
Neal Stephenson Explains His Vision of the Digital Afterlife - MilnerRoute
https://www.pcmag.com/news/368417/neal-stephenson-explains-his-vision-of-the-digital-afterlife
======
apo
>Q: How would you describe the current state of the internet? Just in a
general sense of its role in our daily lives, and where that concept of the
Miasma came from for you.

> Neal Stephenson: I ended up having a pretty dark view of it, as you can kind
> of tell from the book. I saw someone recently describe social media in its
> current state as a doomsday machine, and I think that's not far off. We've
> turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven systems
> that are designed not to have humans in the loop, because if humans are in
> the loop they're not scalable and if they're not scalable they can't make
> tons and tons of money.

How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to
mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?

This line about perception of reality somehow being different today than it
was, say, in the 1980s keeps coming up. The main shift is that the number of
(dis)information sources has risen sharply and they've become much more
efficient. Secondarily, entire media channels (newspapers and TV) have lost
relevance to all but the older generation. Increasingly, those news outlets
just track social media, which may be the oddest development of all.

In this context, the effective discontinuation of the White House press
conference was inevitable. For better or worse, the president talks directly,
unfiltered, to everyone. That's the real doomsday machine if put into the
wrong hands.

~~~
Torwald
He later relativizes that with:

> So that means that access to that kind of higher-quality view of the world
> becomes a class-based situation where people who've got the money to pay for
> or partially pay for human editors and curators are getting higher-quality
> info, which I think is just a slight kind of magnification or
> intensification of the way things are now anyway.

I repeat:

> …intensification of the way things are now anyway.

Now, here I disagree with Mr. Stephenson, these things were much more intense
in prior times.

What he observes seems to be the development in the U.S. in terms of tonality
of political discussions.

If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such
"intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house
of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not
go online without FB or other easy ways. Operating keyword here is easy. For
many people, who just made the jump into being alphabetised, or being the
first in their family to be so, many SN outlets are a somewhat more
comprehensible access point to info, then "Google Fu".

~~~
Barrin92
>If you look at Asian countries as a counterexample, there is no such
"intensification" happen because of SN at all. To the contrary, even the house
of suckage, FB, is contributing positively, because a lot of people would not
go online without FB or other easy ways.

That's hardly an argument in favour of social media. The US is a democracy
where people used to have civic debates around a shared reality.

That social media isn't going to ruin the debate climate in corporate-
governmental societies where civilians don't have any input anyway doesn't
really calm my nerves. In fact it frightens me. If the future of the internet
is a cluster of entertainment bubbles with business and government bending
reality to their will, and China is an example of the future, I'm not really
keen on duplicating it. It's actually a very prescient observation: There
seems to be a strong correlation between societies with high technological
development but no democratic tradition, and the demise of traditional
channels of media in favour of social media.

~~~
Torwald
Which society "with high technological development but no democratic
tradition" witnesses a "demise of traditional channels of media in favour of
social media?"

~~~
Barrin92
I don't think I can actually name you a Chinese mainland newspaper that isn't
government owned and controlled. So calling it a demise might have actually
undersold it, I don't think independent journalism plays a role at all.

------
8bitsrule
I'm not convinced that the impact of SM is much different from the impact of
3-network TV programming back in the 50s-60s.

'We've turned over our perception of what's real to algorithmically driven
systems ....' Like Nielson ratings?

We certainly weren't allowed to play a greater part then. Are we now, really?
So, if once again we've allowed corporations to spoon-feed us, in return for
watching advertising ... how's that any more of a doomsday than the first time
around?

Stephenson's a remarkable story-teller but this comment is not helpful. If
things look darker, that doesn't mean that they are. TV and Newspaper
headlines were essentially algorithmically predictable. 'Darker' stuff wound
up in magazines.

Today, anyone with the time can see it all ... unfiltered by news 'experts'.
If it looks manipululated, _it always was_.

"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to
pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and
his race for his daily bread." \- John Swinton, 1880

------
justin66
The actual article:

[https://www.pcmag.com/news/368417/neal-stephenson-
explains-h...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/368417/neal-stephenson-explains-his-
vision-of-the-digital-afterlife)

~~~
drivers99
Also, title should be fixed to say "Neal" instead of "Neil".

------
0x8BADF00D
Part of the problem is the participation trophy and helicopter parent
mentality.

Who are you to tell me my beliefs are wrong? I can be anything I want, I am
qualified to be an expert on something because I want to be. The Earth is
flat, who are you to tell me otherwise?

The lack of humility is the real doomsday machine.

~~~
RandomTisk
Funny you mention flat earthers, I think it's because of social media that the
number of times they're mentioned dwarfs the actual number of flat earthers
alive today by something like a few hundred thousand to one. Just one example
where something gets blown way out of proportion.

~~~
jsemrau
I would assume the same holds true for the AntiVax movements. While I
constantly hear about it online, I don't know a single parent with that
mindset.

~~~
pacala
We know there are plenty of antivaxers because they sign certificates of
immunization exemption. Plus we keep track of immunization rates. In WA there
are about 4% kindergarten kids with non-medical immunization exemptions [0].
In some communities, like Vashon Island, the exemption rate goes upwards 25%
[1], and the non-vaccination rate upwards to 44% of kindergartners in 2012
[2].

