9 ms·

My Internet Mea Culpa

99 points by pixelcort 9y ago

abusoufiyan 9y ago
The Internet was how I really learned what people really thought about others, and it wasn't a nice thing to realize but it was necessary. My whole life I was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc. It was easy when no one would say to your face that they judged you on these things. It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity. We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened. We forgot that the traditional barriers to intercultural understanding are still there: language, tribal sentiment, political and economic power structures, etc. At the end of the day, in a democracy the majority can do anything it wants, even if what it wants is to punish the minority. The Internet has had all the failings of a total democracy in that sense. I also love the point the author makes at the end. Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence. It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong...
- neveroffensive 9y ago
  > It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong... I don't really understand this sentiment. If we admit that we all hold beliefs that could be wrong, isn't the ultimate conclusion radical freedom? The radical freedom of the internet isn't a result of a set of beliefs, it's the result of evicting belief and allowing all ideas to stand on their own merit. > We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened. I think you're wrong here. The world is becoming an exponentially more peaceful and tolerant place in my experience. There is still a vocal minority which gets attention thanks to the open platform, but the overall result of this openness seems to be growing disdain for beliefs which we now know are founded in hate, not logic or science. Do you really feel that the world is in a worse place than it was in the 70's or even in 2010? In what ways? > It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity. Genuine question, what percentage of 4chan do you believe is racist? Do you feel that racist memes genuinely come from a place of racism? What large anonymous groups do you believe consist of genuine racists? Do you consider me a racist if I make the statement, "more crime in America is committed by people with dark skin, relatively", even if I make no attempt to suggest a correlation or reason for this statistic?
  - denom 9y ago
    1) Yes to ideas on the own merits, but not if those ideas ingratiate themselves vis an unwholesome, saccharine, aptitude that pits human nature against itself. 2) this is debatable, but instability is present in our political system from top to bottom which I believe is due to these transformative tech movements. We should not assume that the sun will rise tomorrow (as in some occasions it will not). 3) your discussion about 4chan lacks some precept or basis of intelligibility. Imagine a similar question as being “what percentage of a psychotic mood is racist”. It’s a non sequitor and doesn’t address the substance of the problem. Similarly, your posited question about ‘dark skin’ lacks traction for similar reasons and illustrates the baseless nature of the internet meme-culture.
    - neveroffensive 9y ago
      > your discussion about 4chan lacks some precept or basis of intelligibility. The poster clearly feels there are large groups of racists on the internet. I'm trying to ascertain where they think these groups are, and exactly what they feel these groups believe. The 4chan mention was a guess. > Imagine a similar question as being “what percentage of a psychotic mood is racist”. It’s a non sequitor and doesn’t address the substance of the problem. I stand by my question. I think the poster has misconceptions about internet culture, and wish to reach the root of them to either correct them, or my own misconceptions. You're assertion here dose not make sense to me. > Similarly, your posited question about ‘dark skin’ lacks traction for similar reasons and illustrates the baseless nature of the internet meme-culture. Once again, I'm trying to understand how the poster conceptualizes racism both within the context of the internet, and society as a whole. Forgive me, but if someone is seeing pervasive racism in society I want to know where and why. I fail to see how this is me parroting a baseless meme-culture. I'm sorry if talking about skin color and crime offends you, but that is no excuse to disregard me as some sort of troll. I have a genuine desire to engage with the poster on their opinions about the nature of the internet/racism/social progress, and being dismissed in such a pedantic manner seems uncalled for. Edit: My larger point here is, in my experience racists are a dwindling minority. However, people have begun to conflate certain types of discussion, and forms of comedy (namely absurdist), with genuine racism. These misconceptions are leading them to feel that the internet is somehow heavily racist. True racism is a serious issue, and deserves a heavy handed response. We need to be careful that the racism we point out is true racism, not just an opinion we disagree with, or a joke we don't find funny.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence. The biggest problem I've found with people that purport to be rationalists (and I include myself) is the propensity to believe they have enough inputs to make definitive statements, when in truth they are just discounting the unknown unknowns. When dealing with people, even on the individual level but it's much worse in groups, the complex motivations and constraints make every statement along the lines of "a rational person would do X" sound hopelessly naive. That some core beliefs are not examined or are believed to be the truth without evidence does not surprise me, even if it still makes me sad.
  - opportune 9y ago
    I was thinking about this today. It is sad how far people will go to rationalize beliefs for the sake of simplicity. It seems people prefer simplicity because it makes the world make sense: people are uncomfortable with nuance because it makes the world so complex and uncertain, and in a way, scary. I think it's the same line of reasoning that draws people towards certain conspiracies (e.g. lizard people, Jews controlling the world). People want to feel like the world can be explained in just a few sentences. Otherwise, I think people feel utterly helpless.
