12 ms·

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear blinders

145 points by apress 8y ago

wiremine 8y ago
> By perpetually refreshing the illusion that progress is just getting under way, gadget worshippers like Kelly are able to wave away the problems that progress is causing. Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just a temporary bug in the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent engineers. These were the key sentences to me. I agree that we can't put our head in the sand about the problems technology produce _today_. Part of those solutions will be technical, and part of those will be cultural. Technology is never operates in a vacuum. Regarding the "we're at the beginning" argument... I think it depends on the time horizon, and if you're a futurist (like Wired tends to be) or if you're responsible for immediate technical/policy decisions. If you view the potential impact of technology over the next 200 to 300 years, then, yeah, we're beginning. If you want to clean up the mess we've made over the last 20 to 50 years, then, no, we're not at the beginning.
- tcmb 8y ago
  Well put. No matter where you stand, you're always at the beginning of the next x years and the end of the past x years at the same time. 'Technological development' didn't begin with computers and won't end there. Ethics should matter at every point.
vahno 8y ago
People on social networks who talk about US politics, to a foreigner, are a complete shitshow. Like monkeys in a zoo hurling turds at each other. You just have to see the responses to any tweet by Trump or Clinton to see that. I wonder if this new or if this was always the level of politics debate.
- gallerdude 8y ago
  I think it's definitely a bias of those who feel the strongest about an issue feel the strongest that they have to post. I don't love the term silent majority, because basically anyone can summon one up to make their point seem more valid. But I honestly to believe that there's a majority of people who just don't want to step into the political arena and get yelled at by people who are more passionate than them.
- akkartik 8y ago
  Please link to tweets showing that other countries have a superior level of debate on Twitter.
  - vahno 8y ago
    I didn't mean to say that at all, it's just that I don't use Twitter much but I sometimes get to see some tweets about American politics (especially tweets about Trump) and they are shameful. I expect them to be the same for any other country of course. I have edited my post a bit to make it clear.
- munificent 8y ago
  There's always been a fringe of people willing to say horrid things but the scale of it is much larger today. You must have missed out on Brexit, Marine Le Pen, and many other things if you think this is unique to the US.
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    To be fair, there's also the case for US having a huge population compared to other countries. And all of them are English-speaking, which means that a foreigner sees way more of that.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    The reach is much larger today. It used to be that the troll would be the loudmouth at the bar. He might get in a fight with someone else at the bar, or he might just annoy the other patrons, but it was a pretty small set of people. Now the troll is saying the same things, but on Twitter, and the whole country can hear his trolling. He's no different, he just has a bigger reach.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Totally agree. I am always surprised how much attention a single person can get for saying something stupid. It would be much healthier if they just got ignored.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Consider that in 1856, one Senator attacked another with a cane on the floor of Congress and beat him nearly to death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jpindar 8y ago
  There is plenty of serious, polite political discussion on social media, but the people who are actually interested in a discussion know better than to try to respond directly to a tweet by Trump or Clinton. Responding to one of those tweets is a waste of time, shouting into the wind. Try following some journalists, authors etc. rather than searching by topic.
gallerdude 8y ago
It's the paradox of the infinite horizon. Dictators in the past have justified genocide under the idea that the pain in the short term can yield infinite rewards by being the foundation to a utopia.
amasad 8y ago
Neomaniac don't understand that everything new is necessary unstable and opaque. Older systems, cultures, technolgies survived for a reason. By obsessing over the new and dismissing the old we are throwing away knowledge and learnings.
50 8y ago
> For much of this year, I’ve been exploring the biases of digital media, trying to trace the pressures that the media exert on us as individuals and as a society. I’m far from done, but it’s clear to me that the biases exist and that at this point they have manifested themselves in unmistakable ways. Not only are we well beyond the beginning, but we can see where we’re heading — and where we’ll continue to head if we don’t consciously adjust our course. Reminds me of a few lines I read months ago from Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open The Head: "In contemporary life we do whatever we can to deny intuition of the invisible realms. We clog up our senses with smog, jam our minds with media overload. We drown ourselves in alcohol or medicate ourselves into rigidly artificial states with antidepressants. Then we take pride in our cynicism and detachment. Perhaps we are terrified to discover that our "rationality" is itself a kind of faith, an artifice, that beneath it lies the vast territory of the unknown." Further reading: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manvotional-thoreau-on-media-and-information-consumption/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manvotional-thoreau-...
- semi-extrinsic 8y ago
  There are two kinds of people: those afraid of their own death, and those who desperately avoid thinking about their own death
  - drb91 8y ago
    Seems deeply cynical. Where is this coming from? Death is the only certain part of life. Who can seriously fear it? It's the part that immediately precedes death that scares me.... if I were to get Alzheimers I would rather put a bullet in my head.
    - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
      I agree there are things worse than death, such as Alzheimers. But still, and this is just my own belief, I think anyone who has given the matter some thought and introspection, is afraid of the end of their own existence. There may come a time indeed when death is better than remaining alive, but that doesn't imply one has stopped fearing death.
blackaspen 8y ago
Discourse around technology is interesting. I've been reading a lot of essays on technology, digital media, and the digital humanities over the past few weeks. The upsides of the future seem to get perpetuated a lot more than the downsides. In one of the papers that's at the forefront of my mind, the New London Group's "Multiliteracies for a Digital Age" essay, they call out the good -- more collaboration, more opportunities for a utopia, etc. While they do mention downsides, they kind of get drowned out. People want to be optimistic -- there's a bunch of core human ideals and one of them is that things will improve. As such, technological downsides and pitfalls either get called out and responded to by tin-foil-hat types, or just fall away until it's a bit too late (thinking randomly of Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" here...)
