7 ms·

As I get older I get more circumspect about loss. Loss is the default - an expression of the universality of decay. Almost all information from almost all of hu

As I get older I get more circumspect about loss. Loss is the default - an expression of the universality of decay. Almost all information from almost all of human history has been lost. There is a long list of extinction events in natural history[0], some smaller, some larger. In every case, millions of years of 'progress' were wiped out along with trillions of individual lives. And yet here we are! If it weren't for those past disasters, we would not be here. It does seem wasteful to lose so much, at first. But then when you put it in context, you realize it's not as bad as other fates that have, can and probably will befall us. Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events

WanderPanda 5y ago
Luckily these types of dystopias are only stable in fiction. Lets hope future ones will destabilise faster than the e.g. soviet union did (after 70 or so years of existence), though.
- danuker 5y ago
  Everything accelerates when you have Internet.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > dystopias > soviet union what about the american imperialism covering much of the globe today? this world is a deep dystopia for a very large amount of people already... (and growing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
  - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
    With the current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if the American intelligence community world order collapses within the decade, either from within or from international pressure.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    For all the many flaws that the USA has[0] there is a massive difference between the cultural imperialism of megacorporations and hard-power imperialism of, say, invading Vietnam. For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi. For all that Facebook is getting blamed for enabling and distributing the rhetoric that led to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground. [0] and as a non-American, I’d add to the Tribune list with things that most Americans I’ve spoken with do not even acknowledge, and of those who do acknowledge them, most favour.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > there is a massive difference between the cultural imperialism of megacorporations and hard-power imperialism of, say, invading Vietnam. True, but one cannot exist without the other. How would the US invade Vietnam (or Afghanistan) without industries to manufacture weapons and surveillance tools? How can they pillage all their resources without predatory industry collaborating with the occupier? > For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi. I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many governments around the planet. The Stasi was pretty bad for east germany but they held no power elsewhere: now every political police on earth is equipped with stasi-like superpowers thanks to Silicon Valley. > that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground. True, but Facebook had a choice: from what i read it was founded as a stalking/girl-rating site by geeky sociopaths, which is already pretty dark. But when they early on censored breastfeeding women and torrent links while letting nazi/misogynist content go rampant was a very political choice in favor of very violent ideologies, and they should be held accountable (not talking about the US judicial system which is just as bad if not even worse).
      - ben_w 5y ago
        > I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many governments around the planet The NSA? No, I don’t think they’re for-hire. And the others aren’t in the business of political repression: none are known for kidnapping people and driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation. Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it. > True, but Facebook had a choice… All of which reflects badly on the business and its leadership, and yet is very very different to an actual repressive regime. You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right? Even though I agree with you that Facebook going “freedom of speech for everything except the defining characteristic of mammals” is a bad thing, that’s peanuts in comparison.
  - chrisweekly 5y ago
    I don't have a citation handy but think most would agree the global median standard of living / life expectancy / quality of life is substantially better than it was 100 years ago. Ofc that's not necessarily predictive, but it is consistent with the belief that history's long arc does indeed bends toward justice.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > it is consistent with the belief that history's long arc does indeed bends toward justice. Then why do inequalities keep rising according to most metrics? Just because the poor fare relatively better (which is debatable depending on which metrics you take) doesn't mean justice is rising.
      - chrisweekly 5y ago
        Maybe substitute "improvement" for "justice"? I'd rather be in the bottom 5% than the middle 50, given better health and comfort in absolute terms. That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad and getting worse" comment.
        southerntofu 5y ago
        > That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad and getting worse" comment. You make a very good point! Yet the metrics you measure also matter. For example, it's fair to say that in terms of "free time" or "environmental pollution" things have absolutely gotten worse over the past centuries. I definitely think it's possible that some communities/States collapsed in the past due to local climatic changes or environmental pollution (for example desertification due to over-exploitation of wood, or water pollution due to rejects from metal workshops falling into the single available source). But in the past this was the exception not the norm. A few weeks back on HN frontpage there was a survey of hundreds of water sources worldwide, only two of which were unpolluted by medicine (the study did not consider other forms of pollution), and some time later was a study about 1/3 of the world population drinking lead-polluted water. In that sense, everything is fucked up because even if your local community respects the environment, you can be sure there's a damn industry upstream polluting everything, or a neighboring chemical agriculture field killing the insects that keep your own food sources available, polluting the water sources... I don't think the "are we faring better?" question can be answered in binary terms, but i think the "negative" side of things is shocking enough that it requires no less than an actual revolution to fix: as long as the people fucking things up for everyone else will profit from it, nothing good can come out of the system.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    I've always observed that defenses of the Soviet Empire are essentially just whataboutisms. But this is the first time I am seeing it literally start with the words "what about"
