7 ms·

It's a man-in-the-middle attack on culture.

by Torgo 10y ago

dredmorbius 10y ago
Which turns out be the general argument against centralised authority. Autocratic rule, monopoly power, monoculture agriculture, etc. You've only got one system, one set of preferences, one set of decision algorithms, often with its own preferences (even if unconscious, though very often not), determining outcomes for all. Any wealth or power imbalance tends toward this result.
hnbroseph 10y ago
just like tv, radio and newspapers. perhaps even churches, temples and mosques... though that might be more controversial to say.
- mabbo 10y ago
  There always another radio, newspaper, church. There's really only one Facebook, and it's now how you get essentially all of those things.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - abraae 10y ago
    Its how some people get all those things. Not people who care enough to get their news directly from a number of sources, instead of via the Facebook filter.
    - amagumori 10y ago
      to be completely honest, having the time and energy to stay well-informed on current events from a variety of sources is a privilege. working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources. the reason i say this is not to tell you to "check your privilege", by the way. it's to make the argument that facebook's shaping of the zeitgeist primarily affects the impoverished and working classes - the people who bear the brunt of all policy decisions, the people who need to be well-informed the most.
      - zaroth 10y ago
        Looking beyond Facebook for news and reporting on diverse topics with balanced viewpoints is a "privilege"? On what can you possibly base this claim? This is why Internet.org and the walled garden got nuked. This is what we really mean when we talk about network neutrality. You type a URL into the address bar and press enter, and the page you requested loads. While certainly there are populations where internet access is not readily available, that doesn't appear to be your argument. "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
        throwanem 10y ago
        > "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around. Consider the possibility that this difficulty lies not with the claim, but with your head. The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. The less of it you have, the more time you must spend on dealing with problems that you could make go away much more quickly and easily otherwise. The converse is also true. That's why people say that it's a privilege to be able to gather a balanced view of the world. I would not say the same, because the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack, and making people feel uneasy and defensive is inimical to worthwhile discourse. But when people use that lazy cliché in this context, that is what they mean.
        zaroth 10y ago
        > The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. This is true to a point, but you stretch it to an absolutism. As if, a lack of money by definition means a lack of time, which is most certainly false. In many ways, having more money increases demands on your time, and this can hold true up through even Larry Page levels of wealth. Working-class and poor people; many often hold a much more balanced world-view than the wealthy or elite. And yes, many of them used the internet to access diverse viewpoints mixed with their life experience in order to help arrive at those viewpoints. I think net worth is very loosely correlated with some of the things you seem to think net worth is strongly correlated with.
    - fasfdkjlk 10y ago
      Even if you don't get your information from Facebook, if enough people do, then Facebook can influence the outcomes of elections which directly affect your life. If you are a plumber who doesn't use Facebook, and Facebook promotes a bunch of content that foments anti-plumber sentiments, you may be attacked on the street by an angry mob of Facebook users. It is not possible to design your life so that you completely avoid the influence of an entity as large and powerful as Facebook, just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government.
      - CRConrad 10y ago
