nah it's too much of a problem in other areas, see the comment i made above.
we need to seriously raise the bar, socially. back in the dialup days we actually read the political stuff, actually contributed to interesting things, kind of like how the 60s was or punk was before the masses who are only interested in the hip factor got a hold of it and simply wore it as a fashion statement. then it died.
whether it's last years riots from people wearing 20 dollar red fist shirts from amazon, or jan 6th insurrection by the dude wearing some funky horn helmet thing, or ariel pink, or the guy from vice starting the proud boys, or trump complaining about the mainstream, or fyre festival, or even once you add some edgelordism to it like lil nas x....
What does this have to do with hipsters? Close to 400M visitors means this is the mainstream. Americans have flocked to their national parks since the first one opened.
> like frank zappa said... america is superficial. no real culture, no real art, just fads.
> Close to 400M visitors means this is the mainstream.
Hasn't it often been said that foreign tourists are so prominent at the biggest parks, because relatively few actual Americans get enough holiday to go that long distance? I would think that visiting the big parks (as opposed to some less famous park nearby one’s home) is not really mainstream.
there's a huge difference between serious art and serious cultural activity.
like experiencing national parks for instance, pack in pack out just like i had to do in boy scouts (and hated i'm not the outdoors type).
hipsters are only there for the "hip" factor. hipsterism as a culture is the mainstream. it's basically a cartoon version of itself, and we're worse off for it. people tried to counteract it within art and things like that, however it has no effect because the hipsters just latch onto it and you're back at square one again.
it's almost like we've gotta go back to book clubs and leagues and things like that, or somehow have some kind of platform like this mixed with twitter where you can have some kind of long form serious discussion, with real evidence (even observances). just like that dude said somewhere else in this thread, probably about half or more of these people are just taking photos for insta.
except there's nothing wrong with even that. it's the "just" part, and the lack of general respect for others and their environment. it is a trend that needs to end or we're over as a species and i'm not even making a joke.
somehow, some way, we need to make the lowest common denominator mentality we have made socially acceptable, socially unacceptable, and the design of our social systems and technology need to reflect it.
note that i'm specific about hipsters because it seems to happen in a few waves.
the first wave are the originals that start something, usually through serious means (ie, through literature, serious study, or whatever - think jimi hendrix right before monterrey)
the second wave is the hipster wave, where a bunch of people who see something cool/new want to capitalize on such new things.
the third wave is the mainstream wave, where now it's just a complete joke, who followed the hipsters because they told them it was the cool new fad.
when in reality, we should be in the first wave all the time, and THAT is what should be mainstream.
What you are seeing, and letting yourself get upset about, are the elements catchy enough to go viral and reach you. Strikes me as a superficial take on things.
nah, i'm upset about republicans singing to YMCA or dancing half wasted to rage against the machine with stop the steal signs in the middle of a national pandemic that has killed 500,000 americans.
i'm upset about nobody reading their literature.
i'm upset about this article. it's just the piles upon piles upon piles of things i'm upset about and i could write books on it, but it all reduces down to our lack of seriousness which is a NEW phenomenon. even adam curtis pretty much agrees with me. that's literally the whole entire 6 hours of his new shindig.
well i mean, even that is just a bifurcation of a bifurcation of a bifurcation lol. that's part of it too. almost like a wave of sh*t roaming across the land. i agree with you too.
like the past few years i started going through history, from the 30s through 1990 (cuz most of that i lived through) and just started mapping out these long trends over 20-40 years. noticing the differences in what happens and so on. and it's kind of funny, you go back 20 years and it's limp bizkit burning down woodstock 99 to break stuff, and 20 years before that you get the sex pistols.
and then you fast forward back to now and it's literally aging johnny rotten screaming his love for trump on television and zoomers burning down anything they can, and having an intergenerational fight between those two camps. i think beyond all, it was that combination that most explains the events that have been going on. the sort of generations of goal post moving, the polished nature of diversity that is both a waste of time and ends up tokenizing the trend vs mavericks like roddenberry. and then you mix that with the sort of careless attitudes because so far we've equated freedom from government control, with freedom from any kind of civil order or basic ethical values.
