5 ms·

What you're basically saying, I think, is that there shouldn't be any easy way for ordinary people to communicate directly with each other and organise politica

by makomk 9y ago

What you're basically saying, I think, is that there shouldn't be any easy way for ordinary people to communicate directly with each other and organise politically. That it's too dangerous to allow them to do this without the press acting as gatekeepers first. That certainly does seem to be the underlying subtext of a lot of the recent criticism of Facebook. It's also an astounding line of thinking, because it basically says that it's politically unacceptable, even a danger to democracy, for ordinary people to actually have power and not just the illusion that they do. (Edit: to be fair, I should probably add that the press wouldn't be the only powerful institution that has the ability to enable or gatekeep activism and organising, just one of the most important. The more fundamental difference is whether you need to have one of those powerful institutions backing your cause.)

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
No, they've always been able to do what you say, even before these apps. The issue is the speed at which it happens, turns ordinary sensible people into members of a mob. That's clearly a problem.
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
Thanks for your comment because I am not saying that at all. All I'm saying is that a certain amount of friction is a necessary part of our survival as a species. I'm not making any comments about the press or people organizing or any of that. Some message boards, including HN, have a delay between the time you read a comment and when you are allowed to form a reply. This cuts way back on flame wars. It's also a nice example of purposely introducing some friction for a larger good. I don't know how much friction is needed or where it should go. I'm just now reaching the conclusion about Facebook and social media. This utopia they've all been preaching is actually a dystopia, a horrible thing indeed. I'm nowhere near having any thoughts about a solution.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  There are ways in which humans self-organise, amplifying individual intelligence and empathy, and ways in which humans self-disorganise, amplifying the naive ambition, greed, and poor choices of powerful individuals. The challenge is to distinguish between the two. The FB memo is self-serving nonsense, because it tries to deny there's a problem. In fact the problem existed outside FB before FB and the rest were created. Why do we have an economy in which a social network exists primarily to amplify the power of persuasive media? Why do our political fitness functions reward this outcome, instead of the other possible outcomes that social networks could generate? This isn't a problem that can be fixed with more or better software, because it's not a technical problem - it's about politics and values, and how our political economy rewards certain behaviours while punishing, or at least strongly disincentivising, others.
- cousin_it 9y ago
  Yeah. I felt much more free and creative when writing LiveJournal posts, which were guaranteed to be seen by my 10-100ish "friends", than when writing Reddit or HN posts, which must compete with tons of other posts to get seen by 0-infinity people.
- dfsegoat 9y ago
  If I understand what you are saying, I think I might be able to give a personal anecdote to show that most definitely, some "friction" is required to get people organizing and socializing as they traditionally would (outside of social media), and why social media isn't enough: In October 2017, my area was hit by the worst wildfires in California history. For days, there was no power, there was no internet (mobile or otherwise), there was no 911. We had AM/FM radio and our neighbors. For all intents and purposes, we were back to the 1900s. What happened? Well, people in my neighborhood (neighbors) who were all on edge - who had LARGELY ONLY EVER INTERACTED VIA SOCIAL MEDIA (myNextDoor and facebook) - suddenly found that SOCIAL MEDIA wasn't enough. Within hours, people were organizing and talking, and sharing information in the streets. I met most of my neighbors that week that we had to go without internet access - people I have lived next to for 5 years now, but never had a conversation with. Literally everyone kept to themselves and used MyNextDoor as a proxy for traditional interaction. Also, social media became toxic during this event - False information was spread rapidly in unofficial groups, evacuation orders which were never issued were reported as fact, etc. Our local PD ended up putting out 24x7 hourly updates to stop the flow of bad information. TL;DR: During the October 2017 wildfires, power and internet were out for days -- the "friction" of this event (plus limited access) showed me that people in crisis / who need to organize can't do so via social media alone. Inevitably, small groups of neighbors organized physically to help ea. other out - and the disaster was the catalyst for this. Edit 1 - Added notes on bad parts of social media during natural disaster. PS: Apologies for the length. This was a traumatic event, and verbalizing this here has been therapeutic.
- wpietri 9y ago
  One interesting book in this context is Neiwart's "Alt America". [1] Neiwart is a journalist who spent decades tracking the armed US fringe, including the "patriot" militias, sovereign citizen movements, conspiracists, and white supremacist groups. It's his view that the alt right didn't come out of nowhere. Instead, the low-friction communication of the Internet allowed these formerly scattered, always-falling-apart groups to connect and recruit in ways that were previously impossible. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of the alt-right happened when social media companies in some sense took friction negative. In the world of websites and blogs, you at least had to actively seek the next site, the next writer, the next article. It wasn't much work, but it was at least a little. Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter were eager to give you an endless stream of content, so as to maximize User Active Minutes metrics. So their algorithms would pull up anything that they thought you'd be interested in. The theory being that any engagement must be good, which implies that total obsession would be best. In retrospect, that theory seems to have some flaws.