- l33tbro 9y ago
  I think you may be subject to a cognitive bias where you overestimate how representative racist, sexist, etc people are of the larger population. Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors. This isn't to say there are not depressingly high numbers of these kinds of people, but the conclusion you've arrived at comes from a typical group attribution error.
  - abusoufiyan 9y ago
    My saying "It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity." does not mean I am overestimating how many people this online group represents in the real world. Even if I underestimated it, it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever. "Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors." Why then, was this not something realized by the "prophets" of the Internet 2.0? That's what the author is asking. What conclusion did I arrive at which came from error? Please kindly point that out to me.
    - l33tbro 9y ago
      I find it difficult to understand when you say "it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever". Even if I were extremely mollycoddled by my parents, I fail to grasp how I would not be exposed to such attitudes - however slight or fleeting - in my pampered upbringing. As for the prophets of Internet 2.0 (not sure why you're adding 2.0 here, we're discussing Brand and Kelly who were prophets of the intial web), I'd hazard a guess that their blindness came from a combination of good old-fashioned wishful thinking mixed with 'the shock of the new' that the web had in spades back then, galvanising them into becoming the 'egg-meet-face' cyber-utopianist proselytizers that the author of this article is deriding.
- jhiska 9y ago
  >My whole life I was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc. As usual in American discussions, class is forgotten. A heterosexual, "white", cisman can also be working class or bourgeois, but for some reason -- probably because of the annihilation of Marxism in the US -- it's never brought up and this despite its modern relevance screaming at us. Without class, one can't understand why Trump got the vote of so many working class people. Ethnicity (Caucasians are ethnic people from the Caucus region; modern biology only accepts one race and that is the human race; "white" is a culture, not a "race" or ethnicity, since Middle-Eastern Caucasians aren't considered "white"; "white" is better defined as a Caucasian of European origin that accepts Western culture), sexuality, sex and gender, religion... None of these explain the working class animosity towards the "ultra-wealthy elites" that are "out of touch with the common person" or why the promise of bringing back working class jobs was so tempting. Trump, while being a liar and actually damaging to the working class, played to their class heartstrings. Social justice without class consciousness creates injustice, and that injustice is being exploited by the extreme alt-right. One can't also understand why Bernie Sanders was as appealing as Trump unless one understands that both Bernie and Trump appealed to anti-bourgeois sentiment and both promised to help the working class. It was class rebellion, and unfortunately it turned out as badly as it did because Bernie was never put on the voting ballots.
malvosenior 9y ago
I don’t think this author speaks for a lot of people in tech. His viewpoint seems to be from a very narrow subculture, mainly Web 2.0 era social networking. Some of us have had a lifelong passion for technology and are actually happy and excited about the current state of the industry (and always have been). If you don’t like people disagreeing with you on Twitter, just turn it off. Don’t claim that it’s part of some apparatus (that the author feels he helped invent) that somehow brought out the worst in humanity. He should feel happy he can now get exposed to views outside of his bubble.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Are you really arguing that social media isn’t optimized to create bubbles?
  - neveroffensive 9y ago
    Social media is a tool, you can use it to create an echo chamber, or to explore alternative view points and discuss. The key to the later is growing up, and being ready to empathize, even when it's hard or you disagree.
  - notacoward 9y ago
    Social media are optimized for maximum engagement. If people engage more in bubbles, they'll get bubbles. If people engage more by reaching out and exploring beyond their bubbles, the platforms will facilitate that instead. Don't blame the mirror.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      I blame the algorithm behind the mirror, and the people behind the algorithms.
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  > (that the author feels he helped invent) agreed... article felt like maximum ego-stroking, minimal thinking. to my mind, the conversation about where "the web" went off the rails ends with the dopamine-hook. I worked with a team building game experiences 5 years ago, it was all we could think about. good examples of it were everything we wanted to emulate. it was disgusting... mea culpa. for the children growing up today, whose parents put their baby photos on blast all day... there will be a reckoning. i wonder what that will look like.
darkr 9y ago
I enjoyed this article, particularly as someone who tried and failed to complete Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable” this year. If the book had been written in 1996, it would have been cute. Unfortunately it was written/released in 2016; the level of naivety displayed was shocking. Page after page of techno-utopian stream-of-consciousness futurist masterbation, without so much as a fleeting thought given to social or political repercussions. As a writer, he struck me as either a deeply cynical person, or as someone with no understanding of humanity at all.
ep103 9y ago
