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The End of the Internet Dream

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Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#41

Post by austerity »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods…

You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.

I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#42

Post by askafriend »

zipwitch wrote: post #33
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods…

A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.

What makes you say that the profit driven world is ending?

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#43

Post by necessity »

zipwitch wrote: post #33
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods…

A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.

Yeah, socialism has worked so well throughout history and capitalism so bad.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#44

Post by necessity »

Again with this "there aren't as many women in computing/politics/NASCAR/mining industry as there should be" bullshit. I'll just paste previous comments because it's always the same irrational shit people like to vomit to get an audience.

Why are there so few male manicures? Why so few male babysitters? Why so few female NASCAR drivers? Why so few female in the army? Why so few male in the wedding dress business?

We MUST to do something about this! People of a certain gender cannot prefer some activities over others!

This is ridiculous.

Relevant: https://youtu.be/ENL-Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#45

Post by TeMPOraL »

austerity wrote: post #41
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods…

You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.

I'm not trying to demonize for-profit work (at least not in this comment). My point is, there's money to be made off breaking the Internet, and there's little money to be made off fixing it.

> You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied.

Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

askafriend wrote: post #42
zipwitch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.

What makes you say that the profit driven world is ending?

I'd say it's collapsing on itself. It's trying to optimize people out of the loop, but is not yet able to sustain itself without humans. Nor will the humans lay down and die without giving a fight.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#47

Post by kijin »

austerity wrote: post #36

Good article. However I don't understand why so many smart people fear decision-making machines. In my experience the decision makers in bureaucracies, government and private alike, never ever show the "humanity" ascribed to them in arguments about this issue. Instead they follow their instruction (which is actually a program written in human language) to the letter and are usually so obtuse and unempathetic it seems…

It is difficult for a machine to be accountable for its decisions. It's not as simple as holding the manufacturer responsible, either.

With human decision-makers, at least you have a bunch of douchebags that you can point your fingers at and attach epithets like "obtuse and unempathetic". And we can hope that if we collectively do something, we'll be able to replace them with less dysfunctional folks.

With complex decision-making machines, it's not even clear whether a subtle bias it exhibits in its decisions is a sign of a bug or intentional design. The machine, of course, is capable of deep and broad analysis, but only of data that some group of engineers decided would be appropriate for it to analyze, using algorithms that were probably hand-tweaked by another group of engineers with their own individual quirks and unconscious biases.

Even the idea that a machine can be "smart" or "flexible" is based on a particular definition of "smart" and "flexible" that other people might strongly disagree with. And yet the machine presents an image of perfect objectivity, and its complexity makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to figure out exactly who or what is responsible for the many assumptions that underlie its design.

Moreover, the possibility of losing one's job is prettty much the only thing that keeps human decision-makers accountable in this world. Take that away, and we've got a benevolent dictator at best and a mechanical tyrant at worst, with the exact same quirks and biases, only hidden better.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#48

Post by simoncion »

natrius wrote: post #25

This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope. The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to interact in the ways we want is difficult. We post things to Facebook and Twitter because that's where our friends and like-minded strangers are actually looking for things. To fight this, we tried fe…

I'm confused.

What are the most significant distinctions between a federated network and a decentralized network?

Is one of those distinctions that the latter has a distributed filesystem/datastore shared amongst most-to-all of its nodes?

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#49

Post by zobzu »

askafriend wrote: post #42
zipwitch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.

What makes you say that the profit driven world is ending?

Fuck this kind of answer. Perfect capitalism ends up with a perfect world. Perfect socialism too. Or communism.

It's the way we corrupt each of them which is the problem, corrupted by people who want power. There's no way we have found of solving that yet. None.

So far, that we're still alive seems to be pure luck, and that we make it out alive or not, seems to also be pure luck or bad luck. We certainly ain't helping ourselves all that much.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#50

Post by meddlepal »

austerity wrote: post #41
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods…

You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.

I think it's an often forgotten (perhaps purposefully to push an agenda in some circles?) part of these discussions about corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone.

Another problem, idealists often ignore the practical realities of a society when dreaming of their idealist visions for the future. Could the internet have turned into a purely free and perfect forum for communication? In an ideal world yes, but not in our flawed world where there are a host of competing contrasting ideas.

To the authors point. Technology is moving too fast for laws, governments and political systems to cope with. The political and legal constructs we use today are not radically different from 200 or 300 years ago. I don't know if there has ever been a time in human history where the rate of technological innovation and change has been moving at such a speed that the legal and political systems cannot stay synced with the change and have no chance of catching up due to the increasing velocity.

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