[HN Gopher] The Absent Silence (2010)
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The Absent Silence (2010)
Author : dcminter
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-12-02 12:59 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ursulakleguin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ursulakleguin.com)
| baerrie wrote:
| She says so eloquently what is such an obvious crime against
| consumers that we tolerate because we must. Modern serfdom is
| when "trust" turns to "must".
| simtel20 wrote:
| In that context, what leads you call yourself and the rest of
| humanity primarily "consumers" in response to an essay? I think
| this has become uncomfortably (to me) normalized, and it begs
| the same question that Le Guin asks about whether we understand
| what we are doing when we are defining ourselves. A citizen and
| a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do
| they?
| 29ebJCyy wrote:
| Have to? No, there are other options. But to twist this
| question a little bit - does a child that grows up in the
| United States _have to_ speak English? They do not,
| technically. And in fact some small percentage don't, but the
| vast, vast majority do. And not because they chose to, but
| because that is the overwhelming tendency of the environment
| they live in. I think much the same happens with consumerism.
| the_af wrote:
| > _A citizen and a person doesn 't have to be defined as what
| they consume, do they?_
|
| I find this is at the core of Stallman's criticism of the
| term "content". We speak of media "content", of "content
| authors", etc, as if movies, articles, books, etc were just
| that: content, ready to be commoditized, packaged and sold.
| And some of it is! But we've conditioned to think of
| everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is
| depressing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content"
| to be "consumed", which is depressing.
|
| Specialization pretty much requires it, and our adherence
| to capitalism demands it.
|
| You specialize to get paid, and by getting paid you can pay
| others that specialize to create. And you're right, it's a
| depressing system, but it's no less depressing than what
| came before that.
| simtel20 wrote:
| I have started to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David
| Graeber and David Wengrow and while I cannot speak to
| most of the book, even in the first hundred or so of
| (ebook) pages, it challenges that frame of reference in a
| way that is clarifying, in the sense of being a palate
| cleanser, admitting different ways of thinking about
| these things.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >but it's no less depressing than what came before that.
|
| You can make an argument that it is more depressing when
| the compartmentalization of everything also isolates off
| community. No amount of individual riches can repair a
| trusted community to engage with. We're definitely
| getting lonlier in the process.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Haven't read Stallman on it, but it's funny how vague &
| generic the term is, and how it requires the existence of a
| container. Content is simply "that which is contained."
| Seems to me it's a word you use when your primary interest
| is the container. Like you're the managing editor of a news
| website or the like. Metaphorically you have a mouth you
| need to fill with words, any words, or else people will
| stop paying attention. But I don't look at the world that
| way. I appreciate something good and call it whatever it
| is. The only time I use "content" is as an ironic and
| derisive synonym for cynical low-quality crap.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Less and less people have the option to male "art" and need
| to make "content" to simply survive. Art has historically
| been reserved for the elite privileged and it seems the
| world is heading back towards old norms as wealth
| consolidates.
|
| In a similar breath, that may be why we don't heat much of
| the next generation of Stallman's and instead hear of a
| looming crisis in FOSS as the old guard retires. Less devs
| (if they are even pursuing that path down the line) will
| have the free time to choose FOSS as a path, unless big
| tech is paying for it to bend ot to their will.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| A person doesn't have to be defined as a citizen either, even
| though membership in a community is as fundamental a part of
| being human as consuming goods is.
| why_is_it_good wrote:
| The mistake is in expecting anything positive from a company,
| brand or celebrity. And then phrasing it as if it's a problem?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Why should that be a mistake though? We take it for granted
| these days that public figures and companies will never show a
| scrap of mercy or generosity, but it doesn't have to be this
| way.
| the_af wrote:
| While acknowledging the truth of what you're saying (the first
| sentence, anyway), the problem is going into a cynical,
| defeatist "that's the way things are". A kind of learned
| helplessness.