- grapeskin 5y ago
  70 years is an entire lifetime. North Korea has survived longer than that even. Dystopias will all eventually fall. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be replaced with something better.
  - cheschire 5y ago
    Was North Korea a dystopia for the entire 70 years or did they at least have a few good decades? Really asking.
    - deaddodo 5y ago
      I mean, I’m not going to write up a whole diatribe on the topic, but yeah; Kim Il-sung was pretty tyrannical from the outset. You can say it got really bad under Kim Jong-Il, but it was never “good”.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - unnouinceput 5y ago
    Communism in North Korea started after WW2, so it has 75+ (three quarters of a century - 1946 to today), while communism started in Russia after WW1, but, at least officially, ended with fall of USSR in 1991 - so in there it was for 70+ years (1918 to 1991).
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > Communism in North Korea ... 1946 to today For what it's worth, NK officially distanced itself from communism in 2009: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSEO253213 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSEO253213 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/asia/29korea.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/asia/29korea.html
- loceng 5y ago
  So far. Both sides - "good" and "evil" - have the technology of this past century and on to utilize. Arguably the interconnectivity and instantaneous communication between any and every human on Earth has its advantages, however the internet can easily be censored once captured - and ideology is ripe around the world which seems to be the precursor to the majority of blind society being led down a dark path to a pit difficult to impossible to escape; if you even realize you're in a pit or not.
- javajosh 5y ago
  >only stable in fiction And in fairness, Orwell himself was quite optimistic about 1984-world's prospects. IIRC in an appendix he opined that the innate human desire to innovate with language could not be suppressed without losing language entirely, and so humans would (slowly, painfully) eventually find the cracks and destroy the system from within.
danuker 5y ago
You don't necessarily need an extinction event to create political change. People can be convinced by others' ideas.
- LightG 5y ago
  That's increasingly rare these days. There's a significant proportion of tribal automatons out there that imbalance the arguments.
fnord123 5y ago
All creature will die and all the things will be broken.
xg15 5y ago
Yeah no. That's the logic of someone who is telling you that rain has always been a part of nature and that you should embrace rather than fight it - while they are stealing the tiles from your roof. What I mean is, on the one hand, you're correct: Loss in some sense is the default state of the universe, there will always be loss and there are far worse things than losing some stuff on the internet. On the other hand, it feels hypocritical to talk this way about instances of loss that we have control over. The current mass extinction is not simply some natural event that came over is and that we have to accept like Tolkien's Long Goodbye. It's a decidedly unnatural event that we know the causes of very well. In a similar way, the loss of information on the internet is not "natural" either, it's the result of deliberate business decisions that come from a specific trend of monetization.
- joenathanone 5y ago
  You ignored his other point >Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way.
  - dottedmag 5y ago
    False dychotomy
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - carapace 5y ago
    Archive.org causes North Korea? - - - - Seriously though, I actually think that the effects of mass digital information on society are going to be very, uh, interesting going forward. I wonder about the people whose parents have been documenting their lives on FB since they were born, or the kids who have never spent more than a few hours away from their smart phones.
    - formerkrogeremp 5y ago
      I think it is called "sharenting" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting
jholman 5y ago
I agree. Separately.... I never know if the following sort of pedantry is welcome or unwelcome. I can only say that I would want it. I think you're using "circumspect" incorrectly. My understanding is that it means to only speak or act with caution, not rashly, because one has looked around (spect: look, circum: around). Usually used to describe speaking discreetly, so as not to offend. And my read of your comment overall is that you are more resigned to loss. Edit: oh darn I almost missed the opportunity to use myself as the example usage: "I tried to be circumspect writing this comment."
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, it may be pedantic, but as a non-native English speaker, it’s things like these that are incredibly valuable: it’s not often that people correct you on this level of “pedantry”, so you’ll never learn. As such, thank you for this.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Waterluvian 5y ago
I partially agree: everything is ephemeral. Humans have an obsession of holding on to all things. We hoard at the civilizational level. That’s not to say we should roll over and let everything be lost like tears in rain.

