Technology changes, people don't.
Related: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=556
Private discords, away from the normies.
Then again, adult life has a way of sucking nerdiness out of people, so maybe OP's right in a way.
Funny, I do just that, despite having a bunch of pets and a full-time job - I follow at least 30 game-specific discords. You must be thinking of people compulsively checking notifications like a social media addict?
I feel sorry for anyone who uses Discord like that. Thankfully, you don't have to since many communities now have mini-wikis inside of the Discord to organize the FAQ/common knowledge.
People come and go, but its wild how the community spirit largely remains, even with significant changes in the lifestyle of the people that have been frequenting the network for a large segment of that time.
anyway, the network is:
* ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/darkscience
You can watch the entire conference here. I want to disclaim that not every attendee and talk is nerdy. It's more that this is a space where nerds are thriving.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2306676590 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2307512869
Ah, discord, the proprietary service that demands a phone number just to be able to read anything (so I've never been able to).
Basically the exact opposite of IRC.
1. Fear and embarrassment. Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous, today you constantly hear about doxxing. People were also less aware of the consequences.Even if it's unlikely for some random person, that doesn't help introverts.
2. Outnumbered. Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird. Today, "new" and "random" are filled with spam, and "popular" is filled with posts upvoted by "normies". Weird posts and posters are still here, but they're obscured by the noise.
3. Feedback. People imitate what they see, and feel more comfortable following trends. When "normal" people see weird posts, they become weird and make weird posts. When weird people see weird posts, they feel safer and make weird posts. When normal people see non-weird posts, they make non-weird posts. When weird people don't see weird posts, they feel embarrassed making weird posts, so post non-weird or not at all.
I think 3 is the biggest factor, caused by 2. As other people mentioned, "weird" people are still on servers that are private or otherwise hidden from the mainstream (preventing 2 and 3). 1 is probably not a big factor, instead it explains why less people show their face or post identifying details.
What years are you referring to when you say "back then"? In the early 90s, which was "the old Internet" for me, the best contributors to discussions on the newsgroups I followed (comp.lang.c, etc.) weren't anonymous; they were well-educated people who used their real names, including academics whose signatures included URLs like http://example.edu/~jsmith. And their posts weren't weird, at least not on the newsgroups I followed.
These people aren't "weird" in a bad way, but in a "different than the average (less-educated, less tech-oriented) person" way.
The anonymity part probably isn't correct. But I get the impression people back then were a lot more open, at least hearing about dating sites, chat-roulette, old YouTube channels, and internet friends who met IRL in the 90s/2000s. Although I know a lot of people post on Facebook and Twitter, so maybe that hasn't changed either.
I remember debates on the talk.origins usenet newsgroup with very highly educated priests, some at the highest levels of the church. These people wouldn't give me the time of day now!
In some sense it's the same filter that a University admissions process applies, and companies like Google try to reproduce.
I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.
Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.
Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.
> Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable
For me it was tech in the 90’s and 00’s so I think the real explanation is even simpler: we grew up.
It’s very easy to be pure of intention and intellectual curiosity when mom fills the fridge.
Even the major “news for nerds” site in the early years of the new millennium, Slashdot, where there was awareness that FOSS was now fueling major economic growth, did not yet have the same overwhelming culture of startups, venture capital, megacorps, and hustling as the venue we’re conversing on now.
I don't think it was a change. Both things existed in parallel, with a little bit of crossover. The startup/VC/megacorp thing just won out, that's all. And nobody ever really doubted that it would, once it was visible.
I do think politics has gotten worse in the "post-truth era". And tech certainly enabled that. It's hard to blame anyone in particular, though. One thing we see in the show "Connections" is that it's always hard to predict the consequences of new technology. Even seeing it coming, it's not fair to believe tech workers should have saved us from the rightward swing.
I don't think that was the case. Go and read the stories of the founders of companies like Apple, Atari, Adobe and others from that era and you will find they all took investments to get started.
In the 70s, we saw many people really believing in astrology, flat-earth and doing all they can to be stupid. There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".
When I was in school (public), classes were divided into "Smart", "Average" and "remedial". That disappeared in the 70s because parents did not want their kid put into remedial classes. So what happened ? Many smart kids were bored out of their mind in class and the "cool" kids acted stupid to get attention. So many kids started following that coolness trend and ended up dumb by not learning anything.
So here we are.
Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.
Waiting for them to go after the entire private school system. Any day now...
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/US-Department-of-Education
Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.
I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.
The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.
There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.
The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.
Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.
My bad, I'm not looking to contest that part, there are definitely serious issues with the school system. I just don't think very much if any of it boils down to "there was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are heroes" as if the kids are intentionally being dumb because it's cool / peer pressure. It's easy to be dumb - especially when we have so many distractions available to us - but I wouldn't call it cool or pin it on some kind of peer pressure thing.
But yes I agree with you, the school system has its troubles (the stats obviously speak for themselves). Funding and teacher pay are probably the biggest factor, though I'd also include classroom distractions (phones, basically), a lack of ability to enforce order in the classroom, and probably parental support as well, off the top of my head.