I think you could make an argument for the exact opposite. No, we have not reached the gifts my father or grandfather thought the internet would bring to society. For every hope that widespread communication would bring understanding among the populace and bring power to people instead of the elite, we now have a bot army or fake news infrastructure working to oppose those ideals. But I think these problems, and the problems the author points to, are the result of the current, pre-internet world order attempting to impose itself on the modern web, not the other way around. We've already seen the massive effects of the internet on the populace over the last 15 years or so, and I think a lot of those changes have been both quiet, and genuinely good for people (How many things are common knowledge now, that were never reported on the news, as a quick example?). What we're seeing now is the empire strikes back, as established organizations attempt to impose themselves back on this newly connected world before they go the way of the music industry. Whether this is done by manipulating people online, walling off sections of the internet, flooding the internet with propaganda/tracking/advertising, or simply removing the open nature of the internet in entirety (Net Neutrality), the drive appears to always be the same: large pre-internet organizations imposing traditional order on a new medium. And I think it is these efforts that are responsible for the majority of issues the author raises. Though that's not to say the internet itself doesn't have a fair share of problems. But even where the internet seems at its worst, I think the problems still primarily come from traditional societal organizations, and it is they, not the internet, that should take the blame and be the focus of change. Let's take the surprisingly large influence of racism and fascism that appears to exist online as an example, easily one of the worst aspects of the internet. I think prevalence of hate speech online exists for two major reasons. The first and largest driving force, is that the internet has revealed that outside of the internet, there are essentially no actually truly-free, anonymous, free speech places in a person's life. Even online, the number of places where one can state whatever they would like, to their hearts content, without having those thoughts potentially affect their daily life, are extremely rare and need to be sought out. Is it any surprise, then, that the people who seek out such forums are often those who are upset at the end of the day, and feel a need to spit some vitriol? Or that the users of such forums specifically focus saying things they know they could not say in any other aspect of their life? I fail to see this as a shortcoming of the internet, and see it more as an indictment of society at large. Perhaps if there were more places where one can truly speak out at the end of a day, and be heard but not judged or discriminated against, less people would be willing to rage alone against an empty screen. But even if you reject this idea, then the alternative to me seems worse. Because the alternative is that we have to accept that the average person is not capable, or should not be allowed, to navigate accountability-free communication, and society will need to be built accordingly going forward. Hopefully I don't need to point out the obvious downside to embracing such a philosophy. That said, I think we did make, and are making one major design mistake, consistently online. And that is that we need to recognize that the way human society works, is that new ideas are shouted by individuals all the time, and then the silent masses judge them, mostly silently, and embrace them slowly into their day to day. On a webpage design level, this needs to be taken into account. If you are listing all comments on your webpage with equal weight, then we need to accept that you're going to get a pretty consistent distribution of comments ranging from insightful to hateful, and from thought-provoking to headache inducing. But if you allow the masses to weigh in, for example, by voting on comments, you'll find that most of the nauseating hate-filled ideas quickly fall off the radar, just like they do in real life. This is the difference between say, youtube comments and reddit comments. I would love to see websites start taking this a step further, and automatically start banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a certain threshold, just how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner after his first diatribe is found to be crazy.
zer00eyz 9y ago
Sigh, Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used for good or bad. The author lost me when they said "Massive amounts of data is still hidden behind firewalls or not online at all." Except: Sci-hub, pirate bay, project Gutenberg, wikipedia, IMDB and even here on hacker news (I could go on but these are big ones). Technology (in all forms) doesn't change humanity, technology enables humanity to change. It is just a tool and we have to decide what to do with it. If for every Peter Theil we get one Ellon Musk, one space x one step toward progress then by all means I consider it a victory. This is progress, and compared to previous generations the price has been fairly low.
- sooheon 9y ago
  > Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used for good or bad. I see this meme everywhere, and I just can't fathom it. Not all tech is perfectly neutral, just because it's "technology". An iron maiden and a wheelchair sit on different places in the good - evil spectrum.
  - neveroffensive2 9y ago
