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This article compares the internet with the invention of the printing press and lays out the pros and cons before coming down solidly on the con side. However,

This article compares the internet with the invention of the printing press and lays out the pros and cons before coming down solidly on the con side. However, we generally agree that the printing press was very good for society in the long run and the author fails to address the question as to why it's different this time around.

ineedasername 7y ago
The longer version is the author noting that the printing press, with publishers, ultimately had curators that hand picked which content to publish. Social media tends to the opposite extreme. That is the context of the author's "con" position, and why it is different this time around. Of course, the techno-utopian view would probably hold that some new version of curation can/will arise to address the issue, so that's one possible counter argument to the author's pessimism. In fact we seem to be in the early stages with platforms trying (albeit very, very, very imperfectly) to filter out false, misleading, or harmful content.
- Kalium 7y ago
  It's true, would-be intermediaries often mourn the loss of their status. They rarely consider that they might not win it back in the future they wish for. A cynical view would be that this author wants a pulpit from which to preach The Truth unchallenged, and resents the diversity of viewpoints that come from the internet.
  - airstrike 7y ago
    > diversity of viewpoints that come from the internet I subscribe the idea that the internet produces diverse echo chambers, but not necessarily a plurality of opinions engaged in healthy debate. Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think the biggest issue with today's media stems from the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine with no adequate replacement (media-ownership rules, increased public broadcasting, etc.)
    - Kalium 7y ago
      I subscrbe to the idea that the Fairness Doctrine era media ecosystem produced a diversity of voices, not necessarily opinions engaged in healthy debate. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not sure it is the business of government to be deciding what is or isn't healthy debate or trying to encourage it. It's far too easy to decide that healthy is things that agree with you, and unhealthy is everything else. This is routine in a number of places in the world that I would rather not live in. This is quite aside from the practical questions of how a person might square the constitutional questions around the Fairness Doctrine with the internet. The considerations that allowed it to apply to radio and TV don't work in an internet context. Call me an idealist, but I don't see why we need to structure things around deciding for the public what speech they are and aren't allowed to be exposed to. We're mostly talking about adults generally capable of making their own decisions, aren't we?
      - airstrike 7y ago
        > Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not sure it is the business of government to be deciding what is or isn't healthy debate or trying to encourage it. I think it's the business of government to encourage debate, as that's really the same as encouraging education. The government wasn't providing agendas on what ought to be discussed when the Fairness Doctrine was in place, just forcing people to debate a little more
        Kalium 7y ago
        The core of the Fairness Doctrine was that the FCC's opinions of what "honest, equitable, and balanced" meant were legally binding. Whether or not that could ever be anything other than forcing people to debate a little more depends, in my opinion, a great deal on a person's faith in the immunity to corrupting influence of executive bodies with political oversight.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    I'm less cynical interpreting the author's motives. I think the author was just in a "get of my lawn" mode of thinking, not without some cause though unless/until the internet forms the immune systems needed to fend off the worse excesses of extremism and propaganda.
- asdf21 7y ago
  Oh no, no curators! Whatever will we do..?!
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    Well, really, we do have curators of sorts - we call them moderators. We don’t always agree with their curation, either.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    > What ever will we do?" What you do is post snarky comments that don't advance the conversation and instead promotes unproductive conflict. Clearly you don't think lack of curation or moderators or whatever is a problem. But it's easy to state an opinion without justifying it. Harder to make a contribution that shares a different viewpoint in a way that improves the overall quality of dialog.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  What we need is curators to hand-pick for us what content to read. Much of social media is extremely bad at this, their "feeds" are one-size-fits-all so automated engagement-promoting algorithms can't do any better than just target the lowest-common-denominator. Even YouTube has had this problem for a long time, although it's supposed to be better now.
