[HN Gopher] On the internet, we're always famous
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On the internet, we're always famous
Author : prostoalex
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-09-27 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| gdulli wrote:
| "The best life is one the gods don't notice."
|
| - Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon
| newbamboo wrote:
| Society will adjust but it won't be an easy adjustment. People
| will need to accept each other and practice more tolerance and
| love. Cancel culture and it's practitioners must be cancelled to
| get there.
| twiddling wrote:
| "People will need to accept each other and practice more
| tolerance and love."
|
| Says every utopian thinker throughout history against the
| overwhelming evidence of the human experience.
| macrolocal wrote:
| Still, I side with the Cathars. ;)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > People will need to accept each other and practice more
| tolerance and love. Cancel culture and it's practitioners must
| be cancelled to get there.
|
| Note that, with the groups they "cancel" in place of "Cancel
| culture and its practitioners," the practitioners of what you
| call "cancel culture" would tend to agree with every word of
| this, which is the entire rationale for what you call "cancel
| culture".
| the-dude wrote:
| From The New Yorker in 1993 : _On the Internet, nobody knows you
| 're a dog_,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
| hazeii wrote:
| Yeah, my dog read that story.
|
| [0] http://hazeii.net/images/2010/iDog_6.jpg
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm not. I even say that, in my GitHub page:
| https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#im-not-famous
| [deleted]
| netfl0 wrote:
| I don't think we've ever seen such large scale systematically
| created narcissism. Who knows what the effects will be.
|
| Major science experiment.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I'm starting to realize that we've always had highly narcissistic
| undertones in the narratives of Western society:
|
| * "You should aspire to be successful"
|
| * "You need to be beautiful"
|
| * "You won't get what you want unless you are powerful"
|
| All of these statements share the same narcissistic attribute of
| requiring attention and validation from people whom you have no
| other connection to. This is deeply weird. Social media gives
| this narcissism a platform.
| imbnwa wrote:
| I sometimes consider the notion that, socially, Western
| modernity was just reified feudalism: everybody's a lord now!
| Up until 30 - 40 years ago, men were regularly addressed as
| Mister/Herr/Signor/etc [insert name], titles which were
| originally reserved for landed gentry and royalty in their
| respective locales; it use to be said that a man's home "was
| his castle"; "Rights" were something that nobles worked out
| with the monarch, see the Magna Carta, not something meant for
| everybody, the peasantry in particular. Within The Federalist
| Papers it was still being debated whether it was a good idea to
| ennoble _everyone_ , whether a democracy where everyone has a
| say was a good idea(which, then, meant the mass of unenslaved
| men); today, people colloquially refer to themselves as a
| "queen" or "king", also "boss".
|
| The presumption of a distinction is pivotal to Western
| subjectivity, again, particularly in America; "class
| distinction" is an ornament of the individual.
|
| Not saying, like Carl Schmitt, that we need to bring back
| actual, explicitly stratified distinction between the people
| and the people who make sovereign decisions, but that perhaps
| we need to reconsider the way we relate to _ourselves_ in the
| form of some sort of socio-political _mastery_.
|
| Then again, this idea of the self as _master_ is as old as
| Aristotle, but the ancient Greek polis was a whole political
| organization built for that idea.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I sometimes consider the notion that, socially,
| Western modernity was just reified feudalism:
| everybody's a lord now!
|
| I figure historians of the future will view it like this:
| there were people in Europe who practiced feudalism
| domestically for several centuries. Eventually they developed
| the technology to outsource serfdom to the rest of the world.
|
| For most of my life, people in the 'third world' lived in
| barely imaginable poverty while the rest of the world walked
| off with oil, lumber, precious metals, gems, historical
| artifacts, slave labor, etc. I was well out of highschool
| before I appreciated the connection between the squalor
| elsewhere, and the four or five previous centuries of
| pillaging that contributed to it.
|
| That unpleasant state of affairs tempers my ability to feel
| triumphalist about 'first-world' nations ridding themselves
| of feudalism.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| If you're thinking that global poverty was invented by
| European exploitation, you're pretty severely
| overcorrecting. For most of history, the vast majority of
| people were even poorer than what we call "barely
| imaginable poverty" today.
| PeterisP wrote:
| "this idea of the self as master is as old as Aristotle"
|
| IIRC Aristotle's writing tends to explicitly exclude slaves
| (i.e. the majority of population) and women from moral
| reasoning, so the idea of self is discussed in the context of
| literate (so not very poor) free adult male citizens, perhaps
| the top 5-10% of the population at most. Quoting Aristotle,
| "The slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element; the
| female has it but it lacks authority; the child has it but it
| is incomplete".
|
| In that time and place they invariably are literal masters of
| a household that's quite larger than modern households,
| including slaves, women, kids and younger male adults; so for
| the target audience of Aristotle's work it's never about
| _just_ them alone as all of them have quite significant
| rights (and some responsibilities) over multiple other
| people; Aristotle was not writing for or about the "lower
| 90%".
