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Was everyone stupid back then?

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Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#81

Post by 0x445442 »

endymi0n wrote: post #46

Looking back, I guess the main point of why the early internet was so special wasn‘t because of cool new communications technology, but because of the self selection. In order to use BBSes or the early Internet, by definition you had to be above average curious, smart, rich, young (late night dialup tarrifs) and/or based in academia, as well as having a volunteering/cooperating mindset. We just managed to keep the ot…

I’m not sure if this comment is a jab at the unwashed masses but you did leave out another group, corporations. BBS Sysops, and people that were putting up web sites in the mid 90s weren’t doing it for money. It wasn’t until the cult of money got involved and turned the internet into a giant direct marketing platform that things began to get really bad.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#82

Post by inejge »

If you consider A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace as singularly representative of the zeitgeist "back then"... Yes, everyone was stupid, in the same manner that love can be stupid. Humanity never gave up on love, and I hope it never gives up on starry-eyed idealism; it can lead to dogmatic and authoritarian horrors, but some of the ideals may enhance the fabric of society and make it a little less savage. Less of the former and more of the latter, please, if possible. The process is slow and uneven, and personally, I'm not too hopeful, but I still prefer faint hope to unrelenting cynicism.

(What's strange about A Declaration... is that it came a decade after Neuromancer and two years after Eternal September. You may choose to doubt the predictive power of dystopian fiction, but the reality check of the influx of participants outside of the pretty exclusive early-internet club should be much harder to overlook. That document managed to disregard both. It was strangely anachronistic even at the moment.)

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#83

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Nope.

The mistake we made, one that we continue to make, is conflating human communication and social interaction with just moving bits around.

We thought the net would be great because we have these bits other people might want. Let's share them! They can learn to grow better crops, ease the world of oppression, and so on.

We still think that, it's just now we've arrived at "Sending bits around is great! But they need to be the _right_ bits"

I think anybody back then would have agreed too. No stupidity required, just a misunderstanding of how progressive societies actually operate. If we had been approached with this problem in these words back then, we would have said something like "But that's not a tech problem"

Well, maybe some stupidity was at play. But heck if anything's changed.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#84

Post by spiffytech »

bragr wrote: post #62
YazIAm wrote: post #17

"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?" I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy. A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became op…

>The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy. Yes it is crazy and we need to wake up to that. Just look around, people have access to all sorts of information and divergent opinions but that doesn't help. Trumpers have access to CNN. Liberals have access to Truth. Antivaxers can go read all the vaccine…

Even when someone gets exposure to a competing viewpoint, it's rare for them to really give it thought if the topic is important to them.

People build their identities on what they believe about the world or on which people (dis)agree with them.

When their belief (and thus their identity) is threatened, people readily perform whatever mental gymnastics allow them to continue believing they're in the right.

The excellent book The Scout Mindset covers this in depth.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#85

Post by shrimp_emoji »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #26
shubhamjain wrote: post #6

Did people really think that Internet was going to solve all problems or is that revisionist history by back-in-our-day millenials? Even for a techno-optimist, it would've been hard to forsee the sheer penetration. Yes, the euphoria was there from the beginning. But, there's a difference between saying "it's going to be huge" and imagining an instantly accessible network available in the hands of 60% of the world fro…

The talk on IRC in the 90’s was “imagine a war going on with the internet and civilians on both sides could talk to each other, why would anyone fight?”

I sincerely feel like, if people spoke the same language, horrible shit would get harder to abide (and, no, Ukraine and Russian are not the same).

Imagine a video of Yemeni people starving to death on the news, but they sound just like you and your loved ones. It feels like that would turn the empathy WAY up.

But maybe I'm tripping into the same optimistic pitfall.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#86

Post by bilbo0s »

kyleyeats wrote: post #50
YazIAm wrote: post #17

"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?" I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy. A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became op…

Imagine saying this about writing, or the printing press. It's not just reductionist but cynical. Optimizing for outrage is a mass communication problem, not an internet problem, and unfolds roughly the same in every new medium from town criers on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

You guys have all missed the point of the comic.

We still have social problems despite having a printing press, or radio, or internet. In fact, at root, we have the exact same social problems as existed prior to Gutenberg's birth. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, etc.

Why have they not been solved? Because they are human problems. The problem is within us and the problem is us. It's who we are on an animal behavior level. This is the reason the boy believes we must also be "stupid". Because surely we don't think an information transfer protocol would change the animal instincts of a human being? Let alone billions of human beings?

That's really the point of the comic. Wherever we go, there we are. It's still just us in a new place.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#87

Post by marcosdumay »

bragr wrote: post #62
YazIAm wrote: post #17

"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?" I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy. A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became op…

>The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy. Yes it is crazy and we need to wake up to that. Just look around, people have access to all sorts of information and divergent opinions but that doesn't help. Trumpers have access to CNN. Liberals have access to Truth. Antivaxers can go read all the vaccine…

People do not have access to all sorts of information. They have access to plenty of cherry picked fact-less divergent opinions, a lot of it even counterfactual. But nothing with any quality.

Atntivaxers can't go read all the studies unless they are willing to push some tens of thousands of dollars into it or break some law.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#88

Post by 0x445442 »

c7b wrote: post #67
ktwbc wrote: post #4

This actually reminds me of a quote in the book The Victorian Internet about the development of the telegraph. Part of the push of the first undersea cable to connect the US and European countries was a belief that with more instant communication there would be no misunderstandings and therefore no more wars. So this belief has been going on a long time.

My understanding was that the primary motivation to build those communication channels was to gain an edge on the stock markets. I don't know about the telegraph, but for radio I remember reading that that was the reason JP Morgan was financing Tesla, and he was mightily annoyed when he got scooped by Marconi.

And, non ironically, along with the platitudes of providing internet to the poor little child in the Ugandan bush, it’s a big driver for Starlink.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#89

Post by karmakaze »

0x445442 wrote: post #81
endymi0n wrote: post #46

Looking back, I guess the main point of why the early internet was so special wasn‘t because of cool new communications technology, but because of the self selection. In order to use BBSes or the early Internet, by definition you had to be above average curious, smart, rich, young (late night dialup tarrifs) and/or based in academia, as well as having a volunteering/cooperating mindset. We just managed to keep the ot…

I’m not sure if this comment is a jab at the unwashed masses but you did leave out another group, corporations. BBS Sysops, and people that were putting up web sites in the mid 90s weren’t doing it for money. It wasn’t until the cult of money got involved and turned the internet into a giant direct marketing platform that things began to get really bad.

I remember when corporations started showing up. They were mostly ignored. It wasn't until mainstream adoption outweighed the early adopter culture that things really started going downhill and combined with corporations accelerated.

Re: Was everyone stupid back then?

#90

Post by 0x445442 »

clolege wrote: post #69

> We thought anonymous people saying what they thought in a public forum would lead to the best idea getting shared the most This is true in some parts of the internet, such as Hacker News and Reddit. The key seems to be good signal/noise moderation and users able to amplify content with cardinal voting (upvotes/downvotes). I'm constantly finding great, new ideas between the two websites (especially when combined wit…

I think there’s another option and that’s to get rid of votes AND comments. Using Twitter as an example, I think removing likes and comments and only providing a retweet and one level deep quote tweet would make it a much better platform. Of course, this assumes no bots as well.
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