    > An iron maiden and a wheelchair sit on different places in the good - evil spectrum. No they don't. They are both just objects, people are the reason the iron maiden has the connotation it dose. The iron maiden could have been a single art piece in a modern art gallery somewhere meant to symbolize the pain of heartbreak. Wheelchairs could have been devices used to intentionally cripple children by preventing them from using their legs. We need to stop living in this fantasy land where people aren't responsible for their actions. I'm comfortable making the assertion that it is an absolute fact that guns, the internet, and all technology are neutral until applied/activated by a thinking being (AI would count as a thinking being, IMHO). What if no human had ever died from a gunshot? What if we only used them to kill cows for consumption, would guns still be inherently evil (bare with me if your vegan)? Is it not humans who first choose to point guns at eachother? We can't let personal responsibility die. We just can't... Otherwise all tech may as well be evil. You don't think there is an evil way to use a heart bypass machine? I bet I can find one. Give me any piece of tech and I can find a way to use it for evil, and a way to use it for good. Even nuclear bombs could be used to save the planet from an out of control asteroid without doing anything evil. Or you could blow up a city of people. Where dose the difference lie? With the person whose fingers on the button.
chasing 9y ago
This feels overdramatic. The internet has helped humanity in many ways and, frankly, the notion of an individual apologizing for it is absurd. I do feel like there are certain cultural assumptions that have not proven themselves out. Those will need to be addressed if we want to maximize the value of our shared internet for all of us.
jhiska 9y ago
Too little, too late. At this irreversible point it's not actual actionable regret, but a merely symbolic act meant to save their conscience from hellish guilt. Besides, the blame for the Facebook-surveillance state and "alternative" facts is dispersed over hundreds of thousands of people. No single individual is responsible. It's an out-sized ego with out-sized guilt that motivates him to write the article.
tzahola 9y ago
Cmd+F, “Trump”, zero results Wtf??? At least there’s some “you shouldn’t be able to read opinions I don’t like” from 2015.
nemild 9y ago
While this is a start, we need a more rational debate about technological trends and their impact. We (technologists) all get very excited about the possible future (Internet, Social Media, cryptocurrencies) without being honest with the problems with these new worlds at scale. The way it works right now: 1. Get angry about state of current world (at different times: IBM, Microsoft, Facebook - or current trends like social media) 2. Evangelize how new trend will make everything better (today, decentralization and cryptocurrencies) 3. Realize that new world has its own set of issues as it grows larger, and external elements co-opt it for their own needs I wish that we had more thoughtful debates about the tradeoffs, rather than seeing new technologies as a panacea. Entrepreneurs who help grow new industries need the self awareness to realize the potential problems with the world they help create. As engineers, we're very attuned to potential ways our system can be technically hacked, but for some reason forget to think about the other ways these systems can be "hacked". For anyone interested, you should read Tim Wu's The Master Switch. It's a unique window into the idealism of past eras (radio vs telephone, telephone vs telegraph) - and often disappointment that the early evangelists eventually feel.
- blfr 9y ago
  If I understand correctly, OP is suggesting that these are not problems of scale but rather that scale itself is the problem in the sense that it's untenable for humans.
tw1010 9y ago
Funny how Medium started out being branded as the one clean template alternative to all the others, and has now devolved into just as cluttered as all the rest.
CodinM 9y ago
I just want to take the time to tell the author that he's not that important and I couldn't give a flying rat about him and his egotistical opinion.
andr 9y ago
I grew up in an ex-socialist country and we got our first McDonald's in the mid 90s. It was an exciting new thing, a new taste, a new model of restaurants and consumption. My family took us on multiple road trips to the McDonald's, which was in a different city. Nobody thought about whether it's healthy, because eating there was a privilege. 20 years later, fast food chains are everywhere, and if my attitude hadn't changed from the 90s, I'd have a serious health issue. I feel like the Internet, and social media in particular, are going through the same period. What was once exotic and a privilege, is now instantly-available, algorithmically-optimized junk food. And it's not healthy to use it as your main source of nutrition. The good news is that, just like McDonald's didn't kill good, healthy restaurants, so has social media not killed good, healthy sources of information. Most of the blogs I followed growing up are still active and rediscovering them - and setting up an RSS reader again - has been a great feeling. News sources that give you thoughtful context, instead of a dopamine feed, like The Economist and The New Yorker, are also thriving. Replacing podcasts with audiobooks on my dog walk listen has also gave me pause and perspective. So my New Year's resolution is every time I open Twitter or Facebook, to ask myself whether I would eat at a McDonald's today.
- taneq 9y ago
  Every time I find myself scrolling through Facebook, I ask myself "am I here for me, because I really want to be, or am I here for Facebook because they've reward-hacked my motivation subsystem?" That thought in itself is usually enough for me to shrug and close the window.
- PrimHelios 9y ago
  >And it's not healthy to use it as your main source of nutrition. This is especially important. Twitter has desensitized its users to the point where thousands of people bullying someone into committing suicide doesn't upset anybody. All that recently happened, and it was a wake-up call for me; looking around, nobody actually cared that someone had died, they had all moved on to whatever short-lived meme had taken over. Leaving Twitter and going to HN, google News, and RSS has definitely been challenging (albeit pretty interesting). It's a lot harder to actually get myself to read articles instead of just headlines, and I've been realizing how short my attention span is because of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I wish more people would leave and start using actual news sources again instead of just reading headlines.

