[HN Gopher] The rise of the camera launched a fight to protect G...
___________________________________________________________________
The rise of the camera launched a fight to protect Gilded Age
privacy
Author : nickwritesit
Score : 129 points
Date : 2024-07-15 15:04 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| datameta wrote:
| Our relationship with technology is an Escher staircase. Similar
| thing happening anew with visual genAI.
| tempodox wrote:
| The idea of privacy has been thoroughly frustrated. Today,
| there's no expectation of privacy any more, let alone "reasonable
| expectation of privacy". Expecting privacy has become
| unreasonable by definition.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It has not yet become unreasonable by definition. Certain
| powerful forces would like that to be the the case, and they
| have been successful at moving things in that direction so far,
| but they haven't succeeded yet.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| *in public
|
| You have a reasonable right to privacy, e.g., in your home.
| hanniabu wrote:
| *As long as you don't own any internet-connected devices
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| How does that remove the right? Presumably one is making
| the decision to connect these devices to the internet and
| could simply decide differently.
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| There gets to be a certain point where we simply have to
| accept that while yes, technically one could simply not
| own a TV (increasingly difficult to find a DumbTV as
| opposed to a SmartTV with always-on microphone), any IOT
| things, a smartphone, etc etc, we cannot reasonably
| expect someone to not do this. Notably the smartphone,
| which of the entire list of probably the worst offender,
| second only to the TV perhaps because of the
| ick/literally-1984 factor of your TV listening to you.
|
| We practically can't expect people to do without a
| smartphone. It's how people pay bills, bank, access
| weather information, etc. And since it's the most-used
| path, it's also the best-maintained path. Non-smartphone
| alternatives have already rotted. Have you tried calling
| into half of those bills you pay via QR code instead of
| just scanning the code? Try it sometime.
|
| Instead of telling people to just go live on a mountain
| monastery in Tibet, we could instead simply eat our cake
| AND have it by just regulating this stuff. Pass privacy
| laws. Fine people who break them. Samsung, Google, etc
| will comply rather than not continue to bathe in our ad
| revenue.
| commodoreboxer wrote:
| It's really not that hard to have a smart TV and simply
| not connect it to your network. They'll beg to connect,
| but I haven't seen one that will refuse to function
| without an internet connection.
| mikestew wrote:
| Our brand-new LG OLED doesn't even beg. It asked at setup
| time, I selected "not in your marketing drone's wildest
| dreams", it said "cool, bro", and hasn't bothered us in
| the last two weeks.
|
| We don't even see the TV's home screen. Just power on the
| Xbox/Apple TV/whatever and HDMI CEC turns everything on
| and sets inputs.
| adastra22 wrote:
| FYI they sometimes share a connection via Ethernet-over-
| HDMI.
| mikestew wrote:
| I am aware that HEC _exists_. Now show me a consumer
| electronics device that actually uses it. None of my
| devices advertise this feature.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It's not about telling people to live outside society but
| instead to be more mindful of how they engage with it.
| One can live in a city and not own a smart TV, nor a
| smartphone, nor any IOT devices, etc., but that's not the
| point I'm making. One can also just choose different
| devices. Once someone gets to the point that they refuse
| to buy the privacy-disrespecting device it's not much of
| a stretch to start looking for a privacy-respecting
| device.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > One can live in a city and not own a smart TV, nor a
| smartphone
|
| I believe parent's point is: no, one cannot. One cannot
| live in a (modern Western urban) society and not have a
| smartphone.
|
| The people who do are now _living in a different
| society,_ where, among other things:
|
| - they have to plan to stop at a bank to take out
| physical cash
|
| - they have to schedule their days in an entirely
| different method from their peers with smartphones
|
| - they are less connected to opportunities and access to
| government and private services because those services
| come via smart devices and assume smart device ownership
|
| Not to put too fine a point on it: there are restaurants
| that give you a QR code instead of a paper menu now. Are
| you and I living in the same society if I can order food
| there and you can't?
| ryandrake wrote:
| You just enumerated some of the things people can do to
| live without a smartphone, demonstrating it is possible
| (albeit difficult).
|
| I think we need to stop calling things "not possible"
| just because they take effort and lifestyle changes to
| accomplish.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I mean, one can live without a house too.