when i was a kid, and this isn't that long ago cuz i'm barely in my 30s, if i got caught even considering any of the stuff i read in this article, somebody would've probably kicked my ass or gave me a stern talking to and rightfully so. you shouldn't have to NEED to feel something to do the most minimal of things. we shouldn't NEED to have some crappy surveillance state and have to pay a bazillion park service people to keep an eye on things. people should just do it. hell, go plant a tree or something and go insta that, go read a book, even go to a Broadway show or listen to some Jazz. that was the ethic that glued together this country, and now it's gone.
i've been watching a lot of the old generation, the pre you know stewart brand types. and the crazy thing is the bookchins and the ayn rands actually if you really look at it - hated them. because they thought they were too careless and merely wanted to just pick whatever sounded good or mostly plausible to run with it.
i'm a big quality over quantity type of person. i think most people drift towards that, but we're habitually lazy. when the social ties reward that, i just don't really think that's a good idea.
What country? I can guarantee you can name American cultural touchstones, but someone from another country - let's pick Brazil, assuming that's not where you're from - could probably not name any cultural touchstones from your country.
Encryption might be unstoppable but they can always just assign you an IPV6 address and encryption fingerprint that becomes your new online social security number that is required from the compiler on up.
Notarize your apps buddy and sign into your app account... ;)
The threat here is not against anonymity, it is against encryption.
You can make as many PGP identities as you want and associate them with any sort of identity you desire, so there might be a political point available with respect to anonymity as well in some situations.
If you're so scared about your government that your activity might get you thrown away for life and it doesn't involve murdering someone, then you need better government, not better security because those kinds of governments will just say you murdered someone without any proof and lock you up or kill you anyway if they don't like you.
Better government and better security are not mutually exclusive. You can work towards both simultaneously, and claiming that one negates the other is a logical fallacy.
Government exists solely for the purpose of negating security and life of bad actors who want to take away your rights. That is it's function, via the social contract.
That can only be broken in one of two ways. Either people don't care enough or they grow so distrustful of it that they don't participate in it or keep it in check.
When things like that happen you get elected officials decided by less than 40% of the country, anti-maskers, and asymmetric warfare in the streets to combat "the man". It's untenable.
I see heavy security with zero recourse by anyone to break it and anonymity is the top single problem with the Internet, not the lack of it.
We should all have to log on with our identification through a blanket "know your customer" law like they do to combat money laundering in banks, and our country of origin at least should be displayed. Other than that... You want encryption? Fine, but if your id links you to 4chan offshoots planning domestic terror attacks i should be able to report your address to the authorities and there should be social repercussions for bad behavior. And I need to know if you're Russian or from the US and that you're human before I engage in US politics with you.
Music got worse since Napster, Sean Parker was the guy who got Zuckerberg funded, Google is evil, and John Perry Barlow is dead.
I respectfully disagree with most of this. The last part was a bit all over the place though, not sure where exactly you were going.
Others who know history much better than me are far better equipped to debate against your position. If you really want a challenge, I would invite you to reply to the top comment in this thread by Jon_Lowtek to help open a discussion on the deeper merits of your position. For me personally, your arguments aren't very persuasive.
I'm saying that the big giant corporations and the giant governments we used to fight against died or became completely ineffective to do their jobs and the only thing that happened was giant corporations took their place that are far more unethical than what they replaced... Funded and led by the same people who were once the underdogs!
I am aware of history as much to know that the Internet was designed by a bunch of people who talked on Ham radio and wanted a secure place to sell drugs to each other without being caught by the fuzz. They hated Ma' Bell. That's why it's designed the way it is. Then later it became the RIAA and the rest. I know all of that and if anything that's hardened my position on this, not decreased it. We don't live in the 1960s or the 1990s anymore, and what's worse is everything the people said during that time about how society would be if we went "full retard' into "fight the man" hipsterism and the subsequent deregulation of everything actually happened. Nobody laughs at Al Gore or Tipper these days, or Lars Ulrich for that matter.
Do you like musicians making a penny on a song leaving no room for art just lowest common denominator crap, the rise of the marxist/fascist camps that are hurling what was once a promising country that was getting over it's growing pains straight into 1920s/30s Germany at lighting speed, the totally unfiltered and unmoderated filth that is 4chan, etc? Or do you just ignore it because "some day blah blah blah dictator might take control" yet we are the closest we have ever been to a dictatorship because of faceless social manipulation technique where we have no clue who or where anyone we talk to is, whether they're paid, etc?
