Interesting. The analogy I reach for is the invention of the printing press. It saw an explosion of pamphlets in Germany, around the Reformation. Luther was one of the great authors. But by the 1520s the ideological opening had led to the Peasants War, and the disaster of Münster (think Waco on a larger scale). Luther himself became disillusioned, and turned more towards the power of the civil authorities and away from unrestricted Bible reading.
Yet, in the long run, societies that embraced this chaotic power did better than those that tried to repress it.
The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. The universalist ethic is also the same; i.e. letting other parts of the world have differing ethical views on certain issues is unacceptable and must be eliminated. There cannot be more than one opinion on X social issue, just as there could not be more than one interpretation of Christianity.
I think we are still in the power-building stages. There is no real alternative to Facebook/YouTube/etc. yet. But say, 30 years from now, there probably will be. Combined with increasing governmental hostility, we'll probably see a deeply fractured internet, undercut by a (semi-illegal) totally open one.
I don't know, I think it just betrays a deep insecurity. Who cares what a bunch of teenagers say on the Internet? Even the real world consequences of fringe online groups are minuscule in comparison to their perceived threat.
Civil society, in theory, is supposed to be about keeping civil with people that you have fundamental disagreements with - so that society can function. That has morphed into one highly religious in tone, in which it's not merely enough to tolerate other people - you have to convert them, and if they refuse to comply, excommunicate (deplatform) them.
I think instead of deplatform them, it's trying to force them off onto their own platform.
When racists (or similar "undesirables") share a larger platform they've kinda got to be on their best behaviour, they can't be too obvious instead they've got to be subtler and in doing so they likely attract more people to their cause because susceptible people tip toe in their direction gradually.
If they're all forced out onto their own platforms because of "muh free speech" the users won't tolerate being policed and so the absolute worst comes out and anyone stumbling across the community is going to be repelled fairly quickly.
That assumes they all only go to one place, which then turns into a cesspool that immediately repels anyone who enters.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it works both ways. If you expel all the heretics then your site becomes a cesspool of groupthink that immediately repels anyone who has had so much as a conversation with someone from the other side, because you'll be saying things that are transparently wrong to anyone who has had any real-world contact with the subject matter and be unable to correct yourself because anyone who spots the error fears being ejected for pointing it out.
And the second is that the version of the opposition on their best behavior for doing recruitment doesn't actually disappear, it just ends up in separate places. Your opponents will have their home base which is full of their own obviously wrong groupthink, but there will also continue to exist places where moderates gather.
Which means you have a new problem. The place where moderates gather will still have the subtle extremism you were trying to eject, but now, because your population hasn't been exposed to it, they're more susceptible to it. They're unvaccinated. So now you have to not only eject the extremists but also the moderates, because anyone who starts listening to the moderates may start to realize that some parts of the things your own extremists say aren't exactly true. Which puts them at high risk of switching to the other team. And you've already turned the other team into a coalition of crazy extremists. But ejecting the moderates turns your team into a coalition of crazy extremists, which is likewise quite ungood.
People like their own online bubbles in much the way they like their own offline bubbles. If you're sick of hearing the shit some people spew in the real world you don't go out of your way to be in the same places as them if you can avoid it.
We choose our social circles and the material we consume in real life it's not unsurprising this happens online as well. These broad platforms like twitter, reddit e.t.c. aren't any more immune to this than offline.
So let me give you an example of the problem. You have your filter bubbles, but then you visit an independent forum for amateur taxidermy. It has an irrelevant miscellaneous section which is well moderated enough to not be full of spam, but not by someone who really cares about or even particularly understands politics at all.
Someone on that forum posts the following statement. "The concept of white privilege is anti-Semitic because the subset of white people who are doing better than black people are disproportionally Jewish."
The factual component is true, it's not obviously spam, so the moderators leave it there. But what happens when people on the left read that?
It pits members of the same coalition against each other. If you're black you start wondering whether Jewish privilege is a term you should start employing, but you're not likely to be pleased with the response if you do, and that may leave a bad taste in your mouth. If you're Jewish you feel attacked and suddenly nervous about a popular tenet of your party's platform. If you're a non-Jewish white Democrat who has never been exposed to anything like this before, you're primed to receive some outright Nazi propaganda next.
Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition.
If you ban them from your filter bubble, that is not the context in which they'll be first encountered.
This is self correcting. The mod will see the inevitable shit storm and ban anything that looks remotely like it in the future. The filter bubble of amateur taxidermists will filter it out in the future.
"Statements like that need to be encountered for the first time in an environment where the problems with them can be analyzed thoughtfully and without vitriol or recriminations, because otherwise, when they are encountered, they create internal conflicts and push people into the arms of the opposition."
This will never happen in social media. Unless in some highly highly moderated forum setup for the purpose, which is its own filter bubble and in which expertise of the participants can be ascertained.
Any forum like that essentially excludes most of the general public.
You're assuming the shit storm happens on the taxidermy forum. But most of the taxidermists aren't there to talk about that stuff, or maybe some of them are but they're not the sort to be uncivil or try to cancel the heretics, so it isn't a problem there.
