A Professor Warns the Internet 'is Not What You Think It Is' (lareviewofbooks.org) 88
Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of the history and philosophy of science. Princeton University Press has just published his new book — titled The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. (Definite internet as "the part that we are glued to for most hours of our waking lives" which in its current usage "hinders the exercise of attention, which, indeed, in the book I try to argue is crucial to a thriving human life.")
Smith recently answered questions from the science editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Some radically condensed excerpts: [T]he "crisis moment" comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That's when the crisis starts....
You identify as another contributing factor to our crisis moment the internet's addictive nature. How do algorithms play a role in addiction...?
[T]he reason why they abandoned the fire hose and started nudging us this way or that is because the social media companies are private for-profit companies, and the more they can nudge us to watch or to keep looking, to keep refreshing, the more money they're going to make. So that's not a philosophical problem. It's just a massively concerted effort to streamline and maximize our screen time..... [E]verything seems to be geared toward harnessing attention and exploiting attention on the designers' parts, rather than in cultivating attention on the user's part....
You could also ask, however, of social media... are you really conversing? Are you really debating? And I think the answer is, almost always, no. What's happening on social media is rather a simulation of discussion and debate. Or, as I like to put it, Twitter is a debate-themed video game, in the same way that, say, Grand Theft Auto is a stolen-car-chase-themed video game.... [S]ocial media [is] more like a false suffocation or a perversion of the thing it pretends to be.... [T]his is a real problem because there's no other game in town. At this point, if you have any lingering hope for the prospects of deliberative democracy, the idea that you need to find a neutral public space to pursue it in, it's just so obvious that the only possible setting is online. I mean, you can go print pamphlets in your basement if you want but that's not going to get your movement very far.
So we only have one choice as a public space, and it's a spurious one. It's one that can't be a public space because its raison d'être is something quite different....
In different government/enterprise meshes in different systems throughout the world, including the United States, but also significantly, China, we're seeing one and the same thing slowly emerge, again, under very different legal systems in very different cultures with different historical legacies. And that is, namely, a system in which algorithms constrain and define and limit our identities rather than enabling us to cultivate our freedoms.
The interview (and the book) re-visit 17th-century German philosopher/early modern polymath Gottfried Leibniz — who built a gear-and-wheel-driven "reckoning engine" — as the first incarnation for the tech utopian dream of outsourcing our reasoning.
"[I]t goes from the mid-1670s to precisely the mid-2010s, by which point it became painfully obvious that such outsourcing of reason was actually causing problems even as it was solving old problems. It was certainly not the path to world peace and stability that one might have hoped for in an earlier generation."
Smith recently answered questions from the science editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Some radically condensed excerpts: [T]he "crisis moment" comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That's when the crisis starts....
You identify as another contributing factor to our crisis moment the internet's addictive nature. How do algorithms play a role in addiction...?
[T]he reason why they abandoned the fire hose and started nudging us this way or that is because the social media companies are private for-profit companies, and the more they can nudge us to watch or to keep looking, to keep refreshing, the more money they're going to make. So that's not a philosophical problem. It's just a massively concerted effort to streamline and maximize our screen time..... [E]verything seems to be geared toward harnessing attention and exploiting attention on the designers' parts, rather than in cultivating attention on the user's part....
You could also ask, however, of social media... are you really conversing? Are you really debating? And I think the answer is, almost always, no. What's happening on social media is rather a simulation of discussion and debate. Or, as I like to put it, Twitter is a debate-themed video game, in the same way that, say, Grand Theft Auto is a stolen-car-chase-themed video game.... [S]ocial media [is] more like a false suffocation or a perversion of the thing it pretends to be.... [T]his is a real problem because there's no other game in town. At this point, if you have any lingering hope for the prospects of deliberative democracy, the idea that you need to find a neutral public space to pursue it in, it's just so obvious that the only possible setting is online. I mean, you can go print pamphlets in your basement if you want but that's not going to get your movement very far.
So we only have one choice as a public space, and it's a spurious one. It's one that can't be a public space because its raison d'être is something quite different....
