Too Much Internet
edzitron.medium.com
edzitron.medium.com
If you're an artist or a musician or a developer or, well anything really, what does it mean to be able to go online and are hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are?
I'm 50 and sufficiently old / mature to be able to cope with this but even so, when I do a search for "linocut" (one of my hobbies) and see 82,000 results (just on Etsy) - and they're all really good and incredibly cheap... this dents something in me.
As I say, I'm realistic enough to know I'm not the world's best artist and I'm not trying to make a living out of it - it's also great, and useful, to see other people's work...but it's also somehow galling as well, in a way that's quite hard to define.
It's a bit like Douglas Adams' infinity - it isn't infinity but it feels sufficiently big to make one teeter a bit and wonder at one's place in the universe...
In a way though, it's liberating. One-upping the entire world is so out of reach that you can focus on your own experience. Just go there and have your fun.
If my place in the universe is to be a mediocre artist and a passable rider, so be it.
In comparing ourselves to others -- wealth, beauty, fitness, career, etc -- we tend to look up (and feel unsuccessful) rather than look down (and feel successful).
Isn't that worse when it comes to travelling? I'd rather experience 7 things in 7 days than 7 things in 2 days.
I haven't gotten my head around that one. If I'm nothing but some random nobody and nothing I do really matters, why should I care about my own experience enough to focus on it? What's the fun in randomly killing time? If that's all it's about, I might as well just zone out and watch netflix, or whatever the easiest way to kill time happens to be.
Choose Netflix, choose a hobby, choose a career, choose a family, pick several of the above, and/or choose to try to surmount the mountain and be the best among billions.
There's no meaning of life, but there's the meaning you choose for your life.
As with best practices in goals and games, I suggest placing meaning in the choices where success is defined by what is within your control, not on what is outside of your control.
If we started to have neural linking that mimics exactly the entirety of another person's subjective experience, perhaps we'd prefer being brains in vats experiencing a handful of human TV channels while the "top" whatever live it themselves. But then again at that point why not experience an eagle's flight, a whale's dive, the sense of scale of an ant, the computing of some supercomputer, etc.. and whatever we currently consider to be topping our experiences would also be relative.
I assume if you had perfect freedom (and an unconditional basic income), you wouldn't be watching Netflix, at least not all the time. Passive fun is what people usually do when they are tired. You wouldn't be tired all the time.
The difficult part is having to work to pay your bills, in a world so large that there is nothing unique about your skills. That makes you tired, and then there is just enough energy left for watching Netflix.
No different than when a child enters high school and finds that the Varsity baseball team (or soccer team or whatever) is on a league above-and-beyond their abilities. You either get better to join the level of the competition, or you drop out.
It happens again in the highschool -> college transition.
Learning your place in the world is part of growing up. Any kid growing up thinking they're hot stuff because of their performance in grade school gets a rude wakeup call in high school and/or college.
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As a Kid, I thought I was pretty good at chess. Turns out my adult skill in chess is roughly class D and I peaked at 1500 Elo (and as an adult, I'm way better at chess than I used to be).
As a kid, I also thought I was good at Starcraft: Brood War. I even played the Blizzard ladder pretty decently. But when I sought the competitive community, I barely made rank D- on Teamliquid.
I always was reasonably humble about my abilities with regards to sports, but I have plenty of friends who got a rude awakening that their skills weren't varsity level. I fortunately was in less ego-driven sports, such as Track and Field, where the teams are always accepting of you regardless of your abilities. A runner who can do 5-minute miles would rather run with a teammate for good discussion / less boredom, even if those teammates are 1 to 2-minutes slower. And we all can have fun with discus or shot-put even if I'm much weaker than everyone else.
Meanwhile, a lot of grade-school baseball pitchers or point-guards couldn't make the high school team. Going from "best in grade school" to "not even on the team" in high school really was quite a shock for them...
Its better to learn your place in the world sooner, rather than later. Getting blasted with the right amount of humility is more important for proper psychological development than thinking you're the best at the world at (insert sport / activity / skill here) and just being completely delusional until adulthood.
