The Absent Silence (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The Absent Silence (2010)

ursulakleguin.com

80 pointsdcminter34 comments

She says so eloquently what is such an obvious crime against consumers that we tolerate because we must. Modern serfdom is when “trust” turns to “must”.

In that context, what leads you call yourself and the rest of humanity primarily "consumers" in response to an essay? I think this has become uncomfortably (to me) normalized, and it begs the same question that Le Guin asks about whether we understand what we are doing when we are defining ourselves. A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?

Have to? No, there are other options. But to twist this question a little bit - does a child that grows up in the United States have to speak English? They do not, technically. And in fact some small percentage don’t, but the vast, vast majority do. And not because they chose to, but because that is the overwhelming tendency of the environment they live in. I think much the same happens with consumerism.

I think I hear you, but you're phrasing your twist as a choice made by individuals or made by their circumstances, e.g. choices that you are not a party to. However I'm asking about you in this case, alongside the "us" that comprise the people taking the time to observe and hypothesize about the world we're living in by discussing in on HN. Maybe after that it'll lead elsewhere.

> A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?

I find this is at the core of Stallman's criticism of the term "content". We speak of media "content", of "content authors", etc, as if movies, articles, books, etc were just that: content, ready to be commoditized, packaged and sold. And some of it is! But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.

>But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.

Specialization pretty much requires it, and our adherence to capitalism demands it.

You specialize to get paid, and by getting paid you can pay others that specialize to create. And you're right, it's a depressing system, but it's no less depressing than what came before that.

I have started to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow and while I cannot speak to most of the book, even in the first hundred or so of (ebook) pages, it challenges that frame of reference in a way that is clarifying, in the sense of being a palate cleanser, admitting different ways of thinking about these things.

>but it's no less depressing than what came before that.

You can make an argument that it is more depressing when the compartmentalization of everything also isolates off community. No amount of individual riches can repair a trusted community to engage with. We're definitely getting lonlier in the process.

Haven't read Stallman on it, but it's funny how vague & generic the term is, and how it requires the existence of a container. Content is simply "that which is contained." Seems to me it's a word you use when your primary interest is the container. Like you're the managing editor of a news website or the like. Metaphorically you have a mouth you need to fill with words, any words, or else people will stop paying attention. But I don't look at the world that way. I appreciate something good and call it whatever it is. The only time I use "content" is as an ironic and derisive synonym for cynical low-quality crap.

You should read Stallman, because what you said (container vs content) is his actual beef with it. It's looking at it from the perspective of companies who own the platform (the container) rather than from the more human perspective of artists and authors.

And we've all adopted it. Or mostly, anyway.

Less and less people have the option to male "art" and need to make "content" to simply survive. Art has historically been reserved for the elite privileged and it seems the world is heading back towards old norms as wealth consolidates.

In a similar breath, that may be why we don't heat much of the next generation of Stallman's and instead hear of a looming crisis in FOSS as the old guard retires. Less devs (if they are even pursuing that path down the line) will have the free time to choose FOSS as a path, unless big tech is paying for it to bend ot to their will.

A person doesn't have to be defined as a citizen either, even though membership in a community is as fundamental a part of being human as consuming goods is.

I believe community should be considered more fundamental than economic consumption.

> it’s as if a great library, say the Library of Congress, refused to tell where they got their books and how they got their books and who chose the books and whether all the books they had were in the catalogue and available or some were held back, kept secret.

I think "proprietary" is a better descriptor for Google Search's inner machinations, than "secret". The general concept of engineering a search crawler is well-trodden. Many companies have done it, there are open-source examples, and Google themselves have written blogs about their own.

It would probably be more apt to say, we know where the books came from and how they were acquired, we just don't necessarily know how the archive shelves in the basement are arranged and we don't know which employee is responsible for organizing them and we don't have the source code to the library's LMS. (All of which is true, by the way, for the LOC.) Proprietary, not secret.

Well, the secret is not how you crawl the web, but how you decide what to show to the users.

It's not like the LOC either publishes their official procedure for what gets to appear on the foremost shelves.

For Google, back in 2010, word order didn't matter much outside of quotes. So if you asked God is silence, the "is" is discarded, and you get a join of a search for "God" and "silence", sorted by rank. That probably won't help.

Try it today, and see what Google's AI turns up. It's amusing. It's still not what LeGuin is looking for. Search for "god is the silence of the universe" in quotes, and while Google does find a Saramago reference, the AI reframes the concept in Christian terms.

Now try

    "god is the silence of the universe" atheist

Now you'll get what LeGuin was looking for. The Christian analysis is turned off.

> So the corporation can and will keep its secrets, even though what it is dealing in is information, even when its business is making knowledge accessible, open, free — the very opposite of keeping secrets.

Oh yeah, I had forgotten Google used to espouse that. Almost seems quaint now. Was it a ruse all along? Or an ideal later betrayed when they were seduced by the siren song of revenue? Or simply a double standard: making YOUR information freely available but OURS not so much?

>Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/search/howsearchworks/our-...

Disclosure: I work at Google.

Search should be a public service, open and transparent, funded by tax revenue, and maintained for the public good. It is too important a service these days to leave it up to profiteers (who have repeatedly demonstrated they are not responsible or responsive stewards of the public good).

The mistake is thinking of Google as a library. Google is a commercial product. The equivalent of the Library of Congress would be something more like Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive, or Library Genesis.

I certainly think that we should be spending more resources as a civilization on storing and categorizing human knowledge in a more systematic and not-for-profit way. Expecting a for-profit corporation to do that is just a category error. I'm not saying this in an anti-capitalist sense; I'm in favor of for-profit corporations. People have unrealistic expectations about what they can or should accomplish.

The mistake is in expecting anything positive from a company, brand or celebrity. And then phrasing it as if it's a problem?

Why should that be a mistake though? We take it for granted these days that public figures and companies will never show a scrap of mercy or generosity, but it doesn't have to be this way.

While acknowledging the truth of what you're saying (the first sentence, anyway), the problem is going into a cynical, defeatist "that's the way things are". A kind of learned helplessness.

So you just want a larger police force than them.

What do you mean?

Brilliant quote!

google: god is silence saramago quote

seems to work ok

I suppose back in 2010 it gave different results. I think Ursula's point was how opaque it was...

Oh wow I missed that this was from 2010. Seems just as relevant as today.

As someone who regularly looks up things I read "a while back," her experience is very common and insanely frustrating.

There always do exist magic combinations of words that you can put into google that will find the thing you're looking for. But the search space doesn't feel differentiable in a mathematical sense: you can't iteratively improve your terms because you either hit on a combo that works, or you get the same wrong results as you saw for your past 10 searches.

i read about pagerank in first year computer science. but her point stands

It appears to me that comrade LeGuin is being rather willfully ignorant here. The detailed implementation of the algorithm is not public, but the basic concept - download every webpage, index by keywords, rank by number of links - is well known and had been well known for some time even in 2010. LeGuin could have, well, googled it. But then she wouldn't have gotten an anti-capitalist essay out of her ignorance.

You libertarian free market types sure hate it when consumers express preferences for—let alone make demands of—our vendors.

Let the invisible hand decide if "provenance" is a differentiator, and lay off the slurs.

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