Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

The medium is the message. We are no longer in the literary age. The power is in the hands of the mob. You can make some carefully thought out post and try to be accountable for what you say. I can show up in your comment forum, shit all over everything and leave.

In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out, and if I saw it a bookstore it wouldn't register, I wouldn't pay money for it, and I wouldn't bother writing an angry letter to send to in the mail because it would have zero capacity to take you down a notch in a public forum.

You're talking about old ideas from a more civilized age. Tribalism is back and in charge. The internet isn't here so that we can all get along and better understand one another's point of view. It's here so that we can take turns bashing one another.

View on HN

> In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out, and if I saw it a bookstore it wouldn't register, I wouldn't pay money for it, and I wouldn't bother writing an angry letter to send to in the mail because it would have zero capacity to take you down a notch in a public forum.

Ha, if only. If you take a look at the actual history, people often were outraged about books and would destroy or burn them - and that's in the happy case when they weren't explicitly censored by the government. Even as we speak there are people banning books from school libraries and pressure businesses not to carry them.

There are many historical cases of actual mobs forming to protest the presence of a book in a library, or even about a ship known to bring some particularly hated book from overseas!

Not to mention, try to run a book shop even today in a more conservative corner of the USA without carrying the Bible at all, see how long it takes until people start complaining to you.

I wonder if the "banned books" line is earnestly trying to fool anybody. Is it just for internal self-deception? Shibboleth? Mood affiliation?

Maybe it can be said it succeeded in changing the topic from "What's in those books, exactly, and who puts them within kids reach, exactly, and why, exactly?" to arguing about their being or not banned. Was that the play?

That wasn't ever the topic to begin with, but good job proving the point that books aren't immune from righteous vitriol, now or then.

One other thing common between now and then is the pulpit beating about public decency and protecting the children.

Children will discover truths whether you try in vain to shield them or not. It's the duty of parents and communities to guide and teach children throughout that growth process, not to be lazy and bully other parents and communities into sharing and enforcing all their same values in depth.

And don't forget resolving differences with duels! Typing on the Internet pales in comparison.

There have always been books that are inappropriate for school libraries because they are patronized by children, not the general population. Many adults, often those who are not in the process of raising children, seem to forget that. Instead of allowing children to have room to master foundational knowledge it seems people with a particular agenda are more concerned with distracting children and pushing wildly inappropriate content into educational spaces.

> In the old days you would've had to publish a book to get your message out

In the old days, there was also strong tradition of people putting out their own pamphlets, newsletters, indie comics, etc. You didn't have to publish a book to get your message out. The early days of the web largely modeled that sort of activity.

Pretty much, we got from network of blogs and forums to all-encompassing massive social networks that impose same rules and sensibilities on everyone regardless of sense and reason, regardless of local culture or really anything else.

Like recently here in Poland we had cause of someone's motorization-related facebook page (basically diary of him building his tuned car) got banned after he posted a poll that dared to contain the word "czarny" (black).. someone else got banned for posting pic of their kids on vacation etc.

Are you saying that that’s a problem with people nowadays? How do we know for a fact that you’re not complaining about human nature as it has always been, say, even during the time of Socrates? How do we know that people are actually being too easily offended, or that it is you who’s being offended by people disagreeing with what you say?

I'm saying what Marshall McLuhan said: the medium is the message.

If you put human nature in one kind of medium it will react one way, and in other mediums people will react a different way. We tend to not be aware of how the media we are immersed in affects us. It takes a deliberate, contrived effort to notice such a thing.

McLuhan was extraordinarily prescient:

> McLuhan: The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There’s no evidence of that in any situation that we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savage, impatient with each together….The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.

He said that in 1977!

https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2017/02/16/marshall-mclu...

That’s not been my experience on HN, out of thousands of comments and interactions with hundreds of different users, maybe a total of a dozen turned out to be random ‘bashers’.

That's because if you fall too far out of line you get !Banged by !Dang.

HN is a heavily moderated forum. And I don't mind that one bit.

I think this holds even on places with much less moderation, even if you write a lot of controversial opinions, even if your a fairly well known figure.

Take PG's X/twitter posts for example, I would estimate not even 50% of the replies count as 'bashers'.

That's how you know you're in an echo chamber. We're all here to pretend like it's still the early days of the internet, before it had come into it's own as a medium, when it was still a skeuomorphic throwback to the literary era.

> That's how you know you're in an echo chamber.

No, how you know you're in an echo chamber is that you rarely hear any opinions that you disagree with. The absence of bashing doesn't mean you're in an echo chamber, it means there's a pleasant lack of assholes.

I hear opinions I disagree with every time I come to HN, so it doesn't seem like a total echo chamber to me. HN does serve a particular subculture, though, and in that broad sense is a bubble -- but there's still a huge variety of differing opinions on any topic.

I completely disagree with your comment but I have no need to bash you.

Why is the positive experience the echo chamber but the negative experience is a result of the inherent nature of the medium?

Because we are inherently tribal. We like being with our tribe. We are suspicious and wary of other tribes.

I know I'm weird, but I get very suspicious and wary of expressions/demonstrations of tribalism itself. It's the main reason why I have a strong dislike of sports, for instance.

Einstein didn’t seem particularly tribal, not about being a physicist, speaking German, being jewish, being smart, etc…

If your talking about the median human then sure, they’re more likely to be tribal.

>Written between October 1922 and March 1923, the diaries see the scientist musing on his travels, science, philosophy and art. In China, the man who famously once described racism as “a disease of white people” describes the “industrious, filthy, obtuse people” he observes. He notes how the “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.” After earlier writing of the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he goes on to say: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/...

Did you quote the wrong section? How are opinions on the living conditions and dispositions of peasants in rural China circa 1922-1923 relevant?

yah, Einstein would have the same assessment of you

Huh, looks like my other comment disappeared, anyways that seems remarkably unlikely, at least compared to random 'bashers'.

What does this comment mean? The internet is a commodity (well strictly speaking, it's not, but people agree that it _should_ be one), of course we're talking about the median person.

The median person doesn't post on HN?

I think it's a bit defeatist to think that the current vitriolic state of the internet is as sweeping and undefeatable as a "new age" when almost all of that vitriol can be traced to a few engagement-maximizing algorithms, held in place by a handful of megacorporations. Even a little antitrust enforcement and legislation would cut it down massively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com