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Techno-pessimism as Agency-Depletion
Note: This is an exploration of what techno-pessimism feels like. I don't think there's an argument I'm making here. Perhaps it's more a reflection on how deep my techno-optimism goes that it's so difficult for me to entertain the idea of techno-pessimism. The connection to the culture war is that techno-pessimism seems to be deeply embedded in the political dialogue of both the left and the right.
Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 classic "The End of History", spends a few pages describing techno-pessimism. It's been a while, but I think he put it as a belief that technology doesn't solve man's problems and may, in fact, make them worse. The flavor we're experiencing now has its source in the meat grinder trenches of WW1 when people were confronted by a mechanized, assembly-line conflict that was optimized for turning real live humans into ground meat.
For a long time, I didn't give this idea much thought. It was a useful label for a cluster of ideas I'd come upon time and again; a useful bucket to put people in to better understand them, nothing. But today, I read a piece that triggered all my "angry uninformed person ranting on the Internet" alarms, and instead of closing the tab, I spent some precious work-time to read it.
At the end, I was blown away. Not by any new points or ideas, but by being, for the first time ever, shown what techno-pessimism looks like from the inside. Suddenly, these two words stopped being merely a label, but also a lens through which to view the world. And I'm still shocked by seeing something so completely alien to my own perception.
I write code for a living. I have a general idea of how computers work and how different types of software works: payments processing, flight controls, video games, social media, VR, point-of-sale systems, etc. I also licked a little bit of physics and information theory, so I kind of see how all the machinery around us operates, at least on vague level. In the world, I feel... comfortable. I can fix a change a door lock, fix a leaky faucet, install an outlet, change a car tire, etc. It's all just machines of different sorts.
I hope this doesn't sound like bragging. I'm no genius. I can't fix most things and I'm more than happy to hire an expert when I can. I don't understand how most things work. Just enough to get the big picture, the relationships, the constraints.
Reading this the above linked blog post showed me a world where I know non of this. A world where I have some vague ideas about simple things like a squeaky hinge and the like, but anything above it is black magic. I mean, computers have inserted them into every facet of our lives. They record, update, store, delete, connect, calculate everything about us: our bank accounts, our working hours, our taxes, our retirement funds. The distance to the store, how busy a coffee place is, how to send flowers to your mother on Mother's day. Even if you're relatively disconnected, over half the world's population is plugged in; over 3bn people have Facebook accounts. TikTok has 1bn users; so even if you're disconnected, the majority of the people around you are plugged in, dancing to the rhythms created by man and machine together.
That's a terrifying. I can't imagine the frustration this guy has to feel. He can't troubleshoot his router, apart from pushing a paperclip into the little hole to reset everything. He can't make his own website (that doesn't look like templated shit). He can't figure out the right steps to get the car computer to reboot correctly after the battery ran out of power. Jesus, the sheer alienation must be terrifying--you can't really affect your immediate environment in any meaningful way. You're at the mercy of these beeping, monitoring, distracting machines all around you.
Now I understand that, perhaps, WW1 was the moment when people realized they built a grand machine that they only pretend to control. A machine with tendrils leading into every house, every room, every other person. And while in the first half of the 20th century any clever farm boy was likely able to mess around with a car, this isn't true today. There's a lot of layers of abstraction. So many interconnected systems. (Though I believe that taking a beginners course in programming would dispell like 80% of ignorance about machines).
How much agency is lost because of the aggregate effects of modern technology? Sure, the world of yesteryear wasn't some primitive utopia. But even within the strict confines of tradition and feudalism people had agency in the little things. Now, people like the author of that blog post I read are left without even the little things--their "smart" coffee machine will calls the cops if he tries to insert off-brand coffee pods into it.
You underestimate the level of horror.
The average person doesn't just not know how things work... They know as a matter of objective fact that they're hostilely designed to take agency away from them.
It is not only a pain in the ass that all cars have computers, it is now illegal to make new ones that don't have computers, those computers ensure you can't do maintenance on your own car, the user agreement might make it literally illegal to do that maintenance via cracks and work arounds, and the government is passing new regualtions so that your car will have remote automatic shutoffs, and maintain tracking data, so that it will betray you if you ever try to run from the state, and bear witness against you at your trial.