But then those people bring the heresy into the rest of their lives and get thumped by the mob for crimethink when they bring it up. And then once they're declared an enemy by their own tribe they seek refuge in the opposition.
...and this actually happens how often? Say, in comparison to the consequences of suppressing speech (easily observable throughout the 20th century)? Or even just other causes of death or violence? It's minuscule, so little that it's almost absurd to even be worried about it.
It’s non-obvious what the consequences of suppressing free speech are. You can’t just assume an equivalent between that and fascism or socialism. Today, Germany bans certain kinds of hate speech, as a result of its previous experience.
They send hate letters to each other with stagecoach services?
The problem is that there is no such thing as "freedom of speech" it's BS, there is a right to have an opinion, but some opinions are crimes and should never become speech, let alone be public
Corollary: public speech must be granted to everyone, because it's in the US Constitution, but you should not use it to badmouth the US
Not as an occupant of course, because that's what usually Americans living abroad do
The point is to prove that "freedom of speech" said by American corporations is ridiculous and nobody should believe it, on the contrary, everybody should start to worry
If you're sincere, you are definitely acting on incomplete information with regard to what America and Americans are actually like, and missing the point that it's individuals who need to have the freedom to speak, not corporations. If you're here with an agenda, well, whatever you're doing isn't making the world better.
Individuals will retain the freedom to speak even if we shutdown social networks.
That's the point you are missing.
> whatever you're doing isn't making the world better.
Imagine what a nation founded to avoid taxation and that became a superpower by securing resources in half of the World by starting wars or supporting dictators that committed genocides is doing to make the World better...
OP never said he pretends that USA are not a violent country where mass shootings don't happen all the time. OP implied that young adults PLANNING mass shootings on the INTERNET is miniscule.
What website should we block if we want to avoid another Boston Marathon bombing or men running trucks over people in Christmas markets like in Berlin?
(I just realized that both happened mere blocks of my residence at the time. Maybe if I become homeless we will be able to prevent these horrific events)
So rare that a very similar one happened in the French Riviera just some months after?
Anyway, the point is that we can not solve social issues with technological solutions. You are just acting on the symptoms but still never going to get a cure. Block a "cancerous" open site, and crazy sick people are just continue to do what they do in a darker corner of the net.
Like a few times in a century, not hundreds times in a year, every year, sir.
Closing social networks is not a technological solution, it's political.
Public speech must not be controlled by private entities
Unless you are the US and don't understand it.
Crazy people with their forums for crazy people have no ability to target hundreds of millions of people through paid ads
Please, try to understand it, because it's really not that hard
There's a reason why every developed country in the World strictly controls firearms but not knifes
There's a reason why the only "developed" country where mass shootings happen all the time is the only developed country that refuses to strictly control firearms
It's the most evident proof of Einstein law of insanity
> Public speech must not be controlled by private entities
This is part where we disagree. Not that I am defending that private entities should "control" public speech, but rather that this control is circunstancial. Remove Facebook and Twitter (and every big media conglomerate as well, FOX, CNN, NBC) all you want, people will still look for groups that share their views and messages that confirm their biases.
This is not just a guess. I am seeing this first-hand with the people looking into leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. Go to /r/mastodon and you will see me arguing with every one that comes with the idea that different instances mean different "communities" and "interests".
Also, consider the alternative. The article is saying that we shouldn't want a decentralized web. Who would you propose to "control" public speech? If not private companies and if not smaller groups, the only alternatives left is, guess what, Big State and tyrants
They always looked for places where to share their opinions with other people
Those places didn't weaponize their feelings and weaknesses against them to sell them ads
Want to make a global social network?
The State should be able to control them (every single state they operate in) and their decisions should be held accountable in court
The SN banned you?
They should have human support to solve the issues and a judge could overrule the decision, while now they are black holes
I trust the State, more than Facebook, if someone doesn't they shouldn't impose their decisions on other groups, including other countries
It's weird to read that people living in countries where the police can arrest you for not stepping out of the car or saying to a police officer to f*ck off defend the right to wear swastikas or private companies keeping public speech hostage in the name of freedom
Decentralised web can exists only among many small actors, when there are a few behemoth that control everything, of course segregation is gonna be the most obvious response: Russian internet, Chinese internet and let's hope European internet soon.
> Those places didn't weaponize their feelings and weaknesses against them to sell them ads.
This can be said of every media company. Every newspaper, magazine (low-brow or high brow), radio, TV station, cable TV company.
Every. Single. One.
> I trust the State, more than Facebook.
It doesn't matter who you trust more. It matters who you are able to disengage from. We as individuals and as groups can choose to keep Facebook of our lives. Can the Chinese say the same from the CCP?
> segregation is gonna be the most obvious response (...) let's hope European Internet
So, you are so afraid of Facebook's "control" of the internet that you would actively advocate to put in the hands of tyrants and kleptocrats?
Either you don't understand the concept of "decentralized web" or you are just fucking with me.
> Weird and revealing double standard you got there, comparing "Chinese" as a collective to "many" Americans.
