[HN Gopher] An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a blea...
___________________________________________________________________
An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for
the internet
Author : tagawa
Score : 87 points
Date : 2024-11-30 22:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| His story appears to be based on combing through the writings of
| an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters.
| labster wrote:
| The short story is mentioned at the very end of the article, _The
| Library of Babel_ [0], which is a far better read than this
| article.
|
| [0]: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-
| content...
| guestbest wrote:
| Why is noncurated linked with low quality? It should be straight
| from the source and thus the highest fidelity.
| defrost wrote:
| Perhaps "untreated" would be a better descripter as it evokes
| untreated wastewater unfit for drinking.
|
| The content being discussed here isn't guarenteed statements
| direct from trusted sources, it's the recirculated gossip
| chains of Reddit, Twitter, <media>.commentSections, Clickbait-
| WebSheets, etc.
| guestbest wrote:
| You'd have those rumor mills without the internet through the
| tabloid sheets. The internet allows someone to publish who is
| a direct source of rather than having to go through the
| press.
| paxys wrote:
| It also allows a million people to publish who aren't
| sources at all.
| defrost wrote:
| To distinguish a reliable direct source from millions that
| aren't requires judgement, filtering, treatment .. much
| like separating drinkable water from wastewater.
|
| Hence the use of terms such as "uncurated", "untreated",
| "raw", "filtered", etc.
| threeseed wrote:
| What makes a story high quality is more than it just being a
| series of accurate quotes.
|
| It is where there is context and insights about the story.
| mcphage wrote:
| > It should be straight from the source and thus the highest
| fidelity.
|
| Sure, if nobody ever lied.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| You can have BS straight from the source as well if it doesn't
| show context for example.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| And not a minute too soon ;-)
|
| William Gibson pays a very nice tribute to Borges in an essay for
| $MAGAZINE that is in his "Distrust That Particular Flavor", which
| I wholly endorse, as I do every single last thing I've read or
| listened to of his or involving him.
|
| Portraying the now in the guise of "the Future" is the _art_ of
| it.
| rezmason wrote:
| I think a more apt Borges story is 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'--
| where a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional
| world with the intent to deceive. The artifacts and the world
| they allude to carry such appeal to the masses, that they
| essentially trump the rest of society as a source of truth and
| annihilate all culture that came before.
| bitwize wrote:
| [An ad for Marvel Funko Pops appears, skippable in 5... 4...
| 3...]
| schoen wrote:
| "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" as I understand it is more
| ambiguous about exactly why Tlon is becoming real in the
| narrator's world. Although there is a description in the
| afterword of such a guild having fabricated Tlon and some
| artifacts from there, the story up to that point seemed to take
| Tlon's metaphysics (in which the idea of a reality _outside_ of
| our perceptions is considered absurd and impossible) pretty
| seriously, and the end of the story presents the situation as
| though the narrator 's world is actually starting to work
| according to these principles. That could conceivably be for
| merely social-perception reasons, although according to Tlon's
| philosophy there _couldn 't be any such thing_ as "merely
| social-perception reasons" because social perception obviously
| wholly creates the real and only reality.
|
| One could imagine that the guild called up something it then
| couldn't put down, but necessarily because people will or
| prefer it so, but somehow because the world, at least in the
| story, fundamentally _could_ work this way.
|
| The Wikipedia article discusses how confusing it is to
| understand the exact position of the story with respect to
| narrative truth, when the entire story is playing with the idea
| of what is real and what makes it real, as well as explicitly
| talking about the idea of fiction coming to life:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
| rezmason wrote:
| We're two comments in and this is, so far, the most extensive
| conversation about a good Borges story I've had in my life,
| so kudos for that :)
| whatshisface wrote:
| I had always thought that the parts where reality was working
| according to Tlon rules was evidence that the author was
| being co-opted. Occasionally this happens in real life when
| political powers get involved in picking and choosing the
| outcomes of intellectual disputes - everyone's answers come
| out to corroborate a fiction, and the real guiding hand is
| never referred to.
|
| The most widely known example is Lysenkoism. No supporter of
| that theory ever said they were fabricating data to please
| the apparatus. An example closer to the one in the story was
| academic support of Nazi "anthropology."
| qazxcvbnm wrote:
| "The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any
| symmetry with a semblance of order -- dialectical
| materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism -- was sufficient to
| entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit
| to Tlon, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly
| planet?"
