Was everyone stupid back then?
smbc-comics.com
smbc-comics.com
We just managed to keep the others out for a miraculous decade by keeping entry barriers hard, costly and complex. Is that an ableist viewpoint? No clue, but it was a bliss for sure.
If I had to pick one thing, I'd say it's about shallow consumption/interactions that kill the signal/noise. Like posting a picture/video with a caption, having it go viral with upvotes/reposts.
Of course that wouldn't have happened until there was a large general population on Usenet--and the dates do check out.
I can't find the Bills that were passed now to commercialize the Internet and get off of NSFnet but that was early in the Clinton-Gore administration.
BBSes still exist. You can use them right now.
The early forums still exist, in some form or another. IRC is still there. A dedicated few keep gopher sites up and running.
Not everyone chose to leave them behind.
This isn't even a "all tens of us!" joke, there are tens of thousands of us.
$ telnet osuny.bell-labs.co 666 Trying 168.235.81.33... Connected to osuny.inri.net.
$ telnet bbs.iscabbs.com Trying 167.88.117.146... Connected to bbs.iscabbs.com.
Over 100 people logged into Particles yesterday.
It seems odd to mourn the death of a friend you no longer call, but who is still very much alive.
I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.
A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became optimized for engagement (ie: emotional reactions), and so are disproportionally rewarding sensationalist content over content that actually promotes understanding of other perspectives.
It makes it funny when illiterates try to culture clump :)
People being manipulated by giant propaganda networks to hate each other more and more and prevent progress from being made is an age old social _problem_.
E: Removed comment about being a throwaway, appears to just be a new account. Sorry about that.
All things that would be problems even where you have only one culture. For instance, ask the average Japanese about Japan's social problems, from mental health up to and including the nation dying.
I think what you mean is that the cultural dimension is the only dimension you care about. Which is a valid view, but on the internet it won't be the only view. (Which kind of speaks to the issue the subject comic of this post was talking about.)
Even the lifestyle divide and language divide define perspective. Lifestyle clumping is just as funny.
Optimizing for outrage is a mass communication problem, not an internet problem, and unfolds roughly the same in every new medium from town criers on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
It’s that humans prioritise social instability because it could mean death in, or of, the tribe; the incentive to make sales, as your link alludes to, is the driving force behind co-opting that. If that incentive disappeared I suspect mass communication would not be the problem.
Tribalism and feudalism reigned for a millennium from either the death of Theodosius or Odoacer deposing the last emperor, depending on how you measure it. The invention of the printing press in the late 15th century led to an explosion of communication and education.
Perhaps most importantly, it arrived at a time when the Medici-funded artistic and humanist influences were at their peak, allowing those ideas to spread until they led to the Renaissance.
The idea that a new, cheap, fast global network of communication (the Internet) at the same time as a major global cultural moment (the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War) could lead to a flourishing of democracy, humanism, and reason... was not unprecedented. And it's not entirely clear that it failed, either.
We still have social problems despite having a printing press, or radio, or internet. In fact, at root, we have the exact same social problems as existed prior to Gutenberg's birth. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, etc.
Why have they not been solved? Because they are human problems. The problem is within us and the problem is us. It's who we are on an animal behavior level. This is the reason the boy believes we must also be "stupid". Because surely we don't think an information transfer protocol would change the animal instincts of a human being? Let alone billions of human beings?
That's really the point of the comic. Wherever we go, there we are. It's still just us in a new place.
The reason that we, naively perhaps, thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems, is because information; anything that can be encoded digitally, is now post-scarcity. But we never reformed society around the invention of the digital realm, and only adapted our old ways around it. This furthered inequality and unrest, rather than healed anything.
With digital distribution, there are now infinity digital sheep for three families and every person, every man woman and child can have infinity digital sheep for their own. It wasn't naive to think that would reform the world because up until that point, scarcity drove and still drives everything. Macroeconomics has us plot supply and demand on a graph, but doesn't tell us how to reform society when supply goes to infinity. Instead of reforming society like we must, we try and artificially limit supply, enacting intellectual property laws trying to deny the copyability of bits, which is like trying to make water not wet.
