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Yes, I've reread is the first 2/3rds of "Understanding Media" several times and never finished it, but would still highly recommend it. There is also some excellent old interview footage of him when he was a pop culture figure which is originally what fascinated me. For me it would have been hard to read his writing without having seen those interviews first -- he has a very distinct style of writing/talking and is interesting as an integrated person within recent history and not just a collection of ideas. On that note, I'd also recommend Videodrome.

edit: There are also more polemic anti-tech presentations of his ideas, especially by Neil Postman or Nicholas Carr which are good in their own way. But to me the fascinating thing about McLuhan himself is his dedication to presenting his views in a such a matter-of-fact way that most of his early followers were probably very antithetical to his personal beliefs.

More than interfaces. To quote McLuhan: "Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth."

The AI thing has been jarring but it's nothing new. All part of the same process.

> How much of the previous disruptions came with actual improvements to the user experience? Or at least something novel?

There was a major "conscious shift" of society to get everyone on the social media boat with a lot of promise and it changed everything. Now we're all on the boat and our lives have not gotten magically better. The new hope is split up two different ways

1. New technologies really do have something magic that will let us have our cake and eat it too -- the benefits of a centralized medium without centralized control

2. "new" technologies are really just a sneaky way of fragmenting the larger system and moving back to something smaller and simpler.

My theory is, on the whole, that we're afraid to admit that we're sick of the big centralized networks and need to dress up that fact by pretending that the real feature of new networks is actually something technical.

edit: See also Bitcoin

Last chance to evacuate Reddit before it is recycled.

> had Kaczynski chosen peaceful decades-later contemporary Internet discourse as his means of promoting his ideas, he'd simply be tarred and feathered as an "alt-right" nutjob, just like everyone else with views that contradict the present Western civilization status quo.

So what? Anyone with an ounce of spirituality knows that living your life to be admired in your lifetime is not the real goal. Ivan Illich spent his life being as lefty and now he's trendy on the right (making similar critiques, btw). Truth is beautiful when it's spoken for its own sake -- insecurity makes it ugly. It can't be forced into the world by terror.

Kaczynski killed because he was unbalanced and insecure, not because he held (partial) truth. Better thinkers on the issue were dime-a-dozen, even in his day (E.M. Forester, Samuel Butler, McLuhan). And it wasn't his terrorism but sophomoricly intellectual "incel" rage and religious fundamentalist movements that are finally waking people up.

edit: ... and this isn't to say that truth never justifies any form of violence, just that there is absolutely nothing to learn from Kaczynski's brand -- which was ignoble and totally futile to his intended ends.

> As a social conservative, I disagree with this. Opportunity and will to make use of opportunity are two separate things and usually originate separately. But this will is NOT innate.

I'd go further and say that the reason any aristocracy has ever survived for more than a generation is because at the core of all its elaborate culture is a machine built to aggressively indoctrinate its next generation to be extremely moderate and conscious of its use of privileges.

There is a progressive ideological strain that banks its legitimacy on the belief that poverty can be one day eliminated, while traditional varieties of aristocrats believe that concentrated privileged is an inherent part of nature that needs to be managed. A "pure" progressive ideology would rise or fall with its apparent success -- it's also possible to imagine also an impure progressive ideology is a barbershop pole of which the real aristocrats are the ones working to maintain the illusion, stringing everyone else along.

That's how I see it anyway, not that I know what's really going on.

> Disagree. "Throw-away" culture has been a historic norm and can actually become a moral "should"

> However, cultures that produce "beneficial" waste have a moral imperative to produce more

To me "throw-away" culture very much implies with it that what you're throwing away something toxic without considering the about consequences -- maybe you could say "composting" culture as an alternative. And in that context, there isn't really "waste" at a system level, only on an individual one. It's a good point that there is all the difference between just managing waste (repair) and recycling it. Both are independent skills and good in their own way.

> It also shocks me that so many people don't know how to repair anything -- though the rational part of my mind wonders if they might be making the right call.

It's a hard line to draw. Consumerism/throw-away culture isn't (and can't and shouldn't be) a historic norm so participating in it will ultimately alienate people from most people who have and will exist across time. On the other hand, not participating at all will alienate you from a lot of people now.

This post gets off on the wrong foot by limiting it's understanding of a servant's object to the whims of an individual. The Christian understanding (which is a deep part of the ideal of the traditional institutions), is that the only valid object of service is God and therefore even our leaders are really servants to the common good. The nobles of the manor don't have absolute rights over their servants, ideally they have serve them in return by caring for the land, providing them with housing, and treating them with dignity (and noblesse oblige).

