
My Internet Mea Culpa - pixelcort
https://shift.newco.co/my-internet-mea-culpa-f3ba77ac3eed
======
andr
I grew up in an ex-socialist country and we got our first McDonald's in the
mid 90s. It was an exciting new thing, a new taste, a new model of restaurants
and consumption. My family took us on multiple road trips to the McDonald's,
which was in a different city. Nobody thought about whether it's healthy,
because eating there was a privilege. 20 years later, fast food chains are
everywhere, and if my attitude hadn't changed from the 90s, I'd have a serious
health issue.

I feel like the Internet, and social media in particular, are going through
the same period. What was once exotic and a privilege, is now instantly-
available, algorithmically-optimized junk food. And it's not healthy to use it
as your main source of nutrition.

The good news is that, just like McDonald's didn't kill good, healthy
restaurants, so has social media not killed good, healthy sources of
information. Most of the blogs I followed growing up are still active and
rediscovering them - and setting up an RSS reader again - has been a great
feeling. News sources that give you thoughtful context, instead of a dopamine
feed, like The Economist and The New Yorker, are also thriving. Replacing
podcasts with audiobooks on my dog walk listen has also gave me pause and
perspective.

So my New Year's resolution is every time I open Twitter or Facebook, to ask
myself whether I would eat at a McDonald's today.

~~~
taneq
Every time I find myself scrolling through Facebook, I ask myself "am I here
for me, because I really want to be, or am I here for Facebook because they've
reward-hacked my motivation subsystem?" That thought in itself is usually
enough for me to shrug and close the window.

------
malvosenior
I don’t think this author speaks for a lot of people in tech. His viewpoint
seems to be from a very narrow subculture, mainly Web 2.0 era social
networking.

Some of us have had a lifelong passion for technology and are actually happy
and excited about the current state of the industry (and always have been).

If you don’t like people disagreeing with you on Twitter, just turn it off.
Don’t claim that it’s part of some apparatus (that the author feels he helped
invent) that somehow brought out the worst in humanity. He should feel happy
he can now get exposed to views outside of his bubble.

~~~
skywhopper
It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on
Twitter?" It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many
violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by
what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and
free speech?"

But I don't think even _that's_ the right question. Google, Facebook, Twitter,
and others have built so much trust in algorithm and API and machine learning,
and no one stopped to ask how careful they needed to be with turning over so
much power to a computer program that can and will be gamed by malicious
actors. Hate speech and conspiracy theories and fraud can now be amplified a
millionfold, and the vehicles by which it's happening were not prepared to
deal with the implications. And they continue to double-down on the "more
machine learning will fix it" self-delusion.

~~~
malvosenior
> It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on
> Twitter?"

No, it’s 100% about this. You do know that violent crime is at an all time
low, right (at least in the US)? There is no problem other than the audience
for technology is using it in a way not approved of by _some_ if its creators
(the OP, not me for instance).

If you’re not unhappy with the state of the industry, these think pieces
lamenting it read as _really_ self-centered and out of touch.

~~~
ninkendo
> No, it’s 100% about this. You do know that violent crime is at an all time
> low, right (at least in the US)?

This is incorrect, it's been rising the past couple years:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-
murder-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-
chicago-increase-.html)

~~~
tomnipotent
You forgot this part.

> While crime over all and violent crime remain well below their levels of the
> 1980s and 1990s, last year was the first time violent crime increased in
> consecutive years since 2005 and 2006

------
nemild
While this is a start, we need a more rational debate about technological
trends and their impact.

We (technologists) all get very excited about the possible future (Internet,
Social Media, cryptocurrencies) without being honest with the problems with
these new worlds at scale.

The way it works right now:

1\. Get angry about state of current world (at different times: IBM,
Microsoft, Facebook - or current trends like social media)

2\. Evangelize how new trend will make everything better (today,
decentralization and cryptocurrencies)

3\. Realize that new world has its own set of issues as it grows larger, and
external elements co-opt it for their own needs

I wish that we had more thoughtful debates about the tradeoffs, rather than
seeing new technologies as a panacea.

Entrepreneurs who help grow new industries need the self awareness to realize
the potential problems with the world they help create. As engineers, we're
very attuned to potential ways our system can be technically hacked, but for
some reason forget to think about the other ways these systems can be
"hacked".

For anyone interested, you should read Tim Wu's The Master Switch. It's a
unique window into the idealism of past eras (radio vs telephone, telephone vs
telegraph) - and often disappointment that the early evangelists eventually
feel.

~~~
blfr
If I understand correctly, OP is suggesting that these are not problems of
scale but rather that scale itself is the problem in the sense that it's
untenable for humans.

------
darkr
I enjoyed this article, particularly as someone who tried and failed to
complete Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable” this year.