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As we grow up and specialize into various subjects, the opposite happens. Lets say... GPU programming. I've probably spent more time searching for the community (be it online, or in person) to find people who can even discuss the subject with me because its so specialized.
Its because the number of GPU-programmers is much smaller than say, the number of people who try to get good at running a mile, play baseball, or play chess. (And most people who do get into the subject just use Python Tensorflow, rather than discussing the lower level programming details).
It is here where the internet shines. You really need a network that connects to the "entire world" just to find other people who can talk to you about this subject.
The problem is that when you compete against the high school, you're competing against maybe ~100? people. With internet you're "competing" against thousands and sometimes millions of people, not just the best of your neighborhood but the whole world, with all the existing inequalities.
Therefore, competition is superfluous, there is little chance for "you" to win.
That's my point. I already accepted my middling skill level in Chess, Starcraft, Drama, Music (Trumpet/Piano), martial arts and sports. Even years of effort in these subjects puts you as simply mediocre, and the sooner you realize the amount of effort it takes to just be "fine" (let alone "good" or "the best") the better it is for your psyche.
"Winning" isn't the point of... most of these hobbies? I wasn't really aiming to be a world-record holder in the 800-meter or 1600 meter by high school, I was already just aiming at something that satisfied myself (which was a ~6:30 mile time and a 2:20 800m time). Nothing crazy good, but something that made myself proud of my own efforts.
Same same as an adult. My mile time isn't as good as when I was younger and healthier and more time to run. But other skills I got, like Tetris, 40L sprint in 1-minute, is acceptable to me. Sure, stronger players can so it in sub 20-seconds but I'm satisfied with 1-minute 40L sprint?
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And you really don't have to work very hard to find an unexplored, useful profession. In particular, programming skills are a a fractal. You can probably become a "world expert" in Cobol in less time than I spent learning Tetris 40L sprints (and certainly less time to become a Cobol expert than to get a 6:30 mile run time). Assuming of course you're proficient in the base level / bachelor's level of Comp. Sci.
There's only one subject you need to be world-class in, and that's your profession. Heck, arguably you don't even need to be world-class in your work. Plenty of money in just being a "fine" programmer.
No matter how hard I try to improve the way my eight year old thinks about things, he always approaches new experiences with thoughts like "maybe I'll be the first to…" or "maybe I'll invent a better…".
I've seen this in my adult peers, but the wording is a bit different even though it's just as unhealthy e.g. "perhaps I'll start the next Facebook".
The sentiment is expressed in the popular meme quote: "Born too late to explore the earth, but born too early to explore the stars".
I reckon this was common in the recent past, but with the naïveté that comes with living without pervasive mass communication, those thoughts were more likely to be motivating than deflating.
There are few billion vids on how to boil an egg and the mindless algos will rank them just cuz thats their job. That doesn't mean it has any great value cause how many people really need the skills of the best egg boiler in the world?
As corporate wonderland and the mega machine that it represents, grow more and more efficient, out of control and mindless, it targets and uses the best of the best for whatever shit its stuck in loop trying to optimize.
They are treated like machine parts and discarded and replaced, the moment they think, say or do anything the machine doesn't need.
Who needs that? Only the clueless.
The moment I start doing something for others is the moment I stop being true to myself.
I’m genuinely happy other people do things better than I do.
A hobbyist, especially one who isn't trying to make a career out of it, isn't going to be able to compete with that.
Which is fair enough. Why would you, as a hobbyist, expect to compete with full-time professionals?
But it's also true creative markets are a bell curve. The big money is in the mediocre middle. It's why a novel series like Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey sells in dumper truck quantities, while something more adventurous and original probably won't even be picked up.
Most people are mediocre at what they do (by definition) but it's still possible to be financially successful, especially in a middle class career.
If you want mass praise and attention, that's a different problem.
There is no middle in the creative markets, the top dozen people take everything and no one else can make a living.
An extremely niche art/book/movie will never make big money, even if the work is from an artistic genius.