In different government/enterprise meshes in different systems throughout the world, including the United States, but also significantly, China, we're seeing one and the same thing slowly emerge, again, under very different legal systems in very different cultures with different historical legacies. And that is, namely, a system in which algorithms constrain and define and limit our identities rather than enabling us to cultivate our freedoms.
The interview (and the book) re-visit 17th-century German philosopher/early modern polymath Gottfried Leibniz — who built a gear-and-wheel-driven "reckoning engine" — as the first incarnation for the tech utopian dream of outsourcing our reasoning.
"[I]t goes from the mid-1670s to precisely the mid-2010s, by which point it became painfully obvious that such outsourcing of reason was actually causing problems even as it was solving old problems. It was certainly not the path to world peace and stability that one might have hoped for in an earlier generation."
The internet is a communication network (Score:5, Insightful)
Those of us who remember how difficult and time consuming it was to get information before the internet may not see the internet as an attention leech.
Re:The internet is a communication network (Score:5, Insightful)
Iffy.
Ease isn't the only metric. There is also quality and pertinence, and increasing the landscape after "do no evil" has been hindering aspects of all three.
Which raises the question as to why. Why isn't the web more streamlined in bringing up more relevant results, especially given all the data mining they have on each person?
Because the web is no longer primarily a communication network. It is a commerce network.
Re:The internet is a communication network (Score:5, Insightful)
The quality and pertinence wasn't there either. You took what you could get, which wasn't much. We get to be choosy because there's so much more of everything. If you let algorithms decide what you take in, that's on you. I'm not going back to phones, letters and card catalogs.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not going back to phones, letters and card catalogs.
And books. Periodicals. Real life gatherings, etc.
Kill those too I guess.
The part you are missing is the algorithms have already chosen for you. Unless you want to wade through the crapflood of "so much more of everything", you'll get what they deliver. And what they deliver is increasingly up for bid.
And as we have seen with the news, what they deliver is also highly manipulated.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The internet is a communication network (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not going back to phones, letters and card catalogs.
But they all had qualities that are worth keeping.
I still use the phone a lot, because the only thing more immediate is a face-to-face conversation. It gets across emotions and reactions so much better than a chat.
Letters are a big loss. People used to think about what to write and then write down whole sentences and full thoughts instead of bits and pieces and fragments. It was much easier to communicate meaning and complex thought and you would also think more about what you said and how you said it because you couldn't immediately go "oh no, that's not what I meant" when the round-trip time is a week or two.
There's a lot that current communication media sacrifices.
Re: (Score:3)
You're taking a "person to person" communication perspective, I see it as a system for making information available. A phone is a woefully inefficient method of accessing information, unless you need the "expert system" on the other end to guide you to the information. A letter is basically useless for that purpose. Card catalogs have the same quality as a curated web index: Great when it's got what you need, but very likely to not have it. I posit that the "thoughtfulness" of the old system that allegedly
Re: (Score:3)
I see it as a system for making information available.
In such case the right comparison isn't phone and letters, but books, libraries, universities, etc.
All of them still exist, and for good reasons. The Internet and sites such as Wikipedia are incredibly good at providing information - but not at providing knowledge.
Re:The internet is a communication network (Score:5, Interesting)
In such case the right comparison isn't phone and letters, but books, libraries, universities, etc.
All of them still exist, and for good reasons. The Internet and sites such as Wikipedia are incredibly good at providing information - but not at providing knowledge.
That's a categorical error.
"Books, libraries, universities" don't provide "knowledge" any more (and actually often far less) than "The Internet" or Wikipedia.
Phone calls and letters provide COMMUNICATION. Information or data contained in them is generally low quality subjective fluff. "How are things? Things are fine. How are yours. Fine."
Books and libraries provide selected and collated INFORMATION. Sometimes also DATA, but that's not the kind of books most people read.
E.g. Reading and rereading Fifty Shades of Gray will provide very little insight or wisdom and only data of value about it is probably related to whether it is ok to use its pages as toilet paper.
Universities, in contrast, provide systematized (and very much commercial) EDUCATION COURSES.
