5 ms·

That was a temporary blip. Specific technologies facilitated an age of mass, top-down communications in the mid 20th century, just by virtue of how those techno

by rayiner 2mo ago

That was a temporary blip. Specific technologies facilitated an age of mass, top-down communications in the mid 20th century, just by virtue of how those technologies worked. It enabled a small group of people in charge of the radio/TV stations to have a monopoly on communications and media. The technology both before (printing presses with myriad newspapers) and after (the Internet) were by their nature decentralized.

flir 2mo ago
Not totally convinced about the printing press example (expensive, technical). The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.
- rayiner 2mo ago
  > The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. You're assuming that "rich" is the only relevant dividing line, which it isn't.
  - flir 2mo ago
    Gnomic.
  - LastTrain 2mo ago
    But GP was pointing at commonalities, not differences. It took money to run a major press.
- shimman 2mo ago
  This discounting how many of the 100s of worker owned newspapers/magazines that were in circulation. Not everything was controlled by a select few. How did you think labor movements in America during the 1800s collectively organized across the country sharing literal war stories?
  - KPGv2 2mo ago
    "Oh those don't count as newspapers. Newspapers are professional. Those are just zines." It's why I hate people looking down on fanfiction, too. Aliens was Alien fanfiction. The New Testament is OT fanfiction. Hell, nolan's The Odyssey is fanfiction. The establishment uses terms to dismiss outsider art as less-than, and this isn't much different. (They of course get to decide what the "inside" is)
    - hollerith 2mo ago
      >Aliens was Alien fanfiction Just because an established Hollywood director was a fan of the first Alien movie does make his script for Alien's sequel "fan fiction". Cameron had already written and directed The Terminator when the owners of the Alien franchise chose his script for the sequel. (Fifty Shades of Grey in contrast really did originate as fan fiction.)
  - flir 2mo ago
    I'm not discounting it by any means. And I know about the pamphlet era that was enabled by the invention of the printing press, and the profound effect it had on Europe. But what's the typical reach of one of those worker-owned newspapers, compared to the reach of a mass circulation newspaper? I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. The "age of mass, top-down communications" didn't start "in the mid 20th century", and the printing press should not be used as a counterexample to support rayiner's argument. William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863.
    - shimman 2mo ago
      Worker newspapers in the US had circulations as high as 10s of thousands to almost a million during the height of national strikes during the new deal (nearly several every month). The point is you are letting a system designed by elites to uphold elites set the boundaries. There are many forms of alternative media out there, some more popular than any billionaire owned rag. Just expand your definition and don't let others tell you what is or isn't appropriate. Especially when it comes to political thought.
- ijk 2mo ago
  The early pre-United States had pamphlets and newsletters. Like, a lot of them. It was a big influence on the early post office. You could get rich running a printing press but you did it by printing for the masses. The yellow journalism era, on the other hand, was a little closer to the rich owning the press.
  - thewebguyd 2mo ago
    The penny press, and a ton of those pamphlets amount to what we now call tabloids. They were funded by advertising too, and used fear & outrage to sell copies. Led to some pretty funny conspiracies like The Moon Hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax) Times are not as different as we'd like to believe
- dragontamer 2mo ago
  Rich _people_ yes. But corporations were an act of Congress in 1776. Early America was decidedly anti-corporate (the Boston Tea Party was about a tax break to a corporation). Early Americans (and early thinkers who influenced Americans) were grossly distrustful of corporations and pools of money. > The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations
__MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, building ever more resistant methods of communication. I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA. 3 was a bit of a flop, but there's a lot of design space still out there to explore.
- rayiner 2mo ago
  The top-down centralization of mid-20th century technologies wasn't caused by "money," it was caused by their technological nature. They inherently relied on limited radio spectrum that was doled out to specific companies by the government.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
    By "money" I mean that you can't attract investors for a project that they cannot later "leverage". This creates a bias towards some designs and away from others. Central points of control are also single points of failure. I think that without this bias we'd have a much more resilient infrastructure, not just in the face of corruption, but in the face of things like solar flares.
- danhodgins 2mo ago
  Yes. I thought maybe Blockchain might be able to provide some of that robustness for the public web, but it's all about speculative investment now.
  - switchbak 2mo ago
    A fully traceable public ledger is kind of a wet dream for an intelligence agency/evil corp. Funny how much faith we put into that, and look at it now.
    - 2mo ago
pstuart 2mo ago
I've thought about this more than I should but I think that the wonders of internet "channels" comes with a significant cost. First, let me acknowledge the quasi-monopoly aspect -- it definitely constrained choice and filtered world events through the lens of their corporate overlords, the CIA dripped propaganda into discourse, etc. But there was so much shared experience that that pretty much unified the US as a tribe. Conspiracies were passed around but were kind of like underground whispers. There was no Red vs Blue. I'm not arguing to go back to those times, but in many ways the internet and more so, social media, is a deal with the devil.

