7 ms·

On the internet, we’re always famous

58 points by prostoalex 5y ago

the-dude 5y ago
From The New Yorker in 1993 : On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
- hazeii 5y ago
  Yeah, my dog read that story. [0] http://hazeii.net/images/2010/iDog_6.jpg http://hazeii.net/images/2010/iDog_6.jpg
rt4mn 5y ago
> Well, guess what? We have now all been granted a power once reserved for totalitarian governments. A not particularly industrious fourteen-year-old can learn more about a person in a shorter amount of time than a team of K.G.B. agents could have done sixty years ago. I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the year) 1984 when the terminator came out, and Arnold killed a bunch of people by looking them up in the yellow pages. Everyone having increasingly easy access to the tools necessary to perform these kinds of "OSINT investigations" into nearly anybody is not good for society.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 5y ago
  > is not good for society. Heh, maybe society can shed the fan star dynamic, and it will all be okay. By the way, Anonymous wrote some pretty good poems back in the day; surveillance doesn't always come with fame.
- gumby 5y ago
  > I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the year) 1984 Not 84, but Brin wrote about it in 1996 in Transparent Society. I find his take on it naive, was the first solid discussion outside academia and is worth read8ng. Agre wrote about this quite a bit in the 80s.
  - mercutio2 5y ago
    Brin's book is one of my favorites. It does seem a little naive in retrospect, but a world where people would be willing to pay a modest amount in a competitive market for pseudonymity, and would trust banks to provide it, sure seems like a better world than the world we live in.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  My missus started a new job recently, she was curious about her boss and it took me about 5 minutes to find his address and house on google maps. That's sodding terrifying.
  - chmsky00 5y ago
    5 minutes, huh? In the 90s, I found a bosses address in the yellow pages in seconds, then called him at home on a Sunday, to chat the end of a football game. Now I hate my boss and love random folks online. Weird.
  - Taylor_OD 5y ago
    Was trying to find a friends address to send them a surprise gift. It was weird how easy it was.
    - laurent92 5y ago
      Have you seen these websites which bring up everything that was available in the past about someone? Past names and emails on Facebook, photos and geolocation of the EXIF data on a map… Purely by tracking Tweets and Facebook posts and keeping history.
      - anonporridge 5y ago
        truthfinder.com is one I've used. It's a paid service, and it presents like a scammy site at first glance, but it's legit. Lookup your own name to prove it to yourself. It has information about my past that even I forgot about. What's especially disconcerting is how fast your physical address leaks out. Within a couple of months moving to a new rental, they have my address down to the apartment number even though I never publish that publicly anywhere. I assume they ingest large data breaches. We really need a kind of DNS for physical addresses. Abstract your physical address behind an fixed virtual one and only allow authorized parties to resolve the address. This would also be hugely helpful for people that move around a lot, since you'd never have to update your mailing address with any vendor ever again.
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
I’m starting to realize that we’ve always had highly narcissistic undertones in the narratives of Western society: * “You should aspire to be successful” * “You need to be beautiful” * “You won’t get what you want unless you are powerful” All of these statements share the same narcissistic attribute of requiring attention and validation from people whom you have no other connection to. This is deeply weird. Social media gives this narcissism a platform.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  Wanting self-improvement isn't narcissism. Its the flaunting for status by actively advertising things.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    I'd argue vying for fame is inherently narcissistic even if it is not as obvious as other behaviors.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- imbnwa 5y ago
  I sometimes consider the notion that, socially, Western modernity was just reified feudalism: everybody's a lord now! Up until 30 - 40 years ago, men were regularly addressed as Mister/Herr/Signor/etc [insert name], titles which were originally reserved for landed gentry and royalty in their respective locales; it use to be said that a man's home "was his castle"; "Rights" were something that nobles worked out with the monarch, see the Magna Carta, not something meant for everybody, the peasantry in particular. Within The Federalist Papers it was still being debated whether it was a good idea to ennoble everyone, whether a democracy where everyone has a say was a good idea(which, then, meant the mass of unenslaved men); today, people colloquially refer to themselves as a "queen" or "king", also "boss". The presumption of a distinction is pivotal to Western subjectivity, again, particularly in America; "class distinction" is an ornament of the individual. Not saying, like Carl Schmitt, that we need to bring back actual, explicitly stratified distinction between the people and the people who make sovereign decisions, but that perhaps we need to reconsider the way we relate to ourselves in the form of some sort of socio-political mastery. Then again, this idea of the self as master is as old as Aristotle, but the ancient Greek polis was a whole political organization built for that idea.
newbamboo 5y ago
Society will adjust but it won’t be an easy adjustment. People will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and love. Cancel culture and it’s practitioners must be cancelled to get there.
- twiddling 5y ago
  "People will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and love." Says every utopian thinker throughout history against the overwhelming evidence of the human experience.
  - macrolocal 5y ago
    Still, I side with the Cathars. ;)
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > People will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and love. Cancel culture and it’s practitioners must be cancelled to get there. Note that, with the groups they “cancel” in place of “Cancel culture and its practitioners,” the practitioners of what you call “cancel culture” would tend to agree with every word of this, which is the entire rationale for what you call “cancel culture”.
- loudtieblahblah 5y ago
  >People will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and love. The thing is - tolerance and love are wonderful values but they're things that need to be worked on, constantly. Humans are, honestly, wired for small-ish tribes. We're not meant to be over-exposed to information, much less endless groups of people and constant "other-ness" the way we are today. And i mean this not just in a "christians discriminate against a homosexual sense" but also the inverse, where progressives can't imagine someone thinking differently from them having a moral reasoning for doing so. The internet has over-connected us and the machines of capital trying to capture eye-balls and clicks, or hell - just motivated people on social media trying to get likes and upvotes, is going to drive people to be assholes, to persecute, to "cancel", to try to ruin and take down someone. and every time that's done another group will try to do it "back". Our connectedness - at the scale and the way we are connecting - is ripping us apart. and there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. we won't be moving on from cancel culture. We will be building ontop of it things that are even worse.
netfl0 5y ago
I don’t think we’ve ever seen such large scale systematically created narcissism. Who knows what the effects will be. Major science experiment.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I'm not. I even say that, in my GitHub page: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#im-not-famous https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#im-not-famous
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
neonate 5y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20210927170734/https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/on-the-internet-were-always-famous http://web.archive.org/web/20210927170734/https://www.newyor... https://archive.is/eAJPX https://archive.is/eAJPX
gdulli 5y ago
"The best life is one the gods don't notice." - Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon

58 points by prostoalex 5y ago

From The New Yorker in 1993 : On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

hazeii 5y ago
Yeah, my dog read that story. [0] http://hazeii.net/images/2010/iDog_6.jpg http://hazeii.net/images/2010/iDog_6.jpg

rt4mn 5y ago

> Well, guess what? We have now all been granted a power once reserved for totalitarian governments. A not particularly industrious fourteen-year-old can learn more about a person in a shorter amount of time than a team of K.G.B. agents could have done sixty years ago. I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the year) 1984 when the terminator came out, and Arnold killed a bunch of people by looking them up in the yellow pages. Everyone having increasingly easy access to the tools necessary to perform these kinds of "OSINT investigations" into nearly anybody is not good for society.

0xdeadbeefbabe 5y ago
> is not good for society. Heh, maybe society can shed the fan star dynamic, and it will all be okay. By the way, Anonymous wrote some pretty good poems back in the day; surveillance doesn't always come with fame.
gumby 5y ago
> I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the year) 1984 Not 84, but Brin wrote about it in 1996 in Transparent Society. I find his take on it naive, was the first solid discussion outside academia and is worth read8ng. Agre wrote about this quite a bit in the 80s.
- mercutio2 5y ago
  Brin's book is one of my favorites. It does seem a little naive in retrospect, but a world where people would be willing to pay a modest amount in a competitive market for pseudonymity, and would trust banks to provide it, sure seems like a better world than the world we live in.
noir_lord 5y ago
My missus started a new job recently, she was curious about her boss and it took me about 5 minutes to find his address and house on google maps. That's sodding terrifying.
- chmsky00 5y ago
  5 minutes, huh? In the 90s, I found a bosses address in the yellow pages in seconds, then called him at home on a Sunday, to chat the end of a football game. Now I hate my boss and love random folks online. Weird.
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  Was trying to find a friends address to send them a surprise gift. It was weird how easy it was.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    Have you seen these websites which bring up everything that was available in the past about someone? Past names and emails on Facebook, photos and geolocation of the EXIF data on a map… Purely by tracking Tweets and Facebook posts and keeping history.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      truthfinder.com is one I've used. It's a paid service, and it presents like a scammy site at first glance, but it's legit. Lookup your own name to prove it to yourself. It has information about my past that even I forgot about. What's especially disconcerting is how fast your physical address leaks out. Within a couple of months moving to a new rental, they have my address down to the apartment number even though I never publish that publicly anywhere. I assume they ingest large data breaches. We really need a kind of DNS for physical addresses. Abstract your physical address behind an fixed virtual one and only allow authorized parties to resolve the address. This would also be hugely helpful for people that move around a lot, since you'd never have to update your mailing address with any vendor ever again.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