| tphyahoo2 wrote:
| google: god is silence saramago quote
|
| seems to work ok
| the_af wrote:
| I suppose back in 2010 it gave different results. I think
| Ursula's point was how _opaque_ it was...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Oh wow I missed that this was from 2010. Seems just as
| relevant as today.
| bloaf wrote:
| As someone who regularly looks up things I read "a while back,"
| her experience is very common and insanely frustrating.
|
| There always do exist magic combinations of words that you can
| put into google that will find the thing you're looking for.
| But the search space doesn't feel differentiable in a
| mathematical sense: you can't iteratively improve your terms
| because you either hit on a combo that works, or you get the
| same wrong results as you saw for your past 10 searches.
| zerolayers wrote:
| Brilliant quote!
| modzu wrote:
| i read about pagerank in first year computer science. but her
| point stands
| rdiddly wrote:
| > _So the corporation can and will keep its secrets, even though
| what it is dealing in is information, even when its business is
| making knowledge accessible, open, free -- the very opposite of
| keeping secrets._
|
| Oh yeah, I had forgotten Google used to espouse that. Almost
| seems quaint now. Was it a ruse all along? Or an ideal later
| betrayed when they were seduced by the siren song of revenue? Or
| simply a double standard: making YOUR information freely
| available but OURS not so much?
| abathologist wrote:
| Search should be a public service, open and transparent, funded
| by tax revenue, and maintained for the public good. It is too
| important a service these days to leave it up to profiteers (who
| have repeatedly demonstrated they are not responsible or
| responsive stewards of the public good).
| wavemode wrote:
| > it's as if a great library, say the Library of Congress,
| refused to tell where they got their books and how they got their
| books and who chose the books and whether all the books they had
| were in the catalogue and available or some were held back, kept
| secret.
|
| I think "proprietary" is a better descriptor for Google Search's
| inner machinations, than "secret". The general concept of
| engineering a search crawler is well-trodden. Many companies have
| done it, there are open-source examples, and Google themselves
| have written blogs about their own.
|
| It would probably be more apt to say, we know where the books
| came from and how they were acquired, we just don't necessarily
| know how the archive shelves in the basement are arranged and we
| don't know which employee is responsible for organizing them and
| we don't have the source code to the library's LMS. (All of which
| is true, by the way, for the LOC.) Proprietary, not secret.
| Animats wrote:
| For Google, back in 2010, word order didn't matter much outside
| of quotes. So if you asked _God is silence_ , the "is" is
| discarded, and you get a join of a search for "God" and
| "silence", sorted by rank. That probably won't help.
|
| Try it today, and see what Google's AI turns up. It's amusing.
| It's still not what LeGuin is looking for. Search for "god is the
| silence of the universe" in quotes, and while Google does find a
| Saramago reference, the AI reframes the concept in Christian
| terms.
|
| Now try "god is the silence of the universe"
| atheist
|
| Now you'll get what LeGuin was looking for. The Christian
| analysis is turned off.
| fasterik wrote:
| The mistake is thinking of Google as a library. Google is a
| commercial product. The equivalent of the Library of Congress
| would be something more like Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive,
| or Library Genesis.
|
| I certainly think that we should be spending more resources as a
| civilization on storing and categorizing human knowledge in a
| more systematic and not-for-profit way. Expecting a for-profit
| corporation to do that is just a category error. I'm not saying
| this in an anti-capitalist sense; I'm in favor of for-profit
| corporations. People have unrealistic expectations about what
| they can or should accomplish.
| kingofmen wrote:
| It appears to me that comrade LeGuin is being rather willfully
| ignorant here. The detailed implementation of the algorithm is
| not public, but the basic concept - download every webpage, index
| by keywords, rank by number of links - is well known and had been
| well known for some time even in 2010. LeGuin could have, well,
| googled it. But then she wouldn't have gotten an anti-capitalist
| essay out of her ignorance.
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