I don’t think this author speaks for a lot of people in tech. His viewpoint seems to be from a very narrow subculture, mainly Web 2.0 era social networking.
Some of us have had a lifelong passion for technology and are actually happy and excited about the current state of the industry (and always have been).
If you don’t like people disagreeing with you on Twitter, just turn it off. Don’t claim that it’s part of some apparatus (that the author feels he helped invent) that somehow brought out the worst in humanity. He should feel happy he can now get exposed to views outside of his bubble.
It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on Twitter?" It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech?"
But I don't think even _that's_ the right question. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have built so much trust in algorithm and API and machine learning, and no one stopped to ask how careful they needed to be with turning over so much power to a computer program that can and will be gamed by malicious actors. Hate speech and conspiracy theories and fraud can now be amplified a millionfold, and the vehicles by which it's happening were not prepared to deal with the implications. And they continue to double-down on the "more machine learning will fix it" self-delusion.
It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on Twitter?"
No, it’s 100% about this. You do know that violent crime is at an all time low, right (at least in the US)? There is no problem other than the audience for technology is using it in a way not approved of by some if its creators (the OP, not me for instance).
If you’re not unhappy with the state of the industry, these think pieces lamenting it read as really self-centered and out of touch.
While crime over all and violent crime remain well below their levels of the 1980s and 1990s, last year was the first time violent crime increased in consecutive years since 2005 and 2006
I agree that this article sounds totally out of touch with reality. I think the author doesn't really believe what he's saying, he's just trying (and failing) to be a hipster to the rest of the tech industry and has attached a virtuous cause to justify it to himself
I'm afraid I suspect that it's revealing a bunch of latent biases as the web has grown to reach people from different socio-economic layers and cultural milieus. These people were always there; we just didn't hear them, because we had a pyramidal media structure controlled by elites.
One theory I've heard is that the nation state is over, and the Internet killed it. Demos, the shared group of people that makes up a voting democracy and validates democratic choice as a group will, is breaking down. People are starting to identity at global levels by social class, education and political outlook, rather than national identity. People no longer participate in the same national narrative. I think this would have happened eventually if we only had newsgroups and chain emails, it's just happened faster because we have easier to use software.
I don't think some unholy union of state and corporate control of free speech is the answer. If anything, it's a path to civil war, eventually.
It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech?"
And once you've made the jump from "speech should be free" to "speech (that I condone) should be free", you've made a big step towards fascism.
Somewhere between all possible speech, ever, should be free, and, well, fascism, is a more nuanced and useful classification of speech than "condone: yes/no".
A thorough and well thought out treatise on why the Holocaust didn't actually happen, exists in a different class of objectionable compared to a single anti-semitic tweet, which is different to credible threats of bodily harm or death against a specific individual (including street address and phone number). Different still is claims that the Earth is flat or 6000 years old.
Expressing like or dislike of current political leaders belongs to yet another class, and the various different kinds of sales pitches could be divided into a few more, as well.
For sure. But trying to get privately owned companies to clamp down on free speech isn't going to fix the underlying issue; if that worked, sooner or later you'll create a market for fringe right-wing / left-wing social networks and messaging platforms that are even more of an echo chamber, and some people will start agitating for state control over permitted corporate platforms for speech - and that really will be fascism.
we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech
We thought people were better, that with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government put on our heads. We never imagined people would deliberately poison our watering hole.
I really wish people would stop using the term “we”. There is no “we” here. The 20th century had both world wars, Vietnam and a host of major atrocities. I’d say people who “thought people were better” were actually in the minority. Most haven’t forgotten what people are capable of and realize the shouting matches on the internet are really no big deal in the grand scheme of things.
with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government
It seems like this is happening. It’s just not aligning with the politics of those in power. Neither the government nor mass media wanted Trump to get elected yet it happened anyway, for instance.
There’s great irony in complaining about Trump’s lack of truth then in the same breath blaming “malicious actors”. The truth is that Trump gave a voice to a large group of people that the media and other establishment didn’t want voiced. And now he’s president. I don’t know if that could have happened without the internet but I doubt it.
