The failed promises of tech liberation

In my view a terse, mildly irritated comment is an entirely appropriate response to the sort of aimless rambling we see in pieces like the OP. I'm sympathetic to those who think a "public square" should strive for a good balance, but length is just not a meaningful correlate to "intelligent discussion".

What if each user gets a fixed number of vote points per month? You can vote as many times you like but the more you vote the less each vote weight.

This can be an example of how social media incentive structure can be iterated on.

The main problem is that social media gets very few iterations on the fundamental stuff because you have to build a new audience for each attempt, or risk loosing the one that has already bought into your existing algorithm.

What if a social media platform could be built where "the algorithms" were user created plug-ins that users could subscribe to? Each "subreddit" with their own set of algorithms.

> Maybe this is what "the medium is the message" means, I never really understood it.

I think you get it. The nature of the medium itself changes people, not just the sort of content that is being delivered through that medium. TV puts people into couch potato trances. Karma-oriented commenting systems have people alter their beliefs to align with the popular majority. Anonymous commenting systems have people act bolder and ruder, etc.

I am pretty sure that is exactly what the medium is the message means. The medium itself brings its own bias and manner of operation.

Social media and a real public square are completely different. A social media post is never going to be the same as public speaking in front of large groups of people. The latter acts as a huge filter on who is going to speak. The village idiot would be filtered out from tending to not want to be shown to be the village idiot in front of the crowd.

That to me is why social media is exactly doomed to fail. It is exactly giving voice to the village idiot who would be filtered out otherwise. To have large scale intelligent discussion most people need to be on mute.

To me, it is a very strange conflation between everyone's vote counting in elections and everyone's opinion about basically everything mattering. The latter is obviously ridiculous.

Time theft of the future will involve couching a simple concept (that could be explained in a single sentence) in paragraphs of ChatGPT vomit, just to make it look more substantive and "intelligent."

SEO has worked this way for years. It helps nobody.

Highly recommend High Noon on the Electronic Frontier for a glimpse of the cautious optimism of the late-80s, early-90s Internet. Book was way ahead of its time in many ways. It kind of missed mobile computing (phones) but most of the social and ethical issues in computing it covered are still relevant and debated today.

I think what makes technology so hard to be optimistic about is that there are two sides of the coin. There is the side that this is a utility for our species, that tech should exist to serve us better, that things should get more efficient and take less time. That side exists entirely in opposition to the other side of the coin, that is most likely to win out as its the more profitable side. That is the side that tech is merely a product to be marketed like any other, that it should further a profitable status quo versus introduce something new that might not be as profitable, that taking up more users time is more profitable because you can monetize more of it, etc.

All the incentives of our society, are aligned to give us a lot more of the latter sort of products, and not much of the former. Imagine if the wheel were invented today; how many times will a dozen companies have reinvented it in ten years time trying to get around the patent, each with their own patentable twists to the idea? I don't believe this sort of thinking can be sustainable for long.

Well, take HN. HN was that - not a couple hundred, but maybe a few thousand. And it was a high quality community, and therefore worth being a part of. And therefore it grew.

And as it grew, it became a more attractive target for zealots, propagandists, and trolls. And as it became a larger community, it became - to some degree - a diluted one.

Metcalf's Law says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. V = k N^2.

AnimalMuppet's Law, which takes into account the greater attractiveness of larger networks to those whose activities destroy value, says that you must subtract a term proportional to the fourth power of the number of users: V = k N^2 - K N^4. Depending on the values of k and K, there will be some optimal number N of users, beyond which the value stops growing - or, beyond which the value to each user stops growing.

"Most important" and "most captivating" are not exactly the same things, because people's attention is imperfect.

Hence the ability to play the meta game, to capture and direct mass attention, is what remains the most efficacious skill, as it has been for centuries, if not millennia. Sadly, it is rarely used to direct the social attention towards a more intelligent discourse.

And there are training courses on being a village idiot so you can be heard too!

Vouched for your comment because it's spot on. It's for gold nuggets like that I'm happy there's the showdead option!

If there are indeed "idots" in society in a sense that they have physical or mental problems, I think looking down on them is wrong.

But I really wonder if there are "idots" at all. What's most likely is that tech people are angry that non tech people have different tastes and preferences, and by virtue of being a larger group, have the market cater to them.

However, who's to say that for example teaching is more important than the NBA? TikTok success should be a cause of celebration, as it means people with different tastes that weren't served by the market, now have an offering that makes them happy.

If you don't like it, don't participate. I don't like cellphones, so I don't operate one. Yet the few times I've had a friend show me funny stuff from TikTok I've been legitimately happy for them.

"De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum".

EDIT: BTW I checked your other comments, you don't bother with the niceties and speak your mind. And you are a goldmine! I especially loved the great content you gather about IQ and theory of the mind on https://i.redd.it/i1ywg8dajac71.png

Depressing. I first read it ~11 year's ago after Occupy Wall St failed as I started trying to understand what might actually work, has worked, etc. I was reading about neoliberalism and ultimately Marxism. The essay is excellent but not necessarily better than so much other prophetic work in the Marxist canon.

He mentioned it briefly in his book/notes on rhetoric. It was from a free audio book.

I've only started my exploration of Aristotle.

Owning a computer in a country of the Soviet-dominated bloc was definitely a sign of privilege. But it would be a game machine.

Tinkering with machines was a lower-class thing; a son of a party official won't usually do that. A professor's son very likely would; still higher class than the working class.

Getting access to a computer in some kind of a club, or at a good school, was not an upper-class thing though, but more of how well-off the city / district was.

> Where's the class politics among "tech liberation" proponents?

Nowhere, it's in the critic. (doesn't make much sense to me, either i'm misreading you or you are) To make it clear "tech liberation" here is the editorialized version of the so-called "californian ideology", which has been coined and attacked by OP, by saying among other things, that it is completely blind of any class-based vision of politics.

> And "tech" as a whole has only become more and more accessible over time to those who used to be broadly marginalized for economic or social reasons. Were computers in the socialist bloc really less inherently "classist" than in the West?

Ooh now i'm understanding your misunderstanding! You seem to have understood "class politics" as defamatory and that's why you thought i applied it to the thing being criticized. It's the opposite: any politic which is not based on class (ie by definition, the only (and all) materialistic criterion relevant socially) is imho based on bogus concepts. Now as is obvious from all my vocabulary the class i'm defending politically isn't the class of owners, but that's another thread. I would be happy already if people doing owner-class politics would publicly acknowledge doing so.

edit: If your not doing class-based politics what are you doing then? Religion-based? Racist? I'm not completely dismissing identity politics insofar that there is sense in fighting for specific rights in some circumstances, but my point is that identity is nowhere near being a working tool for general politics.

This a pretty bad example considering people chose centralized voicemail when available.

GP may not speak for you, but they do speak for 99.9% of users. How’d the whole Mastodon migration go? Seems to have fizzled.

How in the world is decentralization like HOAs? Decentralization would be more like a neighborhood without an HOA, requiring more order and planning is what an HOA does as it centralized command of the neighborhood rather than leaving it up to the individual homeowners.