Why do we have capitalism? It's a long story, but it was invented to distribute the two sheep among three families with as little war as possible. No one wants to go hungry. And to state the obvious, you can't eat digital sheep. Nor are they created like organic sheep. Many someones have to come together, intentionally, working very hard, to lovingly create digital sheep like Disney's latest masterpiece from raw ones and zeroes.
Those someone's exist in a pre-scarcity world. They need pre-scarcity money to buy non-digital food to eat and pay rent on non-digital housing to live in. Digital sheep don't exist without the hard work of people who need non-digital money to exist in a pre-scarcity world. So we still need the old economy to pay those creators in pre-scarcity money. But once that digital sheep exists, there can be infinity copies of it. Every single person on the planet with a cellphone or computer can have their own copy of that digital sheep for a mere pittance in bandwidth costs.
Until we reform our whole society; the economy and the government; to realize that we live in a post-scarcity world for all digital goods - and are effectively post-scarcity for some physical goods, it's always going to be us in the same place. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, they all exist online, but they are different online. People are different because of the Internet.
The reformation we need is going to be radical, because it has to be. Supply and demand just got shot in the face because there's an infinite supply on digital goods. My proposal, in all its earnestness, has a few steps.
1) We abolish copyright. I said it was going to be radical, didn't I? We change systems around so that copying is allowed, but that it tracks what people are watching, and where it came from. But we abolish the system that's trying to make bits not copyable and water not wet.
2) We track what people are watching, and give out points based on that. Every day I'm granted 86400 attention cents, or ACs, and if I watch a two hour long Disney movie, Disney gets paid 7200 ACs by me. Disney gets to further distribute those 7200 ACs however they see fit to the individual creators who made that movie. If I spend 3 minutes chuckling at a tweet or a YouTube or TikTok video or Instagram video, the creator automatically gets 180 ACs from me, which they can pass on to whomever they see fit, literally crediting their sources.
3) We establish an VAT luxury tax, anything that's more than 3 orders of magnitude more expensive than the cheapest one, effectively creating a price ceiling on goods relative to the cheapest version of that same good. The $10 bottles of wine at my local store mean that bottles of wine now top out at $10,000. Anything over that is taxed and goes into an AC fund. Remember, capitalism is just some silly system we've come up with to decide who goes hungry and who gets to eat the sheep. Other such systems include feudalism, where a lord decided who went hungry and who was fed.
4) With that money, we establish an official way of trading ACs for pre-scarcity money, so people can use their ACs to afford non-digital food and housing and clothing and entertainment. Isn't that system going to be gamed and broken and create all sorts of arbitrage opportunities you ask? Yes but have you seen how broken the rest of capitalism is right now?
If that's the case it seems a poor choice of words for the child character in the comic to frame it as "Was everyone stupid back then?" followed quickly by affirmation, "So yes."
The idealized version of the internet always looked to me like "everyone would get along if we just understood each other. Giving everyone a platform solves that.".
The internet is showing us that reality seems more like, "everyone would agree with me if I just knew the right thing to say to them. But they refuse to stop being wrong, so I need to be more vocal.".
Yes it is crazy and we need to wake up to that. Just look around, people have access to all sorts of information and divergent opinions but that doesn't help. Trumpers have access to CNN. Liberals have access to Truth. Antivaxers can go read all the vaccine studies and doctors and academics could lurk in forums skeptical of modern medicine. Simply making these available online does not force people to seek out the correct information or interact with people with diverging opinions.
People build their identities on what they believe about the world or on which people (dis)agree with them.
When their belief (and thus their identity) is threatened, people readily perform whatever mental gymnastics allow them to continue believing they're in the right.
The excellent book The Scout Mindset covers this in depth.
Atntivaxers can't go read all the studies unless they are willing to push some tens of thousands of dollars into it or break some law.
Which is why I really don't like people who are disguising their opinions in a fictional story: You can do all sorts of shady rethodic maneuvers, such as presenting your opinion as some grand truth in-universe or - like here - putting it into the mouth of a character and absolving yourself from actually explaining it further.
Bonus points for adding another character who is impressed by the first character's statement to give the opinion an air of profoundness.
Douglas Adams thought he was joking.
Meantime, thus far it's used just for local genocides, like Myanmar.
Trying to compare real world history with fictional possibilities is non-sensical.
Though you might want to look at your wars by death toll as percentage of total population?