Whether someone will come out of those with some actual understanding, insight, qualification or god forbid knowledge and wisdom is... well... Dumpeacho the Assclown ran one of those and came out of another with a diploma.
Sad.
KNOWLEDGE, on the other hand, is something not provided but something ATTAINED (and maintained) through education, study and/or experience. Also, it is very subjective and personal.
E.g. Disassembling a mechanical clock WILL result in knowledge - but, for most people, rarely will it be the knowledge about how to repair one such clock.
Saying "the Internet" is as meaningless as saying "the electricity" - use and experience of "the..." is as different when using a particular website, a VOIP application or a streaming service (like YTS) as when using "the..." to iron shirts, cook lunch or run a server that the "the..." runs on.
It's a physical network with layers (about sevenish) built on top of it, whose main function is moving ones and zeroes around, fast and on demand.
Wikipedia is not much different than any digital encyclopedia. Only, unlike other encyclopedias, with it you can also see into the editing process and biases of the editors.
A good example would be Croatian Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], which, considering that it was done by amateurs and for free compares rather favorably to professional encyclopedias.
Overall 85% of articles were deemed "satisfactory" (error-free and containing minor errors), while in comparison 92% of articles in the Croatian Encyclopedia achieved the same rating.
And then you scroll down and read about systematic far-right lunacy of Croatian Wikipedia's editors and admins.
Makes you wonder about the state of biases among editors of professional encyclopedias, doesn't it?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes and other quotes by Alan Moore.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not going back to phones, letters and card catalogs.
But they all had qualities that are worth keeping.
Ever wonder why we didn't keep them then? Card catalog? That's like arguing for the abacus over calculators. Yes, a phone call is better than any written word, but a video call makes a phone call look like a letter, due to the simple fact that you can now convey facial expressions with audio. See how technology can improve communications? Not to mention our video quality no longer looks like it was run through a cheese grater.
Letters are a big loss. People used to think about what to write and then write down whole sentences and full thoughts instead of bits and pieces and fragments.
When people wanted to convey thoughts, they would write a letter. When people
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not going back to phones, letters and card catalogs.
But they all had qualities that are worth keeping.
Ever wonder why we didn't keep them then?
That's the wrong question, because he didn't say we should keep the things. He said we should keep the qualities they provided. And perhaps get them some other way.
But since you asked, it's more or less the same question, why do people use leafblowers rather than a rake even if they only have a 2x5 metre garden? Because the blower has a motor in it, and the rake doesn't. We now live in a day and age that to us "digital watches are a pretty neat idea", so most all our watches have to be digital, and even ev
Re: (Score:2)
I think you got exactly what I meant and put it into better words. Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
That's like arguing for the abacus over calculators.
Funny you would mention that. I actually learnt to use an abacus. For many everyday uses, if you are somewhat proficient, you're faster with it than someone with a calculator. My teacher would be done with her abacus in about half the time you need with your smartphone (yes, with the calculator app open and ready).
but a video call makes a phone call look like a letter, due to the simple fact that you can now convey facial expressions with audio.
But you can't take a video call in your underwear (well, depends from whom, but you get the point).
There are advantages to every medium, and disadvantages. And they create their own consequences a
Re: (Score:3)
Email isn't quite what letters were, not so much investment per unit, but it's pretty good. But it seems that many people are unable to use email efficiently due to ADD / disorganization
/ illiteracy / whatever, so now they "hate" email, and we get pushed into used junk like Teams / Slack / etc. And now we see people misusing and ignoring those systems like they did email. What's next, no communication at all?
Re: (Score:2)
But they all had qualities that are worth keeping.
And the qualities worth keeping were kept. Emails can still be as carefully considered and thoughtful as the creator wishes it to be. Blog posts similarly offer the same careful construction, with the added benefit of being available to the entire world (in the past, this would have only been available through print publishing of letters or op-eds or the like). Phones? They still exist, but video chat offers objectively superior instantaneous communication (with even better expression of emotion and reactio
Re: (Score:2)
And the qualities worth keeping were kept. Emails can still be as carefully considered and thoughtful as the creator wishes it to be.
