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As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

thewalrus.ca

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Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#741

Post by vlan0 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #568
nuclearnicer wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics. I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality. First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows. Second, 1989, when cabl…

What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. And even when TV was limited to a small few national OTA (over the air) channels, different people would tune in at different times to watch their different preference of shows. So just because content was fewer, it didn’t necessarily equat…

>What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.

Exactly. The shared reality is the experience. You both were given the same opportunity to take in the same information. The different opinion is what comes out of the other side of the meat suit processing the experience.

Algo driven results changes the experience by changing what the user perceives. So there might never be a shared experience.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#742

Post by intended »

satvikpendem wrote: post #655
intended wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a flippant answer which was “who ever wanted to write for a machine in the past thousands of years” But maybe that is the future. Every country starts erecting their own towers of babel that we talk at, and it constantly compresses our conversations down to the most effective distribution of weights. At some point talking at the machine becomes a high status job, and we give respect to the people who whisper to…

They don't write for machines, they write for themselves.

Why write publicly then?

Theres many people I know who write notes that I know would be great to read. However they never publish them.

So… are we saying that the only public writing in the future is meant to be consumed by the machine?

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#743

Post by embedding-shape »

erfgh wrote: post #579
embedding-shape wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it. Agree, in general, people over-think a lot, and aren't "just doing things" enough, the world would be a better place if people acted more, over-think less. With that said, some decisions are more long-lasting and have a greater impact than others. I'm another child-less person, mainly because I guess I'm selfish enoug…

There's nothing you can really walk back from. Time flows one-way.

I mean if I decide to go to the beach, but I arrive there and don't like it, I just go home again, tomorrow looks the same regardless probably. Deciding to have a child, or other more "long-lasting" decisions, definitely impacts how your tomorrow most likely looks.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#744

Post by Razengan »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #697
Razengan wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, just as the "internet" supplanted newspapers, magazines (gosh those classic gaming mags), and broadcast television for many people, and how the newspapers replaced the town criers before them, why shouldn't the "internet" be supplanted by a more accessible medium? Why should I have to suffer through Fandom raping me with screen-obscuring banners and "PLEASE ALLOW ADS" just to make some sense of fucking Warhamme…

Fandom and Reddit are not the old Internet, they’re ad-driven middlemen that create nothing themselves. Self-hosted or at least self-maintained sites were the old Internet. After that point, the rot had already set in then, it just took until LLMs for it to metastasise.

> Fandom and Reddit are not the old Internet

What exactly WAS the "old" internet anyway?

100 half-baked sites hosted on Geocities, Yahoo, about pointless stuff, covered with gif-vomit that looked like epilepsy simulators?

Serious question: What do the rose-tinted glass wearers actually think was of objective substance on the old internet that's nowhere to be found now?

You can find random pointless stuff now too, just that except Geocities/Yahoo it's Intsagram/TikTok/Twitter etc.

If you mean self-hosted websites, they're still here.

If you loved all the Flash toons on Newgrounds etc there's unironically a lot more shorts and animations on YouTube now, if you but search for them (I suggest Weebl, David Firth, Sechi, to start with, and let the algorithm soak up the weirdness)

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#745

Post by smegger001 »

zajio1am wrote: post #693
nuclearnicer wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics. I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality. First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows. Second, 1989, when cabl…

Well, loss of (control over) shared narrative was one of complains of the Church against the printing press ...

And institutional control of information didnt really start again until the Statute of Anne struck up a deal between printers and the state giving printers copyright over written works and the state the right to cencor and ban works the disapproved of nearly 250 years latter.

Radio gave us Demagogues like Father Coughlin in the US and Hitler in Germany, and we still havent dealt with the problems radio introduced when television came along and now we have the internet with social media, podcast, and algorithmic echochambers, and algorithm induced radicalization. Radio television internet any one is just as much a shock to society as print was and we still havent figured out how to adapt yet to any fully.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#746

Post by cgyvbunji »

criddell wrote: post #735
customguy wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I called it 2001/2002 or whenever they appeared when I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality and therefore the ability to reason and act in public, and with others. I bet some still consider it hyperbole. It's just taking in trends and seeing where the glacier moves to, how the cookie will crumble so to speak.

Before search engines, we had personalized search results in the form of yellow pages. The yellow pages in Chattanooga are different than the Wichita. There was no global yellow pages where plumbers from Odessa were listed beside plumbers from Tokyo, was there? If you were looking for something more esoteric, you were going to find different results in the World Christian Encyclopedia than you would in the Encycloped…

Wait, so anything that's not sold everywhere is personalized? Don't think so.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#747

Post by muwtyhg »

thijson wrote: post #594
gilrain wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner and I adore our childfree lives… not worrying about them suffering climate change is just the gravy!

Climate change is inevitable, whether we exist or not. The sun will continue to get hotter over the next few billion years. Life is a struggle, it sounds like you would rather just give up. I guess evolution is working as intended.

> Climate change is inevitable, whether we exist or not. The sun will continue to get hotter over the next few billion years.

The thing people are thinking about when deciding not to have children for climate reasons is climate change on a human timescale, not a geological/astronomical one. There is a very real chance that children born today will live through a wildly different climate than their parents did.

As far as evolution goes, there are plenty of species that will not breed or even eat their young when circumstances are not good enough to raise them. It's not that out-there for people to put off or avoid having children due to environmental stressors like climate change. We, as humans, can just rationalize and understand it over a longer time period than, say, a Spotted Hyena.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#748

Post by switchbak »

danhodgins wrote: post #740
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, building ever more resistant methods of communication. I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA…

Yes. I thought maybe Blockchain might be able to provide some of that robustness for the public web, but it's all about speculative investment now.

A fully traceable public ledger is kind of a wet dream for an intelligence agency/evil corp. Funny how much faith we put into that, and look at it now.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#749

Post by ryandrake »

benfortuna wrote: post #670
chrisjj wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. A: It excludes opinion.

Everything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide.

The shared reality in that example includes only facts: OP and mum went to a movie. The movie was called X. The actors were Y and Z.

The original point of this subthread was that we can't even agree on a shared set of facts anymore! The political Right has an entirely different set of facts than the political Left, and when our reality is derived from those facts, we cannot share the same reality anymore.

Re: As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

#750

Post by switchbak »

benfortuna wrote: post #670
chrisjj wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it. A: It excludes opinion.

Everything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide.

Everything is perceived, and our perception gets filtered based on our prior experience. Just because we're not directly perceiving objective reality, that does not mean _everything_ is opinion.

JFK was shot, that's not just my opinion.

Unless you choose to believe some kind of post-modern crazyness, in which case - have at it.

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