Peter Wang in the recent Lex Fridman interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0-SXS6zdEQ - gave me names for concepts I'd been noticing but couldn't quite put my finger on, essentially the pitfalls and externalized costs of "homogeneous demand" that's created via ads and algorithms - driving consumerism through making economy of scale easier to reach by generating more buyers at same time, and similarly leads to ideology or group think as you mention.
People see what they want to see in it, other people see it causing divisiveness where you see it causing conformity. It will take us decades to understand the effects.
In decades there won't be anyone around who remembers when things were different.
We're in an interesting time right now, when at least 50% of people in first-world countries remember a time before the internet (obviously higher in countries with less internet adoption)
In 70 years, everyone alive will have grown up in a world where the Internet was everywhere.
Yeah but in more time I think we'll eventually figure it out. The invention of Gutenberg's Printing Press was massively disruptive of both Europe and the Islamic world and in Europe kicked off hundreds of years of war. Eventually we got used to the fact that you can't trust everything you read on print. Hopefully we'll work something out with the internet as well.
These aren't mutually exclusive. I see the internet as mostly segmenting us into separate echo chambers that do not want to compromise. In the past, most people learned some degree of empathy because while they support policy X they also talk to their neighbor who hates policy X because of reasons A, B, and C. Now people will just ignore their neighbor who hates X and instead go online and find a community that builds their identity atop hating a bevy of policies that include X.
There's definitely pros to this as instead of having to hide things like your sexual orientation in your community due to bigotry you can go online and find others like you. There are also cons abound, where instead of (for example, not trying to push policy here) ranting about how nobody rides the bus and encountering your neighbor whose car broke down and is riding the bus you instead go online and talk to other people who think buses are stupid.
Bullshit indeed, but for your disagreement. Just a brief look at the general opinion regarding cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and a number of other positions clearly shows a certain hive mind tendency. It's not complete and there are indeed many dissenting voices with their own nuanced opinions, but the downvote and upvote system is also present to further encourage groupthink positions.
I don’t think it’ll take decades to understand the many many obvious effects. Saying it’ll take decades to work out the effects feels like an attempt to obsfucate or deflect.
Although I’d agree if you are referring to secondary effects — they will take a little longer to manifest. But we are certainly seeing some of those already.
It just turns out most of that thought isn't worth hearing, is easily manipulated externally and by emotions, and poorly educated.
I've stared to think that handing everyone the "microphone" of something like YouTube is actually a way to prevent even moderately subversive thought from ever reaching the mainstream.
Basically let people say what they want - but they have to complete with every other loud moron, while ignoring the manufacturing of consent through traditional channels.
It's horribly dystopian. I almost long for a time when running a pirate radio station meant you had a political message you felt needed to be heard.
Pirate radio stations generally weren't run by people who had things that needed to be heard, in the US most notable examples were simply people who thought broadcasting music illegally was worth getting raided by the feds.
In these times of compassion when conformity's in fashion
Say one more stupid thing to me before the final nail is driven in
- Bob Dylan, Foot of Pride (1983) rec. w/Sly+Robbie,Knopfler
Even before social media got big, corporatization and consolidation had killed what made the 90s Internet so special. The reasons the corporate template started to rule the Internet in place of personal hobby websites are the same things that make Western society in general less vibrant. People want to participate, but everything is complex and they don't have enough time to be experts at everything (as with car maintenance, right-to-repair, and disposable/smart appliances that most people don't like); the threat of bad actors makes non-template sites dangerous or perceived as dangerous (as with letting kids go play outside); efficient template makers eat everybody else's lunch (as with franchise restaurants and soulless big-box stores); and when exhausted people are a captive audience, manipulative people with money can farm their attention (as with offline politics and advertising, and TV). The problem isn't new and it isn't really about group-think; it just caught up with the power of the Internet.
upvotes & downvotes are just the most obvious solution to the noise problem that plagues the internet. Nothing at cost is a blessing and a curse at the same time. We won't solve the internet until we figure out how to solve these fundamental issues in a sustainable bottom-up and incentive-driven way. Which is clearly an immensely hard problem.
group think exists because the average person has the average opinions. the more people that are in a sample, the more that sample's thinking will skew toward the average.
if you don't like group think, avoid popular websites like this one and stick to smaller, more like minded communities
It may be controversial but I believe 3 things can be done:
1. Government grants for open source alternative development. Aka fed oversee and what not can apply for grants.
2. Label all social media and phones common carriers.
3. Require common carriers to be subject to FOIA and audits by citizens. This would include source code. They can still profit from being centralized for the time being, because of networking effects that likely won’t change.
My final thought is that social media shouldn’t be tied to ones public identity.