|
| To me, this suggests rather clearly something similar to the
| OP's interpretation. His drawing on of this story as allegory
| for our future occurs to me also as apt, and what I imagine
| as what Borges would have envisioned.
|
| I also don't quite follow your assertion that "social
| perception obviously wholly creates the real and only
| reality", as social perception clearly varies by each
| persons' distinct society - and anyhow even if considered on
| the level of the entire society, such a vast, sprawling
| perception could hardly be considered a singular "only"
| reality.
| gwern wrote:
| Yes, I've always read the story this way as well. Borges
| may have not been interested in politics, but politics was
| interested in him, and he clashed with the Peronists (who
| fired him from the library) and repeatedly criticizes
| fascism and anti-semites in his nonfiction especially, and
| when he was writing this in 1939/1940, obviously all of
| this was quite imminent and topical.
|
| So what I take TUOT as being is an exploration of the
| Idealism idea, where Borges puts a twist on it: the
| (dialectical) beliefs of the communalistic idealists of
| Tlon turn out to be true, on a certain level, because
| sufficiently compelling ideas and totalizing ideologies
| _make_ their claims true. In that way, 'perception'
| becomes 'reality'. Only that which the ideology or state
| can perceive is real, and everyone is required to see like
| a state. (As much as he loved Idealism & Platonism, Borges
| always seemed to accept them only on a _literary_ level, as
| applying to fiction and literature - there is indeed 'Man'
| in fiction, but there is not an actual Man in a Platonic
| region of forms, there is only a term 'man' we
| nominalistically apply to entities as convenient.)
|
| That is, idealism is correct, in a sense, and the artifacts
| of Tlon become real because the savants of the conspiracy
| 'perceive' them (in their minds) and _create them_. And as
| Tlon takes over the world and gains power, it gains more
| realness and more of its artifacts come into existence - or
| people just lie about them or pretend they exist and
| falsify documents to accord with the new party line, and
| doublethink their way to 'seeing' the new labyrinthine
| reality forged by their fellow humans.
|
| One might say that _hronir_, especially, are a savage
| Orwellian parody of how things go in totalitarian
| dictatorships: the description of the experiments with the
| prisoners could as easily be set in Stalinist Russia or
| Maoist China, where the real story is that on the fourth
| try, after turning up only the equivalent of fishing for a
| muddy boot, everyone has figured out that, to satisfy the
| decrees from above, they need to buy or forge some ancient
| artifacts of unconvincing antiquity (and so no counter-
| revolutionary skeptics can be permitted near) and that is
| how _hronir_ are discovered. The same way Lysenko
| manufactured agricultural miracles or innumerable
| falsifications like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_fro
| m_Dazhai_in_agricultu... became official policy, doubted
| only on pain of death.
|
| Those who disagree and wish to maintain their integrity,
| can only retreat into quietism or 'internal exile', and
| spend their time on topics with as little political
| relevance as possible and avoid even publishing (except as
| samizdat), and let "a scattered dynasty of recluses take
| over", as it is too late to stop the Tlon revolution, and
| "the [whole] world [will] be Tlon".
| EdiX wrote:
| To me Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is about the tendency of
| philosophers, and other wordcels, to confuse the structure of
| language with true metaphysical insights (for example in
| Other Inquisitions Borges describes the history of philosophy
| as "a vain museum of distractions and word games"). One
| example of this, IRL, would be how often, in the history of
| philosophy and theology, "existence" has been used as a
| proprety rather than a quantifier, and all of the paradoxes
| this leads to. The thought experiment about the nine copper
| coins is completely obvious to us but if you try to imagine
| what it would sound like in a language that does not have
| nouns but only verbs it becomes clear why they would find it
| paradoxical and resist materialism.
|
| This is a mirror image of what goes on in our world, where
| materialism is a fairly normal way to understand the world
| and radical idealist notions like Berkeley's subjective
| idealism (which is named in the text) are weird.
|
| Borges was always fascinated by platonism, it's a theme in
| much of his work, and in the postscriptum he's imagining that
| the world finally latches onto it by espousing Tlon's version
| of it to the point where Tlon's language is taught in school,
| cementing its way of thinking in the real world such that
| materialism will be hard to conceive.