There was always such conspiracy, but never talked about at such a scale. But not too much of this has to do with techies outside of "tech made it easy for conspirators to gather".
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/the-u-s-is-losing-its-compet...
The U.S. placed 16th out of 81 countries in science when testing was last administered in 2022.
The top five math-scoring countries in 2022 were all in Asia.
U.S. students' math scores have remained steady since 2003.
Their science scores have been about the same since 2006.
The IMD World Competitiveness Center reports that the U.S. ranked 12th in its 2024 Competitiveness Report after ranking first in 2018.
falling from 1st to 12th in 6 years in competitiveness is even more concerning. Maybe COVID really did ruin attention span.
Or that nerds are not immune to become "bullies and autocrats and sleazebags" themself. I mean, why should love for technology, translate into consistent love for people?
Because so many nerds were treated badly and should know better, how to behave, once in power?
Sadly it is quite known, that people who suffered are likely to cause suffering as well, unless they really processed it all.
So it is a good thing, that therapy looses its stigma. Because people can change as well.
Capitalism increasingly incentivizes (and normalizes) deception as it struggles to squeeze the remaining profits, since the rest have trended toward zero as Marx warned they would. From this stems "enshitification" and other perverse incentives like influencer culture, etc.
An ideal society of the future would allow all information to be freely available. All structures of organization would be transparent, and commonly agreed upon goals would take precedence above all else, instead of the goals dictated by the .01 or .001 percent.
https://jacobin.com/2019/03/sam-gindin-socialist-planning-mo...
Total surveillance?
Or only all technical information?
But transparency of all the organisations, so all the police information as well?
So the murder suspects knows, where the police is looking for them? (Or won't there be a need for a police like organisations because murder is also somehow solved?)
My point is, devil is in the details. And Marx is not someone I would go for inspiration. Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Also, I really don't believe that the problem is a human flaw. I don't want to change humans. (It happens naturally anyway).
But I do believe, that we can create better societies, that serves us better, the way we are.
It is just hard, to create them from scratch for various reasons, but many people are trying and some quite succesful.
> Marxist organisations are not so known for their transparency btw.
Marxism offers a timeless framework and does not require subscriptions or other grifts. That the latter exists does not invalidate the former. It's just example 100539 of what my previous reply was getting at.
> I don't want to change humans.
Humans deserve better opportunities than most presently have, and than most will seemingly have on our current trajectory into late stage capitalist madness. We should acknowledge/embrace our flaws to see commonality (which is different than being ashamed, proud of, or profiting off of them).
Just like the bible, a holy work of truth, you just have to believe in?
"Crime would be a fraction of what it is now due to a massive shifting in incentives and societal landscape"
Because as far as I know, all the marxist experiments did not result in less crime, or corruption, rather the opposite. So why should I believe, that the next marxist experiments will work out any better? Was there a major update recently, that fixed the flaws?
(To clarify, to me the choice is not at all between capitalism and marxism, humans are capable of a bit more flexibility)
In ways which are commonly agreed upon as useful, yes. In the case of the bible it cannot be interpreted literally. But abstract concepts, like that every human contains the capacity for good and evil, absolutely. In fact that's what we're discussing.
> Because as far as I know, all the marxist experiments did not result in less crime, or corruption, rather the opposite. So why should I believe, that the next marxist experiments will work out any better? Was there a major update recently, that fixed the flaws?
Assuming you aren't drinking the sinophobia Kool Aide, which is an admittedly big assumption, have you looked at what China has been able to accomplish in recent decades? Not perfect obviously, nothing is, but they're in different league compared to the crumbling empire of the US.
I see. Well, I strongly disagree to the arbitary dividing of the world in good and evil. In fact, the whole "capitalism is the root of all evil" reminds me strongly of what was the devils doing before. All the bad just happens, because there is this evil force.
In my opinion, this is good ideology for controlling people - we are the good side - they are evil ones. And don't you dare question our side - then you are evil.
Still a surprise, that you see china as a positive force here.
That's not what I said though. It's dividing chunks of time within an individual. There is no purely good or evil person. Humans contain the capacity for both, and how it manifests is mostly a function of their environment at any point in time combined with the historical context that got them to that point. Look up dialectical/historical materialism to understand how this comes to be.
> Still a surprise, that you see china as a positive force here.
I cited it not as a "pure good" like you're attempting to coerce from my words. Instead I cited it as an example of a group of people with a Marxist background doing some things better than capitalism (and some things worse).
Real bullies knew how to make it fun for everybody, so that even the person being bullied had to laugh at it. Nerd bullies are just anti-social and boring.
Put a comment in the source to say you did it on purpose so you don’t scare them off immediately.
gopher://sdf.org
gemini://sdf.org and gemini://gem.sdf.org
I already moved my personal WEB Site there, and there is interesting content there. Maybe "we" should migrate there and leave the LOL cats to the WEB :)
Some nerds were autocrats and sleazebags but they just needed to gain dominance for those traits to appear.
Technically, the iphone is very good and should have made things better.
