12 ms·

Reminds me of an old Bruce Sterling quote: "politics pulls us together, technology tears us apart". That always struck me as being directly opposite of our int

by argomo 2y ago

Reminds me of an old Bruce Sterling quote: "politics pulls us together, technology tears us apart". That always struck me as being directly opposite of our intuitions as technologists. As a species, we need a wider exploration of how to structure online spaces in a way that builds and sustains social capital instead of usurping it. That's difficult to do with out resorting to censorship and ideological totalitarianism. And it's probably not compatible with the ad-funded addiction-driven business model of most modern platforms. One historical example of note here is Wikipedia. It was a complete failure as a for-profit product, but it skyrocketed in significance when it opened up and adopted the relatively new social interaction model of the wiki.

asdff 2y ago
By far the biggest issue with the internet is the power it represents. And there is no avoiding that when it is by definition a way into the hearts and minds for every person connected to it on earth. It will always be ripe for advertising, for propaganda, for misinformation, because the incentives are just too damned great to not let it be. It was one thing when it was 25 years ago and internet users represented a small fraction of the worlds population compared to today. A fraction that might have gone unnoticed from a certain degree of mass advertising and propagandizing that always seeks to put itself where it can get in front of the most eyeballs, but that is no longer the case so long as so many people use the internet. I'm not sure what the solution is beyond niche little forums (tribes) that somehow tip toe the line of having the website be supported at all and also not growing too big to be of much interest for advertising and other forms of propaganda. And even then, how do you discover these little tribes? All the discovery mechanisms for internet content today are centralized or gated away from the upstart individual. Search engines, social media, even advertising in the meatspace takes serious capital. People don't have their own sites with webrings linking to other sites anymore. They have social media profiles and even then most people just lurk after highschool and college vs use it to share actual content or ideas. Search engines favor directing you to mass media and social media results for queries rather than small sites and forums. I feel like what is left of these niche interest and niche forums are doomed to die out in a few generations, since its so hard to actually come up into this world and find these refuges on the web unless you knew about them from years ago when the internet was smaller and signal to noise ratios were much higher. Kids today aren't even interested in using the web, let alone a desktop OS. At least there are still computer science college programs but who knows how long that will be the case everywhere in the chatGPT/cut everything era we find ourselves in.

by argomo 2y ago

asdff 2y ago

By far the biggest issue with the internet is the power it represents. And there is no avoiding that when it is by definition a way into the hearts and minds for every person connected to it on earth. It will always be ripe for advertising, for propaganda, for misinformation, because the incentives are just too damned great to not let it be. It was one thing when it was 25 years ago and internet users represented a small fraction of the worlds population compared to today. A fraction that might have gone unnoticed from a certain degree of mass advertising and propagandizing that always seeks to put itself where it can get in front of the most eyeballs, but that is no longer the case so long as so many people use the internet. I'm not sure what the solution is beyond niche little forums (tribes) that somehow tip toe the line of having the website be supported at all and also not growing too big to be of much interest for advertising and other forms of propaganda. And even then, how do you discover these little tribes? All the discovery mechanisms for internet content today are centralized or gated away from the upstart individual. Search engines, social media, even advertising in the meatspace takes serious capital. People don't have their own sites with webrings linking to other sites anymore. They have social media profiles and even then most people just lurk after highschool and college vs use it to share actual content or ideas. Search engines favor directing you to mass media and social media results for queries rather than small sites and forums. I feel like what is left of these niche interest and niche forums are doomed to die out in a few generations, since its so hard to actually come up into this world and find these refuges on the web unless you knew about them from years ago when the internet was smaller and signal to noise ratios were much higher. Kids today aren't even interested in using the web, let alone a desktop OS. At least there are still computer science college programs but who knows how long that will be the case everywhere in the chatGPT/cut everything era we find ourselves in.