Among the Disrupted
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- Books have never been cheaper. - I can video call around the world. - Almost anything can be delivered quickly. - Email has taken over my life. - I have free access to an evergrowing encyclopedia.
There is some loss, but I'll take this life over that of a small-plot farmer or industrial worker. It's much easier to be an intellectual with access to all this on-line knowledge. It doesn't kill our humanity, it elevates what our humanity is capable of.
Change happens. Something is gained. Something is lost.
I mean, it's fine to lament the passing of a world, but Jesus, get some perspective.
FWIW, I feel keenly for people who get the rug yanked out from under them, even in circumstances when they should have seen it coming, even (usually) when they come across as entitled and patronizing assholes, because fear can do that to you. I admit that my heart grows less tender when people shake their fists at the sky for the cruel turns the world has wrought unto them, without acknowledging the myriad ways they have benefited from the same forces that have given rise to their complaints.
Another mitigating factor, as a sibling on this thread remarked, is that I am unaware of this author's poignant appeal on behalf of milkmen, TV repairmen, and gas station attendants, although you are free to correct me on that account.
That's basically the description of callousness. You're rather arrogantly assuming that you're capable of judging wether or not they have benefited from these changes. Economic factors and whiz-bang gadgets might not excite people as much as having a stable core of friends and family around them. I'm sure you've seen studies on how uncorrelated economic indicators and happiness are?
I am unaware of this author's poignant appeal on behalf of milkmen, TV repairmen, and gas station attendants
Why is that pertinent?
> Why is that pertinent?
The author start Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. I think it is reasonable for someone to point out that his "honoring" only seems to apply to (for want of a better term) the "creative classes" as opposed to blue collar workers.
The fact that blue collar workers have been negatively affected by not only the swift advances in technology but also globalization can be addressed in another essay.
Change happens that much is sure but lets not replace that insight for thinking about how to deal with the fact that people who get disrupted aren't all part of the self improvement clique and can't just change their lives from cleaning lady to Ruby developer.
> Books have never been cheaper.
Thanks to market distortions enforced by a still-growing quasi-monopoly, whose stock price is only propped up by Wall Street's expectation that they will jack those prices way, way up once all the competition has been flattened and customers have nowhere else to go.
> I can video call around the world.
If you and the person on the other end both use the same software out of dozens of options. "Let's see, Jane is on Skype, but Mike uses Google Hangouts..."
> Almost anything can be delivered quickly.
If you live in San Francisco or New York City. If you happen to be among the very few people who live anywhere else, your mileage may vary.
> Email has taken over my life.
As an open platform that can be freely integrated with rather than a closed corporate silo with a cocktail-straw API, email is a remnant of a more civilized age rather than a product of our current one.
> I have free access to an evergrowing encyclopedia.
Whose quality is determined entirely by which obsessive-compulsive editor has the most free time on their hands.
Wall Street will be disappointed. Prices for digital goods always have and will continue to be controlled by piracy.
> If you and the person on the other end both use the same software out of dozens of options. "Let's see, Jane is on Skype, but Mike uses Google Hangouts..."
In real life, Jane and Mike are both on Skype.
> If you happen to be among the very few people who live anywhere else, your mileage may vary.
If you live in the middle of nowhere, chances are you have a PO Box at the local post office. Not as convenient, but works just as well.
> email is a remnant of a more civilized age rather than a product of our current one.
There are plenty of open standards being pumped out. Nobody is using them.
Would it be nice to have everything open and universal? Sure.
But given the choice between sparse and open ... and rich and closed, I'll take rich and closed. Virtually everything has an API now. How awesome is that?
> Whose quality is determined entirely by which obsessive-compulsive editor has the most free time on their hands.
How was this not true of the old encyclopedias? At least now, you can do your own digging pretty easily to verify any claims. On top of that, Wikipedia keeps a history of who wrote what and when, which is specifically useful for determining if the editor has an axe to grind.
But given the choice between sparse and open ... and rich and closed
If you've ever wondered why people with no speculative asset interests are so excited about Bitcoin it is because the technology has the potential to monetize digital goods.
It also commoditizes identity and creates a rich and singular (yet decentralized and equal access) stream of digitally signed transactions and associated data. A public datastore. Rich and open. It spells out the death of privatized social media over the next decade.
