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I remember the '90s, when the Internet as we know it was just a baby... The enthusiasm we all shared for it. Of a better future. Of true democracy in the world

I remember the '90s, when the Internet as we know it was just a baby... The enthusiasm we all shared for it. Of a better future. Of true democracy in the world. Of free people, free minds. The Internet will be the cure for all the social ills that humanity has experienced in the past. People will trade and talk with each other and that's how we can have peace on Earth! We will be able to discuss, collaborate, create. We would be able to watch any film, listen to any song. Some people called us "geeks", we liked to call ourselves "hackers". We are not just hacking code, we're hacking a new world. -- A quarter of a century later and most of those things are now reality. But somehow these great things have brought with them some hidden things. Things which we ignored or brushed off easily back in the day.. Like the fact that the Internet is now populated by the same demographic as the real world, not just hackers and dreamers. Now everyone is online. We thought it would free us from oppression, but it is becoming the ultimate tool for oppression. We thought it would give us true democracy, but it is becoming the ultimate moderation system for "foreign" though suppression and group think generator. We though it will serve our needs, but it is becoming the thing that is telling us what to need. We thought it will satisfy our tastes, but our tastes are now being programed into us by it. Of course we're still high from all the positive aspects and it's not in our nature to be scared of things, but that will soon wear off .. And when we wake up what will we find there ? Either way, it is unstoppable and nobody can turn it off. So we only have to wait and see what it will ultimately turn into. What will it be 25 years from now ? Will we still be able to discuss about this freely ?