If the book had been written in 1996, it would have been cute. Unfortunately
it was written/released in 2016; the level of naivety displayed was shocking.
Page after page of techno-utopian stream-of-consciousness futurist
masterbation, without so much as a fleeting thought given to social or
political repercussions.

As a writer, he struck me as either a deeply cynical person, or as someone
with no understanding of humanity at all.

------
tw1010
Funny how Medium started out being branded as the one clean template
alternative to all the others, and has now devolved into just as cluttered as
all the rest.

------
chasing
This feels overdramatic.

The internet has helped humanity in many ways and, frankly, the notion of an
individual apologizing for it is absurd.

I do feel like there are certain cultural assumptions that have not proven
themselves out. Those will need to be addressed if we want to maximize the
value of our shared internet for all of us.

------
zer00eyz
Sigh,

Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used
for good or bad.

The author lost me when they said "Massive amounts of data is still hidden
behind firewalls or not online at all."

Except: Sci-hub, pirate bay, project Gutenberg, wikipedia, IMDB and even here
on hacker news (I could go on but these are big ones).

Technology (in all forms) doesn't change humanity, technology enables humanity
to change. It is just a tool and we have to decide what to do with it.

If for every Peter Theil we get one Ellon Musk, one space x one step toward
progress then by all means I consider it a victory. This is progress, and
compared to previous generations the price has been fairly low.

~~~
sooheon
> Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be
> used for good or bad.

I see this meme everywhere, and I just can't fathom it. Not all tech is
perfectly neutral, just because it's "technology". An iron maiden and a
wheelchair sit on different places in the good - evil spectrum.

~~~
MAJESJIC
I think you are mistaking "technology" as a principle for "technology" as
tools and objects. Technology, as referred to in this "meme" is merely "the
science of craft" and has no moral component on its own. An iron maiden or a
wheelchair may have been made possible by advances in technology as a whole,
but came into being through the imagination of an individual, or individuals,
who created a tool to fulfill a (moral or immoral / good or bad) purpose.

The underlying technology (metallurgy, ironworking) used in the iron maiden is
the foundation for innumerable instruments of a constructive nature, as I'm
sure the lightweight steel and rubberized wheels that made modern wheelchairs
possible have found plenty of applications in military hardware or other
"evil" devices.

Maybe using a gun as an example was a poor choice for this "meme", as it's
hard to put a positive spin on a killing tool. But I believe the message is
that inventions, with respect to humanity, can be wonderful or terrible, but
"technology" is no more good or evil than the physical laws of the universe.
Hope that's a little more fathomable.

~~~
sooheon
Yours is a better argument, only because it claims less, and it is actually
about science, not technology. Rather than proposing technology as a whole
(including its artifacts) is morally neutral, you have limited the scope to
the subset of technology which is knowledge (--ogy) i.e. science.

The difference between science and technology is the physical reification:
i.e., metallurgy as a body of knowledge vs. a functioning smelter. The fact
remains that whenever humans choose to bring artifacts of technology into
existence, they imbue intent, which is varyingly good or evil. The less
particular the intended purpose of the tool, the fuzzier the morality, until
you get to very general technology such as "wheels" and "fulcrums", or retreat
into science, as you have done with your examples of "metallurgy" or
"ironworking".

I still think it's nonsense to call all technology perfectly neutral, while I
agree that science can be.

> "technology" is no more good or evil than the physical laws of the universe.

This is utter bullshit.

Technology differs from the laws of the universe precisely because it embodies
the intentions of humans to harness said laws for their purposes, good or bad.
That is what functionally distinguishes technology from random complexity.

------
ep103
I think you could make an argument for the exact opposite. No, we have not
reached the gifts my father or grandfather thought the internet would bring to
society. For every hope that widespread communication would bring
understanding among the populace and bring power to people instead of the
elite, we now have a bot army or fake news infrastructure working to oppose
those ideals.

But I think these problems, and the problems the author points to, are the
result of the current, pre-internet world order attempting to impose itself on
the modern web, not the other way around.

We've already seen the massive effects of the internet on the populace over
the last 15 years or so, and I think a lot of those changes have been both
quiet, and genuinely good for people (How many things are common knowledge
now, that were never reported on the news, as a quick example?). What we're
seeing now is the empire strikes back, as established organizations attempt to
impose themselves back on this newly connected world before they go the way of
the music industry. Whether this is done by manipulating people online,
walling off sections of the internet, flooding the internet with
propaganda/tracking/advertising, or simply removing the open nature of the
internet in entirety (Net Neutrality), the drive appears to always be the
same: large pre-internet organizations imposing traditional order on a new
medium. And I think it is these efforts that are responsible for the majority
of issues the author raises.

Though that's not to say the internet itself doesn't have a fair share of
problems. But even where the internet seems at its worst, I think the problems
still primarily come from traditional societal organizations, and it is they,
not the internet, that should take the blame and be the focus of change. Let's
take the surprisingly large influence of racism and fascism that appears to
exist online as an example, easily one of the worst aspects of the internet.

I think prevalence of hate speech online exists for two major reasons. The
first and largest driving force, is that the internet has revealed that
outside of the internet, there are essentially no actually truly-free,
anonymous, free speech places in a person's life. Even online, the number of
places where one can state whatever they would like, to their hearts content,
without having those thoughts potentially affect their daily life, are
extremely rare and need to be sought out. Is it any surprise, then, that the
people who seek out such forums are often those who are upset at the end of
the day, and feel a need to spit some vitriol? Or that the users of such
forums specifically focus saying things they know they could not say in any
other aspect of their life?

I fail to see this as a shortcoming of the internet, and see it more as an
indictment of society at large. Perhaps if there were more places where one
can truly speak out at the end of a day, and be heard but not judged or
discriminated against, less people would be willing to rage alone against an
empty screen. But even if you reject this idea, then the alternative to me
seems worse. Because the alternative is that we have to accept that the
average person is not capable, or should not be allowed, to navigate
accountability-free communication, and society will need to be built
accordingly going forward. Hopefully I don't need to point out the obvious
downside to embracing such a philosophy.

That said, I think we did make, and are making one major design mistake,
consistently online. And that is that we need to recognize that the way human
society works, is that new ideas are shouted by individuals all the time, and
then the silent masses judge them, mostly silently, and embrace them slowly
into their day to day. On a webpage design level, this needs to be taken into
account. If you are listing all comments on your webpage with equal weight,
then we need to accept that you're going to get a pretty consistent
distribution of comments ranging from insightful to hateful, and from thought-
provoking to headache inducing. But if you allow the masses to weigh in, for
example, by voting on comments, you'll find that most of the nauseating hate-
filled ideas quickly fall off the radar, just like they do in real life. This
is the difference between say, youtube comments and reddit comments. I would
love to see websites start taking this a step further, and automatically start
banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a certain threshold, just
how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner after
his first diatribe is found to be crazy.

