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> "What is corruption? On the Internet, it's botnets and DDoS attacks." While I don't disagree these are problems, it seems like the real corruption is misinfo

by cbanek 7y ago

> "What is corruption? On the Internet, it's botnets and DDoS attacks." While I don't disagree these are problems, it seems like the real corruption is misinformation. To follow the flow of the article, the cheaper and faster information flows, the more likely it is to be wrong. Think of how major news networks having "breaking news" that ends up being flawed or wrong. (I'm struggling to find it, but someone watched "breaking news" a couple of weeks after it broke, and tried to figure out how accurate news reporting was. Huge eye-opener for me). It used to be a small number of people knew how to make web pages and host them. Now anyone can comment on any number of social media platforms with maybe even more than one account. To quote Dogbert: "Do you know how hard it was to spread rumors before the internet?" And it's the people that are spreading the information, although some botnets seed it. People are very diverse, and are a great transmission mechanism, since they change it in any number of ways. Also, I remember DDoS attacks and botnets were around and thriving long before most people knew what they were. Anyone remember WinNuke? This isn't some magical new problem, it's just that more people are affected, and therefore more people have heard of it. I think the real problem with the internet isn't that it's too big, or has too many people, but now it basically mirrors the real world. Many people and companies are on the internet, trying to do what they were in the real world on the internet. That invites criminals and troublemakers to also do what they do on the internet. The real problem is human nature, and that system is definitely large enough to be corrupted. And it has been, for a long time.

JulianMorrison 7y ago
The point being made is that it's some mathematical thing, more fundamental than human nature, things that aren't human mediated behave this way too. Think of the transmission of a disease as the percentage of the population immune to it decreases. Island infections isolated by being unable to reach new susceptible victims fizzle out. But above a certain susceptible percentage, the infection can leap from group to group along the edges where they touch, and it becomes a pandemic. It's no just that the internet mirrors the real world, although it does. It's that it breaks down isolation barriers in the real world which used to passively defend against the spread of all sorts of unrelated corruption, everything from Nigerian prince scams to bitcoin wallet stealing to nation state disinformation.
- spinningslate 7y ago
  >It's that it breaks down isolation barriers in the real world which used to passively defend against the spread of all sorts of unrelated corruption You've just put into words the loosely formed thought that's been trying to escape my brain. Nature has a mechanism for limiting the positive feedback effect of new corruption forces: geographic isolation. It's as fundamental to diversity as evolution. Think e.g. the species that survive on the Galapagos islands that would otherwise have been wiped out. The internet has no circuit breaker; no way to attenuate positive feedback cycles amplifying a signal (whatever that signal might be). I'm no economist, but it seems to me that free market economics has the same weakness: unfettered amplification without counterbalancing isolation removes diversity. And leads to the small number of dominant monopolies in given industry sectors. FANMAG[0] in the tech sector being just the latest example. That's probably also why we shouldn't be hopeful about the author's proposal as it's likely to end in one of two results: 1. A failure 2. A new monopoly The idea of a "network of networks" is intuitively appealing at first sight, but it's difficult to see how that serves society well if one company runs them all. Another reason, perhaps, to treat the underlying network as a utility. [0] Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Google.
marcosdumay 7y ago
Reading or writing about things in depth (and thus slowly) used to be a virtue. Society used to look down on unsubstantiated gossip, and up on the people that read long texts. That changed when the stock markets became fast, by the 70's and 80's. Quick access to gossip started to mean money, and gossip reading or writing became virtuous. I have no idea what to fix, but any solution probably involves restoring that one value to its previous state.

by cbanek 7y ago

JulianMorrison 7y ago

The point being made is that it's some mathematical thing, more fundamental than human nature, things that aren't human mediated behave this way too. Think of the transmission of a disease as the percentage of the population immune to it decreases. Island infections isolated by being unable to reach new susceptible victims fizzle out. But above a certain susceptible percentage, the infection can leap from group to group along the edges where they touch, and it becomes a pandemic. It's no just that the internet mirrors the real world, although it does. It's that it breaks down isolation barriers in the real world which used to passively defend against the spread of all sorts of unrelated corruption, everything from Nigerian prince scams to bitcoin wallet stealing to nation state disinformation.

spinningslate 7y ago
>It's that it breaks down isolation barriers in the real world which used to passively defend against the spread of all sorts of unrelated corruption You've just put into words the loosely formed thought that's been trying to escape my brain. Nature has a mechanism for limiting the positive feedback effect of new corruption forces: geographic isolation. It's as fundamental to diversity as evolution. Think e.g. the species that survive on the Galapagos islands that would otherwise have been wiped out. The internet has no circuit breaker; no way to attenuate positive feedback cycles amplifying a signal (whatever that signal might be). I'm no economist, but it seems to me that free market economics has the same weakness: unfettered amplification without counterbalancing isolation removes diversity. And leads to the small number of dominant monopolies in given industry sectors. FANMAG[0] in the tech sector being just the latest example. That's probably also why we shouldn't be hopeful about the author's proposal as it's likely to end in one of two results: 1. A failure 2. A new monopoly The idea of a "network of networks" is intuitively appealing at first sight, but it's difficult to see how that serves society well if one company runs them all. Another reason, perhaps, to treat the underlying network as a utility. [0] Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Google.

marcosdumay 7y ago

Reading or writing about things in depth (and thus slowly) used to be a virtue. Society used to look down on unsubstantiated gossip, and up on the people that read long texts. That changed when the stock markets became fast, by the 70's and 80's. Quick access to gossip started to mean money, and gossip reading or writing became virtuous. I have no idea what to fix, but any solution probably involves restoring that one value to its previous state.