  - basch 7y ago
    exactly. You have public education, the press, and friends. This is what you are shaped by. Now we have a new global consciousness that can also shape you, and exists somewhat within those old borders, but also redefines them. People should take their duty as members of voting society more seriously, incentivising us to dig deeper than our surface tribes starts with a simple "read this not that" type link blog. Horse before the cart means you need a horse before you can pull a cart. We absolutely need a "you should read this, not because youll enjoy it, but because its good for you and us." Drudge report meets http://aldaily.com http://aldaily.com and http://redef.com http://redef.com
    - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
      This is one of the big ideas in Neal Stephenson's recent book, "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", which is a kind of loose sequel to "Reamde". He really foresees the future, to my eyes, across all his works. In his world they call our internet "the miasma", and it's full of people trying to push opinion in different ways with obvious bullshit. Yet lots of people believe it, just like today! Rich people in the west hire 'editors' in 3rd world countries (or in the us if you are really rich) to filter the internet for them. Not to show them a false view or hide them from reality (at least for the main characters), but to prevent them from coming across say pictures of dead babies or seeing too much lying and agitprop. I love these very very long books.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  It seems to me a bit narrow-minded to say that techno-utopianism stands or falls based on the effect of social media. There might be a bit more to the effects (for better or worse) of technology than that.
- Noos 7y ago
  Curation is a weasel word for control, honestly. II think we are seeing a rush limbaugh effect; people are shocked that AM radio allowed limbaugh and hannity to thrive and blame the platform; same with social media and Trump. I didn't see any "social media is bad" in the obama era, despite it flourishing then too-i noticed a lot of this "curation" is being driven by the bogeyman of the alt-right, as if openness allows them to flourish.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    It's not a weasel word. We except curation in online venues already. HN is an excellent example, with two varieties of curation to help keep posts & discussions on topic and flame wars at a minimum. (swap curation for moderators or whatever term you're comfortable with) There is a central mechanism where HN in the form of dang or whoever making decisions, and there is community-sourced curation in the form of upvotes, downvotes, and flags. None of this amounts to the sort of authoritarian or censorship you seem to imply.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
analognoise 7y ago
The internet was definitely a mistake.
- airstrike 7y ago
  OK, I'll bite. Why?
  - igor47 7y ago
    well... do you generally subscribe to consequentialism? potential story that gets told by future historians: we were doing pretty well as a civilization, harnessing powerful technologies, spreading western-style democracy and freedom around the world, and figuring out how to make a better, more fair and just world. then, we invented the internet. within a generation, we had become pettily obsessed with image and fake internet points. massive amounts of disinformation from powerful self-interested sources stifled debate on the important issues of the day. climate change went unchecked, even while far-right nationalists rose to prominence around the world by harnessing the worst forces of racism and bigotry which had been successfully repressed by the mainstream media that collapsed after the internet became widely adopted. not saying this is what i believe, but i definitely think this is a viable narrative and may become dominant, especially if things continue to go downhill from a fake-news, polarization, and "society-of-the-spectacle" perspective. the kids living in the rubble left over after right- and left-wingers go to war over some really convincing fake video might really wish the internet hadn't been invented. actually, imagining this kind of stuff is exactly what the original article is asking of us, the community building the technology. like, at least admit the possibility that it's not all daisies and sunshine and things might turn out -- less than optimal.
    - goatlover 7y ago