~~~
neveroffensive
> I would love to see websites start taking this a step further, and
> automatically start banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a
> certain threshold, just how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on
> the sidewalk corner after his first diatribe is found to be crazy.

Why even bother banning them. This just silences the opinion, which
technically could still be valid. I'm sure at some points in history gay and
civil rights activists would have been the ones getting banned.

I agree about the down-voting, but I truly feel we need to stop babying people
in regard to controversial opinions. If you can't reject and ignore a
blatantly racist and unfounded opinion, I'd argue you shouldn't be
participating in discussions of any kind. This seems like a fundamental skill
necessary to coexist in human society.

Edit:

I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to participate in discussion if you
get angry and offended by an opinion. This is totally fine. However, if you
need someone to step in and hold guns/ban hammers to peoples heads to exist,
maybe the problem isn't with society, but with you.

~~~
thinkingemote
As an early user of the Internet, I was taught "don't feed the troll". We
also, once a troll was persistent and identified, banned them.

Do today's users feed them, have they not got the message I learnt, or is it
that today's web tools allows a troll to be fed much easily?

I see the need for moderation, (4chan is actually heavily moderated as an
example) and I also see the need for users to have the skills in identifying
and not feeding trolls. Identifing trolls and actively not feeding takes
effort. Perhaps todays web assumes users shouldn't expend effort and are
overly moderated. Freedom Vs comfort?

~~~
jonreem
We have long since entered into an "Eternal September" in regards to things
like this. For everyone that knows not to feed the trolls there are seven
people who are happy to do it.

Trolls are also getting increasingly more adept at not appearing like trolls -
their entire goal is to draw you in, if it's too easy to spot then it doesn't
work. They adapt and evolve just like the rest of us.

------
abusoufiyan
The Internet was how I really learned what people really thought about others,
and it wasn't a nice thing to realize but it was necessary. My whole life I
was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of
your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc.
It was easy when no one would say to your face that they judged you on these
things. It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many
people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity.

We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people
in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be
exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened.
We forgot that the traditional barriers to intercultural understanding are
still there: language, tribal sentiment, political and economic power
structures, etc. At the end of the day, in a democracy the majority can do
anything it wants, even if what it wants is to punish the minority. The
Internet has had all the failings of a total democracy in that sense.

