4 ms·

> I believe the internet really upended the central premise. Have you looked at the trending videos on YouTube when you visit in incognito?

by ori_b 8y ago

rgoulter 8y ago
My understanding is that GP is saying F451's dystopia is "everyone sharing the same awful reality". GP's concern about the internet is a complete lack of shared reality between people. EDIT: Although, yeah, of course "pleasure seeking & without depth" seems a good description of unhealthy social media, YouTube, etc.
- salawat 8y ago
  I took it a bit differently actually. No one wants to put in the work to knit together a shared reality anymore. Why put in the effort when the incentives reward blatant trek and lies as much as it does telling the truth. At one point in time, we put a much greater emphasis on integrity and telling the truth. In the last century, it seems like that precedent after precedent for not telling the truth, or spinning it into a form where it's just short of a lie. Tobacco, finance, pharma, big chem, big tech, our legal system, and even our government bakes in lying by omission into the basic gameplay loop. Where's the incentive to be an honest person when the only ones who seem to be getting anywhere are the one's who lie the most? I think the Internet has just made the problem so much more visible due to the ease of spreading information. At the end of the day though, to the gatekeeper of the status of "truth" goes the spoils of the war for the minds of the people.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    > At one point in time, we put a much greater emphasis on integrity and telling the truth When was this? The Victorian era, with its literal snake oil, yellow journalism, adulterated food (e.g. chalk in bread), etc? The era when "all men were created equal", despite there being slavery? When was this era of great integrity?
    - HiloHorse 8y ago
      The FCC fairness doctrine It used to be that the news media was required to be honest, equitable, and balanced. This doctrine has been repealed.
      - CamperBob2 8y ago
        No, in addition to being blatantly unconstitutional, the Fairness Doctrine wasn't even a valid solution to the problem. These days we have an entire news network dedicated to being "fair and balanced," don't we? How's that working out for us? There are more than two sides to every worthwhile argument, and it's not the government's place to decide which voices require equal time to rebut. Furthermore, "Congress shall make no law" means just that, until it's repealed or further amended.
    - salawat 8y ago
      Fine. Let's go ahead and assume that we have as much if not more integrity now than ever before. Is the point we're at peak virtue? Peak integrity? I don't think so. We're connected better than we've ever been before informationally, yet we find now that somehow, magically, every institution that's been put in place to get us where we are is insufficient. Schools don't provide children with a quality education (cheaply enough). The police are too prone to abuse (or not effective enpugh). Our legal system is completely stratified in it's capability to process cases (the poor take plea deals when they can't afford to fight, but corporations never seem to be able to be pinned down as having done anything wrong). Government officials can be felons, who can't even vote (Yet it seems like the number of felonies that can be committed increases every year). Our infrastructure falls apart and starts major fires under private management (Yet public management is out of the question because it is unfair competition). Everything we've got now got us where we are, yet it never seems to be enough to even continue to tread water. Why? W/o what have we lost? What are we not doing? The world has changed. Understood. Yet we're clearly in a state where there is no unified sense of direction. Talking with people, if you can manage to get past small talk, renders an image of a country that can't trust itself. I can't accept that our present day is functional. Even if the integrity I imagine of the past wasn't there, that lack of integrity was appropriate for the time and managed to stay low key enough to maintain some semblance of equilibrium with the environment. Now, the differences in the observable outcomes of events in the world seem to be becoming more and more polarized. The low hanging fruit has been picked, and all that's left is issues that seemingly can only be resolved by the application of overwhelming, global scoped decree. We're backed into a starting point from which change must happen that has been 200 years in the making, that has apparently blossomed into a historo-legal structure that takes longer than a human lifespan to parse. So we're stuck at an impasse. Either every decision up to now was right, and every axiom (be it statute, or legal precedent) built into our government is right, in which case every move we want to make from here is moot. We're already perfect. Or... Bad decisions were made, history stands as an example of what not to repeat, and we should be free to remold things such that an effective governance is reachieved and a more stable foundation from which we all can build our lives, and collective society into something as great to us as where we are now is to our forebearers. So what is it? Are we peak human, or just a bunch of people trying to make a world worth living in? I honestly can't tell anymore, but I can't accept we've hit the zenith. A local one maybe, but not an absolute by far.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I'm hopeful that this is a temporary effect of a growing awareness accompanied by a philosophical shift in society. For a long while now the idea that there is one true objective reality with one valid interpretation has been our model, but we are becoming aware that this is probably not the case. Even physics seems to contest the concept, where GR says such things as the order of occurrence of two events is dependent on their frame of reference, and that's without invoking the weirdness of quantum mechanics. As is often the case when a new idea emerges, it is pushed to extremes to test its limits. Ideally, the useful limit of the new model is eventually found and a reintegration with the old model occurs producing a more sound and stable one. Unfortunately such shifts are always painful, and not always successful.
- pram 8y ago
  Exactly. A feature people seem to miss about 451 is the government is an authoritarian regime, and the media is used to pacify controversial thought. In that sense it's not much different from how media is used in 1984, with trash culture for proles and overt propaganda. 451 is just more subtle about the methods of oppression.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

> I believe the internet really upended the central premise. Have you looked at the trending videos on YouTube when you visit in incognito?

