[HN Gopher] The failed promises of tech liberation
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The failed promises of tech liberation
Author : freedsoftware
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-01-23 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
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| lapinot wrote:
| Ahh. Refreshing to see some people talking about class politics
| on hn.
| Guthur wrote:
| I'm sure the same promises were made to the Greeks and Romans as
| their institutions of governance were slowly bought out before
| their very eyes.
|
| Aristotle wrote about this inevitable path of democracy. It's
| happened before and we've wilfully ignored those lessons.
| freedsoftware wrote:
| Got a link with a discussion of his theories? I would find that
| interesting to see.
| Guthur wrote:
| He mentioned it briefly in his book/notes on rhetoric. It was
| from a free audio book.
|
| I've only started my exploration of Aristotle.
| ed-209 wrote:
| Everyone agrees socials are the scourge of the net, amplifying
| the most hyperbolic trash available, but they (seem to)
| increasingly just accept this to have been inevitable (or more
| erroneously, they blame human nature itself lol). This is
| actually worse than wrong because it creates apathy and
| hopelessness that re-enforce the problem. It's not difficult to
| find out who funded these virtual gulags or to imagine what
| motivated them to seek re-centralization.
| t43562 wrote:
| I would have thought that computer scientists would not really
| fall into debates about "centralisation" or "decentralisation"
| when we're so busy changing from one strategy to the next in CPU
| and software designs. At the broadest level first it was
| mainframes, then client server, now it's all in a kind of giant
| mainframe again which we just call a cloud service provider and
| yet it's not exactly monolithic.
|
| Why would politics ever be free of debate about what is best with
| centralised or decentralised human organisation?
|
| Lets just say that those who think they know best about
| everything will be for centralisation at the extreme if they
| think they can succeed in dominating others or decentralisation
| in the extreme if they think they cannot.
| freedsoftware wrote:
| This is a long-form podcast with Richard Barbrook, the co-author
| of "The Californian Ideology," a 1995 critique of what later
| became the dominant ethos of the tech industry.
|
| Lots of interesting history, including a discussion of how
| Minitel, the French precursor to the web, created a more
| sustainable form of techno-capitalism even though it was created
| by the state-owned phone company.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Title reminds me of how Zhou Enlai replied to someone "Too early
| to say" when asked his opinion on the French Revolution
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Note that he didn't actually say that -- or rather, he did say
| that, but not in reference to the French Revolution:
| https://mediamythalert.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-...
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _The Californian Ideology (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287603 - Jan 2023 (92
| comments)
|
| Also:
|
| _The Californian Ideology_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991057 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Californian Ideology (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29444538 - Dec 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Californian Ideology (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088216 - Jan 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Californian Ideology (1995)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15992151 - Dec 2017 (95
| comments)
| freedsoftware wrote:
| Here's a link to "The Californian Ideology" if you haven't read
| it:
|
| http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol...
| [deleted]
| glitchc wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. Paints a clear picture of how deluded
| the technocrat class is.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The global village is basically here, courtesy of social media
| like TikTok (which did not come from California). What we didn't
| expect was that the village idiots would also come along.
| donatj wrote:
| And that the loudest village idiots get the most attention.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| And there are training courses on being a village idiot so
| you can be heard too!
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Surely you aren't referring to all the "how to become an
| influencer" courses?
| intelVISA wrote:
| Agile methodology(tm)
| didericis wrote:
| Some of us did expect that. The initial techno optimism about
| global connectivity that I think really picked up during the
| 90s (all of this was before my time, correct me if I'm wrong
| about timing) always seemed doomed to this particular end given
| the lack of segmentation. You can't have a village with 8
| billion people.
|
| I distinctly remember a period when the iPhone came out and the
| high score leaderboards for certain apps went from like a
| couple thousand to tens of thousands to like a million. I
| realized this kind of connectivity is going to select for a
| tiny percentage of hyper competitive winners. Those people are
| mixed in with _billions_ of people not used to operating in
| that kind of a space. More and more people are being forced
| into a competition they don 't really want to be a part of. The
| rooms are way too big and way too flat to allow for proper self
| selection and sorting into like minded peer groups at similar
| levels. They make 99% of people miserable, including many of
| those at the top who need to work ungodly hard to maintain
| positions that used to be more secure due to less global
| exposure.
|
| What you _can_ do is create a village of about 200 people and
| their networks with a much more interesting and larger set of
| like minded people than what your geography limits you to, and
| self select and bypass gatekeepers to create new and emergent
| communities beyond anything people might have dreamed or
| expected. But that requires a kind of community maintenance and
| segmentation that we haven 't figured out how to do yet.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, take HN. HN was that - not a couple hundred, but maybe
| a few thousand. And it was a high quality community, and
| therefore worth being a part of. And therefore it grew.
|
| And as it grew, it became a more attractive target for
| zealots, propagandists, and trolls. And as it became a larger
| community, it became - to some degree - a diluted one.
|
| Metcalf's Law says that the value of a network is
| proportional to the square of the number of users. V = k N^2.