I see Trump as the Internet’s first president. Every other avenue was strongly against him but ultimately couldn’t shout down the “truth” of his popularity because he had internet based communication channels that mass media didn’t control.
Structurally speaking, Trump was a major victory for alternatives to mainstream media and politics. That’s why the defeated parties are desperately grasping at the “malicious actors” fabrications. They can’t handle the loss of control.
>how much real-world badness has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically
This is just the age old question of free will. Everyone could be locked in a metal cage and there would be no murder but would this be the best state for humanity? You have to take the good with the bad...
The difference is that when you’re in the middle cage you’re near the other people acting on you.
The Internet has made it trivial for people to cause damage, possibly serious damage (SWATting and other such things) to people large distances away where it’s nearly impossible to figure out who was actually behind it.
All existing message we had to deal with people seem to fail to deal with these issues, but no one ever took that into account. They just pushed ahead assuming that either it wouldn’t be a problem or eventually the laws would “fix” the issues. But in the time between serious damage is being done to people/companies/governments.
I think these are all very good questions for people to ask themselves. I don’t think he’s arguing that technology is bad or that we should’ve all run away from it. But I think the happy unicorn “everything is better with technology“ view that many people seem to blindly apply to large social change may not be a good idea.
To take one example, harassment is not a new thing on Twitter. Harassment on social forums has existed as long as social forums have existed on computers. Same with many of the issues Reddit faces.
But no one seems to of looked into the lessons of how people trying to deal with it on BBSs, USENET, and other places. “We can just think about that later“ where later is defined as some number billion users.
The Internet has made it trivial for people to cause damage
It amazes me that nobody seems to take much of an issue with that. We've seen several instances of people having their lives ruined and/or killing themselves because of things that happened on the internet just this year alone. Whenever I bring any of these up, it's met with indifference, as if that's just the price we pay for the internet. It's really concerning that people just accept all of this online suffering as a necessary evil, like it's just something that comes with society being able to use the internet.
like it's just something that comes with society being able to use the internet.
That's exactly what it is. Whether or not we as a society decide that cost is worth paying is another matter, but yes, the price we pay for the internet is that it acts as a force multiplier for all collective human intent, good and evil. And let's be fair - as much as we're focusing in this thread on the harm the internet has done, I don't think that harm outweighs the benefit to society.
but yes, the price we pay for the internet is that it acts as a force multiplier for all collective human intent, good and evil
I disagree, I think that we can (and should) do everything we can to mitigate that evil. If Tumblr and Twitter didn't half-ass their ToS, we wouldn't have kids killing themselves because they got doxed and sent death threats. Websites don't need to be complete anarchist societies; I think many social media sites are morally obligated to follow up on their ToS and not just let everything go to shit because their AI thought what is clearly a credible terrorist threat is perfectly fine (this has actually happened to me on Facebook).
We have platforms where people can cause harm, but we also have the ability to properly moderate these platforms, the internet doesn't just have to be a bunch of thinly veiled 4chan-esque shitholes, we have the responsibility to make sure these extremely popular platforms aren't just letting people ruin each other's lives.
Websites don't need to be complete anarchist societies; I think many social media sites are morally obligated to follow up on their ToS and not just let everything go to shit because their AI thought what is clearly a credible terrorist threat is perfectly fine (this has actually happened to me on Facebook).
That's true, and individual sites have the right to enforce whatever rules they like, but that doesn't extend to the platform as a whole, because the internet can't be made to conform to any specific moral or legal ideal. Wherever you have freedom of speech and freedom to communicate, you also have freedom to conspire. And, as connections on the internet are necessarily nonlocal, someone without an account on a heavily moderated platform can still threaten you depending on the information you leave publicly available.
It was once said that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. This turns out not to be as true as once assumed, because of the network effect of social media sites, but it is still true enough, where "censorship" is considered as a politically, socially and morally agnostic term. Push the racists and trolls off of Twitter, they'll just go somewhere else. That's intended to be a feature, but only because it applies to everyone.
Within a month or so of signing up with Twitter I got to watch someone I followed live tweet themselves running from their house as someone else was live tweeting that they were coming to attack/kill them.
Because the person I followed tweeted a joke.
That was YEARS ago. Obviously it’s left and indelible mark on how I think about these things.
