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Ask HN: Disillusioned with the direction of society and technology

• prirun 5y ago
  Focus on yourself and what you can improve about your own life and the lives of others close to you. If you focus on things outside your sphere of influence (ie, you can't fix it), you will only upset yourself and live in a state of unhappiness.
  • morpheos137 5y ago
    This is true. I find I have wasted a huge amount of my time with technology for very little real reward. It is kind of like a monkey in a cage pushing a lever to get a shot of some dopamine releasing substance. I am seriously considering disconnecting the internet at home. The thought seems unfathomable on the one hand on the other how did we as a society let this anti-social, time wasting vampiric force take over so much of our lives. It truly is like the frog boiled slowly. It is true valuable and useful information can be found online, but at the end of the day so much of it just does not matter to our daily life and even good information or positive social engagement can serve as a distraction from better, more real world uses of time, like going for a hike or building a house or falling in love or planting a garden or taking care of elders.
  • jyounker 5y ago
    Get involved in local politics so you can expand the sphere of people that you can influence.
    • jart 5y ago
      That's an even better way to become disillusioned. Knowing how local government administrators operate, I'd be reluctant to call tech companies that give everything away for free a bunch of monsters like OP.
• sasaf5 5y ago
  Time to go back to the lab and develop new materials and processes. Capital will one day notice that the social media adtech space is way overfunded for the little benefit it gives and will move on to more interesting things. It is taking longer than I expected though.
• Atlas667 5y ago
  I like how a lot of the discussions on this site are about hating capitalist economic incentives in tech but almost no one acknowledges the underlying framework of capitalism and what is at its center: exploitation.
• dennis_jeeves1 5y ago
  Comments: Direction of society: If you are a small player like me, you have no control on it. The best that can do is what you can do for yourself along with similar minded people. For those that are disillusioned with people in general follow the link on my profile. ( summary: if you are a misanthrope, actively from alliances with 'level-headed' people, whatever your definition of 'level-headed' may be) Direction of technology: No comments.
• rektide 5y ago
  Technology's consumerization[1] has crushed & squeezed out all the earnest genuine enthusiasm & excitement that personal computing & earlier conmected computing brought about. There's no on ramps for humanity to engage in the mediums, to participate & create as a peer tp technology where we are: we are deeply deeply downstream of the act of creation & creativity, using strokes & lines already assembled before us. Nothing obstructs computing from re authenticating itself, from becoming more than a industrialist workshop. Personal computing will happen again. Open source desktops and phones are doing ok, but the bar is higher- personal computing needs to meet society's new raosed bar & be more connected, working across systems, working across people. Personal systems need modernized technical underpinnings, with coherent, respected, operationalized basis, that both newcomers can start to learn and onboard into, but which the advanced seasoned developer also finds fit to purpose, is interested in tinkering on. Finding thr community & time to grow, to bridge humanity & technics is a slow project, a much loftier, nobler, harder, & more important quest than selling product. Technics matter in this world. Finding alignment between parties matters, is much harder. Many different pieces need to flow together, each particular & important, building up & up the stack, towards a competitive, flexible, malleable, comprehendible medium of computing. All based around standards, if at all possible, to stir diversification & groth & prevent ossification. Personally, there's a couple projects i'd list as contendors to re-owning computing: ActivityPub, Kubernetes, Pulsar, Gitea, ForgeFed, Json-ld/rdfa/microdata. Projects like Node-Red, Tekton, Matrix/Xmpp, and Yunohost and the home-cloud folks inspire me greatly & show aspects that are important, but im not sure i believe in them as quite right enough to fully endure. There's still a huge missing hole for what front end systems work & make sense but there are at least lots of interesting social systems built on ActivityPub, matrix and xmpp. More than the tech itself, I see there as so little joint community. So many dispirate partiuclar projects, of great promise & potential, but in their lane. Becoming more generic, more flexible, creating assemblage we can jointly believe in & practice on is key. We have to find new paths where we can go it together. [1] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/02/consumer-class-divide.html https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/02/cons... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317827
• gostsamo 5y ago
  When I got into college, I had a professor who was working on how internet can democratize the world. A bit after that the Arab spring erupted and a bit later it turned out that the internet could be used for repression. Being wrong ones, makes me think that we could be wrong again. The doomsday scenarios around social media and ads are like scifi distopias - they won't happen because they show up exactly when the pendulum is about to reverse. To reverse it, we just need more general awareness and a healthy discussion about the goals, problems, and solutions.
• jdkjs 5y ago
  The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
  • Chinjut 5y ago
    Thanks, Ted.
  • morpheos137 5y ago
    I personally think we a converging on some kind of an apocalypse rather than a singularity as the fanboys thought ten or twenty years ago.
  • DavidSJ 5y ago
    Life expectancy has increased dramatically virtually everywhere in the world [1], and not just due to dramatic reductions in child mortality. Poverty, presumably one of the major causes of human suffering, has also declined dramatically worldwide. [2] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy [2] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
    • morpheos137 5y ago
      Life expectancy != quality of life. In the modern world many more people are alienated and kept alive when nature would release them. Many people are spiritually alienated. The newest version iPhone does not give meaning to your life. Neither does buying a bunch of crap you don't need every week off of Amazon.
• throwyqbert 5y ago
• the-dude 5y ago
  He who has seen the light calls the others sheep.
• streetcat1 5y ago
  So maybe the direct effect of those companies is negative, but overall the indirect products, causes multiply revolutions, specially in the field of AI and deep learning. Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies. The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc.
  • lumost 5y ago
    Perhaps the issue is that consumers lack the choice to pay? We're seeing a proliferation of online services that charge money. I only wish that the standard when I pay for a service is to have an ad-free experience.
