11 ms·

The four ways that ex-internet idealists explain where it all went wrong

119 points by jesperht 8y ago

api 8y ago
This is fairly shallow. It doesn't really explain why surveillance and manipulation became the dominant business models of the Internet. I think the culprit is "free." Everything has to be "free." As a result, some indirect means must be found to pay for it. The most convenient model is to turn it around and make the user the product. Use free services to attract users, then surveil and manipulate those users for paying customers -- advertisers, governments, intelligence agencies, think tanks, etc.
- mcphage 8y ago
  > I think the culprit is "free." Everything has to be "free." As a result, some indirect means must be found to pay for it. That raises an interesting point... discussion about "free" often distinguishes free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech, but maybe we were mistaken in thinking that it was ever not going to be about money.
  - smallnamespace 8y ago
    It's not about money, it's about the allocation of scarce resources. The point is that there is always some resource that is a limiting factor, be it time, labor, energy, natural resources, land, or other inputs. Imagine a world where there is no money and no price mechanism, e.g. the Star Trek economy. Society still needs to collectively implement a mechanism that determines what should people do today, and how should we make sure they are able to do it? I'm sure in TNG you can get enough replicator credits to eat like a king, but not everyone gets a starship or prime New Orleans real estate [1] because there's still not enough for everyone. In fact, prices are often useful as an internal planning mechanism even when there is no market or money changing hands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_price#Constrained_optimisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_price#Constrained_optim... This is exactly what Soviet central planners did: try to set 'reasonable' prices for every single good in their economy while also setting input and output targets for every single piece of fixed capital and organization in the USSR. 'Free as in beer' is an ideology that states that 'prices of particular goods and services ought to always be zero'. Why would we expect that to conform to the reality of how valuable a service really is to people, especially as the cost to produce those particular things are always changing? [1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sisko%27s_Creole_Kitchen http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sisko%27s_Creole_Kitchen
    - XorNot 8y ago
      TNG never really explored the dynamics of the post-scarcity society - the setting of the show is really to explicitly avoid having to do that by putting the characters in a context where scarcity exists (a starship on the frontier).
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- topmonk 8y ago
  I think the “customer being the product” happens regardless. Take a look at how credit card agencies sell people's purchase habits, or grocery store loyalty cards that do the same. It's naive to think that not every economic niche won't be exploited regardless of the existence of another one.
- ukyrgf 8y ago
  "Free" worked for me 10-20 years ago. There was the old "if you aren't paying for it, then you are the product" adage. Now, even if you pay, you are being sold.
  - disqard 8y ago
    Fair point, but there are some exceptions. For instance, the Atlantic's Masthead subscription gives you ad-free access to their audio podcasts. Overall, I agree with you: once I am a paying subscriber of NYT (say), why should I be served the same ads as a non-subscriber viewing the same article in an incognito window?
- egypturnash 8y ago
  It’s kind of funny. I run a Mastodon instance. I keep it small so I don’t have to spend more than about twenty bucks a month to keep it running. Pocket change, really. And yet my users regularly poke me to set up a Patreon, so they can help me cover the cost for it. Hell, I paid for Livejournal back in the day, before it turned into a thing that had to expand user numbers at all costs, and had to try and pay the rent of multiple Bay Area employees, and started putting in ads.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  Why did propaganda become the dominant model for the printing press? Controlling information has been a main objective of the ruling class forever, the issue isn't with the Internet.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  Even in the days of the print media, the user was the product. The real money wasn't in subscription prices, it was in advertising. I don't think that much has changed.
adriand 8y ago
This reads like an article that got half-written before the author said, "fuck it" or ran out of time. The first half is excellent but it gets shaky with "The Hopeful", then falls apart in "The Revisionists" with what sounds like ad copy for a design agency. The worst part is the ending: there isn't one. It's a shame because I feel like there's a whole article lurking in there somewhere, with some interesting ideas underpinning it.
ashleyn 8y ago
I mean, George Carlin said this best. Garbage in, garbage out. Maybe something else sucks around here...like the public. Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. Today, it's been democratised enough to allow your racist aunt to ramble on Facebook about how Obama is actually an alien born on Pluto, sent to America to destroy Christianity. The remaining escapes on the Internet devoid of this are vanishing. We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values, motivations, and competencies. The Internet has given too much to those who are not curious about the world or have a serious interest in improving it. Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.
- hnaccy 8y ago
  >Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. This doesn't match my experience at all.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    This doesn't match my experience at all. Ditto. I remember when the internet was apolitical. Not liberal, not conservative. That only became widespread in the last five or ten years. Before this decade, the internet was mostly nerds working to solve problems involving math and science, not social studies and history. Then the nerds got rich and started caring less about technology, and more about “changing the world.”