Chinese are collectively more or less in the same situation, they are ethnically mostly the same people and live under the same rules, Americans are not.
Few very reach Americans enjoy all the freedom power can buy, everyone else either comply or suffer the consequences
You really did not know?
> Chinese who are much, much, much less free than nearly all Americans
Nope.
I don't believe in the kind of freedom Americans believe to possess
It's simply a different kind of tyranny
Unless you mean the freedom to be shot in the streets.
For example: there are 700 people in jail every 100k citizens in USA, they are only 115 in China.
In 2008 USA had the 25% of the global World jail population
And you know why?
Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
USA has the lowest life expectancy of the whole west and it's only one year longer than China, despite being the country with the highest spending per capita in healthcare in the entire globe.
Is this the freedom you're talking about?
So no, USA is not a benchmark for anything good, including the exercise of free speech, which is only a lame excuse to not take action against extremists propaganda
> Indeed
So sometimes you experience moments of lucidity when you see yourself for what you really are?
More than 1 in 15 Chinese people are not part of the Han ethnic group. When somebody makes big “mostly” generalisations about people, I don't expect “you could have half the clubs in a school composed of these people and still have some left over, assuming uniform distribution” to be true.
You do know that saying bad things about $CountryX doesn't prove good things about $CountryY, and vice versa, right?
Have you ever considered the possibility that China has "less people in prison" because their government just kills any dissident and "troublemaker" without any semblance of due judicial process?
Stop giving him such a hard time! China's execution rate is a state secret, so no one really knows how high it is, but it's estimated to be significantly lower than that of peer countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran :)
And besides that, who cares if some troublemakers are killed off? The Han "collective" is not bothered by such minor things as individual rights and due process
First, stop moving the goal posts and the whataboutism. Now you are bringing things like political assassinations. Can you go the part where almost we talk about how almost 50 million people starved to death due to the ideology of the Great Leader, or how the country has 300 million excess men because of the one-child policy which led to sex-selective abortions and plain brutal infanticide?
Second, you seem to be the under the impression that I defend the things done by the US State. I do not. It is precisely because I do not like the US State that I do not want to give it more power than it already has. In fact, it has been quite a bit amusing to see your cognitive dissonance of talking about all the horrible things that the US Government has done and yet you want me and everyone else to "Trust the State" with social media. It's almost as amusing as the cognitive dissonance you show when you say you want to take things out of control of "private entities" and put them to the control of the state that you so clearly (and justifiably) loathe.
> Do you really believe you can go from 700 to 115 by hiding the deaths?
Take just the million Uighur in "re-education centers" and call the thing by what it really is - a concentration camp - and suddenly this number already goes up quite a bit.
However, what you are failing to understand is that there is no point in comparing a country that has established (however flawed) democratic institutions with a country whose authoritarian rulers have unchecked powers. The numbers are meaningless if the masses are subjected to tyranny and indoctrinated to never question the authority of the leaders.
> Because the private prison system in USA is highly profitable
LOL. You "know" just enough to remain comfortable in your ideology, and your self-imposed media echo chamber is more than happy to feed that "knowledge" to you.
If you think you are credible outside your tribe... don't quit your day job. You're just as delusional as the people whose speech you wish to control, and hence provide an abject illustration of why we don't want state control of our speech.
And don't feel bad that China is still behind the US in so many ways, there will be a Great Leap Forward very soon!
Regarding media: "playing the insecurities of people to sell them ads" is actually something that every marketer does. No exceptions. Fabricate demand. From news channels that are considered infotainment to product placement spots on movies, from teen magazines that promote utterly wrong role models and lead girls to bulimia, anorexia and all sorts of psychosis to any property from Arianna Huffington that mastered the exploitation of outrage culture to sell to Millennials. Rest assured that every single media outlet that depends on ads to make money has no interest in elevated public discourse and thrives on public anxiety.
And no matter how bad it is, it is still better than State-owned media, which bypasses the whole marketing mechanisms and just relies on the ruling power to keep the very same type of public control through fear and intimidation.
Regarding China and freedom: tell me if you prefer to be Black in the US or a Uighur in a concentration camp. Afterwards tell me which people gets to more or less manipulated by their media.
China gets more propaganda, but average Chinese knows they're being fed propaganda, whereas free citizens with their free 5th estate are rarely aware of when their consent is being manufactured. More highinfo/curious Chinese are informed about the world simply because there's a fuckload of bilingual Chinese with English fluency able to share news from across the wall. You can't say the same about anglosphere and Chinese information literacy. The amount of absolutely ignorant western commentary on China is staggering, where as Chinese net actually has western perspectives that somewhat comport with reality.
At the end of the day, media that doesn't turn society into idiots that undermine national interests has its virtues and maybe preferrable. That was once the case with tame free media before much of it turned into divisive reality TV. Similarly you can have dangerous state media that whip up nationalist frenzy, cause sectarian violence etc, or you could have boring ass state media and manage civic engagement for political serenity. All media are manipulated, all narratives shaped, blatantly manipulating media for serenity to a knowing population self-fulfilling properties. People stop giving a shit about politics, and politicians end up government instead of campaigning. Prerequisite is having a good system for selecting competent leadership in the first place.
