37% of the world’s population have still never used the internet
itu.int
itu.int
My issues aren't with the internet, but advancements made with social media.
The addictive nature of many platforms. The hivemind and lack of free thought I've noticed in many avenues of the internet.
Having upvotes vs downvotes or likes vs dislikes encourages conformity. It encourages group think.
This group think is ultimately what's driving me off the larger platforms on the internet and away from social media in general.
1. Government grants for open source alternative development. Aka fed oversee and what not can apply for grants.
2. Label all social media and phones common carriers.
3. Require common carriers to be subject to FOIA and audits by citizens. This would include source code. They can still profit from being centralized for the time being, because of networking effects that likely won’t change.
My final thought is that social media shouldn’t be tied to ones public identity.
It’s easy to think of say communism in reference to the horrors of recent history, but it showed up before the US civil war. In the context of slavery and the often stated “need” to compensate people who owned slaves before freeing them it suddenly seems very different. Which just demonstrates how ideologies are shaped by the time period and why understanding history takes more than a history textbook.
Actually reading old newspapers or political speeches is eye opening in the way that’s hard to summarize. https://www.loc.gov/newspapers/?dates=1920-1929 first page of first newspaper The Evening Star (March 8, 1920) “Income tax on dividends held Invalid by Supreme Court Government To Refund Millions” alongside “President takes ride in Automobile” which was apparently newsworthy including the prohibition of taking his photo. Just as interesting “Woman instantly killed by an Auto” referring to a car accident was a front page story. Meanwhile “Democrats Figure Electoral Victory on “WET” plank” referring to a lighter version of prohibition while still prohibiting saloons and Whisky. “British to Sell no part of West Indies to the US” which shows the past wasn’t just a history timeline it was filled with unrealized possibilities.
That's called Twitter and as far as I can tell, more incognito it is, the more toxic it is.
From the perspective of those tools, the problems are brazen - if you accept that there is, effectively, a 'big lie' (without one specific liar). That it's possible for so many to be so misled, for the social norms (groupthink) to be so widespread and wrong, is shocking to experience first-hand. Looking at history, it shouldn't be surprising at all.
What prevents such widespread ignorance is the Enlightenment and post-modernism/positivism. It should not be surprising that the problems are so brazen and that the 'old' tools work so well. It's not coincidence; we got here by discarding them, by (bizarrely) disarming ourselves. The results are completely predictable - discard scientific reasoning and critical thinking and you get lies and conspiracies. Throw away post-modernism and you get, almost immediately it seems, the same cults of power and personality that it protects us from. The consequences aren't overwhelmingly clear to observe. Whoever drives the reactionary movement, one of their first targets was those tools and the norms and institutions that support them: fact, critical thinking, education, all the humanities.
(I'm speaking a bit loosely about the philosophical terms, but close enough, I think, for my point.)
One newsgroup I recommend is `comp.sys.raspberry-pi`. It has a pretty high SNR and is quite active, especially in comparison to some other groups on Usenet.
I've stared to think that handing everyone the "microphone" of something like YouTube is actually a way to prevent even moderately subversive thought from ever reaching the mainstream.
Basically let people say what they want - but they have to complete with every other loud moron, while ignoring the manufacturing of consent through traditional channels.
It's horribly dystopian. I almost long for a time when running a pirate radio station meant you had a political message you felt needed to be heard.
I remember that feeling, that something could be important to say.
It's completely gone though. There's only the compulsion to reply.
Pirate radio stations generally weren't run by people who had things that needed to be heard, in the US most notable examples were simply people who thought broadcasting music illegally was worth getting raided by the feds.
Although I’d agree if you are referring to secondary effects — they will take a little longer to manifest. But we are certainly seeing some of those already.
Ps. HN is also an echo chamber but here readers are more keen to ask questions.
We're in an interesting time right now, when at least 50% of people in first-world countries remember a time before the internet (obviously higher in countries with less internet adoption)
In 70 years, everyone alive will have grown up in a world where the Internet was everywhere.
There's definitely pros to this as instead of having to hide things like your sexual orientation in your community due to bigotry you can go online and find others like you. There are also cons abound, where instead of (for example, not trying to push policy here) ranting about how nobody rides the bus and encountering your neighbor whose car broke down and is riding the bus you instead go online and talk to other people who think buses are stupid.
No it will take time to characterize the effects. Today we know exactly how and why it was designed.