|
| AnimalMuppet's Law, which takes into account the greater
| attractiveness of larger networks to those whose activities
| _destroy_ value, says that you must subtract a term
| proportional to the fourth power of the number of users: V =
| k N^2 - K N^4. Depending on the values of k and K, there will
| be some optimal number N of users, beyond which the value
| stops growing - or, beyond which the value _to each user_
| stops growing.
| asdff wrote:
| I think what makes technology so hard to be optimistic about
| is that there are two sides of the coin. There is the side
| that this is a utility for our species, that tech should
| exist to serve us better, that things should get more
| efficient and take less time. That side exists entirely in
| opposition to the other side of the coin, that is most likely
| to win out as its the more profitable side. That is the side
| that tech is merely a product to be marketed like any other,
| that it should further a profitable status quo versus
| introduce something new that might not be as profitable, that
| taking up more users time is more profitable because you can
| monetize more of it, etc.
|
| All the incentives of our society, are aligned to give us a
| lot more of the latter sort of products, and not much of the
| former. Imagine if the wheel were invented today; how many
| times will a dozen companies have reinvented it in ten years
| time trying to get around the patent, each with their own
| patentable twists to the idea? I don't believe this sort of
| thinking can be sustainable for long.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| You just have to internalize social realism.
|
| Intelligent discourse is a losing proposition. In the social
| market, whatever captures people's interest _is_ definitionally
| speaking the most important social thing. If intelligent
| discourse isn't capturing social attention then it's not
| socially valuable.
|
| This shouldn't be news to anyone familiar with Society of the
| Spectacle. If you want sorcery over the spectacle, there are
| much better ways than pining for intelligent discourse.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Who's more idiotic? The village idiot, or the idiot who forgot
| about Eternal September?
| version_five wrote:
| With the utmost respect, the above post is ironic because it's
| exactly the sort of shallow, snappy internet post (I make them
| too) that's the opposite of what good "public square" social
| media discourse should look like, and it ends up as the top
| post. It's the incentive structure that's inherent in social
| media that means it's doomed to fail as a method of intelligent
| discussion from day 1. Maybe this is what "the medium is the
| message" means, I never really understood it.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Time theft of the future will involve couching a simple
| concept (that could be explained in a single sentence) in
| paragraphs of ChatGPT vomit, just to make it look more
| substantive and "intelligent."
|
| SEO has worked this way for years. It helps nobody.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| What if each user gets a fixed number of vote points per
| month? You can vote as many times you like but the more you
| vote the less each vote weight.
|
| This can be an example of how social media incentive
| structure can be iterated on.
|
| The main problem is that social media gets very few
| iterations on the fundamental stuff because you have to build
| a new audience for each attempt, or risk loosing the one that
| has already bought into your existing algorithm.
|
| What if a social media platform could be built where "the
| algorithms" were user created plug-ins that users could
| subscribe to? Each "subreddit" with their own set of
| algorithms.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Maybe this is what "the medium is the message" means, I
| never really understood it._
|
| I think you get it. The nature of the medium itself changes
| people, not just the sort of content that is being delivered
| through that medium. TV puts people into couch potato
| trances. Karma-oriented commenting systems have people alter
| their beliefs to align with the popular majority. Anonymous
| commenting systems have people act bolder and ruder, etc.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| In my view a terse, mildly irritated comment is an entirely
| appropriate response to the sort of aimless rambling we see
| in pieces like the OP. I'm sympathetic to those who think a
| "public square" should strive for a good balance, but length
| is just not a meaningful correlate to "intelligent
| discussion".
| seydor wrote:
| Tiktok is a specific kind of entertainment, nothing more, and
| hardly a medium to debate ideas. Maybe twitter is a more
| engaged kind of crowd but there too, the people making the
| loudest voice get preferential treatment. But certainly the
| global village does exist and this podcast is even a good
| example of it.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| gsatic wrote:
| What type of villagers have contempt for the village idiots?
| [deleted]
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| TikTok?
|
| Try AOL. Eternal September has the name it does for a reason.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| The amount of people who cannot keep track of their money with a
| simple Excel sheet is astonishing. Heck, scratch that, people
| don't even keep track of their money with a calculator or even
| pen and paper.
|
| And yet, keeping an eye on your money and seeing where it flows
| is an incredible tool to adjust your spending and maybe save up
| where it matters and afford to step up your game.
|
| Technology without education is borderline useless, the
| liberation will always lie in spreading knowledge.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > Technology without education is borderline useless, the
| liberation will always lie in spreading knowledge.
|
| Tech without education is worse than useless - it provides
| access to a non-stop dopamine drip which stops people from
| seeking education.
| jerryu wrote:
| Decentralization is over hyped. People think they want
| decentralized but they really don't.
| slenocchio wrote:
| Decentralization works when the incentives work.
| GenericDev wrote:
| You do not speak for me. I want decentralization, self hosting,
| and the right to repair. The modern technology ecosystem has
| failed me in every one of these areas.
| dymk wrote:
| GP may not speak for you, but they do speak for 99.9% of
| users. How'd the whole Mastodon migration go? Seems to have
| fizzled.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Mastodon has a very decent user base, and recently expanded
| very significantly. For me that is enough.
