Looking back, I guess the main point of why the early internet was so special wasn‘t because of cool new communications technology, but because of the self selection.
In order to use BBSes or the early Internet, by definition you had to be above average curious, smart, rich, young (late night dialup tarrifs) and/or based in academia, as well as having a volunteering/cooperating mindset.
We just managed to keep the others out for a miraculous decade by keeping entry barriers hard, costly and complex. Is that an ableist viewpoint? No clue, but it was a bliss for sure.
I’m not sure if this comment is a jab at the unwashed masses but you did leave out another group, corporations. BBS Sysops, and people that were putting up web sites in the mid 90s weren’t doing it for money. It wasn’t until the cult of money got involved and turned the internet into a giant direct marketing platform that things began to get really bad.
I remember when corporations started showing up. They were mostly ignored. It wasn't until mainstream adoption outweighed the early adopter culture that things really started going downhill and combined with corporations accelerated.
Corporations showed up but it was all running over the NSF backbone so commercial use was suppressed, and "sysops" would e.g. immediately ban users for e-mail spam since they were worried about losing their upstream (and transitively back up to the backbone).
I can't find the Bills that were passed now to commercialize the Internet and get off of NSFnet but that was early in the Clinton-Gore administration.
Yeah, I guess it’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing but corporations brought centralized servers. Of course we’re discussing a topic on a centralized server now but PG is not making any money from it.
I'm trying to remember when and infer why things got so consumer-y. Replaying it in my mind, there was Slashdot, Reddit which were fine. I think Digg was a downstep. Even Facebook was great at the start.
If I had to pick one thing, I'd say it's about shallow consumption/interactions that kill the signal/noise. Like posting a picture/video with a caption, having it go viral with upvotes/reposts.
Good point, I sometimes get caught in the "ah, the internet back then" fallacy but what really has driven it down in the mud was the entry of corporations, not the people involved.
"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?"
I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.
A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became optimized for engagement (ie: emotional reactions), and so are disproportionally rewarding sensationalist content over content that actually promotes understanding of other perspectives.
Imagine saying this about writing, or the printing press. It's not just reductionist but cynical.
Optimizing for outrage is a mass communication problem, not an internet problem, and unfolds roughly the same in every new medium from town criers on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
We still have social problems despite having a printing press, or radio, or internet. In fact, at root, we have the exact same social problems as existed prior to Gutenberg's birth. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, etc.
Why have they not been solved? Because they are human problems. The problem is within us and the problem is us. It's who we are on an animal behavior level. This is the reason the boy believes we must also be "stupid". Because surely we don't think an information transfer protocol would change the animal instincts of a human being? Let alone billions of human beings?
That's really the point of the comic. Wherever we go, there we are. It's still just us in a new place.
It seems to me that life today is a lot better then it was when the printing press was invented, and that the printing press probably has something to do with that.
>> That's really the point of the comic. Wherever we go, there we are. It's still just us in a new place.
If that's the case it seems a poor choice of words for the child character in the comic to frame it as "Was everyone stupid back then?" followed quickly by affirmation, "So yes."
They haven't been solved because we're still living as if we're in a scarce world. Scarcity is what drives human problems. There are two sheep, three families, and one sheep can only feed one family. How do you decide who goes hungry when no one wants to be?
The reason that we, naively perhaps, thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems, is because information; anything that can be encoded digitally, is now post-scarcity. But we never reformed society around the invention of the digital realm, and only adapted our old ways around it. This furthered inequality and unrest, rather than healed anything.
With digital distribution, there are now infinity digital sheep for three families and every person, every man woman and child can have infinity digital sheep for their own. It wasn't naive to think that would reform the world because up until that point, scarcity drove and still drives everything. Macroeconomics has us plot supply and demand on a graph, but doesn't tell us how to reform society when supply goes to infinity. Instead of reforming society like we must, we try and artificially limit supply, enacting intellectual property laws trying to deny the copyability of bits, which is like trying to make water not wet.
Why do we have capitalism? It's a long story, but it was invented to distribute the two sheep among three families with as little war as possible. No one wants to go hungry. And to state the obvious, you can't eat digital sheep. Nor are they created like organic sheep. Many someones have to come together, intentionally, working very hard, to lovingly create digital sheep like Disney's latest masterpiece from raw ones and zeroes.