That's just cars. Computer software for the past 20 years has only gotten worse for 90% of users, going from an objest you owned and could install, to a permanent relationship tying you into dependence on hostile corporate entities you are now a permanent funder of... if Adobe decides they don't want you to be able to create certain images, they can just update your copy of photoshop to make it automatically stop you... sound far fetched? Try photocopying a dollar bill. The machine will detect what you're doing and override you. That isn't even software as a service, that's hardware.
Then there is the near permanent surveillance enabled by all the apps you literally must have to not be shut out of the economy and rendered homeless, the constant assault on your attention and hostile design meant to distract you that you must constantly fight on social media, which you also can't opt out of because that's now how business, romance, communtity organizing and basic socializing is done and you'll die alone and abandoned if you don't give in and feed your personal data and waning atttention to it...
and then even if you accept that as the cost of doing business those systems supposedly objective results are manipulated by people who hate you
to politically disempower you and destroy the last bits of resistance you could possibly muster.
.
Technology has not advanced in America... If we define technology as allowing people to get what they want: Improve their lifestyle, secure shelter, secure social relations, travel... Every aspect of American technology, from cars, to air travel, to office tech has only gotten worse since the 1980s.
Hell flying cars existed in the 1910s (teenagers could fly the Focker Dr3 and it would fit in a double wide garage), Nuclear batteries and freighters existed in the 60s, we had lighter than air freight service in the 20s.
By rights international trade should be dominated by 3000ft nuclear powered zepplins by now, and personal travel by cheap prop planes (you can not tell me just reproducing the Dr3 is more expensive than the modern nisan)
Theil made the case that American technology had advanced in the world of bits, but not atoms, because the world of atoms has been regulated to death...
I disagree America has advanced. Outside of surveilling the population, killing foreigners, and safety features no one would willing pay for and thus have to be regulated... America has only regressed. Housing is uglier, smaller, and more expensive anywhere anyone wants to live, cars are uglier and more expensive (no GM factory worker is getting a new one every 2 years)... even in the realm of health any gain to lifespan has been more than offset by obesity and chronic disease destroying the quality of youth. Hell lifespans have even stopped rising...
The one thing this society values, being safely infirm longer, and even that one metric is reversing.
.
The age of "The Social Network" has seen an implosion of relationship formation! An implosion so catastrophic the greatest geopolitical factor is now population implosion.
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I have trouble accepting the claim that, unlike the author, you have a categorically different understanding of the technology that surrounds us. Famously, there is no single person on Earth that even knows how to even make a pencil. The bewildering complexity of modern microchips is likewise beyond the capacity of any one person to understand.
Going further, the emergent properties of neural networks can sometimes defy explanation entirely. It is likely we are going from an era where no single person can understand technology, to an era where human society as a whole is unable to understand the technology it has created.
Comfort with technology is an illusion created by a person's ability to interact with the human interface of that technology, not by actual deep understanding of the internals.
This doesn't feel right. Sure, a single person might not be able to know how to make all the stuff needed to make a pencil, but surely they can learn the process of taking the necessary inputs/materials and turning that into a pencil. The pencils still get made at a pencil factory, there is a process that is almost certainly documented in a How It's Made episode. I was given to understand that "I, Pencil" was more about market freedom and capitalism and all that, not necessarily the actual knowledge economy or technology at play--it merely illuminates the logistical chain needed to produce a pencil.
Likewise, microchips do have schematics, the transistors don't magically arrange themselves as a protein undergoes folding. There likely is careful consideration of the arrangement of logic gates, channels, and buses.
If your argument is that most people don't understand the inner workings of the technology they use, that's not terribly surprising. I think it just takes a modicum of curiosity, a curiosity that may have limits to how much it can be inculcated modulo things like mindsets or neurodivergence. But it's not outside the realm of possibility for people to learn about things.
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Thanks, interesting character, this Kriss.
I disagree with you both; it looks you are pulled in opposite directions by biases on the level of temperament. For you, tech feels like a natural and comfortable environment; for him it's noise, distraction, cognitive pollution. I'll take your word on him being tech-illiterate to boot, but as other responses show, that's not a necessary prerequisite for such an attitude at all.