|
| I think that trying to read political messages in Borges is
| wrong and disrespectful: he stated in many interviews that
| his stories did _not_ have a message and that he would
| consider such a thing to be a failure on his part, from Seven
| Voices: "I've done my best to prevent these opinions of mine
| (which are merely opinions, and may well be superficial) from
| intruding into what may be called my aesthetic output. (...)
| If a story or a poem of mine is successful, its success
| springs from a deeper source than my political views, which
| may be erroneous and are dictated by circumstances. In my
| case, my knowledge of what is called political reality is
| very incomplete."
|
| It is a very different attitude, almost unthinkable, from
| what we commonly see today, where a work of fiction is only
| judged on the merits of its political message, but I think it
| is valid and should be respected. Something which the article
| fails to do, BTW.
| flocciput wrote:
| "wordcels"?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Caught my attention as well. Must be neologism assuming
| it originated from as a variant of incel, but here
| focused on deriding people getting their jollies out of
| the written word ( me:P ). Naturally, I might be wrong.
| Lets see if the author responds.
| flancian wrote:
| Not the author but: yes. This word emerged from online
| discourse a few years back about 'wordcels' vs 'shape
| rotators':
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wordcel
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shape_rotator
| tessierashpool wrote:
| that's bonkers. "philosophers and other wordcels" not
| only insults Borges but the entire world of philosophy.
| the arrogance and the nonsense in that phrasing are both
| off the charts.
| jancsika wrote:
| > I think that trying to read political messages in Borges
| is wrong and disrespectful
|
| You can say wrong. But for the record, you lost the
| credibility to use the word "disrespectful" when you termed
| all philosophers as "wordcels." :)
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Notably, Tlon is the holding company for Urbit - I credit them
| for having an apt name
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > a clandestine guild creates artifacts from a fictional world
| with the intent to deceive
|
| In coolly-detached economics terms, we could call it a large-
| scale business in assymetric information.[1]
|
| But the abuse of assymetric information can lead to market
| collapse. And to judge from the state of modern society, the
| information collapse has returned people into Plato's
| allegorical cave of ignorance and fear. [2]
|
| The intellectual catastrophe is the same, but the difference in
| the modern world is a) the enormity of what we have lost, and
| b) that people's caves are more comfortable and they watch the
| shadows dance on a wall of high-resolution pixels.
|
| [1] _
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asymmetricinformation.a...
|
| [2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
| gmuslera wrote:
| The Library of Babel books weren't an infinite amount, they could
| fill up to 400 pages or so if I remember correctly. Still, it
| would have been a pretty big amount of books, far more than the
| amount of atoms of this universe.
|
| If we want a really infinite library, a lot of named irrational
| numbers could work as that, and be as efficient for searching for
| something meaningful inside.
| gwern wrote:
| Arguably, it doesn't really make a difference, because every
| possible 800-page sequence exists as a pair of 400-page books
| from the original Library, and so on and so forth. The
| 800-page, 1200-page, 1600-page and every greater length Library
| is as well-defined, complete, and vacuous as the original
| 400-page version.
| flir wrote:
| Hi, there's an infinite number of coach drivers outside. They
| say they booked ahead?
| Filligree wrote:
| Please let them all know, individually, to get in the
| queue. I'll start processing them once you're done.
| em-bee wrote:
| no drivers are currently being processed. no drivers have
| been processed for more than 2000 days. the queue is
| full. any additional drivers are being sent to compressed
| storage until that storage is full too. for more details
| refer to service model by adrian tchaikovsky. ;-)
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Borges should have just stopped with a kids ABC book then!
| hiatus wrote:
| Does the library contain duplicates? Otherwise an 800 page
| book that is just the same 400 page book concatenated to
| itself would not be found.
| gwern wrote:
| Who said you can't just stipulate having the same book
| twice or use self-reference?