    - orev 8y ago
      Small “L” liberal means either “open to new behavior or values” or “seeking knowledge”. That’s not (or shouldn’t be) political.
      - Analemma_ 8y ago
sp332 8y ago
Aza Raskin, a pioneer of infinite scrolling, also has regrets about the effect the design has on users. https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-44640959 https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-44640959
- luxpir 8y ago
  S/He says, sharing an amp link... here: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959 Clean!
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- rapnie 8y ago
  Aza Raskin is one of the co-founders of The Center for Humane Technology [0] which aims to 'Realign technology to humanity's best interests' [0] https://humanetech.com https://humanetech.com
  - newsbinator 8y ago
    > Unfortunately, what's best for capturing our attention isn't best for our well-being: > * Snapchat turns conversations into streaks, redefining how our children measure friendship. > * Instagram glorifies the picture-perfect life, eroding our self worth. > * Facebook segregates us into echo chambers, fragmenting our communities. > * YouTube autoplays the next video within seconds, even if it eats into our sleep. > These are not neutral products. > They are part of a system designed to addict us.
  - natmaka 8y ago
    The Center for Humane Technology could use J. Ellul work ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique ).
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
The tragedy of the commons is another explanation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons you have a common playground where some players start to spam the mailing list/newsgroup/discussion board for their own benefit, this destroys the commons as more spammers join in. Eventually you need moderators and centralisation, now the policeman tends to have an agenda of his own - and the common ground has been appropriated. Where is the new element in that? Self regulation works in small groups but it all breaks down when the group is larger than a village.
- syshum 8y ago
  Centralisation is the problem on the internet today, not a solution. What we need is MASSIVE decentralization, and open protocols,.
- natmaka 8y ago
  Indeed. Moreover whenever something is wrong, something is too big, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy.
- u801e 8y ago
  > some players start to spam the mailing list/newsgroup/discussion board for their own benefit, this destroys the commons as more spammers join in. Eventually you need moderators and centralisation, Mail and news clients have sophisticated filtering abilities that could deal with that issue. I've always wondered why people in general are more than willing to rely in a central party to vet the content they get to see rather than handling it for themselves.
sarcasmic 8y ago
I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs where the engine handled all but the content, and the barrier to entry of sharing personal details was lowered. Correspondingly, the depth of the material got more shallow, but the breadth of it got wider. This transition was happening as commercial ventures first moved beyond sites that were mere billboards, individuals began reading news portals and opening webmail accounts, and communities like phpBB and vBulletin forums flourished as pseudonymous, do-it-yourself takes on newsgroups of old. Aggressive moderation typically kept the conversation in check. There were corners of the web where moderation was shallow, and some of these places achieved notoriety for being cesspits of depravity, and eventually, hate. The depravity was authentic. But there was an air of privileged bravado about the hate, where its expression was used as a shibboleth to an in-group more so than an authentic expression of beliefs. If you were a true hater, finding other true haters was not a trivial task. Early social networks were pseudonymous. It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online. Ten years of Facebook moved the Overton window quite a bit, and now there's a set of people who aren't afraid to bare their cards, or of doxxing and reprisal. And now, they too have tools to build online communities of their own and find like-minded people on the web rather than in person, regardless of the popularity and acceptance of the views they hold. Meanwhile, e-commerce is now everywhere, and so is content and services that can be consumed with no upfront cost. Both of these are supplemented by adtech-like schemes that harvest and correlate user behavior. Despite real harm having occurred from these practices, jurisdictions have been slow to regulate them for many reasons: ineptitude, lobbying, corruption, and ineffectiveness in enforcing regulations in a global, dynamic, resilient system. Shady, underground actors and mainstream actors alike will continue these practices until widespread, debilitating user backlash, or widespread regulation puts and end to them. If they are regulated, only ruthless actors will engage in this behavior: trolls, stalkers, profiteers, and intelligence services.
- adventured 8y ago
  > I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs... The labor-of-love deep topic authors came to entirely dominate across the board. They sit at the top of every single search result, under the Wikipedia.org domain. They moved from writing in-depth on their personal blogs/sites, to writing epic volumes on a site like Wikipedia instead. A place where that vast glorious compilation of human knowledge can easily be shared with all in a quite friendly non-profit, non-soul-eating sort of way (ie the anti-Facebook sort of way). I don't have to get lucky browsing around or dig for hours to find their obscure topic content there, I just conveniently type words into a search box or click one page to the next. No filtering through tons of trash results or in-result ads on Google to find decent quality content.
Synaesthesia 8y ago
As Chomsky put it, in the mid 90’s, the internet was handed over to private corporations for their own use, mostly commerce. It’s now even more in the hands of private power, with net neutrality being gone.
paulsutter 8y ago
