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A common hope back then was that we would enter a new world by giving every child access to every book every written, with technology and knowledge being the ga

by belorn 5y ago

A common hope back then was that we would enter a new world by giving every child access to every book every written, with technology and knowledge being the gateway to a better future. The censorship of knowledge and culture would be forever be broken. In 2004 there was en excellent talk by Eben Moglen on the subject called "Die Gedanken Sind Frei". It focused heavily on the struggle for freedom of thought. The talk seem to me to have an persistent relevance when discussing freedom of thought, knowledge, speech, and equality.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hkt 5y ago
Instead, venture capital backed firms devised systems of corporate surveillance and propaganda delivery that would've made the Stasi proud. What a pity. Still, at least Sci-Hub and Libgen exist.
- digislave 5y ago
  A lot of censorship is mandated by governments. Here in the EU companies have to pay huge fines if they don't comply with censoring laws. The problem might not be venture capital, but simply there being entities (companies) that the government can get to. Individuals fare even worse. Try to host content that your government does not approve off.
chip-8 5y ago
I remember that hope for a future where all knowledge would be available at the click of a button, where the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast. A future where all human knowledge is at one’s fingertips is still a possibility. The problem is that our society is based on the profit motive. This means corporations will subsume everything they can squeeze profits out of.
- dividedbyzero 5y ago
  > The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast. It's not all black and white, though. The amount of knowledge available at, say, youtube, is still absolutely mind-bogglingly vast. Imagine learning to flint knap in the 90s, good luck if you can't get access to one of the very few experimental archaeologists who are able to teach this; now there are entire courses on youtube, free for all. And all those tools and knowledge on how to collaborate on very short cycle times in a massively distributed fashion, I'm absolutely certain that helped a lot tackling Covid-19 (like, with vaccine development and production, treatment research, logistics, etc.)
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    YouTube is a centralized service that's likely not even economically sustainable in the long term, given the sheer amount of random video junk that gets uploaded on there every minute. I'll take this argument more seriously when a comparable service can be built on 100% commodity tech (probably using some variety of IPFS for cdn-like distributed sourcing) and be made economically sustainable for creators as well (the various crowdfunding platforms are showing that something like this can work).
    - indigochill 5y ago
      What's wrong with PeerTube (aside from it being niche, but that's not really a problem per se, more an opportunity)? Is it difficult to deploy (again, an opportunity to create an easier deployment experience)? I think economic sustainability of content creation is orthogonal to the hosting problem. Crowdfunding, like you say, could work, independently of the platform. I see lots of YouTube channels I follow use Patreon, for example.
    - dividedbyzero 5y ago
      Now you're moving goalposts. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge of pretty much arbitrary depth on Youtube, and most is pretty well findable using their search, and Youtube is by far not the only knowledge repository out there, and many are more or less "non-proprietary", whatever exactly you mean by that. But Youtube in particular is a service open to everyone with the barrier of entry being access to an old-ish smartphone. In very large parts of the world, that's almost everyone by now, though not everyone will get 4k quality. I can look up how to fix my bike, how to make Austrian Backhendl from scratch, to what neutron stars are made of and how exactly the physics work, even lectures by great minds in the field, and all of this has grown pretty much organically. As someone who has had to rely on local libraries exclusively because it was the 90s and there was no internet to speak of, I think that's absolutely amazing. Wikipedia is amazing, archive.org is amazing, all the millions of niche encyclopedias are amazing, PubMed and arXiv are amazing, and Google and friends are amazing and profoundly revolutionary, even with all their problems. But you also require this to be non-proprietary, and to run on commodity tech and even more economically sustainable than Youtube, and free of low-quality content – even books can't offer that. Printing at scale is not commodity tech at all, publishing houses are extremely proprietary in every way, gatekeep to the extreme, still publish a lot of junk, pretty much anything niche is fighting to remain afloat, cheap modern paperback paper doesn't last like vellum did, and while there are public libraries in most places, these aren't sustainable on their own, they're funded by the public. Still, books have been central to an intellectual and cultural revolution without equal, and I wouldn't discount them just on their not-libre-enough-ness. Same goes for the present-day internet – yes, there's an awful lot of junk, dark patterns, centralization, what-have-you – but internet for the masses is merely two decades old, and most people haven't even grasped its fundamentals yet, and if you don't see past the problems, you miss the fire-and-printing-press revolutionary technology and cultural leap part, and that would be a shame.
api 5y ago
The flaw in this vision was the naive assumption that all or at least most of this information would be honest and correct. It’s the usual failure of mostly honest people to factor in just how many sociopaths there are and to imagine what those with no ethics (or “end justifies the means” ethics) will do. Instead we have entered a “fog of war” situation where it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s happening. Add to that the new practices of online cult indoctrination (“pilling”) and you now have tons of bad faith sophistry on top of all that bad faith propaganda. Online popular intellectuals now “hide their power level” in a gamified quest to indoctrinate people. I’ve been predicting for a while that at some point civilization will be forced to make lying illegal. To knowingly state a falsehood that is not clearly labeled as fiction or satire would be a felony subject to large fines and loss of access to certain media for corporations and/or prison sentences for people. The reason this has never been done is the thorny problem of determining truth, but at some point we might be forced to either go there or shut off the net. There will be a ton of collateral damage and chilling effects, but I wonder if the choice is between this and death by suffocation in bullshit.
skmurphy 5y ago
A transcript for Eben Moglen's talk is available at http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.h...
- teddyh 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200813222647/http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200813222647/http://moglen.law...