I’m starting to realize that we’ve always had highly narcissistic undertones in the narratives of Western society: * “You should aspire to be successful” * “You need to be beautiful” * “You won’t get what you want unless you are powerful” All of these statements share the same narcissistic attribute of requiring attention and validation from people whom you have no other connection to. This is deeply weird. Social media gives this narcissism a platform.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago
Wanting self-improvement isn't narcissism. Its the flaunting for status by actively advertising things.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  I'd argue vying for fame is inherently narcissistic even if it is not as obvious as other behaviors.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
imbnwa 5y ago
I sometimes consider the notion that, socially, Western modernity was just reified feudalism: everybody's a lord now! Up until 30 - 40 years ago, men were regularly addressed as Mister/Herr/Signor/etc [insert name], titles which were originally reserved for landed gentry and royalty in their respective locales; it use to be said that a man's home "was his castle"; "Rights" were something that nobles worked out with the monarch, see the Magna Carta, not something meant for everybody, the peasantry in particular. Within The Federalist Papers it was still being debated whether it was a good idea to ennoble everyone, whether a democracy where everyone has a say was a good idea(which, then, meant the mass of unenslaved men); today, people colloquially refer to themselves as a "queen" or "king", also "boss". The presumption of a distinction is pivotal to Western subjectivity, again, particularly in America; "class distinction" is an ornament of the individual. Not saying, like Carl Schmitt, that we need to bring back actual, explicitly stratified distinction between the people and the people who make sovereign decisions, but that perhaps we need to reconsider the way we relate to ourselves in the form of some sort of socio-political mastery. Then again, this idea of the self as master is as old as Aristotle, but the ancient Greek polis was a whole political organization built for that idea.

newbamboo 5y ago

Society will adjust but it won’t be an easy adjustment. People will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and love. Cancel culture and it’s practitioners must be cancelled to get there.

twiddling 5y ago
"People will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and love." Says every utopian thinker throughout history against the overwhelming evidence of the human experience.
- macrolocal 5y ago
  Still, I side with the Cathars. ;)
dragonwriter 5y ago
> People will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and love. Cancel culture and it’s practitioners must be cancelled to get there. Note that, with the groups they “cancel” in place of “Cancel culture and its practitioners,” the practitioners of what you call “cancel culture” would tend to agree with every word of this, which is the entire rationale for what you call “cancel culture”.
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
>People will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and love. The thing is - tolerance and love are wonderful values but they're things that need to be worked on, constantly. Humans are, honestly, wired for small-ish tribes. We're not meant to be over-exposed to information, much less endless groups of people and constant "other-ness" the way we are today. And i mean this not just in a "christians discriminate against a homosexual sense" but also the inverse, where progressives can't imagine someone thinking differently from them having a moral reasoning for doing so. The internet has over-connected us and the machines of capital trying to capture eye-balls and clicks, or hell - just motivated people on social media trying to get likes and upvotes, is going to drive people to be assholes, to persecute, to "cancel", to try to ruin and take down someone. and every time that's done another group will try to do it "back". Our connectedness - at the scale and the way we are connecting - is ripping us apart. and there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. we won't be moving on from cancel culture. We will be building ontop of it things that are even worse.

netfl0 5y ago

I don’t think we’ve ever seen such large scale systematically created narcissism. Who knows what the effects will be. Major science experiment.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I'm not. I even say that, in my GitHub page: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#im-not-famous https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#im-not-famous

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

neonate 5y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20210927170734/https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/on-the-internet-were-always-famous http://web.archive.org/web/20210927170734/https://www.newyor... https://archive.is/eAJPX https://archive.is/eAJPX

gdulli 5y ago

"The best life is one the gods don't notice." - Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon