[HN Gopher] Phil Agre saw the dark side of the Internet 30 years...
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Phil Agre saw the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago
Author : lisper
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-08-12 18:25 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Phil Agre's homepage at UCLA is still alive and has numerous of
| his writings:
|
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/
|
| Previous HN posts on Agre:
|
| Phil Agre Missing (Nov 26, 2009)
| http://chronicle.com/article/FriendsColleagues-Search/49222/
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962065
|
| Missing Internet Pioneer Phil Agre Is Found Alive (Feb 1 2010)
| http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/01/missing_i...
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093773
|
| He's mentioned in several HN comments as well, though suprisingly
| few:
|
| Recommended writings:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21818796
| dang wrote:
| Some past threads - not very large - on his writings:
|
| _How to help someone use a computer. (1996)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22989658 - April 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Find Your Voice: Writing for a Webzine (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18248836 - Oct 2018 (8
| comments)
|
| _Your Face Is Not a Bar Code (2003)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17939248 - Sept 2018 (29
| comments)
|
| _Life After Cyberspace (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300953 - April 2015 (2
| comments)
|
| _How to help someone use a computer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644200 - Aug 2010 (8
| comments)
|
| _How to help someone use a computer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400048 - Dec 2008 (5
| comments)
|
| _How to Be a Leader in Your Field_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52443 - Sept 2007 (2
| comments)
|
| Also related:
|
| _Making AI Philosophical Again: On Philip E. Agre's Legacy
| (2014)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21809610 - Dec
| 2019 (15 comments)
|
| _Missing Internet Pioneer Phil Agre Is Found Alive_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093773 - Feb 2010 (5
| comments)
|
| _Phil Agre Missing_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962065 - Nov 2009 (4
| comments)
| horrified wrote:
| The article reads as if the WSJ just needs a pretense to push
| their social justice viewpoints.
|
| They really are not going to give the Gebru story a rest.
|
| I wonder why Bezos doesn't stop them, after all Amazon is also a
| big player in AI. Maybe it is just the usual: pushing for
| government regulation to keep the weaker competition out?
| tpmx wrote:
| WSJ?
| horrified wrote:
| Sorry, WaPo.
| extra88 wrote:
| They're confusing their SJes.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I felt the same - I'd never heard of Phil Agre and he might
| have good writing, but either this presentation was a terrible
| attempt to shoehorn an otherwise solid academic into a
| political agenda, or he's somebody worth ignoring.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > The article reads as if the WSJ just needs a pretense to push
| their social justice viewpoints.
|
| Yes.
|
| Since they used this author I would have assumed he was not
| worth the time but this article is solid - "How to help someone
| use a computer" https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-
| to-help.html
|
| Perhaps this is why he disappeared, the people he railed
| against were using his work against his principals?
|
| Phil Agre's Wired articles - https://www.wired.com/author/phil-
| agre/
|
| The 1995 "While the Left Sleeps" about the Left underestimating
| the Republicans is interesting.
| samizdis wrote:
| > The 1995 "While the Left Sleeps" about the Left
| underestimating the Republicans is interesting.
|
| Good grief. Thanks for pointing that out - it gave me
| goosebumps. I can't get my head around how clearly he could
| see what was happening, and why/how it was happening, and
| what the end game would be. Brilliant, if chilling.
| newbamboo wrote:
| My favorite part, "Business coalitions are already forming
| to eviscerate the Securities and Exchange Commission and
| the Food and Drug Administration, which regulate perhaps
| the country's most morally hazardous industries."
|
| Prescient if not somewhat ironic. We can't even find
| someone who wants to be the FDA commissioner now. It's
| become an organ of our government-media industrial complex.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Nevertheless, AI has barreled ahead unencumbered
|
| And, assuming you accept that there really is a "problem" here,
| what exactly is the solution? To encumber it? Encumber it how,
| exactly?
| malwarebytess wrote:
| I remember 10 years ago I was so interested in and hopeful that
| learning algorithms would revolutionize diagnosis and treatment
| in medicine. Instead it really looks like all these algorithms,
| after being trained by biased apes, are only cementing bad
| policy behind faceless decision makers. The government loves
| them because it removes accountability and access; especially
| when they can use private entities to do so.
|
| I think there are two things at least that must be done:
|
| 1. Make individual people accountable for the decisions that
| 'AI' systems make.
|
| 2. Foster a culture of critique within AI development and
| deployment.
| newsyyswen wrote:
| Requiring a human being to be on the public record as
| personally and financially responsible for an AI's decisions
| would be a good start.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The part about computer science been in a vacuum, disconnected
| for the world is very intersting. Being disconnected can result
| in technologies, which should never left the lab, being released
| on an unsuspecting public, but it can also be a defence
| mechanism.
|
| Many of the tech gigants have employees that must have trouble
| justifying their work, unless they distance themself from the
| reality of it.
| [deleted]
| citizenpaul wrote:
| > inability to resist well-crafted disinformation
|
| Hmmm in the article that mentions this it chooses one singular
| point about the capital riot for disinformation when there are
| probably 1000 better examples.
|
| Lets start with vaccines are bad.
|
| How about ads masquerading as news.
|
| How about scientist discover headlines that have no relation to
| the article.
|
| How about basically everything on twitter.
|
| How about disaster news where the people are photographing tiny
| areas to make it look worse.
|
| All off the top of my head. Yeah no agenda here.
| dionian wrote:
| should we assume all info about capitol riot is non-partisan
| and honest? how bout big pharma?
| turadg wrote:
| > "He was a very enlightening person to think with -- someone you
| would want to have a meal with at every opportunity," Borgman
| said.
|
| +1. He had (has?) an rare combination of intellectual humility
| with didactic ability and drive.
|
| I remember getting to chat with him after he presented at
| Webzine. It was in an SF warehouse, exploring the sociotechnical
| phenomena we'd come to call blogs. It was 1999 IIRC because there
| was wine but I wasn't old enough to drink it. He was happy to sit
| down with this kid, teach and listen.
| simulo wrote:
| A repeated topic in Agre's writings are the practices and
| consequences of (computable) abstraction, which is reflected in
| his (and Chapman's) AI approaches, his criticism of AI and his
| writings on privacy. A core claim is that engineers make
| abstractions based on an implicit aristotelian/cartesian
| philosophy, assuming that what they abstract actually exists in
| the world and is merely "extracted" or "found".
| beckman466 wrote:
| > A core claim is that engineers make abstractions based on an
| implicit aristotelian/cartesian philosophy, assuming that what
| they abstract actually exists in the world and is merely
| "extracted" or "found".
|
| Interesting. Would you share some example contexts he used in
| his analyses? What are the abstractions he defines, and where
| are they used? Is he talking about e.g. our financial system?
|
| Agre covered many topics, so if someone is already clued up on
| his core arguments here (as well as sources for further
| exploration), I'd very much welcome (and deeply appreciate)
| them sharing it here.
| jonjacky wrote:
| Phil Agre was a prolific writer with many high-quality
| contributions on a variety of topics. Here are some samples:
|
| How to help someone use a computer:
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html
|
| Rationalizations for bad design, a posting to RISKS digest:
| http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/7.09.html#subj1
|
| Layering, from a course on Information Systems and Design:
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/240/week5.html
|
| Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying
| to Reform AI:
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html
|
| Notes and Recommendations (from RRE Digest):
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/notes.html
|
| Red Rock Eater Digest, 1994 -- 2004:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20040602193512/commons.somewhere....
|
| The Network Observer, 1994 -- 1996:
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/tno.html
|
| He wrote a book, Computation and Human Experience, here are some
| extracts and a chapter summary:
|
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/che-intro.html
|
| I miss him.
| [deleted]
| nathanyukai wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, I just read the how to help article and
| it's very insightful to how to help people in general!
| beckman466 wrote:
| Fantastic articles, thanks for sharing them here!
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| A few years ago I read his PhD thesis _The Dynamic Structure of
| Everyday Life_ [1]. I found it worth reading. At that time I also
| read the paper he wrote with David Chapman, _Pengi: An
| Implementation of a Theory of Activity_ , which was also
| interesting.
|
| [1] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6975
|
| [2] https://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1987/AAAI87-048.pdf
| howaboutnope wrote:
| > More profoundly, though, Agre wrote in the paper that the mass
| collection of data would change and simplify human behavior to
| make it easier to quantify. That has happened on a scale few
| people could have imagined, as social media and other online
| networks have corralled human interactions into easily
| quantifiable metrics, such as being friends or not, liking or
| not, a follower or someone who is followed.
|
| As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1968 (!)
|
| > From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new
| reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the
| technical means of communication and violence, destroys all
| national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human
| existence. This destructive process can even be considered a
| necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of
| all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would
| be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him
| in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition.
| It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though
| the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even
| on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would
| simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical
| than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would
| ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any
| notion today.
|
| > As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from
| its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative
| and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to
| "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe
| that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by
| the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and,
| in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical
| pasts of the nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in
| their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each
| other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly
| shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension
| of depth out of which modern science and technology have
| developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new
| unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything
| then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the
| national pasts, in their original disparateness, into
| communication with each other as the only way to catch up with
| the global system of communication which covers the surface of
| the earth.
|
| -- Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's also Joseph Weisenbaum's similar sentiments from 1985:
| http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html
| chucktingle wrote:
| "Industrial Society and Its Future" came out 25 years ago and
| predicted and described lots of dark stuff that came true. Why
| didn't people listen?!
| beckman466 wrote:
| > Why didn't people listen?!
|
| People did? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/the-
| unabomber-ted-ka...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Its author was not terribly charismatic and had a somewhat
| counterproductive marketing strategy. In a world in which
| building alliances and finding sympathetic voices and
| supporters is critical to messaging, he burnt bridges (or blew
| them up).
|
| All that for a message which is inherently less palatable. It's
| often said that news has a negativity bias, but that tends to
| be _small_ negativities: petty crimes and small or remote
| disasters, not long-term, distant, and intractable existential
| crises.
|
| Cassandra was ignored. Cassandra was, however, correct.
|
| (Not all doomsayers are, of course. But judging a message
| _soley_ on its conclusion, as is quite often the case, is
| tiself a major failure of reason.)
| natmaka wrote:
| Jacques Ellul wrote about all this since 1954, and his 'Le
| systeme technicien' book covers all the Unabomber's material
| (and more) quite clearly, and even more objectively.
|
| Nearly nobody cared, nearly nobody cares.
| r_klancer wrote:
| The funny thing is, I was a subscriber to Agre's mailing list
| (the archive of which is still at
| https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html)
|
| I was impressed by his methodical way of dissecting the design of
| information systems and how they interacted with the social
| context. The didactic brilliance was consistent with his (and
| David Chapman's) famous AAAI paper about the "Pengi" system
| https://aaai.org/Library/AAAI/1987/aaai87-048.php -- although I
| didn't realize at first that _he_ was the Agre in "Agre and
| Chapman".
|
| Yet, somehow, I missed the importance of whatever he said about
| privacy. Like others I was more interested in what new things we
| _could_ build if we were all as sharp as him.
|
| (The "Surveillance and Capture" paper mentioned by the Post seems
| to capture an important distinction between two modes of privacy
| invasion; even 20 years later I see attempts to discuss privacy
| concerns founder on a failure to reckon with this distinction. I
| will now read.)
| kragen wrote:
| I second your implicit recommendation to read the RRE archives,
| which mysteriously the Washington Post article didn't include a
| link to. I was an RRE reader for many years, and occasionally
| he quoted my replies. Well, once.
| schoen wrote:
| David Chapman is still very interesting (now a Buddhist
| philosopher). Here are some of his references to his
| collaboration with Phil Agre
|
| https://metarationality.com/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial...
|
| https://metarationality.com/abstract-emergent
|
| I was also a subscriber to RRE. I sometimes wrote to Agre in
| reply, usually with pretty naive commentary; he would usually
| then tell me that my commentary was pretty naive.
|
| Agre's disappearance/reclusion reminds me of Grothendieck's.
| fencepost wrote:
| One of the things I still remember picking up from RRE was to
| remember that you can index from either end. Imagine that you
| have a knob with 10 positions and need to adjust it by feel to
| the 8th. Don't start at 1 and count up 7, go all the way to the
| end and count back down 3 instead.
|
| It was an unusual and always interesting read.
| fencepost wrote:
| Fencepost error, count back 2 if starting from 10
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/coxmb
| croes wrote:
| Is it really the dark site of the internet or just another dark
| facet of mankind?
| rchaud wrote:
| Dark facet of mankind, with the potential for exponential
| growth via the cumulative network effects of the Internet and
| and the billions of people tethered to it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Given that a huge faction pushing for the Internet and peraonal
| / personalised computing saw and promoted the technologies as
| democratising and liberating, Agre is a vitally important
| contrarian and cautionary voice.
|
| He's not the only one, and I've compiled a list of critical /
| cautionary voices from the 1980s and earlier here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25124718
|
| That includes Paul Baran, co-inventor of switched-packet
| networking at RAND, Willis Ware, also RAND, Shoshana Zuboff,
| Richard Boeth, and others. Agre is conspicuously absent.
|
| The advocacy voices were numerous --- Arthur C. Clarke, Stewart
| Brand, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelley (and much of the rest of
| the Whole Earth / Wired gang). Adam Curtis's work has focused
| strongly on this, especially on what he sees as the California
| / West Coast school of techno-utopianism.
|
| That was my Cool-Aid growing up.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Adam Curtis seems to work backwards from his desired
| conclusions in general.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A great gig if you can get it.
|
| And he's quite good at it.
| papito wrote:
| David Bowie was also right. _David Bowie_.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tCC9yxUIdw
| jhbadger wrote:
| How about Douglas Adams in the 1970s? His idea of the "Babel
| fish" which allowed clear communication across languages,
| rather than ushering in universal peace as expected (as
| idealists in the 1990s thought the Internet would) instead
| resulted in more warfare and devastation as aliens could insult
| each other clearly.
| Wistar wrote:
| Remember the "KILL YOUR TELEVISION" bumper sticker of the late
| 80s, early 90s?
|
| About 1995 or so, I was driving in Seattle, and at a light, the
| car in front of me had a similarly-styled "KILL YOUR MODEM"
| sticker.
|
| Perhaps it was an Agre reader.
|
| (edit: correction of egregious grammar)
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