Like that is what makes the jokes in hitchhikers guide funny, and why the matrix is one of the most poignant narratives in pop culture... black mirror is real life taken to poetic extremes, it's not a coincidence that zuck's metaverse gives off "black mirror vibes", that is the specific intention of black mirror
HHTG channeled the malaise and confusion of the 1970s, driven by nuclear war and economic downturns. (OK, a bit like now...) HHTG responded to that nihilism with pessimism on one side (Ford) and absurdism on the other (Zaphod). A lot of pleasures (sex, drugs, and rock and roll) were feeling hollow, and all Arthur (the prototypical Englishman) just wanted to hide and be comforted.
That joke certainly reflects a pessimism that is persistent in all societies, that every good thing must also have a downside. I took it out of context to highlight the communication aspect, something that I don't think was especially on Adams' mind -- though it would be only a few years before a communications revolution.
I think Adams' would take credit for pessimism being right -- usually a safe bet.
> I also gain a sense that the time was ripe for change to the nursing profession – and that Florence Nightingale sparked a revolution in health care that was waiting to happen (prior to the Crimea, British women had not served in military hospitals). Newspapers and improved communication raised public awareness of the conditions of wounded soldiers in Crimea, and the nursing profession was gradually becoming more respected. But the museum also leaves the impression that it was more than just a case of her being in the right place at the right time. Her combination of intellect, fierce sense of vocation (fuelled by her religious faith), and her well-connected family background, meant perhaps that only Florence Nightingale could have shaped the nursing profession so effectively in that era.
The book where I read about this linked it to e.g. photos and videos from Vietnam affecting US public perception of the conflict and generally the better and rawer the communications from the war, the better it gives you an honest angle on it compared with the official propaganda.
* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
Previous observations on the CB radio band:
> Similar behavioral patterns have been observed in the anonymous usage of Citizens’ Band radio, a short-distance radio communications device widely used by truck drivers to find well-stocked fuel stations and share traffic information. On February 20th, 1978, a New Yorker[5] magazine profile piece on talk show host Johnny Carson mentioned that CB radio conversations can include disturbing amounts of racism and masturbation fantasies resulting from the lack of accountability.
* https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theo...
(What's strange about A Declaration... is that it came a decade after Neuromancer and two years after Eternal September. You may choose to doubt the predictive power of dystopian fiction, but the reality check of the influx of participants outside of the pretty exclusive early-internet club should be much harder to overlook. That document managed to disregard both. It was strangely anachronistic even at the moment.)
Rather, while bringing people together in virtual spaces does probably help different peoples see each other with empathy, and diminish tribalistic attitudes... The wrong people are in the chat. Every nation that goes to war is itself fractured into classes. The people who send a nation to war are different from those on the battlefield. Empathy for the enemy on the part of soldiers doesn't prevent them being compelled to violence.
Forums and chat rooms were nice because the communities were small and directed. People were jerks for sure but they weren’t getting points. Even among the jerks the communities were localized enough that the jerks that cared enough to stick around weren’t mere trolls.
Imagine a video of Yemeni people starving to death on the news, but they sound just like you and your loved ones. It feels like that would turn the empathy WAY up.
But maybe I'm tripping into the same optimistic pitfall.
I'm sure someone could point to some quotes and some evidence of it happening but I don't remember that being the dominant theme. For every techno optimist there were probably an equal number of people terrified of their kids downloading porn or talking to strangers.
There was unbridled optimism, to what I remember as sickening levels of hype (although some of it turned out to be true eventually). But the optimism was more general I think and my impression was it was focused more on business and work opportunities, about how it would facilitate and open up possibilities for making tasks and things like communicating with loved ones easier. The stuff about it leading to a democratic utopia seemed to be looked on with a bit of ridicule — most from that time period had some memory of terrorism and conflict worldwide, and of the shadowy anxieties of the cold war. The idea that sort of thing would go away because of the internet seemed laughable, if for no reason its penetration wasn't clear even in the US and Europe.
But that's just one impression.
Technology natives skipped social to enjoy innovation without the emotional fodder. They were left on their own with nobody to coddle them.
Its 2022.. Illiteracy is obvious
> But also generally there was a belief that everyone was going to be smarter
That still gets regurgitated: "Gen Z -> technology -> smarter." Utter bollocks, of course.