99 points by pixelcort 9y ago

The Internet was how I really learned what people really thought about others, and it wasn't a nice thing to realize but it was necessary. My whole life I was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc. It was easy when no one would say to your face that they judged you on these things. It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity. We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened. We forgot that the traditional barriers to intercultural understanding are still there: language, tribal sentiment, political and economic power structures, etc. At the end of the day, in a democracy the majority can do anything it wants, even if what it wants is to punish the minority. The Internet has had all the failings of a total democracy in that sense. I also love the point the author makes at the end. Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence. It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong...

neveroffensive 9y ago
> It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong... I don't really understand this sentiment. If we admit that we all hold beliefs that could be wrong, isn't the ultimate conclusion radical freedom? The radical freedom of the internet isn't a result of a set of beliefs, it's the result of evicting belief and allowing all ideas to stand on their own merit. > We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened. I think you're wrong here. The world is becoming an exponentially more peaceful and tolerant place in my experience. There is still a vocal minority which gets attention thanks to the open platform, but the overall result of this openness seems to be growing disdain for beliefs which we now know are founded in hate, not logic or science. Do you really feel that the world is in a worse place than it was in the 70's or even in 2010? In what ways? > It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity. Genuine question, what percentage of 4chan do you believe is racist? Do you feel that racist memes genuinely come from a place of racism? What large anonymous groups do you believe consist of genuine racists? Do you consider me a racist if I make the statement, "more crime in America is committed by people with dark skin, relatively", even if I make no attempt to suggest a correlation or reason for this statistic?
- denom 9y ago
  1) Yes to ideas on the own merits, but not if those ideas ingratiate themselves vis an unwholesome, saccharine, aptitude that pits human nature against itself. 2) this is debatable, but instability is present in our political system from top to bottom which I believe is due to these transformative tech movements. We should not assume that the sun will rise tomorrow (as in some occasions it will not). 3) your discussion about 4chan lacks some precept or basis of intelligibility. Imagine a similar question as being “what percentage of a psychotic mood is racist”. It’s a non sequitor and doesn’t address the substance of the problem. Similarly, your posited question about ‘dark skin’ lacks traction for similar reasons and illustrates the baseless nature of the internet meme-culture.
  - neveroffensive 9y ago
    > your discussion about 4chan lacks some precept or basis of intelligibility. The poster clearly feels there are large groups of racists on the internet. I'm trying to ascertain where they think these groups are, and exactly what they feel these groups believe. The 4chan mention was a guess. > Imagine a similar question as being “what percentage of a psychotic mood is racist”. It’s a non sequitor and doesn’t address the substance of the problem. I stand by my question. I think the poster has misconceptions about internet culture, and wish to reach the root of them to either correct them, or my own misconceptions. You're assertion here dose not make sense to me. > Similarly, your posited question about ‘dark skin’ lacks traction for similar reasons and illustrates the baseless nature of the internet meme-culture. Once again, I'm trying to understand how the poster conceptualizes racism both within the context of the internet, and society as a whole. Forgive me, but if someone is seeing pervasive racism in society I want to know where and why. I fail to see how this is me parroting a baseless meme-culture. I'm sorry if talking about skin color and crime offends you, but that is no excuse to disregard me as some sort of troll. I have a genuine desire to engage with the poster on their opinions about the nature of the internet/racism/social progress, and being dismissed in such a pedantic manner seems uncalled for. Edit: My larger point here is, in my experience racists are a dwindling minority. However, people have begun to conflate certain types of discussion, and forms of comedy (namely absurdist), with genuine racism. These misconceptions are leading them to feel that the internet is somehow heavily racist. True racism is a serious issue, and deserves a heavy handed response. We need to be careful that the racism we point out is true racism, not just an opinion we disagree with, or a joke we don't find funny.
kbenson 9y ago
> Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence. The biggest problem I've found with people that purport to be rationalists (and I include myself) is the propensity to believe they have enough inputs to make definitive statements, when in truth they are just discounting the unknown unknowns. When dealing with people, even on the individual level but it's much worse in groups, the complex motivations and constraints make every statement along the lines of "a rational person would do X" sound hopelessly naive. That some core beliefs are not examined or are believed to be the truth without evidence does not surprise me, even if it still makes me sad.
- opportune 9y ago
  I was thinking about this today. It is sad how far people will go to rationalize beliefs for the sake of simplicity. It seems people prefer simplicity because it makes the world make sense: people are uncomfortable with nuance because it makes the world so complex and uncertain, and in a way, scary. I think it's the same line of reasoning that draws people towards certain conspiracies (e.g. lizard people, Jews controlling the world). People want to feel like the world can be explained in just a few sentences. Otherwise, I think people feel utterly helpless.
l33tbro 9y ago
I think you may be subject to a cognitive bias where you overestimate how representative racist, sexist, etc people are of the larger population. Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors. This isn't to say there are not depressingly high numbers of these kinds of people, but the conclusion you've arrived at comes from a typical group attribution error.
- abusoufiyan 9y ago
  My saying "It became difficult when you would go online and see just how many people iterated these sentiments behind a veil of anonymity." does not mean I am overestimating how many people this online group represents in the real world. Even if I underestimated it, it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever. "Anonymous communications technology that enables avatars are always going to attract these kinds of malcontents, lending to a perception that most people are bad actors." Why then, was this not something realized by the "prophets" of the Internet 2.0? That's what the author is asking. What conclusion did I arrive at which came from error? Please kindly point that out to me.
  - l33tbro 9y ago
    I find it difficult to understand when you say "it was a sentiment I was not at all exposed to in real life, ever". Even if I were extremely mollycoddled by my parents, I fail to grasp how I would not be exposed to such attitudes - however slight or fleeting - in my pampered upbringing. As for the prophets of Internet 2.0 (not sure why you're adding 2.0 here, we're discussing Brand and Kelly who were prophets of the intial web), I'd hazard a guess that their blindness came from a combination of good old-fashioned wishful thinking mixed with 'the shock of the new' that the web had in spades back then, galvanising them into becoming the 'egg-meet-face' cyber-utopianist proselytizers that the author of this article is deriding.
jhiska 9y ago
>My whole life I was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc. As usual in American discussions, class is forgotten. A heterosexual, "white", cisman can also be working class or bourgeois, but for some reason -- probably because of the annihilation of Marxism in the US -- it's never brought up and this despite its modern relevance screaming at us. Without class, one can't understand why Trump got the vote of so many working class people. Ethnicity (Caucasians are ethnic people from the Caucus region; modern biology only accepts one race and that is the human race; "white" is a culture, not a "race" or ethnicity, since Middle-Eastern Caucasians aren't considered "white"; "white" is better defined as a Caucasian of European origin that accepts Western culture), sexuality, sex and gender, religion... None of these explain the working class animosity towards the "ultra-wealthy elites" that are "out of touch with the common person" or why the promise of bringing back working class jobs was so tempting. Trump, while being a liar and actually damaging to the working class, played to their class heartstrings. Social justice without class consciousness creates injustice, and that injustice is being exploited by the extreme alt-right. One can't also understand why Bernie Sanders was as appealing as Trump unless one understands that both Bernie and Trump appealed to anti-bourgeois sentiment and both promised to help the working class. It was class rebellion, and unfortunately it turned out as badly as it did because Bernie was never put on the voting ballots.