|
| Perhaps we are just quibbling on definitions if we're
| arguing about whether being homeless counts as living in
| the same society as those with a permanent address.
|
| The meta point is: government regulates housing because
| it's something "everybody" (modulo outliers) does: live
| in a house. If "everybody" (modulo outliers) owns a
| smartphone and smartphone ownership is assumed for full
| societal participation... We probably need to regulate
| it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Also this take is not great because your privacy is also
| dictated by the people around you that have smartphones
| and are listening to you.
| talldayo wrote:
| > but instead to be more mindful of how they engage with
| it.
|
| This is like the recycling debate all over again.
| Fundamentally we agree with you; littering is bad, the
| diminishing of privacy is bad, and none of us should feel
| hopeless about a situation we are capable of changing.
|
| But consider the average person, not me or you or the
| hackers. Someone who opts for convenience, not "mindful
| engagement" for the slightest of interactions with the
| world. _They_ do not care. Fundamentally they cannot be
| _made_ to care, even if we show them posters of the Earth
| burning or make them hear about the Snowden leaks. They
| consider themselves to be powerless, and _will not_
| consider an alternative unless it is as convenient as
| what they 're addicted to now. They're not going to buy
| respectful TVs because they're not the cheap ones.
| They're not going to buy respectful phones because it
| doesn't have the little Apple logo on the back that their
| friends love so much. The average person _literally_
| cannot be made to care unless we make privacy-respecting
| software easier to use than spyware.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| And because of how markets work, that person who doesn't
| care is dictating what is available to us.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > unless we make privacy-respecting software easier to
| use than spyware
|
| This point is key.
|
| I don't use an Android instead of a Pinephone because I
| don't care. I use an Android because Pinephone sucks
| right now, and I can't be hacking on the device I need to
| rely on to schedule my bank payments and call the
| emergency services if I fall in a ravine. That device has
| to be five-nines trustworthy.
|
| The solution is going to have to be make Pinephone suck
| less. That's the _only_ way to mass adoption and actually
| changing the landscape.
|
| Music piracy didn't get its back broken by a sudden
| global attack of conscience. It got its back broken by
| iTunes making it more convenient to get music-to-
| portable-device than running a torrent server.
| ryandv wrote:
| > But consider the average person, not me or you or the
| hackers.
|
| Forget the average person - even as a technically adept
| person who has tried to "mindfully engage" with
| technology and minimize his use of it as much as is
| reasonably possible, the way our societies in the west
| are structured are making it increasingly difficult to
| participate in the world without plugging yourself into
| the surveillance borg. Examples abound even in this
| thread - QR codes to order food; needing to ask concierge
| to call you a Lyft because taxis are nonexistent in the
| neighbourhood and you aren't carrying a smartphone.
|
| There is so much friction involved in living life with
| minimal technology that you are placing yourself at a
| significant disadvantage and living your life less
| efficiently than others by needing to make compromises or
| forego certain amenities entirely. While it is possible
| to live life like this and eschew such creature comforts,
| it becomes exhausting after several years of doing so,
| and there is no indication that the tides will turn or
| the winds will begin blowing in the other direction. You
| can continue swimming upstream for naught and at great
| disadvantage to yourself, but it will not change the
| direction of the current. If anything, the pandemic and
| work-from-home has only accelerated the trend, with the
| invasion of Internet-connected surveillance devices into
| one's private quarters now made mandatory in order to
| participate in the workforce.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I don't think it's reasonable to say "just don't have
| internet connected devices at all" in 2024. This falls
| too far into "caveat emptor" territory for my tastes. We
| all need to be informed and responsible but the burden of
| creating a totally disconnected-from-the-internet house
| (except for your core devices like phones/laptops) is
| actually pretty substantial and gets harder every year.
| Hell it's becoming a problem with cars.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I worry the normalization of Internet-connectedness in
| "smart devices" in the eyes of the public will lead to
| regulation of these devices for "privacy reasons" while
| offering no real privacy guarantees.
|
| I think the drive for "privacy respect" in devices should
| really be an effort to push manufacturers toward making
| devices that work without Internet-connectivity. I think
| everybody technical who cares about privacy should beat
| this drum to all their friends, family, etc, to vote with
| their wallets.
|
| Standalone devices make a stronger privacy guarantee than
| the alternative.