I’m with you. It continues to amaze me that people seem to see this stuff as acceptable status quo. I don’t know if it’s because they were in a group that isn’t being attacked, or they haven’t had friends attacked, or they think they’re safer whatever reason.
What goes on… just the worst of it not even the ‘basic’ racist insults and such… is rather horrifying.
But in even the most obvious cases Twitter and others refuse to do anything. I’d say the courts are our only hope but I don’t see them being able to catch up. By the time you track someone down and prosecute them it’s been far too many years and the problematic behaviors have continued from that person and others.
Two months form now will mark 4 years since I received hundreds of death threats because of a dumb edgy tumblr post.
Some of the "safest" sites really are incredibly dangerous in ways people think only apply to things on the dark net. The internet is an absolute nightmare in an incredible state of disarray. Social media giants use horrible tactics to create addictions, and then let their sites turn into anarchy because they don't moderate anything. The internet's interactivity really is awful sometimes, I've moved to just passive consumption of content, I won't even use certain sites without being behind Tor or a proxy.
It does feel a lot like a Pandora’s box.
I feel like it's worse. Pandora's box was filled with nothing but evil, but the internet didn't start that way, we just let it get like this because nobody cared enough to stop it. To me, that's a lot more upsetting than something that was evil from the start.
agreed... article felt like maximum ego-stroking, minimal thinking.
to my mind, the conversation about where "the web" went off the rails ends with the dopamine-hook. I worked with a team building game experiences 5 years ago, it was all we could think about. good examples of it were everything we wanted to emulate. it was disgusting...
mea culpa.
for the children growing up today, whose parents put their baby photos on blast all day... there will be a reckoning.
It's not Web 2.0-era social networking, it's a kind of tech utopianism that's been around for decades. I agree that the article doesn't make a lot of sense if you never believed that the Internet was going to automatically bring about (or be) a utopia. It's also reasonable to argue that the Internet, for all its flaws, succeeds at being an agent of social progress.
I think this author is pretty clear about what it means to be culpable, and why a "lifelong passion for technology" is no substitute for ethical analysis, and introspective skepticism of our enthusiasm.
I have had a lifelong passion for technology, and I am not happy or excited about the current state of the industry, nor am I doom and gloom pessimistic and advocating a Neo Luddite approach.
The author is talking about Nazis. Not just people who disagree with you. You are wrong, and I hope, as Alexis Ohanian did, that you admit the error of your ways.
The author is talking about Nazis. Not just people who disagree with you. You are wrong, and I hope, as Alexis Ohanian did, that you admit the error of your ways.
No you are wrong. Nasty people exist, you are blaming X technology for making it worse, what about mobile phones, cars, microwave ovens, shoes... where does it end, nasty people exist, stop fucking blaming technology and try to understand why they are nasty if you care.
Microwaves don’t make it easy for someone to send harassing messages to 40,000 people.
Shoes don’t make it possible for someone across the globe to send a SWAT team into your living room.
Those aren’t communication methods. That’s like asking why the waffle maker didn’t solve tuberculosis.
You have to compare communication methods, like the telephone and the post office. And notice that we have lots of rules about how and who can contact you and trying to enforce accountability. If you start sending threatening letters to the post office, they’ll work to find you. If you start making dirty calls to random strangers, you’ll be tracked down.
But Twitter and Reddit and a great many other things on the Internet don’t seem to think that’s necessary… or at least didn’t early on. They chose to ignore (or didn’t know of) how previous communication methods tried to deal with these issues.
You can only make one phone call at a time. For a VERY long time you might not have been able to call across the country let alone overseas. It would’ve cost you a lot of money to do either one. It took time to physically mail envelopes or postcards and you had to pay a fee for each one.
The Internet has removed all those barriers. It’s made harassment trivial. Without something else to keep a lid on the issue the obvious has happened: harassment has exploded compared to other media.
Honestly I’m not even talking about the effects on democracy. Just the direct effects of attacks on people and threats against them are horrible enough. Stuff that’s been going on for YEARS. Basic safety.
I’m not trying to touch the more complex and problematic issues of how social media is changing democracy in my comments here. I don’t know how we’re ever supposed to get a handle on that if we can’t even keep people vaguely safe.