I also love the point the author makes at the end. Silicon Valley loves to
think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every
ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on
faith and not on evidence. It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith
on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic
space was founded, are...wrong...

~~~
neveroffensive
> It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as
> a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded,
> are...wrong...

I don't really understand this sentiment. If we admit that we all hold beliefs
that could be wrong, isn't the ultimate conclusion radical freedom? The
radical freedom of the internet isn't a result of a set of beliefs, it's the
result of evicting belief and allowing all ideas to stand on their own merit.

> We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people
> in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be
> exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has
> happened.

I think you're wrong here. The world is becoming an exponentially more
peaceful and tolerant place in my experience. There is still a vocal minority
which gets attention thanks to the open platform, but the overall result of
this openness seems to be growing disdain for beliefs which we now know are
founded in hate, not logic or science. Do you really feel that the world is in
a worse place than it was in the 70's or even in 2010? In what ways?

> It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people
> iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity.

Genuine question, what percentage of 4chan do you believe is racist? Do you
feel that racist memes genuinely come from a place of racism? What large
anonymous groups do you believe consist of genuine racists? Do you consider me
a racist if I make the statement, "more crime in America is committed by
people with dark skin, relatively", even if I make no attempt to suggest a
correlation or reason for this statistic?

~~~
AgentME
>Genuine question, what percentage of 4chan do you believe is racist? Do you
feel that racist memes genuinely come from a place of racism?

Five years ago, I'd say a small fraction and "No", but I no longer believe
either of those. The amount of vocal support for possible racist policies,
celebration of politicians' racist dog-whistling, and worship of neo-Nazi
figures since then was way higher than I ever expected. When it was just jokes
and memes, it was easy to write off as ironic, and maybe much of it was, but
real support can't be written off as ironic. Maybe the people changed over the
years, or maybe it's just different people. (Maybe ironic memes drew in people
that liked them unironically: "Any community that gets its laughs by
pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who
mistakenly believe that they're in good company.") Or maybe it's largely the
same people, but the relationship between the internet and politics has
changed since then, with people more willing to fully discuss their political
ideas (including racist ones) now online.

~~~
CaptSpify
But that's kind of a feature, rather than a bug. Speaking for the USA: We're a
pretty racist country, that's not news to anyone. What was news, especially
for the coasts, was just _how_ racist much of the US still is.

By giving these people a voice, we now know that they exist, and what they
really believe. You _never_ would have gotten that out of them by just talking
to them on the street.

Do certain parts of internet culture encourage that behavior? Absolutely, and
it's terrible, and we need to find ways to fix it. But to fix that problem, we
need to understand it first.

~~~
MBCook
Before the racists were, to some degree, self-censoring due to their fear of
how they were perceived by others. In many cases they would try to conform
more so that they wouldn’t be outcast.

Now people are far more aware how many racists are in the US. And many of them
have taken that as proof that there’s nothing wrong with their way of thinking
and are censoring themselves less. They are discussing their beliefs and
pushing their agendas stronger than they have in a long time.

Is that an actual improvement? Before all but some of the most hard-core we’re
effectively incentivized to be more accepting. Now they’ve learned not only do
they not have to do that, they can STRENGTHEN their position knowing there are
others like them.

Given the level of backlash they’ve faced, I don’t think it’s an improvement.

~~~
krapp
I think it is an improvement, though.

American society had an excuse, before. Racists weren't tolerated, but also
weren't confronted. They were allowed to gather power so long as they did so
quietly, and decent people could pretend that there wasn't a problem. Now, at
least, the internet has made the problem impossible to ignore. A disease which
is never diagnosed can never be treated.

~~~
MBCook
Time will certainly tell. If we had seen a much bigger backlash I would’ve
agreed with you. Right now I’m not sure whether this is a giant step backward,
a small step backward, or (in the long run) not a real change at all.

Unless something big changes in the next year or two I’m having a hard time
seeing it as any sort of progress.

After all the GOP had decided to be much more inclusive and welcoming after
getting trounced in 2012. Last year America taught them that was the wrong
lesson.

I really hope this is a “last gasp“ kind of thing but my pessimism says it
isn’t.

~~~
krapp
From my perspective, the backlash has already been more significant than
expected.

But, the embrace of racism, anti-Semitism, historical revisionism, anti-
scientific and neo-fascist ideologies seem to be both an expression of
generational counterculture rejecting the status quo of "liberal" and
"politically correct" thought, and a reactionary movement by the right-wing
political establishment trying to maintain relevance in the face of changing
ethnic, religious and gender dynamics in the US. I suspect real societal
change will take much more than a year or two, or even a swing of the
political pendulum from Red Team back to Blue Team. It might take generations,
maybe long enough for children to reject the ideals of their alt-right and
neoreactionary parents, the way the yuppies rejected the hippies, and the
hippies rejected the beatniks.

------
jhiska
Too little, too late.

At this irreversible point it's not actual actionable regret, but a merely
symbolic act meant to save their conscience from hellish guilt.

Besides, the blame for the Facebook-surveillance state and "alternative" facts
is dispersed over hundreds of thousands of people. No single individual is
responsible. It's an out-sized ego with out-sized guilt that motivates him to
write the article.

------
CodinM
I just want to take the time to tell the author that he's not that important
and I couldn't give a flying rat about him and his egotistical opinion.