ilaksh 8y ago
I find this post to mainly explain a worldview in a very broad manner without getting into specifics. I doubt it can lead to a constructive discussion. People that also have a worldview with a negative view of the effects of technology on society will mainly just agree in mostly broad ways. People that have an opposing worldview will state their own beliefs, mostly in a broad way. But because this is not a specific issue but rather a worldview, there is almost no possibility of constructive discussion where someone really gains insight or changes their mind. Everyone's already made up their mind on this broad aspect of their worldview. That's just the nature of beliefs. Another aspect of this is that any perspective is largely about seeing farther and farther forward into the future. It is quite literally like looking into the distance. Since it is impossible to clearly see things that are far away, it is quite easy to have a disagreement about what's on the horizon or beyond in any particular direction. But the landscape is so complex that blanket statements about good or bad in any direction have little utility. In my opinion.
TimJYoung 8y ago
I think one of the big mistakes that we make is to assume that our current/future was destined to be what it is, and that an alternative, any alternative, did not take place because it was "less efficient", "not as good", etc. This completely ignores the effects of chance and fashion. The new series "Maniac" is a good example of this (forget the merits of the show, I'm just referring to the backdrop). It's set around the same time as today, but everyone is (still) using CRTs and older-style office equipment. Also, we so desperately want the "future" to be different from "now", that we often latch on to novelty with both hands, simply to distinguish "our generation" from the prior one. In reality, things change, but not as much as we'd like to think that they do. It's one of the things that freaks me out so much as I get older: everything is pretty much the same as what it was when I was a kid. Yes, things are different, but they're not that different.
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  I saw Maniac's setting as a conscious attempt to emulate the future as envisioned by Philip K Dick, but with modern twists. The idea that you'd get free services by allowing a person to sit next to you and make a sales pitch was especially poignant.
- FooHentai 8y ago
  Something I really love about the Fallout universe is that it poses a fundamental question: What if the transistor was never invented, what would that world look like in its future? It's not necessarily an anachronism if it's on a different timeline.
athenot 8y ago
> Is there an overarching bias to the advance of communication systems? Technology enthusiasts like Kelly would argue that there is — a bias toward greater freedom, democracy, and social harmony Technology itself has its advantages, but scrutiny is needed for how it is put to use by large corporations with lots of power. A healthy discussion needs to happen around the role of platforms which are gaining influence into people's emotional lives. But is that a technology thing or a business/ethics thing? I used to love the communities on USENET; and many IRC channels still exhibit some of that vibe. Even web forums centered around special interests are great communication tools and (can) bring people together. But building centralized communication tools (1:1 tools or group/tribe tools) around advertisement and making those the primary mode of communication for people is something new for society and I'm not sure this is for the best. The large companies that run them answer to shareholders and have fiduciary obligations to them. Instead of "provide a communication tool and monetize with ads, hoping they don't degrade the experience too much", they are doing what we expect of any large business: "maximize shareholder value and hope the communication tools don't cross too many ethics boundaries". I work in technology and have greatly benefited from it. I also see positive and negative impacts around me. To me, the real question is whether technology is improving the lives of ALL people or just those like me who happen to have a vested interest in it.
- TimJYoung 8y ago
  Great post. My wife and I have conversations about this all of the time, especially the FB vs. good 'ole web forums discussion. I think the issue with centralized communication tools is that we haven't figured out the "shame" thing yet. Or, perhaps, it isn't even possible to scale up shaming. There's a lot of evidence that scaling up shaming simply results in its weaponization (the internet doesn't do nuance...). Watching Roseanne on Joe Rogan this week was simply heart-breaking. The speed with which her entire career and body of work was tossed in the garbage really makes me think that it isn't possible.
  - invalidOrTaken 8y ago
    I think either the Internet will self-regulate by developing a "hey let's not lynch people" norm, or the brick-and-mortar crowd will slowly develop some backbone against Twitter mobs. I can't predict the future. But I'm a great fan of that quote: "If something can't go on this way forever...it will stop."
lubujackson 8y ago
I was struck reading about the Amish and their relationship to technology. We tend to think of the Amish as hopelessly backwards, but every year they convene and discuss new technologies and which ones should be allowed. As you can imagine, the process is highly selective and considers the impact both individually and for the entire community. Negative effects from modern advancements are so common and globally threatening that it is easy to see how the cultural obsession with "new" could be replaced with "stable" as we face more and more of the fallout from this mindset.
- sampo 8y ago
  At least the Amish use GMO crops, whereas many in the "global techno elite" are still afraid of modern plant breeding.
- pjmorris 8y ago
  I will always recommend the 'Amish Hackers' article by Kevin Kelly [0] which describes the sophisticated relationship the Amish have with technology. [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/
Nasrudith 8y ago
Really I think the impact of technology with communication is twofold and contradictory - transparency and anonymity. It is highlighting all of the ugly truths we would rather ignore - including scarcity of critical thinking. Societal hypocrisies start to slowly fall apart - like expectations to be both social and "career friendly" or looking down on those we depend upon. Even the lies and manipulation are oddly transparent - there is nothing stopping anyone but time from making several accounts to promote absolute nonsense. As opposed to traditional sources which make claims to authenticity and can betray the trust. Lack of trust is a growing trend related to manipulators, not wanting to understand the uncomfortable and genuine untrustworthiness. Like always we need to adapt to changes as a society for good or ill.