My theory is that once our communication mediums are again as rich and open as standing on the street corner and selling newsprint that our intellectual property industries will rebound and thrive yet again.
Right now our dominant forums for discussion are privately owned. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and the rest aren't optimized for quality discussions. They can only quantify and measure in an attempt to subsidize the communication of the people who use their services.
We need true public venues for a vibrant intellectual community!
It's never been cheaper to self publish, either by a blog (self hosted if you choose) or in an ebook. How is selling newsprint on a corner more rich and open that that? You had to own a printing press to have a voice!
A consensus database that is replicated completely across all nodes acts more like a public square than anything we've seen before on the Internet.
Gnutella. 15 years ago.
and
> A consensus database ...
Yup. If the database isn't ephemeral, it can't be a consensus database. If it's the consensus that certain data should disappear, then it should disappear. If you force retention, it's no longer a consensus database.
Expecting data the has been publicly broadcast to be capable of being erased from existence is a lost cause. A better solution is to embrace the permanence of publication. The Way-back Machine watches all.
The solution is much like with git. Append a delete or a subtraction to the chain. Software in userland can then make it appear as if though edits or deletions have been made.
> Thanks to market distortions enforced by a still-growing quasi-monopoly, whose stock price is only propped up by Wall Street's expectation that they will jack those prices way, way up once all the competition has been flattened and customers have nowhere else to go.
Assuming you mean Amazon here, this isn't the case at all. Wall Street supports Amazon's stock price because they keep growing. They do that by expansion, not by price rises. Wall Street has zero expectation that Amazon will ever raises prices for anything it does - they expect Amazon will continue to cut prices and expand markets.
That expectation may be bad for book publishers and possibly authors, but not for consumers.
>> Books have never been cheaper. >Thanks to market distortions enforced by a still-growing >quasi-monopoly, whose stock price is only propped up by Wall >Street's expectation that they will jack those prices way, >way up once all the competition has been flattened and >customers have nowhere else to go.
Even in the worst case, today's access to books is much better than ever in history. It is easier to learn about most every topic than ever before.
>> I can video call around the world. >If you and the person on the other end both use the same >software out of dozens of options. "Let's see, Jane is on >Skype, but Mike uses Google Hangouts..."
Even with multiple standards, it's much better than years ago when video calling didn't exist, and regular calls were very expensive.
>> Almost anything can be delivered quickly. >If you live in San Francisco or New York City. If you happen >to be among the very few people who live anywhere else, your >mileage may vary.
Even in Middle America, delivery is still cheaper and better than any time in history.
>> Email has taken over my life. >As an open platform that can be freely integrated with rather >than a closed corporate silo with a cocktail-straw API, email >is a remnant of a more civilized age rather than a product of >our current one.
I'm not sure how to answer this one.
>> I have free access to an evergrowing encyclopedia. >Whose quality is determined entirely by which obsessive->compulsive editor has the most free time on their hands.
Encylopedia Brittanica (and World Book) had editors too. There you were at the whim of 1 editor per topic. Is Wikipedia's editing really that much worse? It's scope is certainly an order of magnitude larger.
That's just what one would have expected from Leon Wieseltier. His columns at The New Republic often likewise came across as self-important, contemptuous, and entitled. The jury's still out about the recent management "changes" at TNR, but more than a few readers won't be sorry to see L.W. gone from there. (Except now he's at The Atlantic.)
What's interesting is we're starting to see the outlines of the narrative that will define the intellectual critique of silicon valley, and it's an old chestnut.
It's the line that silicon valley is all machine and no soul -- a group of folks interested in success only without any capability for reflection, intuition, emotion. That in the quest to ask 'does it work,' we fail to ask 'should it work?' Robots and nerds, in essence.
It's a line that can be traced back to Doug Bowman's '41 shades of blue' post[0] -- itself beginning to define the narrative of Google (and Marissa in particular) as pencil-necked spreadsheet jockeys who wouldn't know good taste if it hit them over the head.
This narrative is, frankly, bullshit. Anybody who's worked on any sort of technology product knows the limits of data in decision-making -- I have yet to see any place where gut feel didn't radically dictate the shape and vision of every company. Similarly, to argue that the Internet is anything other than the most effective device for the production of the same humanistic, intellectual material that Wieseltier bemoans the loss of is to demonstrate an utter unfamiliarity with the internet and how it works.
