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I lack an ability to put into words just how much I hate the tone of this article and the tone of this author. Particularly this last line. > As we build new w

I lack an ability to put into words just how much I hate the tone of this article and the tone of this author. Particularly this last line. > As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us. Why has every Silicon Valley leftist gotten it into their heads that this isn't a completely ridiculous statement? We're not superheros or magicians, in spite of the fact that the technical illiteracy of the rest of society may make us believe we are. We had some power a decade ago, but we've spent that. How did we spend it? What do humans historically do with power? They leverage it! We pillage and rape the earth. Five million people are dead in the congo so that we can steal their minerals and ship them to China where a suicidal 9 year old makes it into an iPhone, which is sold at exorbitant prices to lower and middle class Americans who consume websites that act as Centrifugal Bumble-Puppies and Orgy-Porgies that we create. But yeah, the real tragedy is that there's a TLD for an island of 2000 people who are losing their culture. Techies needs to be aware of THAT and stop THAT tragedy. Get real. The only power of the Internet ever held any promise in was allowing fringe opinions to be heard. Anyone could publish and be heard and read about certain taboo subjects and not be publicly shamed for entertaining a certain thought. 4chan still holds this sentiment. Reddit did for a while until it decided it had to make more money. I grew up on that Internet. It's long dead. Political correctness has killed everything. We had an opportunity to expose the masses to truly uncontrolled thought and discussion. We had an opportunity to embrace society-- ALL of society. We had an opportunity to create forums where we could all try to understand each other. Yes, that means racists and pedophiles and sexists and dickheads. But we instead created controlled environments like Facebook and reddit that represent nothing new and the world will flow on as it always has. We've created systems that encourage homogeneity in opinion and have marginalized the same people we always have. Tech isn't special.