- deleted 8y ago
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Animats 8y ago
From about 1900 to 1970, aviation was like that. Aircraft got bigger and went faster and flew higher. Everyone would have a flying car. In the late 1960s, the Boeing 747 and the Boeing 737 flew. The Concorde was flying. The X-15 had flown. There were many experimental transonic aircraft. Men had landed on the moon, even. Even the flying car looked close. There were lots of VTOL aircraft in the 1950s and 1960s. Small helicopters like the UH-1 were working well for the military. Then, suddenly, it was over. The last 50 years of aviation have produced fewer innovations than any single decade in the previous 50 years. Versions of the B-737 and B-747 are still in production. The Concorde was retired and not replaced. As Scott Crossman, the test pilot, once said, everything that ever flew substantially faster than Mach 3 is now in a museum. No one has been beyond low earth orbit since the early 1970s. If you want to see the VTOLs of the 1950s and 1960s, they're in the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos. Aviation hit the limits of what you can do by burning fuel. In the early 1970s, the aerospace industry had huge layoffs as the space program wound down and not much was happening in aviation. Computing may be there. Clock rates for mainstream CPUs have been in the 3-4 GHZ range for a decade now. That never happened before. We've hit fundamental limits. Atoms are too big. Line widths are measured in atom counts now. Electrons are too big. The number of electrons in a flash memory cell is in two digits. Photons are too big. Optical lithography has had to go to soft X-rays ("extreme ultraviolet") to get better resolution, using an insanely complicated technology that just barely works. Fabs cost way too much and there are fewer leading-edge ones. Moore's Law is over. As with aircraft, computing may shift to doing slightly better within the limitations of the physics we've got. The happy time of better hardware every year is over.
- cakeface 8y ago
  I wonder if we were at a plateau with aviation that we are now ascending out of. Look at drones and multi-copters and advancements from SpaceX for example. I agree with the main argument that I think you were making. We cannot assume that the growth we have been seeing continues indefinitely.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Also some concepts of electric jets come to mind.
yellowstuff 8y ago
This bit from the article: > Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just a temporary bug in the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent engineers. (If you look at Mark Zuckerberg’s responses to Facebook’s problems over the years, you’ll find that they are all variations on this theme.) Seems unfair in light of this: > Ezra Klein: That is one of the ways Facebook is different, but I can imagine reading it both ways. On the one hand, your control of voting shares makes you more insulated from short-term pressures of the market. On the other hand, you have a lot more personal power. There’s no quadrennial election for CEO of Facebook. And that’s a normal way that democratic governments ensure accountability. Do you think that governance structure makes you, in some cases, less accountable? > Mark Zuckerberg: I certainly think that’s a fair question. My goal here is to create a governance structure around the content and the community that reflects more what people in the community want than what short-term-oriented shareholders might want. And if we do that well, then I think that could really break ground on governance for an internet community. But if we don’t do it well, then I think we’ll fail to handle a lot of the issues that are coming up. > Here are a few of the principles. One is transparency. Right now, I don’t think we are transparent enough around the prevalence of different issues on the platform. We haven’t done a good job of publishing and being transparent about the prevalence of those kinds of issues, and the work that we’re doing and the trends of how we’re driving those things down over time. > A second is some sort of independent appeal process. Right now, if you post something on Facebook and someone reports it and our community operations and review team looks at it and decides that it needs to get taken down, there’s not really a way to appeal that. I think in any kind of good-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal. And I think we can build that internally as a first step. > But over the long term, what I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebo... You might question whether Zuckerberg's suggestions are sincere or practical, but they certainly don't amount to dismissing the scope of the problem.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
Should I bother to read this article? > utopians who believe that computer technology is an unstoppable force for good and that anyone who resists or even looks critically at the expanding hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool This is such an absurdly straw-many straw man. Is the rest of the article just a takedown of this nonsense position? Or is there a good faith discussion of techno-optimism?
- mikestew 8y ago
  Should I bother to read this article? I found it to be a quick read, which is good because I also found it to be very shallow.
- goatlover 8y ago
  > This is such an absurdly straw-many straw man. Never heard or Ray Kurzweil before? The article mentions a couple other techno-utopians.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Ray Kurzweil says anyone who looks critically at the expanding hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool?
    - stan_rogers 8y ago
      That's a pretty good summary, yes.
zackmorris 8y ago
I've been around long enough that I'm realizing we're closer to the end than the beginning. The late 90s were so bright we had to wear shades - then the whole thing came crashing down and set progress back about a decade in the 2000s. Innovation happened by forcing us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, not by cultivating our potential. Now here we are again, having caught up to where we were in 1999: VR and AI are taking off (it was 3D gaming and online support then), billions of dollars of VC money are being thrown at mundane ideas that a couple teenagers could pull off in their parents' basement (if they weren't stuck working 40 hours a week at call centers), and vacuous claims are made daily by people who won the internet lottery. This is not the future we're looking for. Or is, when you think about it. The wool has been pulled over our eyes. The rat race has become a marathon, the fruits of our labors are no longer ours to utilize. AI (especially) will be used to maximize profits rather than free us from labor. And unfortunately I'm not seeing acknowledgements of how badly we've flown off the rails, especially at the highest levels of the tech industry. My predictions: another crash around 2020, populist policies that do the opposite of what's needed (austerity, tax cuts for the wealthy, suppressing the Other, etc etc), little done to reduce consumption or help the environment as a percentage of GDP or even at a personal level, and a revolutionary reaction to all this in the form of protests and cooperatives that have too little capital to mount a meaningful resistance. Playing out over 1 or 2 more lost decades until the endgame in 2040 when corporations finish merging with AI and human beings have lost all autonomy. Disclaimer: I may have been watching too much Mr. Robot and Handmaid's Tale..