But what it actually did was to set an example of control over the user that propagated throughout all of computing. People no longer had control over their own device.
People who bought an iPhone were unable to install their own software without permission from apple. And apple didn't give permission, destroying general computing.
Additionally, apple DID give permission to app creators and advertisers to do things on the phone. More than the person who owned the phone could, in fact against their interests. We've never recovered.
This.
There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around.
Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know.
Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.
We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.
I mean not having social skills, not identifying with women or not treating them as fellow human beings, not having empathy for non-tech users etc, being obsessed with technology, sometimes at the expense of their humanity. I'm not excusing myself btw here either.. but as I get older I see our own community can be as toxic as any other, what I mean is I'm not laying the blame on outsiders but our own-selves. Power and Money corrupts anyone.
Sure I loved pcs, and programming, got bullied as a youth and I wasn't into sports but that doesn't make me any more or less likely to want to 'Make the world a better place' with tech.
Honestly 'Silicon Valley' the tv show, took out much of the wind and visionary magic that the real Silicon Valley was viewed as over 10 years ago. And subsequent actions of the real valley have not proven it false but a resounding and biting commentary on the culture
These days we have Tech Bro culture, immense tech layoffs, offshoring of work, Doomscrolling and tech which splinters humanity instead of binding it, consigns people to contract menial work at the whim of an algorithm and uses AI to generate art and music while human artists get locked out proper reward for their efforts .. I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
He can just direct his supporters to violently attack opposition:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-haras...
You ever heard of a Heckler's Veto?
It is not legitimate to launch death threats against a woman who (a) had no involvement in the discussion and (b) was not responsible for the role existing.
Which Musk didn't do? Are all the people who said "Trump is a threat to democracy" and similar statements responsible for the multiple assassination attempts against him?
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...
"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
"Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come."
"But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword."
It strikes me more as someone trying to give fascism a formal definition as a way to use it as an ideological cudgel in arguments than any attempt to define it based pn observation of multiple actual fascist states and political movements.
Some call what they fear to come is fascism, but I think it will be inaccurate. Oligarchism maybe. Or something new.
a) Publicly shamed a civil servant with full knowledge it would drive the violent elements of his supporters to attack her. I've never seen this before in US politics where an innocent party was targeted this way and clearly it was done to drive fear within the government.
b) Has constantly promoted false stories about immigrants, black people, trans people, women etc. The narrative being that the US is a zero sum game where in order for non-white males to succeed white-males must lose.
c) I run Twitter business accounts which are post-only and every single one shifted hard towards showing ultra-right wing political content in the For You feed. There is no doubt that the platform was used as a propaganda tool during the last election.
Hmm, you must have missed when the Department of Justice sent protestors to Florida to pressure a local district attorney into pressing charges against a very clearly innocent man. And if you disagree with the very clearly innocent part then you definitely didn't watch the trial and missed the eyewitness reports and the medical reports.
https://theweek.com/articles/462236/did-justice-department-i...
Just that they provided support to those protests which is part of their remit i.e. to reduce conflict by encouraging dialog, mediation as opposed to protesting etc: https://www.justice.gov/crs
Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.
"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.
Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.
For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).
> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil
Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.
From my perspective, business ruins everything it touches, whether right away or slowly over time through enshittification.
My own general explanation of why everything sucks is more like this: we don't know how to stop. The market can't stop itself from over-optimizing, over-exploiting.
The evolution of any product, service, company or technology, can be to a first approximation plotted as a bell curve:
total value provided to society
^
| ....
| .. ..
| ... ...
| .... ....
| ..... .....
------------------------------------> time
The market always goes all the way to the right. What it should do, what we need it to do, is to stop at the peak of the bell curve. Alas, there is no mechanism that would get people to say, "yeah, this is the best it could be, let's go do something else"; the market demands they move to the right, all the way to diminishing returns.
The 90s nerds were fucking malevolent. They’re the ones that built the dystopia we are currently experiencing.
I know, I was one of them and I had a first row seat for a lot of this stuff.
I guess the mistake was that nerds assumed there were more people like them, or that introducing people into their world would change the people and not have the people change the environment.
The thing with stupid people overcoming the internet was not corporations investing on publicity nor searching engines selling the rankibgs of searching results. What made stupidity feel safe on internet and become trending, were the spaces that allowed those people to gather, to be in "the same place" with no one there to judge, correct them and laugh at them for being ignorants. This gave them the wrong idea that they were relevant in a sense were despite knowing nothing about anything, their opinion was valid and deserved respect, as much as the opinions from experts.
Also modern search manipulation optimized on engagement had a particular moment when both Facebook and Twitter went from showing you a defined set of things to their selected subset of things.
I think the bloom came off the flower for me when I participated in the design discussions for Freenet, and I started actually looking at what people were uploading.
Those nerds from 90s became autocrats and sleezbags of today.
Well yeah nerds that did not get shitloads of money like Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezps did not turn into autocrats ;) but yeah money change people.
I, for one, am glad the networks became easier and more accessible. I wouldn't be here otherwise.