Not really, no.
An E-Mail has a roundtrip time of minutes to hours. You can easily answer, explain, expand on the details, etc. It's not uncommon to shoot off one-liner e-mails. In the age of letters, you wouldn't have shot off one-liner letters.
The limitation of the medium does create implicit rules.
unless you let it.
But that's the point. You CAN now do something, and that's why a lot of people WILL do it.
Re: (Score:1)
In the case of email, you could, at one time, have thoughtful discussions in it. I know, because I did, for a while.
But it takes skill, and that skill is no longer acquired. In part of how we introduce new people to email: Put'em in front of a client, don't explain anything. "Here, it's easy."
Any of you know what Sender: does or when to use Reply-To:?
So we get top-posting because effectively nobody understands what they should be expecting their email clients to do for them (keep an archive, link threads
Re: (Score:2)
Letters are a big loss. People used to think about what to write and then write down whole sentences and full thoughts instead of bits and pieces and fragments. It was much easier to communicate meaning and complex thought and you would also think more about what you said and how you said it because you couldn't immediately go "oh no, that's not what I meant" when the round-trip time is a week or two.
We still have those. We call them blogs now.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The internet is a communication network (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet has stopped being used for the reasons it was built for.
No, it hasn't. People just use it for lots of other things too. As you may have seen explained before: Twitter is not the web. The web is not the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
no matter how much open standards are pushed the creator of content will never really own or control that content. You can code your own presentation but the "WEB" not the Internet, is about standards concerning how someone else is supposed to receive, store, deliver, keep safe, refactor, reorganize your content. whoever wants to do that owns you. at least DRM identifies content as something to protect and keep the state of therefore the argument will naturally be directed towards who creates the content an
Re: (Score:2)
And the Internet is any different from what TV and the Telephone were before the Internet?
Re: The internet is a communication network (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but we liminal internet users (I am also in that age group) are not what will become of the world. We're on our way out the door, so to speak. Perhaps in our old age we can make a lining using our multi-minute attention spans to wow crowds of youngsters with our mental feats. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Those of us who remember how difficult and time consuming it was to get information before the internet may not see the internet as an attention leech.
It's quite simpler than that.
It's hardly easy to call out addiction when everyone is an addict.
It's kind of like coffee. Most people cannot easily explain why they suck on hot bean juice every morning. All they know, is what happens when they don't.
Re: (Score:2)
Those of us who remember how difficult and time consuming it was to get information before the internet may not see the internet as an attention leech.
Yup.
And it's not like we were all spending our time learning Latin or curing cancer either.
Re:The internet is a communication network (Score:5, Insightful)
My first experiences on the Internet were on the *ARPANET*, and definitely see the Internet as an attention leech.
When the Internet was opened to the public, the idea is that it would connect people to information ... and it has. But because we, specifically *Americans* have weak privacy laws, it's been coopted by companies to collect information on *us*.
Back in 1973, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare compiled a report called "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens [justice.gov]". It was compiled under the highly respected Republican lawyer Elliot Richardson, but when John Mitchell had to resign as Attorney General because of the crimes he committed in Watergate, they tapped Richardson as a trusted figure to take over at Justice.
That happened just as the computer privacy report was being finished; Nixon brought in Caspar Weinberger (later Reagan's Secretary of Defense) at HEW. If you read the report, it *clearly* warns of the danger of letting a market develop in private data about citizens. Too late to change the report, Weinberger simply changed the conclusions: the government should not be able to share certain information between agencies, but the private sector should be allowed to regulate itself. The conclusion reframed the problems in the report as exclusively about *government* intrusion. Laws were passed later limiting the ability of federal agencies to share private data about citizens, but after 9/11 these were shown to be ineffective, because agencies could *buy* that information from the private market that had developed in the ensuing 30 years. In effect the right of government agencies to snoop in your private life is unrestricted, as long as they pay someone else to do it.
