Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

m.nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 523 posts

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#231

Post by mquander »

lovich wrote: post #179
mquander wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example Hangouts makes me lose at least half a hour of productity a day but if I uninstalled it and never checked it then I would never talk to all of my friends on Hangouts which is not a trade-off that I am willing to take. A lot of people say this one (usually about Facebook), but I don't understand it. If you want to talk to those friends, why doesn't it suffice to schedule spending time with them in the same…

I don't know about your age but in 2000 I was in middle school and all my friends communicated by aim since we didn't have the ability to go where we wanted when we wanted. That social structure has carried over into adult life where I have several close friends that I get to see maybe twice a year due to our schedules, but can still talk to them everyday. Dropping communication through messaging apps would probably…

Yeah, actually I'm the same age as you and I did most of my talking over IM too then, so my comment was poorly made. The spirit of my comment was "in a way you could have done it in 2000, whichever you prefer", e.g. email, phone, in-person, scheduling time to be online together. I use all of those to keep in touch with people now as an adult.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#232

Post by 1_2__4 »

snerbles wrote: post #6

One can argue that this isn't really anything new - look back at the media hype for war surrounding an explosion of a certain U.S. warship. In 1898. Amusing, how the most vaunted prize in journalism is named for one of the most famous perpetrators of yellow journalism. Social media is merely a slimmer middle man in that frenzied feedback loop, and the legacy media is upset that their slice of the pie is shrinking.

I hate this argument so much, any along the lines of "people have always said this". It's not true that just because something has been raised as a concern before that it can't possible be a concern now. The world changes, as do the circumstances for engaging it.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#234

Post by pmichaud »

dmfdmf wrote: post #15
yosito wrote: post #9

As someone who works in tech, I like the analogy of a DoS attack. The root of the issue is attention capitalism. Our attention is essentially a resource being exploited for profit. In that scenario, we're effectivley no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. On an individual scale, we can give it relatively benign labels like "distraction". But when you look at it…

> In that scenario, we're effectively no longer in control of our own free will as long as someone else can profit by controlling it. This is a self contradiction. You always have the choice to turn off or tune out the distractions and focus your attention on more important things (which is the essence of free will). That people don't feel like doing that is a psychological problem not a problem with capitalism or pr…

This is wrong because it looks exactly one layer deep and ignores the greater complexity.

Of course the answer to a DOS is to not accept the incoming requests. It's tricky to distinguish between the malicious requests and the legitimate ones, and doing so doesn't cost nothing. One way to break the defense of a DOS is to DOS the system that does the sorting.

Further, The "requests", in this case bids for our attention, exist on a spectrum from "legit" to "malicious"-- or more precisely "information I will endorse having gotten in long-term retrospect" to "information I will have wished I had no gotten in long term retrospect." So we're already fucked, because you can't even make that determination in a meaningful sense.

When do you eventually settle on a filter that is an approximation of the above, you'll find that it's trivial to DOS that filter too since we're made of meat and exist in a low trust environment.

You can live in the woods or whatever, but since you're posting on HN, I assume you haven't chosen that. And you can look at the other posts in this threads for examples of just how intrusive and unavoidable the bid for attention actually are.

And all this is only the first layer of complexity: the difficulty/impossibility of individually choosing to "free will" your way of this issue. The next layer is that we're not even talking about individuals. We're talking about Capitalism, by which I mean we're talking about systemic issues.

That's a whole different can of worms, but the headline is: in response to global, systemic issues if you find yourself saying a variation of "it's simple! humans just need to be different/better," then you're doing it wrong. You're missing most of the relevant dimensions, so you will not solve the problem, nor is your voice likely to be particularly helpful in the discussion about potential solutions.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#235

Post by natural219 »

My biggest question is: When are people going to stop spilling ink over this issue and actually fix it?

Here are some things that won't work:

1) Continue writing long thinkpieces about how bad big tech companies are and how they should feel bad

2) starting Yet Another Startup, raising $50 million in VC funding, and repeating all the same problems 5-10 years down the road.

3) Government regulation. Watch the recent Facebook/Google/Twitter congressional hearings if you want to hear the state of tech understanding in our government...

Here's what does work:

1) Pursue and promote technological standardization / decentralization efforts regarding social platforms. These problems would be very easily fixable if 1,000 developers agreed to build out a single web standards that encapsulated social data, discovery, and communication. I keep a small list at http://decentralize.tech, but the list is only growing (Beaker/Rotonde, Mastodon/Gnusocial/Activitypub, Blockstack, IPFS, Urbit, Brave/BAT, IndieWebCamp, Scuttlebutt -- All groups with working software today you could work on that kills this and other problems overnight).

tldr; Stop complaining about things you got for free and build the dang alternative already.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#236

Post by Jach »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #24
eyeinthepyramid wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That raises interesting questions -- how much free will does an addict have? Are those who exploit an addiction for profit complicit in that addiction?

>Are those who exploit an addiction for profit complicit in that addiction? When it comes to drug law, precedent would show that they are far more culpable than the user/addict.

Behind every addict there's usually an enabler in some form. Sometimes there's a nasty feedback loop. Of course that doesn't negate human agency or its importance, however it makes for a convenient excuse. Agency seems unevenly distributed, but it also seems to vary within a single individual depending on what sorts of things they face and what excuses they have to avoid exercising it. Humans have a wide range of adaptations. In the modern world where even the very poor can live better than the wealthiest in olden times, exercising much agency isn't that important.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#237

Post by adjkant »

shmageggy wrote: post #33

I would gladly pay for something like what is advocated for in this article, but I'm not aware of anything like it. A news publication that: * Has the goal of filtering rather than flooding * No ads * No pop-ins 3/4 of the way through the article telling me about four other articles I should read * No endless scrolling * Upfront about bias * Cites sources

This may be what you want on many fronts:

https://thecorrespondent.com/

https://thecorrespondent.com/principles

* The Correspondent is openly subjective

* The Correspondent is an antidote to the daily news grind

* The Correspondent is entirely free of ads

* The Correspondent does not strive to maximize profits

Example Article:

https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-...

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#238

Post by hyper_reality »

bubinubn wrote: post #89
mobilefriendly wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just as dangerous as governments Corporations don't have nukes or concentration camps.

The Black Hole of Calcutta is a widely known example of what can only be considered a corporate concentration camp of the (at the time privately owned) British East India Company...

That is a bad example indeed. The event of the Black Hole of Calcutta, where soldiers were rounded into a tiny dungeon which few survived, was perpetrated against British soldiers working for the East India Company by the governor of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#239

Post by ghzkvhjk »

ak39 wrote: post #14
snerbles wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” A blog entry on Brandolini's Law: https://real-psychiatry.blogspot.com/2016/12/brandolinis-law...

I think this could apply to the ratio of coding to debugging too.

What a coincidence. I copied this law to my collection of quotes, and the last entry was this:

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

-Brian Kernighan

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#240

Post by cortesoft »

Jean-Philipe wrote: post #87

I'd pay Facebook to be ad free. Why don't they want my money?

I have heard stories that you can be VERY selective with the advertising. I wonder if you could construct an ad that targeted only you; then, you could put family pictures or something as the ad image, so basically the ad space is filled with nice pictures for you to look at.

Wonder how much that would cost?

Post reply on HN