This is not unambiguously endorsing state media as good, but decline of free media in many places is simply that bad. Some countries still have passable public broadcasting, but for how long, and whether commercial pivot for ads + anxiety is terminal transition.
For Uyghurs: under the most delusional estimates, Chinese Uyghurs still have less lifetime chance of being in a indoctrination camp than US blacks in US prison industrial complex. For much shorter sentences. After they'll be coerced to work in vocational program for more pay, even adjusted for exchange rate. Not US prison labour moving covid bodies tier coerced labour, but actual useful jobs designed to transition into society instead of recidivate back into for profit prisons. China actually wants to integrate minorities instead of exclude, even at extreme costs. So I suppose the answer is, it's better to be a Chinese Uyghur in a few generations after they've been sinicized and integrated than a Black American in 20 years who will still be getting executed on the street and fighting equal treatment.
What good is it to be aware of the propaganda if no one gets to act and defend the values they seem worthy of protection?
Take the Hong Kong situation. If "highinfo/curious" chinese people in mainland China look at it and just repeat the Party line of "they are just troublemakers" instead of supporting them as loudly and as effectively as they can, then all this awareness of being fed propaganda is as good as nothing.
I mean, you are actually parroting the bullshit about concentration camps being about "integrating minorities". Minorities that are being tortured and brainwashed into submission are not "integrated", just destroyed while keeping a shell of the people to show around.
Maybe mainlanders don't deem HK worthy of protection. Mainlanders cared about pollution, they protested, government responded. They lost their shit at poor safety due to rapid development (aviation, high speed rail, food, medicine), the government responded. They were disgruntled over pork prices. The government responded. Chinese society skews old, conservative and anti LGBT. Government unfortunately responded. Unprecedented MeToo trials happening right now. Government responding. Sufficiently significant issues that elicit widespread attention gets addressed, Chinese people advocate for themselves all the time.
> fed propaganda
Fact is pork prices is literally a bigger problem to mainlanders than plight of privileged HKers with historic acrimonious relationship. This is a well understood dynamic, suggesting HKers would have ever got mainstream mainland support because of propaganda and not bad blood is exactly the kind of anglosphere illiteracy on China I'm talking about. ProHK / pro liberal reform voices exist but not much. Why? HK protestors from mainland perspective: young, nativist, disillusioned but privileged individuals who spread shit about mainlanders on social media for years... Yeah, I just described alt-right. Is it any surprise they got minimal support. Lots of mainland diaspora in the west with access to both side of the story, did meaningful numbers come out to support HK? No, they had access to both sides of the story, they just knew better.
>integration
Of course the goal is integration, CCP is not spending tremendous resources to be cruel for shits and giggles. If Han knew how much was going into XJ they'd protest, due to costs not human rights. Like people everywhere, the public would rather the minorities rot than take disproportionate resources. But unlike democracies, CCP can actually ignore public sentiment. Some in this generation will be a shell, their descendants will be integrated. It's ugly, but things move fast in Chinese 5 year plans. None of this long arc of justice nonsense. It's not right, but history will judge relative wrongness compared to locking up 1/4 of black Americans or trapping indigenous peoples in backwater reserves forever.
I hope you realize that you so into getting into a shouting match that you are not making any sense whatsoever.
I don't know where you are from, but as someone who grew up in Brazil, lived in the US for ~5 years and now has 7 years in both Northern and Southern Europe and close relationships in the Middle East: globalization is real. Someone autistic like you may not notice due to subtle differences to adapt to local cultures and local flavors, but the message everywhere is to get people to measure themselves by what they consume and to stimulate consumption by creating needs where there are none.
It might surprise you but being in the spectrum doesn't mean being autistic as in the cliché.
It's, as the same implies, a spectrum.
I've lived in the US, New York, Los Angeles and Columbus Ohio for a brief period.
(I also lived in Berlin and Barcelona, but that doesn't really count as a radically different experience for an European)
I have strong northern African looks, but am still white and loved every moment in the US.
But the devil is in the details, I could not ignore that when my friends there told me that some neighborhood was dangerous it really was dangerous, not dangerous as we usually mean it when we say it in Italy.
I could not ignore the staggering amount of homicides reported in the news.
This year LA will surpass 300 homicides in a year, Italy has 12 times the population of LA and there were "only" 270 homicides last year.
I could not ignore that the police is scary there and you should not talk to them or engage in any way.
I swear I notice a difference when I see one.
Having said that.
Globalization is real, but the media here are not trying to exploit my weaknesses to sell me ads, they are putting ads on their products, generic ads, not "I know who you are and I know you're gonna like this" ads.
I'm ok with the first kind, not so much with the latter.
The point of decentralised web is a misguiding one.
The decentralised web is the web!
Everyone can build their own website and host it at home on a raspberry PI on their connection.
That's what made the web a novelty that could (hopefully) spread culture and knowledge.