- dstroot 8y ago
  > policies that do the opposite of what’s needed... The jury is definitely out if democracy can actually “do what’s right” with regard to social issues, the environment, income inequality, etc. In fact it is mainly showing the opposite - that those with $ can buy elections using “weaponized” mis-information directly targeted at emotional humans using Facebook and then do whatever they want. I am rooting for a real Mr. Robot to take down Facebook et al.
  - zackmorris 8y ago
    I'm concerned about democracy issues as well (tyranny of the majority, tragedy of the commons, etc) but can't endorse targeting an ever-present Evil Corp, whoever that might be in these times. Plus I don't think it would work in the long run. I've been having a hard time lately coming to terms with the fact that there is no quick fix. There's probably not much that even Mark Zuckerberg could do at this point to take Facebook in a more equitable direction. It might require a leap of insight even greater than starting it in the first place. All of the important positive changes in history happened through organizing. It's really up to the employees of Facebook to do their part every day to make things better. If the system doesn't allow that, then they need to work to change the system. On a personal level, I'm going to vote and donate to positive causes. But I'm concerned that won't be enough to counter the decline in education and civics that I've witnessed over my lifetime. There are fundamentals that we could work on though. For example, the US was founded on public education. I'd ask anyone reading this to ask themselves why they might favor private education over public, and how that basic idea might lead to college that is more expensive, or dogma in our political discourse. Some ideals are timeless and needed now more than ever.
rmason 8y ago
I'm really getting tired of people continually bashing Kevin Kelly. Kelly's book, New rules for the new economy, was what gave me the final push to quit my job and become a software entrepreneur. But he got few things wrong in that book and the criticism was so harsh he stopped writing books for a few years. Kelly is a cheerleader. But he ties disparate threads together and gives you a mental model where he sees the future going. He's been far more right than wrong. But some people I guess are natural born pessimists. George Gilder has a similar approach. Kelly wrote in Wired in a famous essay after the 2000 crash that the Internet was at the beginning of a 200 year boom and I believe that to be true.
patientplatypus 8y ago
So... If you haven't already read this: https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero. So - the science tells us that plastic is killing us. The news stories say it's in our water supply and food. The keyboard you are typing on is probably made of plastic (mine is). And that's only one of the many things that is currently set to wipe out the human species due entirely to our own stupidity (climate change being another one, but AI/automation and it's affects on capitalism could be another). In my own humble opinion, the human race was better off when were not so smart, although we may not have been so comfortable. If you have children that are under the age of 10 they'll probably be old enough to fight in the wars that are coming as a result of food shortages and mass migration that will probably happen in the future. Think about that a minute. In all likelihood our children are going to fight and die because we are too short sighted to stop buying so much and throwing so much away. Humans are a disgusting species.
solatic 8y ago
I really don't get this piece. Improving machine connectivity and improving human communication are interrelated but mostly exclusive concepts. Of course there are major issues with the "improvements" to human communication (Facebook) notwithstanding actual improvements like Wikipedia. But that has little to do improvements made to machine connectivity. The power of APIs to automate away the tedium of actually applying human-decided policy is barely realized. Too many services do not expose APIs; too much necessary tooling (monetization, security, documentation, publication, monitoring) is either proprietary, non-standard, poorly publicized, or too complex to easily apply. Too few regulators and legislators appreciate the potential to kickstart adoption by mandating adoption and standards publication in government services. Too few citizens are adequately educated in ways to take advantage of the relatively few APIs which are available. The hardware race may be on its last legs, but claiming that we've exhausted what is possible with APIs is flat-out laughable and ridiculous.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
> In his books Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), the Canadian historian Harold Innis argued that all communication systems incorporate biases, which shape how people communicate and hence how they think it seems that there were many thinkers which have been ignored at this time. I'm currently reading Jaques Ellul who made very similar conclusions in 1954 in his (IMHO) monumental: "The Technological Society".
ciconia 8y ago
There's this belief, very common on HN, in technology as the solution to any and all problems facing humanity. In a way, technology has become a religion - "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Technology was in many ways the force that shaped the last century - it changed warfare, transport, communications, agriculture, medicine. Technology promised us a future of unlimited growth, with ourselves as masters of the universe and of our destiny. But by submitting ourselves to the cult of technology, we've removed ourselves from the world, and thus lost our connection to the world, with its myriad living creatures and endless mysteries. In building ourselves castles of concrete and steel and experiencing our consciousness through 5" screens, we have become isolated and desensitized. It is deeply ironic that the age of ubiquitous communication is also the age of alienation. And it is deeply distressing that so much time and effort goes into developing and manufacturing space rockets, mobile phones, new cars, while so little is being done, it seems, about ensuring our future on this planet. I have become convinced that for us to have a better future we actually need to give ourselves a break from technology, in absolutely all facets of life: the food we eat, our personal health, the way we participate in our community and in political life, and our place in relation to this earth that is our home.
Stryder 8y ago
The effects we've observed so far of the wide-spread social media with regards to our social and political systems seems akin to a 5-yr old walking in on his parents having sex; old enough to be traumatized, but not old enough to successfully deal with it. Jury's still out on the long-term consequences of this exposure. Suffice to say, it doesn't look particularly healthy.