The Overton window is a form of group think that’s pervasive across what people think of as the political spectrum. Outsider views isn’t simply pro and anti X, or even flat earth whack jobs it’s the full realm of possibilities.
It’s easy to think of say communism in reference to the horrors of recent history, but it showed up before the US civil war. In the context of slavery and the often stated “need” to compensate people who owned slaves before freeing them it suddenly seems very different. Which just demonstrates how ideologies are shaped by the time period and why understanding history takes more than a history textbook.
Actually reading old newspapers or political speeches is eye opening in the way that’s hard to summarize. https://www.loc.gov/newspapers/?dates=1920-1929 first page of first newspaper The Evening Star (March 8, 1920) “Income tax on dividends held Invalid by Supreme Court Government To Refund Millions” alongside “President takes ride in Automobile” which was apparently newsworthy including the prohibition of taking his photo. Just as interesting “Woman instantly killed by an Auto” referring to a car accident was a front page story. Meanwhile “Democrats Figure Electoral Victory on “WET” plank” referring to a lighter version of prohibition while still prohibiting saloons and Whisky. “British to Sell no part of West Indies to the US” which shows the past wasn’t just a history timeline it was filled with unrealized possibilities.
It may be my bubble but this doesn't seem that controversial and instead fairly sensible. While I'd also love to see #1 and see it expanded toward infrastructural development (e.g. have a grant funded body research advancements with internet standards), I don't think it's as necessary as #2 and #3. The fact that social media can apply their own moderation standards but still be treated like common carriers is pretty ridiculous.
The principles of the Enlightenment (scientific method) via post-modernism or post-positivism (particularly skepticism of power and of myself, and the fallibility of human perception and cognitive ability) work really, really well in the current environment. They are almost a panacea - very powerful. Simply have some faith and use them; it's not hard; and then you are free from the oppressive weight of it all. (And stop wasting your time reading the other stuff.)
From the perspective of those tools, the problems are brazen - if you accept that there is, effectively, a 'big lie' (without one specific liar). That it's possible for so many to be so misled, for the social norms (groupthink) to be so widespread and wrong, is shocking to experience first-hand. Looking at history, it shouldn't be surprising at all.
What prevents such widespread ignorance is the Enlightenment and post-modernism/positivism. It should not be surprising that the problems are so brazen and that the 'old' tools work so well. It's not coincidence; we got here by discarding them, by (bizarrely) disarming ourselves. The results are completely predictable - discard scientific reasoning and critical thinking and you get lies and conspiracies. Throw away post-modernism and you get, almost immediately it seems, the same cults of power and personality that it protects us from. The consequences aren't overwhelmingly clear to observe. Whoever drives the reactionary movement, one of their first targets was those tools and the norms and institutions that support them: fact, critical thinking, education, all the humanities.
(I'm speaking a bit loosely about the philosophical terms, but close enough, I think, for my point.)
Damn you nailed it down. I wanted to write something similair but your text nails it. This is the problem that people who are enlighted Don’t want to engage into discussions on social media because screaming at each other is not a part of enlightnment. Here at hackernews there is at least the diskussion….once upon a time I got facebook… thats pure imbicil mayhem…
FYI, places like Usenet are still around. Usenet is full of spam, trolls, and obnoxious contrarians, but you can post about whatever you'd like, receive replies for whomever, and never have to deal with upvote politics or comment pile-ons. Ask your friends to join you in these sorts of spaces.
One newsgroup I recommend is `comp.sys.raspberry-pi`. It has a pretty high SNR and is quite active, especially in comparison to some other groups on Usenet.
Does that mean the Eternal September[1] is almost over?
We're about at what, September 20th or so? Maybe later in the month if we account for people too young to use the internet, or unable to do so for some reason.
Or maybe it has already ended, if we define it as a ratio of new internet users joining per month compared to the existing user base [2].
Question: What will be the effect of the majority of internet users being EXPERIENCED internet users, increasingly so over time, compared to the last 10-20 years where a higher proportion has been new, inexperienced users?
[2] "Whereas the regular September student influx would quickly settle down, the influx of new users from AOL did not end and Usenet's existing culture did not have the capacity to integrate the sheer number of new users" (from [1])
It’s about the size of the network, not the size of the Internet. There are many community networks that run atop the Internet. Each one will have an eternal September if they move from niche to popularity and have their culture changed. In fact this phenomenon isn’t even new to the Internet. As companies or countries grow many bemoan about how “the organization just isn’t what it used to be” while ignoring that this is kind of the “success” state where others are coming in and contributing their own piece of it.
