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Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

latimes.com

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Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#11

Post by situational87 »

rinchik wrote: post #8

It feels like author is depressed. It's a bit sad to read. He manages to pull so much negativity out of the things that are generally have a net-positive impact, things that drive the progress, that are progress. Disappointing article. I don't need this negativity in my life.

Progress for a select few, for everyone else things are going backwards. Life expectancy and quality of life is doing nothing but going down year after year in the United States.

If you're one of the few privileged elites who benefited from the internet, congrats! You're a very small minority.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#12

Post by Ygg2 »

I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy

    Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing 
    all barriers to communication between different races and 
    cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else
    in the history of creation.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#15

Post by lotsofpulp »

situational87 wrote: post #11
rinchik wrote: post #8

It feels like author is depressed. It's a bit sad to read. He manages to pull so much negativity out of the things that are generally have a net-positive impact, things that drive the progress, that are progress. Disappointing article. I don't need this negativity in my life.

Progress for a select few, for everyone else things are going backwards. Life expectancy and quality of life is doing nothing but going down year after year in the United States. If you're one of the few privileged elites who benefited from the internet, congrats! You're a very small minority.

A very small minority of people benefit from instantaneous and cheap communication with anyone around the world?

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#16

Post by shadowgovt »

yetihehe wrote: post #10

How did it go so wrong - the same way it did go wrong with many other tools - people used them to better themselves at the cost of others. > We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties — which means pretty much everyone. That "everyone" also includes bad actors.

Exactly. The "ethical" roots people imagine weren't actually the roots of the Internet; they were an ideal that was hypothetically possible (but in hindsight, probably assumed too much human virtue atop an infrastructure built around assumed trustable nodes). The actual roots of the Internet would be to kick most users off and keep individual nodes behind locked doors controlled by a joint military-industrial-education confederation of separate institutions with overlapping goals. Privacy was assumed close to nil at several of those institutions.

That's a non-starter for building a system that can serve all people on the planet, so it's not the right approach. There is no way back; the only way is forward, informed by the past, but recognizing the weaknesses of its origins as well as its strengths.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#17

Post by eej2ya1K »

pron wrote: post #9
rinchik wrote: post #8

It feels like author is depressed. It's a bit sad to read. He manages to pull so much negativity out of the things that are generally have a net-positive impact, things that drive the progress, that are progress. Disappointing article. I don't need this negativity in my life.

Almost every big positive change in society is a result of people feeling negative about the status quo. This reminds me of Steven Pinker who goes around saying, please stop whining; some/many/most/all things are better than they used to be! while somehow neglecting the fact that to the degree things are better, they usually are because people didn't stop whining.

Whining doesn't help. Steven Pinker is not telling people not to do what they can to make the world a better place. Your resentment is showing.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#18

Post by rinchik »

pron wrote: post #9
rinchik wrote: post #8

It feels like author is depressed. It's a bit sad to read. He manages to pull so much negativity out of the things that are generally have a net-positive impact, things that drive the progress, that are progress. Disappointing article. I don't need this negativity in my life.

Almost every big positive change in society is a result of people feeling negative about the status quo. This reminds me of Steven Pinker who goes around saying, please stop whining; some/many/most/all things are better than they used to be! while somehow neglecting the fact that to the degree things are better, they usually are because people didn't stop whining.

Well, yeah I agree that makes sense. I misspoke. Only idiots are always happy and this endless treadmill, our ability to see possible improvements in systems that were already perceived as decent, drives the progress.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#19

Post by bilbo0s »

frereubu wrote: post #6

"You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards." It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship rather than a consensual one.

Not exactly in my opinion. My understanding of the passage is that he wants to block the entire website outright. So not, "Look at reddit, but block ads." Rather it would be, "Block reddit."

Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be like in a parallel timeline where that happened?

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