Those someone's exist in a pre-scarcity world. They need pre-scarcity money to buy non-digital food to eat and pay rent on non-digital housing to live in. Digital sheep don't exist without the hard work of people who need non-digital money to exist in a pre-scarcity world. So we still need the old economy to pay those creators in pre-scarcity money. But once that digital sheep exists, there can be infinity copies of it. Every single person on the planet with a cellphone or computer can have their own copy of that digital sheep for a mere pittance in bandwidth costs.
Until we reform our whole society; the economy and the government; to realize that we live in a post-scarcity world for all digital goods - and are effectively post-scarcity for some physical goods, it's always going to be us in the same place. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, they all exist online, but they are different online. People are different because of the Internet.
The reformation we need is going to be radical, because it has to be. Supply and demand just got shot in the face because there's an infinite supply on digital goods. My proposal, in all its earnestness, has a few steps.
1) We abolish copyright. I said it was going to be radical, didn't I? We change systems around so that copying is allowed, but that it tracks what people are watching, and where it came from. But we abolish the system that's trying to make bits not copyable and water not wet.
2) We track what people are watching, and give out points based on that. Every day I'm granted 86400 attention cents, or ACs, and if I watch a two hour long Disney movie, Disney gets paid 7200 ACs by me. Disney gets to further distribute those 7200 ACs however they see fit to the individual creators who made that movie. If I spend 3 minutes chuckling at a tweet or a YouTube or TikTok video or Instagram video, the creator automatically gets 180 ACs from me, which they can pass on to whomever they see fit, literally crediting their sources.
3) We establish an VAT luxury tax, anything that's more than 3 orders of magnitude more expensive than the cheapest one, effectively creating a price ceiling on goods relative to the cheapest version of that same good. The $10 bottles of wine at my local store mean that bottles of wine now top out at $10,000. Anything over that is taxed and goes into an AC fund. Remember, capitalism is just some silly system we've come up with to decide who goes hungry and who gets to eat the sheep. Other such systems include feudalism, where a lord decided who went hungry and who was fed.
4) With that money, we establish an official way of trading ACs for pre-scarcity money, so people can use their ACs to afford non-digital food and housing and clothing and entertainment. Isn't that system going to be gamed and broken and create all sorts of arbitrage opportunities you ask? Yes but have you seen how broken the rest of capitalism is right now?
Agreed. The printing press is probably the second-most socially transformative development in the history of human kind, right after fire.
Tribalism and feudalism reigned for a millennium from either the death of Theodosius or Odoacer deposing the last emperor, depending on how you measure it. The invention of the printing press in the late 15th century led to an explosion of communication and education.
Perhaps most importantly, it arrived at a time when the Medici-funded artistic and humanist influences were at their peak, allowing those ideas to spread until they led to the Renaissance.
The idea that a new, cheap, fast global network of communication (the Internet) at the same time as a major global cultural moment (the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War) could lead to a flourishing of democracy, humanism, and reason... was not unprecedented. And it's not entirely clear that it failed, either.
But the internet is so much more effective in that due to dramatically short feedback loop. Your ranking algo may select most outrageous posts/topics in a matter of minutes and even seconds with large enough DAU, compared to days for radio/TV and weeks for printing press. It is 2-4 orders of magnitude difference.
It’s that humans prioritise social instability because it could mean death in, or of, the tribe; the incentive to make sales, as your link alludes to, is the driving force behind co-opting that. If that incentive disappeared I suspect mass communication would not be the problem.
Which is why I really don't like people who are disguising their opinions in a fictional story: You can do all sorts of shady rethodic maneuvers, such as presenting your opinion as some grand truth in-universe or - like here - putting it into the mouth of a character and absolving yourself from actually explaining it further.
Bonus points for adding another character who is impressed by the first character's statement to give the opinion an air of profoundness.
> The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.
The idealized version of the internet always looked to me like "everyone would get along if we just understood each other. Giving everyone a platform solves that.".
The internet is showing us that reality seems more like, "everyone would agree with me if I just knew the right thing to say to them. But they refuse to stop being wrong, so I need to be more vocal.".
>The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.
Yes it is crazy and we need to wake up to that. Just look around, people have access to all sorts of information and divergent opinions but that doesn't help. Trumpers have access to CNN. Liberals have access to Truth. Antivaxers can go read all the vaccine studies and doctors and academics could lurk in forums skeptical of modern medicine. Simply making these available online does not force people to seek out the correct information or interact with people with diverging opinions.