> if a store is open
Well, you don't need to tell if you plan ahead. That's how it used to be. Shops here opened from 9 to 6, except on Saturday (shorter), and never on a Sunday. There simply was no reason to look up opening hours. And if you needed something after 6, you had bad luck, or you asked the neighbours.
I don't think your examples work well, especially when you add in that there are actual flat-earthers around: not because it's Gen Z, but because of that handy device.
I'm not sure if there was ever a real belief that the internet was going to cure hunger and bring world peace, but I think most of the opinion in the late 90's internet explosion is that it would make people more informed and understanding overall.
This would allow for people in less free societies to read about and interact with people in more democratic societies, eventually causing them to demand their own countries become more democratic. This was also supposed to end war, since democratic countries don't generally war with one another.
It was a blissful naiveté.
And with scarcity inverted from information supply to demand, each information source will spend more and more of their bandwidth declaring the other sources worthless and evil, and that only their source is worth attention.
This way people are driven to consume very few sources, whose content is inevitably impoverished.
How to break out of this dynamic?
The military, academia, government, business are 'conscientious' culture who assume people act rationally.
But go to the drug store and look at the magazines: games, sports, sex, porn, gossip, celebrities, fashion, vacations etc..
And that's the 'above bar' stuff - now you have to add in all the things people are interested in that's not 'regulated' by social mores of 'what can be in a magazine'.
The internet is a 'giant ball of noise' that are are thoughts, and it's mostly not about knowledge, civility etc.
Even as people have access to 'information' they don't want to access it, often they prefer to live in a bubble of someone telling them what they want to hear.
So the web is a bit like 'everyone's voices being raised very loudly, some more than others' and that's that.
There is 'some' information in there, but even then it's still hard to parse through the noise. Even in ultra conscientious culture we debate about what reality is.
Take heart: I really do believe that 2022 might be the start of a 'post noise' era. Every one of us realizes that we've been duping ourselves a bit. We all know Instagram and LinkedIn are a bit vapid, Facebook is a bit rubbish, TikTok is meaningless, Cable News is into flame wars. We continue to use them for their nominal value but I really believe we are bit sick of it. Even the 'ultra digital native' Gen Y are tuning out a bit.
It's here to stay obviously but I think we are developing a new relationship with it.
For the 90's look up terms like "the global village" and also maybe Charles Stross' Accelerando for a differently optimistic viewpoint :
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
In some ways, that was true. Police treatment of black people in some parts of the US, for example, is incontrovertible now whereas in the 90s most people simply wouldn't believe it.
We weren't wrong about the sunlight, but we were wrong about what it would do - what the human reaction would be to the lights being turned on.
Rousseau has been in the ring with Hobbes, and Rousseau lost.
This is true in some parts of the internet, such as Hacker News and Reddit. The key seems to be good signal/noise moderation and users able to amplify content with cardinal voting (upvotes/downvotes).
I'm constantly finding great, new ideas between the two websites (especially when combined with search) and sharing them with others.
On other sites.. it seems as though the drive to engage users ($$) and a lack of a "downvote" option allows the flame-bait/low-brow/spammy content to take center stage. Which eventually drives users away (-$$).
While I hate online dating now, I respect it worked for tons of couples when it first started.
Something about having to head home to do your online stuff slowed it down. Now, it's constantly in your face.
We live in a digital feudalism now. And every few years (e.g. when Musk bought Twitter) there is renewed interest in open source alternatives. We can fix this, if the open source community ever achieves parity with the features that most Web 2.0 social platforms provide:
An idea should be separate from a person, to really be neutral. If there is a person behind it, people start investigating the person, rather than checking the idea in depth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_inventions_o...
It was sold to me as: you will have access to all the knowledge at your fingertips, and it is mostly true. And by the time I thought of a traditional computer you have to turn on and sit in front of, not something that is in my pocket and accessible 24/7. You may talk about "fake news" and all sorts of falsehoods, but debunking these have never been easier, not only the truth is usually available, but there are is also information on how to do the debunking. I realize now how much bullshit I heard and believed in in my childhood with no easy way to fact check.