Remember Geocities? Friendster? MySpace? Facebook is just another point in the curve. And we’ll get there. Don’t panic. The optimists are still right. These are all just growing pains while everyone competes to find the right formula.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  You say "we'll get there"--get where? The curve you describe is sharply descending at all points. I see no evidence that it's working around towards something that's overall positive. You're right that everyone is competing to find "the right formula," but they're trying to maximize profit, full stop. They're not optimizing for anything related to the public good, except incidentally.
  - paulsutter 8y ago
    Then look at the larger pattern of human history. It’s a little absurd to suggest that the general directing of firearm progress has suddenly reversed.
    - paulsutter 8y ago
      That’s a crazy autotype - I meant human progress!
      - Proziam 8y ago
        I think I prefer the original version, actually. Made me chuckle.
- Agathos 8y ago
  Geocities was a lot more fun than what we have now.
sandov 8y ago
Both optimists and pessimists were right. The Internet is the most powerful tool we have to spread knowledge, but it's also the most powerful one to spread bullshit. If you hang around smart people you'll get positive effects from the internet, if you are an idiot or hang around idiots, you'll get crap. Author seems to be of the second kind.
- krapp 8y ago
  Yeah... to me this is like complaining that the printing press was a bad idea because it was once only used to publish scholarship and now it's mostly coffee table books and pulp fiction.
beerlord 8y ago
As long as websites are funded based on eyeballs, this will continue. We need to move to a model of micropayments, where I can pay a few cents easily (and automatically) to visit a site or read an article. The total amount could be aggregated monthly, like Patreon does.
blindgeek 8y ago
"Even boosters now seem to implicitly accept the assumption (accurate or not) that the internet is the root of multiple woes, from increasing political polarization to the mass diffusion of misinformation." I certainly don't accept that the Internet is the root of increasing political polarization. It's nothing new. Ever heard of the Nika Riots? Polarization is a story as old as time, Internet or no Internet. On the other hand, top-down culture is breaking down on account of the Internet. How many people watch the CBS Evening News anymore? There was, in the minds of American "thought leaders", a sort of cultural consensus. It doesn't exist anymore, never mind that it was probably always more myth than reality. The facade is being shattered, and a lot of folks are running scared, blaming the newest technology for their woes. There are ways out of the crises we face, but neither blaming the Internet for our problems nor treating it as a panacea is one of them.
captainmuon 8y ago
New, disruptive technologies "want" to change society. The problem is people assumed that would happen automatically. What happened instead is that the establishment insisted on keeping society the way it is, and managed to shoehorn the new technologies into the old social molds. Example: File sharing. This would easily make it possible to give everybody access to all media for free. But artists (and entertainment industry workers) need to be fed, and we apparently don't know how to do this without turning music and videos into a commodity. I would rather try to solve the general problem: How to feed somebody whose labor is not required by society. But the obvious solutions to this would be unconditional basic income, or communism, or something else people don't like. Instead we invent DRM and pretend digitalization didn't happen. Another example is cryptocurrency. Instead of bringing upon the anarchocapitalist utopia/apocalypse, it just got regulated to hell in record time. We (as "hackers" / "tech people") should not blindly believe that disruptive technology will bring upon social change by itself. Instead, people should address the hard social and political problems directly. Don't ask what's the next Uber, Bitcoin, Internet, but rather what's the next Democracy, Capitalism, Enlightenment, ...
KarlRutnick 8y ago
People get the leaders they deserve, they are only a reflection of the population in general. No wonder it all went downhill when that collective came online. And yet in that process things have changed for the better. The old guard has to fight to preserve their hold on the narrative. Technology is the great equaliser and really the only thing that changes externalities apart from resources and nature in general. Externalities lead, then humanity follow. Culture and finally politics adapt, the rest is just rationalisation. I doubt this will change short of genetically altering ourselves. So if you want to improve the world, forget politics. I remain hopefully because today even just one person can write a piece of software and change the world
zoomablemind 8y ago
The article seems to narrow the scope of problem with Internet to its effects on social dynamics. All means of communications held at some point the manipulative powers over the socium (TV, newspapers etc.). New means will have them too. So nothing to regret here. Meanwhile, as technology Internet provided goods of wider access to knowledge, should one needed it. Indeed, it also promoted the freedom of speech too, should anyone needed to be heard! It's just inevitable that Internet got saturated just as well, such that signal-to-noise is below quality threshold. Same as your cable channels, or bookstores back in the gone century. So now people need either to devise a better selectivity or invent and use a new clear channel. All of current 'social messngers' are effectively trying to offer a clear channel.
zoomablemind 8y ago
I wish the author pointed the spotlight at an increasing bloat of the general Internet traffic. Comparing to Internet early days we now have communication pipes of gigantic bandwidth... yet somehow they get overrun, ISPs still peddle more bandwidth for more coins. Ratio of usable content to aux (scripting, ads, cosmetics) just keeps dropping. The pages are not only byte heavy, they now CPU heavy (due to scripting, SSL etc). In retrospect, I'd rather wonder wheather the current __implementation__ of Internet is the right one. Perhaps now one could envision an alternative implementation, leaner, more secure (or less reliant on that), more analog/human? After all the base purpose for Internet was to connect computers, now it's used to connect people lives.