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Wanting self-improvement isn't narcissism. Its the flaunting
| for status by actively advertising things.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I'd argue vying for fame is inherently narcissistic even if
| it is not as obvious as other behaviors.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Is it really true that wanting to be successful is just western
| culture?
| macrolocal wrote:
| Probably not, but people in WEIRD cultures tend to
| disproportionately value impersonal social accomplishments,
| trust in institutions, individualism, self-enhancements, and
| confidence.
|
| [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-
| henric...
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I doubt it, but I'm not qualified to comment on anything
| other than Western culture, so I didn't. :)
| [deleted]
| rt4mn wrote:
| > Well, guess what? We have now all been granted a power once
| reserved for totalitarian governments. A not particularly
| industrious fourteen-year-old can learn more about a person in a
| shorter amount of time than a team of K.G.B. agents could have
| done sixty years ago.
|
| I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed
| often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the
| year) 1984 when the terminator came out, and Arnold killed a
| bunch of people by looking them up in the yellow pages. Everyone
| having increasingly easy access to the tools necessary to perform
| these kinds of "OSINT investigations" into _nearly anybody_ is
| not good for society.
| gumby wrote:
| > I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not
| discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have
| happened in (the year) 1984
|
| Not 84, but Brin wrote about it in 1996 in Transparent Society.
| I find his take on it naive, was the first solid discussion
| outside academia and is worth read8ng.
|
| Agre wrote about this quite a bit in the 80s.
| mercutio2 wrote:
| Brin's book is one of my favorites.
|
| It does seem a little naive in retrospect, but a world where
| people would be willing to pay a modest amount in a
| competitive market for pseudonymity, and would trust banks to
| provide it, sure seems like a better world than the world we
| live in.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| > is not good for society.
|
| Heh, maybe society can shed the fan star dynamic, and it will
| all be okay.
|
| By the way, Anonymous wrote some pretty good poems back in the
| day; surveillance doesn't always come with fame.
| noir_lord wrote:
| My missus started a new job recently, she was curious about her
| boss and it took me about 5 minutes to find his address and
| house on google maps.
|
| That's sodding _terrifying_.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Was trying to find a friends address to send them a surprise
| gift. It was weird how easy it was.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Have you seen these websites which bring up everything that
| was available _in the past_ about someone? Past names and
| emails on Facebook, photos and geolocation of the EXIF data
| on a map... Purely by tracking Tweets and Facebook posts
| and keeping history.
| anonporridge wrote:
| truthfinder.com is one I've used. It's a paid service,
| and it presents like a scammy site at first glance, but
| it's legit. Lookup your own name to prove it to yourself.
| It has information about my past that even I forgot
| about.
|
| What's especially disconcerting is how fast your physical
| address leaks out. Within a couple of months moving to a
| new rental, they have my address down to the apartment
| number even though I never publish that publicly
| anywhere. I assume they ingest large data breaches.
|
| We really need a kind of DNS for physical addresses.
| Abstract your physical address behind an fixed virtual
| one and only allow authorized parties to resolve the
| address. This would also be hugely helpful for people
| that move around a lot, since you'd never have to update
| your mailing address with any vendor ever again.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Ooh I had the DNS idea for addresses a few years ago... I
| would love for that to exist! Updating addresses is such
| a pain in the ass.
| xur17 wrote:
| If you know roughly what area someone lives in, county
| auditor websites have a lot of information.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Not to someone living and working in a small town.
| chmsky00 wrote:
| 5 minutes, huh?
|
| In the 90s, I found a bosses address in the yellow pages in
| seconds, then called him at home on a Sunday, to chat the end
| of a football game.
|
| Now I hate my boss and love random folks online.
|
| Weird.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210927170734/https://www.newyor...
|
| https://archive.is/eAJPX
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(page generated 2021-09-27 23:01 UTC)