[0]
[https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/Pubs/348-682-SY20...](https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/Pubs/348-682-SY2017-18immunizationgraphs.pdf)

[1]
[https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article26252716.ht...](https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article26252716.html)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/health/measles-
outbreak-w...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/health/measles-outbreak-
washington-new-york.html)

------
parrellel
I'm vaguely interested in the article, which this wasn't, but wow Slashdot's
gotten really scummy since I last visited.

~~~
isostatic
I left ahortly after Malda, tr days of conversations with Bruce Perens and Wil
Wheaton are long gone, it’s mainly Infowars fans now.

~~~
neilv
Too bad Malda sold it before the social media valuations like of Facebook.

Slashdot had some commercial awareness (e.g., there was a lot of predictable
"take my money!" meme about products), but wasn't thinking along the most
profitable lines, and maybe never could've. (I've been wondering how
much/often dotcom founders of successful startups reshape the world in their
image, and I doubt that Malda saw the world with a Zuckerberg eye, for
example.)

Another big property that was bought by the same people was SourceForge. Which
didn't fetch anywhere near the price of GitHub.

------
mirimir
> PCMag: The first glimpse we get of Bitworld is this newly sentient virtual
> mind conceiving its surroundings, its being, and its ability to think and
> create and learn and adjust in the midst of endless chaos. It was
> fascinating stream-of-consciousness writing to encapsulate cognition. That
> must've been a really tricky part to write.

I'm looking forward to reading this, for sure.

But I gotta say that Greg Egan did a good job of this, at the beginning of
"Diaspora". Which he published in 1998.

Also interesting is Kevin MacArdry's _The Last Trumpet Project_ , which goes
further. Read-only access to the past permits bringing everyone who ever lived
into digital heavens. It came out in ~2010.

------
0x445442
"My big picture view of this is that broad access to the facts is empowering
to everyone who can get it. The broadening of that power base to include more
people comes at the expense of the oligarchs of the world, who are always
going to be able to reap power, wealth, and benefits from keeping everybody
else in the dark."

This is a very interesting quote to me because it's the type of quote that
"the oligarchy" uses to label those like Alex Jones wing nut conspiracy
theorists.

------
mxcrossb
Why is social media the poster child for algoritmically driven content? If
anything, social media response to scale hasn’t been to use algorithms to
drive content from top down, but instead to crowd source that information. Yes
Facebook might rearrange your newsfeed. But the information it shows is still
driven by the likes and shares of your network. On places like reddit it is
driven by upvotes, or hash tags and retweets on twitter. The algorithm is
secondary to the user group.

Thus if we really are going to blame social media, it’s because we aren’t more
selective about the social networks we embed ourselves in. But this of course
is a problem that existed from the dawn of humanity.

~~~
detaro
The problem is still that the algorithms cause problems. Social media is also
a poster child because we could actually observe the transition in many cases:
Early Twitter and Facebook as far as I know had entirely chronological
timelines, and then changed that to "increase engagement", with all the side-
effects that has. Just some examples:

\- boosting things that are already popular increases their measured
popularity even more, which both

a) over-emphasizes things that get reacted to quickly, which means e.g. quick
outragous headlines get even more benefit over more in-depth coverage than
they already do by human nature and

b) over-emphasizes popular sources over niche ones.

\- Facebook actually does guesses at audiences, which means liking something
can actually mean you _decrease_ it's reach with the intended audience. (the
"Facebook mom problem": if you post e.g. about your latest scientific paper
and your mom likes it immediately, because that's what moms do, Facebook
assumes it's family content and is less likely to show it to professional
contacts that are the actual audience)

\- for commercial content, Facebook intentionally limits reach among people
who explicitly choose to follow you unless you pay for visibility

------
earenndil
Technologically, it seems to be pretty speculative and hand-wavy. Consider:

> One thing we do know about quantum computers is that once we can get them to
> work, which is no small task, they will be unbelievably fast and increase
> available computing power by orders of magnitude compared to traditional
> computers

> The near-future world of _Fall_ is full of familiar buzzwords and concepts.
> Augmented reality headsets, next-gen wireless networks, self-driving
> vehicles, facial recognition, quantum computing, blockchain and distributed
> cryptography all feature prominently.

------
hprotagonist
relatedly: [https://www.nealstephenson.com/why-i-am-a-bad-
correspondent....](https://www.nealstephenson.com/why-i-am-a-bad-
correspondent.html)

 _That is not such a terrible outcome, but neither is it an especially good
outcome. The quality of my e-mails and public speaking is, in my view, nowhere
near that of my novels. So for me it comes down to the following choice: I can
distribute material of bad-to-mediocre quality to a small number of people, or
I can distribute material of higher quality to more people. But I can’t do
both; the first one obliterates the second._

~~~
Krasnol
But his books are quite mediocre too (besides those wikipedia articles he adds
to them) so what does it make his speeches?

~~~
rapind
I love his books...

------
netsec_burn
Is this an ad for a book on HN?

------
dang
Url changed from [https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/05/25/0117238/neal-
stephe...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/05/25/0117238/neal-stephenson-
says-social-media-is-close-to-a-doomsday-machine), which points to this.