      > at least admit the possibility that it's not all daisies and sunshine and things might turn out -- less than optimal. I tend to be more optimistic about the future and technological progress on the whole, but if we are headed toward a great filter or massive reset, then modern technology might be judged as a negative development by the survivors. We really don't know what the long-term effect of civilization is yet. We're still in the experimental stage.
Analemma_ 7y ago
“in the long run” is kind of the key phrase, you’re using it to stuff a lot of moral complexity into the closet. The printing press may have been good for society in the long run, but in the short run it caused a century of sectarian warfare that killed tens of millions of people. If the Internet is analogous (and I’m not saying it definitely is, but I don’t think it can be clearly ruled out either), you don’t think people living now should have a say in whether they just get to be collateral damage on the road to a Utopian future? That was exactly the sort of thinking behind some of the ghastly failures of 20th-century authoritarianism.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Only a century? And some of the tropes Mr Trump appeals to are rooted in Sectarinisiam - don't forget the KKK started as anti Catholic.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >The printing press may have been good for society in the long run, but in the short run it caused a century of sectarian warfare that killed tens of millions of people. Compared to the peaceful millennia that preceded it?
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Of course the printing press was one of the forces that caused the reformation and all the wars that where caused by that.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
I wouldn’t call the printing press “good” in the long run at all (it’s just a hell of a claim to make about most technology). I think we have been forced to adapt around technology that refuses to cease existing once it’s discovered. That adaptation is often very violent. To be trite, your iphone is the perfect symbol of the violence of capitalism: you will never perceive the blood, sweat, and exploitation that leads to your device, ie commodity fetishism. Violence, cultural conflict, class conflict, and technological progress are all inextricably linked. Reducing technology to “good” or “bad” isn’t a conversation that goes anywhere.
loosetypes 7y ago
A bit similar to Ted Chiang (Arrival)’s The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth...
igor47 7y ago
> we generally agree that the printing press was very good for society But are we right about that? To answer questions like that we have to make up counterfactuals, which are hard and hand wavey. Maybe we would never get the Reformation, and so the Catholic Church would still be burning heretics (a different spin on the modern day burning man), but as the article points out, maybe we also wouldn't have the haulocast... I personally agree with historians like Yuval Noah harrari that it's been all downhill since agriculture
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
The article's point is that it really isn't different this time around, isn't it? Should Caxton overrule the translator and restore the original text? Or should he let the censorship stand, implying that, even if such insults were acceptable in ancient Athens or medieval Cairo, they were now beyond the pale? After many sentences of ornate hand-wringing, he tried to have it both ways. [...] As soon as he made his decision, he attempted to rationalize it. In the rest of the epilogue, he seemed to imply that he wasn’t a gatekeeper after all—that, although he was clearly a publisher, his printing press should be treated more like a platform. He was merely serving his customers, he suggested: they deserved to hear all perspectives and make up their own minds. Later, it goes on to describe how the printing press allowed Martin Luther to "shake Saint Peter's throne," but also to produce and distribute "the first work of modern anti-Semitism and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust." (I'm quoting the passages the article quotes, from historians Elizabeth Eisenstein and Paul Johnson respectively.) The article isn't suggesting that the Internet is all the dark side here -- it's suggesting that the "techno-utopians" seriously underestimated the potential for their inventions to be misused, and that that really isn't different from what happened with the printing press. The difference now is the scale, speed and reach. But as the note at the end of the article reads, the print headline for this piece was "The More Things Change."
Apocryphon 7y ago
Instead of arguing about whether or not we can put the genie back in the bottle, why don't we figure out how we can do better than we opened one last time, e.g. how can we avoid the mistakes that followed the adoption of the printing press?