In these times of compassion when conformity's in fashion
Say one more stupid thing to me before the final nail is driven in
- Bob Dylan, Foot of Pride (1983) rec. w/Sly+Robbie,Knopflerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC2roZjsv44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4siXnAuVb8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex2UHrJg2h4 (perf. Lou Reed, GE Smith)
if you don't like group think, avoid popular websites like this one and stick to smaller, more like minded communities
We're about at what, September 20th or so? Maybe later in the month if we account for people too young to use the internet, or unable to do so for some reason.
Or maybe it has already ended, if we define it as a ratio of new internet users joining per month compared to the existing user base [2].
Question: What will be the effect of the majority of internet users being EXPERIENCED internet users, increasingly so over time, compared to the last 10-20 years where a higher proportion has been new, inexperienced users?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[2] "Whereas the regular September student influx would quickly settle down, the influx of new users from AOL did not end and Usenet's existing culture did not have the capacity to integrate the sheer number of new users" (from [1])
The internet is just a continuation of this, in myriad different subgroups with their own norms, and like everyone else, they don't like change (but usually only when it inconveniences or is easily extrapolated to situations they see to do with themselves).
The eternal September was the point in time when the internet culture stopped reproducing, because it no longer could. Its replication rate was too low. Those who carried the culture could not make it "go viral" anymore. So it died.
All the people coming in have their own idea of the appropriate way to act. It's not an entire lack of culture, it's a hundred different ones all clamoring and drowning out the original. Eventually, if the group has enough of a shared reason for being, it will settle into a new culture. If there isn't a shared reason and it's large enough, an enveloping culture and subgroups might develop. Just look at Twitter, or Reddit, and probably Facebook.
> Culture is the reproduction of something through multiple people being replaced.
Yes, but it's never reproduced perfectly. There's drift over time, and some aspects are lost, some gained, and yet others altered in fundamental ways.
> The eternal September was the point in time when the internet culture stopped reproducing
Sometimes it was lost, but sometimes it was just diluted. I suspect most the time it was the latter. If the culture was beneficial, then given enough time it should return in some semblance or another.
> Those who carried the culture could not make it "go viral" anymore. So it died.
It was never viral in the sense of what that word means for memes (as ideas, not necessarily cat gifs) as we apply it to the internet. It was an indoctrination. Some of it was meme, where people learned as they saw, but much of it was people actively enforcing the culture on any that came.
There is a lot in common with people in the U.S. worried about immigrants changing their own culture, which they see as "American" (even though there's been wildly different ideas of what that is for a long time, regardless of what TV would have us believe much of the time). Lots of people coming in from outside and changing what they view as "normal" behavior. "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", Spanish on legal forms, etc.
Those people are worried about the exact same thing the people that lament Eternal September complain about, outsiders coming in and changing what's considered the norm. But here's the thing, if enough of them actually cared and thought it was worse, they could (and let's be honest, most eventually did) just migrate to different more exclusive or less popular groups that more more aligned with how they wanted to interact with people.
The question is, is that perfectly fine and expected, and people that want to preserve a culture should make their own effort to do so, and if it fails that means the culture in question has outrun its value, or should everyone else be required to adopt someone else's culture just because those already of that culture have staked a claim somewhere and view others as outsiders attacking or hurting their culture?
Personally I think the former is the only feasible solution. I'm willing to accept that may make me unhappy at times. HN is moderated, so it's somewhat protected by this, but if hundreds of thousands of new accounts were created in the next year and they all thought that dick jokes were the height of discourse and the moderators couldn't keep up, well I'd lament the HN that used to be, and also start looking for somewhere new. I'd like to think I'd be open minded enough to not blame those people (as long as it wasn't a concerted effort to ignore the rules, and instead just too many new people to adequately inform of the culture here), but that wouldn't change the reality.
Or maybe it would be something less outlandish, such as the careful balance between VC techbro people and interesting hackers and lurking forum philosophers getting too far out of wack and the one or more of those groups getting too much influence/people and HN becomes no longer is more than the sum of it's parts to me (and maybe many others). It's easy to point at HN and say it also has a culture, but I think more accurately it has a few cultures, which large shared components enforced by the mods. Maybe an influx of people wouldn't be so much the erasure of culture as much as the ballooning of one over the others. I'm sure there were people in the original Eternal September forums that thought the current culture an ill fit, and perhaps they saw that influx of people as like minds coming to their subgroup?
> Sometimes it was lost, but sometimes it was just diluted. I suspect most the time it was the latter.
No, it just stopped existing. You can't go find it somewhere or anything.
> If the culture was beneficial, then given enough time it should return in some semblance or another.
That's not how anything works.
> There is a lot in common with people in the U.S. worried about immigrants changing their own culture, which they see as "American"
Not really, because those people are worried about an immigrant minority, not worried about an immigrant supermajority.