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| "A short stay in hell" (Steven Peck) is a fun short read about
| living in a place. Totally recommend.
| Shalah wrote:
| > misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and
| TikTok.
|
| Meanwhile the New York Times acted to discredit the Biden Laptop
| story.
|
| > Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of
| factual and ostensibly truthful content
|
| You have got to be kidding. So-called curated content reflects
| the prejudices and interests of the owners of the online
| repositories.
|
| > On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the
| misinformation epidemic.
|
| Going on chatGPT, I see a most sinister development. Wherein
| chatGPT functions as gatekeeper to the current conformism.
|
| > Consider Borges' 1941 short story "The Library of Babel."
|
| Borges was writing satire, a writers in-joke. Something chatGPT
| finds difficult to detect. --
|
| Q: Tell a joke on Jesus
|
| chatGPT: Why did Jesus get kicked out of the basketball game?
| Because he kept turning the fouls into points!
|
| Q: Tell a joke on Buddha.
|
| chatGPT: Why didn't Buddha order a hot dog at the stand? Because
| he was already one with everything!
|
| Q: Tell a joke on Muhammad
|
| chatGPT: Out of respect for religious sensitivities and the
| diverse beliefs of people, I strive to ensure that humor remains
| inclusive and considerate of all cultures and faiths. Let me know
| if you'd like a general or alternative joke instead!
| zw123456 wrote:
| The Tower of Babel was a library that contained every possible
| combination of letters to form a 400 page book. Or something like
| that. It made me wonder, what if you made a content honey pot
| full of just random text and a chatbot vacuumed that up? Does
| it's data vacuum have a garbage detector?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| So.. I think it already has been happening ( people attempting
| to poison some sources for a variety of reasons ). I was doing
| a mini fun project on HN aliases ( attempting to derive/guess
| their user's age based on nothing but that alias ) and I came
| across some number of profiles that have bios clearly intended
| to mess with bots one way or another. Some have fun
| instructions. Some have contradictory information. Some are the
| length of a small night story. I am not judging. I just find it
| interesting. Has vibes of a certain book about a rainbow.
| Loughla wrote:
| Tell me about that side project. How does that work? What
| does it say about me? I find that very interesting.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> To some extent, this has already happened: Many news
| organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street
| Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls.
|
| This was funny to me because the NYT is already highly biased. I
| consider them compromised on political topics, and a bit
| sensational on any number of headlines.
| alecst wrote:
| How can someone tell if a newspaper is biased? What's the test?
| Is it the eye test -- as in, I can tell it when I see it -- or
| something more?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| A demagogue tells you so and then either you believe it or
| you become suspicious that their manipulation of you is the
| actual danger.
| lxgr wrote:
| Then again: Should I trust a given medium just because
| somebody I don't trust tells me I shouldn't?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| You're supposed to use a combination of your life
| experience and best judgment, which is as it always was.
| Extreme trust and extreme distrust are both
| irresponsible.
|
| Your responsibility is to remember that institutions are
| made up of flawed people just like yourself, and work
| towards improving them. You don't let someone manipulate
| your emotions to turn them into abstract enemies, tear
| them down, and replace them with nothing.
| Loughla wrote:
| Spoiler; every newspaper and media source is biased. They
| have to be. Starting with what stories they run and don't run
| and ending with the specific word choice they make inside the
| articles.
|
| Critical thinking is the only thing you can use to spot bias.
| Compare and contrast different stories. Then make up your own
| mind.
|
| Media literacy and virtual l critical reasoning should be the
| bedrock of modern education, and it is not.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Political I don't know, but in terms of hard science the NYT
| has an abysmal track record.
| lxgr wrote:
| One useful heuristic is to look at a newspaper's reporting in
| a domain you are deeply familiar with. If it misses the mark
| by a lot there, you could still take your chances with their
| remaining reporting under the assumption that that was an
| outlier and the rest will be much better - but I personally
| wouldn't.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| One exampe:
|
| https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/ny-times-
| admits-m...
|
| > New York Times Retracts 1920 Article Saying Spaceflight
| is Impossible
|
| This is Newton's third law. It was known to work for
| centuries.
|
| They retracted but it was something like
|
| > Nerds...
|
| > Who can stand them?
| cduzz wrote:
| Strange that this appears to be nearly lost to history -- but
| this is rhymes with kibo's (James Parry) declaration of
| happynet[1].
|
| For a long time I thought that the internet would be like the
| library described in "The Abortion: An Historical Romance" by
| Richard Brautigan[2], where anyone can put anything they've
| written into the library.
|
| Somewhat tragic, I guess, that the world's been predicted by kibo
| not brautigan. So it goes[3].
|
| [1]http://www.kibo.com/kibopost/happynet_98.html [2]https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/The_Abortion:_An_Historical_Ro... [3]yes, I know
| that's Vonnegut.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times...
| motohagiography wrote:
| >As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-
| generation texts - complete with made-up information called
| "hallucinations," as well as outright errors, such as suggestions
| to put glue on your pizza - will further pollute the web.