People do not have access to all sorts of information. They have access to plenty of cherry picked fact-less divergent opinions, a lot of it even counterfactual. But nothing with any quality.
Atntivaxers can't go read all the studies unless they are willing to push some tens of thousands of dollars into it or break some law.
Even when someone gets exposure to a competing viewpoint, it's rare for them to really give it thought if the topic is important to them.
People build their identities on what they believe about the world or on which people (dis)agree with them.
When their belief (and thus their identity) is threatened, people readily perform whatever mental gymnastics allow them to continue believing they're in the right.
The excellent book The Scout Mindset covers this in depth.
People being manipulated by giant propaganda networks to hate each other more and more and prevent progress from being made is an age old social _problem_.
E: Removed comment about being a throwaway, appears to just be a new account. Sorry about that.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm having a hard time parsing this, almost to the point of wondering if you're running a natural language model for these comments.
Social problems are not only culture problems. They are also economic. They are mental health problems. They are education problems. They are industrial (logistical and infrastructural). And so on and so forth.
All things that would be problems even where you have only one culture. For instance, ask the average Japanese about Japan's social problems, from mental health up to and including the nation dying.
I think what you mean is that the cultural dimension is the only dimension you care about. Which is a valid view, but on the internet it won't be the only view. (Which kind of speaks to the issue the subject comic of this post was talking about.)
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
I'm repeatedly surprised at how many people dont seem to get that most scifi is deliberately a reflection of issues that already exist in our current day society.
Like that is what makes the jokes in hitchhikers guide funny, and why the matrix is one of the most poignant narratives in pop culture... black mirror is real life taken to poetic extremes, it's not a coincidence that zuck's metaverse gives off "black mirror vibes", that is the specific intention of black mirror
That joke most certainly was a reflection of society, but I think it's different from the way that joke reads today (and out of context).
HHTG channeled the malaise and confusion of the 1970s, driven by nuclear war and economic downturns. (OK, a bit like now...) HHTG responded to that nihilism with pessimism on one side (Ford) and absurdism on the other (Zaphod). A lot of pleasures (sex, drugs, and rock and roll) were feeling hollow, and all Arthur (the prototypical Englishman) just wanted to hide and be comforted.
That joke certainly reflects a pessimism that is persistent in all societies, that every good thing must also have a downside. I took it out of context to highlight the communication aspect, something that I don't think was especially on Adams' mind -- though it would be only a few years before a communications revolution.
I think Adams' would take credit for pessimism being right -- usually a safe bet.
Funny quote and all (no sarcasm intended) but I don't think it's fair to imply that, if future wars are bloodier than the past, it would be because we lowered barriers to communication.
Well, there was the time that the Krikkit decided to wage war on the entire universe for 2000 years - I believe the estimate was about two grillion casualties.
In case you’re being serious, Douglas Adams was an author of comedic fiction and the babel fish is from his Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book and allowed different races from different planets to communicate with each other.
Trying to compare real world history with fictional possibilities is non-sensical.
WWII wasn't the bloodiest conflict when you adjust for world population at the time. E.g. the Mongol Conquests or An Lushan Rebellion probably killed more.
In terms of body count, those still win, because Mutually Assured Destruction keeps giving people pause. But the Internet has turned into a machine for goading people into making a mistake, and it will only take one.
Meantime, thus far it's used just for local genocides, like Myanmar.
This actually reminds me of a quote in the book The Victorian Internet about the development of the telegraph. Part of the push of the first undersea cable to connect the US and European countries was a belief that with more instant communication there would be no misunderstandings and therefore no more wars. So this belief has been going on a long time.
I can't remember if it was that book, or another that referenced it, but the fame of "Florence Nightingale" has been linked to the use of the telegraph to bring back news from a previous war in Crimea:
> I also gain a sense that the time was ripe for change to the nursing profession – and that Florence Nightingale sparked a revolution in health care that was waiting to happen (prior to the Crimea, British women had not served in military hospitals). Newspapers and improved communication raised public awareness of the conditions of wounded soldiers in Crimea, and the nursing profession was gradually becoming more respected. But the museum also leaves the impression that it was more than just a case of her being in the right place at the right time. Her combination of intellect, fierce sense of vocation (fuelled by her religious faith), and her well-connected family background, meant perhaps that only Florence Nightingale could have shaped the nursing profession so effectively in that era.