Effectively, Americans have no data privacy except for certain health information held by certain parties. The businesses created by this lack of individual privacy rights have metastasized to the rest of the world. It's not all bad; this certainly has done a great deal to advance the technology of amassing and querying huge datasets; we'd probably be twenty years behind where we are now in that if people had legally protected data privacy rights.
Oh No! (Score:4, Funny)
Internet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
What Mods. Most post never get above +2.
No Modifiers ether.
I did have mod points a week or so back. only after over a year.
Re: (Score:2)
There does seem to be something broken with Slashdot's moderation system lately - although it's possible it's an intentional change. Very few posts are getting modded up lately.
Re: (Score:2)
I have noticed sudden decrease of invitations to moderate.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I always struggle with my own bias. Sometimes points of view have merit, but the delivery is so tactless I don't want to reward people for being unnecessarily hostile (lot of that on /.). Then I read points of view that agree with mine, and want to mod them up, but what am I doing there except voting for what I think should be popular. And frankly, I don't have time to research every claim made.
So in the end, something that seems interesting, not too lunatic fringe, and not expressed in a way that would mak
Re: (Score:3)
Readers here on Slashdot say to yet another technophobic professor "it's not the network, pal, it's the greedheads and marketroids who use it to 'monetize' things!"
Not at all news . . . to irritate nerds. Because someone on the web is wrong again.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Readers here on Slashdot say to yet another technophobic professor "it's not the network, pal, it's the greedheads and marketroids who use it to 'monetize' things!"
I find it rather ironic that when it comes to the richest "greedheads" in the known universe, pretty much all of them used to be known, or still are, Nerds.
Re: (Score:2)
Readers here on Slashdot say to yet another technophobic professor "it's not the network, pal, it's the greedheads and marketroids who use it to 'monetize' things!"
I find it rather ironic that when it comes to the richest "greedheads" in the known universe, pretty much all of them used to be known, or still are, Nerds.
Disagree. I'll give you Brin and Page. I certainly don't think Bezos, the Waltons, and Jack Ma are nerds. And people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren't nerds any more than farmers are plants - we thrive under their care but somehow they profit more than we do.
Re: (Score:2)
Readers here on Slashdot say to yet another technophobic professor "it's not the network, pal, it's the greedheads and marketroids who use it to 'monetize' things!"
I find it rather ironic that when it comes to the richest "greedheads" in the known universe, pretty much all of them used to be known, or still are, Nerds.
And people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren't nerds any more than farmers are plants - we thrive under their care but somehow they profit more than we do.
You thrive under their care because these world class nerds spent their nerdy years inventing shit that even fellow nerds are jealous of.
Bill Gates and Zuck, not nerds? Give me a fucking break. When the hell did the definition become that damn warped? Probably when people got so high they started comparing farmers to plants.
Re: (Score:2)
world class nerds spent their nerdy years inventing shit
What did they invent? Bill maybe gave the world software patents. Zuck - no idea. What else did they actually invent?
When the hell did the definition become that damn warped?
As for definitions getting warped, I feel I'm being asked from a mirror universe. In my universe, Slashdot realizes these exploitative goons are not nerds.
Re: Internet? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot has algorithms too, but not used to display content; there's so little content that they can't pick and choose what to show you. But the algorithms can control who gets modpoints, which control which comments most people see in the end.
Real life isn't Star Trek (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people aren't on the internet to better themselves. To the average person, it's just an idiot box where you can be part of the peanut gallery if you wish.
Look at that "Place" thing that Reddit recently put up. It's primarily flags, identity banners, video game characters, corporate logos, reproductions of existing artwork, and a few cryptocurrency ads. Give people a blank slate to create whatever they want and they just copy, because the average person isn't creative.
So yeah, it's not surprising that social media primarily consists of people re-sharing and amplifying their own tribal beliefs and things they've been told to like by corporations. It's human nature.
Re: (Score:1)
...Look at that "Place" thing that Reddit recently put up. It's primarily flags, identity banners, video game characters, corporate logos, reproductions of existing artwork, and a few cryptocurrency ads...
Reddit? that over-moderated psuedo-forum? does anyone still go there?