119 points by jesperht 8y ago

api 8y ago

This is fairly shallow. It doesn't really explain why surveillance and manipulation became the dominant business models of the Internet. I think the culprit is "free." Everything has to be "free." As a result, some indirect means must be found to pay for it. The most convenient model is to turn it around and make the user the product. Use free services to attract users, then surveil and manipulate those users for paying customers -- advertisers, governments, intelligence agencies, think tanks, etc.

mcphage 8y ago
> I think the culprit is "free." Everything has to be "free." As a result, some indirect means must be found to pay for it. That raises an interesting point... discussion about "free" often distinguishes free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech, but maybe we were mistaken in thinking that it was ever not going to be about money.
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  It's not about money, it's about the allocation of scarce resources. The point is that there is always some resource that is a limiting factor, be it time, labor, energy, natural resources, land, or other inputs. Imagine a world where there is no money and no price mechanism, e.g. the Star Trek economy. Society still needs to collectively implement a mechanism that determines what should people do today, and how should we make sure they are able to do it? I'm sure in TNG you can get enough replicator credits to eat like a king, but not everyone gets a starship or prime New Orleans real estate [1] because there's still not enough for everyone. In fact, prices are often useful as an internal planning mechanism even when there is no market or money changing hands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_price#Constrained_optimisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_price#Constrained_optim... This is exactly what Soviet central planners did: try to set 'reasonable' prices for every single good in their economy while also setting input and output targets for every single piece of fixed capital and organization in the USSR. 'Free as in beer' is an ideology that states that 'prices of particular goods and services ought to always be zero'. Why would we expect that to conform to the reality of how valuable a service really is to people, especially as the cost to produce those particular things are always changing? [1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sisko%27s_Creole_Kitchen http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sisko%27s_Creole_Kitchen
  - XorNot 8y ago
    TNG never really explored the dynamics of the post-scarcity society - the setting of the show is really to explicitly avoid having to do that by putting the characters in a context where scarcity exists (a starship on the frontier).
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
topmonk 8y ago
I think the “customer being the product” happens regardless. Take a look at how credit card agencies sell people's purchase habits, or grocery store loyalty cards that do the same. It's naive to think that not every economic niche won't be exploited regardless of the existence of another one.
ukyrgf 8y ago
"Free" worked for me 10-20 years ago. There was the old "if you aren't paying for it, then you are the product" adage. Now, even if you pay, you are being sold.
- disqard 8y ago
  Fair point, but there are some exceptions. For instance, the Atlantic's Masthead subscription gives you ad-free access to their audio podcasts. Overall, I agree with you: once I am a paying subscriber of NYT (say), why should I be served the same ads as a non-subscriber viewing the same article in an incognito window?
egypturnash 8y ago
It’s kind of funny. I run a Mastodon instance. I keep it small so I don’t have to spend more than about twenty bucks a month to keep it running. Pocket change, really. And yet my users regularly poke me to set up a Patreon, so they can help me cover the cost for it. Hell, I paid for Livejournal back in the day, before it turned into a thing that had to expand user numbers at all costs, and had to try and pay the rent of multiple Bay Area employees, and started putting in ads.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
Why did propaganda become the dominant model for the printing press? Controlling information has been a main objective of the ruling class forever, the issue isn't with the Internet.
amanaplanacanal 8y ago
Even in the days of the print media, the user was the product. The real money wasn't in subscription prices, it was in advertising. I don't think that much has changed.