cvet 11y ago
Cynicism like this only leads to self imposed amorality. It makes stagnation a self fulfilling prophecy. You're basically making a bandwagon argument that humans historically have abused power, so this frees anyone in tech from any obligation to try to not abuse power. This is an absurd argument because it precludes progress. There's a fair criticism of bleeding heart syndrome in the article. It's not the job of "tech" to solve every problem. But this doesn't mean we should just say "fuck it" when confronted with moral ambiguity because millions of people died in the Congo. The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push. And if pushing veers into silliness sometimes, who cares.
- developer1 11y ago
  "The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push." Please provide a real-world example of when this has most recently happened in any situation important enough to actually "count". The abuse exists everywhere you look, and there is never, ever, any serious backlash against it. The problem is that 99.99% of the population can care, but it only takes 0.01% willing to take advantage of the remaining population. There will never be a sense of justice in such things. People who want the power will always take it, and there is nothing that will change that. Cynicism is not a negative trait, it's the bloody goddamn truth of our species. It sucks, but that's how things work. There is no changing this. It's simply not in the cards. Anyone who disagrees is either full of themselves or totally blind to the way the world works.
  - eric-hu 11y ago
    One recent real world example of "things [improving] by large numbers of people speaking out" is gay marriage in America. It took time and victory had some false starts (i.e. Prop 8 in California), but now gay people are equally entitled to ruin their lives with marriage. In all seriousness, legalizing gay marriage is clearly one that far more than 0.01% of the population cared to oppose the issue, and yet they still eventually lost to an informed and vocal majority.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> But yeah, the real tragedy is that there's a TLD for an island of 2000 people who are losing their culture. Techies needs to be aware of THAT and stop THAT tragedy. Get real. So because big bad things happen, we must ignore the small things? This is nihilistic and selfish.
stvswn 11y ago
You had me nodding in agreement when I thought you were standing up against slacktivism and outrage-bait. Then I got puzzled when you started railing against consumerism and its consequences. Finally I realized you were just nostalgic for when the internet wasn't mainstream -- as if you are starved for open forums on today's internet. I think your real issue is that regular "lower and middle class Americans" are also on your internet, and as such it reflects society, which you find conformist and boring. Fine, just don't tie it into some nihilistic rant about how we're all complicit in mass murder because we consume electronic devices.
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  > I think your real issue is that regular "lower and middle class Americans" are also on your internet, and as such it reflects society, which you find conformist and boring. That's exactly my point. I'm upset that the internet going mainstream meant that they're not on "my" internet. They're on the part of the internet accessible via facebook and maybe reddit if they're <25y/o males.
- nl 11y ago
  I liked the claim that political correctness killed racism and pedophilia. If that's the case then I'm all for it!
  - nickysielicki 11y ago
    You haven't killed racism or pedophilia, you moron. You've created an environment where you can continue to misunderstand them. You've continued the tradition of denying to try to understand them and actually make progress on the issues.
raintrees 11y ago
For me, that last line conjured memories of Blank Reg from Max Headroom when one of the episodes examined a possible futuristic court of law. No official identity, no justice.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nyolfen 11y ago
>about: https://nicky.io https://nicky.io make way for the 20 year old whining about political correctness
- SeoxyS 11y ago
  > - The Unabomber Manifesto - Ted Kaczynski That's a really weird thing to have as a favorite writing and to advertise.
  - nickysielicki 11y ago
    From my original comment on this article: > [the internet was a place where] Anyone could publish and be heard and read about certain taboo subjects and not be publicly shamed for entertaining a certain thought. It's hilarious to me that you're doing just that. You're trying to shame me for finding some ideas interesting simply because it came from a crazy person? Does finding a piece of writing interesting imply that I agree with it or the actions of the person who wrote it? Are you going to shame me for finding van Gogh's art beautiful in spite of the fact that he cut his ear off? Have you ever even read what I'm referencing?
    - tim333 11y ago
      I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example. Also it was never the case such people were not criticised / shamed. Free speech works both ways you know - if you're free to say what you want then others are free to slag it off.
      - nickysielicki 11y ago
        > I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example. Yeah that's wholly disinteresting to me. Firstly, because that is a trolling subreddit. If it was a serious racism subreddit it would be more interesting, because I could debate with people who actually feel that way and hear their arguments, instead of angsty 15 year olds posting unfunny images. I guess I shouldn't be arguing that fringe opinions are not available on the internet-- they are. What I should be arguing is that fringe opinions are much easier to ignore on the internet now. We've created a lot of information and ways to filter it, and now we can effectively ignore them. I think downvoting and upvoting and hiveminds are what really has killed meaningful discourse. That's why I like the 4chan model so much-- every post gets to take up space and can't be ignored. For an extra dose of tin-foil-hat, I think reddit could be doing some vote manipulation in the larger subreddits. No one has really challenged the fact that they stopped including upvotes and downvotes in their JSON as of a few years ago. Without them it's really difficult to collect information and do analysis on certain users and keywords that anything is happening. (That's a fun idea, reddit should stream metadata about what's going on in the site to interested people.)
BorisMelnik 11y ago
>We're not superheros or magicians No, but we are the architects and general contractors of the internet. Sure as web developers and engineers at small companies we don't have vast decision making power, but as a whole especially in the open source community the distributed power we all possess is really something magical that will define the future of the web as a whole.

cvet 11y ago

Cynicism like this only leads to self imposed amorality. It makes stagnation a self fulfilling prophecy. You're basically making a bandwagon argument that humans historically have abused power, so this frees anyone in tech from any obligation to try to not abuse power. This is an absurd argument because it precludes progress. There's a fair criticism of bleeding heart syndrome in the article. It's not the job of "tech" to solve every problem. But this doesn't mean we should just say "fuck it" when confronted with moral ambiguity because millions of people died in the Congo. The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push. And if pushing veers into silliness sometimes, who cares.

developer1 11y ago
"The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push." Please provide a real-world example of when this has most recently happened in any situation important enough to actually "count". The abuse exists everywhere you look, and there is never, ever, any serious backlash against it. The problem is that 99.99% of the population can care, but it only takes 0.01% willing to take advantage of the remaining population. There will never be a sense of justice in such things. People who want the power will always take it, and there is nothing that will change that. Cynicism is not a negative trait, it's the bloody goddamn truth of our species. It sucks, but that's how things work. There is no changing this. It's simply not in the cards. Anyone who disagrees is either full of themselves or totally blind to the way the world works.
- eric-hu 11y ago
  One recent real world example of "things [improving] by large numbers of people speaking out" is gay marriage in America. It took time and victory had some false starts (i.e. Prop 8 in California), but now gay people are equally entitled to ruin their lives with marriage. In all seriousness, legalizing gay marriage is clearly one that far more than 0.01% of the population cared to oppose the issue, and yet they still eventually lost to an informed and vocal majority.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

