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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 b

• 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
        There is no question more intensely political than the question of which values people think “shouldn’t be political”.
        • matthewwiese 8y ago
          That reads more like a tautology than a genuine insight.
        • yesenadam 8y ago
          That's the most interesting, thought-provoking comment I've read on here for a long while. (I bother saying that, because it's been, amazingly, downvoted and accused of being closer to saying nothing than anything.)
    • RRRA 8y ago
      The internet apolitical? When what where... Before DNS?
      • reaperducer 8y ago
        Since DNS is didn't go live until 1984, and didn't hit Windows until 1987, pretty much. I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger. I don't remember ever seeing politics on Gopher, but I could have just missed that.
        • alxlaz 8y ago
          Maybe not political debates per se, but I definitely remember many posters' political views being easy to decipher behind their USENET posts.
          • TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
            In the late 90s, parts of Usenet and IRC made modern Twitter look like a polite lunch date with your accountant.
        • dragonwriter 8y ago
          > I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger. Even aside from overtly political newsgroups like talk.politics.misc, and talk.abortion, politics was all over Usenet.
    • Mediterraneo10 8y ago
      I think the internet has been "political" for longer than that. The development of blogging systems like Movable Type and then Wordpress in the early millennium gave rise to some extremely popular and vigorous blogs like Little Green Footballs. Some of these got so much traffic that suddenly their proprietors could live off the money earned just by casually sharing their political views (thanks to some affiliate links here and there). The big political change of more recent years, I would say, is political discussion overflowing expressly political fora and contaminating pretty much everywhere because of how social media functions. A band or author will share some entirely innocuous, non-political post on their social media pages, but the comment threads below them can easily descend into a shitshow of partisan quarreling.
      • pacala 8y ago
        We could blissfully ignore that Little Green Footballs / Daily Kos / etc. ever existed and go on with our lives. Enter Facebook / Twitter and their hunger for "engagement" and all of a sudden inflammatory political rants pop in everyone's news feed multiple times a day. Advertisers are happy, technocrats are happy, people are connected, what's not to love?
      • AmericanChopper 8y ago
        >I think the internet has been "political" for longer than that. I would agree with that. Freedom of expression seemed to be a foundational value of the internet when I was growing up, but perhaps that was a less political idea back then. Nowadays, the top comment in this thread is lamenting that we have allowed people who don’t have ‘the correct values’ to participate in the internet.
      • pasabagi 8y ago
        I think the west has grown more political, to be honest. Until the last few years, the choices in basically every developed country has been between 'red neoliberal' and 'blue neoliberal'. Predictably, voters were bored. Recently, there have started to be genuinely different options on the ballot sheet, on both ends of the spectrum.
      • syshum 8y ago
• h4b4n3r0 8y ago
  Could you expand a little on the notion of “correct values”?
  • __jahh 8y ago
    reciprocity is a favorite
  • ashleyn 8y ago
    Pretty obvious stuff we can agree on, like "hate is wrong" and "facts are indisputable."
    • reaperducer 8y ago
      Pretty obvious stuff we can agree on, like "hate is wrong" I hate mayonnaise. I guess that makes me “wrong.” and "facts are indisputable." 1942: “The Germans are our enemies.” That was a fact. 1992: “The Germans are our friends.” That was a fact. Facts change. Nothing in the universe is indisputable.
      • johnchristopher 8y ago
        I am working in a toxic environment these days and for months now I have been throwing this maxim at everyone's face every occasion I get: "Facts don't matter, only opinion on those facts do."
      • tzs 8y ago
        > 1942: “The Germans are our enemies.” That was a fact. It still is a fact. The statement is implicitly about the relationship with Germany at the time of the statement. It is not a claim that the relationship will stay the same for all time forward.
        • Fnoord 8y ago
          Context matters, indeed.
      • 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
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• anonytrary 8y ago
  > 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. Who exactly are the right people to be using technology? How do they decide what constitutes correct values, motivations and competencies? Your sentiment seems to carry a lot of hubris behind it. The world is just not that simple. > The Internet has given too much to those who are not curious about the world or have a serious interest in improving it. This sounds like a generic pretentious sentiment. What are you exactly trying to say? Because I'm pretty sure that widespread access to the internet has resulted in an overwhelming net good for the world, allowing people to learn more and do more than ever before.
