13 ms·

Haha. Remember when we all thought that the internet was going to spread democracy, open ideas, and freedom? Good times, good times.

lopmotr 6y ago
It did, didn't it? Facebook and Twiter took credit for creating a few democracies in the middle east during the Arab Spring.
- analyte123 6y ago
  The Arab Spring lead to possibly one democracy (Tunisia), otherwise it lead to minor reforms, horrific civil war (Syria, Yemen, Libya), or a theocratic dictatorship and then a military coup (Egypt).
  - varjag 6y ago
    Syria is largely a result of foreign interference. Namely, Iran early on and Russia since 2015. Without them, Assad would've been done with 7 years ago. Libya, where international community did stop the dictator early, ended up infinitely better even with ongoing civil strife. It's like an A/B test for non-interventionism. The coup in Egypt was so swift that there was no time for then hypothetical Islamist dictatorship to form.
    - analyte123 6y ago
      What makes one thing "foreign interference" and the other the "international community"? Besides that, I agree with you on Syria: many deaths could have been avoided if the US had refrained from sending billions of dollars of money and weapons to various armed groups there.
    - worik 6y ago
      Lybia too the result of foreign interference. Europe and USA
      - qserasera 6y ago
        Led by France.
    - Aunche 6y ago
      >Libya... ended up infinitely better even with ongoing civil strife Better how? In the 2 civil wars, tens of thousands of people got killed, millions got displaced, and oil production never recovered. Since the country is so fragmented, they can't do anything about the ongoing pandemic. Even Obama refers to Libya has his greatest mistake.
    - creato 6y ago
      There is never going to be any major political upheaval without foreign intervention. Furthermore, foreign intervention is usually welcomed, it rarely just happens in a vacuum. Sometimes it's rebels, sometimes it's the incumbent government, it's usually both. The fact is that a country undergoing a revolution or even just significant unrest is very weak, and weakness will be exploited.
    - andrepd 6y ago
      Libya is definitely not better after Khadafi... It was a reasonably stable place (despite the murderous despot, lesser evil etc) that was irrevocably fucked by the intervention. Surely you don't think the Western campaign was done out of the goodness of our hearts and love of democracy?
    - pell 6y ago
      Libyan prisons and camps have been called "concentration-camp-like" by Germany's foreign office. There are mountains of evidence of prisoners and refugees being subjected to systemic rape, murders, enslavement and forced participation to fight in the war. Ghaddafi's Libya was a terrible dictatorship. Libya now is in the middle of a gruesome civil war. Horrific human rights abuse is the absolute norm.
  - malinens 6y ago
    actually at that time almost nobody in those countries were using twitter/facebook
- everdrive 6y ago
  It's tempting to be sarcastic here, so I'll just play it straight. The Arab spring turned out terribly for almost everyone.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    Yes. I'm kind of pointing out how even that "positive" vision was naive because it actually did come true and it was still bad. Just creating democracies isn't necessarily a good thing.
    - licebmi__at__ 6y ago
      I think the naive view is thinking that Arab spring was shaped by the internet and not plain old foreign intervention.
jungturk 6y ago
I still think it will, but its also created opportunity for other innovators less devoted to liberalism. In my area, every spring as the days get longer and the frost subsides my yard springs up weeds. Within a month the turf crowds it out despite its slow start. Every year the same thing - the weeds are just quicker on the draw than the grass. I think we're in the spring dawning of massive global connectivity - the nodes are online but they aren't good at resisting infection, the networks are vast but not resilient to abuse, truth struggles against the speed and virality and appeal of propaganda - but humanity's good at inventing approaches and institutions to improve on those things. Asteroids, pandemics, and climate change on the other hand....
- meddlepal 6y ago
  Doubtful. Adoption of honest liberalism requires some baseline intelligence to understand the parameters. The internet has shown that most people are very very stupid. Not to mention neither the right or the left which have the biggest voices seem to actually care about true liberalism. They both have very narrow world views that they want to force everyone else to behave by.
  - jungturk 6y ago
    I agree with you - it doesn't seem like we're smart enough in aggregate to actually pull it off. And the counterpoint of "but look how far we've come" isn't satisfying because we all advance due to the absurd excellence of the few (researchers, inventors, philosophers, organizers, etc...) and what you're talking about seems to require excellence from the many. But I also believe that the internet can be the solution to that problem. A bigger bunch of the kids that come behind us are much much smarter than we are, and I think it'll be the same for them and those that follow. Drowning in information, awareness, and interaction from such a young age is going to promote rapid and broader smartening and wizening. The nodes will have an opportunity to slide up the competence gradient now that its apparent and the resources to exploit it are abundant. Youth won't be wasted on the young in an environment where the young are already wise.
    - 6y ago
CyberDildonics 6y ago
The internet used to be difficult to get to, we were playing with a loaded deck.
K0SM0S 6y ago
World Wide Web (www or W³): (between 1992 and 2042) Technological economic subsystem designed to monetize the intelligence of a few to produce ignorance in many more others. Internet is a fertile space for baseless or futile controversies (see "nihilistic relativism"), bad faith arguments (see "trolls") and personal attacks (see "DOTA 2"); it's been shown to warm up populations to authoritarianism and speech control (see "Xiism"), and to generate the cannibalistic stock-splosions of the early 21st century. It was eventually replaced in 2042 by radioweb, a quantum mesh network which ultimately spanned forty-eight thousand stars centered on the Sun by the year 4000. The only remnant of the World Wide Web in use today is Javascript. Replicas of the W³ circa 2020 are commonly used in airgap VR settings, to train soldiers to resist torture, or as horror depiction in movies. Psycho-history estimates that the human race would have gone extinct by 2145 at the latest if the W³ "experiment" hadn't been shut down prematurely by the Pixies.
serf 6y ago
The worst kind of satire is the kind that is dead wrong in its' own motivation. The internet did spread ideas. The spread of ideas can bring certain philosophical freedoms. 'Democracy' is too loosely defined in this context. The entire attitude is really offensive to me only due to the sheer fact that I am amazed at the accomplishments we've made as humans in the short time that I've been around -- and the internet is one of those huge accomplishments that leaves me in awe every time I stop to think about it. Previous history was widely categorized and considered by the data storage methods thought of during that time, and the dissertation of that information over the world -- the internet blows all previous methods out of the water by many orders of magnitude, while simultaneously lowering the barrier of entry to these stores of information down low enough to where even the most destitute human can usually find a method to participate. Did the printing press have as many detractors? Have humans always expected the tools to do the entire job, rather than facilitating it? 'Can someone call up The-Internet and mention that they're late to a 3 o'clock democracy spreadin' gig?' I joke, 'the internet' is a tool, a network -- not an entity. To anthropomorphize the tool into a lazy being that hasn't solved the promised problems would be silly. but, you're right, humans have done a lousy job using tools, like the internet, to create equality; thankfully we seem to have a long enough future ahead of us to remediate such laziness on our own part.