ineedasername 7y ago

The longer version is the author noting that the printing press, with publishers, ultimately had curators that hand picked which content to publish. Social media tends to the opposite extreme. That is the context of the author's "con" position, and why it is different this time around. Of course, the techno-utopian view would probably hold that some new version of curation can/will arise to address the issue, so that's one possible counter argument to the author's pessimism. In fact we seem to be in the early stages with platforms trying (albeit very, very, very imperfectly) to filter out false, misleading, or harmful content.

Kalium 7y ago
It's true, would-be intermediaries often mourn the loss of their status. They rarely consider that they might not win it back in the future they wish for. A cynical view would be that this author wants a pulpit from which to preach The Truth unchallenged, and resents the diversity of viewpoints that come from the internet.
- airstrike 7y ago
  > diversity of viewpoints that come from the internet I subscribe the idea that the internet produces diverse echo chambers, but not necessarily a plurality of opinions engaged in healthy debate. Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think the biggest issue with today's media stems from the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine with no adequate replacement (media-ownership rules, increased public broadcasting, etc.)
  - Kalium 7y ago
    I subscrbe to the idea that the Fairness Doctrine era media ecosystem produced a diversity of voices, not necessarily opinions engaged in healthy debate. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not sure it is the business of government to be deciding what is or isn't healthy debate or trying to encourage it. It's far too easy to decide that healthy is things that agree with you, and unhealthy is everything else. This is routine in a number of places in the world that I would rather not live in. This is quite aside from the practical questions of how a person might square the constitutional questions around the Fairness Doctrine with the internet. The considerations that allowed it to apply to radio and TV don't work in an internet context. Call me an idealist, but I don't see why we need to structure things around deciding for the public what speech they are and aren't allowed to be exposed to. We're mostly talking about adults generally capable of making their own decisions, aren't we?
    - airstrike 7y ago
      > Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not sure it is the business of government to be deciding what is or isn't healthy debate or trying to encourage it. I think it's the business of government to encourage debate, as that's really the same as encouraging education. The government wasn't providing agendas on what ought to be discussed when the Fairness Doctrine was in place, just forcing people to debate a little more
      - Kalium 7y ago
        The core of the Fairness Doctrine was that the FCC's opinions of what "honest, equitable, and balanced" meant were legally binding. Whether or not that could ever be anything other than forcing people to debate a little more depends, in my opinion, a great deal on a person's faith in the immunity to corrupting influence of executive bodies with political oversight.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  I'm less cynical interpreting the author's motives. I think the author was just in a "get of my lawn" mode of thinking, not without some cause though unless/until the internet forms the immune systems needed to fend off the worse excesses of extremism and propaganda.
asdf21 7y ago
Oh no, no curators! Whatever will we do..?!
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  Well, really, we do have curators of sorts - we call them moderators. We don’t always agree with their curation, either.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  > What ever will we do?" What you do is post snarky comments that don't advance the conversation and instead promotes unproductive conflict. Clearly you don't think lack of curation or moderators or whatever is a problem. But it's easy to state an opinion without justifying it. Harder to make a contribution that shares a different viewpoint in a way that improves the overall quality of dialog.
zozbot234 7y ago
What we need is curators to hand-pick for us what content to read. Much of social media is extremely bad at this, their "feeds" are one-size-fits-all so automated engagement-promoting algorithms can't do any better than just target the lowest-common-denominator. Even YouTube has had this problem for a long time, although it's supposed to be better now.
- basch 7y ago
  exactly. You have public education, the press, and friends. This is what you are shaped by. Now we have a new global consciousness that can also shape you, and exists somewhat within those old borders, but also redefines them. People should take their duty as members of voting society more seriously, incentivising us to dig deeper than our surface tribes starts with a simple "read this not that" type link blog. Horse before the cart means you need a horse before you can pull a cart. We absolutely need a "you should read this, not because youll enjoy it, but because its good for you and us." Drudge report meets http://aldaily.com http://aldaily.com and http://redef.com http://redef.com
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    This is one of the big ideas in Neal Stephenson's recent book, "Fall, or Dodge in Hell", which is a kind of loose sequel to "Reamde". He really foresees the future, to my eyes, across all his works. In his world they call our internet "the miasma", and it's full of people trying to push opinion in different ways with obvious bullshit. Yet lots of people believe it, just like today! Rich people in the west hire 'editors' in 3rd world countries (or in the us if you are really rich) to filter the internet for them. Not to show them a false view or hide them from reality (at least for the main characters), but to prevent them from coming across say pictures of dead babies or seeing too much lying and agitprop. I love these very very long books.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
It seems to me a bit narrow-minded to say that techno-utopianism stands or falls based on the effect of social media. There might be a bit more to the effects (for better or worse) of technology than that.
Noos 7y ago
Curation is a weasel word for control, honestly. II think we are seeing a rush limbaugh effect; people are shocked that AM radio allowed limbaugh and hannity to thrive and blame the platform; same with social media and Trump. I didn't see any "social media is bad" in the obama era, despite it flourishing then too-i noticed a lot of this "curation" is being driven by the bogeyman of the alt-right, as if openness allows them to flourish.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  It's not a weasel word. We except curation in online venues already. HN is an excellent example, with two varieties of curation to help keep posts & discussions on topic and flame wars at a minimum. (swap curation for moderators or whatever term you're comfortable with) There is a central mechanism where HN in the form of dang or whoever making decisions, and there is community-sourced curation in the form of upvotes, downvotes, and flags. None of this amounts to the sort of authoritarian or censorship you seem to imply.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

analognoise 7y ago

The internet was definitely a mistake.