If your arena is the internet, then it's essentially the whole world. But if you focus more on smaller scale communities and the people around you, it's much easier to find a way to contribute that makes you proud and accomplished. The fact that the best guitar player in the world is accessible on the internet is neat, but they are probably not available to play a gig in your town. It's great that there are better software developers out there, but only a few of them are working on a project you're part of, etc.
I believe the OP is referring to e.g. Salieri vs. Mozart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsZ5pmZfIc0
Clearly, everything else is subservient to art as far as Sam Dillemans is concerned. That's who he is. That's the mind space in which he operates. It's his innate personality.
Do you have to be like Sam Dillemans? Do you want to be like Sam Dillemans? Sure, there are aspects of him that everyone recognizes within themselves. It's up to you, though, to figure out what you want to take from that and how far you want to take that for yourself. Everyone is living their own unique, personal experience of life. There's only one Sam Dillemans living the life of Sam Dillemans. Trying to become Sam Dillemans is futile.
Trying to become yourself, well, that's what it's all about, isn't it?
It truly is. I felt inadequate as a musician until I found “my voice”. Now it seems incoherent to compare myself to another artist. I’ve also found myself a lot more accepting of other art because it doesn’t seem to be a competition any longer.
That sums up the thread for me. It's a noble goal, thank you for the reminder. Being an artist, a human being, is not about competing with others as to who is better, it's about becoming truly and deeply yourself.
Recently I wrote down the following, from an eulogy by Conan O'Brien about an advice he got from a respected elder.
"Be yourself. That's the only way it can work." - Johnny Carson
"Be yourself, everybody else is taken."
that must suck worse.
Sometimes when I look at the posts here, and follow software dev sites and blogs, and about things going on in e.g. the Linux kernel, or compiler development, I wonder if I'll ever be in the top 90% of software devs.⁰
Then I realise it doesn't matter that there are thousands of devs out there better than me. They might be able to do any project I might want to get involved in better than I can - but they can't do all the projects that interest me. No matter how good the top 1% of software devs are, they can't do all the software dev work that desperately needs doing, let alone all the software dev work that is merely "important". There's just too much that could be done.
So I can get on with my own projects in peace. It doesn't matter that other people could do my projects better than me, because they're busy on their own projects instead. I can still work on my stuff, and that's fine.
⁰ I always forget about the existence of thousands of devs who struggle with fizzbuzz, because my brain is mean to me.
Now our Tribe seems to be enormously large and it's far harder to feel special - there is fierce competition. But in reality we are all part of a system that is not a tribe but we're still trying to think of it as if it was and one can be "safe" in it and happy without having to feel too unique.
You can be locally famous for things still. Live music is still better than recordings and a painting by someone you know is still better than one you bought off the internet.
I suggest ignoring the vastness of talent out there because it's not the right way to draw a feeling of safety and self worth. You only have to be the best dad in the world to your own kids - the other kids in the world have their own best dad.
"hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are" existed much before internet.
But when the world gets too big I take a walk downtown, and ask myself how many of these people I am looking at are famous, content-producing top talent developers.
Probably I am the only embedded C developer walking on this street right now. Maybe the only one in town?
How many of these people care about Vim vs Emacs, Rust vs C, etc? How many care about that guy that cheated on the wife?
How many towns like this, with none or a few software developers, there are in the world?
The answers to all those questions confort me.
Yes... but the population has exploded so exponentially that 8% of all people who have ever lived in history are alive today[1], so people back then also had less people to compete with to stand out during their time.
They also had less and less previous generations of people's achievements accumulated to study and be aware of to build off of as well. Also they had much more low-hanging fruit they could tackle. It's much harder to find something novel or likely to lead to a scientific breakthrough to pursue, creative or scientific, nowadays.
And also didn't have an internet full of constant distractions, so they were likely more productive in their respective field(s).
https://www.techopian.com/eight-per-cent-of-people-who-have-...
"Back then there was less people to compete with. Accumulated knowledge was less than today. There were more easier topics to explore. On top of that, I am constantly distracted. It's OK if I don't breakthrough in anything today".