> I'm going to miss the era of Venture-Capital subsidised services. I think the people doing the hard work to actually get goods into customers' hands shouldn't be thought of as servants; they should be thought of as co-founders.

... or to put it a different way, maybe we should think of each other as fellow servants of capital. Obviously the traditional system in practice was repleate with flaws (of which the new system is highly motivated to point out, to bolster itself), but at least it acknowledged the fundamental reality that "You Gotta Serve Somebody" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotta_Serve_Somebody

The way we're going (and as related to the article) feels a lot more like Minority Report [1].

[1] https://archive.is/CC2t8

I liked most of this article and found it interesting. Maybe a bit long-winded, but like many people I've been thinking a lot about the same topic in recent years, struggling to break free of a certain mindset. Hearing the images and language how someone else feels when they describe that "machine" that keeps them captive is interesting -- a very "blind men and the elephant" experience. The cargo cult aspect is a new connection to me and something I'll think about more.

That said, like many tech critiques, I found the conclusion underwhelming. In particular, the idea that how we manage our "upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets" is important strikes me as foolish. These are the master's tools and they won't unmake the master's house. Sites like reddit and twitter have long put their thumbs on the scale to rewrite these metrics. Plus, just like with democracy, institutions and norms that encourage uninformed frivolous voting will drown out the meaningful signal. Not to say these forms of engagement are all bad, but they aren't a solution in and of themselves.

The real commodity to regulate is attention, of which "upvotes" are only a simulacrum. It should never be forgotten that this means often means disengaging from certain sites and systems entirely.

edit: on the note of attention being the real metric -- another thing I thought the author could have done well drawing attention to is the trend of watching/listening at 2x speed. It increases our tolerance for drawn out drivel. Maybe an alternative would be to shun media that we don't think would be worth playing 2x times at normal speed.

> In the nineteen-twenties, dowry payments occurred in about a third of marriages. By 2008, they were near-universal in rural areas, and many regions had seen alarming rates of dowry inflation.

> The expansion of dowry coincides with other worrying changes. Rates of sex-selective abortion appear to have increased in almost all states between 1981 and 2016, especially among wealthy and educated women.

> The payment of dowry, which was expected to die out with modernization, provides a telling example. In Europe, marriage payments mostly disappeared with industrialization

Abortion/family planning for the wealthy and sophisticated, dowry for the poor. National and international. Highly industrialized countries no longer need as many children to work the farm, since they can exploit their colonies and machines. Poorer countries have an extra incentive to create male dominated jobs as human farm/factory equipment foisted on their economy that traditional structures become ugly as they bear. Exploited men exploit women. Being exploited may be lucrative way to make USD, but it's not good for your culture.

There definitely are better and worse among traditional system of inheritance/dowry/brideprice, but I don't feel like dowry is the main thing at play here.

Exactly. People can argue all day about how silly normalized middle-class tipping is (very silly, IMO), but the thing is that clicking a "20%" button isn't even tipping. The implementation of the buttons on the bottom of the screen is offensively out-of-touch with the actual tradition of tipping, making it even more transparent a cash-grab.

In addition to the fact that the POS button is often clicked before the service takes place and in the presence of the server, another key distinction of tipping is that it's off the books. It's a gift from me and a specific person providing service. If I pay through some POS machine it's a gift mediated through Visa and the IRS and the company payroll.

Yeah, well put. There are a lot of difficult to quantify cost for new features:

* monetary for the consumer (new features give manufactures an excuse to keep the price high) * environmental (because increased failure surface area causes consumers to need more repairs/upgrades) * safety (side airbags hurt visibility... Bigger cars are more dangerous ... generally safety features may make more people drive more dangerously [1]) * increased oligopoly (complex safety requirements stifle competition)

The problem isn't that there's no benefit, it's just that all of those "unintended" costs are actually boons to the manufacturers, so as long as they're calling the shots new features will just keep on rolling. Meanwhile, we just get more and more dependent on something that fewer and fewer really understand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> Idols say what the priests want.

That's only partially true, and only at first. "Those that make them are like them, so are all who trust in them" (Ps 115). To promulgate idols is necessarily destroy one's own agency. And the deeper you go the worse it gets.

I agree, I'm not scared at all of the machines themselves, but the demented framing of what they are. All these "AI apocalypse" people are so convinced that machines have the power to end death and suffering that can't help but construct these horrible hell-stories about the vengefulness of their gods. The thing that makes people like Yudkowsky effective is that their fear is based on a obviously sincere life of devotion.