| aliqot wrote:
| I don't use twitter or mastodon, so I consider it a
| significant sign that I keep seeing so many of my peers and
| people whose content I read showing up on Mastodon. I
| consider myself impartial. That's just n=1 from my
| perspective, but it's a datapoint nonetheless considering
| I'm the least likely to be exposed to this.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Mastodon doesn't speak for decentralization
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Mastodon doesn't speak for decentralization
|
| That's kind of the point, IMHO.
|
| Mastodon doesn't _speak_ for decentralization, it _is_
| decentralized. And that 's not really splitting hairs
| here, it's an important distinction.
|
| I _could_ set up a Mastodon instance (although
| Writefreely[1] and Pixelfed[2] are more my speed) that
| advocated for centralized _everything_. I could even ban
| folks who argue for decentralization and delete any
| comments they make in favor of same.
|
| It's a tool that allows folks to speak for themselves,
| without a central corporate authority dictating what's
| acceptable and what isn't.
|
| If you don't like a particular Fediverse[0] instance,
| move to another one or set one up for yourself.
|
| [0] https://fediverse.party/
|
| [1] https://writefreely.org/
|
| [2] https://fediverse.party/en/pixelfed/
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| We all had answering machines back in the day to hold our voice
| mail.
|
| There's no reason we have to entrust all our
| emails/photos/media to big companies that actively spy on us,
| mine us for more data and in general act against our interests.
|
| If things are convenient enough (i.e.. "just plug in this box
| into your router and use this address to access your own
| everything without fiddling with manual backups, network
| configuration, security, ddos, power outages, spam etc.." ), I
| genuinely believe that people would prefer that to "trusting
| big tech with all our data".
|
| I mean i still remember how people made fun of Google for
| scanning through our emails to show us ads. The price we have
| paid for convenience is very high imo.
| jayd16 wrote:
| This a pretty bad example considering people chose
| centralized voicemail when available.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| To be honest "choosing" voicemail is something that has
| never once crossed my mind. It has always been "just there"
| as a part of every cell phone I have ever owned.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I don't know... I think there's a middle ground where we can
| have a decentralized base with large players that add
| convenience for naive users. Email is a successful
| decentralized service. The issue is navigating the risks to
| lock-in and embrace-extend-extinguish tactics from the larger
| players in the space.
| rektide wrote:
| Your arguments would be more compelling & discussable, if you
| had any support or contentions you made.
|
| As such, all I can say is: I disagree. We've had difficulty
| emerging a resillient reliable & compelling path, but we also
| have spent so many many orders of magnitude less trying, since
| inherently most creators want & seek control & arent interested
| in expanding the viable modes of compute.
| atoav wrote:
| Who do you mean with _people_? Customers?
|
| If we forget about the web for a second and imagine a mostly
| analog world, people running small businesses have _a ton_ of
| things they do without having to rely on centralized services.
| The reason for that is that there is a ton a small business
| _can_ do themselves with just a little research. People don 't
| choose centralized over decentralized because they carefully
| weigh one against the other, they choose centralized because it
| is the only way they see themselves skinning that cat.
|
| If you ask me, the sole reason for people not running their own
| services is because the whole world fucked up education around
| how to actually do that. Someone invented the typewriter and it
| got a teaching subject at schools because offices needed people
| who were able to type. We failed to do the same for how to
| actually use a computer to solve problems. Sure, there are
| benefits to hand writing, but given that in 2023 much of the
| correspondence and work happens digitally, surprisingly little
| thought goes into how to translate this into an adequate
| education on a big scale.
| jerryu wrote:
| Sorry!
|
| What I meant to say was that... everyone wants decentralization
| but few are willing to take the responsibility if/when
| something goes wrong because of their own fault.
|
| I wish I had more time right now to contribute to this
| discussion but regardless of what arguments I present, this
| debate cannot be solved. It's like a debate on pros/cons of
| social security. I trust myself to handle my retirement and I
| wish I could opt out of SS contributions. But no...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I think people want decentralization, all else equal.
| Unfortunately, like most things in life, we don't have a way to
| just change that but keep all else equal.
| dqpb wrote:
| Fun fact, our economy is decentralization and it's done more
| for society than anything else has.
| kradroy wrote:
| I partially agree. People do want decentralization but don't
| want the responsibility of maintaining and moderating those
| systems. And in the end they, the passive consumers, end up
| with the same situation they were in when the systems they
| consumed were centralized.
|
| Decentralization is just the tech equivalent of HOAs.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| How in the world is decentralization like HOAs?
| Decentralization would be more like a neighborhood without an
| HOA, requiring more order and planning is what an HOA does as
| it centralized command of the neighborhood rather than
| leaving it up to the individual homeowners.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| This is sort of a hollow claim though, to me.
|
| It's like saying "Less sugar is over hyped. People think they
| want less sugar, but they really don't."
|
| Both statements are actually true. My body craves sugar. It's
| in my biology. It would eat itself to death if I let it. But
| the larger system that is me does want less sugar. And to live
| in a world, where gods producers didn't operate under the
| inevitable "if you add sugar they'll eat more of it."
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