  - DanielBMarkham 9y ago
    If you'd like to join me in speculating a bit, let's take an imaginary look at ten years from now. Good news! AI has advanced enough that it is now possible for you to have a customized bot that handles all of the crappy and mundane parts of life: scheduling travel, getting groceries, making sure the house is clean, and so on. The bot learns about you and is able to anticipate your needs. And because we have this tech, we also have bots that will play your emotions like a finely-tuned fiddle. Think Elvis never died? Afraid that lizard-people in the government are controlling your thoughts? Well, now there's a bot that will find others like you and deliver to you a continuous stream of information confirming your beliefs -- and warning you of the dangers lurking out there. Now guess which of these bots makes more money for its creators, the one scheduling airline flights or the one keeping you emotionally-connected with 400 people just like you and making sure that all of you are living a dramatic life on the edge where you're fighting the bad guys?
    - manjushri 9y ago
      So it seems the theory here is that strong AI whose primary objective is to make money is ultimately self destructive?
ben_w 9y ago
Interesting, I would agree with the conclusion without the intermediary. I don’t trust the press to do a better job of this than anyone else. The press is made of people and subject to the same flaws and desire for power — both to campaign for the freedom to do certain things, and also to restrict other things (I’m thinking of UK issues like fox hunting and one particular moral panic about the drug MDMA that turned out to be a water overdose). That said, like the two famous Churchil quotes on democracy, I’ll say both that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter, yet also that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. I can see democracy’s flaws, but not how to fix them. I wouldn’t even want to be in a benevolent dictatorship if I was running it.
- makomk 9y ago
  I certainly don't trust the press to do a better job of this than anyone else, and they definitely don't do a great job of encouraging deliberation and slowness to act - if anything the exact opposite. This is more of a practical observation of how things actually are and what the actual end result of this would look like. There hasn't been the same kind of push to stamp down on hasty, mob-like action backed by the press as there has been to restrict social media and direct unmediated communication, and I can't see any such push going anywhere given the amount of media pushback that would result. (Also, to be fair, I should probably have extended this to other powerful institutions and organisations with the ability to mediate what kinds of activism can and cannot happen, not just the press. Meant to but it didn't make it into my original comment.)
crusty 9y ago
I didn't read that. Organizing a union or a political or social movement occur through deliberate, thoughtful efforts. I took his comment to indicate something along the lines of; Mobs (IRL or digital) are emotion driven and feed off of (or even are dependent upon) instantaneous, omni-directional communication. Maybe adding friction to communication has historically had the benefit of reducing mob tendencies. But friction does not mean prevented or blocked. I haven't thought any of this over myself, but if I supported this idea, I'd offer that friction, in reducing mob tendencies, might actually make more room for the types of communications that promote rational democratic ideas. Basically, i think you read way more into his idea of friction than was there.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Yup. The way I see this is more like adding intertia in control systems - it makes a system a bit more sluggish, but can prevent it from oscillating out of control.
- makomk 9y ago
  The ultimate problem I have with this idea is that it only makes creating structures slow, not actually taking action. (We lost the kind of friction that would slow down the latter around the time TV and radio appeared.) So even without social media we can have hasty, knee-jerk extreme reactions to pretty much anything, they just have to go through the established structure.
crdoconnor 9y ago
>That certainly does seem to be the underlying subtext of a lot of the recent criticism of Facebook. It's also an astounding line of thinking, because it basically says that it's politically unacceptable, even a danger to democracy I noticed this too. I presumed it's just the media reacting to its declining influence and facebook's increasing power over what we see. I've also noticed a lot of hand wringing about "facebook fake news" and the importance of "responsible journalism" from the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post as if none of use remember them (among other things) vigorously beating the Iraq war drum with equally fake news in 2003. On the one hand they've got a point. On the other hand it should be just about anybody else except them making that point.
cirgue 9y ago
Facebook is designed to incentivize vitriol and dramatic interactions and actively prevents uniting around common interests. Facebook is a massive obstacle to robust political organization.
canoebuilder 9y ago
>What you're basically saying, I think, is that there shouldn't be any easy way for ordinary people to communicate directly with each other and organise politically. This isn't an either/or. There's a world of possibility you're missing. Like, people should be able to freely communicate online, but maybe not on platforms that psychologically exploit them for ad revenue (and other, potentially nefarious, aims should the wrong person get hands on the levers.)

