It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances and has been self-sustaining from a profitable perspective. Sure, the worlds' governments could have spent billions / trillions building bases on Mars or even terraforming it. But for what purpose? And for how much misery would earth have to endure for all that effort?
It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances
What exactly has this given us? People have smart phone addiction. Studies have shown that people feel more isolated than before, because the coherence of local communities is dissolving.
The Internet has brought us much. A kid somewhere can learn a lot of things that you could not easily learn before in a small town in the middle of nowhere. We have FLOSS software and people that cooperate on large, open, projects.
But to me Facebook and other advertising-based have been a net loss. Of course, there is community and communication, but they existed before Facebook in Usenet, e-mail lists and forums. However, now all the communication is spoiled by advertisments, people being driven subconsciously to get likes, and numerous attempts to induce dopamine shots. I really liked the internet more from 1995-2008 (before Facebook got very big in Western Europe) than from 2008-now.
I'd argue that the decline of religion and the implementation of this Darwinian style of capitalism in the West is a large contributor towards this. The large increase in the number of non-working people (pensioners) also plays a roll.
In America I'd give television - especially Fox News. That channel is like WWF - it's basically a scripted soap opera written to be extremely compelling to the viewers. Only unlike WWF it's portraying itself as a true representation of the real world.
If anything the internet increases the amount of community: you can always find like-minded people.
This sounds a bit too much like "Facebook invented the Internet".
There were plenty of tools available for sharing and communicating in real time before Facebook existed. The actual innovation was the Internet and personal computing.
This seems to be the core of what this poster is trying to express as far as I understood.
>It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources.
Facebook is not the internet. This problem was solved long before 2005.
And the world was connected long before the internet. Instant intercontinental comms have been around since intercontinental telegraph cables were laid in the late 19th century.
The advent of radio, television, and telephone added more modes of instant very long distance comms. The internet was just the next layer of that.
In the future, cheap satellite internet will further reduce geographic isolation.
What misery is Earth enduring now, because we built Facebook instead of building next-generation mass transit to link continents and cities? Instead of optimizing food and water logistics, so less food is wasted and more of the world were fed? Instead of taxing petro and plastics companies for the externality of destroying the climate? My point being that if you or most people really gave a damn about human misery, there would be far fewer people tolerating the kind of unfettered capitalism that exists today.
I don't completely demonize Facebook's general concept. I appreciate and advocate for the idea of a federated Internet with single identity and no central authority on content. I'm not attacking that. I am challenging your idea (and the article's) that profit should be that important, or that the existence of Facebook is mutually exclusive to costly research/welfare/exploration.
i m not against facebook , but no, the world was "more" connected before facebook and mobile (which i think both represent a shift in the way internet was used). People were connected in open pseudonymous platforms and engaging in continuous explorative mystery with each other, everyone, not just their friends. It's fair to say i haven't read radical ideas online in a decade, and a lot of the edgy stuff of the old internet has been censored / outlawed. Real names BS and phone numbers turned the internet to a phonebook.
> People were connected in open pseudonymous platforms and engaging in continuous explorative mystery with each other.
This also had the effect that most people were way more respectful towards each other because you didn't have an instant "ego comparison" trough shined up social media profiles.
Nowadays most discussions quickly turn ad-hominem because all the needed information is readily available: "You said this nasty thing 4 years ago! A horrible person like you can't have any valid opinions!".
Yet somehow to this day, some people keep peddling this myth that "anonymity breeds toxicity", when Facebook sits there as one of the biggest and most glaring counter-examples collective humanity could ever produce.
Imho the web was way nicer and more productive pre-social media mass adoption.
It was not pioneered by Facebook at all. Before the web was even a thing, there was a split between dialup BBSes. In my area it was WWIV vs. Wildcat.
The WWIV boards were all pseudonymous, open and welcoming. There was pretty much no discrimination there (because no one knew your gender, age, religion, skin color, or class unless you told them). They were typically run by a mix of ordinary people, including those who would be discriminated against in real life.
The Wildcat boards in my area were all real-name only, enter your address and phone number to register an account and the sysop will call to verify. Those were the ones who claimed to be more civil, but were rife with discrimination, bullying, and snobbery. They were typically run by the more wealthy and powerful, who never faced discrimination.
The early internet, with IRC, usenet, web forums, and even some way into the blog phase, seemed to have followed the WWIV path, and it was good. But then the wealthy and powerful wanted more control and more data to discriminate on, and they resurrected the old real-names policies.
Also would like to add, sheer advances in compute and software lead by Facebook and others has enabled much cheaper space travel than what was possible in 1970's - 80's. This type of stuff is getting cheaper every day, so why be selfish because you "want to see it in your lifetime?" It'll happen. I don't care if it happens in 20 years, 200 years, or 2000 years.
Facebook (and other web advertising companies) isn't leading most of the advances in computing power. Moore's law is much older than Facebook.
And they certainly aren't developing the software that space agencies and companies are using. If anything they're likely diverting talent away from more beneficial work towards selling ads.
There are maybe 2 projects on this list that could possibly be beneficial for space exploration, and they aren't groundbreaking.
No one is using either of those directly in aerospace applications. And I can guarantee you that an aerospace company using React instead of Rails or a desktop app for a marketing page or internal app isn't significantly driving down the cost of space travel.