Reddit mods censor the crap out of so many reddit forums, anything critical just gets removed immediately, basically useless except for corporate propoganda and group think self-reassurance
Re: (Score:2)
Reddit? that over-moderated psuedo-forum? does anyone still go there?
Yes reddit. It's basically a slightly updated /. with actual users.
The algorithms aren't what we think they are (Score:5, Informative)
There's a fundamental mismatch between what we expect and what the reality is. Most people think of eg. Twitter as a site to see the latest stuff the people they follow have posted. What Twitter actually is, what the algorithms underneath it make it into, is a site to see the latest content the people paying Twitter money to promote it have posted, the content from people you follow is solely there to give you a reason to visit the site. Even on a site like Google's search where it appears the majority of the content is what you asked for, it's still adjusted and tweaked to maximize the amount of content Google is getting paid to display.
That disconnect between what people expect and what they're being given is at the heart of all the problems. We can't legislate that social media sites give us what we expect or what we ask for, but I think we need to legislate that they have to clearly indicate as part of the content presentation the degree to which it's determined by what we asked for vs. influenced by other factors (including what the site thinks we want, to the degree that it differs from what we expressly asked for).
Re:The algorithms aren't what we think they are (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right there.
This is not entirely new, though. The same can be said of TV and radio, where the program exists so you watch/listen and keep watching/listening while the real game is the ads.
Newspapers are a bit of a mixed thing because you buy them, so ads are not their only revenue stream. It's probably why the transition to online is still difficult for them.
I don't think legislation or transparency solve this issue. Paying for what we want will solve it. A search engine that runs on a subscription instead of an advertisement model would have an incentive to serve those who use it as good as possible. Unfortunately, Google has a similar incentive, just for a different reason (you'll come more often to use it so they can show more ads). So not sure how winnable that is.
On video, we do see that paid-for content works. The likes of HBO or Curiosity Stream prove that you can have a business model without advertisement. And since you pay the same money each month they don't have an interest in hooking you up as much as possible.
Maybe just maybe a social network based on a similar model would be possible. But in social media, the barrier to entry is very high because the network is worthless if most of your friends aren't on it.
Re: (Score:2)
What Twitter actually is, what the algorithms underneath it make it into, is a site to see the latest content the people paying Twitter money to promote it have posted, the content from people you follow is solely there to give you a reason to visit the site.
There may be more truth to that when it comes to places serving ads with content, but Twitter can't get away with bending reality as much as we might assume. For example, it became painfully obvious who was shilling for Hollywood or fans of Will Smith, based on who would talk about the Oscars, and who would not.
Even if Jack Dorsey ran the Will Smith fan club, that Oscars moment would have still been trending on Twitter.
Re: (Score:3)
I fear that... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It depends on what you mean by "internet", if you mean the parts of it people interface with most these days then it's certainly the web.
Besides, knowing TCP/IP only tells part of the internet story. You have to at a minimum also know about ICANN, DNS and BGP to get what's going on (though one of these things is not like the others, those are perhaps the most important other acronyms...)
Re: (Score:2)
Not really, you also need to know something about UDP.
I just go WTH with Professor's excerpts (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
He's a philosopher and a historian. His specialty is opinion.
Deception is harder now (Score:2)
Deception is *easier* than ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The real issue is people speak freely and are able to hear each other clearly.
Not in the main. While the technology can be used that way by the savvy, mostly people's speech is being hidden when it's not engaging enough for social media, and amplified when it's beneficial to the economic status quo. When you disagree with the mainstream, your speech tends to be obscured from others.
hmm (Score:1)
[T]he reason why they abandoned the fire hose and started nudging us this way or that is because the social media companies are private for-profit companies, and the more they can nudge us to watch or to keep looking, to keep refreshing, the more money they're going to make.
Kind of a bizarre claim, considering how much of the "nudging" (er, and disappearing, and "de-platforming") is really just in the desired political direction of the social media giants' management.
Which, whatever your political leanings, is manifestly the opposite of being market and profit driven.