The book where I read about this linked it to e.g. photos and videos from Vietnam affecting US public perception of the conflict and generally the better and rawer the communications from the war, the better it gives you an honest angle on it compared with the official propaganda.
My understanding was that the primary motivation to build those communication channels was to gain an edge on the stock markets. I don't know about the telegraph, but for radio I remember reading that that was the reason JP Morgan was financing Tesla, and he was mightily annoyed when he got scooped by Marconi.
> Similar behavioral patterns have been observed in the anonymous usage of Citizens’ Band radio, a short-distance radio communications device widely used by truck drivers to find well-stocked fuel stations and share traffic information. On February 20th, 1978, a New Yorker[5] magazine profile piece on talk show host Johnny Carson mentioned that CB radio conversations can include disturbing amounts of racism and masturbation fantasies resulting from the lack of accountability.
I think when we consider what Facebook has taught us about anonymity vs real name policies we have to also remember that Facebook's feed disproportionately rewards sensationalist content.
What about the clearly false information spread on Facebook? Do we know the names of the people who are writing as QAnon? There’s a clear lack of accountability for anyone other than the messenger.
If you consider A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace as singularly representative of the zeitgeist "back then"... Yes, everyone was stupid, in the same manner that love can be stupid. Humanity never gave up on love, and I hope it never gives up on starry-eyed idealism; it can lead to dogmatic and authoritarian horrors, but some of the ideals may enhance the fabric of society and make it a little less savage. Less of the former and more of the latter, please, if possible. The process is slow and uneven, and personally, I'm not too hopeful, but I still prefer faint hope to unrelenting cynicism.
(What's strange about A Declaration... is that it came a decade after Neuromancer and two years after Eternal September. You may choose to doubt the predictive power of dystopian fiction, but the reality check of the influx of participants outside of the pretty exclusive early-internet club should be much harder to overlook. That document managed to disregard both. It was strangely anachronistic even at the moment.)
Did people really think that Internet was going to solve all problems or is that revisionist history by back-in-our-day millenials? Even for a techno-optimist, it would've been hard to forsee the sheer penetration. Yes, the euphoria was there from the beginning. But, there's a difference between saying "it's going to be huge" and imagining an instantly accessible network available in the hands of 60% of the world from a device that's hundreds of times faster than most powerful computer available at that time.
The talk on IRC in the 90’s was “imagine a war going on with the internet and civilians on both sides could talk to each other, why would anyone fight?”
I think the problem with this vision isn't that "people talking to each other won't prevent violence" it's that people posting text, images, and video is not the same as people talking to each other. Even a video call is not the same as talking to someone in person. It's hard to build empathy and connection with someone you can't make eye contact with.
I think that the medium of communication is not the main problem with this idea. I say that as someone who has had & still has strong relationships formed and maintained almost entirely through text. This has been going on for centuries, with pen pals and written correspondence in general. People vary and I think not everyone has the same need for physical proximity and nonverbal comms like eye contact. (In my case you could probably go further to say I don't interpret well or express well in non-verbal communication channels.)
Rather, while bringing people together in virtual spaces does probably help different peoples see each other with empathy, and diminish tribalistic attitudes... The wrong people are in the chat. Every nation that goes to war is itself fractured into classes. The people who send a nation to war are different from those on the battlefield. Empathy for the enemy on the part of soldiers doesn't prevent them being compelled to violence.
I think the exception might prove the rule in this case. I still believe the majority of people require the presence of some body language in order to connect with others, if this weren't the case then we would have abandoned meeting in person altogether long ago with the invention of the telephone or even writing since we've been sending letters to each other for a long time as you mention. Since most people don't connect well empathetically with others through text or images alone, I think the best thing we can do is to bring more human presence to long distance communications. If you prefer to stick with text or voice alone then no one is going to stop you but lots of other people will flock to a system that provides a close facsimile of in person conversation.
Such perspective isn't really so surrealistic, when we think about the lengths some governments and institutions go to stop people from talking to each other. Some countries censor the outside internet wholesale. Military conscripts are often chosen from more remote, poorer locations where people are less internationally-minded. Dividing people into ideological bubbles also seems to be a measure to stop people from talking to each other, in spite of sharing the same language and internet.
I sincerely feel like, if people spoke the same language, horrible shit would get harder to abide (and, no, Ukraine and Russian are not the same).
