What do you sense about technology? Can you describe what you're worried we are creating? Obviously there are unintended negative effects, but I think it's not certain how they'll play out.
When your long-term goals and short-term actions don't line up, you're in for nasty weather.
We don't know where it's going or how it'll play out. But we can feel that it is already bad and is going to get worse. Some day people will try to say "we didn't know" but that will be a lie. Some of us did and tried to convince y'all. But because we aren't able to convincingly predict the future in minute detail we've been ignored.
Anyway yes, as I said. Dismiss excuse invalidate. I will truly be happy if I turn out to be wrong about this. Where will you be if you are wrong?
> Where will you be if you are wrong?
You do not know my stance on the matter. You presume, because I responded inquiring into how your senses were different, that I was not on your side. But I would most likely be in a little cabin in the mountains. I have quit Meta for the past 6 years, have de-Googled myself (in so much that you cannot really what others do), and generally agree that many technologies are more harmful to society than help. Particularly, what people call surveillance capitalism. That being said, I recognize that it is not the underlying technology that is problematic but the institutions and decision makers. If you read the article, they are recreating the exact widening of the gap between themselves and the people under the guise that they know better (since the have the data, they made it, only they understand the tech, etc.) I would never advocate for the destruction of the internet to prevent these institutions but rather educate and elucidate my peers to narrow this gap. I asked you to help close this gap by telling me what you see and your response was "you're the problem for even asking".
That is a disingenuous comment or you gravely misunderstand the issues.
There are almost no groups ever in history "opposed to technological progress", even the "Luddites" that inevitably will get mention a dozen times in this thread.
Nobody is opposed to technological progress. The opposition is to technological tyranny. I do hope you understand the difference between the two.
I would agree that the Luddites were not opposed to all technological progress, just the part that impacted their jobs. But this type of reasoning leads to the tragedy of the commons where each group refuses technology that replaces themselves. The end result is no technological progress. Anyway, "technological tyranny" is poorly defined and people just pick whatever they deem wrong as tyranny and whatever is good as a non-issue. We are under rule of the internet. Without it, society would cease to function. Are people opposed to the internet tyranny? We require a functioning society to have advanced health care, regardless of socialism/capitalism, are we under "advanced health care tyranny" because it is being used to push people into a functioning society?
Destroying equipment was a tactic, not an ideology. The worst that can honestly be said about it is that it didn't work.
> "We are under rule of the internet."
Good Lord! No! If we are "under the rule" of anything it is the Rule of Law. In Britain, unlike USA, we are "subjects of Her Majesty", such that the Law is mediated through a parliamentary democracy. You have it slightly different under a republic. Either way, despite general cynicism we are lucky enough to enjoy governments that serve us, and long may that last.
The internet is nothing but a tool. It damn well serves us. And it does so if and only if we ask it to. Your's is precisely the sort of expressions that gives me concern, please reconsider what you are saying.
> I'm confused because you are the one who said that they were opposed to technological tyranny.
Yes, sorry if my lazy parsing (overzealous response) means we're talking at cross purposes. I think we are more in agreement than not.
If there's anything we are confusing each other over it may be "what already is" versus "what we want to avoid".
respects
We don't have to know the exact form it will take. We should oppose all the forms that tech can become oppressive.
But are you seriously rejecting the post-WW2 paradigm where tech was made sacred and engineers and scientists were turned into its high priests ?
I know some people like that, but I wouldn't have expected to see them on hacker news !
The overall system and how it is applied and incentivized, not the random non-deterministic effects some of which are cool and some very bad, is the issue.
Tech introduces a governance layer with increasingly par relevancy with the rest of our civil social contract. I have to pay taxes to the city, and I also have to do it through a website. I want to go out to a restaurant, I have to pay via a toasttab app. I want to use public transportation, and its a cashless affair. I want to go to a concert, I need a ticketmaster app on an updated smart phone with geolocation services turned on (and so on). I want to get car insurance, I install an app and list my social media for discounts.
Worse, the system leverages massive network effects, so there are stronger links everyday to enforce tech and civil society, not just the civil society part. Worse, the automation will eventually start drowning the knowledge class careers as well.
While I am definitely letting my ideology leak through above, this area has a tremendous amount of research behind it so this just isn't me and my luddite buddies. Big Tech discovers it occasionally, cypherpunks(tor, pgp, bitcoin) have been on it for a while, non-technical observers (pysch, lib arts) often notice it from external evaluation especially around misinformation, and so on. MIT pioneered cybernetics research, which specifically aims for the above governance.
It's really hard to miss this dynamic if you work in the industry and look beyond your company, and even if you do miss it or don't believe your own take, there is a mountain of cross-disciplinary research on it.
Norbert Wiener was himself a devastating critic of the immediate Dr. Strangelove type conclusions his generation of peers immediately took to. At the time a comparison was made to eugenics, though I forget by whom within that circle.
It has incarnations not just in the obvious twentieth century fascist/axis contexts (Germany, Italy, Japan) but then in South America and as a Soviet version, both with leftist spins.
The most modern condemnation I have encountered (other than of economists/doco-journalists like Varoufakis, Adam Curtis etc) is from "The Invisible Committee" which offers an anarchist take [1]. []
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-commit...
[] This presents some really interesting dichotomies/contradictions for the libertarian-anarchists stereotypically of Silicon Valley.
Thanks for the link!
If you're looking for a modernist take that's not econ or journalism, the way in is probably checking out the CCRU, which still has a lot of literature on it and by it around [0], and the Cybernetic Hypothesis [1]. CCRU is like if a technically aware philosophy department discovered this and extended it into total conclusion(idk, that's not really a good explanation), Cybernetic Hypothesis is like if like arts/anarchist types did the same, and then both filter into interesting pools. Cypherpunk and early bitcoin are definitely tuned in, but with probably different motivations and outcome goals.