You would do better to look at the same example in the opposite way: immigrant parents worried that their children will become native English speakers and lose the family language and traditions.
> That's not how anything works.
As long as there's some population left continuing the practice, if it's beneficial and can be proven (and the cost benefit is what people consider to beneficial), then it can and will come back. Breastfeeding rates dropped to 28% in the 1970s due to various reasons. There's been a resurgence for many reasons.
> Not really, because those people are worried about an immigrant minority, not worried about an immigrant supermajority.
That is, most definitely, what some people are worried about, whether there's any validity to that worry or not. Have you never heard the "poor immigrants have so many children that they'll outnumber us soon" racist statements? That are just an extrapolation and extreme version of that thought.
> You would do better to look at the same example in the opposite way: immigrant parents worried that their children will become native English speakers and lose the family language and traditions.
I did look at it that way, in my original comment.
As a personal example, I've never used a Discord but see references to it everywhere online and am vaguely aware of what it is (IRC to me). Generally, I don't get why chatting is so interesting and I'm only interested in async communication methods.
It's the same as old IM/chat room applications. The big difference being that it allows voice chat if you want it and some embedded file sharing.
Whenever I asked someone to google something, watch a YouTube video, or simply go to a website, I got nothing but bewildered looks — as if I just talked gibberish. Even Instagram was completely irrelevant. But if something was on Facebook, everybody knew about it or how to find it. All of most people's online life happens exclusively on Facebook.
Does this count as "using the internet"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
In many 3rd world countries people only use the Internet to access Facebook and WhatsApp on their smartphones.
The only way to break this I can imagine would be for someone to provide a pipeline that seamlessly automates the domain name registration and hosting for these businesses (similar to how Let's Encrypt popularized HTTPS by reducing the technical hoops to jump through). It would probably have to be funded similarly to Let's Encrypt as well, because in countries where Instagram is the de facto business platform, they're certainly not going to pay for this service.
Small businesses that have paid a web developer to make them a website rarely get a good return on their investment.
What if they make their own website? It's relatively easy these days, depending on what you want to do (and if it isn't, there are packages to help!).
Far fewer customers care about a website than an active social media profile, and the effort required to maintain them, secure them and set them up is orders of magnitude higher.
If you're a growing small business, there are typically much better ways to invest your time.
I have a wierd blind-spot when it comes to fax machine usage.
A laptop and broadband connection are going to cost a lot more. A desktop is simply going to be out of reach for most of the poorer population.
When the pandemic began, IIRC US public school districts serving poorer students discovered that only 50% had laptops or desktops in their families.
Like, yeah, they help build Facebook's brand and place it in a position of market dominance... but they're doing that by providing low-cost internet to vast populations that otherwise couldn't afford it.
There are millions of people that can talk to their relatives and have better access to government services and communicate with people they've never met, that would still be cut off if not for Facebook.
The benefits are great, but it's not among the things that should be done by a for profit company, let alone one that lives on "engagement".
I don’t think being technically literate has anything to do with it. We in the developed world are just as susceptible to misinformation.
Tor is used for CSAM. PhpBB and PeerTube are used for djihadist propaganda.
There really isn't any trivial way to give people better communication technology without giving them better ability to coordinate to do awful things. If you don't want that, fine, but then the natural conclusion isn't "we shouldn't push Whatsapp on third-world countries", it's "we shouldn't develop the internet in third-world countries". Telegram and Signal can be used to incite genocides just was well.
This is a tad misleading. Your sentence implies they are given access to 'the internet', but in reality it's a select list of Facebook-approved sites that are slimmed down. Obviously, this sets a bad precedent and is anti-competitive (other social media platforms on Internet.org, etc.). This is far from the internet: this is a locked-down Facebook-controlled vision of what they'd like the internet to be.
The UN may be the arbiter of global politics but what they might be exempting are people whom are part of the "opt out" crowd or, would rather not have to explicitly opt out of such (free) services.
No, none of the connectivity is because of Facebook. They didn't build the connectivity; they're a parasite on it. What they add is a layer of disconnection, under their control, that they use to exploit.
Facebook does actually help build the connectivity up in these countries so they do in fact pay for the infrastructure. It is still exploitative in that they mislead folks in developing countries to think they have access to the internet when instead they're on Facebook's private network. But they do pay the cost of connectivity, at least somewhat.
Not a rhetorical device. I mean that FB inserts itself as a kind of centralized middleman that can disconnect people that the internet connects. To speak of it in computer architecture terms it could be called a single point of failure.
It makes everybody go through their App and watch their ads or else they get disconnected from everybody else. This isn't something that should be called connecting people.
