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Comment by doubloon | Hacker News Reader

This is what I thought the internet wiuld become, back in the 1990s, just tons of projects like Povray. Not addeictive dark pattern trillionaires, see the recent Eli Gray article posted on HN how big tech enables link fraud for example. This was before FAANG existed as it does now. Apple was a struggling PC maker and Microsoft was the evil empire being challenged by a Finnish college student. Sun and SGI and DEC were big tech and they made you know… actual tech. It was this crazy dream that it would last like that forever, that the internet would just be one huge BBS of Povray style people, makers and users, who were interested in art and science above all else. Nobody was thinking you could contract third parties of poor people to screen out death videos on your BBS so they would have PTSD but you could make billions. Nobody was thinking to clickfarm children.

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As I have aged (almost 50 now) I have realised that greed will turn any good thing dark without vigilance, and then who watches the watchers. Eternal spring perpetually. A culture which prioritises individual profits over the commons will destroy anything not regulated.

As I have said before on this forum, we need a way to price in the whole lifecycle of manufacturing through to waste and punishments for behaviour like Purdue and the opioid crisis should be the loss of all wealth generated by such dark behaviour.

of course this is also unworkable, but I am not personally certain what is workable without a secular moral revolution.

Or we could move away from pricing everything and the neoliberal obsession to turn everything into a market, and restructure our economy to provide everyone with their basic material needs, regardless of how much income they have.

even if we restructure everything to meet human basic needs, pricing will still be part of the equation. finite resources means value has to be attached to materials.

Value and price are not the same thing. Money is a form of access control which limits the availability of scarce resources to those people and organisations which have enough funds. It also collapses the value of all things to a single dimension. There are other ways to decide how much of something is produced and how it is distributed, for example participatory economics.

Money isn't just a form of rationing, it creates the scarcity it claims to solve.

A neoliberal economy wastes talent and skill in much the same way an ICE wastes most of the energy from the gas it burns. Vested interests clog up the engine and keep it from running cleanly and efficiently.

This doesn't just create pollution of all kinds - physical, social, political, and ecological - which makes the environment a very unpleasant space for most humans.

It also puts a hard cap on the maximum speed, which is nowhere close to what's possible.

pricing is the exercise of determining value, even in a non monetary economy (think barter or contribution) you still need to price the value of materials and time. obviously money creates secondary effects which are not related to value due to arbitrages and other effects, but I do not believe you can have finite resources without determining value, which is what I meant by pricing.

So, a socialist society then?

Make it opt-in, please.

We still haven't found a better resource allocation model than pricing.

We have tried central planning, and it resulted in horrendous living standards (as compared to the western world), queues all-night-long that you had to wait in if you wanted to buy bread in the morning, "if you're not stealing from your employer, you're stealing from your family" being adopted as a common proverb, and the whole system basically running (for some definition of running) on bribes, favors and theft. Communism finally fell around '89 in most of Eastern Europe, and we're still recovering.

Perhaps you could solve some of these points with computer-aided optimization and dystopian AI-powered mass surveillance, but is that really what we want?

In my view, the problem isn't capitalism, the problem is the government trying to fix capitalism, but instead making it much harder for small competitors to emerge, effectively causing almost-government-mandated monopolies.

Think about what industries are complained about most in America, and how regulated those industries are. You can't just lay fiber, make medications or help patients without going through a regulatory minefield, mostly for good reasons, but this is why the big providers of these services aren't outcompeted by smaller ones. There's a reason why the mostly-unregulated big tech is considered to be one of the most trustworthy industries among most (non ideologically motivated) consumers, far surpassing any political party.

Capitalism is sometimes bad, central planning is worse, but heavily regulated capitalism is the worst of them all.

A key problem with unfettered capitalism is the tragedy of the commons. If left alone rogue/selfish actors will destroy that which belongs to all of us and is required to live (see nature). How do you propose to solve this without "benign" interference?

I'm personally in favor of taxing externalities.

If your property generates air pollution, noise pollution, smells, unclean water, radio interference etc, you get taxed and/or have to offset the effects (e.g. by planting trees).

You can do this with very simple, straightforward regulation, in a way that is very easy to understand, doesn't require an army of lawyers to follow and doesn't advantage or disadvantage large companies.

The temptation of exceptions, exceptions to exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions to exceptions might be too much for governments to stomach, though.

> We still haven't found a better resource allocation model than pricing.

There are many different models. Look at Elinor Ostrom's work, or projects using participatory budgeting.

See also: enshittification

Very well said. I miss the early days of the internet. In addition: Event though the net was not very safe at the time (no/poor encryption, no much monitoring by officials etc.) it kind of felt differently. Many users where at least aware of the dangers of speaking with strangers and downloading things but today it's somehow of more deceiving. It looks nice and shiny on the outside but full of traps. Maybe because the 90s web was less "shiny" on the outside, it was less deceiving?

Would you really go back to the internet as it was in the 90s? The current one may have problems (to say the least) but it also has miracles.

I’d go back for nostalgia, but not for practical purposes. Even in the 2000s it was much harder to find information. Wikipedia didn’t launch until 2001, and wasn’t useful till long after.

Yes! Mostly for usenet but also for efnet and dalnet.

Usenet in the early 1990's is still superior to modern forums. Threads could go on for years, the newsreader programs automatically marked posts as read and would only show you new posts in the thread. Compared to today it is hard to find what is new and then discussions die after a day on places like Hacker News and Reddit after it is no longer a top post on the page or subreddit.

> Would you really go back to the internet as it was in the 90s?

It's like looking at a sweet kid who grew up to be a huge asshole and saying "would you really go back to that kid? He couldn't even drive a car!"

I don't want to be frozen in the embryonic phase. I want the bright future that was promised and then snatched away.

Me too...

Sometimes I wonder, what is current / next thing that's like the PC / BBS / early internet scene of the 90s, with such a rich ecosystem of innovation, hobbyists, open source / shareware, where one or two people in a garage have as much of a chance of changing the direction as any entrenched company?

At least from the outside, the bitcoin scene of the early-mid 2010s looked like that - although there was plenty of dumb hype about the "product" itself, there was also of opportunity for innovation with mining, exchanges, and trading setups.

What seems like it could be the next such scene?

I too wish there was someone cutting their way through the Internet jungle to find the Scene, and report back to the rest of us. Pockets of vibrant, virtuous, inventive community about. They are, rightfully, protective of their hard-earned turf. We probably need not look far to find one nearby, just keep an open mind about the tech being used. It could be a WhatsApp group, an old-school bulletin board, a Mastodon hashtag. Your own genuine engagement and empathetic attention are the entry ticket. Go thrive!

Also the high-quality amateur scientist webpages. e.g. measurements on radiation heat loss to the sky when camping.

OTOH... we now have sci-hub.se with high-quality professional scientist papers.

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