Earlier quoted context omitted.
People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers would pay you to surf. Money was a big factor and you would have to go pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it. Geocities had ads. Punch the monkey was everywhere.
I remember the weird ‘paid to surf’ things. Hilarious what wildly silly business ideas pop up when money is cheap and people are exuberant.
Being Raised by the Internet
261–270 of 331 posts
Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#262Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm old and fortunate enough to have gotten on the Internet in 1993, when it was smaller, more communal, and less commercial. As much as we old-timers lament the direction things have gone, there are still corners of the Internet where people still help each other, where people seek to share their knowledge freely, and help other humans, even strangers, without regard to artificial reputational or commercial gain. Yo…
i only lament some things; others have gotten better. there's enormously more free software and better information, and disks are big enough for kiwix to be a thing. consider: wikipedia, openstreetmap, library genesis, sci-hub, the internet archive, bitcoin, stack exchange, tor, debian, termux, f-droid, and lineageos. heck, even firefox is noticeably better than lynx was when i joined the internet! and, as i alluded…
Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work." It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Speaking up when something is wrong, open door policies, and work-life balance are the usual suspects. Continuous learning and development are also values…
> Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do! These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends. Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
Along with "giving back" to "the community" in the form of unpaid labor. There is a class system at play where the owners and financiers--not the builders--benefit the most. And they make sure of it. They've effectively co-opted everything that made the early (mid-late 90s) Internet many of us grew up on good and turned it into a money printing machine. Acknowledging that you the worker are a skilled person worth investing resources in, rather than an interchangeable component in the money printer, would give you power they're not comfortable with you having.
Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#265If OP was 12 today, in 2024, would he have gotten into Linux? Or would he have been sucked into watching endless MrBeast videos? It's easier than ever to get started understanding and building software... but at the same time it seems easier than ever to get distracted by the modern internet.
Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
i only lament some things; others have gotten better. there's enormously more free software and better information, and disks are big enough for kiwix to be a thing. consider: wikipedia, openstreetmap, library genesis, sci-hub, the internet archive, bitcoin, stack exchange, tor, debian, termux, f-droid, and lineageos. heck, even firefox is noticeably better than lynx was when i joined the internet! and, as i alluded…
Bitcoin can come off that list - it's real estate trading for people who can't grasp real estate trading. Cool concept when it was invented, but its net effect has been rather negative, serving to further concentrate wealth.
(for evidence, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677494 which are all, astoundingly, within the last two days, and mostly content-free hate-filled political flaming unrelated to bitcoin)
to post an actual argument rather than just the one-line shallow dismissals you're here for, several of the other items on the list depend on bitcoin to survive. several others will start to depend on it as soon as they are banned in the usa, probably after the next major terrorist incident. and, in my actual experience, the people who benefit most from bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies) on a personal level are impoverished venezuelans supported by family remittances from abroad despite economic sanctions by the usa
more broadly, the reason the internet is good is that sharing knowledge is a positive-sum game: the social benefit that results from sharing what you know is far greater than the cost of doing so, while it's comparatively more difficult for bad actors to do harm by spreading misinformation. it's not that nobody vandalizes wikipedia; it's that undoing and blocking vandalism is easier than the vandalism itself. this makes it possible to collaborate effectively on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number permits
unlike knowledge, though, some things are zero-sum, like the ownership of computers and houses, and the allocation of human effort to competing goals. as it turns out, having 'money', an impartial way to keep score in voluntary transactions regarding those things, is also publicly beneficial, because such 'markets' also permit collaboration on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number. money and sharing of knowledge have different strengths, so we cannot simply replace one with the other
the dramatic irony of this bears repeating: having an impartial institution for zero-sum transactions is a positive-sum outcome
a problem with money systems so far has been that they mostly depend on a central authority to regulate the money supply. this opens many vulnerabilities to the abuse of that power; the money in my pocket today buys a quarter of what it bought a year and a half ago, for example, evidently because a disproportionate expansion of the money supply made our domestic inflation here the worst in the world. and, when russia invaded ukraine, 300 billion dollars of its overseas reserves were confiscated by ukraine's allies, who were in a position to do so because they controlled the international money system—a power which, though used justly in this case, is too great to be entrusted to any potential belligerent in future international conflicts
on a smaller scale, in 02022, the canadian government froze the bank accounts of people suspected but not convicted of donating to fund a protest against some of the government's domestic policies, the so-called 'trucker's strike'. in this case, in the end, the government backed down and returned the money, but it's another clear case of structural vulnerabilities in the current money system
cryptocurrencies make it possible to have money without these vulnerabilities
when bitcoin appeared, i thought this would probably destroy civilization. now i think civilization is doing a fine job of that on its own despite cryptocurrencies slowing the collapse
Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the central takeaway of this essay is dead wrong, you should aim for the exact opposite. The fewer labels or identities you have yourself, the more strongly you hold on to them and the more fragile your personality. If the only thing you identify yourself by is your job and that gets taken away from you in a downturn, never to return, what's left? A lot of people who are in that situation and don't have other…
Respectfully, I disagree. Every label or identity is yet another pigeonhole to be stuffed into and a thought-terminating cliche that reduces the complexity of one's life into an overly simplistic symbol which fails to represent the totality of one's being. Better to dispense with such coarse-grained oversimplifications and reject the notion of labelling selves entirely. > You're not only your job, but you're also a p…
You'd be happier with the neo-Orthodox, I suspect, some of whom at least are not total charlatans. You should read Paul Kingsnorth in particular, who gives a much better account of the ideology you and he share; I would not normally make such a recommendation, but you'll believe what you believe in either case, and at least from him you'll see how a consistent account of it may be given.
Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work." It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Speaking up when something is wrong, open door policies, and work-life balance are the usual suspects. Continuous learning and development are also values…
> Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do! These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends. Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.
Has your manager actively asked you what you want to work on or do?
Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that, but it happens all of the time. Its immensely painful of an experience. Painters who lose their sight, musicians who damage their fingers, car lovers who get too old to drive... That's just the fragility of life and people deal with it in different ways. Some people overcome it, some don't. I think it's important to recognize that reality and still choose to love those things knowing full well it could…
I’m not suggesting that we should “pull back” from the things we love for fear of the potential pain of losing them. What I am suggesting is that the worth of a person is not in what they can do. Their identity should be more than the things they enjoy or are good at. My grandmother is 100 years old. She has led an incredible life filled with all kinds of achievements. Her passion for reading, learning, languages and…
That's not everything, but it says more than you might yet have realized.
Re: Being Raised by the Internet
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Biggest thing I missed is that I don't live in the US. Even if I lived in the US, and the times I visited, I'm still disregarding most of the recommendations. It feels more like these people are making political statements of what should be and recruiting me and other viewers to help move towards that ideal. Especially they want regular citizens to do this shit so that everyone has plausible deniability. The issue is…
"First they came for…" by Niemöller wants a word with you. By not doing your social duty of providing plausible deniability wherever possible, you are recklessly endangering your future self, and everyone else you care or not care about.
Man, fuck that. Glad I quit weed anyways.