I truly appreciate humanity's ability to dream up spaces of infinite possibility. And then to turn around and artificially limit those spaces such that people can indulge their lizard-brain urges to treat absolutely everything as exclusive territory/property. Quickly followed by support for primate dominance hierarchies, so that people can rank-order themselves and be guaranteed to feel superior to somebody.
Well, sure absolutely. I mean, a database might hold an arbitrary # in a given row & column but what would be the point of letting users of, say, Reddit manipulate their cell in the database freely? If that were possible then they couldn't lord their internet points over all the other redditors with fewer upvotes. And if you don't have the validation of masses of faceless internet users quantifies in this way where's the fun of social interactions? Are we supposed to go back to the barbaric days where you didn't know how many people approved of a family photo you physically showed to a coworker? Civilization didn't spend thousands of years advancing to this point merely to fall back on analog & non-discrete valuations on human worth.
Primate dominance hierarchies are a bit of a myth.
Many people have this old-fashioned concept that monkeys form social hierarchies based purely on violent domination. It's true that territorial primates are observed to wage war against their neighbors, but many also partake in time-sharing of resources (groups of monkeys taking turns visiting a fig tree, rather than fight over it), and within groups of primates it is actually altruism and caring that promotes an individual to the top, not brute strength.
To be honest, I can't take a post seriously which debunks one claim and replaces it with an equally dubious, uncited claim, that the poster has "been hearing recently."
Honestly, I think human brains are just wired such that things without constraints or scarcity just aren't that interesting to us.
I think if you want to successfully launch a VR world, artificial scarcity is necessary in order to create interesting interactions within your world. The real threat to your platform is actually likely the inevitable money-motivated removal of those scarcity limitations. ("Oh look we found more widgets, you can buy them from us for x$")
Anyone remember Reframe It? (And a few similar projects.)
Users using the browser extension could surf the web and see each other's comments attached to pages.
Thus any site could have comments about any of its content, without the control of that site.
Reframe It, IIRC, was acquired and turned into something else. Or something. Now there is a cryptic ghost website with a FAQ which says you can sign up if you click something in the corner of some webpage that doesn't exist.
There was a lovely project by _why called mousehole, a little ruby proxy you’d run locally that would add a little overlay where you could comment and read comments on anything you browsed.
The code is archived here, not sure if anyone is still doing anything derived from it.
I remember back before all the political noise Gab had a web extension like this, a comment section controlled by them. It was an interesting paradigm, an awesome idea, I tried it once and the comments weren't my cup of tea, didn't feel like engaging in that sort of environment so I deleted it. But the concept is pretty cool nonetheless.
This makes it sound like there's only a single platform for "augments," and we all need to share it.
In reality, I imagine there will be many different platforms, some free-for-all and some tightly curated. Users will choose which platform's augments they want shown at any given time.
Which doesn't address any of the platform-related free speech concerns, but I think that's a much more general discussion, that has little to do with AR.
Bummed to hear it came across that way. In the next post I’m going to detail exactly how I envision it working, but my intent with Augmented Realist is to advocate for something like an AR web. The ideal system would allow users to choose their own markup/language, payloads, hosting, search, filtering, ‘browsers’, hardware etc., with scene understanding happening on-device.
The secret sauce to this design is to allow users choice in the 'semantic lookup' labeling step between scene understanding/segmentation and the use of language to search the world of available augments. In my opinion, the most important component of a hypothetical AR web absolutely nobody is talking about is how language is used to describe the world, and my proposed solution is focused on assuming that there can be no consensus in that regard. I believe if we can design with that acknowledgement in mind we can unlock a truly modular, private, free, decentralized AR web.
> the most important component of a hypothetical AR web absolutely nobody is talking about is how language is used to describe the world, and my proposed solution is focused on assuming that there can be no consensus in that regard.
This is the opposite of how the actual web happened, with just HTML, CSS and Javascript used to describe it.
To clarify, I meant language like English or Spanish. This is a hard point to compress into a comment but - if there is a central authority that labels things definitively (think DNS-> IP), we have a problem where the very first step in attaching an augment to the world requires you to use the language someone else has chosen for you to describe it. I framed this up in the ‘Manifesto’ post on the blog: https://noahnorman.substack.com/p/manifesto
Even beyond the language (eg Esperanto) the words are expressed in, the words themselves are likely to be subject to some serious debate. It is entirely wrong, IMO, to believe that you can acquire consensus on what things are called even in ‘objective’ labels, to say nothing of the clearly subjective language we use to describe things.