api 11y ago
The big error of the 90s digital utopians was over-estimating how much the Internet would change society and under-estimating how much society would change the Internet.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  There was a fair amount of resistance to society changing the internet from that crowd in the 90s. They've turned out to have been pretty much right, they just lost the fight.
- colordrops 11y ago
  The internet and society are intertwined in a fractal feedback loop, to the point where they are almost one in the same now.
CaptSpify 11y ago
I think the old internet still exists. Despite how terrible things have gotten in some aspects, you can still freely share ideas, data, and opinions. Yes, it makes me sad that we are forcing archaic meat-space ideas onto the internet, but, in many ways, the "core idea" of the internet moves around them. I agree that in many ways the internet looks sad compared to what it was, but I don't think hope is lost.
- krapp 11y ago
  Just because most people only consume content from a few corporate sites now, that doesn't mean the entire rest of the web has disappeared. The truth is, the web has only grown since its adoption by the mainstream. Yet out of some mixed sense of hipster despair and anti-capitalist contrarianism, it seems that "hackers" more than anyone have lost the ability to see the forest for the trees. Of course the old internet still exists, at least as far as the old sites go - as long as someone is still paying to keep the servers up. What doesn't exist anymore is the exclusivity of online culture. But if the web is a platform for expression, and I don't think anyone can argue it isn't, then is it really the case that the old "culture" of the web, biased as it was towards hackers and university students merely by happenstance, was really more "true" than the culture of the web today?
daodedickinson 11y ago
Re: "I remember the '90s, when the Internet as we know it was just a baby... The enthusiasm we all shared for it. Of a better future. Of true democracy in the world. Of free people, free minds. The Internet will be the cure for all the social ills that humanity has experienced in the past. People will trade and talk with each other and that's how we can have peace on Earth!" The inventor of television thought it would end war once people could see directly into other countries. I guess he thought it would make people more like himself. And you're right that the population of the internet has changed drastically. In the past 6 years, more Indian people have come online than the number of people in the United States. The mass migration into Europe has not been triggered because the Middle East is suddenly violent, but because now anyone, even without family abroad, can see how they can be paid far more in Europe for doing nothing than they can for doing anything accesible to them in their current location. They can read and share intricate details on how to make the trip, how unlikely it is to be deported, what benefits they can get where and by taking what steps, how to and why to destroy their passports and acquire Syrian passports, etc. Sure television let them see 90210 and all sorts of Western things, and that was influential, but the Western channels that could be retrieved by satelites never ran infomercials on one weird trick to raise your income by twenty times. And all of the extra information accessed through the internet has made living in the "worst" countries ever more embarassing and painful because the relative and absolute differences are harder to ignore. And this obviously effects the experience of lifestyle differences in the richest countries, too. "Homer was wrong when he said 'Would that Conflict might vanish from among Gods and men!'... One must realize that war is shared and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict." - Kahn translating Heraclitus If we want something to be different, we'll have to fight to change it, and we can be sure someone will want to change something further still. Re: "What do we call the state of the world that leaves us with only 2 pre-selected choices who happen to agree on 90%+ of all policies?" Well, and supposedly over 90% of my DNA is shared with chimpanzees. If anything, there is plenty of competition in both primaries this year even if superdelegates mean that Bernie's chances are fake. Bernie was down over 30% in the polls and won Michigan so I'm not sure how pre-selected these choices are. I know there is rampant voter fraud in the United States, but new ID requirements instituted to give a possibility of detecting it seem to be deterring fraud quite well this cycle. Democratic party turnout is a whopping 285 percent (!!!) worse in states with new voter ID laws. Even as turnout overall is much higher! Voter fraud investigations ending in convictions have shown that it has been trivial for less than ten people to successfully conspire to get hundreds of thousands of ballots counted as valid, so I'd say choices are becoming less pre-selected. The only person who pre-selected Trump was Trump. Re: "None of this is any kind of pre-planned conspiracy, just brain chemisty" But it is a pre-planned conspiracy. These are exactly the Alinsky-ite tactics Hillary studied for her senior thesis. Yes, the average foot soldier doesn't know the origins of why they treat people with different politics the way that they do, but they are modeling behavior that was originally meticulously designed. The Twitter Trust and Safety council's biased banning is driven by Habermas's arguments for a need for censorship in favor of the good. Philosophers / theorists / prophets / thinkers drive behavior. Even if Google is diverting people to pages, someone has to come up with the ideas on those pages, even the idea that people should buy a graphic t-shirt. The ideas are then presented using techniques of rhetoric / advertising / proganda / presuasion / captology / seuduction to propel themselves through brains and their chemistry but reduction to chemisty here is unfair to the lucidity of the most far-seeing, far-planning, and far-influencing of our species. Re: "replace voting with polling!" And have laws fly back and forth with vacillating of polls? You haven't even acknowledged any of the historical problems of direct democracy or any of these reasons such polling was opposed by both Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Even if this polling was legitimate (its scientifically debatable whether it could be and, I feel, psychologically / sociologically impossible) its contravention to the Constitution and the sense of illegitimacy it will be saturated with to those who lose on important issues would guarantee that 10%+ of U.S. citizens would begin an armed revolution. 45% of Americans believe in ghosts and enough Americans disbelieve polls (I don't know how to Google for a poll about polls!) even when they more indirectly influence policy that I believe your policy would be a grave danger to the general peace. Hillary was favored in EVERY Michigan poll, most by 20-30 points! And she lost! Polling is less accurate than ever and it would be far more difficult to actually vet a poll where you had to make sure that the pollee was legitimate. I've been polled twice in my life and never selected for jury duty. I've heard lots of older people complain that they've never been polled. Do you understand that if people went years without being polled by your system that the mind trick by which democracy gives people the illusion of control would suddenly fail? You underestimate the ritual function of elections. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Bias is inevitable, what kind should we want, and why? Our answer to that will be decided by who best seduces us into an answer. See: Baudrillard

api 11y ago

The big error of the 90s digital utopians was over-estimating how much the Internet would change society and under-estimating how much society would change the Internet.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
There was a fair amount of resistance to society changing the internet from that crowd in the 90s. They've turned out to have been pretty much right, they just lost the fight.
colordrops 11y ago
The internet and society are intertwined in a fractal feedback loop, to the point where they are almost one in the same now.

CaptSpify 11y ago

I think the old internet still exists. Despite how terrible things have gotten in some aspects, you can still freely share ideas, data, and opinions. Yes, it makes me sad that we are forcing archaic meat-space ideas onto the internet, but, in many ways, the "core idea" of the internet moves around them. I agree that in many ways the internet looks sad compared to what it was, but I don't think hope is lost.

krapp 11y ago
Just because most people only consume content from a few corporate sites now, that doesn't mean the entire rest of the web has disappeared. The truth is, the web has only grown since its adoption by the mainstream. Yet out of some mixed sense of hipster despair and anti-capitalist contrarianism, it seems that "hackers" more than anyone have lost the ability to see the forest for the trees. Of course the old internet still exists, at least as far as the old sites go - as long as someone is still paying to keep the servers up. What doesn't exist anymore is the exclusivity of online culture. But if the web is a platform for expression, and I don't think anyone can argue it isn't, then is it really the case that the old "culture" of the web, biased as it was towards hackers and university students merely by happenstance, was really more "true" than the culture of the web today?