The whole idea of a culture being a static thing that shouldn't change has always seemed rather shortsighted to me. What people are complaining about is that it's changing fast enough for them to notice before they've become crotchety old people (who always complain about the youth...). People act like cultural identity is so tied to these traditions that if you took their grandpatenys and introduced them to their own ancestors from 10 generations back that all their traditions would be the same. My guess is that they would both be aghast at what each other does, for different reasons.
The internet is just a continuation of this, in myriad different subgroups with their own norms, and like everyone else, they don't like change (but usually only when it inconveniences or is easily extrapolated to situations they see to do with themselves).
It's not about culture being a static thing. It's about culture existing or not. Culture is the reproduction of something through multiple people being replaced.
The eternal September was the point in time when the internet culture stopped reproducing, because it no longer could. Its replication rate was too low. Those who carried the culture could not make it "go viral" anymore. So it died.
> It's not about culture being a static thing. It's about culture existing or not.
All the people coming in have their own idea of the appropriate way to act. It's not an entire lack of culture, it's a hundred different ones all clamoring and drowning out the original. Eventually, if the group has enough of a shared reason for being, it will settle into a new culture. If there isn't a shared reason and it's large enough, an enveloping culture and subgroups might develop. Just look at Twitter, or Reddit, and probably Facebook.
> Culture is the reproduction of something through multiple people being replaced.
Yes, but it's never reproduced perfectly. There's drift over time, and some aspects are lost, some gained, and yet others altered in fundamental ways.
> The eternal September was the point in time when the internet culture stopped reproducing
Sometimes it was lost, but sometimes it was just diluted. I suspect most the time it was the latter. If the culture was beneficial, then given enough time it should return in some semblance or another.
> Those who carried the culture could not make it "go viral" anymore. So it died.
It was never viral in the sense of what that word means for memes (as ideas, not necessarily cat gifs) as we apply it to the internet. It was an indoctrination. Some of it was meme, where people learned as they saw, but much of it was people actively enforcing the culture on any that came.
There is a lot in common with people in the U.S. worried about immigrants changing their own culture, which they see as "American" (even though there's been wildly different ideas of what that is for a long time, regardless of what TV would have us believe much of the time). Lots of people coming in from outside and changing what they view as "normal" behavior. "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", Spanish on legal forms, etc.
Those people are worried about the exact same thing the people that lament Eternal September complain about, outsiders coming in and changing what's considered the norm. But here's the thing, if enough of them actually cared and thought it was worse, they could (and let's be honest, most eventually did) just migrate to different more exclusive or less popular groups that more more aligned with how they wanted to interact with people.
The question is, is that perfectly fine and expected, and people that want to preserve a culture should make their own effort to do so, and if it fails that means the culture in question has outrun its value, or should everyone else be required to adopt someone else's culture just because those already of that culture have staked a claim somewhere and view others as outsiders attacking or hurting their culture?
Personally I think the former is the only feasible solution. I'm willing to accept that may make me unhappy at times. HN is moderated, so it's somewhat protected by this, but if hundreds of thousands of new accounts were created in the next year and they all thought that dick jokes were the height of discourse and the moderators couldn't keep up, well I'd lament the HN that used to be, and also start looking for somewhere new. I'd like to think I'd be open minded enough to not blame those people (as long as it wasn't a concerted effort to ignore the rules, and instead just too many new people to adequately inform of the culture here), but that wouldn't change the reality.
Or maybe it would be something less outlandish, such as the careful balance between VC techbro people and interesting hackers and lurking forum philosophers getting too far out of wack and the one or more of those groups getting too much influence/people and HN becomes no longer is more than the sum of it's parts to me (and maybe many others). It's easy to point at HN and say it also has a culture, but I think more accurately it has a few cultures, which large shared components enforced by the mods. Maybe an influx of people wouldn't be so much the erasure of culture as much as the ballooning of one over the others. I'm sure there were people in the original Eternal September forums that thought the current culture an ill fit, and perhaps they saw that influx of people as like minds coming to their subgroup?
> > The eternal September was the point in time when the internet culture stopped reproducing
> Sometimes it was lost, but sometimes it was just diluted. I suspect most the time it was the latter.
No, it just stopped existing. You can't go find it somewhere or anything.
> If the culture was beneficial, then given enough time it should return in some semblance or another.
That's not how anything works.
> There is a lot in common with people in the U.S. worried about immigrants changing their own culture, which they see as "American"
Not really, because those people are worried about an immigrant minority, not worried about an immigrant supermajority.
You would do better to look at the same example in the opposite way: immigrant parents worried that their children will become native English speakers and lose the family language and traditions.
>> If the culture was beneficial, then given enough time it should return in some semblance or another.
> That's not how anything works.
