8 ms·
Was everyone stupid back then?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago"People, what a bunch of bastards." -IT Crowd
- nells 4y ago[flagged]
- autotune 4y agoPolitics were not mentioned, in any way, yet you are trying to inject politics into it. What is wrong with you?
- slackfan 4y agoSure sucks when a loud contingency of people claim that everything is political, donut?
- nells 4y agoWhat is “social problems” (mentioned in the comic) if not politics?
- falcolas 4y agoHomelessness. Poverty. Addiction. Spousal Abuse. Sexual Abuse. Etc.
- RunSet 4y agoA: "Let's attempt to solve poverty, addiction, spousal abuse, and sexual abuse." B: "Why do you have to make everything political?"
- watwut 4y agoDo you even know what social problems are? Usually it refers to criminality, drug use (including opioid epidemics), violence, poverty and so on. How you managed to turn it into conservatives are victim here point is mystery.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- karmakurtisaani 4y agoProbably just a conservative.
- thedorkknight 4y agoThis website is weird. Anecdotally I've noticed it tends to generally be more level-headed and non toxic than other websites I go on (mainly reddit...) yet at the same time the mods seem to be pretty polarized
- autotune 4y agoI left reddit about a month ago after having been on there for years, substituting in healthier habits like running, listening to music, and meditation when I need a break, and have been much happier as a result. HN is pretty good like 75 percent of the time but yeah there are occasionally hiccups like the comment from OP that make it through.
- ktwbc 4y agoThis actually reminds me of a quote in the book The Victorian Internet about the development of the telegraph. Part of the push of the first undersea cable to connect the US and European countries was a belief that with more instant communication there would be no misunderstandings and therefore no more wars. So this belief has been going on a long time.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoFor anybody not familiar with this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
- c7b 4y agoMy understanding was that the primary motivation to build those communication channels was to gain an edge on the stock markets. I don't know about the telegraph, but for radio I remember reading that that was the reason JP Morgan was financing Tesla, and he was mightily annoyed when he got scooped by Marconi.
- 0x445442 4y agoAnd, non ironically, along with the platitudes of providing internet to the poor little child in the Ugandan bush, it’s a big driver for Starlink.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI can't remember if it was that book, or another that referenced it, but the fame of "Florence Nightingale" has been linked to the use of the telegraph to bring back news from a previous war in Crimea: > I also gain a sense that the time was ripe for change to the nursing profession – and that Florence Nightingale sparked a revolution in health care that was waiting to happen (prior to the Crimea, British women had not served in military hospitals). Newspapers and improved communication raised public awareness of the conditions of wounded soldiers in Crimea, and the nursing profession was gradually becoming more respected. But the museum also leaves the impression that it was more than just a case of her being in the right place at the right time. Her combination of intellect, fierce sense of vocation (fuelled by her religious faith), and her well-connected family background, meant perhaps that only Florence Nightingale could have shaped the nursing profession so effectively in that era. The book where I read about this linked it to e.g. photos and videos from Vietnam affecting US public perception of the conflict and generally the better and rawer the communications from the war, the better it gives you an honest angle on it compared with the official propaganda.
- throw0101c 4y agoSee also Penny Arcade's take from 2004: * https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa... Previous observations on the CB radio band: > Similar behavioral patterns have been observed in the anonymous usage of Citizens’ Band radio, a short-distance radio communications device widely used by truck drivers to find well-stocked fuel stations and share traffic information. On February 20th, 1978, a New Yorker[5] magazine profile piece on talk show host Johnny Carson mentioned that CB radio conversations can include disturbing amounts of racism and masturbation fantasies resulting from the lack of accountability. * https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theory https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theo...
- teddyh 4y agoAnd then Facebook (and Google+), with their Real Names policies, proved that it wasn’t anonymity which was the cause.
- YazIAm 4y agoI think when we consider what Facebook has taught us about anonymity vs real name policies we have to also remember that Facebook's feed disproportionately rewards sensationalist content.
- williamcotton 4y agoWhat about the clearly false information spread on Facebook? Do we know the names of the people who are writing as QAnon? There’s a clear lack of accountability for anyone other than the messenger.