Not everyone is an engineer out looking for how things work. It's the same error the founding fathers made with the enlightenment thinking everyone is going to become smarter if you just opened everything up. It's complete baloney, people will just use the power vacuum to seize it for themselves because they make the most noise. Nobody cared about Aaron Swartz except the hacker community. Snowden sold out to the Russians from the beginning. And you're sitting there still in the year 2000 when all this stuff was new and the only ones who spoke were nerds and we all agreed on basically everything.
The point is that everything that this theory set out to solve, became worse. More nationalistic, more poor musicians with even bigger giant platforms controlling their art, more corrupt, more propagandized, etc. Not less. Everyone knows it. The other point is that instead of tearing stuff down and engaging in subversive activities for the same ends, maybe it's time to focus on making the systems you have better. Not turn it into some weird mix of The Matrix, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson. They're just as bad of an instruction manual as 1984 was to be honest.
This implies that said governments are bad. Or have the perception of it.
You know who benefits from VPNs, privacy, and security?
The proud boys. Russia. China. Steve Bannon. And their bots, that's who. They are a threat to civil society at present, and they're using that very privacy and security to organize to destroy the thing you're trying to "protect" by drinking Barlow's kool-aid.
I prefer the idea of internet governance via third party instead of the state. Flip it on it's head, where instead of government spying on everyone, we're in control of the surveillance democratically through consensus. But there needs to be some kind of governance of some kind.
Except state actors are currently also using the blanket privacy and security to influence elections. This is a couple of levels above talking crap about your government or buying some drugs.
And if that is to the point that it scares you that they'd lock you up for such behavior then you need better government, not better privacy.
It will have the same effect the DMCA did on piracy after Napster. That's what will happen. Even if the big companies come clean and start policing, that will just move the extremists who have already built their army into decentralized encrypted chat platforms, and they will still recruit over these tools too.
You've gotta basically build the entire Internet from scratch, with some kind of government and some kind of identification system so that if someone comes to take down social discourse they are removed from not just one platform but all of them and they can't come back without some kind of appeal. In addition, all political discourse held should be required to adhere to scientific and scholarly standards. I have no problem with people who aren't from institutions to challenge the status quo, sometimes that has benefits but if they aren't armed with a pile of evidence to prove why the status quo is wrong, they should not be amplified and that regulation should be central.
Until you have both of these things, anything else you do will be a waste of time. It will either become like some sort of Vegan alt-lifestyle or morph into yet a new set of big platforms. Both are untenable, as fixing this has to require the participation of the entire social system.
Well that's what I'm arguing. I think algorithms have less power than people think they do, even the computer scientists. Social sciences/economic theories that study how crowds work all say that it's driven by information. You don't need an algorithm to do this you just need someone in your group to share that information with you, and this is actually is what really is happening when you look at it and get out of data and charts.
People are leaving these algorithm ran places in droves especially now because they already believe that the government is working with these companies to track their movements and radical plans. They're already going to decentralized networks, and once that happens you will not be able to control the radicals just like you couldn't control the pirates after they switched to decentralized piracy networks. This isn't trying to stop someone downloading a couple Metallica songs. This is trying to stop the proliferation of fascist/totalitarian thought and foreign actors stoking it up. It's much more dire, and the world of John Perry Barlow is dead. Not to mention the last few right wing terrorist attacks weren't planned on Facebook or were they radicalized through there. Neither was QAnon. That all came from 4chan/8chan/etc. There are no algorithms there, no AI, and anyone could basically code something on that level of complexity in a day.
Information should not be free. It should have limits. Once such information threatens the proliferation of a free society and brings people back towards totalitarianism the slippery slope "first they take away the press and then we get Hitler" argument falls flat on it's face because large swaths of the population freely gravitating towards Hitler gets you the exact same effect, and not only that the nuance between society trying to regulate information for the general health of said society and a fascist dictator doing the same is completely different.
> I think algorithms have less power than people think they do, even the computer scientists.
Algorithms are powerful because they can cause tiny, incremental and often completely unnoticeable changes of opinions and perception. These changes adds up when they affect large enough populations. I agree that people who gather in groups and share information makes up the bulk of this equation – algorithms do not operate in a vacuum.