I'm much more concerned with direct physical attacks in real life than remote harassment - I was bikejacked and had my motorcycle taken from me, pulled to the ground and kicked in the head a few months ago in London - and I think societal breakdown and inequality is what ultimately created the level of alienation that made that kind of attack ok for its perpetrators.
No, I am blaming certain people in positions of power for making bad decisions about designing technologies, and I am blaming certain other people in positions of power for not making better policy decisions.
I do try to understand why individual humans at work and in my neighborhood sometimes lash out with nasty remarks. I try to empathize, and give them the benefit of the doubt, as long as they aren't becoming clearly abusive.
I do not, however, tolerate Nazi sympathizers. They can go take a flying fuck at the moooooon!
A lot of people are simply not very bright (half are below 100 IQ!), or not very good at thinking. Correlation is causation, formative experiences become lifelong prejudices, and simple explanations are accepted over nuances. Solutions that promise to directly address issues are preferred over those that consider second and third order effects. And so on.
With great advantages come equal disadvantages. I agree, the author does not speak for a lot of people in tech and there lies the problem. The fact that some people who work in tech are thoroughly excited by disruption and automation is disturbing. It certainly does not excite photographers, musicians, gallerists, truck-drivers, customer service workers, industrial workers and 50% of the public who does not have the IQ to work in tech.
Look what high frequency trading has done to "Main Street. In fact look what Amazon is doing to Main Street. Then there is the Dark web... How do you think the opioid crisis which has lowered life expectancy in the US for two years in a row got that lethal? It's not by by street dealers on a corner but rather through online purchasing.
Yes tech is mad, phat, awesome but the consequences are catching up with it.
Social media are optimized for maximum engagement. If people engage more in bubbles, they'll get bubbles. If people engage more by reaching out and exploring beyond their bubbles, the platforms will facilitate that instead. Don't blame the mirror.
Comments
I don’t think this author speaks for a lot of people in tech. His viewpoint seems to be from a very narrow subculture, mainly Web 2.0 era social networking.
Some of us have had a lifelong passion for technology and are actually happy and excited about the current state of the industry (and always have been).
If you don’t like people disagreeing with you on Twitter, just turn it off. Don’t claim that it’s part of some apparatus (that the author feels he helped invent) that somehow brought out the worst in humanity. He should feel happy he can now get exposed to views outside of his bubble.
It's not really about "can I keep from seeing opinions I don't like on Twitter?" It's more about, "how much real-world badness (specifically, many violent, racist, hate-based movements around the world) has been enabled by what we thought were benevolent principles of radically open information and free speech?"
But I don't think even _that's_ the right question. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have built so much trust in algorithm and API and machine learning, and no one stopped to ask how careful they needed to be with turning over so much power to a computer program that can and will be gamed by malicious actors. Hate speech and conspiracy theories and fraud can now be amplified a millionfold, and the vehicles by which it's happening were not prepared to deal with the implications. And they continue to double-down on the "more machine learning will fix it" self-delusion.
No, it’s 100% about this. You do know that violent crime is at an all time low, right (at least in the US)? There is no problem other than the audience for technology is using it in a way not approved of by some if its creators (the OP, not me for instance).
If you’re not unhappy with the state of the industry, these think pieces lamenting it read as really self-centered and out of touch.
This is incorrect, it's been rising the past couple years: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-c...
You forgot this part.
I agree that this article sounds totally out of touch with reality. I think the author doesn't really believe what he's saying, he's just trying (and failing) to be a hipster to the rest of the tech industry and has attached a virtuous cause to justify it to himself
I'm afraid I suspect that it's revealing a bunch of latent biases as the web has grown to reach people from different socio-economic layers and cultural milieus. These people were always there; we just didn't hear them, because we had a pyramidal media structure controlled by elites.
One theory I've heard is that the nation state is over, and the Internet killed it. Demos, the shared group of people that makes up a voting democracy and validates democratic choice as a group will, is breaking down. People are starting to identity at global levels by social class, education and political outlook, rather than national identity. People no longer participate in the same national narrative. I think this would have happened eventually if we only had newsgroups and chain emails, it's just happened faster because we have easier to use software.