|
| "Connected" devices that offer "privacy" rely on the
| compliance of the companies who run the servers for the
| devices. It also means they can't get breached, either.
| ryandv wrote:
| What say you of all the remote workers who now need such
| devices in order to do their work from home? Should they
| decide to return to office?
| tempodox wrote:
| Having the right to privacy on paper doesn't mean you get
| it in practice.
| EasyMark wrote:
| It time we revisit "basic human rights" and emphasize
| privacy as part of those, and revamp laws to reflect
| that. Companies can still have ads and send out fliers in
| the mail. They don't need to know every move we make,
| website we visit, what we buy, etc. They have no right to
| that and it causes a lot of damage to society and mental
| health while only rewarding the company and no one else.
| pojntfx wrote:
| > Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition.
|
| *in the US that is. Basically everywhere else, esp. Europe, has
| been moving into the complete opposite direction here. There is
| _more_ privacy rights - and recourse, like the right to delete
| - then there has been at any point in the past.
| parasense wrote:
| Yeah, Europe has an interesting way of maintaining legal
| fictions.
|
| The geographical naming rights is one such thing. Anybody
| anywhere can make any kind of cheese, but one cannot say the
| cheese is parmesian (or any other given example) cheese
| without being located in a certain region. There was a
| famouse case where a cheese maker in itally opened a new
| factory on the other sside of town which happened to be
| across the lambardi river, and suddenly they were no longer
| able to say that cheese was whatever kind of cheese...
|
| That is just one example of many... why legal fictions are
| bad arguments in Europe, and don't work internationally. One
| cannot demand other people unsee things they have seen (wipe
| their brain memory), and so it goes it's equally unjust to
| demand other people delete photos of them they have seen and
| recorded in photos.
|
| It's a lot more nuanced than that, and in some cases the
| privacy ideas are fully justified, but you get the idea....
| there cannot be absolutism in either direction.
| em-bee wrote:
| just consider parmesan to be a protected trademark owned by
| the people living in that area.
|
| should they not have the right to protect their trademark?
| dnissley wrote:
| There is a reasonable expectation of privacy. But we should
| distinguish between "privacy" with no qualifiers, and "digital
| privacy" which is a whole other thing. Some people see an
| equivalence. Others do not.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| What's the difference?
| dnissley wrote:
| One relates to what people do in their own homes. The other
| relates to things people do on the internet.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The blurring of the line between "in your own home" and
| "on the Internet" is the crux of the issue. The average
| person doesn't understand that bringing Internet-
| connected devices into their home makes some quantity of
| "behavior in their home" into "behavior on the Internet".
| ryandrake wrote:
| Application developers are deliberately trying to blur
| the line, too, in their user interface. How many users
| really grok that when they use iCloud syncing with their
| photos, they are uploading their photos to the Internet?
|
| Since many of us grew up before and then after the
| Internet, we kind of instinctively get what application
| functionality needs the Internet, what functionality
| doesn't, what gets written to the Internet, what gets
| read from the Internet and so on. Younger computer/phone
| users don't get this at all. My 11 year old has no mental
| picture of why X requires Internet and Y doesn't require
| Internet. She doesn't understand the concept of Data A is
| stored on-device, and Data B is stored on the Internet.
| And honestly, I'm even having a harder and harder time
| explaining it. Tech applications have totally blurred and
| grayed the previously black-and-white line.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition.
|
| Hard disagree. The only unreasonable expectation is that you
| could go out in public and not be seen at all. It is entirely
| reasonable to expect not to be tracked, doxxed, etc.
|
| I would like to put the brakes on the idea that just because we
| _can_ do something, it is _okay_ to do it. The law was written
| when computers, networking, smartphones, and high resolution
| digital cameras did not exist. We could easily conclude that
| every bit of surveillance technology that did not exist in e.g.
| 1950 is illegal until explicitly permitted by law. Certain
| organizations would like to gaslight us into thinking that is
| impossible, that the cat is out of the bag so to speak. I do
| not agree. We can do it.
| em-bee wrote:
| the opposite is true.
|
| as the article shows, according to the law of the time there
| was no right to privacy, and photos were not protected until
| the public protested and the laws were changed.