I do think that the negative effects caused by algorithms are largely unintended consequences. Profit is the motive, not malice.
> People are leaving these algorithm ran places in droves especially now because they already believe that the government is working with these companies to track their movements and radical plans.
A tiny fraction of the technically literate people escape the big platforms, the rest stays on even though they are somewhat conscious of the negative effects and ruthless business practices.
> That all came from 4chan/8chan/etc. There are no algorithms there, no AI, and anyone could basically code something on that level of complexity in a day.
Many people joining extreme communities have been nudged by algorithms, especially Youtube's. What happens from there is usually just plain old group think and tribalism, feeling the comfort of finding a community to belong to. The point is that those nudges from suggested videos gently pushes you down a rabbit hole you otherwise would not be exploring in such a rapid and captivating manner.
Like they say in the film; algorithms are not evil on their own, they just tend to enable and amplify some of the worst tendencies in people who know how to exploit this tool for their own gain, political or otherwise.
> Information should not be free. It should have limits.
I disagree. What I do think is that the many "information outlets" should be held responsible for their editorialization. Newspapers, TV and social media platforms do all editorialize, only social media has left this task to the algorithms – which is rather careless and naive. These companies have indeed moved fast and are now braking things.
> Algorithms are powerful because they can cause tiny, incremental and often completely unnoticeable changes of opinions and perception.
Stafford Beer predicted in 1972 that increasing variety without regulatory variety to combat said variety would send society towards catastrophic collapse because there are so many possible states in the social system it becomes as complex as things like weather and wave formation.
But we got the American Skinner Box model, mixed with heavy doses of hipsterism instead.
> A tiny fraction of the technically literate people escape the big platforms
I suggest you look into it a bit more and read about the associations between people like Nick Land, Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, etc. While it's true some of it was done by social media, the thing about it is that conservative media has and always been this close knit juggernaut hype machine since when Rush Limbaugh appeared in the depths of AM Radio hell. To them, it's merely a faster way of organizing the way they have for years because there isn't any cost. They no longer have to print 5000 copies of something. It's low hanging fruit. Most of the alt-right are ex Ron Paulers, that were already into things like bitcoin through the libertarian party since like 2012. They never "escaped the big platforms", they were always recruitment points for normies, which doesn't even require them to do anything but promote mainstream conservatism then say "go here for more stuff" that can't be tracked by Facebook's AI. Maybe your grandma may not have "escaped" but your grandma probably isn't on the streets shooting black people or lefties. Bitcoin was transacted between these Russian/American groups according to the Mueller report also.
> Many people joining extreme communities have been nudged by algorithms, especially Youtube's. What happens from there is usually just plain old group think and tribalism, feeling the comfort of finding a community to belong to.
The algorithms merely bayesian filter a giant database of what people like and feed it back to them for their increased engagement. These people would have chosen such content on their own, and the fact the content exists in the first place that plays to their real views (not views they show in public) that have existed for hundreds if not thousands of years and are passed through blood lines (if your mom is a dem or rep or kkk, you're gonna be a dem or rep or kkk 80% of the time) it legitimizes the worst of human behavior which was socially unacceptable.
But algorithms don't do that, communication without moderation does. You aren't going to get a Trump supporter to start watching CNN or MSNBC, and if the satellite stopped carrying it they would cancel their subscription and go somewhere else. So if the Internet offers media that has their views, they will seek it out and if the algorithms amplify this by sharing what other people in their social circles say, even better according to them. Saying that these people were innocent and normal before Facebook came along and made them radicals is just flat out wrong. They can just say the n word to each other with millions of people instead of having to hide it among close friends like they're smoking weed or something.
This polarization was happening long before Facebook and the Internet even existed, especially during the Clinton administration and the things that got Tim McVeigh to bomb Oklahoma City over Ruby Ridge, Branch Davidians, and the Assault Weapons ban. That's who these people are, always will be, and giving them a communication platform without strong information control is asking for trouble.
You aren't going to get away from business interests, religious interests, or racial interests it's basically impossible. You just need to create a sense of civil society via the web through ejecting bad actors from the public square. I know if I walked into a gay bar and started yelling homophobic slurs I probably wouldn't make it out of there alive, and if so I'd be kicked out for life with a nice bouncer at the door to greet me if I tried again. The Internet has no such protections.