No, what Wieseltier bemoans is one thing and one thing only: That the means of distribution are no longer so dominated that he automatically, uncritically earns a right to them. The world doesn't need that any longer and we are the better for it.
[0] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
Did you come up with this while reading "The Top 8 Reasons Why Silicon Valley Should Never Be Criticized" on Buzzfeed?
This is absolutely not one of them.
I don't fully subscribe to all of Model View Culture's political aims but their arguments need to be engaged with.
In a different direction, what the Long Now foundation does with trying to reframe our focuses on the ultra-long-term is powerful.
Outside of that, I see much (maybe too much of it) happening on twitter, not enough written out. Definitely a challenge to improve.
Especially when it comes to literary works, art, and discussions of politics and economics.
I've worked in tech for the last decade so I know from first hand experience that there is plenty of subjectivity in the decision making and design processes.
But at the same time there's an attitude that "if it sells, it's good". Sometimes when I'm in meetings it seems like were selling lowest-common-denominator products on after hours television. Basically just trying to come up with scams instead of trying to build real value.
Furthermore, thinking that web pages and software are the best approaches to "solving the world's problems" definitely lends towards a digital and quantified solution.
From what I've heard at The New Republic they wanted to start using the same sort of metrics that a company like Bleacher Report (which I was the first engineer at) might use.
There's world of a difference between stories about 3rd tier college football teams and the history of intellectual criticism that made The New Republic what it was.
But there are also plenty of folks in silicon valley creating and empowering new forms of content and thought. Even buzzfeed, everyone's favorite target, has produced some awesome longform work to complement their listicle crap. To say nothing of the Mediums of the world.
To argue, as Wieseltier does, that this first group is indicative of a silicon valley ethos, is where he goes off the rails. By what right does he get to make that claim? Because Google hired Ray Kurzweil?
The most generous interpretation is that he's simply unaware of the humanistic side of the internet.
What worries me is the more likely claim that this stems from a certain form of engineer essentialism -- that technologists are inherently unable to appreciate a work of art or cultural criticism. He himself writes this:
"The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers."
Wieseltier seems to really believe that a bunch of pocket-protectored math geeks have taken over his beloved humanities and are trying to reduce it to a bunch of equations. To do so is, I still find, extremely shallow and deeply insulting.
That humanistic side of the Internet has been drowned out by a sea of dingbats so obsessed with becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg that it is barely perceptible.
I'm an engineer as well as an artist and I got in to this industry for the humanistic side of things. I'm frankly disgusted with how things have been shaping up over the last decade. Our industry is full of callousness and arrogance. To make it worse the economic externalities of their successes are driving out anyone involved with humanities from the cities where this is taking place. It has created the feedback loops that result in the kind of ignorance that he's addressing.
Well I'm very familiar with how the Internet works and I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement so, to use a "logical fallacy" against you, I believe you're making an "argument to authority".
BTW, logical fallacies are a rhetorical device that attempt to deny the subjective experience in it's entirety by presuming that all interactions can be reduced to a set of objective axioms. I'm only mentioning this because you leaped to the old "strawman" device in your second sentence, and that you seem to have the generally pleasant demeanor of an esteemed Student of Lesswrong, and that this style of argument and the worldview that it presupposes are being directly addressed by the author of the article.
Can you explain how the Internet is so effective at producing "humanistic, intellectual material"? From my perspective knowing a number of writers, musicians and artists, it seems that professional industries are suffering big time. The network of agents, managers, publicists, production and support staff have steadily been disappearing because the revenue streams that supported them are drying up. This means that artists are having to take up all this slack instead of just focusing on their work. Obviously the work suffers.
I'm sure that there will be a solution but in the meantime things are pretty shit. It takes big and complex systems quite some time to reorganize.
Get ready for an argument to authority here: Maybe you're so ignorant to humanistic and intellectual pursuits that you can't see what is going on?
that he's accorded greater privilege demonstrates just how high the shit must have been piled at The New Republic's stables.
This narrative is, frankly, bullshit.
Hey buddy, if you wanna have chilled out conversation you might want to take a look at how your own approach might affect how things progress.
