Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-Pocalypse | Hacker News Reader

Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-Pocalypse

honest-broker.com

68 pointsdrywater220 comments

I feel so strongly about this article. Someone I think maybe in 2015 postulated an idea of dead internet theory where stuff like this would be common.

I confess I am just a poor person who works for food at goodwill sorting. I have seen many things which are stirring to heart but one of those really cut down to it. I had a huge cart with seminal and very recent books about super important college text many of them of scientific nature and others of an important nature like bad affairs concerning publishing in college of all things.

I saw the some of the greatest knowledge the MIT library had to offer being simply recycled. I think they wanted it all to simply disappear. It was troubling to someone that it was at MIT. Down here in the worlds retail therapy dump it troubled me. The act of thinking anything of any sort is in itself has become taboo.

I wanted to save even just one book to read but we aren't allowed to even buy trash there. I cried about this after reviewing all these things in this article. I am profoundly disturbed. I can't even categorize what I feel anymore. It is an unbelievable experience and it isn't good. And it's just the first year of AI. No would could ever be fully prepared for this even if you never logged in to the net in your life. Because everyone else did and being drip fed outrage. I'm just beside myself.

I hope you find this thought comforting: those books were merely holographic projections of the master copies which are safe. Copies are still being made. New editions are still being printed. In a sense, those books sent to recycling are overflowing the cup of knowledge. They're evidence not that the bottle has run low, but that the cup is too shallow--or else it's missing the rest of the champagne fountain[0]. I will admit it feels like a loss that these texts aren't run absolutely ragged--especially when one looks at the sorry state of home libraries across the world[1]. This is inspiration for me to re-read some of the quality tomes I've collected and not yet exhausted.

0. https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7013/6678160845_0a3d9e7fb3_b.j...

1. https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street?topic=books&media=al...

I started to read, then I scrolled down and it got dark and insisted I must create an account to read more.

The irony of this headline is not lost on me hahaha.

To be fair, you can just click “continue reading” which will close the popup, but Substack does a pretty well job applying UX anti patters that some readers don’t notice tiny greyed-out link and just walk away.

I think the fact that Substack is both widely popular with authors and provides one of the few modern viable platforms for these authors to get paid, just further proves the point of the article.

Coming from the early web days it still is somehow weird for me to believe in getting paid for such a blog post.

just don’t call the author a content creator.

please.

Strange, I got a "Continue reading" option under the Subscribe button.

Yeah but they're trying hard to make it invisible.

Plus you have trained yourself to know 'continue reading' means 'close this damn popup'. So have I, but there was a time I was closing such sites with the article unread.

If you use reader mode this problem goes away.

I beg you to read this try just a little harder.

There's an archive at https://archive.is/WcGsS which gets around that issue.

> Of course, this can’t go on forever. Eventually people abandon those polluted streams. That’s what will happen after the Age of Information crashes.

Strong claim with a stain of nuisance.

I would love to call it bs, because the mass internet is still relatively young and our society still has momentum in taming this medium.

On the other hand though, religion is much older than any medium and still alive and kicking and the enormous amplification by the internet to manipulate useful idiots to keep the status quo for our grande profiteurs is out of question.

The internet is usefull, not just for our information/nonsense/tribal addicted brains, i think, we won't overcome it either way.

If you think this is pessimistic, the worst is yet to come. The AI/ML genie is out of the bottle and the s/n ratio is only going to get worse.

>Of course, this can’t go on forever. Eventually people abandon those polluted streams. That’s what will happen after the Age of Information crashes.

No, this Age of "Information" (for want of a better word) has changed the meaning of language itself (and hence our thoughts themselves) so that words like "Truth", "Trust", "Information", "Right/Wrong" etc. no longer mean what they used to. Everything is in the service of Power and Money. Think of it as "Newspeak" in a different form and amplified beyond belief. Everything has changed/will change further and the sane/rational amongst us will just have to find ways to cope with it.

Nobody these days would believe how enthusiastic I was about the early internet. The best ideas will win bla bla...

The best ideas do win, it's just that people have different ways of measuring "best".

Sure, let's define best as "that which wins". Moloch is the best!

Archive: https://archive.is/WcGsS

“People keep telling me that we’re living on an Information Superhighway. But that’s not true.”

Just a thought, but perhaps don’t open your profound thinkpiece with a cliched metaphor that was already beat to hell three decades ago?

But, man, the internet is just a flow of information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com