Imagine a video of Yemeni people starving to death on the news, but they sound just like you and your loved ones. It feels like that would turn the empathy WAY up.
But maybe I'm tripping into the same optimistic pitfall.
It is really bizarre the way that the aggregate/news/post/tweet + comment section + upvote/downvote format that is pervasive on the current internet creates an incentive for people not to talk to each other, but to just throw their ideas at the wall hoping to get points from people that agree with them or even points from bots.
Forums and chat rooms were nice because the communities were small and directed. People were jerks for sure but they weren’t getting points. Even among the jerks the communities were localized enough that the jerks that cared enough to stick around weren’t mere trolls.
Is that a millennial in the comic? I thought it was a Gen X or older character. Back in our day, I am thinking mid to late 90’s for techno optimism at its peak.
Yeah, 90s tech optimism was more Gen X. It's probably conflating this time with the early 2010's (see "Arab Spring") optimism towards self-liberation via social media driven uprising?
We mostly assumed things would be better because we assumed the net would be 'information'.
The military, academia, government, business are 'conscientious' culture who assume people act rationally.
But go to the drug store and look at the magazines: games, sports, sex, porn, gossip, celebrities, fashion, vacations etc..
And that's the 'above bar' stuff - now you have to add in all the things people are interested in that's not 'regulated' by social mores of 'what can be in a magazine'.
The internet is a 'giant ball of noise' that are are thoughts, and it's mostly not about knowledge, civility etc.
Even as people have access to 'information' they don't want to access it, often they prefer to live in a bubble of someone telling them what they want to hear.
So the web is a bit like 'everyone's voices being raised very loudly, some more than others' and that's that.
There is 'some' information in there, but even then it's still hard to parse through the noise. Even in ultra conscientious culture we debate about what reality is.
Take heart: I really do believe that 2022 might be the start of a 'post noise' era. Every one of us realizes that we've been duping ourselves a bit. We all know Instagram and LinkedIn are a bit vapid, Facebook is a bit rubbish, TikTok is meaningless, Cable News is into flame wars. We continue to use them for their nominal value but I really believe we are bit sick of it. Even the 'ultra digital native' Gen Y are tuning out a bit.
It's here to stay obviously but I think we are developing a new relationship with it.
Moore's Law was already known about. Techno-optimists especially expected something even more dramatic. I have a cybernetics encyclopedia for childrens written in the 80's (or was it late 70's ?) that discusses neural networks in one chapter, and in another Moore's Law including some scifi projections of the expected computer power (IIRC fairly accurately) and new computer types like optical/photonic and organic computers (IIRC too optimistic, though they were careful to not give a precise timetable).
For the 90's look up terms like "the global village" and also maybe Charles Stross' Accelerando for a differently optimistic viewpoint :
Before China soundly disproved it with their great firewall, one of the early assumptions about the internet was that it would naturally route around censorship.
This would allow for people in less free societies to read about and interact with people in more democratic societies, eventually causing them to demand their own countries become more democratic. This was also supposed to end war, since democratic countries don't generally war with one another.
I think you'd get different responses from different people but this comic didn't ring true for me because I don't recall the sort of optimism about information sharing it claims.
I'm sure someone could point to some quotes and some evidence of it happening but I don't remember that being the dominant theme. For every techno optimist there were probably an equal number of people terrified of their kids downloading porn or talking to strangers.
There was unbridled optimism, to what I remember as sickening levels of hype (although some of it turned out to be true eventually). But the optimism was more general I think and my impression was it was focused more on business and work opportunities, about how it would facilitate and open up possibilities for making tasks and things like communicating with loved ones easier. The stuff about it leading to a democratic utopia seemed to be looked on with a bit of ridicule — most from that time period had some memory of terrorism and conflict worldwide, and of the shadowy anxieties of the cold war. The idea that sort of thing would go away because of the internet seemed laughable, if for no reason its penetration wasn't clear even in the US and Europe.
The final panel in the comic is an allusion to the "wisdom of the crowds". To my recollection, for a while people were very excited about how it was going to make a lot of everyday things better.
There was extreme optimism, and (pretty much) everyone thought the internet was going to solve the particular problems they cared/obsessed over. Most commonly: now everyone is going to agree with me and governments will do what I want them to do. But also generally there was a belief that everyone was going to be smarter, more capable and productive and society would accelerate advancement dramatically.