As long as there's some population left continuing the practice, if it's beneficial and can be proven (and the cost benefit is what people consider to beneficial), then it can and will come back. Breastfeeding rates dropped to 28% in the 1970s due to various reasons. There's been a resurgence for many reasons.
> Not really, because those people are worried about an immigrant minority, not worried about an immigrant supermajority.
That is, most definitely, what some people are worried about, whether there's any validity to that worry or not. Have you never heard the "poor immigrants have so many children that they'll outnumber us soon" racist statements? That are just an extrapolation and extreme version of that thought.
> You would do better to look at the same example in the opposite way: immigrant parents worried that their children will become native English speakers and lose the family language and traditions.
I did look at it that way, in my original comment.
It will never end because new users come online to use it in completely different ways than prior generations of users. Even when everyone on earth is touching the internet, there is biological churn.
As a personal example, I've never used a Discord but see references to it everywhere online and am vaguely aware of what it is (IRC to me). Generally, I don't get why chatting is so interesting and I'm only interested in async communication methods.
Voice chat is another level of “why do I need that” in my mind for me personally. I’m actually surprised younger generations are interested in that given they won’t even make a phone call to order a pizza. It’s for talking smack on video games I suppose.
I was in Madagascar in 2019 and while some people have top notch fiber connectivity at home, most people only have Facebook. It's free on mobile phones while any other internet traffic costs money which most people can't afford. And I doubt that the idea of net neutrality is on anybody's mind.
Whenever I asked someone to google something, watch a YouTube video, or simply go to a website, I got nothing but bewildered looks — as if I just talked gibberish. Even Instagram was completely irrelevant. But if something was on Facebook, everybody knew about it or how to find it. All of most people's online life happens exclusively on Facebook.
Imagine the power of Facebook and the people who can manipulate it. That is frightening. We worry about its power in places where people can access the rest of the Internet; think of its power where Facebook is all people see.
Do you mean Facebook Zero[1] / Internet.org[2]. I had completely forgotten about it after TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India ) had banned it 2015/2016. It's interesting to know, that the project is still alive.
In my country Instagram is nightmaringly popular. I hate it, but I'm forced to use it, because more and more businesses have their Instagram account as their webpage with prices, contacts, etc. It seems ridiculous. UX is so terrible. It's not indexed by Google. I can understand when some girl publishes her selfies, probably Instagram is good for that, but not for business web presence.
The UX might not be great, but at least it establishes a floor for how bad the company’s web presence will be. I can’t count the number of supposed company websites I’ve encountered that are totally broken, or replaced by a parked domain because they probably haven’t paid their bills for 10 years, or literally using a flash embed that browsers don’t support any more, etc. I’d honestly rather see the social media profile. It’s unlikely to be broken and it’s more likely to be up to date.
This is key. For small businesses, their web presence must require no ongoing costs, be in the same walled garden that the users look in, and no expertise to set up or edit.
Small businesses that have paid a web developer to make them a website rarely get a good return on their investment.
I've been in this position myself (as someone with an engineering background!!), and it's a matter of effort vs. return.
Far fewer customers care about a website than an active social media profile, and the effort required to maintain them, secure them and set them up is orders of magnitude higher.
If you're a growing small business, there are typically much better ways to invest your time.
Let's say a barista have to update the instagram account their cafeteria, requiring them to update a WP site is millions more effort taxing on the employee and means they won't do it (at least not on their private phone as it's expected). Must be one of the reasons I often see those overly huge signs "follow us on instagram" so often.
Easy is a relative term, though. Establishing presence on the internet for a person who knows their business extremely well can be just a big of a mystery as using a fax machine is to me, a full-blown programmer.
I have a wierd blind-spot when it comes to fax machine usage.
The "developer" experience is pretty great compared to the alternative, though. If you can set up your corporate presence on a social media platform that means you're paying nothing for (and not dealing with the hassle of) hosting or domain name registration or even email (if you only communicate via your platform of choice). Sure, you're a slave to Instagram, but -practically- that doesn't matter to most businesses that choose this path.
The only way to break this I can imagine would be for someone to provide a pipeline that seamlessly automates the domain name registration and hosting for these businesses (similar to how Let's Encrypt popularized HTTPS by reducing the technical hoops to jump through). It would probably have to be funded similarly to Let's Encrypt as well, because in countries where Instagram is the de facto business platform, they're certainly not going to pay for this service.
Well don't tell Facebook, those greedy bastards. They'd probably provide the people in those countries with Facebook-only smartphones, or Facebook-only Internet connections, or something else horrible and dystopian like that.
I think people go way too hard on these Facebook-sponsored internet deals.
Like, yeah, they help build Facebook's brand and place it in a position of market dominance... but they're doing that by providing low-cost internet to vast populations that otherwise couldn't afford it.