The dicotomy between centralised and decentralised web was born because the web has been taken away from people and transformed in a targeted ads delivery machine by the same companies that sell ads (FB, Twitter, Instagram and most of all Google, they sell ads as a primary business)
They are fighting to get screen attention so that they can deliver even more ads to the people.
And when we say ads we are not simply talking about product advertisement, we are talking about political ads used to radicalise the debate, that the same companies selling ads control, thanks to the network effect.
And since the majority of companies doing it are American, I blame the USA that let them do it
As paradoxical as it might sound China doesn't need to sell ads to people to convince the people to support this or that position, because there is no alternative position.
They rely on good old State propaganda, which existed for centuries ans has been studied for decades and is a well understood topic.
> There's a reason why every developed country in the World strictly controls firearms but not knifes.
As a slight tangent, Britain actually does strictly control knives - a short folding non-locking penknife is the only knife that can be carried in public without good reason, and “self defence” is considered never a good reason, and the penknife can still get you arrested if you happen to have it on you in an inappropriate place (bar, nightclub, sports event, etc).
480 deaths in a year in a country of 350M isn't a lot, and doesn't make a place "a violent country".
Being killed in a mass shooting in the US is only approximately one order of magnitude more likely than getting struck and killed by lighting in the US.
Rather than censoring people, we could take the approach that our worldview is robust enough to withstand competition / challenge. More discussion should in theory wither the fragile ones:
Which they never will without some central power because the (economic)market selects for virality when it comes to communication tools.
The action of that central power will be called censorship.
You could also try to have some guarantee of interoperability to reduce network effects and thus make the market effect weaker and reduce the selection for virality. That seems like something we could try.
Maybe they become those young adults for different reasons? It could be an effect of an alienating society, focused mainly on wealth instead of on the human being.
You can’t explain a change with a constant. We’ve had capitalism for centuries. Far right and Islamic terrorism are not new, but they have risen greatly, and their spread is linked to extremism on the internet.
Most Islamic extremism is spread through mosques and prisons, at least in Europe. I can't remember the last time a terrorism investigation tracked the original radicalisation back to the internet. It's a non issue.
Good point, but I'm struggling to remember people who were radicalised exclusively through ISIS websites. There probably have been a few just because there were so many cases by now they all blur together a bit, but usually ISIS sympathisers seem to have been exposed to a lot of ISIS propaganda during sermons. They may also have consumed online content but it was in addition to, not in replacement of, traditional offline radicalisation.
OP’s argument was specific: “ Take a look at some BLM protests and how people wanted to chant, display repent for their sins, subjugate in Communion, etc.” By all means, disagree on the specifics - that will be more persuasive than calling him “sad”.
Won't speak for your OP, but from my perspective most Social Justice Warriors embrace the term, even if it is thrown at them derisively from the other side. Same thing goes for being "Woke" -- it is a term and mindset that they embrace.
Yeah, pretty much. My comment was not about trying to put a blanket statement on anyone that defends any kind of progressive policies. I am referring to the fundamentalist "activists" and those that turn Progressive/Liberal values to an extreme core point of their identities.
No. The vague language is to avoid getting caught in fruitless conversations with some holier-than-thou puritanical clown who will comb through any comment I make with the intent of showing how something I said is an unforgivable sin.
"SJWs are the puritans of the 21st century." What's vague about that? The fact that you are trying to police me show that it doesn't take much to have such a good sample of the statement.
There's been more than a few terrorist incidents connected to forums like 8chan. In terms of the physical damage these attacks are not a threat to society but that's true of all terrorism. The argument normally is that the psychological damage to society as a whole is worth throwing everything we have at it.
Large media outlets like The New York Times were instrumental in convincing the public that Saddam had WMDs and thus justifying the Iraq War. That conflict led to something like a million deaths (and counting), which is 1000x more than all the "Internet forum"- related terrorism put together.
Yet I don't see anyone calling for further control of The New York Times or implementing restrictions on the corporate media.
No, I can't, unless you assume that everyone else doing the reading is somehow more gullible or impressionable than yourself.
Did 8chan make you pick up a gun? Did 8chan turn you into a nazi?
Just because seeing something published makes you upset does not mean that publishing those things is inherently dangerous.
You need to trust the other people in your society a bit more than you do, and stop assuming most readers are ten years old.
Your conclusion is based on fear, not the millions of people who read "objectionable" things online and go "ugh" and then close the tab (and sometimes go write long-winded blog posts about how censorship is essential to prevent violence).
"The rhetoric coming from Big Tech ("we can't let people even think these bad ideas") is extremely similar to the rhetoric that came from the Catholic Church during the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion."
Not only is the rhetoric from Big Tech not at all similar to that of the Church, the comparison to Big Tech now and Printing Press then has no merit at all really.
The Church was suppressing arcane knowledge, and controlling their access to 'God' - so to speak.
The Internet is a new form of 'hyper commons' where a race war could flame up instantly if allowed.
Understand that the Internet has absolutely nothing to do with the 'truth'. The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners, purveyors of information. If that legitimacy does not exist, then the truth is just whatever everyone wants it to be.