adriand 8y ago

This reads like an article that got half-written before the author said, "fuck it" or ran out of time. The first half is excellent but it gets shaky with "The Hopeful", then falls apart in "The Revisionists" with what sounds like ad copy for a design agency. The worst part is the ending: there isn't one. It's a shame because I feel like there's a whole article lurking in there somewhere, with some interesting ideas underpinning it.

ashleyn 8y ago

I mean, George Carlin said this best. Garbage in, garbage out. Maybe something else sucks around here...like the public. Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. Today, it's been democratised enough to allow your racist aunt to ramble on Facebook about how Obama is actually an alien born on Pluto, sent to America to destroy Christianity. The remaining escapes on the Internet devoid of this are vanishing. We tend to worship democratising institutions without considering whether or not the people recieving these new powers are capable of handling them with the correct values, motivations, and competencies. The Internet has given too much to those who are not curious about the world or have a serious interest in improving it. Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change.

hnaccy 8y ago
>Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. This doesn't match my experience at all.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  This doesn't match my experience at all. Ditto. I remember when the internet was apolitical. Not liberal, not conservative. That only became widespread in the last five or ten years. Before this decade, the internet was mostly nerds working to solve problems involving math and science, not social studies and history. Then the nerds got rich and started caring less about technology, and more about “changing the world.”
  - orev 8y ago
    Small “L” liberal means either “open to new behavior or values” or “seeking knowledge”. That’s not (or shouldn’t be) political.
    - Analemma_ 8y ago

sp332 8y ago

Aza Raskin, a pioneer of infinite scrolling, also has regrets about the effect the design has on users. https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-44640959 https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-44640959

luxpir 8y ago
S/He says, sharing an amp link... here: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959 Clean!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
rapnie 8y ago
Aza Raskin is one of the co-founders of The Center for Humane Technology [0] which aims to 'Realign technology to humanity's best interests' [0] https://humanetech.com https://humanetech.com
- newsbinator 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, what's best for capturing our attention isn't best for our well-being: > * Snapchat turns conversations into streaks, redefining how our children measure friendship. > * Instagram glorifies the picture-perfect life, eroding our self worth. > * Facebook segregates us into echo chambers, fragmenting our communities. > * YouTube autoplays the next video within seconds, even if it eats into our sleep. > These are not neutral products. > They are part of a system designed to addict us.
- natmaka 8y ago
  The Center for Humane Technology could use J. Ellul work ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique ).