145 points by apress 8y ago

> By perpetually refreshing the illusion that progress is just getting under way, gadget worshippers like Kelly are able to wave away the problems that progress is causing. Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just a temporary bug in the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent engineers. These were the key sentences to me. I agree that we can't put our head in the sand about the problems technology produce _today_. Part of those solutions will be technical, and part of those will be cultural. Technology is never operates in a vacuum. Regarding the "we're at the beginning" argument... I think it depends on the time horizon, and if you're a futurist (like Wired tends to be) or if you're responsible for immediate technical/policy decisions. If you view the potential impact of technology over the next 200 to 300 years, then, yeah, we're beginning. If you want to clean up the mess we've made over the last 20 to 50 years, then, no, we're not at the beginning.

tcmb 8y ago
Well put. No matter where you stand, you're always at the beginning of the next x years and the end of the past x years at the same time. 'Technological development' didn't begin with computers and won't end there. Ethics should matter at every point.

vahno 8y ago

People on social networks who talk about US politics, to a foreigner, are a complete shitshow. Like monkeys in a zoo hurling turds at each other. You just have to see the responses to any tweet by Trump or Clinton to see that. I wonder if this new or if this was always the level of politics debate.

gallerdude 8y ago
I think it's definitely a bias of those who feel the strongest about an issue feel the strongest that they have to post. I don't love the term silent majority, because basically anyone can summon one up to make their point seem more valid. But I honestly to believe that there's a majority of people who just don't want to step into the political arena and get yelled at by people who are more passionate than them.
akkartik 8y ago
Please link to tweets showing that other countries have a superior level of debate on Twitter.
- vahno 8y ago
  I didn't mean to say that at all, it's just that I don't use Twitter much but I sometimes get to see some tweets about American politics (especially tweets about Trump) and they are shameful. I expect them to be the same for any other country of course. I have edited my post a bit to make it clear.
munificent 8y ago
There's always been a fringe of people willing to say horrid things but the scale of it is much larger today. You must have missed out on Brexit, Marine Le Pen, and many other things if you think this is unique to the US.
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  To be fair, there's also the case for US having a huge population compared to other countries. And all of them are English-speaking, which means that a foreigner sees way more of that.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  The reach is much larger today. It used to be that the troll would be the loudmouth at the bar. He might get in a fight with someone else at the bar, or he might just annoy the other patrons, but it was a pretty small set of people. Now the troll is saying the same things, but on Twitter, and the whole country can hear his trolling. He's no different, he just has a bigger reach.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Totally agree. I am always surprised how much attention a single person can get for saying something stupid. It would be much healthier if they just got ignored.
crooked-v 8y ago
Consider that in 1856, one Senator attacked another with a cane on the floor of Congress and beat him nearly to death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jpindar 8y ago
There is plenty of serious, polite political discussion on social media, but the people who are actually interested in a discussion know better than to try to respond directly to a tweet by Trump or Clinton. Responding to one of those tweets is a waste of time, shouting into the wind. Try following some journalists, authors etc. rather than searching by topic.

gallerdude 8y ago

It's the paradox of the infinite horizon. Dictators in the past have justified genocide under the idea that the pain in the short term can yield infinite rewards by being the foundation to a utopia.

amasad 8y ago

Neomaniac don't understand that everything new is necessary unstable and opaque. Older systems, cultures, technolgies survived for a reason. By obsessing over the new and dismissing the old we are throwing away knowledge and learnings.

50 8y ago

> For much of this year, I’ve been exploring the biases of digital media, trying to trace the pressures that the media exert on us as individuals and as a society. I’m far from done, but it’s clear to me that the biases exist and that at this point they have manifested themselves in unmistakable ways. Not only are we well beyond the beginning, but we can see where we’re heading — and where we’ll continue to head if we don’t consciously adjust our course. Reminds me of a few lines I read months ago from Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open The Head: "In contemporary life we do whatever we can to deny intuition of the invisible realms. We clog up our senses with smog, jam our minds with media overload. We drown ourselves in alcohol or medicate ourselves into rigidly artificial states with antidepressants. Then we take pride in our cynicism and detachment. Perhaps we are terrified to discover that our "rationality" is itself a kind of faith, an artifice, that beneath it lies the vast territory of the unknown." Further reading: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manvotional-thoreau-on-media-and-information-consumption/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manvotional-thoreau-...

semi-extrinsic 8y ago
There are two kinds of people: those afraid of their own death, and those who desperately avoid thinking about their own death
- drb91 8y ago
  Seems deeply cynical. Where is this coming from? Death is the only certain part of life. Who can seriously fear it? It's the part that immediately precedes death that scares me.... if I were to get Alzheimers I would rather put a bullet in my head.
  - semi-extrinsic 8y ago
    I agree there are things worse than death, such as Alzheimers. But still, and this is just my own belief, I think anyone who has given the matter some thought and introspection, is afraid of the end of their own existence. There may come a time indeed when death is better than remaining alive, but that doesn't imply one has stopped fearing death.

blackaspen 8y ago

Discourse around technology is interesting. I've been reading a lot of essays on technology, digital media, and the digital humanities over the past few weeks. The upsides of the future seem to get perpetuated a lot more than the downsides. In one of the papers that's at the forefront of my mind, the New London Group's "Multiliteracies for a Digital Age" essay, they call out the good -- more collaboration, more opportunities for a utopia, etc. While they do mention downsides, they kind of get drowned out. People want to be optimistic -- there's a bunch of core human ideals and one of them is that things will improve. As such, technological downsides and pitfalls either get called out and responded to by tin-foil-hat types, or just fall away until it's a bit too late (thinking randomly of Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" here...)

