chomksy's five filters of mass media model to social media. My hunch is the Owners stole the Advertisers lunch money. But I'm no media critic (academic), so it's just a guess.
It'd also be cool if someone "followed the money", as you suggest. It'd be pretty wild if the shareholders behind the Owners remained the same.
Huh. Writing this out, it's now obvious that Flak stole almost all of Media Elite's power and money.
The first part reads (intentionally) archingly technophillic. That's balanced by the following sections.
The number of currently-extant issues identified with piercing accuracy is ... large. I strongly recommend the book.
David Shenk's Data Smog is similarly pioneering and insightful.
Other signers are better known. Douglas Rushkoff's current project is his Team Human podcast, he's also known for his book Cyberia, both of which are strongly critical of tech trends since the late 1990s. Steven Johnson has written several books on technology. Paulina Borsook wrote Cyberselfish.
Given that the manifesto takes a decidedly humanist stance on technology its not surprising. Education isn't just about 'learning stuff' its about having institutions that form citizens and instill some sense of virtue and values, and that can't be done in front of a screen, or replaced by technology. Very relevant today with the amount of covid-related lack of socialization outside of the home.
Sure, we live in a society. I think we all understand that. Technology is there to facilitate the transmission of teaching. There will always be a group that creates the curriculum, but students don’t necessarily need to have an actual person at the intake point. So while I agree that you can’t rely solely on technology, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in it, which I fear is what’s being implied by your statement.
As a purely practical example, right now the average current ratio between teachers and students is still somewhere around 30:1 or 20:1, which pretty much makes it impossible for consistent individualized attention. Ideally we could get to a 1:1 ratio, but that’s unrealistic. Effective use of technology though can be used to dramatically improve the leverage and reach of a teacher such that a lower ratio could be simulated in some sense. Not perfect, but it sure would help a lot.
You can also do this online. In chess you don’t have complexity so the best bots can beat the best experts. You can learn languages with tapes and digital materials.
In an increased complex environment, this is not realistic until/if they catch up which is possible.
…then I saw the date and now I’m wondering how likely it is that this was the first text I ever read on the internet, and if my brain might be using a strict first-come-first-serve policy for hot takes.
Human society shifts with literal priorities, not politically or socially preferred. We rebuilt after WW2 and churn around repainting, but a lot of folks need to get over the narrative not being about their tribe specifically
I include myself in this; if tech salaries implode because ML, oh well. I am not just a utilitarian gig
As technorealists, we seek to expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism. We are technology "critics" in the same way, and for the same reasons, that others are food critics, art critics, or literary critics. We can be passionately optimistic about some technologies, skeptical and disdainful of others. Still, our goal is neither to champion nor dismiss technology, but rather to understand it and apply it in a manner more consistent with basic human values.
From TFA.
Which is precisely what they are doing: freely expressing what at the time was a distinctly minority view.
For a list of signatories, see: https://www.technorealism.org/faq.html
You'll have to use the Wayback Machine on many of those links, though HN readers who've followed this debate should recognise at least some names. I've highlighted a few in an earlier comment.
Several (and perhaps most) of the signatories have written books (either before or after the launch of Technorealism), and/or articles in the tech or general press.