I don't think some unholy union of state and corporate control of free speech is the answer. If anything, it's a path to civil war, eventually.
And once you've made the jump from "speech should be free" to "speech (that I condone) should be free", you've made a big step towards fascism.
Somewhere between all possible speech, ever, should be free, and, well, fascism, is a more nuanced and useful classification of speech than "condone: yes/no".
A thorough and well thought out treatise on why the Holocaust didn't actually happen, exists in a different class of objectionable compared to a single anti-semitic tweet, which is different to credible threats of bodily harm or death against a specific individual (including street address and phone number). Different still is claims that the Earth is flat or 6000 years old.
Expressing like or dislike of current political leaders belongs to yet another class, and the various different kinds of sales pitches could be divided into a few more, as well.
Free speech has no requirement that privately owned companies must promote your speech to a mass audience.
For sure. But trying to get privately owned companies to clamp down on free speech isn't going to fix the underlying issue; if that worked, sooner or later you'll create a market for fringe right-wing / left-wing social networks and messaging platforms that are even more of an echo chamber, and some people will start agitating for state control over permitted corporate platforms for speech - and that really will be fascism.
However, it does have a requirement that there are large public spaces available to masses to practice free speech.
Another important note is that promotion is hardly the same as allowing.
We thought people were better, that with the open flow of information truth and debate would flow freely and we'd be free from the blinkers traditional media and government put on our heads. We never imagined people would deliberately poison our watering hole.
I really wish people would stop using the term “we”. There is no “we” here. The 20th century had both world wars, Vietnam and a host of major atrocities. I’d say people who “thought people were better” were actually in the minority. Most haven’t forgotten what people are capable of and realize the shouting matches on the internet are really no big deal in the grand scheme of things.
It seems like this is happening. It’s just not aligning with the politics of those in power. Neither the government nor mass media wanted Trump to get elected yet it happened anyway, for instance.
His election was the opposite of truth and debate flowing freely and a textbook example of malicious actors poisoning the watering hole.
There’s great irony in complaining about Trump’s lack of truth then in the same breath blaming “malicious actors”. The truth is that Trump gave a voice to a large group of people that the media and other establishment didn’t want voiced. And now he’s president. I don’t know if that could have happened without the internet but I doubt it.
I see Trump as the Internet’s first president. Every other avenue was strongly against him but ultimately couldn’t shout down the “truth” of his popularity because he had internet based communication channels that mass media didn’t control.
Structurally speaking, Trump was a major victory for alternatives to mainstream media and politics. That’s why the defeated parties are desperately grasping at the “malicious actors” fabrications. They can’t handle the loss of control.
This is just the age old question of free will. Everyone could be locked in a metal cage and there would be no murder but would this be the best state for humanity? You have to take the good with the bad...
The difference is that when you’re in the middle cage you’re near the other people acting on you.
The Internet has made it trivial for people to cause damage, possibly serious damage (SWATting and other such things) to people large distances away where it’s nearly impossible to figure out who was actually behind it.
All existing message we had to deal with people seem to fail to deal with these issues, but no one ever took that into account. They just pushed ahead assuming that either it wouldn’t be a problem or eventually the laws would “fix” the issues. But in the time between serious damage is being done to people/companies/governments.
I think these are all very good questions for people to ask themselves. I don’t think he’s arguing that technology is bad or that we should’ve all run away from it. But I think the happy unicorn “everything is better with technology“ view that many people seem to blindly apply to large social change may not be a good idea.
To take one example, harassment is not a new thing on Twitter. Harassment on social forums has existed as long as social forums have existed on computers. Same with many of the issues Reddit faces.
But no one seems to of looked into the lessons of how people trying to deal with it on BBSs, USENET, and other places. “We can just think about that later“ where later is defined as some number billion users.
But people got hurt in the meantime.
It amazes me that nobody seems to take much of an issue with that. We've seen several instances of people having their lives ruined and/or killing themselves because of things that happened on the internet just this year alone. Whenever I bring any of these up, it's met with indifference, as if that's just the price we pay for the internet. It's really concerning that people just accept all of this online suffering as a necessary evil, like it's just something that comes with society being able to use the internet.
