
The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism - IfOnlyYouKnew
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/the-dark-side-of-techno-utopianism
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DrScientist
To blame all the $#!+ that's going on Facebook et al is really either missing
the point or willful misdirection.

I'd argue that fear not Facebook brings out the worse in people - fear about
income or place in society.

In my view, the real cause of the recent rise tribalism is rising social
inequality and corrupt politics doing nothing about it.

You could argue then why hasn't democracy acted?

I'd argue that it's paid for content - whether it's ads or partisan coverage,
lobbyists, paid shills, or astroturfed pressure groups all managed by
professional manipulators ( ad people ) - that's the problem, not the medium (
Facebook or TV/radio or whatever).

Why haven't politicians acted decisively on climate change? I don't think it's
the Internets fault.

~~~
roenxi
> rising social inequality and corrupt politics doing nothing about it.

People keep saying inequality but I'm still searching for a convincing
argument as to why my neighbour's life getting better should make me unhappy.
I really don't see it.

The problem is more likely to be that employee productivity has been
completely delinked from compensation. That means that a lot of economic
measurements showing good times are irrelevant. Eg, to a typical worker
productivity growth prior to ~1971 meant better living conditions.
Productivity growth after 1971 means nothing. Recipe for political disaster,
because now the workforce has no particular incentive to make things better.
Technological improvements just mean layoffs or expenses reeducating.

I can easily see why I should be unhappy about that. If I go from being
responsible for 1% of a companies output to 2%, why isn't there a mechanism
for me to get more money? I dream for a world where workers automatically own
a significant share of the company.

> You could argue then why hasn't democracy acted?

Everyone agrees on symptoms, there is plausible deniability about the problems
because there is just enough disagreement on the root cause.

~~~
DrScientist
We are seeing the first generation where large numbers of children are worse
off than their parents. ie there isn't a sense of general progress.

Parents are working, but children can't find a well paying job or put down a
deposit for a house. The trend in life expectancy is even reversing.

The concept of justice and fairness comes in to play as well - it's not just
about whether people feel they have enough, it's about whether they feel they
are getting a fair share.

If you went to work and got paid the living wage ( just enough to get by ) and
somebody else doing the same job got paid more - most people would feel it was
unfair and be unhappy.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Yes, excellent points. On top of that, people are clearly (as a group) less
well off than their parents, with hardly any pensions, not enough money from a
single income (think about how elizabeth warren's mom supported the family and
a house with just a min. wage job in the 50s).

It's only people who are in special job categories today (like say
programmers) who have so much opportunity. And nothing lasts forever.

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dsfyu404ed
This article compares the internet with the invention of the printing press
and lays out the pros and cons before coming down solidly on the con side.
However, we generally agree that the printing press was very good for society
in the long run and the author fails to address the question as to why it's
different this time around.

~~~
ineedasername
The longer version is the author noting that the printing press, with
publishers, ultimately had curators that hand picked which content to publish.
Social media tends to the opposite extreme. That is the context of the
author's "con" position, and why it is different this time around.

Of course, the techno-utopian view would probably hold that some new version
of curation can/will arise to address the issue, so that's one possible
counter argument to the author's pessimism. In fact we seem to be in the early
stages with platforms trying (albeit very, very, very imperfectly) to filter
out false, misleading, or harmful content.

~~~
Kalium
It's true, would-be intermediaries often mourn the loss of their status. They
rarely consider that they might not win it back in the future they wish for.

A cynical view would be that this author wants a pulpit from which to preach
The Truth unchallenged, and resents the diversity of viewpoints that come from
the internet.

~~~
airstrike
> diversity of viewpoints that come from the internet

I subscribe the idea that the internet produces diverse echo chambers, but not
necessarily a plurality of opinions engaged in healthy debate.

Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think the biggest issue with today's media stems
from the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine with no adequate replacement
(media-ownership rules, increased public broadcasting, etc.)