We aren't smarter for sure but we're less ignorant i'd say, if ignorance = unawareness of random facts (e.g. the weather, how old some actor is, if a store is open) now that we have devices capable of retrieving those facts at any time in our pockets. What to do with those facts, what facts actually matter, and what do they actually mean in the context of solving problems? Who knows really...
Would we (I'm of an older generation) have been less ignorant if I'd been carrying a pocket encyclopedia with me? Doesn't seem the appropriate word.
> if a store is open
Well, you don't need to tell if you plan ahead. That's how it used to be. Shops here opened from 9 to 6, except on Saturday (shorter), and never on a Sunday. There simply was no reason to look up opening hours. And if you needed something after 6, you had bad luck, or you asked the neighbours.
I don't think your examples work well, especially when you add in that there are actual flat-earthers around: not because it's Gen Z, but because of that handy device.
I'm sure there's information that you appreciate being at your fingertips that wasn't there before. I think we've taken for granted really how easy it is now to access information, and how annoying/difficult it used to be, and the consequences of that, many of which are clearly positive. It's just now we're at the stage where we are starting to be a bit more critical instead of jubilant about it.
I remember people in elation over the idea that information would be democratized and control taken away from "the establishment". No longer would any small group of people be able to restrict flow of information.
That almost came true, but ignores people’s decisions about which sources to attend to.
And with scarcity inverted from information supply to demand, each information source will spend more and more of their bandwidth declaring the other sources worthless and evil, and that only their source is worth attention.
This way people are driven to consume very few sources, whose content is inevitably impoverished.
There was a good amount of talk about "perfect information economics", which before the internet had only been a crazy idea, but then suddenly seemed like something within grasp.
I'm not sure if there was ever a real belief that the internet was going to cure hunger and bring world peace, but I think most of the opinion in the late 90's internet explosion is that it would make people more informed and understanding overall.
The unsaid implication of this comic is that getting rid of the internet would make society better. It would NOT. The ability to have rapid peer to peer communication with anyone on the planet is a good thing. BLM, LGBT rights, disability rights are causes that have thrived thanks to the Internet. The Internet did not cause fascism and any suggestion that it does ignored all of the 20th century.
> and it was mainly smartphones that enabled that, because they let you take the internet outdoors.
I'm not sure it was "taking the internet outdoors" that made the difference - we could do that before, I certainly did with laptops.
The key difference with smartphones, IMO, was the conversion of the internet from a "pull" technology (I had to choose to go to a website) to a "push" technology (that website/service can disrupt me wherever I am). That's driven a lot of the nasty impacts (remember how Facebook used to send nonsensical pings to your phone to drag you in? "Your friend so-and-so you've not talked to in 20 years has a birthday! Wish them well!" I assume it still does it, but I've long since stopped using it and it hasn't been an app on my phone in far more years than that).
But we also had all the work on addiction from the "free to play" game model enabled by in-app purchases, which supercharged the research into how to just drive people up the wall and keep them staring at your service ("engaged").
If smartphones only worked inside, I think the problems would be almost as bad. I agree with you about smartphones, I just think there's a bit more nuance into why they ruined everything.
Think about why people wanted push in the first place: because the internet was now always-on instead of something you checked or surfed periodically. It has everything to do with carrying it in your pocket.
Personally I don't let apps interrupt me and I keep my phone fully muted by default.
LGB rights aren’t being curtailed by transgenderism, but I’d argue that if a large part of your identity is wrapped up around ideas of gender, then you might not want the “T” part of LGBT to gain any traction.
He was also hysterically complaining way before anyone leaned on him.
The problem with transgenderism today is that it actually is extremely regressive to say that just because you don't conform to the male or female stereotype, you therefor are transgender and should transition.
It is the exact opposite of what gay acceptance strived for.
We were naive idealists, but not for the reason the comic says. We thought a lot of societal problems had their roots in centralized control of information by government and big media companies. Democratizing communications would lead to good outcomes for the oppressed. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" and all that.
In some ways, that was true. Police treatment of black people in some parts of the US, for example, is incontrovertible now whereas in the 90s most people simply wouldn't believe it.
We weren't wrong about the sunlight, but we were wrong about what it would do - what the human reaction would be to the lights being turned on.
Rousseau has been in the ring with Hobbes, and Rousseau lost.