To me, he definitely does symbolize the same, though I don't think it's fair to pin all the blame on him. People make mistakes and there are a lot of factors in play. Also, to Doctorow's credit I do think releasing through creative commons and touting remix culture is admirable.

That said, holding onto the scrappy tech-rebel free internet idealizer persona of early 2010s is just silly today, and those who do it look like fools. You can't just treat the fact that the big tech companies "went bad" as an incidental that can be fixed. The implicit promise of the early internet idealizers was that big tech companies were good because they were tech companies and that big copyright holders were bad because they were IP owners. This has been proven ridiculous.

I think now is the time for honest people who idealized the internet needs to take a few big steps back and reexamine their premises more deeply than just whinging about needing regulation for "big tech" so we can get back to our anarchist cyberpunk future and start giving some more respect to the people who they considered backwards ten years ago for not being excited about the newest shiny thing.

This article points out what is probably a real trend, but is hilariously blind to the fact there may be legitimate reasons WHY this is happening.

1. Perhaps the "regressive attitudes and censorship of sexual minorities and sex-positive content" represent a real popular movement that believes that sexual liberalization has been a giant boon for predators and we need to set some collective limits. The insinuation that this is all just an effect of FOSTA is idiotic. The wind shifted and people with different concerns than before now feel comfortable voicing them.

2. Perhaps fandom is just irredeemable. There is an unresolved deeper tension with the fact that the "sex-positive" undercurrent where fans fill-in-the-blanks from a very sexually sanitary show gives sexual identity to the characters (especially female) that wasn't there in the original. If you embrace this as a first-class part of the culture (which is what is being celebrated in the article), it makes everything very weird and you draw into the same space some adults who are obviously into it sexually and some kids who just enjoy the characters. Your two points of reference for developing a common ethical framework are a corporate-controlled piece of fiction marketed towards children and horny rule34 fans. It's basically cultural jurassic park.

Yes, exactly. The "greedflation" label definitely has an element of truth to it, but it strikes me as misleading. Why is everything so expensive? Oh, it's greed. Guess we'll just have to either shrug and live with it or dismantle everything and go to a centrally planned economy. Greed is part of the human condition that will rear its ugly head whenever you allow individuals or groups freedom. Not something that could have been easily foreseen and dealt with by good governance.

Something like "trustflation" would be a better name. Want to reduce prices by allowing/encouraging corporations to consolidate their supply chains? Maybe that's a good short term trade off. But prepared for the inevitable trustflation when your too-big-to-fail, risk-averse monster can now hike prices as it sees fit.

> And, what about people forwarding from accounts they never log into directly?

I'm basically in this situation, which is why I have been paying for the annual plan. Despite the fact I passionately hate Google. Not sure when if ever I will be comfortable deleting my account entirely.

> Yeah this is just a transition to a new form of neo-mysticism that they hope will be more satisfying than the last one—i.e. the idle speculation that a science-fictional transhumanist future will arrive any day now.

I think just as significant a fraction of disillusioned silicon valley mindset people are swinging just as hard to the opposite pole of being basically anti-tech. I've seen a disquieting amount of Kaczynski-simping recently (and admit I may have laughed and joked along). Also, from what I've seen the renewed interest in traditional religion is fairly anti-tech -- more pointed towards medieval philosophy than the Omega Point.

> You can just, like, go to a music festival or a sports game or something

I think this is partly true (and I won't speak to music) but I will say that sports in the US are starting more are more to seem like a silicon valley/commercial product. And add to it that traditional religious institutions are in shambles.

I was considering the same question this year. I've been doing mine with freefilefillableforms (basically just an online version of paper) for several years and have gradually been getting better at it.

Here's my breakdown of what took the most time/stress (I didn't use a stopwatch, so it's heavily impacted by how it felt):

2% creating a spreadsheet that did the simple arithmetic to add up sums for investment boxes and that did the final tax calculation

90% spent trying to understand/fix one stupid mistake with an HSA account that was very confusing in the tax code. I am nearly certain that TurboTax wouldn't have helped.

5% reviewing all our other accounts, saving copies of the statements, and inserting relevant values into a spreadsheet

3% copying and reviewing my copying of other numbers, including the long stupid EIN numbers from W-2s that I miscopied and caused the IRS to automatically reject my return

... and here are my conclusions:

* The thing I personally would most love but don't believe is easily possible is a way to avoid all the mistakes copying and to simplify some of the data collection and staring at 1099s from different accounts that arrange the boxes slightly differently, but I can see why this hasn't really been automated in an open source way. While some sort of image processing or by trying to scope out APIs with the financial institutions might help, it's hard to envision an open source project that would do this.