> Facebook does actually help build the connectivity up in these countries so they do in fact pay for the infrastructure.
Facebook "pays for" the expansion of infrastructure with proceeds from parasitism on the existing infrastructure.
That doesn't make sense.
If Facebook was purely parasitic in these deals, people would just buy regular internet subscriptions (yes, there are counter-arguments to that, but the general principle holds). The fact that they don't implies that there are large swathes of people who can't afford internet subscriptions, and therefore would not get any of the benefits of one without Facebook.
One option is to advocate for corporations to be allowed to act as sole providers of social services in exchange for a monopoly on network platform infrastructure.....
....but why not just advocate for taxing the corporations and using the money to provide those services to the public on an open platform instead?
Have you heard about internet.org[0]?
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (there are so many articles on what's wrong with it / public outcry, I'm just going to link the search results.)
Suppose the definition includes the concept of "social networking application on your mobile device that works over the Internet even though you don't have a data plan due to a special arrangement".
I would not count that as online.
It's likely that more than 37% are offline according to a proper definition of online which means that you have a device with a data plan which lets you use whatever Internet-based applications you want and visit whatever websites you want.
By the "visit whatever" criterion, entire nations are offline. All of China that doesn't have a foreign VPN is offline, and so that's about 1.4B right there.
The user is not running a freely selected Internet-based VoIP application connecting to a server of their choice located anywhere in the world. (In which case that would be real Internet use and not incidental.)
It's not way different than pressing the Netflix button on your TV remote and picking a movie to watch.
Heck, how much if this population is imprisoned or incapacitated?
> On average, 71 per cent of the world’s population aged 15-24 is using the Internet, compared with 57 per cent of all other age groups. This generational gap is reflected across all regions. It is most pronounced in the LDCs, where 34 per cent of young people are connected, compared with only 22 per cent of the rest of the population.
LDCs : Least Developed Countries
There are roughly 670 million under age of 5, 1.3 billion in age of 5 - 14.
Are you willing to give up those things in order to reduce homogeniety (or do you just want others to forego them)?
To your question, I don’t think I would be willing to disconnect fully; my career is based around the web and my way of life is and always has been quite electrified and banked. If it hadn’t been I might feel very differently. I recognize the privilege I enjoy, but I can’t presume the pleasure of not having bank ads, overdraft fees, and power dependence is entirely inferior to my experience. Maybe. Probably even, but not definitely.
One does not have to be dragged into the "OUTRAGE OF THE DAY!" mud that is Twitter or Facebook.
I have only seen "revolutionized" used in the context of commerce and industry. Whether the procession of such is negative or positive is subjective to one's own taste.
I think what you just stated is a negative. The net benefit is material, at the cost of everything incorporeal.
I believe the GP and I are in agreement here.
As someone who's spent a lot of time in the global south and met a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on the internet, I'm curious what evidence you have to back up your claim.
The new stuff (social media in particular, and the instantaneous, always-connected nature of things in general, and the privacy-invading tendencies of online providers) is what we haven't figured out yet, and where most of the negative effect is coming from.
Are you talking about the global south?
So I'd say the onus is on you to provide comprehensive data to support your sweeping claim that the number of losers has been apparently negligible in the countries (including all factors, not just economic). And that's data, not your pile of subjective observations from the biased selection of people you met, here and there.
Yet the commenter above was treating like a bold proposition that needs mounts of evidence to support.
But they do have no internet retreats you can try. You can also just leave your phone at home and ride an Amtrak for 3 days.
But it's likely that the number is relatively maxed out, which is kinda interesting. Everyone who can uses the internet.
And among those who can't are children who will soon use it, rural people who might soon use it and oppressed people who might experience a revolution, migration or whatever reason to then use the internet.
My favorite example is how when missionaries contacted the Pirahã people, there was a missionary who was a language expert to learn their language quickly to do Bible teachings. He postulated their language didn't have recursion, which caused quite a bit of debate with Noam Chomsky and others. My take away from learning about this is that the Pirahã people didn't have a notion of past and future ("It's always been this way") and how they were totally transformed for the worse, in my opinion, by watching and seemingly becoming addicted to watching television
Everett was even converted by them: after learning language basics he tried to tell them bible stories, but they just asked whether he knew Jesus, and when he said No they asked whether he knew anyone that knew him, which he also denied. At that point they did not have any more interest in the stories. So they do have terms for the past, but they simply don't consider any 'far' past. Wiki summary on this:
> As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everet
Someone earlier asked why people make comments on Hacker News with no expectation of getting a response (far down in a thread for example.) This is why.
Edit:
Since my religious sensibility is getting downvoted I might as well throw in this
Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?'