That's exactly what it is. Whether or not we as a society decide that cost is worth paying is another matter, but yes, the price we pay for the internet is that it acts as a force multiplier for all collective human intent, good and evil. And let's be fair - as much as we're focusing in this thread on the harm the internet has done, I don't think that harm outweighs the benefit to society.
I disagree, I think that we can (and should) do everything we can to mitigate that evil. If Tumblr and Twitter didn't half-ass their ToS, we wouldn't have kids killing themselves because they got doxed and sent death threats. Websites don't need to be complete anarchist societies; I think many social media sites are morally obligated to follow up on their ToS and not just let everything go to shit because their AI thought what is clearly a credible terrorist threat is perfectly fine (this has actually happened to me on Facebook).
We have platforms where people can cause harm, but we also have the ability to properly moderate these platforms, the internet doesn't just have to be a bunch of thinly veiled 4chan-esque shitholes, we have the responsibility to make sure these extremely popular platforms aren't just letting people ruin each other's lives.
That's true, and individual sites have the right to enforce whatever rules they like, but that doesn't extend to the platform as a whole, because the internet can't be made to conform to any specific moral or legal ideal. Wherever you have freedom of speech and freedom to communicate, you also have freedom to conspire. And, as connections on the internet are necessarily nonlocal, someone without an account on a heavily moderated platform can still threaten you depending on the information you leave publicly available.
It was once said that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. This turns out not to be as true as once assumed, because of the network effect of social media sites, but it is still true enough, where "censorship" is considered as a politically, socially and morally agnostic term. Push the racists and trolls off of Twitter, they'll just go somewhere else. That's intended to be a feature, but only because it applies to everyone.
Within a month or so of signing up with Twitter I got to watch someone I followed live tweet themselves running from their house as someone else was live tweeting that they were coming to attack/kill them.
Because the person I followed tweeted a joke.
That was YEARS ago. Obviously it’s left and indelible mark on how I think about these things.
I’m with you. It continues to amaze me that people seem to see this stuff as acceptable status quo. I don’t know if it’s because they were in a group that isn’t being attacked, or they haven’t had friends attacked, or they think they’re safer whatever reason.
What goes on… just the worst of it not even the ‘basic’ racist insults and such… is rather horrifying.
But in even the most obvious cases Twitter and others refuse to do anything. I’d say the courts are our only hope but I don’t see them being able to catch up. By the time you track someone down and prosecute them it’s been far too many years and the problematic behaviors have continued from that person and others.
It does feel a lot like a Pandora’s box.
Two months form now will mark 4 years since I received hundreds of death threats because of a dumb edgy tumblr post.
Some of the "safest" sites really are incredibly dangerous in ways people think only apply to things on the dark net. The internet is an absolute nightmare in an incredible state of disarray. Social media giants use horrible tactics to create addictions, and then let their sites turn into anarchy because they don't moderate anything. The internet's interactivity really is awful sometimes, I've moved to just passive consumption of content, I won't even use certain sites without being behind Tor or a proxy.
I feel like it's worse. Pandora's box was filled with nothing but evil, but the internet didn't start that way, we just let it get like this because nobody cared enough to stop it. To me, that's a lot more upsetting than something that was evil from the start.
I meant it in a “it’s too late and we can’t go back“ way.
I hadn’t even thought about the fact that pandora’s box was meant to be evil and the Internet was meant to be neutral/good.
I agree with you.
agreed... article felt like maximum ego-stroking, minimal thinking.
to my mind, the conversation about where "the web" went off the rails ends with the dopamine-hook. I worked with a team building game experiences 5 years ago, it was all we could think about. good examples of it were everything we wanted to emulate. it was disgusting...
mea culpa.
for the children growing up today, whose parents put their baby photos on blast all day... there will be a reckoning.
i wonder what that will look like.
It's not Web 2.0-era social networking, it's a kind of tech utopianism that's been around for decades. I agree that the article doesn't make a lot of sense if you never believed that the Internet was going to automatically bring about (or be) a utopia. It's also reasonable to argue that the Internet, for all its flaws, succeeds at being an agent of social progress.