Distance seem almost like an abstract concept now. Here I am, in France, writing to you guys in the US like you were my neighbors. In fact, it is sometimes easier to communicate with someone on the other side of the globe than with my neighbor. I like to travel (guess how I book my plane...), but not by necessity.
So, sure enough, the internet didn't change human nature, but for me it was world changing enough to be compared to something like the industrial revolution.
The mistake we made, one that we continue to make, is conflating human communication and social interaction with just moving bits around.
We thought the net would be great because we have these bits other people might want. Let's share them! They can learn to grow better crops, ease the world of oppression, and so on.
We still think that, it's just now we've arrived at "Sending bits around is great! But they need to be the _right_ bits"
I think anybody back then would have agreed too. No stupidity required, just a misunderstanding of how progressive societies actually operate. If we had been approached with this problem in these words back then, we would have said something like "But that's not a tech problem"
Well, maybe some stupidity was at play. But heck if anything's changed.
https://networkencyclopedia.com/networking-history-1980/
The military had in past decades (60s and 70s) funded a lot of research into a networked system that would hopefully allow communications to survive a nuclear war, not exactly a utopian future vision:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/ARPANET
Few if any were thinking that networking was going to lead to some social utopia due to the ease of communication among groups of people online - although ease of information sharing was recognized as a big plus in academics, at least. The introduction of the bulletin board system, and then usenet, mostly seemed to be about technically savvy people sharing information, some games, etc.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-we-talk-online-a-history-o...
Then came the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the sale of ads, the rise of engagement metrics, and realization that there was nothing quite as effective as outrage porn (i.e. 'look at these terrible people and what they're doing! Tell everyone what you think about it!' )for drawing repeat users to your site. That's really when it went all sour.
I think the whole 'the Internet will bring people together in a beneficial way' theme was just a revisionist history put out by the PR people at outfits like Twitter and Facebook to put a patina of do-gooderness over what was essentially a predatory business model. I don't think such views were being widely promoted in the 1980s or early 1990s, at least I can't seem to find any such optimistic articles from that period.
One thing about $8 for Twitter Blue is it will make it easier to filter out the noise -- the trolls, the bots, etc.
Previously I would have worried that having a toll on communication would mean we'd lose some important voices. That may still be true, but I've learned that having no cost on communication results in a lot of garbage being spewed.
Discussions in Usenet had exactly the same topics and flavour as forums and twitter today. Guns, abortions, free speech (including the old 'fire in a crowded theatre' trope).
Also present was various shades of mental illness, including the benign and the performative and narcissistic. Netnews was nicknamed 'nutnoise' for a reason.
You might find this sad but I find it strangely comforting. People in large semi-anonymous communities are predictable. At least things won't get (much) worse.
But bad actors and bad intentions and lowest common denominator is always inevitable.
Reddit alone proves you can still have anonymity and people still behaving well enough to share/help. The key is moderators and moderation tools. And obviously "unlimited" freedom has to be sacrificed for "ground rules".
Perhaps we need to be smarter about metered and unmetered data?
I don't know how you'd support or discredit such a view but I generally feel like the free flow of information has been overall positive.
Not uniformly so, but even the bad stuff say Nazis, was already there and mostly brought into the sunlight.
I'm reminded of something I saw on the internet long ago, which compared a Time magazine piece about "life in Iran" which was all black and white photos of war murals, and contemporary Flickr photos from Iran, which was just normal people stuff, in color.
Can't find it now, but here's a conversation on Flickr in 2007 that kind of sums up the same thing of "Iranians are normal people, like us", "I know, I'm Iranian":
https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/discuss/7215761559...
And here's someone who made a Firefox extension around the same time to work around the attempts to block flickr:
https://advox.globalvoices.org/2007/02/14/iran-flickr-users-...
Iran isn't currently some Disneyland, but would it be better or worse without the internet? I vaguely feel there's been a positive impact.
I know it was fashionable to get excited about the Arab Spring and then fashionable to be cynical about it all, but I feel like in one of those hype cycle things, the long term impact is being understimated, even as some overestimated the short term impact.
Other stuff has been disappointing, like it seems to have made the left/right wing arguments more polarized. Maybe we'll get a fix for that?
Something that seems a big deal but it doesn't get much credit for is pre internet there were lots of talk about third world poverty, people starving and the like. That's got way better and I think better communications have a lot to do with it.