> But yeah, the real tragedy is that there's a TLD for an island of 2000 people who are losing their culture. Techies needs to be aware of THAT and stop THAT tragedy. Get real. So because big bad things happen, we must ignore the small things? This is nihilistic and selfish.

stvswn 11y ago

You had me nodding in agreement when I thought you were standing up against slacktivism and outrage-bait. Then I got puzzled when you started railing against consumerism and its consequences. Finally I realized you were just nostalgic for when the internet wasn't mainstream -- as if you are starved for open forums on today's internet. I think your real issue is that regular "lower and middle class Americans" are also on your internet, and as such it reflects society, which you find conformist and boring. Fine, just don't tie it into some nihilistic rant about how we're all complicit in mass murder because we consume electronic devices.

nickysielicki 11y ago
> I think your real issue is that regular "lower and middle class Americans" are also on your internet, and as such it reflects society, which you find conformist and boring. That's exactly my point. I'm upset that the internet going mainstream meant that they're not on "my" internet. They're on the part of the internet accessible via facebook and maybe reddit if they're <25y/o males.
nl 11y ago
I liked the claim that political correctness killed racism and pedophilia. If that's the case then I'm all for it!
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  You haven't killed racism or pedophilia, you moron. You've created an environment where you can continue to misunderstand them. You've continued the tradition of denying to try to understand them and actually make progress on the issues.

raintrees 11y ago

For me, that last line conjured memories of Blank Reg from Max Headroom when one of the episodes examined a possible futuristic court of law. No official identity, no justice.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nyolfen 11y ago

>about: https://nicky.io https://nicky.io make way for the 20 year old whining about political correctness

SeoxyS 11y ago
> - The Unabomber Manifesto - Ted Kaczynski That's a really weird thing to have as a favorite writing and to advertise.
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  From my original comment on this article: > [the internet was a place where] Anyone could publish and be heard and read about certain taboo subjects and not be publicly shamed for entertaining a certain thought. It's hilarious to me that you're doing just that. You're trying to shame me for finding some ideas interesting simply because it came from a crazy person? Does finding a piece of writing interesting imply that I agree with it or the actions of the person who wrote it? Are you going to shame me for finding van Gogh's art beautiful in spite of the fact that he cut his ear off? Have you ever even read what I'm referencing?
  - tim333 11y ago
    I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example. Also it was never the case such people were not criticised / shamed. Free speech works both ways you know - if you're free to say what you want then others are free to slag it off.
    - nickysielicki 11y ago
      > I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example. Yeah that's wholly disinteresting to me. Firstly, because that is a trolling subreddit. If it was a serious racism subreddit it would be more interesting, because I could debate with people who actually feel that way and hear their arguments, instead of angsty 15 year olds posting unfunny images. I guess I shouldn't be arguing that fringe opinions are not available on the internet-- they are. What I should be arguing is that fringe opinions are much easier to ignore on the internet now. We've created a lot of information and ways to filter it, and now we can effectively ignore them. I think downvoting and upvoting and hiveminds are what really has killed meaningful discourse. That's why I like the 4chan model so much-- every post gets to take up space and can't be ignored. For an extra dose of tin-foil-hat, I think reddit could be doing some vote manipulation in the larger subreddits. No one has really challenged the fact that they stopped including upvotes and downvotes in their JSON as of a few years ago. Without them it's really difficult to collect information and do analysis on certain users and keywords that anything is happening. (That's a fun idea, reddit should stream metadata about what's going on in the site to interested people.)

BorisMelnik 11y ago

>We're not superheros or magicians No, but we are the architects and general contractors of the internet. Sure as web developers and engineers at small companies we don't have vast decision making power, but as a whole especially in the open source community the distributed power we all possess is really something magical that will define the future of the web as a whole.