malvosenior 9y ago

I don’t think this author speaks for a lot of people in tech. His viewpoint seems to be from a very narrow subculture, mainly Web 2.0 era social networking. Some of us have had a lifelong passion for technology and are actually happy and excited about the current state of the industry (and always have been). If you don’t like people disagreeing with you on Twitter, just turn it off. Don’t claim that it’s part of some apparatus (that the author feels he helped invent) that somehow brought out the worst in humanity. He should feel happy he can now get exposed to views outside of his bubble.

QAPereo 9y ago
Are you really arguing that social media isn’t optimized to create bubbles?
- neveroffensive 9y ago
  Social media is a tool, you can use it to create an echo chamber, or to explore alternative view points and discuss. The key to the later is growing up, and being ready to empathize, even when it's hard or you disagree.
- notacoward 9y ago
  Social media are optimized for maximum engagement. If people engage more in bubbles, they'll get bubbles. If people engage more by reaching out and exploring beyond their bubbles, the platforms will facilitate that instead. Don't blame the mirror.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I blame the algorithm behind the mirror, and the people behind the algorithms.
mr_spothawk 9y ago
> (that the author feels he helped invent) agreed... article felt like maximum ego-stroking, minimal thinking. to my mind, the conversation about where "the web" went off the rails ends with the dopamine-hook. I worked with a team building game experiences 5 years ago, it was all we could think about. good examples of it were everything we wanted to emulate. it was disgusting... mea culpa. for the children growing up today, whose parents put their baby photos on blast all day... there will be a reckoning. i wonder what that will look like.

darkr 9y ago

I enjoyed this article, particularly as someone who tried and failed to complete Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable” this year. If the book had been written in 1996, it would have been cute. Unfortunately it was written/released in 2016; the level of naivety displayed was shocking. Page after page of techno-utopian stream-of-consciousness futurist masterbation, without so much as a fleeting thought given to social or political repercussions. As a writer, he struck me as either a deeply cynical person, or as someone with no understanding of humanity at all.