daodedickinson 11y ago

Re: "I remember the '90s, when the Internet as we know it was just a baby... The enthusiasm we all shared for it. Of a better future. Of true democracy in the world. Of free people, free minds. The Internet will be the cure for all the social ills that humanity has experienced in the past. People will trade and talk with each other and that's how we can have peace on Earth!" The inventor of television thought it would end war once people could see directly into other countries. I guess he thought it would make people more like himself. And you're right that the population of the internet has changed drastically. In the past 6 years, more Indian people have come online than the number of people in the United States. The mass migration into Europe has not been triggered because the Middle East is suddenly violent, but because now anyone, even without family abroad, can see how they can be paid far more in Europe for doing nothing than they can for doing anything accesible to them in their current location. They can read and share intricate details on how to make the trip, how unlikely it is to be deported, what benefits they can get where and by taking what steps, how to and why to destroy their passports and acquire Syrian passports, etc. Sure television let them see 90210 and all sorts of Western things, and that was influential, but the Western channels that could be retrieved by satelites never ran infomercials on one weird trick to raise your income by twenty times. And all of the extra information accessed through the internet has made living in the "worst" countries ever more embarassing and painful because the relative and absolute differences are harder to ignore. And this obviously effects the experience of lifestyle differences in the richest countries, too. "Homer was wrong when he said 'Would that Conflict might vanish from among Gods and men!'... One must realize that war is shared and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass in accordance with conflict." - Kahn translating Heraclitus If we want something to be different, we'll have to fight to change it, and we can be sure someone will want to change something further still. Re: "What do we call the state of the world that leaves us with only 2 pre-selected choices who happen to agree on 90%+ of all policies?" Well, and supposedly over 90% of my DNA is shared with chimpanzees. If anything, there is plenty of competition in both primaries this year even if superdelegates mean that Bernie's chances are fake. Bernie was down over 30% in the polls and won Michigan so I'm not sure how pre-selected these choices are. I know there is rampant voter fraud in the United States, but new ID requirements instituted to give a possibility of detecting it seem to be deterring fraud quite well this cycle. Democratic party turnout is a whopping 285 percent (!!!) worse in states with new voter ID laws. Even as turnout overall is much higher! Voter fraud investigations ending in convictions have shown that it has been trivial for less than ten people to successfully conspire to get hundreds of thousands of ballots counted as valid, so I'd say choices are becoming less pre-selected. The only person who pre-selected Trump was Trump. Re: "None of this is any kind of pre-planned conspiracy, just brain chemisty" But it is a pre-planned conspiracy. These are exactly the Alinsky-ite tactics Hillary studied for her senior thesis. Yes, the average foot soldier doesn't know the origins of why they treat people with different politics the way that they do, but they are modeling behavior that was originally meticulously designed. The Twitter Trust and Safety council's biased banning is driven by Habermas's arguments for a need for censorship in favor of the good. Philosophers / theorists / prophets / thinkers drive behavior. Even if Google is diverting people to pages, someone has to come up with the ideas on those pages, even the idea that people should buy a graphic t-shirt. The ideas are then presented using techniques of rhetoric / advertising / proganda / presuasion / captology / seuduction to propel themselves through brains and their chemistry but reduction to chemisty here is unfair to the lucidity of the most far-seeing, far-planning, and far-influencing of our species. Re: "replace voting with polling!" And have laws fly back and forth with vacillating of polls? You haven't even acknowledged any of the historical problems of direct democracy or any of these reasons such polling was opposed by both Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Even if this polling was legitimate (its scientifically debatable whether it could be and, I feel, psychologically / sociologically impossible) its contravention to the Constitution and the sense of illegitimacy it will be saturated with to those who lose on important issues would guarantee that 10%+ of U.S. citizens would begin an armed revolution. 45% of Americans believe in ghosts and enough Americans disbelieve polls (I don't know how to Google for a poll about polls!) even when they more indirectly influence policy that I believe your policy would be a grave danger to the general peace. Hillary was favored in EVERY Michigan poll, most by 20-30 points! And she lost! Polling is less accurate than ever and it would be far more difficult to actually vet a poll where you had to make sure that the pollee was legitimate. I've been polled twice in my life and never selected for jury duty. I've heard lots of older people complain that they've never been polled. Do you understand that if people went years without being polled by your system that the mind trick by which democracy gives people the illusion of control would suddenly fail? You underestimate the ritual function of elections. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Bias is inevitable, what kind should we want, and why? Our answer to that will be decided by who best seduces us into an answer. See: Baudrillard