ilaksh 8y ago

I find this post to mainly explain a worldview in a very broad manner without getting into specifics. I doubt it can lead to a constructive discussion. People that also have a worldview with a negative view of the effects of technology on society will mainly just agree in mostly broad ways. People that have an opposing worldview will state their own beliefs, mostly in a broad way. But because this is not a specific issue but rather a worldview, there is almost no possibility of constructive discussion where someone really gains insight or changes their mind. Everyone's already made up their mind on this broad aspect of their worldview. That's just the nature of beliefs. Another aspect of this is that any perspective is largely about seeing farther and farther forward into the future. It is quite literally like looking into the distance. Since it is impossible to clearly see things that are far away, it is quite easy to have a disagreement about what's on the horizon or beyond in any particular direction. But the landscape is so complex that blanket statements about good or bad in any direction have little utility. In my opinion.

TimJYoung 8y ago

I think one of the big mistakes that we make is to assume that our current/future was destined to be what it is, and that an alternative, any alternative, did not take place because it was "less efficient", "not as good", etc. This completely ignores the effects of chance and fashion. The new series "Maniac" is a good example of this (forget the merits of the show, I'm just referring to the backdrop). It's set around the same time as today, but everyone is (still) using CRTs and older-style office equipment. Also, we so desperately want the "future" to be different from "now", that we often latch on to novelty with both hands, simply to distinguish "our generation" from the prior one. In reality, things change, but not as much as we'd like to think that they do. It's one of the things that freaks me out so much as I get older: everything is pretty much the same as what it was when I was a kid. Yes, things are different, but they're not that different.

EamonnMR 8y ago
I saw Maniac's setting as a conscious attempt to emulate the future as envisioned by Philip K Dick, but with modern twists. The idea that you'd get free services by allowing a person to sit next to you and make a sales pitch was especially poignant.
FooHentai 8y ago
Something I really love about the Fallout universe is that it poses a fundamental question: What if the transistor was never invented, what would that world look like in its future? It's not necessarily an anachronism if it's on a different timeline.

athenot 8y ago

> Is there an overarching bias to the advance of communication systems? Technology enthusiasts like Kelly would argue that there is — a bias toward greater freedom, democracy, and social harmony Technology itself has its advantages, but scrutiny is needed for how it is put to use by large corporations with lots of power. A healthy discussion needs to happen around the role of platforms which are gaining influence into people's emotional lives. But is that a technology thing or a business/ethics thing? I used to love the communities on USENET; and many IRC channels still exhibit some of that vibe. Even web forums centered around special interests are great communication tools and (can) bring people together. But building centralized communication tools (1:1 tools or group/tribe tools) around advertisement and making those the primary mode of communication for people is something new for society and I'm not sure this is for the best. The large companies that run them answer to shareholders and have fiduciary obligations to them. Instead of "provide a communication tool and monetize with ads, hoping they don't degrade the experience too much", they are doing what we expect of any large business: "maximize shareholder value and hope the communication tools don't cross too many ethics boundaries". I work in technology and have greatly benefited from it. I also see positive and negative impacts around me. To me, the real question is whether technology is improving the lives of ALL people or just those like me who happen to have a vested interest in it.

TimJYoung 8y ago
Great post. My wife and I have conversations about this all of the time, especially the FB vs. good 'ole web forums discussion. I think the issue with centralized communication tools is that we haven't figured out the "shame" thing yet. Or, perhaps, it isn't even possible to scale up shaming. There's a lot of evidence that scaling up shaming simply results in its weaponization (the internet doesn't do nuance...). Watching Roseanne on Joe Rogan this week was simply heart-breaking. The speed with which her entire career and body of work was tossed in the garbage really makes me think that it isn't possible.
- invalidOrTaken 8y ago
  I think either the Internet will self-regulate by developing a "hey let's not lynch people" norm, or the brick-and-mortar crowd will slowly develop some backbone against Twitter mobs. I can't predict the future. But I'm a great fan of that quote: "If something can't go on this way forever...it will stop."

lubujackson 8y ago

I was struck reading about the Amish and their relationship to technology. We tend to think of the Amish as hopelessly backwards, but every year they convene and discuss new technologies and which ones should be allowed. As you can imagine, the process is highly selective and considers the impact both individually and for the entire community. Negative effects from modern advancements are so common and globally threatening that it is easy to see how the cultural obsession with "new" could be replaced with "stable" as we face more and more of the fallout from this mindset.

sampo 8y ago
At least the Amish use GMO crops, whereas many in the "global techno elite" are still afraid of modern plant breeding.
pjmorris 8y ago
I will always recommend the 'Amish Hackers' article by Kevin Kelly [0] which describes the sophisticated relationship the Amish have with technology. [0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/

Nasrudith 8y ago

Really I think the impact of technology with communication is twofold and contradictory - transparency and anonymity. It is highlighting all of the ugly truths we would rather ignore - including scarcity of critical thinking. Societal hypocrisies start to slowly fall apart - like expectations to be both social and "career friendly" or looking down on those we depend upon. Even the lies and manipulation are oddly transparent - there is nothing stopping anyone but time from making several accounts to promote absolute nonsense. As opposed to traditional sources which make claims to authenticity and can betray the trust. Lack of trust is a growing trend related to manipulators, not wanting to understand the uncomfortable and genuine untrustworthiness. Like always we need to adapt to changes as a society for good or ill.