    • streetcat1 5y ago
      Just look for free app vs paid app in the app store. Most consumers do not even want to pay 0.99 for apps which took at least 6 figures to develop.
      • lumost 5y ago
        Most apps in the app store are pretty useless or one offs. I pay for photo storage, file storage, grammar checking, IDEs, and useful/interesting content.
  • IHLayman 5y ago
    "Most of the open source tools today (e.g. kubernetes, tensorflow, pytorch) are not coming from academia , but from big tech companies." The three projects chosen for the argument were started by companies, but let's dig a bit deeper. Kubernetes wouldn't be possible without container technology, enabled by modules contributed to Linux, and Linux did not start in a company, but rather by a student at the University of Helsinki. Pytorch wouldn't exist without Python, which was started at CWI (another research institute) in the Netherlands. Heck, we are having this argument over a protocol developed by CERN. The references seem to indicate a bias towards machine learning, but I can tell you that the researchers working on these tools would still be doing so at a university even if the companies weren't bankrolling the salaries, and even though they are at a company, they still act as if they are in academia. Thus, I would claim that saying "most of the open source tools today are not coming from academia" is short-sighted at best. The revolutions are happening in academia, where it is safer to do more greenfield research, as opposed to working in a company where you have to have a shorter runway to profitability. "The problem is not those companies, but rather the consumers do not want to pay for anything online. Hence, the need for advertising, privacy issues, etc." IMHO, the problem exists on both sides. Yes, someone needs to pay to keep the lights on, and consumers should be expected to pay a nominal fee for some services. But they shouldn't need to pay with their privacy, or by shady manipulation, or by disingenuous EULAs. I don't know the solution, but I do know that cookie tracking isn't it, nor forcing people to watch ads with eye tracking like MoviePass is suggesting, nor surreptitiously spying on people's watching habits to subsidize TVs.
• uniqueuid 5y ago
  Three things help greatly. (a) big picture. Read about the past centuries, millennia. In a lifetime that only lasts an hour, appreciate how much, how little is within our power. Democracy is an outlier. Individual freedom is an outlier. But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected). (b) appreciate that the balance of bad and good that we see is not a zero-sum-game, we aren't presented a ratio. We are presented with negative and positive narratives independently. Some of the negative narratives we see today are over-rated, and many of the lesser seen positive ones remain very valid. (c) almost nothing is a tipping point. The systems of our world are full of feedback loops, and often extreme outcomes are averted by (super-)exponential costs that ultimately change our behavior. There are dynamics that humans can't run away from, and they will (probably) not be the spontaneous destruction of earth, but rather a gradual forced change of behavior.
  • dealforager 5y ago
    I highly recommend the book "Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order" for helping see the big picture. I am also saddened by the state of the world, particularly in regards to inequality which I think is the source of many problems. After reading the book, I realized that social media (or the internet in general) is a technology like any other and the countries that can harness its power for good will likely lead the next century. For instance, a country that sets aside short term profits from anxiety inducing ads and instead focuses on inspiring its people will win in the long run. Same for crypto, it is just technology and it depends on people to put it to good or bad uses. We've been fortunate to live through extremely easy times, but that is the exception not the rule. Think about how people must have felt during WWII or the Great Depression or any of the other countless tragedies we've faced. They also probably though the world was ending, but at the end of the day most people figured out a way to work together to get through it. Finally, be careful when reading news because almost everything you read has an agenda behind it.
  • atentaten 5y ago
    > But total dystopia is also an outlier (and not to be expected). Depends on which groups of people and time periods you're talking about. Many groups of people have suffered through total dystopias throughout history.
• recursivedoubts 5y ago
  whenever i get into this sort of mood I try to focus on one small thing I can make better sometimes that's a small open source tool, maybe that's remembering to help a neighbor out, or going out to a public trail and picking up trash, something positive that I can do immediately and that takes my focus off the negative stuff there's a lot of good in the world, but the little black mirror can obscure it
• argvargc 5y ago
  I believe you're shooting the messenger. Tyrannical, greedy, and well-resourced psychopaths have been using technology to lead us into an Orwellian hell-hole. Without them, all of this tech is a fantastic opportunity to empower and connect our world. And that will happen - they've overstepped their mark and most people who matter know this already.
  • morpheos137 5y ago
    If you build a weapon it will be used as one by those with the will to do so. Much of technology is a psychological weapon against the human psyche. It pretends to fulfill our wants and needs like a drug but actually it is feeding off our energy and emotions to empower and enrich the few at the expense of the many. The real threat of technology is not some rogue AI taking over the world but human intelligence and energy being harnessed and shepherded for nefarious ends.
    • marcosdumay 5y ago
      Informatics is an extremely powerful tool that can help with almost any task. It's not a gun.
      • carapace 5y ago
        The first thing the computer did was break the German codes. The second thing the computer did was model atomic explosions. Computers are war machines first and foremost.
        • marcosdumay 5y ago
          IBM was selling computers 4 decades before they were used to break the German codes.
          • carapace 5y ago
            What do you mean? IBM didn't sell computers until 1952: > IBM built the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, an electromechanical computer, during World War II. It offered its first commercial stored-program computer, the vacuum tube based IBM 701, in 1952. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History
• egrex 5y ago
  Hey, I've been there and I have found no answer at this level of abstraction. Most people are great - but there are enough psychopaths to cause mayhem. The way out of this pit of thinking is to take a more spiritual viewpoint. Read around what human beings are capable of, mysticism, and ideas like Yugas - most technology is just trying to replace what we have lost as humans. Learn to be at peace with yourself and the world will slowly join you.
  • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
    > most technology is just trying to replace what we have lost as humans. Truth. Try and find what void technology is filling and fill it with non-tech solutions
• civilized 5y ago
  Some lessons that will come with age. 1. There is no magic that will change human nature. 2. Rules that keep people from harming others are very important. 3. Don't expect to live a "special" or "great" or "revolutionary" life. Aspire to something extraordinary if you see an opportunity, but ordinary things like health, moderate wealth, and family are also good enough, and will have to be good enough for most people. And there is something very special in simply living a very good ordinary life. 4. Try not to be pushed into doing things that corrode the moral goodness within you. You will not regret spurning material rewards to live in accordance with your values, but you will regret the opposite.
  • zouhair 5y ago
    Let's start by making revolving doors illegal.
    • etrautmann 5y ago
      Even if this is trolling, I don't understand? who doesn't like revolving doors?
      • gurkendoktor 5y ago
        I guess it refers to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
    • pirate787 5y ago
      Revolving doors -- when people work for companies and then that industry's regulators, and back -- are a symptom of the problem. The problem is the government is too large and engages in too many activities that pick winners and losers. The government should be a neutral referee. End corporate subsidies (including regulatory cross-subsidies) and flatten the tax code to reform this area. Also a ban is plainly unconstitutional, people have a right to free speech, free association, and to work for whom they choose.
      • 5y ago
• trebligdivad 5y ago
  Some bits are, some bits aren't - look at the good things! We've got high volume DNA sequencing all over; we've got rapidly produced mRNA vaccines (with modified bases!). We can mostly work from the comfort and safety of home. The web is being used to share vast amounts of genetics info (heck the Bio people have incredible web sites). We're generating a fair amount of electricity now from wind and solar; on a good day. We've got growing numbers of electric cars. With a few clicks of the mouse I can order kg of chocolate to appear at my door. It's the future - it's not all bad!
  • yostrovs 5y ago
    "But do you know the names of your neighbors?" - an Amish man asked in an article I read recently. Technology took over the space that previously was devoted to real human relations.
• recuter 5y ago
  This is a common thought and hardly a new one. Reminds me of a certain manifesto from the 90s. It starts like this: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." More happily, it also reminds me of Douglas Adams: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” Recently Facebook had a drop in daily users for the first time ever and the stock plummeted. Quaranteenies aren't signing up for it and adults are increasingly walking away from it. It is absolutely not too late, it is never too late.
  • FridayoLeary 5y ago
    Only because even worse alternatives have sprung up.
    • recuter 5y ago
      Since alternatives are springing up perhaps a good one can emerge, no?
      • mawise 5y ago
        That's what I've been working on. With self-hosting (or paid hosting) the incentives change. I'd love any feedback people have. https://havenweb.org/ https://havenweb.org/
      • FridayoLeary 5y ago
        It's the survival of the fittest. Whoever can make the most number of people feel the worst wins.
    • noneeeed 5y ago
      I'm honestly out of the loop these days, what are the worse alternatives, in the sense of their impact on society? I feel like Instagram is utterly toxic in the materialistic ideals it spreads, but TikTok mostly seems to have been fairly harmless compared to Facebook and Twitter which just seem to be rage amplifiers. Also Telegram groups seem to be a hive of scum and villany, but also the organising ground for people fighting for their freedom, so I don't know how I feel about it. Young people seem to have drifted away from the "broadcast" social media systems and towards messaging systems, but as a middle-age person without teenage kids I suspect I'm probably being naive.
• bannedbybros 5y ago
• mentos 5y ago
  Social media giants are like tobacco companies in the 1950/60s. If the next president ran on a platform of regulating social media as the harmful and addictive product it is, people would probably be receptive. Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken. No social media company is going to regulate themselves, but if there was industry wide regulation they could probably find some peace of mind knowing they can implement more healthy practices without fear of a competitor undercutting them.
  • morpheos137 5y ago
    There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website three decades after the innovation that was the WWW. However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) and everybody is too busy arguing about something on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook and watching the latest viral 30second tiktok vids to care. Everybody is in one pasture or another being shepherded by vampire corporate interests harvesting their time and emotions.
    • jasode 5y ago
      >There is no reason why a social media company needs to exist as such. It should be easy to make a personal html/css based website You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids. I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061
      • jvanderbot 5y ago
        this is very insightful. I realize I don't have socials because I want to present content, I have it to receive chronologically sorted updates on people I know in real life. Except now it's not chronological, and so I'm disinterested
• EGreg 5y ago
  You ain’t seen nothing yet. Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) VR, and then Neuralink, used to suck many people into virtual worlds and keep them “engaged” to feed the profit motive of the Wall St quarterly earnings (capitalism requires platforms to extract rents after all) But why stop at the virtual world? Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace. Artificial intelligence with access to this info is used to predict all kinds of inconvenient gatherings and movements taking place and nip them in the bud, leading to precrime. Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone Drones become cheap to manufacture, and rogue drones can drop grenades anywhere without any way to figure out who launched them Swarming autonomous slaughterbots that bring down the cost of eliminating anyone, first by governments, then by private actors. Guns become cheap to 3d-print while replicating biological agents become cheap to release. Bitcoin mining rewards make it more profitable to spend kilowatt-hours on using Proof of Work to secure those same 7 transactions per second than on air conditioning and brownouts regularly occur worldwide. Think this is far-fetched or we can somehow solve these problems? How are we doing with the last few decades of problems: the anthroposcene ecological collapse plummeting biodiversity (insects, birds, tigers) non-biodegradeable plastic greenhouse gas effect Humanity is like a young teenager that lives on a credit card, that future generations have to pay. We think we are so clever and so much smarter than previous generations, because we know the truth revealed by science. But we aren’t wise enough to use it sustainably. At best, humanity is building a zoo for itself to be run by a benevolent AI, while the rest of the planet is turned into monocultures and factory farms. At worst, the AI will not understand human needs and we’ll just all be frustrated all the time, or perhaps countries will just nuke the planet. Where is that nuclear clock?