        "...just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government." Yeah. So in a way we all oughta have a vote in US elections. Right?
  - khattam 10y ago
    I REALLY hope that you are being sarcastic.
    - mabbo 10y ago
      Honestly? I'm not. I personally browse a few news sites, hacker news, etc, but I'm in the minority. Facebook is doing a very fine job of being the first place people hear about stuff happening. It's one website, and it will give you exactly the news you care about- big stories side by side with your friends' random musings. They've aggregated all information that a person cares about in one place, personalized, custom-fit, nothing you don't care about. I'm not calling that a good thing, but I do think it's true. There's a MacDonald's in every city in the planet, and it's literally killing us from how unhealthy it is, but good god I keep going back every now and then. Same idea as Facebook.
      - xiaoma 10y ago
        You may have a point about facebook, but I have to disagree about McDonald's. Many, many people eat tons of McDonald's and live to a ripe old age, including Warren Buffet, my great aunt (now 103), and countless others. Yes, you can make a strong argument that eating ONLY McDonald's is unhealthy (though others have done the opposite in various documentaries), but if you're going to say that McDonald's is "literally" killing us, you'll need to back it up with a mountain of evidence. Anecdotes aside, the places with the greatest longevity also tend to have a lot of McDonalds restaurants. The top McDonald's eating countries (per capita) outside the US are Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada and France—some of the longest living people in the world! If they're "literally" being killed by the food, it sure takes a long time to do its damage! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464729
- kmonsen 10y ago
  true, but the main point is that they are competing with each other and so there is so movement as public opinion shifts.
- rdiddly 10y ago
  All the examples you cite are essentially one-to-many communication channels, where you expect to hear one viewpoint from the getgo. Whereas Facebook dishonestly promises many-to-many, but all you get is the same old one-to-many.
munificent 10y ago
machine-in-the-middle, since most of this is all automated using machine learning. Each human's window into the larger world is increasingly through a lens controlled by automated software we don't understand.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Media has always been that. Why, during a military coup, is the first thing that is attacked are the TV stations? Control the message, control the culture. It is fascinating to see the Internet (and in this case Facebook) displacing the multi-billion(trillion?) media estate. I remember the dot.com bubble where the media claimed that statements that the Internet would make them obsolete was crap. 20 years ahead of its time I guess. The policy question is similar to the phone system one, is it in the people's best interest that their be a standard phone system? And if so, can you regulate it sufficiently to avoid abuses? Those were the questions surrounding the original Bell network in the US. What does a monopoly look like in the Internet world, and do we, can we, regulate it? Pretty important questions.
- ethbro 10y ago
  We ultimately decided landlines needed to be subjected to pretty stringent regulatory requirements in return for their monopoly (before ultimately breaking them up). Hopefully the same will happen to Facebook if they retain market share in 20 years.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    The government created the AT&T monopoly.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      I defer to you, but my take would be that the government simply declined to fight it on anti-trust grounds between ~1910-1970. On the other hand, I don't think you can ignore Bell Labs or the fact they they did build some amazing infrastructure. Would the world have been better off on the whole with more competition in AT&T's heyday?
      - jacobolus 10y ago
        Go read Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch. The details of these media/communications monopoly histories are fascinating. It’s hard to answer your counterfactual definitively, but probably, yes.