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

The tragedy of the commons is another explanation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons you have a common playground where some players start to spam the mailing list/newsgroup/discussion board for their own benefit, this destroys the commons as more spammers join in. Eventually you need moderators and centralisation, now the policeman tends to have an agenda of his own - and the common ground has been appropriated. Where is the new element in that? Self regulation works in small groups but it all breaks down when the group is larger than a village.

syshum 8y ago
Centralisation is the problem on the internet today, not a solution. What we need is MASSIVE decentralization, and open protocols,.
natmaka 8y ago
Indeed. Moreover whenever something is wrong, something is too big, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#Philosophy.
u801e 8y ago
> some players start to spam the mailing list/newsgroup/discussion board for their own benefit, this destroys the commons as more spammers join in. Eventually you need moderators and centralisation, Mail and news clients have sophisticated filtering abilities that could deal with that issue. I've always wondered why people in general are more than willing to rely in a central party to vet the content they get to see rather than handling it for themselves.

sarcasmic 8y ago

I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs where the engine handled all but the content, and the barrier to entry of sharing personal details was lowered. Correspondingly, the depth of the material got more shallow, but the breadth of it got wider. This transition was happening as commercial ventures first moved beyond sites that were mere billboards, individuals began reading news portals and opening webmail accounts, and communities like phpBB and vBulletin forums flourished as pseudonymous, do-it-yourself takes on newsgroups of old. Aggressive moderation typically kept the conversation in check. There were corners of the web where moderation was shallow, and some of these places achieved notoriety for being cesspits of depravity, and eventually, hate. The depravity was authentic. But there was an air of privileged bravado about the hate, where its expression was used as a shibboleth to an in-group more so than an authentic expression of beliefs. If you were a true hater, finding other true haters was not a trivial task. Early social networks were pseudonymous. It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online. Ten years of Facebook moved the Overton window quite a bit, and now there's a set of people who aren't afraid to bare their cards, or of doxxing and reprisal. And now, they too have tools to build online communities of their own and find like-minded people on the web rather than in person, regardless of the popularity and acceptance of the views they hold. Meanwhile, e-commerce is now everywhere, and so is content and services that can be consumed with no upfront cost. Both of these are supplemented by adtech-like schemes that harvest and correlate user behavior. Despite real harm having occurred from these practices, jurisdictions have been slow to regulate them for many reasons: ineptitude, lobbying, corruption, and ineffectiveness in enforcing regulations in a global, dynamic, resilient system. Shady, underground actors and mainstream actors alike will continue these practices until widespread, debilitating user backlash, or widespread regulation puts and end to them. If they are regulated, only ruthless actors will engage in this behavior: trolls, stalkers, profiteers, and intelligence services.

adventured 8y ago
> I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs... The labor-of-love deep topic authors came to entirely dominate across the board. They sit at the top of every single search result, under the Wikipedia.org domain. They moved from writing in-depth on their personal blogs/sites, to writing epic volumes on a site like Wikipedia instead. A place where that vast glorious compilation of human knowledge can easily be shared with all in a quite friendly non-profit, non-soul-eating sort of way (ie the anti-Facebook sort of way). I don't have to get lucky browsing around or dig for hours to find their obscure topic content there, I just conveniently type words into a search box or click one page to the next. No filtering through tons of trash results or in-result ads on Google to find decent quality content.

Synaesthesia 8y ago

As Chomsky put it, in the mid 90’s, the internet was handed over to private corporations for their own use, mostly commerce. It’s now even more in the hands of private power, with net neutrality being gone.

paulsutter 8y ago

Remember Geocities? Friendster? MySpace? Facebook is just another point in the curve. And we’ll get there. Don’t panic. The optimists are still right. These are all just growing pains while everyone competes to find the right formula.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
You say "we'll get there"--get where? The curve you describe is sharply descending at all points. I see no evidence that it's working around towards something that's overall positive. You're right that everyone is competing to find "the right formula," but they're trying to maximize profit, full stop. They're not optimizing for anything related to the public good, except incidentally.
- paulsutter 8y ago
  Then look at the larger pattern of human history. It’s a little absurd to suggest that the general directing of firearm progress has suddenly reversed.
  - paulsutter 8y ago
    That’s a crazy autotype - I meant human progress!
    - Proziam 8y ago
      I think I prefer the original version, actually. Made me chuckle.
Agathos 8y ago
Geocities was a lot more fun than what we have now.

sandov 8y ago

Both optimists and pessimists were right. The Internet is the most powerful tool we have to spread knowledge, but it's also the most powerful one to spread bullshit. If you hang around smart people you'll get positive effects from the internet, if you are an idiot or hang around idiots, you'll get crap. Author seems to be of the second kind.