* I actually value tax time as a time to review accounts and finances. So even if the data collection stress was reduced, I would still want to have a good feel for the numbers.

* The most serious problems I seem to run into never feel like software problems. I have had problems like the HSA issue in the past with turbotax and the "helpful" UI can only do so much to answer tough questions.

* Last year I filled out the Qualified Dividends worksheet by hand, the spreadsheet is a million times better though. It's basically the same thing as those online calculators, but I wanted to be able to see what calculations it was doing and review it and also not put my tax info online.

* Overall, what I'm most inspired to do would be to share the spreadsheet or a similarly scoped program and document/continue to refine my process for entering and collecting data. Working towards an end-to-end solution feels to me like a loser, at least to start off. Modular seems like the way to go. Solve one problem at a time. There is already an https://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/. Haven't tried it out yet, but I feel like it isn't what I'm looking for.

> Inflation is a solution to these problems

... inflation in combination with hegemony.

My understanding is that if the US wasn't calling so many shots on the world stage, other countries would be less willing to tolerate us inflating away the US dollars they hold. But as "the global reserve" currency (for now), they have no choice but to grin and bear it, desperately try not to inflate their own money supplies to deal with the loss in value.

This is basically the truth behind MMT. Inflation actually can get you "free" money, but only because you're basically forcing it out of other economies by virtue of holding all the guns and oil.

I think it comes down to the definition of "love".

There are limits to how far you can redefine what it means to "love" a particular person in your life because we all have a natural intuition of what it is like to live harmoniously with someone in love. People can sense when you're actually acting out of self interest because they can relate to the same temptation. However, there's no way analogous way to call bullshit when you try to redefine "love" for humanity as a whole because it's not even clear what that means. Longtermists have defined loving humanity as a whole as wanting to maximize a metric of how many people exists across the universe, but seeing "loving" humanity that way isn't really a shared experience. There are so many alternate metrics you can come up with about "loving" humanity (spreading democracy and "freedom" or eliminating prejudice get talked about the same way).

The problem is in mixing up the metaphor with the real thing. Especially with media technologies it's tempting to hold up loving humanity above loving other people because it seems so much bigger and more universal, but ironically this is exactly backwards. Love of humanity is just a simulacra of loving real people.

A relevant quote that came to mind from Brothers Karamazov:

I love humanity ... but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams ... I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me.

...

Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.

> How are those member stations funded?

A case quick case study on this for Wisconsin I did recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35294972&p=2#35295817

... in summary, our station seems to be about 1/3 funded directly by the the government (state+federal). It's obviously simpleminded to claim that NPR is directly and obviously a stooge of the federal government, but trying to deflect the question with the "99% non-federal funds" doesn't convince me of anything.

> all students will see the teacher as a creator of universes that can be wiped away from existence as easily as they were spawned. And you better write down what these symbols and drawings mean while you can

Even v.s. a whiteboard, there is something poetic about symbols being wiped away to dust of the earth rather than a vivid blue smudge. And that dust becomes part of the institution. I spent a little time around high level physics students in their natural habitat and there is still a strong feel of it being clung onto tightly by professors and (perhaps LARP-ingly) students dedicated to the culture.

> I have a theory that the declining respect students have for teachers in our modern age can mostly be attributed to the extinction of chalkboards in modern classrooms and the increasing reliance on wimpy whiteboards or even projectors.

I think the transition away also correlates with hermetically seal buildings and using central air everywhere.

I've heard this "debunked" many times before, but I looked it up this time for our local public radio [0]. Looking at this report for my state it looks like it's coming up on 29% government funds (state funds and CPB)! Listener and business support add up to about 50%. About 22% looks like it's basically income (proceeds on ticket sales, etc).

I'm not a total public radio hater or anything, but this definitely makes me take the idea that public radio is mostly listener supported a lot less seriously in the bigger scheme of things. Public radio fans can try to talk me down. I'd like to know where I'm wrong.

[0] https://www.wpr.org/sites/default/files/annualreport2021_fin...

Edit: ... and I do know there is a distinction between the national entity and the member stations. It's just that tracing it up further feels like a shell game. Maybe all the other states are different and have way more donations, but I have no idea. I'm already confused about how many of WPR's "in kind" funding from the UW-system are state/federal funds and even if any of the state funds are from federal aid.

I've had some eye-opening moments where I went back to music I listened to growing up and was revolted with myself when I actually read through the lyrics and thought about what they meant. It really is like there is something like a spell that comes over you when listening to certain music that opens you up to hearing and helping propagate messages you wouldn't otherwise.