It's a man-in-the-middle attack on culture.

by Torgo 10y ago

It's a man-in-the-middle attack on culture.

Which turns out be the general argument against centralised authority. Autocratic rule, monopoly power, monoculture agriculture, etc. You've only got one system, one set of preferences, one set of decision algorithms, often with its own preferences (even if unconscious, though very often not), determining outcomes for all. Any wealth or power imbalance tends toward this result.

hnbroseph 10y ago

just like tv, radio and newspapers. perhaps even churches, temples and mosques... though that might be more controversial to say.

mabbo 10y ago
There always another radio, newspaper, church. There's really only one Facebook, and it's now how you get essentially all of those things.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- abraae 10y ago
  Its how some people get all those things. Not people who care enough to get their news directly from a number of sources, instead of via the Facebook filter.
  - amagumori 10y ago
    to be completely honest, having the time and energy to stay well-informed on current events from a variety of sources is a privilege. working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources. the reason i say this is not to tell you to "check your privilege", by the way. it's to make the argument that facebook's shaping of the zeitgeist primarily affects the impoverished and working classes - the people who bear the brunt of all policy decisions, the people who need to be well-informed the most.
    - zaroth 10y ago
      Looking beyond Facebook for news and reporting on diverse topics with balanced viewpoints is a "privilege"? On what can you possibly base this claim? This is why Internet.org and the walled garden got nuked. This is what we really mean when we talk about network neutrality. You type a URL into the address bar and press enter, and the page you requested loads. While certainly there are populations where internet access is not readily available, that doesn't appear to be your argument. "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        > "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around. Consider the possibility that this difficulty lies not with the claim, but with your head. The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. The less of it you have, the more time you must spend on dealing with problems that you could make go away much more quickly and easily otherwise. The converse is also true. That's why people say that it's a privilege to be able to gather a balanced view of the world. I would not say the same, because the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack, and making people feel uneasy and defensive is inimical to worthwhile discourse. But when people use that lazy cliché in this context, that is what they mean.
        zaroth 10y ago
        > The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. This is true to a point, but you stretch it to an absolutism. As if, a lack of money by definition means a lack of time, which is most certainly false. In many ways, having more money increases demands on your time, and this can hold true up through even Larry Page levels of wealth. Working-class and poor people; many often hold a much more balanced world-view than the wealthy or elite. And yes, many of them used the internet to access diverse viewpoints mixed with their life experience in order to help arrive at those viewpoints. I think net worth is very loosely correlated with some of the things you seem to think net worth is strongly correlated with.
  - fasfdkjlk 10y ago
    Even if you don't get your information from Facebook, if enough people do, then Facebook can influence the outcomes of elections which directly affect your life. If you are a plumber who doesn't use Facebook, and Facebook promotes a bunch of content that foments anti-plumber sentiments, you may be attacked on the street by an angry mob of Facebook users. It is not possible to design your life so that you completely avoid the influence of an entity as large and powerful as Facebook, just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government.
    - CRConrad 10y ago
      "...just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government." Yeah. So in a way we all oughta have a vote in US elections. Right?
- khattam 10y ago
  I REALLY hope that you are being sarcastic.
  - mabbo 10y ago
    Honestly? I'm not. I personally browse a few news sites, hacker news, etc, but I'm in the minority. Facebook is doing a very fine job of being the first place people hear about stuff happening. It's one website, and it will give you exactly the news you care about- big stories side by side with your friends' random musings. They've aggregated all information that a person cares about in one place, personalized, custom-fit, nothing you don't care about. I'm not calling that a good thing, but I do think it's true. There's a MacDonald's in every city in the planet, and it's literally killing us from how unhealthy it is, but good god I keep going back every now and then. Same idea as Facebook.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      You may have a point about facebook, but I have to disagree about McDonald's. Many, many people eat tons of McDonald's and live to a ripe old age, including Warren Buffet, my great aunt (now 103), and countless others. Yes, you can make a strong argument that eating ONLY McDonald's is unhealthy (though others have done the opposite in various documentaries), but if you're going to say that McDonald's is "literally" killing us, you'll need to back it up with a mountain of evidence. Anecdotes aside, the places with the greatest longevity also tend to have a lot of McDonalds restaurants. The top McDonald's eating countries (per capita) outside the US are Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada and France—some of the longest living people in the world! If they're "literally" being killed by the food, it sure takes a long time to do its damage! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464729
kmonsen 10y ago
true, but the main point is that they are competing with each other and so there is so movement as public opinion shifts.
rdiddly 10y ago
All the examples you cite are essentially one-to-many communication channels, where you expect to hear one viewpoint from the getgo. Whereas Facebook dishonestly promises many-to-many, but all you get is the same old one-to-many.

munificent 10y ago

machine-in-the-middle, since most of this is all automated using machine learning. Each human's window into the larger world is increasingly through a lens controlled by automated software we don't understand.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Media has always been that. Why, during a military coup, is the first thing that is attacked are the TV stations? Control the message, control the culture. It is fascinating to see the Internet (and in this case Facebook) displacing the multi-billion(trillion?) media estate. I remember the dot.com bubble where the media claimed that statements that the Internet would make them obsolete was crap. 20 years ahead of its time I guess. The policy question is similar to the phone system one, is it in the people's best interest that their be a standard phone system? And if so, can you regulate it sufficiently to avoid abuses? Those were the questions surrounding the original Bell network in the US. What does a monopoly look like in the Internet world, and do we, can we, regulate it? Pretty important questions.

ethbro 10y ago
We ultimately decided landlines needed to be subjected to pretty stringent regulatory requirements in return for their monopoly (before ultimately breaking them up). Hopefully the same will happen to Facebook if they retain market share in 20 years.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  The government created the AT&T monopoly.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    I defer to you, but my take would be that the government simply declined to fight it on anti-trust grounds between ~1910-1970. On the other hand, I don't think you can ignore Bell Labs or the fact they they did build some amazing infrastructure. Would the world have been better off on the whole with more competition in AT&T's heyday?
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      Go read Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch. The details of these media/communications monopoly histories are fascinating. It’s hard to answer your counterfactual definitively, but probably, yes.