|
| likewise today any expectation of privacy is a matter of
| opinion. just because laws do not sufficiently protect our
| privacy, does not mean that we should give up any expectation
| of privacy. on the contrary, we need to demand better
| protection from out lawmakers. vote accordingly
| batch12 wrote:
| This seems analogous to how large companies now scrape user-
| generated content to train their language models for profit.
| unraveller wrote:
| The lack of clear conclusion suggests a new likeness misuse
| wave is coming though I doubt it.
|
| AI's super power is melding many styles to better effect. My
| scraped up social media artworks are being considered to such a
| minuscule degree by the LLM that my likeness is lost unless
| someone tries to hone in and pass it off as me by legacy means.
|
| None of this is worth upsetting the delicate balance of public
| journalism vs privacy laws as the article alludes to.
| batch12 wrote:
| The concern I have is less around using emulating a work and
| more around not compensating or crediting those whose work
| has been taken to enrich these companies.
| ghaff wrote:
| How many writers and artists and scientists do you suppose
| have been "borrowed" from over time?
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| The throwaway line in TFA about village life and the section
| about common law recognizing no right to privacy both highlight
| my thoughts on this. In prior years we didn't have cameras
| preserving all our moments in 4K for all time, but as humans we
| had so little happening in our hamlets/villages, that most of our
| neighbors knew everything about us and all of our individual
| actions were never forgotten. Just like how you still remember
| all the embarrassing things different kids at your high school
| did (for me, 20+ years later). Life in a village was likely that
| same dynamic but for a person's whole life, not just high school
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, the scale of things is different but the idea that
| everyone in your town (or your social circles) didn't know more
| or less everything about you is counterfactual.
| mulmen wrote:
| I only remember the embarrassing things _I_ did. And because I
| graduated in the pager era there are very few photographs to
| remind me of what I have forgotten.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We did not need a strict law about privacy when the only way to
| surveil and preserve information was to use your eyes and
| brain. And given that everyone tends to be their own main
| character, even that level of preservation was not terribly
| effective.
|
| The rise of computers and the ability to record things in near
| perfect fidelity is a problem. I hope we can get a handle on it
| before it gets much worse.
| whstl wrote:
| Maybe we need to start preserving those things in AI neural
| nets so they are a bit fuzzy and slightly inaccurate!
| plussed_reader wrote:
| Ah, proprietary recollection! Surely that won't engender an
| entire middle-man economy.
| maxwell wrote:
| > the ability to record things in near perfect fidelity is a
| problem
|
| Ancient Egyptians and Romans would seem to have relished such
| a problem.
| wongarsu wrote:
| And if you move away (to escape your past or for other
| reasons), any new village you move to will treat you as a
| tolerated outsider for 20+ years because you didn't go to the
| same kindergarten as them.
| o11c wrote:
| And, by and large, they were _right to do so_. In the absence
| of a very strong central government, the only way to protect
| yourself from criminals (or other social problems) is to
| assume _all_ outsiders are problematic.
|
| Allowing "escape your past" is generally not socially
| desirable.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Another critical shift in the last ~120 years is the ease with
| which private information can be productized.
|
| I say 120 years because I believe the Kodak Brownie No. 2 was
| the inflection point. Other film cameras existed before that
| point, but did not have user-replaceable film - you would
| return the whole camera to Kodak and they'd send you back
| prints and a new camera.
|
| Thus, before the Brownie No. 2, the camera's owner had never
| posessed the _negative itself_. For the first time, an
| indisputably real account of an event could be reproduced over
| and over, on demand, with a low financial barrier to entry, and
| in any shape or size the negative 's owner could imagine.
|
| Obviously, the internet age has come with its own staggering
| paradigm shifts. Sure, private information may not be more
| sensitive than it ever was. But, it is easier than ever before
| to distribute it for profit.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, there are important qualitative differences between the
| steps of:
|
| 1. Neighbor X _claims_ they saw {embarrassing thing}
|
| 2. Neighbor X has objective proof that the event occurred
|
| 3. Here's a picture of the event
|
| 4. Here's a picture which is endlessly duplicable and
| broadcastable
| JohnFen wrote:
| My issue is this. Or, more specifically, I think the actual
| privacy invasion doesn't come from the use of cameras, it
| comes from the use of databases.
