If it hasn't already, social media almost certainly will.
A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
111–120 of 452 posts
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counterpoint, I've seen lots of people become more accepting because of the way the internet connects people. If you lived in a rural place before, you likely had very little interaction with minority groups outside of how they were portrayed in media. Now it's possible to interact with all kinds of people and recognize them as people instead of stereotypes. I don't deny that there are echo chambers and major co…
How does that work, like how does the connection get made and identity discovered? Generally I feel the echo chamber effect would be more common.
One consumes information online, that information causes introspection and a better perspective of one's identity.
Usually it's not one specific event but a bombardment of information that over time, hopefully gives someone more perspective and their place in the world.
On the other hand, it closes some people off and causes the echo chamber. Cuts both ways.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#113Regarding the first paragraphs where luddism is mentioned several times; Lord Byron, father to Ada Lovelace the first programmer, was one of the few on the House of Lords to defend the Luddites:
> But the police, however useless, were by no means idle: several notorious delinquents had been detected; men liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty; men, who had been nefariously guilty of lawfully begetting several children, whom, thanks to the times!—they were unable to maintain. Considerable injury has been done to the proprietors of the improved frames. These machines were to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to starve. By the adoption of one species of frame in particular, one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment. [...] These men never destroyed their looms till they were become useless, worse than useless; till they were become actual impediments to their exertions in obtaining their daily bread.
There is a lot of proganda use of "luddites" as anti-tech when luddites main grief was regarding income and inequality.
[1]: http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html
[2]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/byron-was-one-few-...
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#114no.
not even close.
things are quite in chaos here and there, as is normal, but it certainly hasn't turned into this absurd mad max scenario that was described.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#115It destroyed the average Joe's faith in the average Joe. Now, people are more separated than ever, in their echo chambers, hating each other and firmly believing they are better and righter than the other.
I'm reminded of the stereotypical personality alignment matrix common to role playing games, with lawful and chatic matched to good and evil. Each of to need to strive to sit in the middle, true neutral. In this position one can recognize echo chambers are all around us and one must hop from to the another to gain understanding and sympathy. This would be easy if we mandated the teaching of cognitive and logical fall…
We have to make choices, often complicated ones, so just the concept of recognizing our limitations doesn't really help. Or rather it does not change the basic fact that we have to live artfully and figure things out with very little information to guide us even in the best of cases. True neutral is not far from evil in a highly contrasted world where work has to be done.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree that this is the fault of tech at all. Facebook et al are still largely echo chambers, where we see what we have cultivated ourselves to see. Sure, recommendation algorithms show us external things once in a while, but by and large you can cultivate what you see on social media. The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and sta…
>I don't agree that this is the fault of tech at all. >The real culprit I believe, has been the incredible hysteria of the legacy media as it joined the social media spaces, and started their race to the bottom for clickbait and outrage porn. Covering inane tweets, and blowing them up to pretend that crackpot points-of-view have more weight and are more common than they truly are. Gotcha gonzo-journalism, that prides…
Instead of blaming technology, why can't we blame capitalism? Capitalism obviously incentives both parties (big tech and the media) to compete for eyeballs and drive content to the bottom to make money. I don't think anybody is so nieve enough to believe that these companies have society's interests at heart. Their very existence is to make money.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't get people I am close with to even consider engaging in conversations about firmly held beliefs they have if I even remotely present myself as possibly holding a different opinion.
Same. I want to start a club of people like us. At a library with a coffee shop and bar included. Bunch of us philosophical peeps chillin and talking shit but nobody gets mad. I would love such a paradise.
It's called 4chan.
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#118` ...after General Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga during the Revolutionary War...a young nobleman...declared that the surrender would be “the ruin of the nation.” To which Adam Smith reportedly responded, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” '
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#119I’m reminded of a long bet made a number of years ago between Joseph Romm and Greg Blencoe that 1% of car sales in the US would be Hydrogen Fuel cell vehicles by 2015.
I’d done a report on this in college and completely forgot about it, probably because hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are near impossible to find on the consumer market.
So Blencoe lost the bet and paid Romm the $1000 and wore a T-shirt. He posted a very short post to his blog saying it happened. [1]
What’s most interesting to me is that the blog has since disappeared. At the time these things seemed like such a big deal, but a few years on and it just vanished. It’s like the bet never took place and the advocacy for Hydrogen wasn’t a big deal. It was kind of shocking to me how ephemeral it is, in spite of “nothing ever disappearing from the internet”
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160911231646/http://www.h2carb...
Re: A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a counterpoint, I've seen lots of people become more accepting because of the way the internet connects people. If you lived in a rural place before, you likely had very little interaction with minority groups outside of how they were portrayed in media. Now it's possible to interact with all kinds of people and recognize them as people instead of stereotypes. I don't deny that there are echo chambers and major co…
How does that work, like how does the connection get made and identity discovered? Generally I feel the echo chamber effect would be more common.
> Generally I feel the echo chamber effect would be more common
almost certainly is