I mean, whatever "branding half of the US population as deplorable" actually is, I don't think you can say that it's purely profit driven, can you?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: hmm (Score:2)
Parallel Universes (Score:2)
I wish I could remember the name of the book (think Sliders) where an inventor finds a way to communicate with parallel universes which he starts by passing notes with questions on it through the device.
Every time he passed a question through the device, he would get a variation of the question in return. That was until he started putting information in the device and he would get a variation of the information back.
My point is it seems the internet seems oriented around consuming content instead of p
here we go again (Score:1)
1) create moral panic
2) sell book
3) profit
tl;dr (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Leibniz (Score:2)
The interview (and the book) re-visit 17th-century German philosopher/early modern polymath Gottfried Leibniz — who built a gear-and-wheel-driven "reckoning engine" — as the first incarnation for the tech utopian dream of outsourcing our reasoning.
Leibniz was clear that all the Staffelwalze could do was calculate - not think. He denied that machines could ever think.
Moreover, his machine was far from the first; Pascal had also built one, an inferior version that could only add and substract. Leibniz's could do all four basic operations.
Maybe we're just apes? (Score:2)
Typo? (Score:1)
Social media != Internet (Score:1)
Confusing social media sites for "the internet" seems to be a big problem that this professor hasn't solved for himself yet.
Outsourcing judgement .. (Score:2)
WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong.
Public space... no. (Score:3)
The Internet is, in no case, actually a public space. If you're on an Internet-based social platform of any significance, at some point, your access is via a corporate entity, or entities, that have solid legal standing to muzzle you in the name of any rationale they like — or none at all.
Your ISP can do it.
A backbone provider can do it.
A hosting service can do it.
A nameserver operation can do it.
A DNS server operation can do it.
Any social platform can do it (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.)
Moderators operating on behalf of a social platform can do it.
Without legislation formally declaring that access and platform comprise a public space, what we have in the context of the Internet is, at best, a thin illusion of a public space.
I don't see that happening, either. It's been completely obvious for years that the Internet should be serving in this role, and our political system hasn't done anything of real import to address this reality.
I'm a pretty dedicated lefty, with a few conservative positions here and there;. I am just as appalled as any other lefty when I read some of the absolutely ridiculous ignorant, and/or conservative and/or regressive garbage that hits the Internet; anti-vax and anti-mask; the various outbreaks of xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, genism ("the boomers this", "the gen-x'ers that"), superstition, misogyny, jingoism, classism, etc... but you would never induce me to say that those posts should be disallowed or the posters thrown off the platforms they posted on.
The only context in which people should experience kickback is from their fellow citizens, those with an equal, not superior, right to express their own views in an unfettered manner in the public space of the Internet, were such a space to actually exist. Any denial of access outside of a carefully considered court order comprises de facto and arbitrary imposition of a lower class of freedom of speech and access to services. That's something we should look upon with no favor whatsoever.
There's no established right to "not be offended", nor should such a thing ever arise in a healthy society. But the reality is that such a protective envelope is firmly in place, buttressed by the legal positions that allow corporations to do anything they want where (some of) the public is allowed access to their concept of what speech and access is okay, and what is not.
Today, for the disenfranchised, this means limited or no access to things like the health department's web presence; the invisibility of the political statements of politicians; the inability to share with your own family on platforms like Facebook, limited access your own patient records, and so on.
For all the FS's and FA's bitching about social networks, the reality is that for the majority, the Internet is the major communications pathway. The Internet is where most information reaches us; and it is where we may react to information. When access and/or posting is restricted, that can have a huge impact on people's lives, to the extent that they fall solidly into a lower, less abled class of person.
No one should be in favor of imposing such isolation. I'm not even comfortable with it being done by the courts to any otherwise free individual. Not just because courts make mistakes, either; also because it strikes me as an incredibly bad idea with the effect of preventing people who are so limited from re-integrating. That's a recipe for creating lower class individuals by fiat.
Old man yells at the cloud (Score:3)
We is the internet (Score:2)
There is no I in we...as he said "I". We are the internet.
Pareto principle (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]