This place is a circle jerk of anti-intellectualism and smug arrogance. Juvenile phrases about how anyone suffering these days deserves their fate. "Why didn't they just learn JavaScript!?".
Oh, but if it's the poor and blue collar there will be some pity for their fate, barely masked contempt for the unwashed masses. But the middle class? Eviscerated and this forum spits on their grave. The story goes that they squandered their privileged position in the world.
No one can write a proper response. No one can address the content in the author's essay because there is no respect nor understanding for what has been written. Like frothing lobotomized acolytes of McLuhan the only mantra is that the "median is the only message".
Human subjectivity is reduced to a cold bowl of porridge. Everyone's opinions are equally dismissible. The only thing that matters is what can be quantified. The size of one's paycheck takes precedence. Further irony is that everyone thinks they are "creatives" and better than those mongrels in finance or law. This is just our generations version of the Wolf of Wall Street but in the lambs clothes of the globally cultured. "We teach people to code so they can better their economic stature and increase their quantifiable measurements and therefor become a better and happier person!".
Downvotes and upvotes... those ARE part of the problem! They destroy dialog. It turns what could be healthy discussion in an American Idol like popularity contest. "Vote next week for your favorite asshole!". You think it is an ethical device? Have you ever noticed that tptacek, the holder of the most "karma" on HN is basically a troll? My language is in no way more inflammatory than his. He's just got the foot soldiers to put people in their place.
All that these things do is turn forums in to an echo chamber. The other approach is to use active moderation to get rid of the trolls. But that's not the agenda. That's not the belief. The church of quantification must attempt to remove all subjective and therefor inefficient human biases.
Label them "gatekeepers" and convince the world you're doing it a service when you instead shift the power to secretive algorithms that are controlled by a small cabal of wealthy elites.
DOWNVOTE THIS!
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..............\.............\...The funny thing is, personal attacks aside, I actually agree with a lot of what you have to say, especially about karma and about the impact of the Internet on artists. And on that latter point, you & I do in fact disagree sharply with the majority of the site. You pick weird enemies.
I have no inherent respect for the powerful although I will sometimes shamefully choose not to bite the hand that feeds me.
I tend to agree with most of the points you make as well. I should stop ragging on you. I'm sorry. You're not a troll. You're just terse. The Hemingway of commenters. I hope you don't drink as much as he did.
You overestimated your disagreement with the people who (try to) manage this site. I'm personally sympathetic to a lot of what you were trying to say—small-minded technical literalism is a personal bugbear—and appreciated the emotion in your venting as something real. It's refreshing when someone says how they feel instead of sniping from an intellectual bunker. Your comment became more alive when you did that.
But you (i.e. we, i.e. any of us) can't take out your frustration on individual other users. First, if one can do it, everyone can do it, and that way lies lameness. Second, we're figments on an internet forum to each other, which means we're mostly projection screens—we see what we imagine about each other and we're all almost certainly wrong. Discussion on that basis isn't interesting, just agitating.
The only way out of this is to cultivate the benefit of the doubt. That's harder than it sounds, because it requires awareness of when one is not doing it.
The irony here is that forums like this seem to promote "small-minded technical literalism". Upvotes, downvotes, threaded discussion, and a quantified system of points are antithetic to discussions on humanistic qualities.
But you're quite right, I should strive to be more mindful.
I should find better ways to show how upsetting I find it when people dismiss well-written essays as "bullshit" but fail to actually address the content on it's own terms.
The thing is, people consistently use downvotes to lazily express that they don't agree. I don't know if there is a solution to that.
Can't you see how all of this is actually directly related to the concerns addressed by the author in the actual article? A fiery response is about as middle-brow as it gets. I take no shame in being mortal and emotional. I'm not trying to transcend humanity and live forever nor try to attain some sort of idealized state of being.
But yeah, if everyone was just shouting explicitness back and worth we'd get nothing done. Save that for the sports bars.
I suppose this is a dig at Amazon and Apple. Two companies which have made it much easier than ever for anyone to share their creative work with a global audience. They've also made it easier than ever for a music lover or a reader to acquire music and books no matter the obscurity of the work or the consumer's location in the world.