  • DennisAleynikov 8y ago
    the tech is rarely the issue at scale. When almost everyone uses something you run into the same problems you get from any crowd. traffic, deviancy and abuse of resources. humans are animals and we need to keep that in mind for when we expect large groups of them to act like anything but a herd
    • anonytrary 8y ago
      > humans are animals and we need to keep that in mind for when we expect large groups of them to act like anything but a herd Then it is equally foolish to assume that humans are capable of shepherding each other. Either every human is an animal, or none of them are. Which animals get to decide how the rest of the animals use something in the world? It's not as easy as it seems. Finding "clever" ways of partitioning people is a recipe for disaster.
      • imartin2k 8y ago
        Well, humans are the only animal which is able to actually act against its animal nature. But this requires work, education, self-awareness. Acceptance and understanding of one’s cognitive biases. Not everyone on the internet is acting equally destructive. But possibly at this point in collective human evolution, people (on average) maybe are not ready for the internet.
• AmericanChopper 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 is a complete fantasy. The internet has always been a fermenting pot of stupidity and intellectual garbage. >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 I honestly can’t tell if this is a satire? What the hell are ‘the correct values’?
• Eupolemos 8y ago
  I agree with this, with one exception. > Like anything else we lose hope on, it will never change until those using it change. To me, this part comes off as implicitly defeatist. I don't think "people" change, and while general education makes a difference, it isn't a solution we can rely on on its own (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment). But I think we can make a difference when shaping how people communicate on the internet. Facebook is - as I see it - made to make us interact in the most basic, emotional way, so the company can farm our dispositions. That doesn't make for healthy conversation. If we shaped and popularized the means of being social on the internet in a more responsible way, we might see people acting in a less soulcrushing manner. The trick, of course, is to make people like such a social platform.
  • TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    It's not about conversation so much as the easy industrialisation of propaganda and election fixing. FB and TW make it far too easy to set up bots and troll farms to influence public debate for relatively tiny amounts of money. And FB has also been used to supply individually targeted political advertising - which makes it easy to swing an election or a referendum by influencing a few million, or even just a few hundred thousand, people - by lying to them. This is part of a bigger problem in the Western democracies, where it's considered perfectly okay for billionaires to use media empires to influence voters with knowingly fake outright propaganda. The conversation part is largely irrelevant. A lot of people will simply parrot talking points they're given by the media, so there is in fact no real conversation or debate happening.
• pervycreeper 8y ago
  This is more or less the establishment view, held by those who shepherded in the current state of affairs.
• scruffyherder 8y ago
  > correct values Wow, just wow.
• scottlocklin 8y ago
  Funny, the first thing I remember doing in 1991 when I got on the internet on an actual z-19 terminal hooked up to an Ultrix machine ... arguing with holocaust revisionists and young earth creationists on Usenet. I'd say the internet population in those days was higher IQ as it required literacy rather than instagram accounts, but it was if anything significantly less 'liberal' than it is now. More libertarian, really. It was also not run by authoritarian nincompoops at Google and Facebook.
• DanielGee 8y ago
  > 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. I was/am a liberal, competent tech worker. And the internet was just as racist and divisive in the 90s and the 00s as it is today and as it will be the next decade. And this is going to shock you, but us "liberal, competent tech workers", vociferously defended all speech. You might want to look up what liberal means. When entities wanted to stifle speech - whether it was hate speech, pornography, gay rights speech, you name it, us "liberal, competent tech workers" defended all of it. You can't have free speech while censoring some speech you disagree with. But you are right. The problem with today's internet is the influx of a certain group of people. The childish leftists intent on pushing an agenda and censoring speech they disagree. Unfortunately, this group has gotten funding and corporate backing and are pushing censorship everywhere. > 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 Correct values? Who decides what correct values are? Christian fundamentalists? Leftists? It's amazing how our leftists anti-free speech rhetoric is so similar to the chinese, european, saudi and russian anti free speech rhetoric. "Xi said the internet must be “clean” and vulgar content must be resisted in the field of culture." "“Uphold a clean and righteous internet space,” the Xinhua news agency cited Xi as saying." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics/chinas-xi-says-internet-must-be-clean-and-righteous-idUSKCN1L71CG https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics/chinas-xi-... Censorship is the problem with the internet right now.