What sort of blows my mind is especially those first two sources offer really clear eyed commentary on 'all of this,' but they are also dated - 1990's publishing date. It's like you have to tap into sometimes hokey "the information age" literature to get a clear read on 2020's tech. What's worse is the 1990's lit theorizes fairly radical (for the time) outcomes that came very true today even beyond the usual Neuromancer/Cryptonomicon/Sci-Fi mappings, yet there isn't much discussion on it (like this thread).
edit - would check out Jaron Lanier, 'who owns the future,' for a pretty modern take that discusses the above well and he has tech bonafides.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un... [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cyberneti...
Yes that's weird isn't it. I don't believe in "suppression conspiracies" but am amazed how often deeply prescient things are passed over the first time around and must be dug up. For more archaeology dig around Phil Agre's "Red Rock Eaters" and the old Whole Earth where I first discovered Dana Meadows.
A drugged out 1990 Nick Land, the MIT crew (Meadows, Wiener), the original computers (Lanier, Agre, cypherpunks), Mark Fisher and the Occupy area, etc. etc. all come to fairly similar conclusions or exist in very similar orbits, "other research" by the same entities was or is fairly influential, but this area - cybernetic, the Concern, "idk but something isn't great" just does not exist currently and that lack of anchoring really concerns me. All that's available is ex-Social Media/adtech CEOs going on podcast apology tours like that Social Dilemma doc.
Really don't know what to think of it.
Found it (but not read yet) : from p45 on :
https://agorist.xyz/files/Agorism_XXI_I_2022.pdf
I'm guessing that they were always fundamentally opposed anyway, Land being of "bottom" and Yarvin of the "top" sensibilities (in the political compass sense) ?
I'm 30% in, and this does seem to be a potential seed for a vision of the future that the (bottom) left has been so sorely lacking since the failure of the Soviets !
You don't see something so radical often (last time would have been the Unibomber ?), since they seem to consider that the whole Western civilization has to be thrown away, including its Ancient Greek roots ?!
(But then we are in unprecedented times, with tremendous responsibility, and keep failing harder and harder, so at some point you have to wonder why...)
Otherwise pretty smart people, but somehow they fall for the dumbest shit. Thinking back, I don't think I ever heard them express such views, and especially not be so adamant about it. They get angry when anyone points out why they're wrong. They're always right, everyone else is wrong...
I didn't believe in Fecebook/Twatter making everyone dumber (never used them myself), but maybe there's truth to that. I guess that's one way technology is affecting the masses, and it's scary because you can't stop the masses, the majority will win, as for now they're in a democracy, actively voting to destroy it and probably not even realizing it. All so a few rich assholes can gain more power.
Other than that, the centralization of everything, that just can't be good. Not only software, but hardware, too. I mean, half of the world's chips (and most of the best ones) are made on one tiny island - God forbid something happens to it.
The few big companies making computers will gladly solder everything and break a chip if you try to reuse it elsewhere, just so you throw it away and buy a new computer when the time comes (i.e. it breaks).
Can't even fix your own car anymore because disconnecting the battery means you need your onboard computer reprogrammed - at an authorized price gouge...errr, I mean, service center, of course.
Not to mention surveillance and the ability to charge you with something at any point if they ever so wish (thanks to "social media").
Technology itself is not at fault, but it does give assholes a whole lot of newpower.
Resilience is one of the big issues I work with. It's one of the topics that's not about tyranny or malice, but is in some ways more frightening. It's because we don't see it as "other inflicted" that it stays beneath the radar somewhat.
I believe in their mind, they're getting "the truth" and know better. But the reality is it's... self-propagandization.
When 50 channels say you're wrong but you find one that tells "the truth"... I dunno, it's like the common sense circuits have been fried.
Just like people in Russia are brainwashed by the state media, so do these people brainwash themselves online, likely reinforced by the recommendation systems used on the major platforms.
Which I notice on Youtube, btw, and it always skews towards some dumb/funny or just idiotic content. View a couple of funny videos and that's all I get for the rest of the month. I mostly watch stuff like DIYPerks, various machine & history stuff, tutorials on a lot of things and listen to music, but I never get good, or any, recommendations on that. Although to be completely fair, I don't subscribe to anything, just mostly look it up after Google+Wikipedia.
I don't think that it was a coincidence that a significant fraction of the "alternative" online places I was hanging out on (like Zero Hedge) suddenly went pretty crazy at the same time as the Russo-Ukrainian war started in 2014 ?
(They're typically called "alt-right" now.)
Not that this is completely new - I got my "conspiracy theory education" in 2005-2010 when I watched a pretty convincing hour(s)-long YouTube video about how the World Trade Center had supposedly been subjected to controlled demolition... and then shortly after that an even more convincing, detailed, and longer video describing how that previous video was wrong.
What possibly happened to ZH, and what you're discussing, has a good operational walkthrough here - https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/blog/pdfs/Gh...
Not in a casual comment. So I took some time to write a book that hopefully contains some insights if you're genuinely interested to know.
So did a bunch of other people;
For a gentle interest to modern tech critique I'd suggest Zuboff, Rushkoff, Lanier and so on, but to be honest of you want non-fictional/sci-fi accounts of the "Nineteen Eighty Four" and "Brave New World" type then I'd recommend starting with Postman, Illich, Ellul and Mumford as these lay firmer foundations.
IBM and the Holocaust (Edwin Black) is obviously worth a read in this context.
> Obviously there are unintended negative effects
Those are interesting. But so are the intended ones.
> but I think it's not certain how they'll play out.
I'd put good money it being uncertain too. :)