10000 years in the future there may be someone saying the exact same thing as they travel through a lab-generated wormhole to their home in another galaxy.
"If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."
These emotions are normal when faced with the internet, but some perspective is important. Or rather, it helps to focus on the basic facts of life and its finiteness.
or his Total Perspective Vortex: "when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here.”"
My hunch is that this is behind a great deal of the mental health problems we're starting to see them have.
Growing gusto depends, in part, on naïveté since it's so easy to be deflated when you're just starting to explore something.
I think I kinda disagree about the impact on younger people though. If anything, they are more likely to develop appropriate filters than we are.
I thought so too, but the data seems to suggest that they're not.
When I was young, it seemed impossible to me to think that someone could know ALL of recorded music, or ALL of cinema, because there was so much of it. But there really isn't _that_ much. Not as of the 1990s. And there are music and film buffs who have encyclopedic knowledge of these things, who impress me to this day - if at least for the dedication of time, mindspace, and memory.
But we're at a stage where the output could potentially surpass a single human's ability to input. Where it might be impossible for a person, not only to hear all the music in a single genre, but in a single decade. It's possible that there would be so much music made in a single genre, in a single decade, that a person could not know all of it.
That's amazing to me. It's something we haven't experienced collectively - an unfathomable mass of creative output. The potential to hear a new song every 5 minutes of every day of the rest of your life.
What does music critique look like in that world? What does fandom look like? How do the pretentious maintain their imagined status if their pedestals are too short?
I love the idea that a musician could make a living from the proceeds of thousands or hundreds of thousands of fans, whom most in the world would have never heard of. It's a scale our current culture can't comprehend.
I marvel at the potential and consider it as beautiful, scary, and liberating as seeing thousands of galaxies in a pinhead-sized portion of the night sky.
> omg 6billion people consume more information then I can scan in my lifetime
Here is my showerthought.
Twitter sells the illusion that their platform is the center of the world. They do this so well that a large part of their userbase internalized this belief.
Furthermore, this is almost a caricature "clueless USAian that doesn't acknowledge (realize ??) that most of the Internet is not in English, and most of the English content isn't by USAians"...
Maybe this could be filed under “it’s ok to lurk”? Or something.
For instance, Discord isn't being crawled, Instagram and Twitter tend to be very annoying about having to create an account with them.
Reddit (and HN) have a separate issue in that they fundamentally violate netiquette by locking threads and preventing necroposting even WHEN it's what should be done (also in case of Reddit, frequently (ab)using shadowbans).
Ha.
The author’s journey is a standard realisation of growing up. You think you can keep up with everything popular when “popular” is judged based on the 200 people you know and the occasional others you meet in similar demographic groups.
As you are exposed to more influences it becomes harder to keep up. You think it’s because times have changed. But people have been making this statement for hundreds of years across every mass media in existence. There was too much internet for any person to keep up in 1993 before most of the world was on the internet.
Eventually you realise that there isn’t one definition of popular. There are literally hundreds. Maybe millions. For every billion viewed thing on Website X, where surely everyone “popular” has viewed this thing, you can eliminate duplicate viewings and find out that 99% of the world has never looked once. They’re doing something you never thought had mass appeal on a website or service you didn’t realise was huge. They’ve never heard of Website X and are astounded anything on it has a billion views. You don’t know about each other because even the ways you discover “popular” things are different. Because most people grow up in a relatively narrow niche. People think they’re trying everything the world has to offer but they’re not even close.
And that’s not even counting the fact that people who don’t chase the popular thing probably outnumber those who do.
But don’t feel bad that the concept of a single unifying “popular” doesn’t exist because the reality is better. You don’t need to keep up with anyone else’s definition of popular and you can just pursue what you enjoy and you get so much more out of hobbies if you specialise instead of trying to do everything.
There were a couple of hundreds webpages in 1993.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef...
Guessing 90% were "Hello world personal pet fansites", you had to know about 60 pages to know them all.