  • helloworld11 5y ago
    >Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace. >Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone I'd say that those two scenarios directly contradict each other in many ways.
• wowokay 5y ago
  I think what you are describing is witnessing the passage of time and it's affect on what we consider normal. I don't think technology is ruining the world, I think it's ruining the world you thought you would be living it, but in fact it's just pushed past it. When someone invented toliets, do you think everyone thought it was a great idea? I imagine people that lived without them thought they were an unnecessary advancement in technology.
  • cphoover 5y ago
    Do you think omnipresent screens, access to media and visual stimuli has a more profound impact on psyche or being able to use toilets? I would think the former has a way larger impact on our brains.
  • noodleman 5y ago
    That is an obscure comparison. Toilets fulfilled a very real issue. When did you last get cholera? Most tech does not serve any real utility like this. Beyond generating money through increasingly deceitful means, what does Google do nowadays? The search engine has helped turn the internet into white noise. It has essentially become the obstacle it was designed to bypass. If it wasn't for extremely targeted and manipulative advertising a lot of tech products wouldn't have a place in the world at all.
• throwaway2214 5y ago
  Maybe the internet has peaked in how much good versus evil it brings upon the world. In the same time, hackernews has become a negative spiral of death. Every third post is negatively fatalist in some sort. From cancer to civilization and environmental collapse. Keep in mind, you can be fatalist in a positive way. Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. As wallstreet people say, it is never as bad or as good as you think. I suggest you do: echo '0.0.0.0 news.ycombinator.com' | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts and just unblock it from time to time if you wanna see whats up. (thats what I do)
• kornhole 5y ago
  I have been there too, but then I found solutions, hope, and excitement. Small tech provides alternatives to just about everything being done by big tech. Small tech is run by you or your community using free and open source software. You control it instead of it controlling you. I have been free of almost all big tech for a long time and love the freedom from surveillance, censorship, and manipulation. The list of alternatives are long to list here in a post. The challenge is in marketing to get your friends and family onto small tech too. Because these solutions are free and don't take anything from you, they have no multi billion dollar marketing budgets like big tech. You learn about them by following HN, Mastodon, and Reddit. I am currently building out my own servers from home to host these services using Yunohost which makes it quite easy. I do like learning a lot of new things, but my motivation is to help my friends and family. This can spread one group at a time.
• EGreg 5y ago
  The thing you’re worried about is actually fixable. But it requires someone to build open source alternatives to Facebook and other Web2 social networks. I wrote a comment showing far worse and more dangerous trends. But now let me address what you wrote 42 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29759615 Yes, capitalism gets like this when the small thing you built becomes bigger than you. And if you take VC money and then IPO to Wall St they will force you to perpetually every extract rents from your users in the form of their attention, engagement, advertising tolerance, and your “slow AI” will push out of management anyone who doesn’t get with the program to satisfy quarterly earnings. People who bought shares at $200 will make a lot of noise and can be quite persuasive to make sure their shares don’t drop to $5. That’s why Google dropped “don’t be evil” motto and now gets “right up to the line without crossing it”: profit motive of shareholders. Web3 was going to fix it but (the network would be owned by the participants) but the industry got stuck using outdated technology (blockchain) because it perversely promised things built on it to become slower and more expensive over time, so buying the block reward / fee token would pay off by making it “worth more” in the future. This is going to be fixed. We are working on exactly this microtransaction alternative: https://qbix.com/token https://qbix.com/token However, keep in mind that advertising may always be more lucrative than microtransactions, for Facebook and other capitalist “privately owned” social networks. There are many goods and services in the world that pay far more in commissions to the social network, and as long as that is the case, it would be more lucrative to get money from them than having the users pay some membership fees to access content. And besides, if you can get free content, why pay for it? No, the way to get out of this mess is to finally realize that capitalism and the profit motive has diminishing returns the bigger an organization gets, and that transitioning to a gift economy with no profit motive and no celebrities (wikipedia, science, creative commons, peer review) is far better for humanity. Once everyone is in VR and using neuralink, it will be even more pronounced. The problem started when your computers were miniaturized into mobile phones and had always-on internet. You’re already a “cyborg”. Now, consider … would you want your back end software to be produced and hosted by a for-profit capitalist company beholden to wall street? Or by an open source thing like Wordpress, Matrix or Qbix that you can at least control your own metaverse and not pay rents? Most people, like a slowly cooked frog, will just choose to become the borg basically. Not as a conscious decision, but by a thousand cuts from friends who urge you to get that latest VR headset with the brain interface so you can smell their latest pot pie, which is a limited edition sponsored by Friday’s, of course. It’s like the movie “Eagle eye” where everyone is recruited to keep you on track, and everyone is peer-pressured by N people. Unless permissionless open source platforms become compelling enough to compete and disrupt centralized for-profit platforms, as Web 1.0 disrupted and destroyed America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, MSN, Minitel, magazines, newspapers, and other gatekeepers — while VOIP / multimedia on the Internet severely undercut the telecom cartel ($3 a minute calls), cable channels, the companies using the radio spectrum etc. We are currently living in digital feudalism. That’s what you are describing: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
• sokoloff 5y ago
  I put Amazon and Facebook into two opposed categories. FB may well be negative, but Amazon gave us excellent breadth of selection and logistics, very good e-readers, excellent HDMI-output android devices, flexible and easy utility computing, and probably several other broad categories that I’m not thinking of at the moment. I think Amazon has added a ton of value to end-users. (No affiliation with Amazon.)