There are millions of people that can talk to their relatives and have better access to government services and communicate with people they've never met, that would still be cut off if not for Facebook.
> but they're doing that by providing low-cost internet to vast populations that otherwise couldn't afford it.
This is a tad misleading. Your sentence implies they are given access to 'the internet', but in reality it's a select list of Facebook-approved sites that are slimmed down. Obviously, this sets a bad precedent and is anti-competitive (other social media platforms on Internet.org, etc.). This is far from the internet: this is a locked-down Facebook-controlled vision of what they'd like the internet to be.
> There are millions of people that can talk to their relatives and have better access to government services and communicate with people they've never met, that would still be cut off if not for Facebook.
No, none of the connectivity is because of Facebook. They didn't build the connectivity; they're a parasite on it. What they add is a layer of disconnection, under their control, that they use to exploit.
> No, none of the connectivity is because of Facebook. They didn't build the connectivity; they're a parasite on it.
That doesn't make sense.
If Facebook was purely parasitic in these deals, people would just buy regular internet subscriptions (yes, there are counter-arguments to that, but the general principle holds). The fact that they don't implies that there are large swathes of people who can't afford internet subscriptions, and therefore would not get any of the benefits of one without Facebook.
What is a layer of "disconnection"? Is this a new rhetorical device?
Facebook does actually help build the connectivity up in these countries so they do in fact pay for the infrastructure. It is still exploitative in that they mislead folks in developing countries to think they have access to the internet when instead they're on Facebook's private network. But they do pay the cost of connectivity, at least somewhat.
> What is a layer of "disconnection"? Is this a new rhetorical device?
Not a rhetorical device. I mean that FB inserts itself as a kind of centralized middleman that can disconnect people that the internet connects. To speak of it in computer architecture terms it could be called a single point of failure.
It makes everybody go through their App and watch their ads or else they get disconnected from everybody else. This isn't something that should be called connecting people.
> Facebook does actually help build the connectivity up in these countries so they do in fact pay for the infrastructure.
Facebook "pays for" the expansion of infrastructure with proceeds from parasitism on the existing infrastructure.
> There are millions of people that can talk to their relatives and have better access to government services and communicate with people they've never met, that would still be cut off if not for Facebook.
One option is to advocate for corporations to be allowed to act as sole providers of social services in exchange for a monopoly on network platform infrastructure.....
....but why not just advocate for taxing the corporations and using the money to provide those services to the public on an open platform instead?
If I could give an analogy: if facebook is the hammer, everything would look like a nail and we (in a civilized society) would know the difference whereas people new to such platform may not.
The UN may be the arbiter of global politics but what they might be exempting are people whom are part of the "opt out" crowd or, would rather not have to explicitly opt out of such (free) services.
But it literally results in genocides (Rohingya) because those people aren't technically literate and Facebook can't be bothered to hide moderators for exotic (non-english) languages.
The benefits are great, but it's not among the things that should be done by a for profit company, let alone one that lives on "engagement".
Tor is used for CSAM. PhpBB and PeerTube are used for djihadist propaganda.
There really isn't any trivial way to give people better communication technology without giving them better ability to coordinate to do awful things. If you don't want that, fine, but then the natural conclusion isn't "we shouldn't push Whatsapp on third-world countries", it's "we shouldn't develop the internet in third-world countries". Telegram and Signal can be used to incite genocides just was well.
The key point is moderation is a requirement if they are going to offer these services in new places. Hire locals that speak the language to remove problematic content or don’t do this at all.
I don’t think being technically literate has anything to do with it. We in the developed world are just as susceptible to misinformation.
> They'd probably provide the people in those countries with Facebook-only smartphones, or Facebook-only Internet connections, or something else horrible and dystopian like that.
What is the definition of "internet" or "online" here?
Suppose the definition includes the concept of "social networking application on your mobile device that works over the Internet even though you don't have a data plan due to a special arrangement".
I would not count that as online.
It's likely that more than 37% are offline according to a proper definition of online which means that you have a device with a data plan which lets you use whatever Internet-based applications you want and visit whatever websites you want.
By the "visit whatever" criterion, entire nations are offline. All of China that doesn't have a foreign VPN is offline, and so that's about 1.4B right there.
The internet is a lot more than just the web. If you place a telephone call with a landline telephone, there's a chance your call is being routed over the public internet. I'm guessing they don't include this kind of incidental use.
The use isn't simply incidental; it's restricted. You have some piece of equipment which runs telephony firmware that is configured to talk to a particular server, and identify itself with some credentials that bind it to a particular line.
The user is not running a freely selected Internet-based VoIP application connecting to a server of their choice located anywhere in the world. (In which case that would be real Internet use and not incidental.)
