I'm in an "elite coastal city" or whatever but people are conversationally very aware & very disgusted by the state of affairs. It gets brought up socially a good bit, and far outside the tech circles.
But we want to connect & share & use the internet, and these are incredibly easy ways to participate widely with the rest of the planet. Heck yes I love having some Robert Reich in my feed; man is epic, on point. Can I drop him a comment telling him how much he rocks or elaborating a point? Yes I can.
Right now there is no other avenue into the noosphere. I'm all for ActivityPub but the network effect here is immense. This is happening because of Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is users^2. So there is no alternative. You either give up your privacy & let Facebook/Meta/whomever data mine you, or you stop participating with the planet.
As for the law, I have little hope that we can mete out a just relationship through regulation. EU is trying but just look at Privacy Shield difficulties; making a product which is compliant with all the overlapping & abutting laws across the globe is diabolically difficult. That Threads is saying, yeah, we can't, it's too hard is evidence that more attempts to add more laws, to try to regulate a balance is optimistic. It has the Utopian fragility, the dream that a just society can be produced & synthesized, which maybe it can, but too often there is a naivete about control, and a rigidity & inflexibility which creates brittleness. The law has it's idea of what it wants but it keeps becoming decoupled from whats happening in the world; lawmaking is singular, produces isolated static artifacts, but the world is full of billions of people responding & changing & shifting.
Competition seems like the must to me. Cory Doctorow & EFF were talking about Competitive Compatibility for a big, trying to make it viable to switch across networks & not have to lose all your friends & data to do so. A market & freedom based approach won't immediately or directly resolve the privacy concerns, but I think it would let new things get started that could be viable winning alternatives. Right now we are locked in to unprivate.
There's a recognizable & real value to this call. It presents something hopeful: that values human spirit, that says we each have value and are unique & worthwhile.
And it leaves the door open to the future; think of how hard scholars today go to find words from antiquity, what effort they take to understand the past: isn't it a noble idea to equip the past with a better view, to be able to see broadly into what the world is today?
The world is so tired & frustrated & angsted up, over so many situations. The comments here almost universally come in extremely hot. They are short on possibility, actively disbelieve in what we have. I confess it's indeed reasonable to have some curmudgeonliness, to assume people are useless & uninteresting. But isn't an effort like this what would make the world better? If we thought laterally, if we both recognized that we have but one small voice but also cherished that light? To me, what's proposed here is the most basic inner-core of social contract: the recognition of human value, human dignity.
These comments are amok with only the downsides of today. They are afraid of the couple scattering of examples of the weird that emerges at scale, the people harassed or bugged in real life. But there's so many hundreds of millions of people who are posting & sharing & blogging just fine. These comments disdain people & their discard their worth, without pausing to reflect on what gems in the rough might emerge. No one takes a long view, and asks how humanity might be different if we thought long, if we made a long context part of our existence. These attitudes engender the short term mercenary small view of exstence, they promote the havoc & irrelevance that they themselves disdain.
There's so many interesting fractal possibilities & growths we could make towards this kind of idea. The costs have never been lower to keep & preserve. The prompt, of writing for the long, for the world: that calling I think would change us, would help us beget something closer to a smart & sensible noosphere, that can care, that escapes the traps of negativity & turmoil-driven attention hounding, that would help us break free of so many of the unlikable conditions. I hope we can believe in each other, I hope we don't forever stay so pissy & snarky & short, I hope we can believe in trying for good things, moral & right things, even though there are challenges, even though it won't be perfect, even though less worthy & ideal words might also be captured in the archive.
There was a brief spike at the beginning of the Holocene, a bit over 10,000 years ago, when there was a brief slightly warmer average. Someday soon-ish we seem likely to have a day higher than whatever peak happened then. We won't know it but the odds are already non-zero and rising that we've crossed that threshold.
Walking back in time, we have to go to 115k-130k years ago to find a hotter time period. That's during a brief Eemian period, before the last glacial period (where the glaciars retreated for good). This is called the Pleistocene era. Heaven help us if we breach that peak, whatever it was, but for a couple hundred years it looks like it was +3.5 or 4 C hotter on average than our 1960-1990 average.
