Comment by apantel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apantel | Hacker News Reader

We're currently living through a race to the bottom in everything: technology (degradation of platforms like Google and FaceBook — Google has become practically unusable; proliferation of bots, SEO junk, AI junk; also the degradation and over-complication of hardware, e.g. these fridges: overly-complicated smart appliances that don't last long; "they don't build things like they used to"), society (social media, polarization, siloing, echo chambers), politics (Trump, fake news, the death of a well-educated electorate), media (the death of editorial and journalistic responsibility, the death of the institution of the brick-and-mortar press), products and markets (all of the utterly cheap and crappy products on Amazon), the environment (pollution, climate change, mass extinction)... I could probably go on and on. We're about to lose our ability to know what is true and what is real as AI becomes more powerful. The race to the bottom is happening everywhere, all at once. Which means there's a set of root causes behind all of these seemingly-disparate effects: globalization + erosion of barriers to entry in all industries + externalization of costs + technological amplification of capabilities + Moloch + tragedy of the commons + Lord of the Flies (i.e. no adults in the room, no one to step in and stop us from destroying ourselves) + who knows how many other factors.

The free market economy promised to deliver better quality products with lower prices, but it seems to result in low quality products for low prices. Buyers vote with their wallets, and pricing seems to be more important than quality. I see this also in B2B where high quality products have a hard time competing with lower priced products. Whenever Microsoft decides to include even a half functioning product into their office suite, competition is hurting.

Centralization and reliance on 3rd parties will do that. Next they will deanonymize, and it'll be over. Build your websites, resurrect the cool internet of the 1990s!

I honestly can't tell if this is satire/trolling. Moloch? If it's trolling, bravo, well done!

If not: you're not wrong about any one individual thing but you have a completely distorted sense of proportions.

I would say it’s recreational pessimism because I’m usually an optimist except I can’t help but feel that lately everything is starting to seem increasingly unreal. The Moloch dynamic is a serious thing — it’s a name used in some circles to describe any dynamic where people have to behave in ways that go against collective interest because of the game conditions they find themselves in, for example a nuclear arm’s race.

Recreation pessimism sounds reasonable enough. With any ominous looking trend in society, it's probably a good idea to spend a bit of time thinking/worrying about it. It's just important to maintain an overall level head and not get too caught up in negativity and cynicism.

Irrational optimism and irrational pessimism both lead to similar sorts of faulty decision making and wind up being equally detrimental to well-being.

May I politely suggest you step away from the computer and go read something optimistic? "Factfulness" perhaps? Or https://futurecrunch.com/ if you must continue to surf.

I’m actually generally optimistic. I’ve spent my whole life singing the tune of tech optimism. But it’s starting to seem like we’re passing an inflection point specifically with respect to being able to maintain a grip on the real. Most of the things I put in my rant have to do with losing our grip on the real: the platforms are degrading because search results are now mostly created by people who are in the business of gaming search engines, as opposed to people who are in the business of sharing real information. The social media sites are overrun by bots, and even the real profiles are sharing curated if not fake snapshots of their lives. They’re not sharing their realities. The erosion of the barrier to entry in publishing has made it possible for anyone to “publish” anything, so it’s very hard to figure out what is real reporting on real things happening in reality. AI is going to enable the deepfaking of basically anything. You won’t be able to tell what is real from what is fake in basically any digital media. These days you can’t trust product reviews to be from real people. You can’t trust the people making the products. You can’t even trust branded products you see on the internet because Amazon doesn’t care to gatekeeping truth. You can’t trust ads you see on YouTube because Google doesn’t care to filter out fraud. FaceBook outright shoves completely unreal sponsored crap into everyone’s news feeds because few people post real updates anymore… FaceBook has to create an illusion of activity to fill the feeds.

Everything is becoming like this. If you want to buy a reliable product, good luck! It’s not easy to do that anymore because incentives are so misaligned: you can’t trust the quality of the products, you can’t trust reviews — trust is breaking down so widely that to bypass that fact is foolish. It needs to be considered. Trust is everything.

The blackpill is once you realize this all stems from democracy catering to the lowest common denominator in everything.

I wouldn't call it democracy; the stuff this person is complaining about is neither caused by, nor even particularly related to, the government. I would call these trends in popular culture.

Democracy of the markets maybe? People are voting with their wallets and these are our results.

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