There are a lot of interesting societal effects caused by the internet and social media, many of them very problematic. But when was this time in the past when people agreed about facts? Is it during the period of time when we lionized science after WWII and before the 80s but during which smoking was still healthy? Or was it when the Church decided what was true? Or was it when Hearst could print what he wanted and make it so? We have been in the Miasma since the dawn of civilization.
Neal Stephenson had a hand in sparking my interest in cuneiform and I've read many tablets myself (mostly Ugaritic and some Akkadian). The same effects are evident all the way to the beginning of recorded history, and likely predate it. The Miasma is the result of any indirect epistemology combined with human proclivities. There is a certain scale and swiftness that is novel, but it's not yet a brand new thing: much as flash crashes on the stock market are a new side-effect of high frequency trading, the crash of 1929 happened just fine without it.
The Miasma is us, not the tech we use to connect us.
>But when was this time in the past when people agreed about facts? Is it during the period of time when we lionized science after WWII and before the 80s but during which smoking was still healthy? Or was it when the Church decided what was true? Or was it when Hearst could print what he wanted and make it so? We have been in the Miasma since the dawn of civilization.
I see this fallacy quite often. Just because we had something in the past doesn't mean we e.g. don't have it 10x now.
It's like arguing that nuclear weapons are nothing special, we had spears and arrows since forever...
Scale matters, degree matters, automation matters, and technology is a multiplier. At some point amassed quantity becomes a new quality.
A government could have someone followed for example in the past, for example.
That was true even in ancient Rome. But 24/7 tracking of everybody, everywhere, made possible with mobile phones, GPS, facial recognition, plate recognition, and so on, is a totally new ballgame, not even available to the Stazi or KGB. A dictatorship with those tools at hands can do much more damage than one that just can tap into few phone calls with manual labor, or have someone followed. We can't dismiss it as "governments could always track someone if they wanted it".
Similarly, we can't dismiss the effect of the internet, because we had yellow press and smoked...
Fortunately we have a real-world example to demonstrate the effect of technology on surveillance: China. Let's see if they ever manage to become a democracy.
On this topic I've noticed something quaint on HN: people making excuses for China's "special" situation or even arguing against democracy itself.
> On this topic I've noticed something quaint on HN: people making excuses for China's "special" situation or even arguing against democracy itself.
I don't think it's quaint or HN-specific, especially if you talk with people outside of tech. People make excuses for China because the official narrative ("we're Good Guys who do Good Things, they're Evil People who Hate our Freedom") is bullshit, and are also impressed with their ability to execute large-scale infrastructure projects, something the West no longer can. On the other side, they look at how democratic governments are primarily a tax-funded, continuously running standup comedy.
But the conclusion from that isn't "China good, democracy bad"; you won't find many people who would actually prefer for their government to be replaced by the CCP. People are just asking, "could we stop with the bullshit good/evil narrative, try to understand them and their motivations instead, and perhaps figure out how to do infrastructure again and make our politics be less of a shit-show"? I'd say it's a fair sentiment.
I doubt that anyone's concerned about the average Chinese citizen and whether they're evil. The discussions are always about the government.
The fact that "we" whoever might that be are not the good guys doesn't actually influence whether the Chinese government are the bad guys. Their behavior makes them the bad guys.
>On this topic I've noticed something quaint on HN: people making excuses for China's "special" situation or even arguing against democracy itself.
I'm of several different minds about this.
a) I'm against many things the Chinese government is doing (religious persecution, surveillance, credit system, censorship, etc.).
b) I prefer populations to find their own way, not to be subjected to foreign intervention. If they want western-style democracy they should bring it themselves.
c) Foreign interventions are always or almost always hypocritical and self-serving. Especially when the same foreign powers play friends with dictators or support a worst regime at the same time they condemn another. There's also a track record of living places worse than they were, from (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.).
d) The foreign population is easily manipulated as to the truth on the ground, especially if a country is the "enemy du jour". It's easy to find dissidents and make it like the whole nation agrees with them on this or that matter, when it doesn't. Especially if the people you find are more like your culture (e.g. westernized in this case), which could make it even less representative to their compatriots, but more likable to your population. Bad as the CCP can be, it can still be the case that many Chinese still like it -- after all the country does well, they rise out of poverty, the might feel safer, be more conservative, etc. Heck, some Americans can't fathom why half their country can possibly like Trump, and they'll know whether the average Chinese might be OK with the regime?
e) China especially might be worse off if the CCP doesn't hold, especially with a sudden transition. It already had very bloody civil wars for the best part of the 20th century. Imagine the forces and power struggles in a 1.6 billion strong country if there's a power vacuum...