~~~
Kalium
I subscrbe to the idea that the Fairness Doctrine era media ecosystem produced
a diversity of voices, not necessarily opinions engaged in healthy debate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not sure it is the business of
government to be deciding what is or isn't healthy debate or trying to
encourage it. It's far too easy to decide that healthy is things that agree
with you, and unhealthy is everything else. This is routine in a number of
places in the world that I would rather not live in.

This is quite aside from the practical questions of how a person might square
the constitutional questions around the Fairness Doctrine with the internet.
The considerations that allowed it to apply to radio and TV don't work in an
internet context.

Call me an idealist, but I don't see why we need to structure things around
deciding for the public what speech they are and aren't allowed to be exposed
to. We're mostly talking about adults generally capable of making their own
decisions, aren't we?

~~~
airstrike
> Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not sure it is the business of
> government to be deciding what is or isn't healthy debate or trying to
> encourage it.

I think it's the business of government to encourage debate, as that's really
the same as encouraging education. The government wasn't providing agendas on
what ought to be discussed when the Fairness Doctrine was in place, just
forcing people to debate a little more

~~~
Kalium
The core of the Fairness Doctrine was that the FCC's opinions of what "honest,
equitable, and balanced" meant were legally binding. Whether or not that could
ever be anything other than forcing people to debate a little more depends, in
my opinion, a great deal on a person's faith in the immunity to corrupting
influence of executive bodies with political oversight.

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rblion
All these articles are saying the same few things in different words now. I am
a little burnt out on this topic at this point. I've felt this and said this
for almost a decade now.

Technology amplifies our nature. It is a neutral force. Being mindful and
having empathy are not just good habits but foundational to being healthy and
happy in the 21st century.

~~~
hasbroslasher
Yeah, this is one tired trope. I'm especially bored of the "Facebook causes
the rise of nationalism/fascism" rhetoric - I think it's pretty convenient to
scapegoat the Zuck (who is an asshole, oblivious, naive, etc.) with something
so complex and fueled by so many factors outside of the internet. "Russians
made us do it because Facebook" is such a wonderful cop out because it means
we can't really _do_ anything to fix it, and it's totally _not_ our fault. And
we're addicted to such messages - that the terrorists hate our freedom, that
poor people are just jealous losers, that scientists are moralizing assholes
for telling us not to eat steak every day - and we even prefer these messages
because they let us be the victim of the cruel outside world, rather than
understanding how our own complacency, ignorance, or greed has worsened
situations.

None of these articles place as much emphasis on the selling-off of our
regulatory systems, the dismantling of election law, the homogenization of
American thought in the televisual era, or the truly rampant epidemics of
complacency, addiction, hedonism, and consumerism as possible catalysts behind
a nation rapidly declining into total social schism.

~~~
scarejunba
Exactly. Facebook is a convenient scapegoat because people can't
simultaneously hold in their head the two concepts "My grandfather is loving
and kind and good to his family" and "My grandfather hates Mexicans and gay
people". An easy way to resolve this is "Zuckerberg deceived him!".

~~~
ordinaryradical
I think this misses that it's easy to type some of the nastiest things you can
imagine into a comment prompt, but it is substantially harder to set up a box
on a college campus and shout them through a megaphone, particularly when you
start getting nasty looks, jeered at, or harrassed.

Facebook is the perfect outlet for every dingus who thinks themselves
transgressive for having a cruel opinion or two but who can't handle the the
cost of social ostracism.

This outlet reinforces and radicalizes beliefs gradually because there is no
obvious "cost" or "censure" for saying horrible things about your fellow man
except, perhaps, being unfollowed. The most unwell in our society use sites
like facebook and 4chan and particularly their say-anything mechanism as
incubators for their paranoia and rage and then go kill people. There's an
obvious cause and effect here, even if the person was unwell prior to engaging
with the site.

So, no, it's not Facebook's fault that people think and say this stuff, but it
has created a mechanism to amplify it. And the design of the system, driven by
"engagement" (aka addiction), creates a negative feedback loop. The more awful
something is, the angrier we get, the more we engage, comment, argue, and the
higher it climbs in the feed.

They are _definitely_ responsible for this algorithm, at the very least.

------
macawfish
The internet is still being invented. There is work to be done.