It was around 2.5m years ago that the earth actually stayed consistently hotter: the Pilocene era.
Meh. I wish society could over time better vote & analyze people.
Right now the action is all post by post, has near net no aggregate impact in helping us asses how we view each other. I would love love love to see a real balanced fair view on how society views the different people.
Personally I don't find these negative views bad. I personally think there are enormous negative sapping energies of bad. Oh yes, there is a little Exiting the Vampire Castle that self-owms the various progressive/hopeful fronts. But my word. This is such the small side of things compared to the ur-connected negative regressive anti-societal creeps that so advance.
We don't need to stop the bad people. But there are so many bad people, horrible things advocated. We dont stop; but we need options for self warding. We desperately require anti anti-social networking. We direly need social warding, against so many trash pieces of garbage here to spread rot & bedlam & meanness.
This was always asymmetric, with the bad garbage having endless more time & energy to invest in being garbage. Brandolini's Law strongly implies that discourse against bad shitty shits is impossible; the aggressors of shittiness can stack overflow the entire internet. The only response of reason is socialized defense, is identifying & making know aggressors. We don't block these people, we don't stop them! But we enable society to form some basic social warding to alert & make each other aware of the bad actors, to provide warning.
This phase of no longer endless acquiescing to the worst is building, thankfully, with vigor. The absolutely unhinged & cruel having free reign has worn out so much of the internet, has become completely expected, to such a degree that response is inevitable.
Thankfully Western society still values freedom of speech. Nor could we succeed in self policing - in a State way - the ideas about. Nor would proxy corporations be able to maintain a reasonable society.
Leaving these trust decisions to centralized moderation is obviously idiotic. What we can move to next is to protecting each other & voluntarily opting in: it's not real now, but the possibility is growing exponentially as all other ideas fail to deliver relief & let bad people run amok unchecked forever, & make everything shitty. Checks come. Thank the stars.
And we don't have to kick anyone off. We just can start to see how people are viewed on the net. And decide for ourselves to agree disagree allow or deny based on much much much bigger baselines, at much much lower frequencies of analysis than the post-by-post immediacy horseshit the poor online world has had to suffer under so far. We are going to get better & will get to see how we all view things, and thank the frelling stars. Thank the stars this shitty junk protest against review will be buried. Thank the stars each voice of stupid no longer will enter each new post fully renewed in health points. Some historical view will help us all calibrate, help us assess how to read what everyone says.
But we want to connect & share & use the internet, and these are incredibly easy ways to participate widely with the rest of the planet. Heck yes I love having some Robert Reich in my feed; man is epic, on point. Can I drop him a comment telling him how much he rocks or elaborating a point? Yes I can.
Right now there is no other avenue into the noosphere. I'm all for ActivityPub but the network effect here is immense. This is happening because of Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is users^2. So there is no alternative. You either give up your privacy & let Facebook/Meta/whomever data mine you, or you stop participating with the planet.
As for the law, I have little hope that we can mete out a just relationship through regulation. EU is trying but just look at Privacy Shield difficulties; making a product which is compliant with all the overlapping & abutting laws across the globe is diabolically difficult. That Threads is saying, yeah, we can't, it's too hard is evidence that more attempts to add more laws, to try to regulate a balance is optimistic. It has the Utopian fragility, the dream that a just society can be produced & synthesized, which maybe it can, but too often there is a naivete about control, and a rigidity & inflexibility which creates brittleness. The law has it's idea of what it wants but it keeps becoming decoupled from whats happening in the world; lawmaking is singular, produces isolated static artifacts, but the world is full of billions of people responding & changing & shifting.
Competition seems like the must to me. Cory Doctorow & EFF were talking about Competitive Compatibility for a big, trying to make it viable to switch across networks & not have to lose all your friends & data to do so. A market & freedom based approach won't immediately or directly resolve the privacy concerns, but I think it would let new things get started that could be viable winning alternatives. Right now we are locked in to unprivate.