by belorn 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hkt 5y ago

Instead, venture capital backed firms devised systems of corporate surveillance and propaganda delivery that would've made the Stasi proud. What a pity. Still, at least Sci-Hub and Libgen exist.

digislave 5y ago
A lot of censorship is mandated by governments. Here in the EU companies have to pay huge fines if they don't comply with censoring laws. The problem might not be venture capital, but simply there being entities (companies) that the government can get to. Individuals fare even worse. Try to host content that your government does not approve off.

chip-8 5y ago

I remember that hope for a future where all knowledge would be available at the click of a button, where the internet would be used to enlighten and enrich ordinary people. The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast. A future where all human knowledge is at one’s fingertips is still a possibility. The problem is that our society is based on the profit motive. This means corporations will subsume everything they can squeeze profits out of.

dividedbyzero 5y ago
> The internet of today is truly tragic in contrast. It's not all black and white, though. The amount of knowledge available at, say, youtube, is still absolutely mind-bogglingly vast. Imagine learning to flint knap in the 90s, good luck if you can't get access to one of the very few experimental archaeologists who are able to teach this; now there are entire courses on youtube, free for all. And all those tools and knowledge on how to collaborate on very short cycle times in a massively distributed fashion, I'm absolutely certain that helped a lot tackling Covid-19 (like, with vaccine development and production, treatment research, logistics, etc.)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  YouTube is a centralized service that's likely not even economically sustainable in the long term, given the sheer amount of random video junk that gets uploaded on there every minute. I'll take this argument more seriously when a comparable service can be built on 100% commodity tech (probably using some variety of IPFS for cdn-like distributed sourcing) and be made economically sustainable for creators as well (the various crowdfunding platforms are showing that something like this can work).
  - indigochill 5y ago
    What's wrong with PeerTube (aside from it being niche, but that's not really a problem per se, more an opportunity)? Is it difficult to deploy (again, an opportunity to create an easier deployment experience)? I think economic sustainability of content creation is orthogonal to the hosting problem. Crowdfunding, like you say, could work, independently of the platform. I see lots of YouTube channels I follow use Patreon, for example.
  - dividedbyzero 5y ago
    Now you're moving goalposts. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge of pretty much arbitrary depth on Youtube, and most is pretty well findable using their search, and Youtube is by far not the only knowledge repository out there, and many are more or less "non-proprietary", whatever exactly you mean by that. But Youtube in particular is a service open to everyone with the barrier of entry being access to an old-ish smartphone. In very large parts of the world, that's almost everyone by now, though not everyone will get 4k quality. I can look up how to fix my bike, how to make Austrian Backhendl from scratch, to what neutron stars are made of and how exactly the physics work, even lectures by great minds in the field, and all of this has grown pretty much organically. As someone who has had to rely on local libraries exclusively because it was the 90s and there was no internet to speak of, I think that's absolutely amazing. Wikipedia is amazing, archive.org is amazing, all the millions of niche encyclopedias are amazing, PubMed and arXiv are amazing, and Google and friends are amazing and profoundly revolutionary, even with all their problems. But you also require this to be non-proprietary, and to run on commodity tech and even more economically sustainable than Youtube, and free of low-quality content – even books can't offer that. Printing at scale is not commodity tech at all, publishing houses are extremely proprietary in every way, gatekeep to the extreme, still publish a lot of junk, pretty much anything niche is fighting to remain afloat, cheap modern paperback paper doesn't last like vellum did, and while there are public libraries in most places, these aren't sustainable on their own, they're funded by the public. Still, books have been central to an intellectual and cultural revolution without equal, and I wouldn't discount them just on their not-libre-enough-ness. Same goes for the present-day internet – yes, there's an awful lot of junk, dark patterns, centralization, what-have-you – but internet for the masses is merely two decades old, and most people haven't even grasped its fundamentals yet, and if you don't see past the problems, you miss the fire-and-printing-press revolutionary technology and cultural leap part, and that would be a shame.

api 5y ago

The flaw in this vision was the naive assumption that all or at least most of this information would be honest and correct. It’s the usual failure of mostly honest people to factor in just how many sociopaths there are and to imagine what those with no ethics (or “end justifies the means” ethics) will do. Instead we have entered a “fog of war” situation where it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s happening. Add to that the new practices of online cult indoctrination (“pilling”) and you now have tons of bad faith sophistry on top of all that bad faith propaganda. Online popular intellectuals now “hide their power level” in a gamified quest to indoctrinate people. I’ve been predicting for a while that at some point civilization will be forced to make lying illegal. To knowingly state a falsehood that is not clearly labeled as fiction or satire would be a felony subject to large fines and loss of access to certain media for corporations and/or prison sentences for people. The reason this has never been done is the thorny problem of determining truth, but at some point we might be forced to either go there or shut off the net. There will be a ton of collateral damage and chilling effects, but I wonder if the choice is between this and death by suffocation in bullshit.

skmurphy 5y ago

A transcript for Eben Moglen's talk is available at http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.h...

teddyh 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200813222647/http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200813222647/http://moglen.law...