I think this author is pretty clear about what it means to be culpable, and why a "lifelong passion for technology" is no substitute for ethical analysis, and introspective skepticism of our enthusiasm.
I have had a lifelong passion for technology, and I am not happy or excited about the current state of the industry, nor am I doom and gloom pessimistic and advocating a Neo Luddite approach.
The author is talking about Nazis. Not just people who disagree with you. You are wrong, and I hope, as Alexis Ohanian did, that you admit the error of your ways.
No you are wrong. Nasty people exist, you are blaming X technology for making it worse, what about mobile phones, cars, microwave ovens, shoes... where does it end, nasty people exist, stop fucking blaming technology and try to understand why they are nasty if you care.
That’s a ridiculous argument.
Microwaves don’t make it easy for someone to send harassing messages to 40,000 people.
Shoes don’t make it possible for someone across the globe to send a SWAT team into your living room.
Those aren’t communication methods. That’s like asking why the waffle maker didn’t solve tuberculosis.
You have to compare communication methods, like the telephone and the post office. And notice that we have lots of rules about how and who can contact you and trying to enforce accountability. If you start sending threatening letters to the post office, they’ll work to find you. If you start making dirty calls to random strangers, you’ll be tracked down.
But Twitter and Reddit and a great many other things on the Internet don’t seem to think that’s necessary… or at least didn’t early on. They chose to ignore (or didn’t know of) how previous communication methods tried to deal with these issues.
You can only make one phone call at a time. For a VERY long time you might not have been able to call across the country let alone overseas. It would’ve cost you a lot of money to do either one. It took time to physically mail envelopes or postcards and you had to pay a fee for each one.
The Internet has removed all those barriers. It’s made harassment trivial. Without something else to keep a lid on the issue the obvious has happened: harassment has exploded compared to other media.
Harassment isn't the problem. The formation of groups of like-minded people in echo chambers is the issue that corrodes democracy.
Honestly I’m not even talking about the effects on democracy. Just the direct effects of attacks on people and threats against them are horrible enough. Stuff that’s been going on for YEARS. Basic safety.
I’m not trying to touch the more complex and problematic issues of how social media is changing democracy in my comments here. I don’t know how we’re ever supposed to get a handle on that if we can’t even keep people vaguely safe.
I'm much more concerned with direct physical attacks in real life than remote harassment - I was bikejacked and had my motorcycle taken from me, pulled to the ground and kicked in the head a few months ago in London - and I think societal breakdown and inequality is what ultimately created the level of alienation that made that kind of attack ok for its perpetrators.
No, I am blaming certain people in positions of power for making bad decisions about designing technologies, and I am blaming certain other people in positions of power for not making better policy decisions.
I do try to understand why individual humans at work and in my neighborhood sometimes lash out with nasty remarks. I try to empathize, and give them the benefit of the doubt, as long as they aren't becoming clearly abusive.
I do not, however, tolerate Nazi sympathizers. They can go take a flying fuck at the moooooon!
A lot of people are simply not very bright (half are below 100 IQ!), or not very good at thinking. Correlation is causation, formative experiences become lifelong prejudices, and simple explanations are accepted over nuances. Solutions that promise to directly address issues are preferred over those that consider second and third order effects. And so on.
With great advantages come equal disadvantages. I agree, the author does not speak for a lot of people in tech and there lies the problem. The fact that some people who work in tech are thoroughly excited by disruption and automation is disturbing. It certainly does not excite photographers, musicians, gallerists, truck-drivers, customer service workers, industrial workers and 50% of the public who does not have the IQ to work in tech.
Look what high frequency trading has done to "Main Street. In fact look what Amazon is doing to Main Street. Then there is the Dark web... How do you think the opioid crisis which has lowered life expectancy in the US for two years in a row got that lethal? It's not by by street dealers on a corner but rather through online purchasing.
Yes tech is mad, phat, awesome but the consequences are catching up with it.
Are you really arguing that social media isn’t optimized to create bubbles?
Social media are optimized for maximum engagement. If people engage more in bubbles, they'll get bubbles. If people engage more by reaching out and exploring beyond their bubbles, the platforms will facilitate that instead. Don't blame the mirror.
I blame the algorithm behind the mirror, and the people behind the algorithms.