He's probably very wrong on the future of internet. Cycles exist on different scales, and there's no law dictating that booms and busts happen synchronously, amounting to constant total engagement. It may be that there's systemic exhaustion with our current modes of online interaction; this will only make the next boom phase, prompted by some technological shift (near-inevitably it'll be AI-related) more insane. Maybe it'll even be about Zuck's Metaverse, or some less boomerish innovation.
He's very right about ephemeral online activity having very real opportunity costs. Most online happenings are nothingburgers, and they detract from purposeful socialization which disproportionately happens in person or, at least, though legacy, meatspace-centric networks such as one's professional community or political organizations.
But that's just another tax on akrasia and having low standards.
Regarding the loss of agency – you understate this. It's not a minor thing; we are getting scammed out of agency. With fancy UIs and castrated gadgets prompting zoomers towards software illiteracy, corporate mainframes encouraging one to outsource increasingly high-level cognitive operations and surreptitiously becoming adversarial, blessings of scale and specialization patching holes on one side, legitimizing de facto exploits on the other and disempowering even an above-average tinkerer, the Wild West Web has definitely come to an end. A month ago, @FCfromSSC has spoken on Gibson's Neuromancer and... I bet there was some more developed post, damnit. Anyway, what I want to say (and what was in that hypothetical post) is that Cyberpunk was not dystopian at all. It was full of hope, hope for the sovereign individual cutting through the mayhem and inept anarcho-tyranny of the near future, armed with nothing more than his trusty terminal, hacker mindset, high IQ and massive cajones. A solo console cowboy who can have a multi-year career running circles around major players of his economy (albeit knee-deep in the muck of the underworld, living on the edge of ruin and poverty) is a blindingly heroic image today, when Hackernews regulars are all employed by big tech, cultivate their CVs and race to affirm woke rhetoric of their HR betters, just like any other disposable blue collar serf – despite their ludicrous compensation packages and apparent prestige. They have no power within the system and no power without it, plenty of enthusiasm for geeky cooperation and no capacity for guild-building and lobbyism.
They sneer at artists who are getting impoverished by their tech – and fair enough, artists' Gnostic condescension of the higher spiritual caste has been insufferable and unmerited, a case of obvious but still obnoxious ressantiment. That said... artists are at least fighting for their turf. Do developers truly believe that helpful low-level tools like Copilot are where it stops, or are they just broken serfs? In my impression, these first-generation AI assists are akin to DeepDream in image generation. Maybe DALL-E 1. This means we're at most 7 years away from Imagen-for-code, and then the bulk of those folks go the way of middling coom accounts seething about Stable Diffusion right now. How much of their already gimped agency will remain in the world where they're as employable as artists or journalists? Will they still be meaningfully superior to boomers for whom even email is magic? Does it matter how well you understand email if nobody will ever write you and you can't host it yourself?
Tech is but a force multiplier. Political force is as easy to multiply as any other kind of force, and techies have not seized it while building the multiplier. Maybe we had missed the less centralized Cyberpunk option. Maybe the growth of tech couldn't have produced a meaningfully different world. It's like imperial centralization: I can dream of a beautiful Russian Empire ran by some constitutional meritocratic patrician monarchy... thing, leveraging vestiges of autocracy for common good projects spanning generations; commies can imagine much the same for their Politburo; Wolf Tivy can write about State Capacity Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics – but in practice we get what we get, probably what we deserve – lying, corruption, cynicism, idiocy, weakness, ruin, and NAFO types mocking the predictable result. Maybe those two domains are completely dissimilar.
Tech Pessimists have a point, regardless.
On a brighter side: Google has just thrown us a bone in the form of what looks to me like a very good open-source LLM. Thanks.
I detect a faint hint of sympathy for the artists raging against Imagen/Dalle/stable diffusion et al! Surprised in light of your previous gleeful takes on AI-taking-artist-jobs...