> We thought anonymous people saying what they thought in a public forum would lead to the best idea getting shared the most
This is true in some parts of the internet, such as Hacker News and Reddit. The key seems to be good signal/noise moderation and users able to amplify content with cardinal voting (upvotes/downvotes).
I'm constantly finding great, new ideas between the two websites (especially when combined with search) and sharing them with others.
On other sites.. it seems as though the drive to engage users ($$) and a lack of a "downvote" option allows the flame-bait/low-brow/spammy content to take center stage. Which eventually drives users away (-$$).
I think there’s another option and that’s to get rid of votes AND comments. Using Twitter as an example, I think removing likes and comments and only providing a retweet and one level deep quote tweet would make it a much better platform. Of course, this assumes no bots as well.
The internet pre 2010 was pretty great. Facebook showed who got married, no body was political yet. I did well connecting with friends of friends and went out with a few folks.
While I hate online dating now, I respect it worked for tons of couples when it first started.
Something about having to head home to do your online stuff slowed it down. Now, it's constantly in your face.
Actually, it worked, Web 1.0 totally disrupted AOL, CompuServe, MSN etc. until the companies which built on top of the open Web didn't give away their software. These "Web 2.0" companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. just had all your data.
We live in a digital feudalism now. And every few years (e.g. when Musk bought Twitter) there is renewed interest in open source alternatives. We can fix this, if the open source community ever achieves parity with the features that most Web 2.0 social platforms provide:
Just because that there ARE anonymous people posting stupid shit, doesn't mean all people do that when anonymous. In fact, show me a nice invention that wasn't made by a freedom loving person. No bigger freedom than anonymity! We need it. How can you express yourself without being silenced right from the start without it? How can you spread disruptive ideas when people instanly have a name to point fingers to?
An idea should be separate from a person, to really be neutral. If there is a person behind it, people start investigating the person, rather than checking the idea in depth.
The internet has actually exceeded my expectations in how a revolution it would be.
It was sold to me as: you will have access to all the knowledge at your fingertips, and it is mostly true. And by the time I thought of a traditional computer you have to turn on and sit in front of, not something that is in my pocket and accessible 24/7. You may talk about "fake news" and all sorts of falsehoods, but debunking these have never been easier, not only the truth is usually available, but there are is also information on how to do the debunking. I realize now how much bullshit I heard and believed in in my childhood with no easy way to fact check.
Distance seem almost like an abstract concept now. Here I am, in France, writing to you guys in the US like you were my neighbors. In fact, it is sometimes easier to communicate with someone on the other side of the globe than with my neighbor. I like to travel (guess how I book my plane...), but not by necessity.
So, sure enough, the internet didn't change human nature, but for me it was world changing enough to be compared to something like the industrial revolution.
The mistake we made, one that we continue to make, is conflating human communication and social interaction with just moving bits around.
We thought the net would be great because we have these bits other people might want. Let's share them! They can learn to grow better crops, ease the world of oppression, and so on.
We still think that, it's just now we've arrived at "Sending bits around is great! But they need to be the _right_ bits"
I think anybody back then would have agreed too. No stupidity required, just a misunderstanding of how progressive societies actually operate. If we had been approached with this problem in these words back then, we would have said something like "But that's not a tech problem"
Well, maybe some stupidity was at play. But heck if anything's changed.
I don't know if anybody really thought this about the Internet back in the early days, say the 1980s, when networks were mostly restricted to academic institutions, large corporations and banks, and military communications:
The military had in past decades (60s and 70s) funded a lot of research into a networked system that would hopefully allow communications to survive a nuclear war, not exactly a utopian future vision:
Few if any were thinking that networking was going to lead to some social utopia due to the ease of communication among groups of people online - although ease of information sharing was recognized as a big plus in academics, at least. The introduction of the bulletin board system, and then usenet, mostly seemed to be about technically savvy people sharing information, some games, etc.
Then came the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the sale of ads, the rise of engagement metrics, and realization that there was nothing quite as effective as outrage porn (i.e. 'look at these terrible people and what they're doing! Tell everyone what you think about it!' )for drawing repeat users to your site. That's really when it went all sour.
I think the whole 'the Internet will bring people together in a beneficial way' theme was just a revisionist history put out by the PR people at outfits like Twitter and Facebook to put a patina of do-gooderness over what was essentially a predatory business model. I don't think such views were being widely promoted in the 1980s or early 1990s, at least I can't seem to find any such optimistic articles from that period.