lopmotr 6y ago

It did, didn't it? Facebook and Twiter took credit for creating a few democracies in the middle east during the Arab Spring.

analyte123 6y ago
The Arab Spring lead to possibly one democracy (Tunisia), otherwise it lead to minor reforms, horrific civil war (Syria, Yemen, Libya), or a theocratic dictatorship and then a military coup (Egypt).
- varjag 6y ago
  Syria is largely a result of foreign interference. Namely, Iran early on and Russia since 2015. Without them, Assad would've been done with 7 years ago. Libya, where international community did stop the dictator early, ended up infinitely better even with ongoing civil strife. It's like an A/B test for non-interventionism. The coup in Egypt was so swift that there was no time for then hypothetical Islamist dictatorship to form.
  - analyte123 6y ago
    What makes one thing "foreign interference" and the other the "international community"? Besides that, I agree with you on Syria: many deaths could have been avoided if the US had refrained from sending billions of dollars of money and weapons to various armed groups there.
  - worik 6y ago
    Lybia too the result of foreign interference. Europe and USA
    - qserasera 6y ago
      Led by France.
  - Aunche 6y ago
    >Libya... ended up infinitely better even with ongoing civil strife Better how? In the 2 civil wars, tens of thousands of people got killed, millions got displaced, and oil production never recovered. Since the country is so fragmented, they can't do anything about the ongoing pandemic. Even Obama refers to Libya has his greatest mistake.
  - creato 6y ago
    There is never going to be any major political upheaval without foreign intervention. Furthermore, foreign intervention is usually welcomed, it rarely just happens in a vacuum. Sometimes it's rebels, sometimes it's the incumbent government, it's usually both. The fact is that a country undergoing a revolution or even just significant unrest is very weak, and weakness will be exploited.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    Libya is definitely not better after Khadafi... It was a reasonably stable place (despite the murderous despot, lesser evil etc) that was irrevocably fucked by the intervention. Surely you don't think the Western campaign was done out of the goodness of our hearts and love of democracy?
  - pell 6y ago
    Libyan prisons and camps have been called "concentration-camp-like" by Germany's foreign office. There are mountains of evidence of prisoners and refugees being subjected to systemic rape, murders, enslavement and forced participation to fight in the war. Ghaddafi's Libya was a terrible dictatorship. Libya now is in the middle of a gruesome civil war. Horrific human rights abuse is the absolute norm.
- malinens 6y ago
  actually at that time almost nobody in those countries were using twitter/facebook
everdrive 6y ago
It's tempting to be sarcastic here, so I'll just play it straight. The Arab spring turned out terribly for almost everyone.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  Yes. I'm kind of pointing out how even that "positive" vision was naive because it actually did come true and it was still bad. Just creating democracies isn't necessarily a good thing.
  - licebmi__at__ 6y ago
    I think the naive view is thinking that Arab spring was shaped by the internet and not plain old foreign intervention.