• parkingrift 5y ago
  Every generation feels this way. Humanity will be alright. Earth will be alright. If it isn’t you won’t be around to feel bad about it. Just live your life and find things that bring joy.
• jknoepfler 5y ago
  I'm puzzled that Amazon - a company which made its billions disrupting the retail economy, and subsequently the datacenter/managed infrastructure economy - is lumped in with Facebook. I think it might be worth unpacking what you are uncomfortable with in more precise terms.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• mrozbarry 5y ago
  A thought I had a few years ago was what sort of technology was in Star Trek (TNG, but any of the series is a reasonable point), and what technology we have now. Star Trek had a very utopian sense about technology, were tech giants have a much more distopian sense about it. For instance, in both cases, we want an AI that can understand regular language, and give us accurate results for our requests. In Star Trek, every ship has this tech, and it's all used without any thought of privacy concerns or what it means for a computer to be always listening. In fact, as far as I can think, Star Trek never really had self-awareness about what the technology the people of that time used and it's implications (like privacy, but there are likely many more ethical concerns). This led me to a bit of a split mind on technology. Using speech recognition as the example. Yes, it would be great if I could ask a computer something and it can answer me. No, it would not be great if that information was used to manipulate me or exploit my situation (like suggesting products to buy). I do think all advancements are a two-edged sword. Is it orwellian? I definitely agree. My phone is always listening (even when there are claims it is not, or it's in standby mode), cameras are small enough to fit in a pocket and be used any time. Outside of living in a cave, you can choose what you participate in. You don't _need_ a smart phone - your emails can be answered when you sit at a computer, your calls can go to voicemail when you're not home. You don't _need_ to be on facebook - get your photos printed, save your videos to DVDs, share them with people when you invite them over. A popular saying is vote with your wallet, but it can also be vote with your attention, too! Don't use social media if you think it sucks. Just log out, deactivate your account, and live your life. Don't share information on the internet you don't want to be used against you, and that even includes things like purchases on amazon, your address, or anything else. It's only too late if you're not willing to do anything about it. Don't blame big tech if at the same time, you're logging in and feeding them your attention. It's not up to you how other people waste their time, either, but you can encourage different behaviour by having real-life interactions without technology in the way.
• danlugo92 5y ago
  > So do cryptocurrencies. C'mon man don't let the narrative get to you! Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) will separate money and state, no more wars no more lopsided battles no more power asymmetry, no more printing and giving to those closest, no more printing machines in the hands of the 3 letter agencies, etc. It will bring great progress to humanity if we adopt it. > The internet is like an opiate Yeah > as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions The people that are manipulated by Big Tech would be manipulated anyways by Big Media, sadly. But maybe it's more worrisome with Big Tech.
• mynegation 5y ago
  I hear you and I often have thoughts along the same lines. Here are my (very unorganized) thoughts on this. First: have faith. Nothing of what you mention is really new under the sky. Many people lost their wealth (and sometimes lives) in tulip mania in 17th century, yet we learned important lessons about how markets work, collective behaviour, boom and bust, financial instruments. We are bound to repeat the same mistakes again, with different things, but that is just how learning works. Second: look into both sides. Social media, while rightly blamed for feeding the fires of division in the society, brings a lot of good into the world: extended families spread over the world keeping in touch, charity and community organizers using it for outreach, people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts. Even with all externalities and mistakes, you can reach out to so many people anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, get any peace of publicly available information without going to the library and sifting through the books and newspapers, or get almost any imaginable product shipped to you in a matter of days and sometimes same day. As to what can be done: tools are also well-known and have been working for a long time. Education and teaching critical thinking. Creating wealth and spreading it around. Reducing inequality. Elimination of menial labour. Finding new solutions in energy and raw materials, so that some countries having those resources and ruled by oppressive leaders are not able to exercise undue influence. Cheaper energy. Inventing new materials. Creating new tools. And yes, applying regulation and better legislation, where needs be - it worked for alcohol and tobacco, workplace safety, fire safety... We are still trying to figure things out as is the case with war on drugs, but there is no reason regulation would not work for social media or "web3".
  • gloriana 5y ago
    >people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts This extends to democratic systems as well. It seems as if a veil has been lifted on the workings of governments and corporations because information and reporting is no longer processed and packaged by a compact, semi-corrupt media system or fourth estate. No one is going to believe a Weapons of Mass Destruction lie anymore, few are buying into the Ukraine crisis etc, multiple government dissenting views on Covid have proven to be accurate despite censorship and banning. Time scales are shortened, information leakage is everywhere, distribution avenues are many orders of magnitude larger than they used to be, and people really do have a lot more time to look at and think about things. It seems like we are just now more aware of the crap that is happening at large corps/govs. There is a fifth estate now – a formidable alternative to legacy media, of small and independent, more numerous and interesting, analysts and interpreters of the world and human affairs. This is enabled by more easily usable social media – it is twitter/YouTube/podcasts. This is special and new and I am thankful for it. Now, we have to diminish the negative addiction and consumption effects that these same systems can have. I suspect these systems do not actually need that much money to operate and manage, and can eventually be treated as water/energy utility type businesses - regulated to fixed profits and with anti-addiction rules. This is no longer advanced technology.