The global imprisoned population is less than 10Million, or a rounding error when discussing the global population. Seniors? Well that’s a large portion of the population, but they are more concentrated in developed nations that have had the internet longer.
Exactly. I am pissed this 37% of the world still not online is now entering mainstream headline ( after being circulated on twitter and other social media for a while ).
There are roughly 670 million under age of 5, 1.3 billion in age of 5 - 14.
I assumed kids started using internet at 2 these days, based on my anecdotal data, and assuming apps like Khan Academy Kids and PBS Kids count. Or, unfortunately, YouTube.
they should also define what they mean by "using the internet", 50% of my household doesn't use internet, both kids under 6 unless you mean they click button on remote to launch Youtube where I play them something
> On average, 71 per cent of the world’s population aged 15-24 is using the Internet, compared with 57 per cent of all other age groups. This generational gap is reflected across all regions. It is most pronounced in the LDCs, where 34 per cent of young people are connected, compared with only 22 per cent of the rest of the population.
The problem with getting the remaining communities connected is that there are no AOL CDs left, and even if more could be supplied, devices tend not to have CD drives.
31% of the world’s adults are ‘unbanked’ and rely on cash and dark credit. In the 1970’s a similar amount lacked electricity. It’s global ways of living are remarkably diverse, and I for one hope they stay that way. Homogeneous is bad for our species.
Having access to banking, electricity, and the internet are inherently good things. I hope 100% of people have access to these things and use them as freely as they would like to. When people have limited access to resources they are most vulnerable to being treated unfairly.
> 31% of the world’s adults are ‘unbanked’ and rely on cash and dark credit. In the 1970’s a similar amount lacked electricity. It’s global ways of living are remarkably diverse, and I for one hope they stay that way. Homogeneous is bad for our species.
Are you willing to give up those things in order to reduce homogeniety (or do you just want others to forego them)?
I’m not asking anyone to do without something they would desire or benefit from. It seems rather colonial and paternalistic to say it’s needed for an acceptable quality of life. I can’t speak to global experiences with any authenticity, but I can say my uncle from Idaho hasn’t had any internet access by choice at any point in his life, and his is no lesser than mine. He takes pride in that choice and hasn’t really missed out on too terribly much of what matters to him.
To your question, I don’t think I would be willing to disconnect fully; my career is based around the web and my way of life is and always has been quite electrified and banked. If it hadn’t been I might feel very differently. I recognize the privilege I enjoy, but I can’t presume the pleasure of not having bank ads, overdraft fees, and power dependence is entirely inferior to my experience. Maybe. Probably even, but not definitely.
Maybe for the better? The internet hasn’t been the positive life force many in the global south have needed. WhatsApp rumors, TikTok, crypto scams… there’s nobody warning them about all these things.
People tend to emphasize the negatives, like you mentioned, but WhatsApp has revolutionized communication in the low-income country I came from. And I think ultimately creating a net benefit for society (even though the conspiracy theories are really bad). Calling/texting using the cellular networks is still pretty expensive, so a lot of mom-and-pop shops conduct a significant portion of their business over WhatsApp (for a fraction of the cost of an equivalent 1-800 number).
I have only seen "revolutionized" used in the context of commerce and industry. Whether the procession of such is negative or positive is subjective to one's own taste.
I think what you just stated is a negative. The net benefit is material, at the cost of everything incorporeal.
> The internet hasn’t been the positive life force many in the global south have needed
As someone who's spent a lot of time in the global south and met a lot of people whose livelihoods depend on the internet, I'm curious what evidence you have to back up your claim.
The internet has made a lot of things more convenient (sending mail, ordering goods and services for example) but there were solutions to these problems before (postal mail, catalogs, phone/mail order, etc).
The new stuff (social media in particular, and the instantaneous, always-connected nature of things in general, and the privacy-invading tendencies of online providers) is what we haven't figured out yet, and where most of the negative effect is coming from.
The commenter made a perfectly reasonable observation, actually, which could apply just as well to any sweeping modernization (for example the advent of mass-scale global trade, the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, or even colonialism). Each of these transformations have created winners and losers within the affected countries, and a heck of a lot of social churn to boot. It's pretty superficial to just say "net overall benefit, nevermind the losers" any of these cases.
So I'd say the onus is on you to provide comprehensive data to support your sweeping claim that the number of losers has been apparently negligible in the countries (including all factors, not just economic). And that's data, not your pile of subjective observations from the biased selection of people you met, here and there.
If you post an opinion, you'll be told by one person that you need to back it up with citations, and by another that it's too obvious to be worth saying. That's the internet for you.