Submitting music for sale on iTunes Store is impossible for independent producers - you have to go through a third party intermediary such as cdbaby (it's actually more complicated than that: http://www.audiorecording.me/how-to-sell-your-music-or-songs...). Amazon Music didn't even launch until 2008.
There is a reason why most small bands and producers sell through Bandcamp, Beatport, or Juno Records.
If you're actually talking about "sharing" and not "selling" specifically, mp3.com and Soundcloud were the two companies that made the most impact for music.
I also think that people having the ability to buy books (or music) from anywhere, and to choose from an effectively unlimited selection is something that ultimately benefits literary culture.
Prove it.
All I'm trying to point out is that a rather broad statement about literary culture was made with no attempt at justification.
Perhaps one of the problems with HackerNews is the reliance on quantified measurements to score a discussion?
It's almost like the article in question was bringing up issues related to this kind of philosophy...
I also think that ebooks open up a lot of possibilities for experimentation. For instance, in the past it may not have made a lot of financial sense to write a 60 page novella - you couldn't really put it on a shelf in a bookstore by itself, it would have to be packaged with other work. But with an ebook there's no reason you can't write a 60 page novella and charge $3 for it.
I think a good analogy is print journalism and commentary vs web journalism and commentary. There's a lot more crap on the web, and a lot of the traditional institutions are hurting, but there are also so many more opportunities for new voices and for innovation.
You can't just think about the consumption side of things. You have to think about the production side.
> Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire
That's an uncharitable paraphrasing of Google's mission statement which, taken to its logical conclusion, might as well say "To know everything there is to know in the universe, to grant agency to this knowledge, and to make it available to everyone." Maybe this just reveals a fundamental rift between my values and those of the author, but I cannot think of a higher calling for the human spirit.
> Searches for keywords will not provide contexts for keywords. Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons. The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.
The author is making an empirical claim here, and it is wrong. AI is already advanced enough that such absolutes as "searches for keywords will not provide contexts for keywords" are demonstrably false. To a limited but growing extent, software is already capable of erudition and interpretation; these are not uniquely human endeavors.
The biggest problem with this article (and so many others like it) is tying an argument for the value of the humanities with unscientific denial of materialism. That the human mind is ultimately an emergent property of matter does not make art and literature any less worthy of study.
It must be tough to fight progress. It's a battle you're never going to win.
I strongly disagree with this article (and I guess your argument). Technology is part of society. Technological progress IS societal progress. There's nothing "problematic" about that.
Yes, of course, I never said it wasn't.
I never said technological progress was problematic. I said that favoring quantifiable progress at the expense of qualitative progress is problematic.
Because you work in technology you are benefiting from it's progress. People who work in industries who are being disrupted by technology are not. This is what makes progress subjective. Assuming that the people who are NOT immediately benefitting from technological progress are somehow involved with things that we don't need to worry about is problematic.
Art and culture cannot be quantified. Communities that promote quantification and deride qualification are problematic. These things do not need to be at ends with each other.
We don't need to look at the existing qualified members as "evil gatekeepers" who deserve their fate in the soup lines. We should be figuring out how their experience and skills are useful and how to integrate them these new technological and economic changes. There is wisdom in age and experience. That our industry is known as "agist" should be a further indicator on how it views the world.
If you strongly disagree with the article, by all means, please write a counter-argument. You're gonna have to make it more than a single sentence as it addresses a number of issues. You might even need to research some of the topics the author was referring to. The onus is on you.
What irony!
Please, keep it going everyone, this is just amazing!
Can you make some citations? I frankly don't see see any self-pity.
Why are you putting "intellectual" in quotes? Because he's talking about the humanities?
Personally, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel because of what I see related to the future of decentralized monetization of digital media, so I can see how we can rebuild industry around intellectual property.
Still, he makes a lot of great points about posthumanist tendencies. We in this industry, an industry that is shaping the world with very little in the way of a conversation, are incredibly obsessed with quantifying things and we seem to think that "improving what we can measure" and economics are going to be the only things we need to think about.
I mean, come on, your first response was about how a machine generated essay would be better than his well argued piece! Unbelievable levels of irony! Fantastic! Haha!
Where is YOUR originality and emotion? Somehow a single snarky paragraph is enough? A quantum of downvote is enough? Open YOUR mind!