krapp 8y ago
Yeah... to me this is like complaining that the printing press was a bad idea because it was once only used to publish scholarship and now it's mostly coffee table books and pulp fiction.

beerlord 8y ago

As long as websites are funded based on eyeballs, this will continue. We need to move to a model of micropayments, where I can pay a few cents easily (and automatically) to visit a site or read an article. The total amount could be aggregated monthly, like Patreon does.

blindgeek 8y ago

"Even boosters now seem to implicitly accept the assumption (accurate or not) that the internet is the root of multiple woes, from increasing political polarization to the mass diffusion of misinformation." I certainly don't accept that the Internet is the root of increasing political polarization. It's nothing new. Ever heard of the Nika Riots? Polarization is a story as old as time, Internet or no Internet. On the other hand, top-down culture is breaking down on account of the Internet. How many people watch the CBS Evening News anymore? There was, in the minds of American "thought leaders", a sort of cultural consensus. It doesn't exist anymore, never mind that it was probably always more myth than reality. The facade is being shattered, and a lot of folks are running scared, blaming the newest technology for their woes. There are ways out of the crises we face, but neither blaming the Internet for our problems nor treating it as a panacea is one of them.

captainmuon 8y ago

New, disruptive technologies "want" to change society. The problem is people assumed that would happen automatically. What happened instead is that the establishment insisted on keeping society the way it is, and managed to shoehorn the new technologies into the old social molds. Example: File sharing. This would easily make it possible to give everybody access to all media for free. But artists (and entertainment industry workers) need to be fed, and we apparently don't know how to do this without turning music and videos into a commodity. I would rather try to solve the general problem: How to feed somebody whose labor is not required by society. But the obvious solutions to this would be unconditional basic income, or communism, or something else people don't like. Instead we invent DRM and pretend digitalization didn't happen. Another example is cryptocurrency. Instead of bringing upon the anarchocapitalist utopia/apocalypse, it just got regulated to hell in record time. We (as "hackers" / "tech people") should not blindly believe that disruptive technology will bring upon social change by itself. Instead, people should address the hard social and political problems directly. Don't ask what's the next Uber, Bitcoin, Internet, but rather what's the next Democracy, Capitalism, Enlightenment, ...

KarlRutnick 8y ago

People get the leaders they deserve, they are only a reflection of the population in general. No wonder it all went downhill when that collective came online. And yet in that process things have changed for the better. The old guard has to fight to preserve their hold on the narrative. Technology is the great equaliser and really the only thing that changes externalities apart from resources and nature in general. Externalities lead, then humanity follow. Culture and finally politics adapt, the rest is just rationalisation. I doubt this will change short of genetically altering ourselves. So if you want to improve the world, forget politics. I remain hopefully because today even just one person can write a piece of software and change the world

zoomablemind 8y ago

The article seems to narrow the scope of problem with Internet to its effects on social dynamics. All means of communications held at some point the manipulative powers over the socium (TV, newspapers etc.). New means will have them too. So nothing to regret here. Meanwhile, as technology Internet provided goods of wider access to knowledge, should one needed it. Indeed, it also promoted the freedom of speech too, should anyone needed to be heard! It's just inevitable that Internet got saturated just as well, such that signal-to-noise is below quality threshold. Same as your cable channels, or bookstores back in the gone century. So now people need either to devise a better selectivity or invent and use a new clear channel. All of current 'social messngers' are effectively trying to offer a clear channel.

zoomablemind 8y ago

I wish the author pointed the spotlight at an increasing bloat of the general Internet traffic. Comparing to Internet early days we now have communication pipes of gigantic bandwidth... yet somehow they get overrun, ISPs still peddle more bandwidth for more coins. Ratio of usable content to aux (scripting, ads, cosmetics) just keeps dropping. The pages are not only byte heavy, they now CPU heavy (due to scripting, SSL etc). In retrospect, I'd rather wonder wheather the current __implementation__ of Internet is the right one. Perhaps now one could envision an alternative implementation, leaner, more secure (or less reliant on that), more analog/human? After all the base purpose for Internet was to connect computers, now it's used to connect people lives.