jungturk 6y ago

I still think it will, but its also created opportunity for other innovators less devoted to liberalism. In my area, every spring as the days get longer and the frost subsides my yard springs up weeds. Within a month the turf crowds it out despite its slow start. Every year the same thing - the weeds are just quicker on the draw than the grass. I think we're in the spring dawning of massive global connectivity - the nodes are online but they aren't good at resisting infection, the networks are vast but not resilient to abuse, truth struggles against the speed and virality and appeal of propaganda - but humanity's good at inventing approaches and institutions to improve on those things. Asteroids, pandemics, and climate change on the other hand....

meddlepal 6y ago
Doubtful. Adoption of honest liberalism requires some baseline intelligence to understand the parameters. The internet has shown that most people are very very stupid. Not to mention neither the right or the left which have the biggest voices seem to actually care about true liberalism. They both have very narrow world views that they want to force everyone else to behave by.
- jungturk 6y ago
  I agree with you - it doesn't seem like we're smart enough in aggregate to actually pull it off. And the counterpoint of "but look how far we've come" isn't satisfying because we all advance due to the absurd excellence of the few (researchers, inventors, philosophers, organizers, etc...) and what you're talking about seems to require excellence from the many. But I also believe that the internet can be the solution to that problem. A bigger bunch of the kids that come behind us are much much smarter than we are, and I think it'll be the same for them and those that follow. Drowning in information, awareness, and interaction from such a young age is going to promote rapid and broader smartening and wizening. The nodes will have an opportunity to slide up the competence gradient now that its apparent and the resources to exploit it are abundant. Youth won't be wasted on the young in an environment where the young are already wise.
  - 6y ago

CyberDildonics 6y ago

The internet used to be difficult to get to, we were playing with a loaded deck.

K0SM0S 6y ago

World Wide Web (www or W³): (between 1992 and 2042) Technological economic subsystem designed to monetize the intelligence of a few to produce ignorance in many more others. Internet is a fertile space for baseless or futile controversies (see "nihilistic relativism"), bad faith arguments (see "trolls") and personal attacks (see "DOTA 2"); it's been shown to warm up populations to authoritarianism and speech control (see "Xiism"), and to generate the cannibalistic stock-splosions of the early 21st century. It was eventually replaced in 2042 by radioweb, a quantum mesh network which ultimately spanned forty-eight thousand stars centered on the Sun by the year 4000. The only remnant of the World Wide Web in use today is Javascript. Replicas of the W³ circa 2020 are commonly used in airgap VR settings, to train soldiers to resist torture, or as horror depiction in movies. Psycho-history estimates that the human race would have gone extinct by 2145 at the latest if the W³ "experiment" hadn't been shut down prematurely by the Pixies.

serf 6y ago

The worst kind of satire is the kind that is dead wrong in its' own motivation. The internet did spread ideas. The spread of ideas can bring certain philosophical freedoms. 'Democracy' is too loosely defined in this context. The entire attitude is really offensive to me only due to the sheer fact that I am amazed at the accomplishments we've made as humans in the short time that I've been around -- and the internet is one of those huge accomplishments that leaves me in awe every time I stop to think about it. Previous history was widely categorized and considered by the data storage methods thought of during that time, and the dissertation of that information over the world -- the internet blows all previous methods out of the water by many orders of magnitude, while simultaneously lowering the barrier of entry to these stores of information down low enough to where even the most destitute human can usually find a method to participate. Did the printing press have as many detractors? Have humans always expected the tools to do the entire job, rather than facilitating it? 'Can someone call up The-Internet and mention that they're late to a 3 o'clock democracy spreadin' gig?' I joke, 'the internet' is a tool, a network -- not an entity. To anthropomorphize the tool into a lazy being that hasn't solved the promised problems would be silly. but, you're right, humans have done a lousy job using tools, like the internet, to create equality; thankfully we seem to have a long enough future ahead of us to remediate such laziness on our own part.