The comparison is not 'The printing press' - it's the Rwandan genocide.
In Rwanda, the driving fuel was radio. Unfettered, angry people would urge, every day, to think of the 'other' (i.e. Tutsi v. Hutu) like 'dirty cockroaches'.
Without daily, constant mass propaganda of an entire nation mesmerized and inflamed by genocidal talk radio - there would have been no genocide.
The Rwandan war was mostly not a military incursion - it was militias vs. people. It was individuals, coming out of their homes with machetes, chopping up their neighbours.
Extremism is fuelled by a nudge in either direction - as a small, populist media example, we saw this as both CNN and MSNBC leaned harder left as Trump rhetoric rose.
I'm not political - but some of the Talking Heads on Fox have been aggressively and actively promoting voting conspiracy theories about voting issues that have been very publicly debunked and rejected by the courts - but the opinionists of course avoid that part, and just push the conspiracy without at all pointing out the facts have literally been proven false.
Millions of viewers accept the conspiracy as truth.
While the comments section on Fox has been surprisingly more enlightened that normal, with somewhat of a majority even calling them out as 'Fake News' - a sizeable majority of responders are adamant the election was stolen.
At OAN and Breitbart, the comments section is vicious about the 'clear fact' that the election was stolen by Biden, and there's talk of violence.
There was quite a lot of violence in the streets during the BLM unrest, we are not in a happy situation, there are a lot of guns in America.
If for example 'some group with guns' ended up killing 'someone from some other group' - things would get out of hand fast.
If FB, and Twitter, Google and the Press did not manage information - I think it would devolve into regional, balkan like violence, like a quasi civil war very quickly.
While it's really hard sometimes to fathom how information should be controlled - the night of the election, when Donald Trump came out and claimed the election was rigged without any evidence, literally trying to overthrow the Republic on the basis of his ego ... using threats of having his, often armed supporters 'not stand down' (!!!) it became crystal clear how important information control is.
The issue contend with is how we go about it. We need transparency, regulation, independence, proportionality etc..
So Google, FB, Twitter - the 'huge' entities, need to set guidelines and probably have some way of ensuring they are enforced consistently and not selectively. The rules for what constitutes 'organizing violence' need to be clear etc..
Webs of trust can help isolate the issue, in that if you can trace news back to it's source, you can weight the relevance of the news according to the weights assigned to the friend's and your own weightings combined, in that particular web of trust (eg. A Web for cooking, a Web for politics etc).
The issue then is that you're likely to get a balkanization of the webs of trust - echo chambers.
How we can support cross pollination of these webs is the issue. I don't have an answer for that, but being able to trace news sources at least helps though.
First, this is missing the point a little bit - people don't care about the truth. They actively seek out channels of bias. If everyone were so conscientious as to be seeking the truth society would have far fewer problems.
Second, there is no such thing as 'web of trust', it's an academic idea.
Third, it's unnecessary. We already have pretty good institutions.
FYI I just checked the commentary on Fox to see where there plebes minds are at this morning, and this was the 4th comment on the top article:
"The military must restore President Trump to the presidency.
Any pockets of military resistance should be dealt with.
Our country needs military law and God's chosen President, President Trump.
President Trump for life!!!!"
A few comments down:
"MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW MARTIAL LAW
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STEALING AN ELECTION IS AN ACT OF WAR! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
STOP THE STEAL"
This kind of rhetoric is not uncommon now, and this is on a mainstream news outlet, it's only a little bit of accidental violence from words to deeds.
Yes, that was the point with the balkanisation bit. There's no grey area for debate as the echo-chambers polarise discussion.
Hence the real issue- how to persuade people to see news etc outside their usual fare. This could be simply a random post of the day on their feed, to a 'you may like' or 'the other side' on a post.
Far from being academic, webs of trust have existed since the dawn of time, for example marriage with other tribes to strengthen trust. On the web, twitter retweets are a loose example in that people retreat what they find useful, building trust between users over repeated retweets.
I don't know the answer to this btw but the current institutions don't appear to be enough, from potentially influenced elections and referenda, to trying to silence whistleblowers (Assange, Whitehouse leaks etc)
Isolating the issue though ie. Being able to verify optionally signed posts goes some way towards building better Web. Curated posts by Facebook have no indication of agenda or veracity, same as for most of twitter.
Something like Radicle or Spritely might be the way forward, more research needed :)
>how to persuade people to see news etc outside their usual fare
I'm not sure, but you actually need a place where people COULD see viewpoints outside the usual before those interested can go there.
An example of this working was the Slatestarcodex Culture War thread and its successor, The Motte.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
It turns out that there's a sizeable contingent of people who do want to talk to people on the other side, and if you build it, they will come- and be surprisingly civil to each other, given you might expect them to assault each other on the streets in other circumstances.
Of course, as mentioned in the above article, one problem with building a space where people can talk civilly about their differences is that you end up talking civilly to unpalatable folks, and people on the outside really don't like that and will try to destroy you- even if what you're seeing here, people de-escalating by talking to each other, is a miracle in the making.
