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The End of the Internet Dream

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Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#71

Post by qznc »

kijin wrote: post #47
austerity wrote: post #36

Good article. However I don't understand why so many smart people fear decision-making machines. In my experience the decision makers in bureaucracies, government and private alike, never ever show the "humanity" ascribed to them in arguments about this issue. Instead they follow their instruction (which is actually a program written in human language) to the letter and are usually so obtuse and unempathetic it seems…

It is difficult for a machine to be accountable for its decisions. It's not as simple as holding the manufacturer responsible, either. With human decision-makers, at least you have a bunch of douchebags that you can point your fingers at and attach epithets like "obtuse and unempathetic". And we can hope that if we collectively do something, we'll be able to replace them with less dysfunctional folks. With complex de…

People do point at Facebooks news filtering algorithm, which is "obtuse and unempathetic". People do complain about Googles algorithms flagging stuff as spam in an "obtuse and unempathetic" way.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#72

Post by beatpanda »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #53
zipwitch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.

Why is it not compatible? The profit driven world has lifted more humans out of poverty than any other system by leaps and bounds.

"Poverty" is a relative condition that couldn't exist without Capitalism. There is no objective state of poverty anyone has been lifted out of by Capitalism.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#73

Post by anon4 »

mdpopescu wrote: post #68
TeMPOraL wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone. Oh it's not shady in the sense that it has agency and decides to screw everything up. But it's very powerful and increasingly misaligned with the interest of humans. Being driven by demand does not map well to the shared wishes and morals of humanity, only if because o…

I generally upvote your comments but I think this one is far too pessimistic. You're worrying about coordination problems on the internet ? That's like, I don't know, worrying about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean. Oh wait... :P On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit…

To be annoyingly pedantic, ocean water is unfit to drink, i.e. contains too much salt, so you can very easily die of thirst in the middle of the ocean.

Just s/ocean/any big lake/

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#74

Post by beatpanda »

adventured wrote: post #63
TeMPOraL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's collapsing on itself. It's trying to optimize people out of the loop, but is not yet able to sustain itself without humans. Nor will the humans lay down and die without giving a fight.

Capitalism optimizes people into the loop in fact. It pulls more people into higher standards of living, and produces more jobs for people. We have four billion more people than 50 years ago, and more people have jobs today globally than at any other time in history, and less people are in poverty, and there's more food available for everyone, and famines are almost non-existent, and the infant mortality rate has bee…

"More people have jobs" is a completely meaningless sentence. There is an amount of work that all humans have to do to ensure the survival of themselves and all other humans. If we were doing it right, we would all he doing less work, not more, and we would have some kind of equality of access to the total product of society. Instead, and increasingly, the people doing the hardest work are disconnected from access to the product of their labor or the chance at ever getting access to it.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#75

Post by TeMPOraL »

SpaghettiCat wrote: post #65
TeMPOraL wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to demonize for-profit work (at least not in this comment). My point is, there's money to be made off breaking the Internet, and there's little money to be made off fixing it. > You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict wit…

> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities. What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they…

First of all, the consumer and the supplier do not form a closed system (regardless of what some ideologies would want one to believe). You have to account for the effects supplying a customer with something has on the third parties. Those are the externalities I've mentioned, and even Wikipedia has a lot of examples.

Secondly, you have to take a look at the aggregate effects. So for instance I may need a new, shittier way to spam web with ads, and there's a company who'll happily satisfy my needs. By having this transaction, I start earning more, and now my competitors see the strategy and all decide to adopt it. The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back. A classic coordination problem[0].

Finally, as 'lostlogin points out downthread, what you want doesn't always equal to what you need.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/, a day does not go by without me linking to it...

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#76

Post by JupiterMoon »

SpaghettiCat wrote: post #65
TeMPOraL wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to demonize for-profit work (at least not in this comment). My point is, there's money to be made off breaking the Internet, and there's little money to be made off fixing it. > You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict wit…

> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities. What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they…

What if they want something illegal/immoral/harmful to others?

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#77

Post by beatpanda »

mbrock wrote: post #70
beatpanda wrote: post #34

You know, one way out of building an internet none of us actually wants just because the people with the money tell us to is to organize as a union. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of leverage software engineers already have, as evidenced by the wages and benefits that are standard in this industry, that we nevertheless refuse to use to try to exert some control over what we are building.

Wouldn't "we" be more likely to unionize if our wages were bad? And are unions good at this stuff? Here in Sweden, they seem to be mostly aligned with the industrial profit motive. For example, the big metal workers' union supported extending our large arms export deal with Saudi Arabia, since it employs thousands of people.

Yes, historically unions don't get organuzed unless conditions are bad to begin with.

But look, what if we just didn't use the word "union"? What if we were talking about a professional organization like the bar association that set standards of what its members can and can't do, what is and is not ethical work? That set certain expectations of providing your otherwise very expensive services for free to people who need it but can't pay?

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#78

Post by mdpopescu »

anon4 wrote: post #73
mdpopescu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally upvote your comments but I think this one is far too pessimistic. You're worrying about coordination problems on the internet ? That's like, I don't know, worrying about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean. Oh wait... :P On a more serious note, though, I think this is just another problem to be solved. Long-term, I am an absolute optimist: everything will get better, everywhere. Short-term, I admit…

To be annoyingly pedantic, ocean water is unfit to drink, i.e. contains too much salt, so you can very easily die of thirst in the middle of the ocean. Just s/ocean/any big lake/

That's why I said "oh wait" :)

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#79

Post by darkr »

natrius wrote: post #25

This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope. The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to interact in the ways we want is difficult. We post things to Facebook and Twitter because that's where our friends and like-minded strangers are actually looking for things. To fight this, we tried fe…

> you'll see why: federated systems can't keep up with the pace of evolution that we see in successful social systems

Federated social software failed to have long-lasting, wide-spread adoption largely because any market that is created as a result tends to be immediately competitive, democratised, and with a low barrier of entry. Companies would rather create a monopoly/walled garden and then milk that for all it's worth. They are in the business of making money after all.

Though I have high hopes in the future for distributed systems utilising blockchain tech, real-time comms are not ever going to be a good use case.

Pour one out for our fallen federated friends SIP/ENUM & XMPP.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#80

Post by escherize »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75
SpaghettiCat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities. What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they…

First of all, the consumer and the supplier do not form a closed system (regardless of what some ideologies would want one to believe). You have to account for the effects supplying a customer with something has on the third parties. Those are the externalities I've mentioned, and even Wikipedia has a lot of examples. Secondly, you have to take a look at the aggregate effects. So for instance I may need a new, shitti…

And in doing so, you create a larger market for anti newer-shittier-spam ads, with the potential to erase ads for anyone who cares enough.
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