As someone coming from a failed state, the Internet is probably the recent invention with most tangible positive impact on people's lives. Even with Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, ... etc the pros hugely outweigh the cons.
TikTok always get a lot of negativity because it's a cheap, easy joke to throw out there. Even I am guilty of abusing it this way. If you open a new account you get a lot of retarded videos, but if you stay for a while and let the blackbox algorithm work its magic then you can find some incredibly insightful videos, especially around topics of neurodivergence, mental health and gender/sexual diversity.
Seems to me that 37% could easily encompass small children, old people, tribes, prisoners and some living under oppressive regimes. So in other words, pretty much everyone uses the internet.
Don't know why we should casually dismiss these people? Small children in developed countries use the internet. Old and tribes people deserve access to knowledge. And prisoners/those under oppressive regimes.
I'm not saying this number won't grow. It will absolutely grow, if only because we will all get older.
But it's likely that the number is relatively maxed out, which is kinda interesting. Everyone who can uses the internet.
And among those who can't are children who will soon use it, rural people who might soon use it and oppressed people who might experience a revolution, migration or whatever reason to then use the internet.
I hope someone has selected a control group to see how the internet and especially social media changes people
My favorite example is how when missionaries contacted the Pirahã people, there was a missionary who was a language expert to learn their language quickly to do Bible teachings. He postulated their language didn't have recursion, which caused quite a bit of debate with Noam Chomsky and others. My take away from learning about this is that the Pirahã people didn't have a notion of past and future ("It's always been this way") and how they were totally transformed for the worse, in my opinion, by watching and seemingly becoming addicted to watching television
If you haven't read it, "don't sleep, there are snakes" is a wonderful read, half travel report, half grammar tutorial.
Everett was even converted by them: after learning language basics he tried to tell them bible stories, but they just asked whether he knew Jesus, and when he said No they asked whether he knew anyone that knew him, which he also denied. At that point they did not have any more interest in the stories. So they do have terms for the past, but they simply don't consider any 'far' past. Wiki summary on this:
> As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
Awesome! Thanks, I'll look for it. I forgot that delicious detail that he's the one that lost his religion, which destroyed his marriage of 35 years over religion. Score one for the uncontacted tribes of the world.
Someone earlier asked why people make comments on Hacker News with no expectation of getting a response (far down in a thread for example.) This is why.
Edit:
Since my religious sensibility is getting downvoted I might as well throw in this
Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?'
> their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
> one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; you simply don't tell other people what to do.
> There appears to be no social hierarchy; the Pirahã have no formal leaders. Their social system is similar to that of many other hunter-gatherer bands in the world, although rare in the Amazon because of a history of horticulture before Western contact
> They take naps of 15 minutes to, at the most, two hours throughout the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night.
> The concept of drawing is alien to them and when asked to draw a person, animal, tree, or river, the result is simple lines.[7] However, on seeing a novelty such as an airplane, a child may make a model of it, which may be soon discarded.
> According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god,[9] and they lost interest in Jesus when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made.[
> Everett states that it has no relative clauses or grammatical recursion. Everett points out that there is recursion of ideas: that in a story, there may be subordinate ideas inside other ideas.
> Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations."
> Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so.
> The language may have no unique words for colors, contradicting Berlin and Kay's hypothesis on the universality of color-naming. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the recorded color words are all compounds like mii sai[6] or bii sai, "blood-like," indicating that colors in the language are adjectival comparisons that are not consistently applied.
And then finally:
> Adoption of western culture
> A 2012 documentary called The Grammar of Happiness which aired on the Smithsonian Channel, reported that a school had been opened for the Pirahã community where they learn Portuguese and mathematics. According to FUNAI the school is the responsibility of the Ministry of Education of Brazil.[10] In addition to a formal school being introduced to the culture, the documentary also reported that the Brazilian government installed a modern medical clinic, electricity and television in the remote area.
Truly, the West subsumes all cultures it comes into contact with.
There is no hope in trying to progress further, because it's like grinding two mis-matched gears together, to generate torque: all you're doing is forcing things that are not meant to be.
> In addition to a formal school being introduced to the culture, the documentary also reported that the Brazilian government installed a modern medical clinic, electricity and television in the remote area.
> What a depressing article.
Agreed. That was my reaction at the time I came across this. I got the impression that some felt it was cruel to leave them in such a primitive state. That was not my feeling at all. I felt there was a lot to learn from them as an antidote to modern anxieties and neurosis, but that opportunity is lost. My original comment was made out of fear that when everyone is on the internet, something important will also be lost.
> Yet in some of the world’s poorest nations, getting online can cost a staggering 20 per cent or more of per capita GNI.