• carapace 5y ago
  First of all, welcome to the club. You've noticed that we arguably do not live in the best of all possible worlds, to put it mildly. Let's get you a membership card and a tee-shirt. "We accept you, we accept you. One of us, one of us." Second, yeah, kiss your ass goodbye, it's too late, and you should probably move into the woods and learn to make fire with sticks and hunt and gather. You're still going to be fucked when the climate goes wonky, but at least you'll be happy and more-or-less bullshit-free until then (unless you wind up needing a dentist or surgeon! Brush your teeth and don't jump around too much.) Third, and this is general advice, try not to go by what the masses are doing. Humans are only really intelligent as individuals or small groups. Above a certain size (roughly 25) groups of humans are actually pretty dumb. If you predicate your emotions and outlook on the mass behaviour of humanity "you're gonna have a bad time." - - - - With the preliminaries out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks. We do have already all the technology we need to live well on this planet even with a few billion more people. We can reduce our fossil fuel use by 100x-1000x without sacrificing quality of life. Look into applied ecology (Permaculture, Syntropic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, etc.), and passive solar design et. al. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design ), We also already have technology for dealing with our psychological and emotional issues. Things like Nonviolent Communication ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication ) and weirder stuff like Core Transformation Process ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ https://www.coretransformation.org/ ). But you seem to be much more concerned with the effects of the Internet on people and culture. > The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions. Pretty much. I mean, my neighbor is into NFTs. I don't know what you and I as individuals can do about it. To me it seems like billions of people are happy to be reduced to peasants in a newfangled techno-plantation. The lure of convenience seems to overwhelm all other principles and values. The wedge is that most of them aren't happy, so there may yet be room to get in there and pry people from their digital thralldom. I have no idea how, though. :( - - - - The one concrete idea I do have is something I call "A Machine for Easy Living". It's sort of like a vertically integrated real estate development company that build (ecologically harmonious) neighborhoods and rents homes at a drastically reduced rate (like 10% of market value) with the covenant that the residents use some of their free time (freed up by lowered cost of living) to "pay it forward" culturally and economically. My hope is that folks would spend more time doing things like participating in local government or volunteering for elder care or whatever rather than vegging out on their screens. - - - - I think we're seeing the emergence of vast AIs that have humans as neurons. I don't mean in the future, I mean now, right in front of us. These corporations with their unprecedented insight into the daily lives of billions of people are like nothing we've ever seen before.
• gambler 5y ago
  I hate the gaslighers who try to downplay this by putting into some BS "context". The situation with tech is abysmal right now. I do think it's fixable, though. > What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster? We have to use extreme lateral thinking and build systems that support themselves and over time outcompete garbage like social media and "crypto". Neither are long-term stable anyway. One of the problems, though, is that this needs to be worked on over time. People who see the problem need places to cooperate. Social media is clearly not the place to do that, because pretty much by definition it is ran and inhabited by people who aren't interested in solving these kind of problems. (In fact, they are interesting in the opposite.) One of my biggest regrets right now is that I spent too much time on my normal work in tech, while spending not enough time and effort on cultivating independent communities of people who actually think about stuff like this. It was easy to find interesting and interested people to cooperate with in late 90s and early 00s. Today it's really hard. Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now. Another problem is that we have no good conceptual vocabulary or an analytical framework to precisely talk about these problems. Everyone just repeats terms like "misinformation" and "censorship". Public conversations about this spin in place, going nowhere good. I understand (at least I think I understand) what you're talking about because I've already independently reaches the same conclusions. That's not enough to conceptually advance anywhere.
  • mancerayder 5y ago
    >Everything is filtered through social media. We are on social media right now. What's an example of the anti-social media that fits the mould you seek? BBSes? email groups ? I agree about mindless repetition of terms like misinformation and censorship. These terms are used to attack political opposition rather than advance any progress.
    • gambler 5y ago
      I define "social media" as anything that manipulates content visibility based on metrics that aren't related to the content itself or user's direct inputs. Because of deliberately deceptive terminology in play this definition will inevitably sound kooky. Yes, BBSes/forums, chats, NTP news groups and mailing lists are not "social media" in my book. It's important to note that the word "social" in social media was always a kind of marketing ploy.
• cletus 5y ago
  Whenever I read anything like this I think people have a weirdly rosy view of the past. 30 years ago people have libraries and encyclopedias. Now billions of people take it for granted that you can have a handhold device in your pocket that has access to virtually the entire body of human knowledge. Sure people use that device for all sorts of crap that ranges from the inane (eg "look at how amazing I am or my life is" IG posts) to the dangerous and outright harmful (eg cyberbullying, QAnon BS) but let me clue you in: I challenge you to find a point in history where this wasn't the case. I mean a few centuries ago we were burning witches in the US. Only decades ago we had racial segregation. We had lynchings. The 20th century saw people killing millions of other people. We dropped nuclear bombs on cities. In the 19th century (and earlier) we literally bought and sold people and ripped them from their homeland to drag them against their will to a new continent. The fact is when it comes to social media you can completely ignore it and it won't have a negative impact on your life. In fact it's probably the opposite. I'm genuinely curious: when were things better? And why?
  • egrex 5y ago
    I once had a conversation with the head of an Aboriginal group in Australia - until recently (i.e. when the Europeans came) they could get by on a couple of hours of hunter-gathering a day and spend the rest of the day enjoying themselves. Makes you think!
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  Note that technology advancement always needs a large sum of capital so whoever has it controls technology. I in my life never had the illusion of the other way around.