The culture war and the Motte have problems, of course. I'd just like to see a Cambrian explosion of spaces with a similar ethos, to explore the design space.
> Understand that the Internet has absolutely nothing to do with the 'truth'. The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners, purveyors of information. If that legitimacy does not exist, then the truth is just whatever everyone wants it to be.
Ironically this sounds just like the kind of argument Thomas More would have made against Erasmus. And he’d have referred to Münster just as you refer to Rwanda.
Anyone can have their printing press. But if they want to start printing pamphlets that say 'Kill All the Celts/Jews/Lutherans/Catholics' then it's going to get taken away.
Again that's very similar to arguments made in the 16th century. "Take away the magistrate, and let loose the bridle unto the unruly multitude... virgins shall be deflowered, matrons ravished, old men slain in their beds...." Despite all this, it's hard to be sad that freedom of speech eventually won out in Northern Europe.
The truth comes from examination, and the legitimacy of the examiners,
It sounds an awful lot like you are calling for an explicitly elevated class of people, with the sole authority to interpret the literature. Sort of like a priesthood.
We have to find a new way through this problem.
Censorship is hardly "a new way." And this problem only exists if enough people pay attention to it. It's not the freedom of speech that is the problem, it's traditional media that amplify every debate instead of projecting nuance, and it's algorithms that optimize for engagement over connection.
I've never heard anyone use the Rwandan genocide as an analogy for what's going wrong with the modern web but I think you've hit the nail on the head.
It seems that the most ardent supporters of unrestricted free-speech are the most optimistic in their belief in humanity to come to a stable, moral consensus if we all just say whatever we want.
The Rwandan genocide shows the darker truth that we're just as likely to talk ourselves into horrific violence and war over arbitrary divisions. Cultural and societal pressure over what's acceptable to discuss seems like a very real, and very useful bulwark against that possibility.
Rwandan hate radio is not simply a story of unbridled free speech.
"One of the most virulent voice of hate, the newspaper Kangura, began spewing forth attacks on the RPF and on Tutsi immediately after the October 1990 invasion. It was joined soon after by other newspapers and journals that received support from officials and businessmen linked to the regime. "
"Until 1992, Radio Rwanda was very much the voice of the government and of the president himself.... Before the daily news programs, Radio Rwanda broadcast excerpts of Habyarimana’s political speeches. This national radio sometimes broadcast false information, particularly about the progress of the war, but most people did not have access to independent sources of information to verify its claims.
In March 1992, Radio Rwanda warned that Hutu leaders in Bugesera were going to be murdered by Tutsi, false information meant to spur the Hutu massacres of Tutsi."
[later Radio Rwanda becomes less partisan:]
"With the new direction at Radio Rwanda and the voice of the RPF increasingly strong, Hutu hard-liners decided to create their own station. They began planning their radio in 1992, incorporated it as Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in April 1993, and began broadcasting in August 1993...."
"Although nominally private and opposed to Radio Rwanda, RTLM in fact was linked in a number of ways with the national radio, with other state agencies and with the MRND. RTLM was allowed to broadcast on the same frequencies as the national radio between 8am and 11am, when Radio Rwanda was not transmitting, an arrangement that encouraged listeners to see the two as linked, if not as identical. The new station also drew personnel from Radio Rwanda, including Nahimana, who played a leading role at RTLM after having been dismissed from ORINFOR, and announcer Noel Hitimana."
First - my Prof. and colleague was the Adjutant to the Chief of Staff of the UN mission (General Dallaire) during the Rwandan Genocide. I'm well informed.
Second - that the 'government' was in control of some of the radio has nothing to do with the argument - that's an example of 'political speech', particularly lacking institutional controls of the press.
The genocide was not arbitrary, of course there were leaders and those pushing for it. There were political forces moving millions of machetes into the country to be used in 'the uprising'. But when it happened, it was almost universal, like a Zombie film.
President Trump, using 'direct channels' (Twitter/FB) to spout lies about election rigging, is able to do this completely without any fact checking. He can say almost anything he wants, and a certain % will believe him. He has made veiled hints at violence.
5-10 Million people believe that the election has been rigged, and the constitution has been usurped. Those are Revolutionary terms, and they have guns.
This story reads like an election in a crappy African Republic where there is zero institutional credibility.
A 'decentralized web' mostly lacks any ability to decipher fact from truth - it's expensive, it requires integrity, transparency, oversight - which is why we have many institutions to do that right now, and it becomes a real problem when they start to bend.
It seems that the most ardent supporters of unrestricted free-speech are the most optimistic in their belief in humanity to come to a stable, moral consensus if we all just say whatever we want.
Personally, it's more that I'm pessimistic about giving governments the power to imprison people for expressing opinions that governments don't like.
The government of Quebec fined a comedian $30 000 for making a joke about a handicapped person.
I think the issue is that 'Freedom of Expression' ought to exist - it's #1 in Canada and #2 Ammendment in the US, but there's no such thing as 'unrestricted' speech, and, institutional controls are going to have to be in place.