|
| I honestly don't care even a little if I happen to appear in
| (or even are the subject of) a random photo taken by a
| regular person. I care a lot if I appear in a commercially-
| operated snapshot/video.
|
| The difference is that a regular person probably isn't going
| to include that photo/video and related metadata in a
| database where it will be combined with the contents of other
| databases and weaponized against me.
|
| Yes, I know they may upload it to Facebook and such, where it
| is weaponized. That does bother me, but I choose to ignore
| that part except to make sure that my friends and family
| don't do it.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > I care a lot if I appear in a commercially-operated
| snapshot/video.
|
| This is where likeness rights come into place. A commercial
| entity can't use your image as an endorsement of their
| product or in marketing materials without your consent,
| which is why many production companies err on the side of
| making sure they vet every face in every image of their
| marketing material.
|
| > The difference is that a regular person probably isn't
| going to include that photo/video and related metadata in a
| database where it will be combined with the contents of
| other databases and weaponized against me.
|
| As you said in the next paragraph, this is impossible to
| prevent without stripping people of their copyrights to use
| their work however they please, including by sharing on
| social media or uploading to a extremely value-oriented
| service (like Google Photos) that only provides their
| services for free/cheap because of the value they get from
| being able to "improve the product" using user content.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > This is where likeness rights come into place.
|
| I don't see how likeness rights apply. I'm not talking
| about my image being used in marketing materials.
|
| > this is impossible to prevent without stripping people
| of their copyrights to use their work
|
| That's not a copyright issue. Copyright allows you to
| restrict how others use your works, it says nothing about
| how _you_ use your works.
|
| I think you're talking about free speech rights here, and
| free speech rights have never been, will never be, and
| shouldn't be, absolute. There are many cases where those
| rights (like all rights) need to be balanced against
| other contradictory rights.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Other than targeted advertising, how has private (I think you
| meant personally identifiable) information been productized?
|
| The only examples I can think of is auto insurers buying your
| vehicle usage data, and creditors buying your borrowing data.
| I don't know if cameras or the Internet has anything to do
| with either case.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Political parties buying your browsing/buying habits to hit
| you up with political ads. Police buying your location data
| to see whether your were near a crime. Insurance companies
| will soon be buying data about your exercise routines so
| they can adjust your rates accordingly.
|
| And then there are the really creepy services. There was a
| service not long ago in Russia that would allow you to
| upload a picture of any woman you saw on the street. They
| would identify the face (via VK) and provide you with their
| contact and job information. Totally creepy. Totally
| abusive. But easily done with basic tech.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FindFace
| thayne wrote:
| There is a huge difference between people in your village, that
| you grew up with, knowing a lot about you, and strangers from
| halfway around the world knowing things about your personal
| life.
| Hasu wrote:
| > Life in a village was likely that same dynamic but for a
| person's whole life, not just high school
|
| One BIG difference between high school and ordinary life is
| that high school is filled with a bunch of adolescents who are
| forced to be in a place where there isn't much to do for fun
| other than gossip about the other adolescents. Given that
| adolescence is a time when humans are maximally embarrassing
| and maximally interested in other adolescents' embarrassment, I
| don't think it's a good model for general life.
|
| People in small towns and villages today do not act like high
| schoolers, and they are perfectly capable of keeping secrets
| from each other. You don't need a legally enshrined right to
| privacy when your most dangerous threat model is Fred down the
| street who is a nosy twerp.
| cxr wrote:
| Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859854>
|
| 9 (13) days ago. 46 points. 8-ish comments.
| autoexec wrote:
| see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900087
|
| 7 days ago
| belter wrote:
| The pioneer of DeepFakes... "Anthony Comstock--the anti-obscenity
| crusader after whom the 1873 Comstock Act is named--had arrested
| an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped
| pictures that placed "the heads of innocent women on the undraped
| bodies of other females." "
| apantel wrote:
| Some things you can count on to never change and always be new
| again.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I wonder if anybody's found any ancient sculptures where one
| kind of bust was swapped onto another, er, _another_ kind of
| bust. :p
|
| Or further back: "Zog, why you paint other head on cave-wall
| of fertility goddess!?"
| jodrellblank wrote:
| The real non-story in the article is describing the downright
| awful behaviour of advertisers and marketers, and trying to say
| the problem is cameras.