by rayiner 2mo ago

flir 2mo ago

Not totally convinced about the printing press example (expensive, technical). The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.

rayiner 2mo ago
> The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people. You're assuming that "rich" is the only relevant dividing line, which it isn't.
- flir 2mo ago
  Gnomic.
- LastTrain 2mo ago
  But GP was pointing at commonalities, not differences. It took money to run a major press.
shimman 2mo ago
This discounting how many of the 100s of worker owned newspapers/magazines that were in circulation. Not everything was controlled by a select few. How did you think labor movements in America during the 1800s collectively organized across the country sharing literal war stories?
- KPGv2 2mo ago
  "Oh those don't count as newspapers. Newspapers are professional. Those are just zines." It's why I hate people looking down on fanfiction, too. Aliens was Alien fanfiction. The New Testament is OT fanfiction. Hell, nolan's The Odyssey is fanfiction. The establishment uses terms to dismiss outsider art as less-than, and this isn't much different. (They of course get to decide what the "inside" is)
  - hollerith 2mo ago
    >Aliens was Alien fanfiction Just because an established Hollywood director was a fan of the first Alien movie does make his script for Alien's sequel "fan fiction". Cameron had already written and directed The Terminator when the owners of the Alien franchise chose his script for the sequel. (Fifty Shades of Grey in contrast really did originate as fan fiction.)
- flir 2mo ago
  I'm not discounting it by any means. And I know about the pamphlet era that was enabled by the invention of the printing press, and the profound effect it had on Europe. But what's the typical reach of one of those worker-owned newspapers, compared to the reach of a mass circulation newspaper? I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. The "age of mass, top-down communications" didn't start "in the mid 20th century", and the printing press should not be used as a counterexample to support rayiner's argument. William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863.
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Worker newspapers in the US had circulations as high as 10s of thousands to almost a million during the height of national strikes during the new deal (nearly several every month). The point is you are letting a system designed by elites to uphold elites set the boundaries. There are many forms of alternative media out there, some more popular than any billionaire owned rag. Just expand your definition and don't let others tell you what is or isn't appropriate. Especially when it comes to political thought.
ijk 2mo ago
The early pre-United States had pamphlets and newsletters. Like, a lot of them. It was a big influence on the early post office. You could get rich running a printing press but you did it by printing for the masses. The yellow journalism era, on the other hand, was a little closer to the rich owning the press.
- thewebguyd 2mo ago
  The penny press, and a ton of those pamphlets amount to what we now call tabloids. They were funded by advertising too, and used fear & outrage to sell copies. Led to some pretty funny conspiracies like The Moon Hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax) Times are not as different as we'd like to believe
dragontamer 2mo ago
Rich _people_ yes. But corporations were an act of Congress in 1776. Early America was decidedly anti-corporate (the Boston Tea Party was about a tax break to a corporation). Early Americans (and early thinkers who influenced Americans) were grossly distrustful of corporations and pools of money. > The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations

__MatrixMan__ 2mo ago

It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, building ever more resistant methods of communication. I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA. 3 was a bit of a flop, but there's a lot of design space still out there to explore.

rayiner 2mo ago
The top-down centralization of mid-20th century technologies wasn't caused by "money," it was caused by their technological nature. They inherently relied on limited radio spectrum that was doled out to specific companies by the government.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  By "money" I mean that you can't attract investors for a project that they cannot later "leverage". This creates a bias towards some designs and away from others. Central points of control are also single points of failure. I think that without this bias we'd have a much more resilient infrastructure, not just in the face of corruption, but in the face of things like solar flares.
danhodgins 2mo ago
Yes. I thought maybe Blockchain might be able to provide some of that robustness for the public web, but it's all about speculative investment now.
- switchbak 2mo ago
  A fully traceable public ledger is kind of a wet dream for an intelligence agency/evil corp. Funny how much faith we put into that, and look at it now.
  - 2mo ago

pstuart 2mo ago

I've thought about this more than I should but I think that the wonders of internet "channels" comes with a significant cost. First, let me acknowledge the quasi-monopoly aspect -- it definitely constrained choice and filtered world events through the lens of their corporate overlords, the CIA dripped propaganda into discourse, etc. But there was so much shared experience that that pretty much unified the US as a tribe. Conspiracies were passed around but were kind of like underground whispers. There was no Red vs Blue. I'm not arguing to go back to those times, but in many ways the internet and more so, social media, is a deal with the devil.