  • jackcosgrove 5y ago
    It's true that technology advancement requires capital and seemingly absent military threats the government is happy to allow private interests to supply that capital. There's another distinction to be made which is also useful, that between open and closed systems. The PC ecosystem in the 1980s democratized computing yet was privately funded, so I don't think the private funding barrier is impossible to overcome when trying to make progress. One thing I don't hear much about is how any system that relies heavily on a large database produces concentration. The internet era came to be dominated by companies with huge databases. That's different from the PC era. This is mostly just a technology yo-yo between centralized systems and decentralized systems over the years, and you have to ride out the storm when your favored flavor is on the outs. Techno-optimists should be focused on building decentralized databases and many are. Until we've solved the problem of systems with huge databases outperforming systems with decentralized databases, concentration will continue.
• mistrial9 5y ago
  first, breathe In the midst of this emerging, high-energy system-of-systems, please notice that there are other systems-of-systems also, quite vigorous. Like two painted dots on the surface of an expanding balloon, those dots are expanding away from each other, but also from all other possible dots, at once. Systems-of-systems are growing (or dying) right now, at the same time as the energetic emergence that you rightly call attention to here. Your own stable intelligence and committed efforts, are required to steer away from these self-referential and empowered systems. Overall, I tend to agree, but differently in degree and specificity. best from California
• nanomonkey 5y ago
  You need better filters, as there are plenty of technologies and social groups that are doing the exact opposite as what you are lamenting. If you put your time and effort into these groups then you will realize that there are whole other ways of living and producing that are convivial. For example, there are decentralized social medias built on gossip protocols and mesh networks, and ipv6 that are creating participatory platforms and economies. There are also a variety of alternative fuel, permaculture and solar punk groups creating living environments that are sustainable. Join up with them. Our physical needs are minimal, our cultural needs are to help one another.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  Why not include Google, Apple, TikTok and Twitter!? Apple has funneled $275 Billion to China [1], 10x more than what Intel got to start the Ohio fab. Gutting out American rust belt is one of the key problems in US and no one seems to care. It has brewed a whole political movement and we will suffer for decades. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chinese-authorities-apple-ceo-signed-275-billion-deal-with-them https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...
• paganel 5y ago
  Nothing of value to add, just to thank you sincerely for putting into words what I had been feeling for the last 3-4 years, but didn’t know how to do it concisely or how not to sound like a Cassandra. My individual solution is to stay employed in an IT job that pays the bills and that’s it, I do not want to change/improve the world through IT, much less so do I want to do something interesting at work. Ellul was right.
• tim333 5y ago
  In the big picture Facebook etc are a bit of a blip. Tech as in antibiotics, sewers etc have increased life expectancy at birth from 20-40 years to 80 or so, famines are rare, stuff like smallpox gone. Going forward we have AI, uploading, immortality, interplanetary travel and the like. I'd chill out over the current stuff. Aslo check out stuff like Pinker on war https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_the_surprising_decline_in_violence?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_the_surprising_decli... and Ridley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxe73iJPbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxe73iJPbo It's easy to think things are getting worse because that's what the press reports because 'horror crash' get's more clicks than 'things not bad really' but if you look at history they are getting better in most ways. For instance as to things getting Orwellian, Orwell was writing after the holocaust, WW2 and communist famines killing tens of millions. Facebook ads are quite mild in comparison.
• deleted 5y ago
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• electric_mayhem 5y ago
  Be the change you wish to see in the world.
• thenerdhead 5y ago
  There's a fundamental problem that not many people see. It's our attitude towards time. This attitude is setup as an unfair game. Instead of just living our lives alongside time, we are actively fighting against the time we have and wanting to make every second count. We then go to these platforms to find some sort of social validation and compare ourselves to others in the process. This makes us more lonely than ever. That gives us some sense of failure in our own lives as we might not be as successful or as far along in our journey as other people who are publicly sharing theirs. It's a losing game. The house always wins. It's not about blaming humanity or ourselves for letting it get this bad. It's about taking drastic action today to do your part. Practice digital minimalism and have digital sabbaths on the weekends. Only use technology when it's necessary for you. Find better ways to spend your time on things you're truly passionate for. It's a long journey, but it sure as hell is worth it and makes you happier.
• gloriana 5y ago
  > They are making society worse not better. Perhaps a component of this perception is that these technologies are exposing a rotten tree stump that was already there. You only think it's making things worse because you couldn't see it was already bad. But only part of it. The mental destruction out there is real.
• kingcharles 5y ago
  I just spent 8 years totally off the grid. No tech. The biggest thing I missed was Wikipedia. Tech is what you make of it. It was depressing to tune back in and see what a mess the Web was with advertising destroying most sites. Support has gone to the birds. You used to be able to get hold of humans who could help you. Now, you're just fucked, there is no way out. AI is starting to get scary, like we might actually make an AGI that destroys us. Even now you can do some fucked up shit using GANS to create fake videos. Take this for instance - we know Tom Cruise is fake, but is Paris a deepfake or real? I cannot tell, and I've worked in CG: https://www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise/video/7060950433082182917 https://www.tiktok.com/@deeptomcruise/video/7060950433082182... This shit gets better, not yearly, but monthly. Soon it'll be possible to fake anything of anybody. So AI is already taking us towards destruction. Perhaps we can turn it around and AI can be used to save us. I hope that's the end game. Without tech though I couldn't do some awesome things, like see my loved ones on video chat half a world away. So, it's not all bad...!
• pojzon 5y ago
  Issue lies in how fast changes are happening. We are simply not ready for that. This is the moment when ppl who are a bit further on the evolution cycle should take things into own hands and stop others from hurting themselves. It will take a small disaster now to get back on track.