Will be curious to see what you're thinking on a technical level, especially to what degree you want to build on top of existing web standards, web 3 tech, or invent something new.
It’s quixotic and theoretical for sure. Please watch that substack (or subscribe) - next post I’m going into hard details after a year of talks on the topic.
I wonder why this same thing isn't working for social media. Why is it that people want to limit what people can say when they can easily limit what they hear?
They can't 'easily limit what they can hear'. Filtering is technically difficult for some people, and constantly updating and expanding filters can be time consuming - although this problem can be solved with tools like BlockTogether or other utilities that leverage shared data.
Covert social signaling is constantly evolving though; trolls and other people actively look for ways to circumvent defenses, bypassing existing content filters or user filters. You can see this on Twitter; there's a busy secondary market in buying existing accounts (with various levels of age, quality, verification) and then naming and using them for trolling or influence campaigns. Dive into a contentious topic and note how many of the toxic participants have default usernames, very low follower counts, and (if you're really interested) atypical activity histories.
This is not a comment on the source article, whose arguments seemed largely reasonable.
I agree with this - I think the ability to 'filter from the firehose' using a granular, user-controlled filtering is a realistic solution to the issues platforms face with differing opinions of what constitutes unacceptable speech. I think of augments as being a kind of graffiti, in a free-writing-anywhere sense, not in a public nuisance sense, and I think that even in the instance where we have the good problem of far too many high-quality augments sharing 3D and semantic space, we'll need high-quality context-and-user-specific filtering tools to allow us to find what we need (akin to search on the web), and, even further, to continue to navigate the physical world without getting hit by a bus.
It's my understanding what people are trying to limit here is the spreading of extremism. The theory is that people can be drawn in with what people call "dog whistles" that evade filters and once trust is established, proceed to deliver more extremist messages.
These aren't just theories, these are how extremist ideologies get spread around the world, from ISIS to anti-government militias in the US.
I think most people are quite agreeable to filters (personal blocks and mutes, etc.) to deal with speech we find unpleasant. What we don't want is for those filters to provide cover for extremist recruiters.
There have been more than a few people who want to make an extension that lets people leave their own comments on sites. I seem to recall them hitting a lot of issues with that, because people don't want others to comment on 'their' sites.
I have always thought that people who call for censorship do it on behalf of some group they feel responsible for: children or the otherwise gullible people who lack critical thought.
"gullible people who lack critical thought" comprise an enormous proportion of people, and many have influence one way or another, be it voting or violently storming a pizza shop with a rifle
obviously we all have a vested interest in ensuring citizens are educated and informed
More like how one would want a ban on drunk driving. Sure the bad behavior affects the person in engaging in it to a massively higher degree, but it’s still making externalities everyone has to deal with
This is only an issue if there is some centralized platform (ie Meta) that hosts AR and has a monopoly over the space. It's actually likely that that will happen (the average user won't be using the niche platforms) and that everyone will have a "space" with some sort of control over whose you can see (very similar to social media like twitter)
I can think of a few decent ways to solve this problem.
Have an open system where anyone can design an augment in AR or even an open VR world, and put it anywhere, and publish it. People could select their own augments by importing it, like RSS. People might make curated sets of augments for other people and publish. Some people might even get paid for the augments and the curation. As long as people can turn them off, on, curate their curated lists a little (maybe one list is almost perfect for one person but needs something extra or something less), share their curated lists, augments and changes freely, and use as many as they like, it would be alright.
An AR augment as described is basically a geo-linked URL, and should be treated the same way as any other URL. For the most part we can link to whatever we want, and "decorate" it with our commentary. Adding a reference to a point in space shouldn't change that. Presenting the commentary as animated 3D instead of text doesn't either.
I'm not really interested in his larger argument here but I think there is a specific interesting point:
There is no particular reason why trying to rent seek things like land or property should work in a digital world. They aren't constrained by physics which is the whole reason any of that stuff works in our physical reality. Why should it matter what neighborhood your house is in if you don't have to follow euclidian geometry.
It seems like most people who are attracted to the space are exclusively interested in rent seeking opportunities but it seems likely that these people will get burned trying to chase a broken metaphor.