|
| > " _By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera
| debuted, Eastman's company had sold 1.2 million devices_ "
|
| Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add
| laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV
| cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I
| think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the
| world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet";
| twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost
| nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any
| place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other
| people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the
| impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday,
| there's countless photos and videos of it.
|
| Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in
| a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain
| top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or
| Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and
| chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen,
| people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing,
| the insides of factories offices public places or government
| buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-
| seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration,
| drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or
| poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of
| propane?
|
| You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly
| scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a
| whim - but you can't _have it_ through a screen.
|
| it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to
| fully happen.
|
| [1] Roughly 1.2Bn/year, ~100M/month,
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
| bgoated01 wrote:
| "...arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually
| photoshopped pictures..."
|
| Am I the only one who finds the phrase "manually photoshopped" in
| an article about the late 1800s to early 1900s amusingly
| anochronistic? How about "manually doctored" or even "altered"?
| nerdponx wrote:
| I made the same comment but got flagged for my clumsy phrasing.
| I got a good laugh out of it. I couldn't tell if it was a
| subtle joke, or a confused young author + lapse in editing.
| 13of40 wrote:
| That one's kind of come full circle, though, since a "photo
| shop" was a place you could go to get photos printed, altered,
| etc. since the late 1800s.
| nerdponx wrote:
| But was it ever attested as a one-word verb before Photoshop-
| the-software existed?
|
| That would be a fascinating artifact of "skeumorphic"
| software naming.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Shall all amusing text fall at the hands of the machine mind?
| Is there to be no fun in this universe?
| kmoser wrote:
| While "photoshop" may have entered the current vernacular, it's
| annoying (maybe even misleading?) in the context of this
| article because I doubt Comstock used "photoshopped" as a verb.
| More to the point, we still have verbs like "edited,"
| "retouched," and "altered" that just as accurately describe the
| process, are more likely to have been used at the time, and are
| still understood by everybody today (believe it or not, there
| are people who don't know what Photoshop is, and wouldn't
| understand it as a verb).
| briankelly wrote:
| We do kinda take it for granted when old terms are re-adapted
| to the new technology - for instance "splicing" video clips in
| something like iMovie. It's rarer to see it the other way
| around but I'm not sure it's any worse. Today you probably are
| less likely to say "doctored" or "edited" for that kind of
| manipulation described than you are "photoshopped."
| Nition wrote:
| Just like how in WWII, the Bombe programmers manually Visual
| Studioed the Enigma code.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Does Facebook still use your pictures in ads?
|
| Article form ~10yr ago: https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-
| ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy
| RyanAdamas wrote:
| Exclusion through technological adherence.
| rjurney wrote:
| I love articles that completely dispel the idea of singularity -
| that point out that the feeling of our age that things are
| changing too quickly has been around for a very long time.
| jappgar wrote:
| It doesn't dispel the idea that things are changing too
| quickly. It reinforces that we are engaged in a never ending
| battle against exploitation and enslavement.
| jrussino wrote:
| Yeah, I think with all major technological advancements we end
| up with logistic "S-curve" type growth, with a steep rise
| followed by an eventual plateau. At the start it can look like
| exponential growth heading toward a singularity, but that's
| just not realistic and growth always slows down and levels out
| eventually. Based on the degree and timescale though the two
| cases my feel pretty indistinguishable for individuals.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I think what has changed the most about our relationship with
| technology now a days compared to prehistory is the overall
| incentives for technology changing. It used to be technology
| had to actually improve something to be adopted. A bow and
| arrow was superior to throwing a stone, so it was adopted on
| merit. Sowing seed and animal husbandry was superior to
| migrating around seasonal harvest from uncultivated flora and
| game, so it was also adopted on merit. No one was marketing
| this shift.
|
| Meanwhile we have a lot of technology where its only
| incentive is not to be thermodynamically easier to an
| alternative, but to make someone money. Sometimes the
| technology is even less efficient than the alternative, but
| its perpetuated and expanded and iterated upon because it is
| so lucrative. I think once we hit this point with technology
| is when the singularity really kicked off. Not recently or in
| the future but potentially in the time of Ea-Nasir and his
| ingots.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The singularity was already underway by this point.
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