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> The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked around the time of the Arab spring The only people who thought the "arab spring"
by saas_co_de 9y ago
> The old idea of the online world as a burgeoning utopia looks to have peaked around the time of the Arab spring
The only people who thought the "arab spring" was a burgeoning utopia are western military, intelligence, and political elites.
Now those same people see these platforms as a threat and so the "respectable" media is full of anti-SV stories.
> it’s all automated; the owners of the system can’t possibly monitor everything that’s going on, and they can’t control it
Yes, that is the real problem: communications that can't be censored and controlled.
- wpietri 9y agoI'm not sure you read this very well. The notion is not that the Arab spring was a utopia. The notion was that the Arab spring, fueled by direct person-to-person connection on FB, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc, were symptomatic of the Internet's power to create freedom and social utopia. It's part of a persistent strain of technoutopianism. You might read Tom Standage's excellent 1998 book "The Victorian Internet", which talks about the adoption of the telegraph during the Victorian era. Many of the same things people said about the Internet's power to change society were said about the telegraph: https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteenth-line/dp/162040592X https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
- Clubber 9y agoAnd it absolutely did, as did the Gutenberg press, the telephone, the radio and television. We just don't recognize it because we've never experienced a pre-telegraph life.
- wpietri 9y agoIt did change life, but not in the utopian way people were thinking. People thought, for example, that the telegraph would eliminate war by connecting people and eliminating the possibility of the misunderstandings that come from very high-latency communication technologies (e.g., horses carrying handwritten letters). It turns out that part of pre-telegraph life not only continued, but got worse.
- MisterTea 9y agoTelegraphs didn't have dopamine feedback loops via feedback such as "likes".
- dreamdu5t 9y agoDopamine is not uniquely associated with social media. Furthermore, dopamine isn’t addictive and “In studies with rats, where dopamine was suppressed, rats showed “normal hedonic reaction patterns,” and still showed normal pleasure responses even though dopamine was suppressed. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201701/no-dopamine-is-not-addictive%3famp http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201701/n...
- wpietri 9y agoI'm not sure that's material to my point, but assuming you're just starting a tangent, I'd disagree. They had replies. It was not as immediate and exciting as modern technology, but it was way more exciting than what previously existed. People even fell in love by telegraph. See, for example, the 1880 novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes": https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/wired-love-romance-novel-technology_n_3654634.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/wired-love-romance...
- saas_co_de 9y ago"Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article."
- gaius 9y agoThe so-called Arab Spring was interpreted by the entire rest of the world that America can destroy a country purely by “cyber” warfare. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle. But hilariously, America seems dead-set on using the same weapon on itself...
- knowaveragejoe 9y ago> The so-called Arab Spring was interpreted by the entire rest of the world that America can destroy a country purely by “cyber” warfare Considering how much support I saw from outside the US, I'm finding this hard to believe.
- gaius 9y agoConsidering how much support I saw from outside the US Twitter is an American corporation, the users are its product. They did exactly what the platform incentivised them to do.
- thevardanian 9y agoby... communicating with each other? Users aren't the product, they're the revenue stream. The product is an easy to use communication tool.
- gaius 9y agoFTA: literally changes your relationship with society It’s a weapon that can totally disrupt a society to the point at which it cannot function. What else would you call what happened in Libya?
- thevardanian 9y agoWhat happened in France, America, Britian, India, or a whole host of other countries that became unsatisfied with the power structure that was in place. In history we mostly learn about the successful revolution, and rarely hear about the failed ones. In the recent past the Middle-East has a litany of failed revolutions.