I think one thing we've learned is anonymity often makes things worse. Substantially so. As someone raised on BBSes & Usenet, that pains me to say. But I think 4chan, Twitter & others have demonstrated that.
One thing about $8 for Twitter Blue is it will make it easier to filter out the noise -- the trolls, the bots, etc.
Previously I would have worried that having a toll on communication would mean we'd lose some important voices. That may still be true, but I've learned that having no cost on communication results in a lot of garbage being spewed.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Discussions in Usenet had exactly the same topics and flavour as forums and twitter today. Guns, abortions, free speech (including the old 'fire in a crowded theatre' trope).
Also present was various shades of mental illness, including the benign and the performative and narcissistic. Netnews was nicknamed 'nutnoise' for a reason.
You might find this sad but I find it strangely comforting. People in large semi-anonymous communities are predictable. At least things won't get (much) worse.
A man came upon a social media site and asked the guard "How are the people on this site?" The guard asked in turn, "How were the people of your previous site?" The man responded "Cruel and vicious" The guard answered "So will you find them here."
"We thought of people were free to share ideas, they'd just share ideas that we agree with." Well, yes, if you did think that, you were probably stupid.
The thing is, SOME people did and are still trying to use the internet in good ways, to share and help others.
But bad actors and bad intentions and lowest common denominator is always inevitable.
Reddit alone proves you can still have anonymity and people still behaving well enough to share/help. The key is moderators and moderation tools. And obviously "unlimited" freedom has to be sacrificed for "ground rules".
Its exactly the opposite. Back then, everyone was so smart. It was only people near the top of the bell curve who could access the internet in the 90's. Then sometime circa 2007, it stopped being a place mainly for intellectual discussion and pivoted to memes, entertainment, and political tribalism.
Before we go down the road of zero anonymity: When there’s no monetary cost to sending out and receiving information, regardless of the source and size then it shouldn’t be surprising that the noise to content ratio is high, with bad actors being the ones who benefit the most.
Perhaps we need to be smarter about metered and unmetered data?
I'll take the apparently unpopular opinion, that it kind of did work like that, and the internet has accelerated our progress into some kind of future Star Trek utopia (hopefully skipping the 2026-2053 nuclear war that they have in their universe).
I don't know how you'd support or discredit such a view but I generally feel like the free flow of information has been overall positive.
Not uniformly so, but even the bad stuff say Nazis, was already there and mostly brought into the sunlight.
I'm reminded of something I saw on the internet long ago, which compared a Time magazine piece about "life in Iran" which was all black and white photos of war murals, and contemporary Flickr photos from Iran, which was just normal people stuff, in color.
Can't find it now, but here's a conversation on Flickr in 2007 that kind of sums up the same thing of "Iranians are normal people, like us", "I know, I'm Iranian":
Iran isn't currently some Disneyland, but would it be better or worse without the internet? I vaguely feel there's been a positive impact.
I know it was fashionable to get excited about the Arab Spring and then fashionable to be cynical about it all, but I feel like in one of those hype cycle things, the long term impact is being understimated, even as some overestimated the short term impact.
I was around when the internet came out and I don't remember anyone saying it would fix everything. People thought it was cool and would fix some stuff which it kind of has - we have Wikipedia for example and anyone in the world can read smbc-comics pretty much for free.
Other stuff has been disappointing, like it seems to have made the left/right wing arguments more polarized. Maybe we'll get a fix for that?
Something that seems a big deal but it doesn't get much credit for is pre internet there were lots of talk about third world poverty, people starving and the like. That's got way better and I think better communications have a lot to do with it.
This website is weird. Anecdotally I've noticed it tends to generally be more level-headed and non toxic than other websites I go on (mainly reddit...) yet at the same time the mods seem to be pretty polarized
I left reddit about a month ago after having been on there for years, substituting in healthier habits like running, listening to music, and meditation when I need a break, and have been much happier as a result. HN is pretty good like 75 percent of the time but yeah there are occasionally hiccups like the comment from OP that make it through.
Usually it refers to criminality, drug use (including opioid epidemics), violence, poverty and so on. How you managed to turn it into conservatives are victim here point is mystery.
We just managed to keep the others out for a miraculous decade by keeping entry barriers hard, costly and complex. Is that an ableist viewpoint? No clue, but it was a bliss for sure.