• jdrc 5y ago
  There is a lot of things that people value but it is impossible to monetize. Monetization control is a huge factor for the current shape of the internet And then, there is no public internet. Wikipedia is valuable, and it sustains itself, but we don't have public email or public blogs. Why? Expression and association are rights
• mikewarot 5y ago
  Well then, let's learn from events, and choose a better timeline! I believe in this causal chain Computers are insecure Which many bad actors find profit in exploiting Which makes new web sites a risk Which makes users prefer their known "safe" spaces Which leads to walled gardens Which then sell the "users" for profit to advertisers Which incentivizes dark behavior of those walled gardens Which then attract the rentier class Which then leverage control for more power I believe this causal chain can be broken by fixing computer security. The necessary research was done in the 1970s. The Bell-Lapadula model [1] in 1973 was one of the significant results. The Principle of Least Privilege [2] was adopted in the Unix system in a weak form. The superuser (root) account was a special privilege, which administrators and code was supposed to use as little as possible. There were (are???) implementations of a multi-level secure systems, which saw limited application in the military, and briefly elsewhere. However, for general use, the root/user separation was widely seen as good enough. There are now efforts to fully extend operating systems so that they can provide tools so that the users can also use the Principle of Least Privilege. I believe that eventually it will be as easy to use these as more conventional systems. In these systems, no default permissions are given when running a program, the allowed resources, also known as capabilities, must be specified. This is similar to deciding which bank notes you are going to hand to a cashier, instead of handing over your wallet. It is up to US to demand that it be as easy for any user to do so, in a transparent way. It is my hope, that should this model be accepted, a new causal chain will arise Computers will be made secure Which users will grow to trust Which will allow experimentation Which allows new ways of communicating Which don't require corporate sponsorship Which doesn't require the rentier class Which helps innovation Which helps society 1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20060618092351/http://www.albany.edu/acc/courses/ia/classics/belllapadula1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20060618092351/http://www.albany... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege
• tgflynn 5y ago
  > The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative. I'm disabled and in the winter I can't even leave my apartment building. I get almost everything I need from Amazon and I honestly don't know what I would do without them. Their overall economic value may be negative but they sure have a lot of positive value for me.
• BLanen 5y ago
  > They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world. LOL. Peak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
• karmakurtisaani 5y ago
  I think many of us fell into what I'll call "hacker's fallacy", that given society free access to information and communication, people will be free to educate themselves and others and we will progress as a species. At first we were going to that direction, before the status quo caught on. Now people are being exploited and misinformed more than it was imaginable before the information age. I'd like to thing the hippies had a similar fallacy, where they thought they could overthrow the system with flower power (mainly psychedelic drugs). Looking forward to the next iteration.
• TylerJewell 5y ago
  I find that it's important to periodically understand the big picture. I ask myself, are we doing better as a whole for society and can technology aid in that? I get inspired by reviewing the following things: 1. Child mortality rate over time: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality?country= https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality?country= 2. DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough signals a promising decade for the science of proteomics. Most directly, being able to predict protein shapes will enable us to discover drugs more rapidly. 3. The cost to produce PV modules: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices 4. Advancement of geothermal as a potential energy source. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry who think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions. 5. Space exploration. The Space Shuttle entered service in 1981 and launched successfully 134 times. The payload cost to low-Earth orbit (LEO) was $65,400/kg. Today’s Falcon 9 is at $2,600/kg. 6. The improvement in adult literacy rates over time. So much more to do here, but a literate population is one that is more likely to contribute to our global productivity and success. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literacy-rate-adults?tab=chart https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literacy-rate-adults?tab=... 7. Quantum computing experiments and trails are doubling the number of qubits every couple of years right now. Quantum computing will cause a re-imagining of security and cryptography of digital assets if it becomes production grade. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59320073 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59320073 I am sure there are many other examples. Even though I am an enterprise software guy working at Dell, the progress we made in the areas of technology that we get to work in have some contributing impact to all of these trends.
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  No, it's not that bad. Not at all. There is some truth in that, but think of the incredible value just in your smart phone. It's a: - weather forecaster - GPS - phone - news source - email client - gigantic resource library - pedometer - entertainment provider. Music, videos, etc. - and on and on. All this in a little device owned by even people of modest means. It's a miracle! Social media lets you stay in touch with friends and relatives. You can make connections that would be impossible just a few years ago. Our lives are so much better. Sure, there is some trash, too. But rise above that, open your eyes to all the good. It's a wonderful time to be alive.
• p0d 5y ago
  > Technology seems like a giant waste of time and energy for human civilisation. And yet here you are sharing your thoughts with supportive strangers who will hopefully provide some meaningful responses to your concerns.
• dennis_jeeves 5y ago
• sleepingadmin 5y ago
  >Technology seems like a giant waste of time and energy for human civilisation. He says using technology. >Specifically the social media giants and advertising funded tech companies seem like the definition of emotional vampires. So do cryptocurrencies. Im not sure about this emotional vampire factor. >They are making society worse not better. For a time maybe 15-20 years ago, maybe peaking around the era of Snowden it looked like technology was going to truly democratise the world. Good luck fixing it though. Imagine I waved my wand and made you emperor of the world. You then instant ban and shutdown these social media entities. Their stock prices go to $0. Nobody on earth had a chance of selling. What happens? Tons of retirees just got their benefits drastically reduced. Most likely all of them are headed to the job line. Too big to fail. >For what tech produces it is overly rewarded economically. The true economic value of some companies like facebook or amazon may be negative. Hard to prove. >What can we do or is it already too late to save the world from the big tech monster? Not too late, but you cant take down goliath, you have to displace it at this point. >I think it is already too late. The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions. Out of curiousity, what is your opinion of Trump?