- shubhamjain 4y agoDid people really think that Internet was going to solve all problems or is that revisionist history by back-in-our-day millenials? Even for a techno-optimist, it would've been hard to forsee the sheer penetration. Yes, the euphoria was there from the beginning. But, there's a difference between saying "it's going to be huge" and imagining an instantly accessible network available in the hands of 60% of the world from a device that's hundreds of times faster than most powerful computer available at that time.
- fumar 4y agoIs that a millennial in the comic? I thought it was a Gen X or older character. Back in our day, I am thinking mid to late 90’s for techno optimism at its peak.
- elcapitan 4y agoYeah, 90s tech optimism was more Gen X. It's probably conflating this time with the early 2010's (see "Arab Spring") optimism towards self-liberation via social media driven uprising?
- newZWhoDis 4y agoThe talk on IRC in the 90’s was “imagine a war going on with the internet and civilians on both sides could talk to each other, why would anyone fight?”
- pharke 4y agoI think the problem with this vision isn't that "people talking to each other won't prevent violence" it's that people posting text, images, and video is not the same as people talking to each other. Even a video call is not the same as talking to someone in person. It's hard to build empathy and connection with someone you can't make eye contact with.
- smolder 4y agoI think that the medium of communication is not the main problem with this idea. I say that as someone who has had & still has strong relationships formed and maintained almost entirely through text. This has been going on for centuries, with pen pals and written correspondence in general. People vary and I think not everyone has the same need for physical proximity and nonverbal comms like eye contact. (In my case you could probably go further to say I don't interpret well or express well in non-verbal communication channels.) Rather, while bringing people together in virtual spaces does probably help different peoples see each other with empathy, and diminish tribalistic attitudes... The wrong people are in the chat. Every nation that goes to war is itself fractured into classes. The people who send a nation to war are different from those on the battlefield. Empathy for the enemy on the part of soldiers doesn't prevent them being compelled to violence.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- EGreg 4y agoActually, it worked, Web 1.0 totally disrupted AOL, CompuServe, MSN etc. until the companies which built on top of the open Web didn't give away their software. These "Web 2.0" companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. just had all your data. We live in a digital feudalism now. And every few years (e.g. when Musk bought Twitter) there is renewed interest in open source alternatives. We can fix this, if the open source community ever achieves parity with the features that most Web 2.0 social platforms provide: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
- jfengel 4y ago“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” Douglas Adams thought he was joking.
- what_the_h321 4y agoDo you have an example of a bloodier war than the World War 1 and 2?
- jfengel 4y agoIn terms of body count, those still win, because Mutually Assured Destruction keeps giving people pause. But the Internet has turned into a machine for goading people into making a mistake, and it will only take one. Meantime, thus far it's used just for local genocides, like Myanmar.
- SapporoChris 4y agoNo, but Second Sino-Japanese War, Taiping Rebellion and Transition from Ming to Qing are comparable.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jonathanlydall 4y agoIn case you’re being serious, Douglas Adams was an author of comedic fiction and the babel fish is from his Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book and allowed different races from different planets to communicate with each other. Trying to compare real world history with fictional possibilities is non-sensical.
- imnotjames 4y agoWell, there was the time that the Krikkit decided to wage war on the entire universe for 2000 years - I believe the estimate was about two grillion casualties.
- 4y ago
- YazIAm 4y ago"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?" I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy. A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became optimized for engagement (ie: emotional reactions), and so are disproportionally rewarding sensationalist content over content that actually promotes understanding of other perspectives.
- lob_it 4y agoSocial problems == culture divide It makes it funny when illiterates try to culture clump :)
- Shared404 4y agoThere's more than just culture divide. People being manipulated by giant propaganda networks to hate each other more and more and prevent progress from being made is an age old social _problem_. E: Removed comment about being a throwaway, appears to just be a new account. Sorry about that.
- lotu 4y agoThe unsaid implication of this comic is that getting rid of the internet would make society better. It would NOT. The ability to have rapid peer to peer communication with anyone on the planet is a good thing. BLM, LGBT rights, disability rights are causes that have thrived thanks to the Internet. The Internet did not cause fascism and any suggestion that it does ignored all of the 20th century.
- williamcotton 4y agoIt’s more of a critique of techno-utopianism than the internet itself.
- JamisonM 4y agoI didn't take that as the unsaid implication of the comic at all.
- unconed 4y ago
- Syonyk 4y ago> and it was mainly smartphones that enabled that, because they let you take the internet outdoors. I'm not sure it was "taking the internet outdoors" that made the difference - we could do that before, I certainly did with laptops. The key difference with smartphones, IMO, was the conversion of the internet from a "pull" technology (I had to choose to go to a website) to a "push" technology (that website/service can disrupt me wherever I am). That's driven a lot of the nasty impacts (remember how Facebook used to send nonsensical pings to your phone to drag you in? "Your friend so-and-so you've not talked to in 20 years has a birthday! Wish them well!" I assume it still does it, but I've long since stopped using it and it hasn't been an app on my phone in far more years than that). But we also had all the work on addiction from the "free to play" game model enabled by in-app purchases, which supercharged the research into how to just drive people up the wall and keep them staring at your service ("engaged"). If smartphones only worked inside, I think the problems would be almost as bad. I agree with you about smartphones, I just think there's a bit more nuance into why they ruined everything.
- trudler 4y agoJust because that there ARE anonymous people posting stupid shit, doesn't mean all people do that when anonymous. In fact, show me a nice invention that wasn't made by a freedom loving person. No bigger freedom than anonymity! We need it. How can you express yourself without being silenced right from the start without it? How can you spread disruptive ideas when people instanly have a name to point fingers to? An idea should be separate from a person, to really be neutral. If there is a person behind it, people start investigating the person, rather than checking the idea in depth.
- pfortuny 4y agoYou might want to revise this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_inventions_of_the_Nazi_period https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_inventions_o...
- 999900000999 4y agoThe internet pre 2010 was pretty great. Facebook showed who got married, no body was political yet. I did well connecting with friends of friends and went out with a few folks. While I hate online dating now, I respect it worked for tons of couples when it first started. Something about having to head home to do your online stuff slowed it down. Now, it's constantly in your face.
- endymi0n 4y agoLooking back, I guess the main point of why the early internet was so special wasn‘t because of cool new communications technology, but because of the self selection. In order to use BBSes or the early Internet, by definition you had to be above average curious, smart, rich, young (late night dialup tarrifs) and/or based in academia, as well as having a volunteering/cooperating mindset. We just managed to keep the others out for a miraculous decade by keeping entry barriers hard, costly and complex. Is that an ableist viewpoint? No clue, but it was a bliss for sure.
- 0x445442 4y agoI’m not sure if this comment is a jab at the unwashed masses but you did leave out another group, corporations. BBS Sysops, and people that were putting up web sites in the mid 90s weren’t doing it for money. It wasn’t until the cult of money got involved and turned the internet into a giant direct marketing platform that things began to get really bad.
- karmakaze 4y agoI remember when corporations started showing up. They were mostly ignored. It wasn't until mainstream adoption outweighed the early adopter culture that things really started going downhill and combined with corporations accelerated.
- 0x445442 4y agoYeah, I guess it’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing but corporations brought centralized servers. Of course we’re discussing a topic on a centralized server now but PG is not making any money from it.
- karmakaze 4y agoI'm trying to remember when and infer why things got so consumer-y. Replaying it in my mind, there was Slashdot, Reddit which were fine. I think Digg was a downstep. Even Facebook was great at the start. If I had to pick one thing, I'd say it's about shallow consumption/interactions that kill the signal/noise. Like posting a picture/video with a caption, having it go viral with upvotes/reposts.
- emmelaich 4y agoThe more things change the more they stay the same. Discussions in Usenet had exactly the same topics and flavour as forums and twitter today. Guns, abortions, free speech (including the old 'fire in a crowded theatre' trope). Also present was various shades of mental illness, including the benign and the performative and narcissistic. Netnews was nicknamed 'nutnoise' for a reason. You might find this sad but I find it strangely comforting. People in large semi-anonymous communities are predictable. At least things won't get (much) worse.
- ck2 4y agoThe thing is, SOME people did and are still trying to use the internet in good ways, to share and help others. But bad actors and bad intentions and lowest common denominator is always inevitable. Reddit alone proves you can still have anonymity and people still behaving well enough to share/help. The key is moderators and moderation tools. And obviously "unlimited" freedom has to be sacrificed for "ground rules".
- clolege 4y ago> We thought anonymous people saying what they thought in a public forum would lead to the best idea getting shared the most This is true in some parts of the internet, such as Hacker News and Reddit. The key seems to be good signal/noise moderation and users able to amplify content with cardinal voting (upvotes/downvotes). I'm constantly finding great, new ideas between the two websites (especially when combined with search) and sharing them with others. On other sites.. it seems as though the drive to engage users ($$) and a lack of a "downvote" option allows the flame-bait/low-brow/spammy content to take center stage. Which eventually drives users away (-$$).
- 0x445442 4y agoI think there’s another option and that’s to get rid of votes AND comments. Using Twitter as an example, I think removing likes and comments and only providing a retweet and one level deep quote tweet would make it a much better platform. Of course, this assumes no bots as well.
- clolege 4y agoHow would things be amplified then? By number of views?
- photochemsyn 4y agoI don't know if anybody really thought this about the Internet back in the early days, say the 1980s, when networks were mostly restricted to academic institutions, large corporations and banks, and military communications: https://networkencyclopedia.com/networking-history-1980/ https://networkencyclopedia.com/networking-history-1980/ The military had in past decades (60s and 70s) funded a lot of research into a networked system that would hopefully allow communications to survive a nuclear war, not exactly a utopian future vision: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ARPANET https://www.britannica.com/topic/ARPANET Few if any were thinking that networking was going to lead to some social utopia due to the ease of communication among groups of people online - although ease of information sharing was recognized as a big plus in academics, at least. The introduction of the bulletin board system, and then usenet, mostly seemed to be about technically savvy people sharing information, some games, etc. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-we-talk-online-a-history-of-online-forums-from-cavemen-days-to-the-present/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-we-talk-online-a-history-o... Then came the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the sale of ads, the rise of engagement metrics, and realization that there was nothing quite as effective as outrage porn (i.e. 'look at these terrible people and what they're doing! Tell everyone what you think about it!' )for drawing repeat users to your site. That's really when it went all sour. I think the whole 'the Internet will bring people together in a beneficial way' theme was just a revisionist history put out by the PR people at outfits like Twitter and Facebook to put a patina of do-gooderness over what was essentially a predatory business model. I don't think such views were being widely promoted in the 1980s or early 1990s, at least I can't seem to find any such optimistic articles from that period.
- rfrey 4y agoWe were naive idealists, but not for the reason the comic says. We thought a lot of societal problems had their roots in centralized control of information by government and big media companies. Democratizing communications would lead to good outcomes for the oppressed. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" and all that. In some ways, that was true. Police treatment of black people in some parts of the US, for example, is incontrovertible now whereas in the 90s most people simply wouldn't believe it. We weren't wrong about the sunlight, but we were wrong about what it would do - what the human reaction would be to the lights being turned on. Rousseau has been in the ring with Hobbes, and Rousseau lost.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- inejge 4y agoIf you consider A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace as singularly representative of the zeitgeist "back then"... Yes, everyone was stupid, in the same manner that love can be stupid. Humanity never gave up on love, and I hope it never gives up on starry-eyed idealism; it can lead to dogmatic and authoritarian horrors, but some of the ideals may enhance the fabric of society and make it a little less savage. Less of the former and more of the latter, please, if possible. The process is slow and uneven, and personally, I'm not too hopeful, but I still prefer faint hope to unrelenting cynicism. (What's strange about A Declaration... is that it came a decade after Neuromancer and two years after Eternal September. You may choose to doubt the predictive power of dystopian fiction, but the reality check of the influx of participants outside of the pretty exclusive early-internet club should be much harder to overlook. That document managed to disregard both. It was strangely anachronistic even at the moment.)
- DanielBMarkham 4y agoNope. The mistake we made, one that we continue to make, is conflating human communication and social interaction with just moving bits around. We thought the net would be great because we have these bits other people might want. Let's share them! They can learn to grow better crops, ease the world of oppression, and so on. We still think that, it's just now we've arrived at "Sending bits around is great! But they need to be the _right_ bits" I think anybody back then would have agreed too. No stupidity required, just a misunderstanding of how progressive societies actually operate. If we had been approached with this problem in these words back then, we would have said something like "But that's not a tech problem" Well, maybe some stupidity was at play. But heck if anything's changed.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago"We thought of people were free to share ideas, they'd just share ideas that we agree with." Well, yes, if you did think that, you were probably stupid.
- Haga 4y ago
- amadeuspagel 4y agoA man came upon a social media site and asked the guard "How are the people on this site?" The guard asked in turn, "How were the people of your previous site?" The man responded "Cruel and vicious" The guard answered "So will you find them here." https://twitter.com/Hapless23/status/1587856187038613505 https://twitter.com/Hapless23/status/1587856187038613505
- nobodyandproud 4y agoBefore we go down the road of zero anonymity: When there’s no monetary cost to sending out and receiving information, regardless of the source and size then it shouldn’t be surprising that the noise to content ratio is high, with bad actors being the ones who benefit the most. Perhaps we need to be smarter about metered and unmetered data?
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoI'll take the apparently unpopular opinion, that it kind of did work like that, and the internet has accelerated our progress into some kind of future Star Trek utopia (hopefully skipping the 2026-2053 nuclear war that they have in their universe). I don't know how you'd support or discredit such a view but I generally feel like the free flow of information has been overall positive. Not uniformly so, but even the bad stuff say Nazis, was already there and mostly brought into the sunlight. I'm reminded of something I saw on the internet long ago, which compared a Time magazine piece about "life in Iran" which was all black and white photos of war murals, and contemporary Flickr photos from Iran, which was just normal people stuff, in color. Can't find it now, but here's a conversation on Flickr in 2007 that kind of sums up the same thing of "Iranians are normal people, like us", "I know, I'm Iranian": https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/discuss/72157615594907672/ https://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/discuss/7215761559... And here's someone who made a Firefox extension around the same time to work around the attempts to block flickr: https://advox.globalvoices.org/2007/02/14/iran-flickr-users-vs-the-state/ https://advox.globalvoices.org/2007/02/14/iran-flickr-users-... Iran isn't currently some Disneyland, but would it be better or worse without the internet? I vaguely feel there's been a positive impact. I know it was fashionable to get excited about the Arab Spring and then fashionable to be cynical about it all, but I feel like in one of those hype cycle things, the long term impact is being understimated, even as some overestimated the short term impact.
- GuB-42 4y agoThe internet has actually exceeded my expectations in how a revolution it would be. It was sold to me as: you will have access to all the knowledge at your fingertips, and it is mostly true. And by the time I thought of a traditional computer you have to turn on and sit in front of, not something that is in my pocket and accessible 24/7. You may talk about "fake news" and all sorts of falsehoods, but debunking these have never been easier, not only the truth is usually available, but there are is also information on how to do the debunking. I realize now how much bullshit I heard and believed in in my childhood with no easy way to fact check. Distance seem almost like an abstract concept now. Here I am, in France, writing to you guys in the US like you were my neighbors. In fact, it is sometimes easier to communicate with someone on the other side of the globe than with my neighbor. I like to travel (guess how I book my plane...), but not by necessity. So, sure enough, the internet didn't change human nature, but for me it was world changing enough to be compared to something like the industrial revolution.
- wdr1 4y agoI think one thing we've learned is anonymity often makes things worse. Substantially so. As someone raised on BBSes & Usenet, that pains me to say. But I think 4chan, Twitter & others have demonstrated that. One thing about $8 for Twitter Blue is it will make it easier to filter out the noise -- the trolls, the bots, etc. Previously I would have worried that having a toll on communication would mean we'd lose some important voices. That may still be true, but I've learned that having no cost on communication results in a lot of garbage being spewed.
- weberer 4y agoIts exactly the opposite. Back then, everyone was so smart. It was only people near the top of the bell curve who could access the internet in the 90's. Then sometime circa 2007, it stopped being a place mainly for intellectual discussion and pivoted to memes, entertainment, and political tribalism.
- tim333 4y agoI was around when the internet came out and I don't remember anyone saying it would fix everything. People thought it was cool and would fix some stuff which it kind of has - we have Wikipedia for example and anyone in the world can read smbc-comics pretty much for free. Other stuff has been disappointing, like it seems to have made the left/right wing arguments more polarized. Maybe we'll get a fix for that? Something that seems a big deal but it doesn't get much credit for is pre internet there were lots of talk about third world poverty, people starving and the like. That's got way better and I think better communications have a lot to do with it.