ep103 9y ago

I think you could make an argument for the exact opposite. No, we have not reached the gifts my father or grandfather thought the internet would bring to society. For every hope that widespread communication would bring understanding among the populace and bring power to people instead of the elite, we now have a bot army or fake news infrastructure working to oppose those ideals. But I think these problems, and the problems the author points to, are the result of the current, pre-internet world order attempting to impose itself on the modern web, not the other way around. We've already seen the massive effects of the internet on the populace over the last 15 years or so, and I think a lot of those changes have been both quiet, and genuinely good for people (How many things are common knowledge now, that were never reported on the news, as a quick example?). What we're seeing now is the empire strikes back, as established organizations attempt to impose themselves back on this newly connected world before they go the way of the music industry. Whether this is done by manipulating people online, walling off sections of the internet, flooding the internet with propaganda/tracking/advertising, or simply removing the open nature of the internet in entirety (Net Neutrality), the drive appears to always be the same: large pre-internet organizations imposing traditional order on a new medium. And I think it is these efforts that are responsible for the majority of issues the author raises. Though that's not to say the internet itself doesn't have a fair share of problems. But even where the internet seems at its worst, I think the problems still primarily come from traditional societal organizations, and it is they, not the internet, that should take the blame and be the focus of change. Let's take the surprisingly large influence of racism and fascism that appears to exist online as an example, easily one of the worst aspects of the internet. I think prevalence of hate speech online exists for two major reasons. The first and largest driving force, is that the internet has revealed that outside of the internet, there are essentially no actually truly-free, anonymous, free speech places in a person's life. Even online, the number of places where one can state whatever they would like, to their hearts content, without having those thoughts potentially affect their daily life, are extremely rare and need to be sought out. Is it any surprise, then, that the people who seek out such forums are often those who are upset at the end of the day, and feel a need to spit some vitriol? Or that the users of such forums specifically focus saying things they know they could not say in any other aspect of their life? I fail to see this as a shortcoming of the internet, and see it more as an indictment of society at large. Perhaps if there were more places where one can truly speak out at the end of a day, and be heard but not judged or discriminated against, less people would be willing to rage alone against an empty screen. But even if you reject this idea, then the alternative to me seems worse. Because the alternative is that we have to accept that the average person is not capable, or should not be allowed, to navigate accountability-free communication, and society will need to be built accordingly going forward. Hopefully I don't need to point out the obvious downside to embracing such a philosophy. That said, I think we did make, and are making one major design mistake, consistently online. And that is that we need to recognize that the way human society works, is that new ideas are shouted by individuals all the time, and then the silent masses judge them, mostly silently, and embrace them slowly into their day to day. On a webpage design level, this needs to be taken into account. If you are listing all comments on your webpage with equal weight, then we need to accept that you're going to get a pretty consistent distribution of comments ranging from insightful to hateful, and from thought-provoking to headache inducing. But if you allow the masses to weigh in, for example, by voting on comments, you'll find that most of the nauseating hate-filled ideas quickly fall off the radar, just like they do in real life. This is the difference between say, youtube comments and reddit comments. I would love to see websites start taking this a step further, and automatically start banning any users who are consistently voted beneath a certain threshold, just how in real life, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the sidewalk corner after his first diatribe is found to be crazy.

zer00eyz 9y ago

Sigh, Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used for good or bad. The author lost me when they said "Massive amounts of data is still hidden behind firewalls or not online at all." Except: Sci-hub, pirate bay, project Gutenberg, wikipedia, IMDB and even here on hacker news (I could go on but these are big ones). Technology (in all forms) doesn't change humanity, technology enables humanity to change. It is just a tool and we have to decide what to do with it. If for every Peter Theil we get one Ellon Musk, one space x one step toward progress then by all means I consider it a victory. This is progress, and compared to previous generations the price has been fairly low.

sooheon 9y ago
> Tech isn't inherently evil, neither is a hammer or a gun but both can be used for good or bad. I see this meme everywhere, and I just can't fathom it. Not all tech is perfectly neutral, just because it's "technology". An iron maiden and a wheelchair sit on different places in the good - evil spectrum.
- neveroffensive2 9y ago
  > An iron maiden and a wheelchair sit on different places in the good - evil spectrum. No they don't. They are both just objects, people are the reason the iron maiden has the connotation it dose. The iron maiden could have been a single art piece in a modern art gallery somewhere meant to symbolize the pain of heartbreak. Wheelchairs could have been devices used to intentionally cripple children by preventing them from using their legs. We need to stop living in this fantasy land where people aren't responsible for their actions. I'm comfortable making the assertion that it is an absolute fact that guns, the internet, and all technology are neutral until applied/activated by a thinking being (AI would count as a thinking being, IMHO). What if no human had ever died from a gunshot? What if we only used them to kill cows for consumption, would guns still be inherently evil (bare with me if your vegan)? Is it not humans who first choose to point guns at eachother? We can't let personal responsibility die. We just can't... Otherwise all tech may as well be evil. You don't think there is an evil way to use a heart bypass machine? I bet I can find one. Give me any piece of tech and I can find a way to use it for evil, and a way to use it for good. Even nuclear bombs could be used to save the planet from an out of control asteroid without doing anything evil. Or you could blow up a city of people. Where dose the difference lie? With the person whose fingers on the button.