by makomk 9y ago

JoeAltmaier 9y ago

No, they've always been able to do what you say, even before these apps. The issue is the speed at which it happens, turns ordinary sensible people into members of a mob. That's clearly a problem.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

Thanks for your comment because I am not saying that at all. All I'm saying is that a certain amount of friction is a necessary part of our survival as a species. I'm not making any comments about the press or people organizing or any of that. Some message boards, including HN, have a delay between the time you read a comment and when you are allowed to form a reply. This cuts way back on flame wars. It's also a nice example of purposely introducing some friction for a larger good. I don't know how much friction is needed or where it should go. I'm just now reaching the conclusion about Facebook and social media. This utopia they've all been preaching is actually a dystopia, a horrible thing indeed. I'm nowhere near having any thoughts about a solution.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
There are ways in which humans self-organise, amplifying individual intelligence and empathy, and ways in which humans self-disorganise, amplifying the naive ambition, greed, and poor choices of powerful individuals. The challenge is to distinguish between the two. The FB memo is self-serving nonsense, because it tries to deny there's a problem. In fact the problem existed outside FB before FB and the rest were created. Why do we have an economy in which a social network exists primarily to amplify the power of persuasive media? Why do our political fitness functions reward this outcome, instead of the other possible outcomes that social networks could generate? This isn't a problem that can be fixed with more or better software, because it's not a technical problem - it's about politics and values, and how our political economy rewards certain behaviours while punishing, or at least strongly disincentivising, others.
cousin_it 9y ago
Yeah. I felt much more free and creative when writing LiveJournal posts, which were guaranteed to be seen by my 10-100ish "friends", than when writing Reddit or HN posts, which must compete with tons of other posts to get seen by 0-infinity people.
dfsegoat 9y ago
If I understand what you are saying, I think I might be able to give a personal anecdote to show that most definitely, some "friction" is required to get people organizing and socializing as they traditionally would (outside of social media), and why social media isn't enough: In October 2017, my area was hit by the worst wildfires in California history. For days, there was no power, there was no internet (mobile or otherwise), there was no 911. We had AM/FM radio and our neighbors. For all intents and purposes, we were back to the 1900s. What happened? Well, people in my neighborhood (neighbors) who were all on edge - who had LARGELY ONLY EVER INTERACTED VIA SOCIAL MEDIA (myNextDoor and facebook) - suddenly found that SOCIAL MEDIA wasn't enough. Within hours, people were organizing and talking, and sharing information in the streets. I met most of my neighbors that week that we had to go without internet access - people I have lived next to for 5 years now, but never had a conversation with. Literally everyone kept to themselves and used MyNextDoor as a proxy for traditional interaction. Also, social media became toxic during this event - False information was spread rapidly in unofficial groups, evacuation orders which were never issued were reported as fact, etc. Our local PD ended up putting out 24x7 hourly updates to stop the flow of bad information. TL;DR: During the October 2017 wildfires, power and internet were out for days -- the "friction" of this event (plus limited access) showed me that people in crisis / who need to organize can't do so via social media alone. Inevitably, small groups of neighbors organized physically to help ea. other out - and the disaster was the catalyst for this. Edit 1 - Added notes on bad parts of social media during natural disaster. PS: Apologies for the length. This was a traumatic event, and verbalizing this here has been therapeutic.
wpietri 9y ago
One interesting book in this context is Neiwart's "Alt America". [1] Neiwart is a journalist who spent decades tracking the armed US fringe, including the "patriot" militias, sovereign citizen movements, conspiracists, and white supremacist groups. It's his view that the alt right didn't come out of nowhere. Instead, the low-friction communication of the Internet allowed these formerly scattered, always-falling-apart groups to connect and recruit in ways that were previously impossible. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of the alt-right happened when social media companies in some sense took friction negative. In the world of websites and blogs, you at least had to actively seek the next site, the next writer, the next article. It wasn't much work, but it was at least a little. Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter were eager to give you an endless stream of content, so as to maximize User Active Minutes metrics. So their algorithms would pull up anything that they thought you'd be interested in. The theory being that any engagement must be good, which implies that total obsession would be best. In retrospect, that theory seems to have some flaws.
- DanielBMarkham 9y ago
  If you'd like to join me in speculating a bit, let's take an imaginary look at ten years from now. Good news! AI has advanced enough that it is now possible for you to have a customized bot that handles all of the crappy and mundane parts of life: scheduling travel, getting groceries, making sure the house is clean, and so on. The bot learns about you and is able to anticipate your needs. And because we have this tech, we also have bots that will play your emotions like a finely-tuned fiddle. Think Elvis never died? Afraid that lizard-people in the government are controlling your thoughts? Well, now there's a bot that will find others like you and deliver to you a continuous stream of information confirming your beliefs -- and warning you of the dangers lurking out there. Now guess which of these bots makes more money for its creators, the one scheduling airline flights or the one keeping you emotionally-connected with 400 people just like you and making sure that all of you are living a dramatic life on the edge where you're fighting the bad guys?
  - manjushri 9y ago
    So it seems the theory here is that strong AI whose primary objective is to make money is ultimately self destructive?