Priest: 'No, not if you did not know.'
Eskimo: 'Then why did you tell me?'
Annie Dillard
> one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; you simply don't tell other people what to do.
> There appears to be no social hierarchy; the Pirahã have no formal leaders. Their social system is similar to that of many other hunter-gatherer bands in the world, although rare in the Amazon because of a history of horticulture before Western contact
> They take naps of 15 minutes to, at the most, two hours throughout the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night.
> The concept of drawing is alien to them and when asked to draw a person, animal, tree, or river, the result is simple lines.[7] However, on seeing a novelty such as an airplane, a child may make a model of it, which may be soon discarded.
> According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god,[9] and they lost interest in Jesus when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made.[
> Everett states that it has no relative clauses or grammatical recursion. Everett points out that there is recursion of ideas: that in a story, there may be subordinate ideas inside other ideas.
> Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations."
> Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so.
> The language may have no unique words for colors, contradicting Berlin and Kay's hypothesis on the universality of color-naming. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the recorded color words are all compounds like mii sai[6] or bii sai, "blood-like," indicating that colors in the language are adjectival comparisons that are not consistently applied.
And then finally:
> Adoption of western culture
> A 2012 documentary called The Grammar of Happiness which aired on the Smithsonian Channel, reported that a school had been opened for the Pirahã community where they learn Portuguese and mathematics. According to FUNAI the school is the responsibility of the Ministry of Education of Brazil.[10] In addition to a formal school being introduced to the culture, the documentary also reported that the Brazilian government installed a modern medical clinic, electricity and television in the remote area.
Truly, the West subsumes all cultures it comes into contact with.
There is no hope in trying to progress further, because it's like grinding two mis-matched gears together, to generate torque: all you're doing is forcing things that are not meant to be.
What a depressing article.
> What a depressing article.
Agreed. That was my reaction at the time I came across this. I got the impression that some felt it was cruel to leave them in such a primitive state. That was not my feeling at all. I felt there was a lot to learn from them as an antidote to modern anxieties and neurosis, but that opportunity is lost. My original comment was made out of fear that when everyone is on the internet, something important will also be lost.
This statistic jumps out at me. Assuming that GNI per capita approximately equals average income, it may be the case that cash incomes are so low that connectivity is a luxury in some ways (people spend 20% of their incomes on something like housing or feeding themselves, not paying their internet bills).
--
At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if people get confused at cell phone/facebook app is not the internet or "is" the internet. There is no such thing as net neutrality in many parts of the world, so you are gatekeeped off much of the Internet unless you have a "Data" package, but app store/facebook is free.
My comment was more about how I think the parent comment over-inflated the cost when saying "10-20 years ago in "first world" countries was [20% of income]" because my experience in a first world country was much less expensive. To my knowledge, the US has fairly expensive internet compared to other first world countries so I'm not sure how that statement holds up globally but I'd assume it doesn't.
Instead of bringing people together,the internet somehow managed to corner the masses back to their respective roots or fringes, then pit them against each other or against professional trolls and "AI". So sad. It's not a new development, either. It was true 10 years ago. Not sure if things are worse now. I think they are. Censorship wasn't as as it is now. It's everywhere
Sometimes having the internet improved your life, until the internet caused a war that killed you.
If you can't tell, I am all for the internet but I am scared because I've seen what it can do to the masses who were largely unprepared to face enemies such as fb and the armies of professional trolls forming public opinion online
Think about how you would live on $60 a month.
*(local equivalent buying power of what two US dollars can buy in the US)
I visited Indonesia in 2005 and people were quite poor and didn’t have internet on phones or at home. But it still seemed like most people had visited an Internet cafe.
If I use my debit card in a place, is that “using the Internet”?
Imagine there was a planet, not too far from ours, that was inhabited by humans that didn't age, never got ill, never did harm towards others, we satisfied with their lives, and lived in harmony with one another -- wanting for nothing. I'm sure comparing that to our "First World" would lead any intellectually honest person to conclude we're living in a hellscape -- something so horrid it would be sardonic to even call it "Third World."
Good thing that doesn't exist; otherwise, we'd be facing a whole new type of existential dread.
But most people who did not used the internet, probably had other reasons for not being online, yet.
So why not give them a chance to explore the internet as a tool and not addiction?
We're slaves to our dopamine reward system.
It's like injecting someone with heroin constantly for years on end and telling them: "you can leave anytime."
But you can also leave heroin, if you really want. I know people who did.
And when you consider yourself a slave to your body, bad for you. I am because of my body, even though I not only have good habbits, I am still not my slave. But if you think you are, well, then yes, you are.
Is getting more and more dystopian by the day.