~~~
onemoresoop
We're at the walled garden stage. Who knows what's next?

~~~
bizkitgto
> Who knows what's next?

More walls.

~~~
onemoresoop
And then? What comes after the walls? Toppling them? A period of perceived
freefom and disruption followed by more walls?

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rauchp
"his claim that the post-Facebook world 'is better,' as he put it in his note
in November, is arguable, at best"

A horrible statement in an otherwise decent article. There's a lot of work to
be done in keeping these platforms safe, I agree. The article does a really
good job of highlighting the uncontrollable growth these communities
experienced and the founders' inability to control it.

But to state that an interconnected world is "at best" arguably better? The
author comes off as a luddite who disregards the largest human network in
history, just because of their anger towards Zuckerberg or Facebook as a
corporation. Things need to change, but let's not downplay what we're dealing
with here. There has been so much commercial, personal, and community growth
thanks to Facebook's network effects. This isn't about the wealth of a single
individual anymore.

~~~
whiddershins
Yes, I think it’s ok to put the idea out that maybe Facebook hasn’t had a net
beneficial effect on humanity.

Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. Certainly the interconnectedness in general is
moving us forward.

But Facebook in particular is amazing at capturing your attention and
manipulating your emotions to get you to spend more time in Facebook. It is a
responsive actor that learns what you respond to, and it’s interests are not
aligned with yours.

Without Facebook, would we have settled on something less malicious?

That’s impossible to say.

~~~
jerf
"Certainly the interconnectedness in general is moving us forward."

It is undeniably moving us. I can't imagine the argument that it's not moving
us. But I'd submit unless you mean "forward" in the trivial temporal sense, I
am unconvinced it's "forward" in the general sense.

I blame as the root cause the mismatch of incentives between Facebook making
money via advertising vs. the user's desires and goals. Advertising gives
Facebook billions of dollars worth of incentives to invade privacy, hook
people to ways of giving up their personal info, manipulating them in ways to
ever up "engagement" with the ads specifically (not just the service in
general). That's a big negative in my book, possibly as large as "break the
political system" large.

On the positive side, we can't credit Facebook with everything thats happens
on their service. At best they get the difference of the good social
interactions that happen today minus the ones that were already happening
without them (and can still happen without them), e.g., school and family
reunions and parties happened before Facebook.

Until we do something to remove these incentives created as a second-order
effect of trying to build services on top of advertising alone, anything is
going to be toxic, whether or not it's called "Facebook".

The Internet is now primarily a tool for serving eyeballs to advertisers at
any and all costs, rather than a tool for serving people. How can any other
outcome occur until that is fixed?

------
platz
Jaron Lanier made a pretty good argument that the dedication and belief of
freedom of information in the 80's is what pushed businesses to adopt the
advertisement/surveillance capitalism model

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platz
"These are Gothic High-Tech figures, people who position themselves in the
narrative rather than building any permanent infrastructure"

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p4bl0
Is there a light side to it?

~~~
godelski
I don't know about you, but I sure do like indoor pluming.

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buboard
blah blah . why should i read the rest of this. it contains jewels like this:

> had Hillary Clinton been elected, as __most people expected __, it’s
> unlikely that social-media founders would now have as much reason to reckon
> with what they’ve wrought

who's most people? It's sad to see people die on hills but sometimes they
bring it upon themselves.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
There is absolutely no doubt that most expected HRC to win. They obviously
erred, but that doesn't change the truth of the statement.

~~~
buboard
Who is ‘most’?

~~~
Qwertystop
Almost everyone making election predictions with a decent-sized platform, as I
recall.

~~~
buboard
that's not "most people" though

