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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

Did people really think that Internet was going to solve all problems or is that revisionist history by back-in-our-day millenials? Even for a techno-optimist, it would've been hard to forsee the sheer penetration. Yes, the euphoria was there from the beginning. But, there's a difference between saying "it's going to be huge" and imagining an instantly accessible network available in the hands of 60% of the world from a device that's hundreds of times faster than most powerful computer available at that time.

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The talk on IRC in the 90’s was “imagine a war going on with the internet and civilians on both sides could talk to each other, why would anyone fight?”

I think the problem with this vision isn't that "people talking to each other won't prevent violence" it's that people posting text, images, and video is not the same as people talking to each other. Even a video call is not the same as talking to someone in person. It's hard to build empathy and connection with someone you can't make eye contact with.

I think that the medium of communication is not the main problem with this idea. I say that as someone who has had & still has strong relationships formed and maintained almost entirely through text. This has been going on for centuries, with pen pals and written correspondence in general. People vary and I think not everyone has the same need for physical proximity and nonverbal comms like eye contact. (In my case you could probably go further to say I don't interpret well or express well in non-verbal communication channels.)

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.

I think the exception might prove the rule in this case. I still believe the majority of people require the presence of some body language in order to connect with others, if this weren't the case then we would have abandoned meeting in person altogether long ago with the invention of the telephone or even writing since we've been sending letters to each other for a long time as you mention. Since most people don't connect well empathetically with others through text or images alone, I think the best thing we can do is to bring more human presence to long distance communications. If you prefer to stick with text or voice alone then no one is going to stop you but lots of other people will flock to a system that provides a close facsimile of in person conversation.

Such perspective isn't really so surrealistic, when we think about the lengths some governments and institutions go to stop people from talking to each other. Some countries censor the outside internet wholesale. Military conscripts are often chosen from more remote, poorer locations where people are less internationally-minded. Dividing people into ideological bubbles also seems to be a measure to stop people from talking to each other, in spite of sharing the same language and internet.

I sincerely feel like, if people spoke the same language, horrible shit would get harder to abide (and, no, Ukraine and Russian are not the same).

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.

It is really bizarre the way that the aggregate/news/post/tweet + comment section + upvote/downvote format that is pervasive on the current internet creates an incentive for people not to talk to each other, but to just throw their ideas at the wall hoping to get points from people that agree with them or even points from bots.

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.

Is that a millennial in the comic? I thought it was a Gen X or older character. Back in our day, I am thinking mid to late 90’s for techno optimism at its peak.

Yeah, 90s tech optimism was more Gen X. It's probably conflating this time with the early 2010's (see "Arab Spring") optimism towards self-liberation via social media driven uprising?

We mostly assumed things would be better because we assumed the net would be 'information'.

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.

Moore's Law was already known about. Techno-optimists especially expected something even more dramatic. I have a cybernetics encyclopedia for childrens written in the 80's (or was it late 70's ?) that discusses neural networks in one chapter, and in another Moore's Law including some scifi projections of the expected computer power (IIRC fairly accurately) and new computer types like optical/photonic and organic computers (IIRC too optimistic, though they were careful to not give a precise timetable).

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...

Before China soundly disproved it with their great firewall, one of the early assumptions about the internet was that it would naturally route around censorship.

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.

I think you'd get different responses from different people but this comic didn't ring true for me because I don't recall the sort of optimism about information sharing it claims.

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.

The final panel in the comic is an allusion to the "wisdom of the crowds". To my recollection, for a while people were very excited about how it was going to make a lot of everyday things better.

There was extreme optimism, and (pretty much) everyone thought the internet was going to solve the particular problems they cared/obsessed over. Most commonly: now everyone is going to agree with me and governments will do what I want them to do. But also generally there was a belief that everyone was going to be smarter, more capable and productive and society would accelerate advancement dramatically.

I wouldn't say everyone, but there was a vocal, idealistic minority that had high hopes, that's true.

> 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.

We aren't smarter for sure but we're less ignorant i'd say, if ignorance = unawareness of random facts (e.g. the weather, how old some actor is, if a store is open) now that we have devices capable of retrieving those facts at any time in our pockets. What to do with those facts, what facts actually matter, and what do they actually mean in the context of solving problems? Who knows really...

Would we (I'm of an older generation) have been less ignorant if I'd been carrying a pocket encyclopedia with me? Doesn't seem the appropriate word.

> 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 sure there's information that you appreciate being at your fingertips that wasn't there before. I think we've taken for granted really how easy it is now to access information, and how annoying/difficult it used to be, and the consequences of that, many of which are clearly positive. It's just now we're at the stage where we are starting to be a bit more critical instead of jubilant about it.

There are some advantages, accompanied by large disadvantages, and I don't think it has made us smarter or less ignorant.

Nick burns would disagree :)

https://youtu.be/25J3u3P-HHg

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

I remember people in elation over the idea that information would be democratized and control taken away from "the establishment". No longer would any small group of people be able to restrict flow of information.

That almost came true, but ignores people’s decisions about which sources to attend to.

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?

There was a good amount of talk about "perfect information economics", which before the internet had only been a crazy idea, but then suddenly seemed like something within grasp.

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.

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