airstrike 7y ago
OK, I'll bite. Why?
- igor47 7y ago
  well... do you generally subscribe to consequentialism? potential story that gets told by future historians: we were doing pretty well as a civilization, harnessing powerful technologies, spreading western-style democracy and freedom around the world, and figuring out how to make a better, more fair and just world. then, we invented the internet. within a generation, we had become pettily obsessed with image and fake internet points. massive amounts of disinformation from powerful self-interested sources stifled debate on the important issues of the day. climate change went unchecked, even while far-right nationalists rose to prominence around the world by harnessing the worst forces of racism and bigotry which had been successfully repressed by the mainstream media that collapsed after the internet became widely adopted. not saying this is what i believe, but i definitely think this is a viable narrative and may become dominant, especially if things continue to go downhill from a fake-news, polarization, and "society-of-the-spectacle" perspective. the kids living in the rubble left over after right- and left-wingers go to war over some really convincing fake video might really wish the internet hadn't been invented. actually, imagining this kind of stuff is exactly what the original article is asking of us, the community building the technology. like, at least admit the possibility that it's not all daisies and sunshine and things might turn out -- less than optimal.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    > at least admit the possibility that it's not all daisies and sunshine and things might turn out -- less than optimal. I tend to be more optimistic about the future and technological progress on the whole, but if we are headed toward a great filter or massive reset, then modern technology might be judged as a negative development by the survivors. We really don't know what the long-term effect of civilization is yet. We're still in the experimental stage.

Analemma_ 7y ago

“in the long run” is kind of the key phrase, you’re using it to stuff a lot of moral complexity into the closet. The printing press may have been good for society in the long run, but in the short run it caused a century of sectarian warfare that killed tens of millions of people. If the Internet is analogous (and I’m not saying it definitely is, but I don’t think it can be clearly ruled out either), you don’t think people living now should have a say in whether they just get to be collateral damage on the road to a Utopian future? That was exactly the sort of thinking behind some of the ghastly failures of 20th-century authoritarianism.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Only a century? And some of the tropes Mr Trump appeals to are rooted in Sectarinisiam - don't forget the KKK started as anti Catholic.
coldtea 7y ago
>The printing press may have been good for society in the long run, but in the short run it caused a century of sectarian warfare that killed tens of millions of people. Compared to the peaceful millennia that preceded it?

C1sc0cat 7y ago

Of course the printing press was one of the forces that caused the reformation and all the wars that where caused by that.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

I wouldn’t call the printing press “good” in the long run at all (it’s just a hell of a claim to make about most technology). I think we have been forced to adapt around technology that refuses to cease existing once it’s discovered. That adaptation is often very violent. To be trite, your iphone is the perfect symbol of the violence of capitalism: you will never perceive the blood, sweat, and exploitation that leads to your device, ie commodity fetishism. Violence, cultural conflict, class conflict, and technological progress are all inextricably linked. Reducing technology to “good” or “bad” isn’t a conversation that goes anywhere.

loosetypes 7y ago

A bit similar to Ted Chiang (Arrival)’s The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth...

igor47 7y ago

> we generally agree that the printing press was very good for society But are we right about that? To answer questions like that we have to make up counterfactuals, which are hard and hand wavey. Maybe we would never get the Reformation, and so the Catholic Church would still be burning heretics (a different spin on the modern day burning man), but as the article points out, maybe we also wouldn't have the haulocast... I personally agree with historians like Yuval Noah harrari that it's been all downhill since agriculture

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

The article's point is that it really isn't different this time around, isn't it? Should Caxton overrule the translator and restore the original text? Or should he let the censorship stand, implying that, even if such insults were acceptable in ancient Athens or medieval Cairo, they were now beyond the pale? After many sentences of ornate hand-wringing, he tried to have it both ways. [...] As soon as he made his decision, he attempted to rationalize it. In the rest of the epilogue, he seemed to imply that he wasn’t a gatekeeper after all—that, although he was clearly a publisher, his printing press should be treated more like a platform. He was merely serving his customers, he suggested: they deserved to hear all perspectives and make up their own minds. Later, it goes on to describe how the printing press allowed Martin Luther to "shake Saint Peter's throne," but also to produce and distribute "the first work of modern anti-Semitism and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust." (I'm quoting the passages the article quotes, from historians Elizabeth Eisenstein and Paul Johnson respectively.) The article isn't suggesting that the Internet is all the dark side here -- it's suggesting that the "techno-utopians" seriously underestimated the potential for their inventions to be misused, and that that really isn't different from what happened with the printing press. The difference now is the scale, speed and reach. But as the note at the end of the article reads, the print headline for this piece was "The More Things Change."

Apocryphon 7y ago

Instead of arguing about whether or not we can put the genie back in the bottle, why don't we figure out how we can do better than we opened one last time, e.g. how can we avoid the mistakes that followed the adoption of the printing press?