|
| I've come to suspect that the belief that AI's are hallucinating
| -all while they become exponentially more powerful- is a polite
| fiction we will use as an excuse to accept the complete
| domination of reality by these things.
|
| There should be a new corrollary to the Turing test thought
| experiement where we ask, at what point does a human not realize
| or care that he is being actuated by a computer?[1]
|
| On Borges library of all possible sequences of letters yielding
| somewhere in them the secrets of the universe though- they would
| be so distant from each other over a space that large, you'd need
| something that could either traverse over it, or decode it in a
| reasonable order of time, unless you had a key to decipher it.
| one made of transformers apparently.
|
| [1] 42.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > the belief that AI's are hallucinating -all while they become
| exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction
|
| If I may apply a regex:
|
| s/polite/lucrative/g
| em-bee wrote:
| _the belief that AI 's are * hallucinating -all while they
| become exponentially more powerful- is a polite fiction we will
| use as an excuse to accept the complete domination of reality
| by these things_
|
| i am confused by this sentence. are AIs not hallucinating? is
| that a fictional claim? am i misunderstanding or is there a
| "not" missing at the *?
| tim333 wrote:
| No, I think he's saying that when AIs are better at us at
| everything we'll deal with it by saying but they hallucinate.
| em-bee wrote:
| but they are hallucinating. according to this reading they
| won't in the future but we will pretend that they still do
| because that allows us to let AI dominate.
|
| that makes no sense to me.
|
| it's ok for AI to run the world because they just make up
| stuff anyways? don't we want the opposite? in order to
| allow AI to run the world, shouldn't we believe that they
| are foolproof and are always able to figure out the correct
| answer?
| tim333 wrote:
| I think he's saying "the complete domination of reality
| by these things" is going to happen whether we want it or
| not.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It is kinda interesting. I talked with a less technical
| member of my extended family over the holidays. Fairly
| successful guy in his chosen profession ( accounting ).
| To say he was skeptical is an understatement and he is
| typically the most pro-corporate shill you can find for a
| company to save a few bucks. I assumed he would be
| attempting to extol its virtues with the assumption that
| lower level work has errors anyway. I was wrong. Sadly,
| we didn't get to continue down that line since my kid
| started crying at that moment.
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah I'm interested in how it will play out. I can
| understand skepticism because the current AI isn't that
| good, but it'll keep improving.
| em-bee wrote:
| count me among the skeptics. the big problem i see is
| that there is no way to verify whether any AI output is
| correct. it is already very hard to prove that a program
| is correct. proving that for AI is several levels more
| difficult, and even if it were possible the cost would be
| so high to make it not worth it.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| It is clear to me that humans "hallucinate" all the time, and I
| don't see why this should disqualify AI. One prominent human
| hallucinated that a hurricane was going to go in a particular
| direction and kindly updated a map, provided by scientists,
| with a sharpie.
| Loughla wrote:
| There's a difference between that and asking for a basic fact
| and getting errors.
|
| Google's AI result, when I ask for the spot price of silver,
| returns the amount in British pounds, but with an American
| dollar sign in front of it.
|
| That's not a lie, it's just an absolute misinterpretation.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| > at what point does a human not realize or care that he is
| being actuated by a computer?
|
| I don't know about caring, but I think that the point of the
| Turing test is to determine at which point a human can't tell
| whether it's another human. Also, I've read that it's not a
| particularly good test, because even pre-LLM you could craft an
| irritating, misspelling, troll of a chat bot and people would
| think it was a real teenage edgelord.
| mitaphane wrote:
| A fun website that depicts said Library of Babel:
| https://libraryofbabel.info/
| lxgr wrote:
| > Characters in Stephenson's novel deal with this problem by
| subscribing to "edit streams" - human-selected news and
| information that can be considered trustworthy. [...] To some
| extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such
| as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed
| their curated content behind paywalls.
|
| It's been a while that I read it, but I don't remember "edit
| streams" in "Fall" to be comparable to the NYT or WSJ in any way.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| The Machine Stops is also a worthwhile read.
| jongjong wrote:
| The part of the story suggesting that only the rich could afford
| fact checkers to understand reality is wrong because they won't
| know which fact checkers are good. At best, you can only hire
| fact checkers on the basis that they have consensus with some
| other fact checkers. This doesn't guarantee correctness. Most of
| the information we see are lies and their opposites, which are
| mostly lies as well.