f) Democracy is a cultural issue too. E.g. there's the saying "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety". But that's a tradeoff people might knowingly make still (plus "temporary safety" is a weasel word - what's to say they don't get real long-term safety by the trade-off?). In any case, some cultures might not prefer democracy (either because it's all relative, and down to preference, either, if we want to make a "our side knows best" stance, because they're not mature enough to want it). Decorative or not, for example, I can't understand why the British don't behead their royalty and be done with it. But there are people there who genuinely love it (even coming up with BS arguments, like tourism, for all the resources the royalty steals from the nation).
g) Many of the complains against China (not about domestic democracy government abuse), like "IP theft", unfair "government businesses/subsidies", have been leveled against Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. Japan especially had all the same concerns, with the same ton ("stealing our IP", "their government funds their businesses", "they can only make copies of our stuff"), discussions in congress, heated debates in the press, etc. Also the whole "they're buying us" in the late 80s/early 90s when the Japanese bought US companies, Hollywood studios, record companies, etc. Most of those concerns are of the "those are good when we do them", variety (eg. trillion dollar Detroit bailout, huge agriculture and telcom subsidies, and so on) or the "we did them in the past and they benefited us greatly, now that we don't need them anymore they are bad" variety (e.g. https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/ ).
Your points are mostly related to the Chinese internal politics. Even if we look away from their human rights abuses, say because the US also has a bad track record, China's using their economical power to bully other countries and companies into self-censorhip and ignoring those abuses. They're essentially trying to legitimize their unsavory actions, and they're at least partly succeeding.
So they are harming our democracies, never-mind their citizens.
Well, "our democracies", self-censor all the time at many scales (from government to news to entertainment) in matters that suit us, eg. Saudi Arabia, so there's that.
Hollywood for example doesn't cosy-up to China because they're bullied, but to sell more movie seats there. I'd say the same thing is true for Apple's case.
> Decorative or not, for example, I can't understand why the British don't behead their royalty and be done with it.
As long as we have a Monarch, our PM can never become President. Even though the power of the Monarch is theoretical, this still makes for an important distinction because appearances shape the way people think about things.
Just recently we had the PM successfully taken to court for ”misleading advice to the Queen”.
>As long as we have a Monarch, our PM can never become President. Even though the power of the Monarch is theoretical, this still makes for an important distinction because appearances shape the way people think about things.
I don't know, we have a PM here and not a President, and it's not really that great either.
Are humans capable of detecting and understanding what that amplification means? Even though our pattern-matching is a wonderful skill, it doesn't always serve us well. We exaggerate local effects. We are known to be terrible at understanding risk. And I've even heard that nine out of ten dentists are bad at statistics.
I'm not saying we shouldn't ask the question. I'm saying we need a way to answer it that factors out human perceptual error.
Feedback loops are shorter, news reports are increasingly more useless[0], and our current age is somewhat unique - reporting of the past didn't have a strong economic system attached whose sole purpose is making it less truthful, less accurate, and more disagreeable. I'm, of course, talking about funding media through advertising impressions at article granularity.
--
[0] - Gwern makes a really good argument that with the amount of people we have on the planet and how information moves near-instantly around the world, you can plausibly assume that all news reports are flukes, one-in-a-million events, "rare datapoints driven by unusual processes such as the mentally ill or hoaxers are increasingly unreliable as evidence of anything at all and must be ignored." https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood
> before the 80s but during which smoking was still healthy
That's perhaps US-specific but it's certainly a strange view. Europe was issuing anti-tobacco advice and government health warnings in the fifties. The rise in lung cancers was noted pretty much immediately after the war. The US was late to that party, but even so was clear on the link between smoking and health in the sixties. We had anti-smoking and lessons on the effects of tobacco in UK schools in the 1960s, perhaps earlier. I sat through them in the 1970s - they weren't especially effective, but they were there.
That's despite all the free tobacco sent under the Marshall Plan to ensure Europe was good and addicted to Virginia leaf.
> Or was it when the Church decided what was true?
So what, the middle ages? Or the Victorian resurgence?
Neal Stephenson had a hand in sparking my interest in cuneiform and I've read many tablets myself (mostly Ugaritic and some Akkadian). The same effects are evident all the way to the beginning of recorded history, and likely predate it. The Miasma is the result of any indirect epistemology combined with human proclivities. There is a certain scale and swiftness that is novel, but it's not yet a brand new thing: much as flash crashes on the stock market are a new side-effect of high frequency trading, the crash of 1929 happened just fine without it.
The Miasma is us, not the tech we use to connect us.