I think we'll get more "reputation-based" choosiness (not some sort of algorithmic reputation-score, more individually measured, and no, that won't be perfect for anyone) but I don't believe that authoritarianism is also a natural response. Yes, the scale of spam will be far higher than ever before. But I expect people to largely normalize/filter a lot of that out. The elderly will probably be most at risk, still, or even just those of us with habits that formed out of "Wikipedia is mostly reliable" or "random people on Reddit are generally trustworthy" etc, which will be exploited for a while before most of us move on.
Most people have been mostly wrong about most things for most of history.
It is possible to do this with current day technology. Pinbot (was on HN 3 days ago) has a transformer model for embeddings. It could also filter any topic or type of content we want, and the kicker - it runs all in the browser, private and no internet connection required
We can just tick a box to avoid Elon, Bitcoin, or various kinds of hype and activism, it works by semantic matching, so it understands phrase variations. Or maybe we just want to skip the occasional cat videos. The solution to the current situation is end user empowerment, we can make our own AI filters.
And then you could see something like a move from commenting on Twitter about news articles linked out to going back to going directly to the source and discussing things with other "verified subscribers" (whether paid or otherwise verified) there. Even in a "free, but ad supported" world it wouldn't surprise me to see outlets push for more "I'm a real reader and commenter" verification to keep their ad rates up.
Quibbling over specific dates notwithstanding, with the creation of photography, phonography (1887), cinema (also roughly 1887, though one could point to Thomas Muybridge's horse-in-motion series, 1878), audiotape (1928), etc., high definition renderings of images, sound, or video came to be equated with high fidelity.
There's of course been a co-emergent tradition of editing or fabulation in such media, though computerised methods of media editing or generation take this even further. It bothers me when I see people describe CGI or GPT creations as "realistic" when what they actually are is closer to "plausible" or "high-definition".
The period of human-generated evidence --- spoken testimony, first-hand or second-hand visual representations (Albrecht Dürer's Rhinoceros remains an exceptional example, so close in so many details, so off in others: <https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/388409>), were often backed by some form of physical evidence or documentation, often with provenance. This was of course far from perfect, but there are probably lessons for us and future us / our descendants in how to deal with potential fabulation of records or accounts.
It would be great to be able to import identities from businesses, agencies, and humans and use that as a first level filter for electronic messages of any type.
But once everyone is uniquely identified, they can be uniquely punished. Think about the autocratic control by corporations today, with their limited scope. Now give that power to the government, across every property on the internet and off, with the ability to automate the process of punishment and banishment.
It will make the pandemic Government Department of Truth and the resulting censorship look quaint. The tools are coming, and the authoritarian predilections of government aren't going to resist using them to the fullest.
Governments could... governments won't.
If you want to remain anonymous it's not impossible. With POI, well if you tie your identity in with any type of payment or address, well won't be too hard trace that back to your person. Very likely it will make it easier to trace down all your internet communications if used with that same ID.
The future looks like decentralized identity protocols.
There are various groups, some of which tend to be highly geographically-clustered, with fairly high levels of trust of their own "team." And weapons are readily available to speed a transition to enforcement-by-the-local-majority vs enforcement-by-other-bodies (higher-level state or federal government).
Breakdown of governance -> authoritarianism is a common sequence regardless of political lean of the new regime; and both sides think there's currently a breakdown of governance somewhere in the country. If you're Democrat-leaning, you'd read that as red states, of course, but even on the flip side: to some pundits places like SF are already starting to turn into a violent anarchy; a new, armed, local authority would be a logical followup step emerging out of that, sorta Mafia-style.
I don't think this is likely - I don't think today's crises are unprecedented compared to the 1960s/70s or various earlier periods of American unrest - but there's nothing innate about America that would prevent it, and there are plenty of historical American examples of those in power using force to strictly control others.
The second amendment is an uncommon law.
I do hope we never find out who is right on this one…
Even better, it’s a human right, one the federal government has been eroding in both the courts of public opinion and the actual courts for decades.
Thankfully in most states it’s still legal to produce firearms, but I suggest getting them and becoming proficient sooner rather than later.
Plenty of regimes out there that used guns to install an authoritarian government.
Edit-It’s great for things that can be verified easily/safely yourself like food recipes or certain tech stuff. It’s dangerous for things with higher stakes. That’s when you want some “meatspace” corroboration.
Sounds awfully similar to how we see LLMs.