ben_w 9y ago

Interesting, I would agree with the conclusion without the intermediary. I don’t trust the press to do a better job of this than anyone else. The press is made of people and subject to the same flaws and desire for power — both to campaign for the freedom to do certain things, and also to restrict other things (I’m thinking of UK issues like fox hunting and one particular moral panic about the drug MDMA that turned out to be a water overdose). That said, like the two famous Churchil quotes on democracy, I’ll say both that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter, yet also that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. I can see democracy’s flaws, but not how to fix them. I wouldn’t even want to be in a benevolent dictatorship if I was running it.

makomk 9y ago
I certainly don't trust the press to do a better job of this than anyone else, and they definitely don't do a great job of encouraging deliberation and slowness to act - if anything the exact opposite. This is more of a practical observation of how things actually are and what the actual end result of this would look like. There hasn't been the same kind of push to stamp down on hasty, mob-like action backed by the press as there has been to restrict social media and direct unmediated communication, and I can't see any such push going anywhere given the amount of media pushback that would result. (Also, to be fair, I should probably have extended this to other powerful institutions and organisations with the ability to mediate what kinds of activism can and cannot happen, not just the press. Meant to but it didn't make it into my original comment.)

crusty 9y ago

I didn't read that. Organizing a union or a political or social movement occur through deliberate, thoughtful efforts. I took his comment to indicate something along the lines of; Mobs (IRL or digital) are emotion driven and feed off of (or even are dependent upon) instantaneous, omni-directional communication. Maybe adding friction to communication has historically had the benefit of reducing mob tendencies. But friction does not mean prevented or blocked. I haven't thought any of this over myself, but if I supported this idea, I'd offer that friction, in reducing mob tendencies, might actually make more room for the types of communications that promote rational democratic ideas. Basically, i think you read way more into his idea of friction than was there.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Yup. The way I see this is more like adding intertia in control systems - it makes a system a bit more sluggish, but can prevent it from oscillating out of control.
makomk 9y ago
The ultimate problem I have with this idea is that it only makes creating structures slow, not actually taking action. (We lost the kind of friction that would slow down the latter around the time TV and radio appeared.) So even without social media we can have hasty, knee-jerk extreme reactions to pretty much anything, they just have to go through the established structure.

crdoconnor 9y ago

>That certainly does seem to be the underlying subtext of a lot of the recent criticism of Facebook. It's also an astounding line of thinking, because it basically says that it's politically unacceptable, even a danger to democracy I noticed this too. I presumed it's just the media reacting to its declining influence and facebook's increasing power over what we see. I've also noticed a lot of hand wringing about "facebook fake news" and the importance of "responsible journalism" from the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post as if none of use remember them (among other things) vigorously beating the Iraq war drum with equally fake news in 2003. On the one hand they've got a point. On the other hand it should be just about anybody else except them making that point.

cirgue 9y ago

Facebook is designed to incentivize vitriol and dramatic interactions and actively prevents uniting around common interests. Facebook is a massive obstacle to robust political organization.

canoebuilder 9y ago

>What you're basically saying, I think, is that there shouldn't be any easy way for ordinary people to communicate directly with each other and organise politically. This isn't an either/or. There's a world of possibility you're missing. Like, people should be able to freely communicate online, but maybe not on platforms that psychologically exploit them for ad revenue (and other, potentially nefarious, aims should the wrong person get hands on the levers.)