The internet existed before there were websites. For example, there were thousands of newsgroups[1] in 1993, and my ISP provided access to them. There were also mailing list servers, public FTP servers, etc. Even if you were only trying to keep up with technical topics, there was too much content available for any person to keep up with, even then.
Sadly message threading has only gotten worse since that time, and now conversations are incredibly shallow, commonly being restricted to a single reply.
Twitter copied thread forking as re-tweets, and blocklists, but hashtags are too amorphous to be compared to newsgroups. Instead it's like having the latest message from every thread and newsgroup delivered in one thread.
Why does it matter what some influencer says about some shoes they're trying to sell?
If you must indulge, do so with moderation. It's only going to make you addicted / depressed / badly informed.
Granted, it will generally be better than gossip because there is some meat to these topics, but the true cost has to be seen per person.
I really do think that spending time on HN vs TikTok looking at amusing videos, for example, is time better spent on the whole.
There was an excellent interview with LeVar Burton once (I can't remember where, it might have been on NPR's Fresh Air) where he talked about the significance of the TV miniseries Roots, in which he starred. One key thing he mentioned is that Roots was one of the last shows that one could credibly assume "everyone with a television saw at least some of it." Because it came out right on the cusp of the explosion of cable television into the mainstream market and HDTV after it. For a specific generation of Americans, Roots is a common touchstone exploration of the grim history of slavery in the US. Recreating something like Roots today (something with both the wide reach and willingness to shine light on ugliness of the story) would be almost impossible. When there were a half-dozen stations to tune in, a message on them was seen by "everybody" (because even if it made you feel uncomfortable, what were you going to do if you had rabbit years? Tune in the wiggly-lines nightly news? Turn the TV off?) But with dozens and then hundreds of stations, that is no longer true.
For all the complaint about consolidation of social networking, the Internet has had a massively-disintermediating effect on media (entertainment media in particular, but also news and technical; most people may get their basic facts from Wikipedia, but all other online sources of basic facts are exactly the same distance away from the consumer). It has become drastically harder, far more expensive, to get a message to everyone now. The "filter bubble" is the other side of the coin to the broadcaster's modern dilemma: if something actually is important, how do we get it in front of people?
1. We find it more difficult to engage with people who are around us, because our favorite parts of the internet share our exact interests. Very few in our immediate locality can match it.
2. We find it difficult to disengage from our greatest interests because there is a nearly limitless stream of new information flowing from our chosen corners of the internet. Some mundane but necessary tasks get neglected.
3. The internet in all its vastness can contain something that seems like our ideal version of the world. Coming back to the reality of most of our lives can bring on depression.
I'm not out to change the way we interact with the internet, but perhaps if we can remain cognizant of how it's affecting us we'll be able to continue treating each other like human beings. It's easy to forget...
Just talking to a person I'm attracted to makes all of the Internet seem completely uninteresting in that moment.
Internet culture is just culture, Internet celebrities are just celebrities.
The author sees the Internet as a place where you can walk in, hang around, and hear about most things that are happening. But replace "Internet" with "Philippines" or any other space which many people share, and it's clearly not possible.
Internet may have started out as a space where people "go", where the culture was distinct, and so on. But as it became more integrated into people's lives, it stopped being a space, and became a mode of life, just like photography is a mode of art, or "homesteading" is a mode of living. You can't possibly hear about everything happening in a mode because once it becomes accessible, it escapes its delimited roots, it's available for anyone in any society, anywhere.
The Internet stopped being a box a long time ago, and the author didn't notice.
Perhaps to steelman the initial argument: there are things going on the Internet whose importance is greatly magnified or outright fabricated by it. There is such a thing as touching grass so to speak. The medium is the message. There are large swathes of internet activity you could just drop and nothing at all would happen.
Newsflash: Twitter peaked in 2018 with 336m users, significantly less then other social networks.
If there weren't so many news reporters on it, it would be rather obscure to non english speakers.