deleted 8y ago
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Animats 8y ago

From about 1900 to 1970, aviation was like that. Aircraft got bigger and went faster and flew higher. Everyone would have a flying car. In the late 1960s, the Boeing 747 and the Boeing 737 flew. The Concorde was flying. The X-15 had flown. There were many experimental transonic aircraft. Men had landed on the moon, even. Even the flying car looked close. There were lots of VTOL aircraft in the 1950s and 1960s. Small helicopters like the UH-1 were working well for the military. Then, suddenly, it was over. The last 50 years of aviation have produced fewer innovations than any single decade in the previous 50 years. Versions of the B-737 and B-747 are still in production. The Concorde was retired and not replaced. As Scott Crossman, the test pilot, once said, everything that ever flew substantially faster than Mach 3 is now in a museum. No one has been beyond low earth orbit since the early 1970s. If you want to see the VTOLs of the 1950s and 1960s, they're in the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos. Aviation hit the limits of what you can do by burning fuel. In the early 1970s, the aerospace industry had huge layoffs as the space program wound down and not much was happening in aviation. Computing may be there. Clock rates for mainstream CPUs have been in the 3-4 GHZ range for a decade now. That never happened before. We've hit fundamental limits. Atoms are too big. Line widths are measured in atom counts now. Electrons are too big. The number of electrons in a flash memory cell is in two digits. Photons are too big. Optical lithography has had to go to soft X-rays ("extreme ultraviolet") to get better resolution, using an insanely complicated technology that just barely works. Fabs cost way too much and there are fewer leading-edge ones. Moore's Law is over. As with aircraft, computing may shift to doing slightly better within the limitations of the physics we've got. The happy time of better hardware every year is over.

cakeface 8y ago
I wonder if we were at a plateau with aviation that we are now ascending out of. Look at drones and multi-copters and advancements from SpaceX for example. I agree with the main argument that I think you were making. We cannot assume that the growth we have been seeing continues indefinitely.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Also some concepts of electric jets come to mind.

yellowstuff 8y ago

This bit from the article: > Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just a temporary bug in the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent engineers. (If you look at Mark Zuckerberg’s responses to Facebook’s problems over the years, you’ll find that they are all variations on this theme.) Seems unfair in light of this: > Ezra Klein: That is one of the ways Facebook is different, but I can imagine reading it both ways. On the one hand, your control of voting shares makes you more insulated from short-term pressures of the market. On the other hand, you have a lot more personal power. There’s no quadrennial election for CEO of Facebook. And that’s a normal way that democratic governments ensure accountability. Do you think that governance structure makes you, in some cases, less accountable? > Mark Zuckerberg: I certainly think that’s a fair question. My goal here is to create a governance structure around the content and the community that reflects more what people in the community want than what short-term-oriented shareholders might want. And if we do that well, then I think that could really break ground on governance for an internet community. But if we don’t do it well, then I think we’ll fail to handle a lot of the issues that are coming up. > Here are a few of the principles. One is transparency. Right now, I don’t think we are transparent enough around the prevalence of different issues on the platform. We haven’t done a good job of publishing and being transparent about the prevalence of those kinds of issues, and the work that we’re doing and the trends of how we’re driving those things down over time. > A second is some sort of independent appeal process. Right now, if you post something on Facebook and someone reports it and our community operations and review team looks at it and decides that it needs to get taken down, there’s not really a way to appeal that. I think in any kind of good-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal. And I think we can build that internally as a first step. > But over the long term, what I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebo... You might question whether Zuckerberg's suggestions are sincere or practical, but they certainly don't amount to dismissing the scope of the problem.

erikpukinskis 8y ago

Should I bother to read this article? > utopians who believe that computer technology is an unstoppable force for good and that anyone who resists or even looks critically at the expanding hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool This is such an absurdly straw-many straw man. Is the rest of the article just a takedown of this nonsense position? Or is there a good faith discussion of techno-optimism?

mikestew 8y ago
Should I bother to read this article? I found it to be a quick read, which is good because I also found it to be very shallow.
goatlover 8y ago
> This is such an absurdly straw-many straw man. Never heard or Ray Kurzweil before? The article mentions a couple other techno-utopians.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Ray Kurzweil says anyone who looks critically at the expanding hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool?
  - stan_rogers 8y ago
    That's a pretty good summary, yes.

zackmorris 8y ago

I've been around long enough that I'm realizing we're closer to the end than the beginning. The late 90s were so bright we had to wear shades - then the whole thing came crashing down and set progress back about a decade in the 2000s. Innovation happened by forcing us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, not by cultivating our potential. Now here we are again, having caught up to where we were in 1999: VR and AI are taking off (it was 3D gaming and online support then), billions of dollars of VC money are being thrown at mundane ideas that a couple teenagers could pull off in their parents' basement (if they weren't stuck working 40 hours a week at call centers), and vacuous claims are made daily by people who won the internet lottery. This is not the future we're looking for. Or is, when you think about it. The wool has been pulled over our eyes. The rat race has become a marathon, the fruits of our labors are no longer ours to utilize. AI (especially) will be used to maximize profits rather than free us from labor. And unfortunately I'm not seeing acknowledgements of how badly we've flown off the rails, especially at the highest levels of the tech industry. My predictions: another crash around 2020, populist policies that do the opposite of what's needed (austerity, tax cuts for the wealthy, suppressing the Other, etc etc), little done to reduce consumption or help the environment as a percentage of GDP or even at a personal level, and a revolutionary reaction to all this in the form of protests and cooperatives that have too little capital to mount a meaningful resistance. Playing out over 1 or 2 more lost decades until the endgame in 2040 when corporations finish merging with AI and human beings have lost all autonomy. Disclaimer: I may have been watching too much Mr. Robot and Handmaid's Tale..