chasing 9y ago

This feels overdramatic. The internet has helped humanity in many ways and, frankly, the notion of an individual apologizing for it is absurd. I do feel like there are certain cultural assumptions that have not proven themselves out. Those will need to be addressed if we want to maximize the value of our shared internet for all of us.

jhiska 9y ago

Too little, too late. At this irreversible point it's not actual actionable regret, but a merely symbolic act meant to save their conscience from hellish guilt. Besides, the blame for the Facebook-surveillance state and "alternative" facts is dispersed over hundreds of thousands of people. No single individual is responsible. It's an out-sized ego with out-sized guilt that motivates him to write the article.

tzahola 9y ago

Cmd+F, “Trump”, zero results Wtf??? At least there’s some “you shouldn’t be able to read opinions I don’t like” from 2015.

nemild 9y ago

While this is a start, we need a more rational debate about technological trends and their impact. We (technologists) all get very excited about the possible future (Internet, Social Media, cryptocurrencies) without being honest with the problems with these new worlds at scale. The way it works right now: 1. Get angry about state of current world (at different times: IBM, Microsoft, Facebook - or current trends like social media) 2. Evangelize how new trend will make everything better (today, decentralization and cryptocurrencies) 3. Realize that new world has its own set of issues as it grows larger, and external elements co-opt it for their own needs I wish that we had more thoughtful debates about the tradeoffs, rather than seeing new technologies as a panacea. Entrepreneurs who help grow new industries need the self awareness to realize the potential problems with the world they help create. As engineers, we're very attuned to potential ways our system can be technically hacked, but for some reason forget to think about the other ways these systems can be "hacked". For anyone interested, you should read Tim Wu's The Master Switch. It's a unique window into the idealism of past eras (radio vs telephone, telephone vs telegraph) - and often disappointment that the early evangelists eventually feel.

blfr 9y ago
If I understand correctly, OP is suggesting that these are not problems of scale but rather that scale itself is the problem in the sense that it's untenable for humans.

tw1010 9y ago

Funny how Medium started out being branded as the one clean template alternative to all the others, and has now devolved into just as cluttered as all the rest.

CodinM 9y ago

I just want to take the time to tell the author that he's not that important and I couldn't give a flying rat about him and his egotistical opinion.

andr 9y ago

I grew up in an ex-socialist country and we got our first McDonald's in the mid 90s. It was an exciting new thing, a new taste, a new model of restaurants and consumption. My family took us on multiple road trips to the McDonald's, which was in a different city. Nobody thought about whether it's healthy, because eating there was a privilege. 20 years later, fast food chains are everywhere, and if my attitude hadn't changed from the 90s, I'd have a serious health issue. I feel like the Internet, and social media in particular, are going through the same period. What was once exotic and a privilege, is now instantly-available, algorithmically-optimized junk food. And it's not healthy to use it as your main source of nutrition. The good news is that, just like McDonald's didn't kill good, healthy restaurants, so has social media not killed good, healthy sources of information. Most of the blogs I followed growing up are still active and rediscovering them - and setting up an RSS reader again - has been a great feeling. News sources that give you thoughtful context, instead of a dopamine feed, like The Economist and The New Yorker, are also thriving. Replacing podcasts with audiobooks on my dog walk listen has also gave me pause and perspective. So my New Year's resolution is every time I open Twitter or Facebook, to ask myself whether I would eat at a McDonald's today.

taneq 9y ago
Every time I find myself scrolling through Facebook, I ask myself "am I here for me, because I really want to be, or am I here for Facebook because they've reward-hacked my motivation subsystem?" That thought in itself is usually enough for me to shrug and close the window.
PrimHelios 9y ago
>And it's not healthy to use it as your main source of nutrition. This is especially important. Twitter has desensitized its users to the point where thousands of people bullying someone into committing suicide doesn't upset anybody. All that recently happened, and it was a wake-up call for me; looking around, nobody actually cared that someone had died, they had all moved on to whatever short-lived meme had taken over. Leaving Twitter and going to HN, google News, and RSS has definitely been challenging (albeit pretty interesting). It's a lot harder to actually get myself to read articles instead of just headlines, and I've been realizing how short my attention span is because of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I wish more people would leave and start using actual news sources again instead of just reading headlines.