That said, if the internet is at least in part a reflection of humanity’s interests, this isn’t surprising. I’m confident there’s a huge swath of things I look at or read that have never occurred to my parents. Probably less true with my wife by far, but she’s the exception not the rule.
Then there’s the other 60%+ of the internet that is SEO spam.
- There's increased interest in more personalized or niche experiences and media i.e. small (in a relative sense or not) streamers, videographers, discord servers. The idea of a generational movie is gone. Seems like the last time that happened was with the Matrix, ironically.
- Much of what the internet serves you is useless. Instead of thinking how you should have heard of the Try Guys because you do X and Y, ask yourself why you need to hear about them and why your train of thought and lifestyle should be altered by the news you were served. Why do the Try Guys need to occupy your mental space? They do so because an algorithm and/or a "journalistic" sphere based on clicks served them to you.
- The world is always bigger than you think, even if you already think it's impossibly big. You can never grasp its size.
I know someone who is working on walking down every street in his city. Even a smaller city, this is a major undertaking that takes years. Paris has over 6,000 for example.
So 20+ years ago I wouldn't be getting bombarded by scandals surrounding "Lizzo and a flute" and "Liz and a mini-budget" at the same time. If I lived in the US I'd get one and in the UK another.
The Try Guys would have a TV show that was very niche or a morning breakfast show in Chicago. The scandal would be all over the local media and barely covered elsewhere.
I kind of think it's the exact opposite. We all have our own individual views of reality and are only able to see an extremely small subset of what's going on. Whereas before you were mainly reached by broadcast media that others would see as well, now you and the person next to you might have an entirely different feed of information coming in. To me it's not surprising at all that the author doesn't know "all the things going on". Really I think the author should consider the opposite: this is probably just an example of a million similar things that everyone should know about, but that he does not.
There are dozens of them. Each is a magnet for a certain personality type. Each is an echo chamber, and an amplifier for its particular way of thinking.
Hiveminds usually ignore each other. Any mutual acknowledgement is generally antagonistic.
A hivemind is a kind of demon. It whispers seductive arguments to its membership. It speaks with the voice of hundreds. (Literally a 3-part harmony of the damned, which is an interesting bit of art becoming life)
Coming into contact with these demons is kinda not cool.
Let's take Science Fiction fandom, 40 years ago, people knew it existed but probably couldn't name most of the people. But a lot of people who were not in that subculture could probably still sort of identify the top lights of that subculture, er Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov might be identified as science fiction writers by people not particularly into science fiction. Isaac Asimov's autobiography the second part was full of anecdotes of him meeting famous people and having them somewhat be familiar with who he was which he thought was nice, not so much focused on his breast-grabbing routines though.
This guy however is just a little bit future shocked that there exist niche celebrities by virtue of the internet that are wealthy and he does not know who they are at all or what their niche is. This might also have existed in the past, but I think probably most people knew a niche existed (rodeo rider, huh yeah I heard of that), so yeah I do believe the internet has made it that you cannot keep up in what in the 'old days' would be thought of as part of your culture.
on edit: although to be clear knowing that Asimov is a Sci-Fi writer in the old days was akin to knowing that Addis Addaba was the capitol of Ethiopia, you knew basically enough to think you knew something but didn't really know anything useful.
Yesterday I learned about a terrible football stadium incident in Indonesia; I know more about regular expressions than I do about Indonesia (or football) but now I know a little more about both. I learned that Ukraine forces have retaken a city called Lyman, which has given the people of Ukraine some hope that the war forced on them may, possibly, be winnable. I remember the joy I experienced when I asked some work colleagues in Jaipur why they were having a holiday and got to learn all about Holi - including the part where they get to throw paint over each other!
I am so grateful that the days of reading a "Fog in Channel - Continent Cut Off"[1] headline in the newspapers are dead and buried for good!
[1] - https://www.quora.com/Is-the-famous-headline-Fog-in-Channel-...
Doubt.
Somehow, despite being on Twitter 870 hours a week, Hmmm.
I think. Are they still around?
maybe that's your problem? try reading a book instead
obviously i didn't read the "member only" article