dstroot 8y ago
> policies that do the opposite of what’s needed... The jury is definitely out if democracy can actually “do what’s right” with regard to social issues, the environment, income inequality, etc. In fact it is mainly showing the opposite - that those with $ can buy elections using “weaponized” mis-information directly targeted at emotional humans using Facebook and then do whatever they want. I am rooting for a real Mr. Robot to take down Facebook et al.
- zackmorris 8y ago
  I'm concerned about democracy issues as well (tyranny of the majority, tragedy of the commons, etc) but can't endorse targeting an ever-present Evil Corp, whoever that might be in these times. Plus I don't think it would work in the long run. I've been having a hard time lately coming to terms with the fact that there is no quick fix. There's probably not much that even Mark Zuckerberg could do at this point to take Facebook in a more equitable direction. It might require a leap of insight even greater than starting it in the first place. All of the important positive changes in history happened through organizing. It's really up to the employees of Facebook to do their part every day to make things better. If the system doesn't allow that, then they need to work to change the system. On a personal level, I'm going to vote and donate to positive causes. But I'm concerned that won't be enough to counter the decline in education and civics that I've witnessed over my lifetime. There are fundamentals that we could work on though. For example, the US was founded on public education. I'd ask anyone reading this to ask themselves why they might favor private education over public, and how that basic idea might lead to college that is more expensive, or dogma in our political discourse. Some ideals are timeless and needed now more than ever.

rmason 8y ago

I'm really getting tired of people continually bashing Kevin Kelly. Kelly's book, New rules for the new economy, was what gave me the final push to quit my job and become a software entrepreneur. But he got few things wrong in that book and the criticism was so harsh he stopped writing books for a few years. Kelly is a cheerleader. But he ties disparate threads together and gives you a mental model where he sees the future going. He's been far more right than wrong. But some people I guess are natural born pessimists. George Gilder has a similar approach. Kelly wrote in Wired in a famous essay after the 2000 crash that the Internet was at the beginning of a 200 year boom and I believe that to be true.

patientplatypus 8y ago

So... If you haven't already read this: https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero. So - the science tells us that plastic is killing us. The news stories say it's in our water supply and food. The keyboard you are typing on is probably made of plastic (mine is). And that's only one of the many things that is currently set to wipe out the human species due entirely to our own stupidity (climate change being another one, but AI/automation and it's affects on capitalism could be another). In my own humble opinion, the human race was better off when were not so smart, although we may not have been so comfortable. If you have children that are under the age of 10 they'll probably be old enough to fight in the wars that are coming as a result of food shortages and mass migration that will probably happen in the future. Think about that a minute. In all likelihood our children are going to fight and die because we are too short sighted to stop buying so much and throwing so much away. Humans are a disgusting species.

solatic 8y ago

I really don't get this piece. Improving machine connectivity and improving human communication are interrelated but mostly exclusive concepts. Of course there are major issues with the "improvements" to human communication (Facebook) notwithstanding actual improvements like Wikipedia. But that has little to do improvements made to machine connectivity. The power of APIs to automate away the tedium of actually applying human-decided policy is barely realized. Too many services do not expose APIs; too much necessary tooling (monetization, security, documentation, publication, monitoring) is either proprietary, non-standard, poorly publicized, or too complex to easily apply. Too few regulators and legislators appreciate the potential to kickstart adoption by mandating adoption and standards publication in government services. Too few citizens are adequately educated in ways to take advantage of the relatively few APIs which are available. The hardware race may be on its last legs, but claiming that we've exhausted what is possible with APIs is flat-out laughable and ridiculous.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

> In his books Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), the Canadian historian Harold Innis argued that all communication systems incorporate biases, which shape how people communicate and hence how they think it seems that there were many thinkers which have been ignored at this time. I'm currently reading Jaques Ellul who made very similar conclusions in 1954 in his (IMHO) monumental: "The Technological Society".

ciconia 8y ago

There's this belief, very common on HN, in technology as the solution to any and all problems facing humanity. In a way, technology has become a religion - "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Technology was in many ways the force that shaped the last century - it changed warfare, transport, communications, agriculture, medicine. Technology promised us a future of unlimited growth, with ourselves as masters of the universe and of our destiny. But by submitting ourselves to the cult of technology, we've removed ourselves from the world, and thus lost our connection to the world, with its myriad living creatures and endless mysteries. In building ourselves castles of concrete and steel and experiencing our consciousness through 5" screens, we have become isolated and desensitized. It is deeply ironic that the age of ubiquitous communication is also the age of alienation. And it is deeply distressing that so much time and effort goes into developing and manufacturing space rockets, mobile phones, new cars, while so little is being done, it seems, about ensuring our future on this planet. I have become convinced that for us to have a better future we actually need to give ourselves a break from technology, in absolutely all facets of life: the food we eat, our personal health, the way we participate in our community and in political life, and our place in relation to this earth that is our home.

Stryder 8y ago

The effects we've observed so far of the wide-spread social media with regards to our social and political systems seems akin to a 5-yr old walking in on his parents having sex; old enough to be traumatized, but not old enough to successfully deal with it. Jury's still out on the long-term consequences of this exposure. Suffice to say, it doesn't look particularly healthy.