People and groups with strongly held beliefs are not the most affected by algorithms, as you are pointing out. Worst case scenario is that their echo chamber becomes less impenetrable or that they become even more extreme.
Algorithms does most damage to people not currently holding any strong beliefs about any given topic, but do have some wage leanings one way or another. These people can be swung and their views amplified and radicalized without much effort or financial input, as the film The Great Hack makes a good case for.
Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter (who all offers fine-grained ad targeting) can be weaponized to push "normal" people towards the extreme, and pit groups against each other and affect democratic processes in a big way. This was Cambridge Analytica's business model, and it worked really well.
I think a lot of people confuse the appearance of a lack of strong beliefs with simple social filtering. There is no social filtering on the web because you don't have to worry about your reputation.
The thing that people try the hardest to stop from happening to themselves is social isolation and being an outcast. People will lie all the time just to get along with the crowd. You wouldn't know people with strongly held beliefs, unless you found out what they had in their library. It's just the filters are removed and laid bare for the whole society to see, and it's ugly and it always has been.
"In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater, when giving an anonymous interview discussing Nixon's Southern Strategy, said:[28][29][30]
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes. And all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[31]"
This is a great point. At the same time I observe a night and day difference in how some people close to me behaved before and after they had access to Facebook and Youtube. Pre-social media I could have a long and rather nuanced discussion on controversial topics, and we both left the conversation with slightly altered opinions and some new perspectives. Today, all nuance is gone and the conversation is scattered all over the place, spiced up with whatever conspiracy theory they "discovered" on Youtube lately.
Maybe one of the effects of algorithms has been to push people to extremes to such a degree that social filtering is discarded? People I know seem to be almost apologetic in their approach, as if their life depend on convincing people about their views and to not care about the social consequences of constantly "preaching". This form of polarization is not healthy – basic respect for other people is lessened and listening to counter arguments is considered a weakness.
This is just an anecdote from my life. From what I read and hear from others, this experience is not unique.
This type of thing reads like "please compost, recycle, and take public transportation" stuff. That's what I thought of the movie too.
Andrew Keen has the right answer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRbI-Ui9vEI) but nobody likes it. We're still all stuck in the John Barlow trap, thinking that if we just tweaked things here and there all will be right.
TLDW:
i think anonymity is a huge curse i think if we can do away with anonymity then we can begin to rebuild democracy and of course ultimately it comes down to all of us
ultimately we need to learn to be responsible not to insult not to propagandize and i think that will only come just as we look at each other as physical people in a place like this that will only be that will only eventually be realized if we can do away with anonymity
so a new social contract new ways of reinventing democracy through analog and a more creative and responsible regulatory attitude towards um to to big social media and internet companies
cool story, bob29 the 18 day old account with no profile info ;)
I'm just teasing. HN survives on a strong culture, and a moderator who appears to be inhuman, or at least doesn't need the kind of sleep and bathroom breaks we associate with human beings.
Losing pseudonymity would be a high price to pay, for a bunch of reasons. Moderation, on the other hand, doesn't scale.
Perhaps that's a feature, not a bug. Maybe the scales moderation can't reach aren't scales we benefit from having.
It depends on whether you're for or an enemy of the EFF's type of libertarian politics which he definitely is and so am I. I'd even put Jaron Lanier in that camp too. His solution is just make everyone pay. But I guess in such situations you'd have to use your card and you'd also lose anonymity but then you'd have to pay for all your services and I think that's worse. I don't have gripes about the ad model at all, most people see ads as a nuisance anyway. Also if AI is driven by the big data it gets from the people, it's people that facilitate such trends and that's what I am more worried of.
People will weaponize that power vacuum and not everyone is an engineer that just wants to build something. There are people with nationalist interests, theocratic interests, religious interests, and profit interests all in the way of that and this will never change. It's why the internet was way better when it was just engineers and smart people. Also why America on paper looks awesome but in practice doesn't live up to the hype. It's why the freedom of thought Internet got us nothing more than the degeneration into fascist, theocratic, and communist trends. You may agree with the theory that anonymity, no government involvement of any kind at all, anarchist self organizing systems, etc outweighs the bad, but I don't. Not when the central argument for such thing is turned on it's head and totalitarianism is the "fight against the man" which in this case would be liberal democracy.