The internet irony culture uses the same mechanism of passing the message off as "only a joke". But the fact is that even if you say that, there is only so far words can be divorced from their meanings. And even if the network that propagates them originally is just doing it ironically, eventually someone will take the message seriously. There is a quote I wish I could remember along the lines of "what the father accepts as a lie, the son will accept as a truth".

> I've noticed that it makes it difficult to switch back to information-dense reading, and to actually read all of it instead of reflexively skimming it to try and glean out the seed.

Keeping on the religious theme I've noticed this with the Psalms, even before considering the GPT stuff. I think I grew up taught to be over-dismissive of many types of poetry. I always had an impression that it was mostly just silly space-filling pseduo-deep reused imagery and repetition. School didn't help dissuade me of this.

For me, I think the thing to overcome is to focus on the value of a sense of respect for the author and the work unto itself, rather than just valuing the "understanding" you get from the text (which will always be shaped by preconceptions). A sense of awe (maybe at divine inspiration, maybe at near-divine genius, or maybe just at the sacrifice of time and life-force an ordinary person gave up to create something). For the example of the Psalms, I have noticed that despite finding the language clunky at first, they have a certain way of sticking in your head that prose does not.

A strategy I've been focusing on recently is giving myself permission to reread (and maybe memorize) important/enjoyable works. Reading something twice is basically the opposite of skimming, or a way to counteract skimming. There probably is such a thing as rereading something more than it deserves (I reread Calvin and Hobbes for the zillionth time recently, which I still deeply enjoy but now it's more of a way to relax my mind before bed than a source of insight) but there are certainly works that do deserve it [1].

Anyway, something I've been thinking about a lot as well and I agree that it's fascinating to consider how fundamental is it to the human condition that monks have been struggling with it for millennia. The book recommendation is appreciated.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0OY1RDe8Yg

A family member who is somewhat of a fanatical cycling commuter was telling me recently that in the area he lives they deliberately ignore data from males in their 20s/30s (his demographic) when making decisions about bike infrastructure usage because they are more likely to commit to biking even if the conditions are terrible. To be clear, I think he was saying this more as an endorsement of this attitude (and as a personal brag) than a complaint.

> Imputing AI's with human like goals, emotions, motivations, etc doesn't seem reasonable to me. Then again... to play Devil's Advocate against my own position here, I suppose somebody might consciously choose to purposely build an AI that has those attributes for some reason. But even then, I'm skeptical that they'd wind up replicating the parts of being human that could lead to "evil" behavior.

Tabling the question of if the human-like goals/emotions/motivations have some "deeper" quality or not, I think there are actually many reasons why people are working towards and getting better and better at replicating them. On the benign side, because they're lonely, curious if they can do it, etc. On the evil side, because we're social conditioned as humans to treat things that present themselves as humans with respect. I've already gotten some spam calls that did some kind of semi-plausible automated response when I answered them, it's easy to imagine it getting worse. Personalized spam is also on this spectrum.

As I understand it, the second case is basically the definition of sociopathy (i.e. abuse of social trust as a means to serve a selfish end). Again, tabling the idea of if the AI is evil or the creator is evil, the end result is evil behavior that is at least enabled by AI. [0]

The further concern I have is that even the more benign side done with good intentions ultimately saps away human energy for real compassion and perverts actual relationships. A "person" with human-like emotions/goals who is owned and managed by a corporation, or who can be turned off when you're tired of them is not a person at all, regardless of the intentions they were created with. Even well intentioned inventors are ultimately creating hyper-real simulacra of humanity that feels genuine in the moment, but is framed by fundamental untruths about the human condition (ownership, mortality). There is a market for Siri and sex-dolls, I 100% think there is a market for this too.

[0] ...to devil's advocate myself a little here, I guess I'd say that there are some greater goods that can served by minor abuses of social trust -- maybe even extending to personalized spam. But on the whole I think it's been awful for society.

> So even if you don't have a Spot with a mg on its shoulder patrolling your neighborhood, you could be put in jail if you're caught removing the robot's battery on the 360 cam. Would likely lead to robot laws.

There are "delivery robots" on the campus near where I live that drive around on the sidewalk. I think they're partly run autonomously, but partly controlled by out-sourced human labor. They don't get in my way too much, but I deeply dislike the way some stupid delivery company injected themselves into the commons of the sidewalk. Maybe it's a little sadistic, but every time I'm in that area and I walk by one I fantasize about kicking it. I don't know for certain, but that's probably already illegal and I know that they would have good video evidence to file a police report with.

... I don't think it's alarmist. Even today, robots already have more protection than I'm comfortable with.

*edit: fluency and spelling