If you're plotting with your buddies to walk into the post office and murder someone ... well I'll bet most people think your Signal channel should be snared.
If you want to call a Female Trans person a 'He' because that' what they are biologically, even if they present themselves as a She ... well, most people think that should be legal, but there are absolutely people with power who want to make that a form of hate speech.
On Twitter right now, I'm thankful that they are adding notes to indicate that specific actions of election fraud.
But they have also indicated they will ban you for 'dead naming' or 'misgendering' a Trans person.
So you know the Actress 'Ellen Page' is now trans, so 'he' is now 'Elliot Page'. Fair enough. But if you literally use the term 'Ellen Page' or refer to them as 'She' - you could be banned. Which is ridiculous.
Fair point. I wonder if my prioritization of the echo-chamber/fake news balkanization problems the web is facing now is purely because it's a more novel threat than authoritarian government overreach?
But it seems like there should be some level of compromise that can address both risks. We restrict other natural freedoms in all sorts of ways in modern society, why not free speech at all? As an example that's repeated so often it's practically a cliche: even with the second amendment in the US, citizens are still restricted from owning nuclear weapons.
A new class of weapon was invented and society decided that no matter what they said in the past, this was too powerful to treat like any other weapon until now. Seems like this new form of hyper-speech could qualify for a similar approach?
> So Google, FB, Twitter - the 'huge' entities, need to set guidelines
I agree, but let me refine: Dissenting opinions in civil society are arbitrated by civil courts.
So we need the 'huge' entities to commit working together with civil society. That means they need to lobby towards their own regulation. AT&T allegedly did it in the 20th century. Lobbying for more constraints on your own company is only contradictory if the company considers itself infallible in perpetuity, i.e. a benevolent dictatorship.
The Ottoman Empire banned the use of the printing press for 270 years.
"This opposition to the printing press had the obvious consequences for literacy, education, and economic success. In 1800 probably only 2 to 3 percent of the citizens of the Ottoman empire were literate, compared with 60 percent of the adult males and 40 percent of the adult females in England. In the Netherlands and Germany, literacy rates were even higher. The Ottoman lands lagged far behind the European countries with the lowest educational attainment in this period, such as Portugal, where probably only around 20 percent of adults could read and write."
Low literacy in the Ottoman Empire should not be ascribed solely to the lack of the printing press. It also had to do with the standard written language used in the Empire: written Ottoman Turkish was an artificial mixture of Turkish and Persian that was specially taught to a small elite. The average Turk would not have been able to make sense of Ottoman Turkish texts even if he did become literate (in the sense of knowing the letters and being able to read things aloud).
This is why one of the concerns of Atatürk’s revolution was not just increasing printing and switching to the Latin alphabet, but also replacing the Ottoman Turkish written language with one much closer to spoken Turkish.
Based on your writing, it seems you have a level head and a good angle on world history
I am hoping that if you have any books that deal in the history east of present day Germany, present day Italy, and or south of Madrid (directly/indirectly) that you really liked or found especially engaging or informative that you might remember and graciously share what they were if it pleases you to do so.
I am at a point where I am starting to appreciate what I am "rooting for" in western Asia/northern Africa which was a step in my study of northern/western barbarian history (frankish, gaulish, Norse etc etc) that made everything more fun and interesting to learn and therefore easier for me to study and accumulate interesting information
Because you seem very reasonable, I am thinking if you liked any of those direct/indirect history books that I might like them too
If you read this comment, thank you for your time and attention. I hope that you and your loved ones are doing okay in these difficult times.
The printing press still required costs to operate - and these costs were huge compared to the costs of required to post on the Internet nowadays. This post mentions that it is the posts done by usual people that do the most harm, usually due to their sheer amount first and foremost: this is equivalent to giving everyone on the planet the power of having a printing press of their own and multiple free places to hang their pamphlets for other people to see.
The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
That is absolutely true. But compared to what went before, the printing press was a huge advance too. Going from 0 to 1 can be a bigger deal for society than going from 1 to 100.
It definitely was - I'm not negating the fact that the discovery and implementation of printing press was a giant net positive for human civilization as a whole.
I'm just not really sure about the omnipresence of the Internet. Too much of a good thing, you know; the sheer volume of information is insane, usually unless someone actively and awarely combats it. Then there comes the questions of whether and how much pieces of that information are meritorious and beneficial.
> The scale of the Internet's "printing power" is already millions of times bigger than that of the renaissance printing press.
True, but much of that "printing power" benefits the behemoths through their central nodes on the network.
If everyone's not locked down device were also acting as shared consensus/validation on crypto transactions with payouts (instead of ledgers at banks and ZIRP account payouts), partial distributed file storage (instead of on AWS/Azure/GCP), etc, then a lot of the benefits the behemoths have would decrease (while the benefits non- behemoths have increase). I think this will be the case in the long run as the costs go down, knowledge of implementing such capabilities go up and the incentives to move in this direction go up, but getting to such a state can happen outside of our lifetimes.
Yet, in the long run, societies that embraced this chaotic power did better than those that tried to repress it.
Will the same be true this time?