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I can't decide whether to be darkly amused or just depressed, watching millions of humans learn together, as if for the first time, that Government Is Hard. Mu

by Dove 4y ago

I can't decide whether to be darkly amused or just depressed, watching millions of humans learn together, as if for the first time, that Government Is Hard. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of governing well. It could fairly be called the entire output of now risen and fallen civilizations. Institutions such as laws, rights, courts, judges, and citizenship are many millenia old, and people have always been willing to pay to get them. Yes, these digital empires are a new beast, but surely there are better options than running around, reacting to emergencies, helping out people with inner circle access, laying down really ineffective law for everyone else, like some sort of overworked bronze age monarch?

1970-01-01 4y ago
Its hard, but there are known ways to fix this process that Twitter just doesn't care to implement. Placing the banhammer into one all-knowing judge, jury, and executioner algorithm is a really stupid idea. Twitter's auto-banhammer power should be spread across multiple algorithms, with each one reporting back how it voted and exactly why it made its decision. The decisions should be completely transparent to everyone.
- Dove 4y ago
  I think saying that Twitter doesn't care is too lazy a take. It has always been true, to some degree, that the aristocrats really don't care about the fate of individual peasants - they can't. They are outnumbered and don't have the capacity. But at the same time, everyone cares about acting justly. Even the most vile communist dictators who casually kill millions find it necessary to hold mock trials and explain themselves in propaganda. Leaders want to do a good job by their people. They want to believe they are just, and be seen that way. They all do. It makes more sense to me to see these people as overworked and laboring under bad ideas, than to see them as callous. There are a lot of competing considerations - security, legal obligations, this or that socially powerful group making demands! I don't think it's so much that they callously don't care as that they are so vastly outnumbered and can only deal with so many problems. When the internet was young, we thought very little about security. Wide open telnet ports, http without any sort of certificates, software and websites laughably exploitable. As time has gone on, we have started to realize that security is a necessary part of the price of building something, and to factor it in. No one now simply throws a service on the web without making a serious security effort. I feel like we're going through the same process with government. We learned, via hard knocks, that even tight knit communities can't get along without at least a moderator. Now we're learning that really big communities, comparable to nations, can't really function without some of the institutions that they have historically required. I hope that we will learn the lesson and price it in; right now, we seem to be in the stone age tarpit, the peasants angry at the government over injustice, the government angry at the peasants over constant demands that they can't keep up with, no serious solutions in sight. Technology can certainly help, but automated systems are only the implementation of laws, which misfire, and which humans are so good at getting around and exploiting. What you want, when things go awry, are rights, a set of laws, and a series of judges to which you can appeal. We assume, by inertia and analogy with our physical spaces, that we have those things, but we don't. My hope is that we can start to understand these things are necessary, and like security, instead of complaining it is too hard, simply see it as part of the problem definition.

by Dove 4y ago

1970-01-01 4y ago

Its hard, but there are known ways to fix this process that Twitter just doesn't care to implement. Placing the banhammer into one all-knowing judge, jury, and executioner algorithm is a really stupid idea. Twitter's auto-banhammer power should be spread across multiple algorithms, with each one reporting back how it voted and exactly why it made its decision. The decisions should be completely transparent to everyone.

Dove 4y ago
I think saying that Twitter doesn't care is too lazy a take. It has always been true, to some degree, that the aristocrats really don't care about the fate of individual peasants - they can't. They are outnumbered and don't have the capacity. But at the same time, everyone cares about acting justly. Even the most vile communist dictators who casually kill millions find it necessary to hold mock trials and explain themselves in propaganda. Leaders want to do a good job by their people. They want to believe they are just, and be seen that way. They all do. It makes more sense to me to see these people as overworked and laboring under bad ideas, than to see them as callous. There are a lot of competing considerations - security, legal obligations, this or that socially powerful group making demands! I don't think it's so much that they callously don't care as that they are so vastly outnumbered and can only deal with so many problems. When the internet was young, we thought very little about security. Wide open telnet ports, http without any sort of certificates, software and websites laughably exploitable. As time has gone on, we have started to realize that security is a necessary part of the price of building something, and to factor it in. No one now simply throws a service on the web without making a serious security effort. I feel like we're going through the same process with government. We learned, via hard knocks, that even tight knit communities can't get along without at least a moderator. Now we're learning that really big communities, comparable to nations, can't really function without some of the institutions that they have historically required. I hope that we will learn the lesson and price it in; right now, we seem to be in the stone age tarpit, the peasants angry at the government over injustice, the government angry at the peasants over constant demands that they can't keep up with, no serious solutions in sight. Technology can certainly help, but automated systems are only the implementation of laws, which misfire, and which humans are so good at getting around and exploiting. What you want, when things go awry, are rights, a set of laws, and a series of judges to which you can appeal. We assume, by inertia and analogy with our physical spaces, that we have those things, but we don't. My hope is that we can start to understand these things are necessary, and like security, instead of complaining it is too hard, simply see it as part of the problem definition.