WanderPanda 5y ago

Luckily these types of dystopias are only stable in fiction. Lets hope future ones will destabilise faster than the e.g. soviet union did (after 70 or so years of existence), though.

danuker 5y ago
Everything accelerates when you have Internet.
beckman466 5y ago
> dystopias > soviet union what about the american imperialism covering much of the globe today? this world is a deep dystopia for a very large amount of people already... (and growing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
- ThunderSizzle 5y ago
  With the current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if the American intelligence community world order collapses within the decade, either from within or from international pressure.
- ben_w 5y ago
  For all the many flaws that the USA has[0] there is a massive difference between the cultural imperialism of megacorporations and hard-power imperialism of, say, invading Vietnam. For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi. For all that Facebook is getting blamed for enabling and distributing the rhetoric that led to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground. [0] and as a non-American, I’d add to the Tribune list with things that most Americans I’ve spoken with do not even acknowledge, and of those who do acknowledge them, most favour.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > there is a massive difference between the cultural imperialism of megacorporations and hard-power imperialism of, say, invading Vietnam. True, but one cannot exist without the other. How would the US invade Vietnam (or Afghanistan) without industries to manufacture weapons and surveillance tools? How can they pillage all their resources without predatory industry collaborating with the occupier? > For all that Facebook and Google and the NSA know so much about us that they’d make the Stasi drool with envy, they’re not the Stasi. I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many governments around the planet. The Stasi was pretty bad for east germany but they held no power elsewhere: now every political police on earth is equipped with stasi-like superpowers thanks to Silicon Valley. > that persecution predates the birth of Zuckerberg, and Facebook didn’t have any triggers to pull or boots to put on the ground. True, but Facebook had a choice: from what i read it was founded as a stalking/girl-rating site by geeky sociopaths, which is already pretty dark. But when they early on censored breastfeeding women and torrent links while letting nazi/misogynist content go rampant was a very political choice in favor of very violent ideologies, and they should be held accountable (not talking about the US judicial system which is just as bad if not even worse).
    - ben_w 5y ago
      > I guess the major difference is the Stasi was working for a single Nation State, whereas the 3 entities you named perform political-repression-as-a-service for many governments around the planet The NSA? No, I don’t think they’re for-hire. And the others aren’t in the business of political repression: none are known for kidnapping people and driving them around in an unmarked van for intimidation. Perhaps the NSA also kidnaps people, but I don’t remember Snowden mentioning it. > True, but Facebook had a choice… All of which reflects badly on the business and its leadership, and yet is very very different to an actual repressive regime. You do get that repressive regimes will take a family and order their parents to decide which child lives and which child dies, right? Even though I agree with you that Facebook going “freedom of speech for everything except the defining characteristic of mammals” is a bad thing, that’s peanuts in comparison.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  I don't have a citation handy but think most would agree the global median standard of living / life expectancy / quality of life is substantially better than it was 100 years ago. Ofc that's not necessarily predictive, but it is consistent with the belief that history's long arc does indeed bends toward justice.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > it is consistent with the belief that history's long arc does indeed bends toward justice. Then why do inequalities keep rising according to most metrics? Just because the poor fare relatively better (which is debatable depending on which metrics you take) doesn't mean justice is rising.
    - chrisweekly 5y ago
      Maybe substitute "improvement" for "justice"? I'd rather be in the bottom 5% than the middle 50, given better health and comfort in absolute terms. That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad and getting worse" comment.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        > That doesn't excuse injustice and inequality(!) but the absolutes matter, esp. given the context of parent's "things are just bad and getting worse" comment. You make a very good point! Yet the metrics you measure also matter. For example, it's fair to say that in terms of "free time" or "environmental pollution" things have absolutely gotten worse over the past centuries. I definitely think it's possible that some communities/States collapsed in the past due to local climatic changes or environmental pollution (for example desertification due to over-exploitation of wood, or water pollution due to rejects from metal workshops falling into the single available source). But in the past this was the exception not the norm. A few weeks back on HN frontpage there was a survey of hundreds of water sources worldwide, only two of which were unpolluted by medicine (the study did not consider other forms of pollution), and some time later was a study about 1/3 of the world population drinking lead-polluted water. In that sense, everything is fucked up because even if your local community respects the environment, you can be sure there's a damn industry upstream polluting everything, or a neighboring chemical agriculture field killing the insects that keep your own food sources available, polluting the water sources... I don't think the "are we faring better?" question can be answered in binary terms, but i think the "negative" side of things is shocking enough that it requires no less than an actual revolution to fix: as long as the people fucking things up for everyone else will profit from it, nothing good can come out of the system.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  I've always observed that defenses of the Soviet Empire are essentially just whataboutisms. But this is the first time I am seeing it literally start with the words "what about"
grapeskin 5y ago
70 years is an entire lifetime. North Korea has survived longer than that even. Dystopias will all eventually fall. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be replaced with something better.
- cheschire 5y ago
  Was North Korea a dystopia for the entire 70 years or did they at least have a few good decades? Really asking.
  - deaddodo 5y ago
    I mean, I’m not going to write up a whole diatribe on the topic, but yeah; Kim Il-sung was pretty tyrannical from the outset. You can say it got really bad under Kim Jong-Il, but it was never “good”.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  Communism in North Korea started after WW2, so it has 75+ (three quarters of a century - 1946 to today), while communism started in Russia after WW1, but, at least officially, ended with fall of USSR in 1991 - so in there it was for 70+ years (1918 to 1991).
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > Communism in North Korea ... 1946 to today For what it's worth, NK officially distanced itself from communism in 2009: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSEO253213 https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSEO253213 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/asia/29korea.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/world/asia/29korea.html
loceng 5y ago
So far. Both sides - "good" and "evil" - have the technology of this past century and on to utilize. Arguably the interconnectivity and instantaneous communication between any and every human on Earth has its advantages, however the internet can easily be censored once captured - and ideology is ripe around the world which seems to be the precursor to the majority of blind society being led down a dark path to a pit difficult to impossible to escape; if you even realize you're in a pit or not.
javajosh 5y ago
>only stable in fiction And in fairness, Orwell himself was quite optimistic about 1984-world's prospects. IIRC in an appendix he opined that the innate human desire to innovate with language could not be suppressed without losing language entirely, and so humans would (slowly, painfully) eventually find the cracks and destroy the system from within.