by ori_b 8y ago

> I believe the internet really upended the central premise. Have you looked at the trending videos on YouTube when you visit in incognito?

rgoulter 8y ago

My understanding is that GP is saying F451's dystopia is "everyone sharing the same awful reality". GP's concern about the internet is a complete lack of shared reality between people. EDIT: Although, yeah, of course "pleasure seeking & without depth" seems a good description of unhealthy social media, YouTube, etc.

salawat 8y ago
I took it a bit differently actually. No one wants to put in the work to knit together a shared reality anymore. Why put in the effort when the incentives reward blatant trek and lies as much as it does telling the truth. At one point in time, we put a much greater emphasis on integrity and telling the truth. In the last century, it seems like that precedent after precedent for not telling the truth, or spinning it into a form where it's just short of a lie. Tobacco, finance, pharma, big chem, big tech, our legal system, and even our government bakes in lying by omission into the basic gameplay loop. Where's the incentive to be an honest person when the only ones who seem to be getting anywhere are the one's who lie the most? I think the Internet has just made the problem so much more visible due to the ease of spreading information. At the end of the day though, to the gatekeeper of the status of "truth" goes the spoils of the war for the minds of the people.
- icebraining 8y ago
  > At one point in time, we put a much greater emphasis on integrity and telling the truth When was this? The Victorian era, with its literal snake oil, yellow journalism, adulterated food (e.g. chalk in bread), etc? The era when "all men were created equal", despite there being slavery? When was this era of great integrity?
  - HiloHorse 8y ago
    The FCC fairness doctrine It used to be that the news media was required to be honest, equitable, and balanced. This doctrine has been repealed.
    - CamperBob2 8y ago
      No, in addition to being blatantly unconstitutional, the Fairness Doctrine wasn't even a valid solution to the problem. These days we have an entire news network dedicated to being "fair and balanced," don't we? How's that working out for us? There are more than two sides to every worthwhile argument, and it's not the government's place to decide which voices require equal time to rebut. Furthermore, "Congress shall make no law" means just that, until it's repealed or further amended.
  - salawat 8y ago
    Fine. Let's go ahead and assume that we have as much if not more integrity now than ever before. Is the point we're at peak virtue? Peak integrity? I don't think so. We're connected better than we've ever been before informationally, yet we find now that somehow, magically, every institution that's been put in place to get us where we are is insufficient. Schools don't provide children with a quality education (cheaply enough). The police are too prone to abuse (or not effective enpugh). Our legal system is completely stratified in it's capability to process cases (the poor take plea deals when they can't afford to fight, but corporations never seem to be able to be pinned down as having done anything wrong). Government officials can be felons, who can't even vote (Yet it seems like the number of felonies that can be committed increases every year). Our infrastructure falls apart and starts major fires under private management (Yet public management is out of the question because it is unfair competition). Everything we've got now got us where we are, yet it never seems to be enough to even continue to tread water. Why? W/o what have we lost? What are we not doing? The world has changed. Understood. Yet we're clearly in a state where there is no unified sense of direction. Talking with people, if you can manage to get past small talk, renders an image of a country that can't trust itself. I can't accept that our present day is functional. Even if the integrity I imagine of the past wasn't there, that lack of integrity was appropriate for the time and managed to stay low key enough to maintain some semblance of equilibrium with the environment. Now, the differences in the observable outcomes of events in the world seem to be becoming more and more polarized. The low hanging fruit has been picked, and all that's left is issues that seemingly can only be resolved by the application of overwhelming, global scoped decree. We're backed into a starting point from which change must happen that has been 200 years in the making, that has apparently blossomed into a historo-legal structure that takes longer than a human lifespan to parse. So we're stuck at an impasse. Either every decision up to now was right, and every axiom (be it statute, or legal precedent) built into our government is right, in which case every move we want to make from here is moot. We're already perfect. Or... Bad decisions were made, history stands as an example of what not to repeat, and we should be free to remold things such that an effective governance is reachieved and a more stable foundation from which we all can build our lives, and collective society into something as great to us as where we are now is to our forebearers. So what is it? Are we peak human, or just a bunch of people trying to make a world worth living in? I honestly can't tell anymore, but I can't accept we've hit the zenith. A local one maybe, but not an absolute by far.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I'm hopeful that this is a temporary effect of a growing awareness accompanied by a philosophical shift in society. For a long while now the idea that there is one true objective reality with one valid interpretation has been our model, but we are becoming aware that this is probably not the case. Even physics seems to contest the concept, where GR says such things as the order of occurrence of two events is dependent on their frame of reference, and that's without invoking the weirdness of quantum mechanics. As is often the case when a new idea emerges, it is pushed to extremes to test its limits. Ideally, the useful limit of the new model is eventually found and a reintegration with the old model occurs producing a more sound and stable one. Unfortunately such shifts are always painful, and not always successful.
pram 8y ago
Exactly. A feature people seem to miss about 451 is the government is an authoritarian regime, and the media is used to pacify controversial thought. In that sense it's not much different from how media is used in 1984, with trash culture for proles and overt propaganda. 451 is just more subtle about the methods of oppression.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]