This statistic jumps out at me. Assuming that GNI per capita approximately equals average income, it may be the case that cash incomes are so low that connectivity is a luxury in some ways (people spend 20% of their incomes on something like housing or feeding themselves, not paying their internet bills).
Getting online, 10-20 years ago in "first world" countries was the same. There was no free wifi. There was no true internet via mobile cell phones, etc.
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At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if people get confused at cell phone/facebook app is not the internet or "is" the internet. There is no such thing as net neutrality in many parts of the world, so you are gatekeeped off much of the Internet unless you have a "Data" package, but app store/facebook is free.
I was first online 25 years ago and it cost me about 5-10% of my income from a minimum wage & part time job as a 16 year old. I paid for the dedicated phone line and the ISP bill. Maybe other first world countries were more costly but I would be surprised if anywhere in the US was that expensive in the post-Y2K era.
5-10% of your income while a kid living with your parents is very different than 5-10% when you're in college and using your part-time income to pay for tuition/housing/utilities which is different than using 2.5-5% of your income as an adult making minimum wage while working full time. Take a look at the introductory internet plans in the US and weigh it against minimum wage to see how much most folks are willing to pay for connectivity as a fraction of their income.
At minimum wage, any expense is brutal when viewed as a percentage of your income. It sucks to be poor. You have to pick and choose what you spend money on, and you still don't have enough.
My comment was more about how I think the parent comment over-inflated the cost when saying "10-20 years ago in "first world" countries was [20% of income]" because my experience in a first world country was much less expensive. To my knowledge, the US has fairly expensive internet compared to other first world countries so I'm not sure how that statement holds up globally but I'd assume it doesn't.
Instead of bringing people together,the internet somehow managed to corner the masses back to their respective roots or fringes, then pit them against each other or against professional trolls and "AI". So sad. It's not a new development, either. It was true 10 years ago. Not sure if things are worse now. I think they are. Censorship wasn't as as it is now. It's everywhere
If you can't tell, I am all for the internet but I am scared because I've seen what it can do to the masses who were largely unprepared to face enemies such as fb and the armies of professional trolls forming public opinion online
I visited Indonesia in 2005 and people were quite poor and didn’t have internet on phones or at home. But it still seemed like most people had visited an Internet cafe.
At least the poor, the illiterate and North Koreans don't have to deal with the horror of ad retargeting and listicles is the most HN perspective ever!
If it's all you've known, then it's still bliss -- it's just life.
Imagine there was a planet, not too far from ours, that was inhabited by humans that didn't age, never got ill, never did harm towards others, we satisfied with their lives, and lived in harmony with one another -- wanting for nothing. I'm sure comparing that to our "First World" would lead any intellectually honest person to conclude we're living in a hellscape -- something so horrid it would be sardonic to even call it "Third World."
Good thing that doesn't exist; otherwise, we'd be facing a whole new type of existential dread.
Some things are objectively bad. Like infant mortality, which is made worse by a lack of medical care. Or diseases, no matter how surrounded by death you are illness is difficult. My belief is that we don't need to make everyone else believe the same things we do or act like we do-- but we do have a moral duty to equalize access to necessities like medical care
Frequent exposures to infrequent events tend not to occur even once in 37% of populations. The ratio is the same as 1/e. I wonder if that is what is going on here?
In fact is getting more and more difficult to avoid it. If you have a company In Spain now you must to provide an internet email If you want to talk with the government, so you need to have internet. And now you need also a smartphone (Do you want your covid certificate or not? Try to download the magic app in your old Motorola).
Internet addiction is mainly a habit. Heroin addiction is a physical addiction. Much, much stronger.
But you can also leave heroin, if you really want. I know people who did.
And when you consider yourself a slave to your body, bad for you. I am because of my body, even though I not only have good habbits, I am still not my slave. But if you think you are, well, then yes, you are.
I'd love to see a study comparing the attention spans, anxiety level, and overall mental health of that 37% relative to the other 63%. They might be slightly less informed, but I'd bet significantly healthier (mentally).
This would be a terrible study to try to ascertain the impact of the internet on mental health. You would be comparing two populations who are completely different in many many ways.
I know poor people getting into 200% APR loans because of not getting a job during COVID and no math knowledge for refinancing smartly. If you think the bottom 50% is not anxious all the time, you are lucky to live in the 1st world.
The vast majority would of the people in that place would laugh at western problems and mental illnesses. I'm from similar background, trust me.,it comes off as extremely elitist.
My issues aren't with the internet, but advancements made with social media.
The addictive nature of many platforms. The hivemind and lack of free thought I've noticed in many avenues of the internet.
Having upvotes vs downvotes or likes vs dislikes encourages conformity. It encourages group think.
This group think is ultimately what's driving me off the larger platforms on the internet and away from social media in general.