danuker 5y ago

You don't necessarily need an extinction event to create political change. People can be convinced by others' ideas.

LightG 5y ago
That's increasingly rare these days. There's a significant proportion of tribal automatons out there that imbalance the arguments.

fnord123 5y ago

All creature will die and all the things will be broken.

xg15 5y ago

Yeah no. That's the logic of someone who is telling you that rain has always been a part of nature and that you should embrace rather than fight it - while they are stealing the tiles from your roof. What I mean is, on the one hand, you're correct: Loss in some sense is the default state of the universe, there will always be loss and there are far worse things than losing some stuff on the internet. On the other hand, it feels hypocritical to talk this way about instances of loss that we have control over. The current mass extinction is not simply some natural event that came over is and that we have to accept like Tolkien's Long Goodbye. It's a decidedly unnatural event that we know the causes of very well. In a similar way, the loss of information on the internet is not "natural" either, it's the result of deliberate business decisions that come from a specific trend of monetization.

joenathanone 5y ago
You ignored his other point >Plus, the alternative is far worse: dreadful "stable dystopias" like 1984 and Brave New World, which afford no exit from within, by construction, can only be stopped in this way.
- dottedmag 5y ago
  False dychotomy
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- carapace 5y ago
  Archive.org causes North Korea? - - - - Seriously though, I actually think that the effects of mass digital information on society are going to be very, uh, interesting going forward. I wonder about the people whose parents have been documenting their lives on FB since they were born, or the kids who have never spent more than a few hours away from their smart phones.
  - formerkrogeremp 5y ago
    I think it is called "sharenting" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting

jholman 5y ago

I agree. Separately.... I never know if the following sort of pedantry is welcome or unwelcome. I can only say that I would want it. I think you're using "circumspect" incorrectly. My understanding is that it means to only speak or act with caution, not rashly, because one has looked around (spect: look, circum: around). Usually used to describe speaking discreetly, so as not to offend. And my read of your comment overall is that you are more resigned to loss. Edit: oh darn I almost missed the opportunity to use myself as the example usage: "I tried to be circumspect writing this comment."

stingraycharles 5y ago
For what it’s worth, it may be pedantic, but as a non-native English speaker, it’s things like these that are incredibly valuable: it’s not often that people correct you on this level of “pedantry”, so you’ll never learn. As such, thank you for this.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Waterluvian 5y ago

I partially agree: everything is ephemeral. Humans have an obsession of holding on to all things. We hoard at the civilizational level. That’s not to say we should roll over and let everything be lost like tears in rain.