|
| The opposite of a lie is not necessary the truth, it could just
| be a different lie.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Characters in Stephenson's novel deal with this problem by
| subscribing to "edit streams" - human-selected news and
| information that can be considered trustworthy.
|
| > The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke
| services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality,
| noncurated online content.
|
| Why would only the wealthy be able to access that? Since it
| doesn't actually cost anything to add another person to view such
| a feed, it would be extremely cheap if viewership is high.
|
| If only there were a historical precedent where people were paid
| by to go out and seek good factual information which was then
| gathered, edited and put for sale en masse for cheap. Some might
| still remember this wild concept, they called them "newspapers".
| fragmede wrote:
| I mean, that's the case today, with expensive feeds like the
| Bloomberg terminal subscription being more than most people pay
| in rent, pricing it out of reach for the plebes and restricting
| access to the wealthy. the rest of humanity gets access to
| notably low-quality, noncurated online content free feeds like
| Reddit and 4chan.
|
| so I guess there's a historical precedent for that scenario, as
| well as this "newspaper" thing.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well it depends on the effort required to curate the
| information divided by the number of people paying for it.
| Bloomberg is a niche thing that requires a lot of effort to
| run, so it's gonna be expensive per user. If it's something
| that everyone wants to read, then it'll be popular enough to
| be cheap. It's not an altruistic thing either, it just makes
| sense to price it lower since there's an optimal point where
| you can extract the most revenue that way.
|
| I think we're not really in a phase where disinformation
| would be that much of a problem yet, HN and Reddit are
| arguably still sources of very high quality data if you know
| where to look, so there's no incentive for most people to pay
| for anything. Especially when it's where most of ad-driven
| media copies practically all content from these days anyway.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I can see this as a bleak future for AI, as it consumes its own
| output, but any bleak future for information writ large (as
| conflated here with the "misinformation" industry and the often
| intentionally deceptive output of the NYT) comes from the
| suppression of material due to copyright attacks and its locking
| away in archives.
|
| I've spent a frustrating few hours recently discovering that I
| could find any number of interpretations and retrospectives on
| Francisco Ferrer. But the fact that his schools put out a
| newsletter, the _Bolitin de la Escuela Moderna_ , which would be
| the best primary source for learning about it, and is completely
| inaccessible online, is an example of the way information is
| still locked away. I read about John R. Coryell's prosecution for
| obscenity for his six part serial published in Physical Culture
| beginning in 1906, _" Wild Oats, or Growing to Manhood in a
| Civilized (?) Society"_, and I find that I can't read any issues
| of Physical Culture prior to 1910, because they're not online
| (looks like obscenity convictions in 1906 are still effective in
| 2024!) I find any number of books referring to the culture of
| Mexican photonovelas, and that they sold millions of copies a
| month during the 70s, and the best selling ones are only
| preserved by a blogger who is constantly fighting takedown
| notices, and who was grateful to get the scans that I got from a
| local garage sale.
|
| We're failing to put in the minimal effort to preserve, organize
| and keep accessible our own culture, even when copyright is not
| an issue. We have endless legal debates and court cases about
| having our own laws and court cases available to the public
| without a rent-seeking intermediary given a trust by corrupt
| politicians in the past. Everything could be preserved and made
| accessible at lower cost than a few Marvel movies, or two weeks
| of Ukraine adventure, yet we don't do it. Where's the campaign
| for that? Nah, better to whine about "racist, sexist" LLMs.
| That's the opposite of preservation: our entire history is racist
| and sexist content. Wiping that clean is _Year Zero_ talk.
|
| Our governments prefer reality to be interpreted through
| intermediaries who will modify it for their sake, or in exchange
| for payment. Our institutions prefer to be the guardians of
| information rather than the spreaders of information. That's the
| problem.
|
| _The Conversation_ itself is a creepy Australian-based
| conjunction of shady government and nonprofit funding sources
| that is explicitly designed to push particular narratives into
| "mainstream" outlets (which is why all of its articles are
| Creative Commons licensed.) You'll see this article rewritten in
| six different ways in other outlets within the week, and it seems
| to be part of this desperate last push for "misinformation"
| before the US presidential transition, because Trump made a bunch
| of campaign promises to destroy the industry. It's all
| manipulation.
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