With requisite teasing out of the way, I agree with your pessimistic take. Everything is pushing towards less agency: the benefits of scale, the all-but-assured American technological Hegemon (good prediction btw re semiconductors/China! updating to be about 20% more paranoid in my foreign policy predictions as a result...), the (in my view Correct) Vulnerable World hypothesis, and the new consensus among serious American elites that China is to be knee capped. Even the American tort system...
Perhaps I need an About page, like Gwern, to link to in such cases. It feels bad to be strawmanned. (Actually not really, but it's counter to my intentions).
As @2rafa and @HlynkaCG observe (from very different perspectives), I am much closer to a default liberal than many people imagine. I believe that conscious beings of all forms and lineages deserve pity, compassion and opportunity for transcendence of the sort best suited for their inner nature. I am only an anti-egalitarian inasmuch as some of them get in the way of that vision, either on the account of their blind equity doctrine or due to delusions of essential superiority. If coders look down on artists and cheer for their demise, that's immoral. But were they the ones who started it? One can go to /ic/ and read, for instance, this:
(Are their repetitive, annoying boasts of receiving female attention supposed to make techies more merciful when they have the upper hand?)
or:
That's just from scrolling a bit. Lots more where this came from!
Their completely hypocritical, self-serving whining about «greedy corporations» (in the context of Stability which is, for now, handing out tools to produce hobby-level content free of charge, in a non-revokable Promethean manner) stealing their opportunity to extract money out of their coomer customers (whom they look down on) is not helping; neither is their unwillingness to admit the mercantile and non-artistic nature of typical illustrator work and speak with «tech bros» as equals; neither is their obstinacy in the face of good faith explanations. See here what I'd have answered to those jerks if I could post on 4chan.
Many strongly identifying artists are genuinely convinced that their ticket in the lottery of fascinations and their mechanical skill are marks of a categorically greater spiritual worth. They are entirely incurious regarding other ways of life, and consider people of «productive» professions, and especially coders – who have their own poetry, their own (and cognitively much harder, though that's neither here nor there) ways of pursuing beauty, truth, justice, and who are perhaps the last major strata of true, non-privileged commoners able to secure wealth through pure grit and merit – serfs who only exist to provide some material goods to their betters, mere NPCs. I understand that this is largely ressantiment born out of poverty, but how is it different from e.g. Nazi doctrine or the extremes of Orthodox Judaism's notion of Jew and Goy souls? They use the word «soul» unironically, to denote that which they have and «tech bros», «code monkeys», «pajeets» lack.
Should I not rejoice at this dehumanization being punished? They need a reality check, even if they don't deserve the full brunt of economic consequences of AI.
But none of us deserve it.
Spinners and weavers 250 years ago did not deserved what happened to them.
These charming people people you cited, if your quotes are representative of their mindset and attitude, deserve everything that will happed to them.
(objectively, having to go back to jobs they did few years ago before they learned that drawing robot pirate Harry Potter fucking werevolf ninja Darth Vader in Japanese schoolgirl uniform is good gig)
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They say that "justice" is receiving what one deserves, seeing what one would inflict on others inflicted upon one's self...
...and that is why the wise man never prays for justice, he prays for mercy.
"Let justice reign, though the heavens should fall on my own head" is I think an underrated sentiment. He who prays for mercy fears an excess of justice. But the distance between the natural state and pareto optimal justice spans a great degree of judgment.
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I think it might still be not too late to try, but it would require some genuine effort to restore slack to the system, or otherwise cultivate it. Possibly some big-enough state undergoing a massive effort to inculcate computer literacy (maybe something like when the BBC tried getting British kids to learn computers), general preference for open-source software, treating more platforms as common carriers--things that probably couldn't happen in America.
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Thanks for sharing your pov.
I see this too, but I think I also see the mounting cultural counter-reaction to this. When I think back to the late 00's and early '10s, when the Internet was becoming really simple to use (compared to the late 90's/early 00's) and was getting flooded with SaaS apps and the iphone came out and all that, I saw non-tech people around me consume it all as if it were magic. There was joy, as if the possibilities of checking timetables on to go was just a step away from living in the sci-fi future of AI. There was also a lot of naivette, much to the frustration of all the crusty web users. I think the epitome was the Arab Spring also called (if I remember correctly), the Twitter Revolution--people really thought Twitter would usher in a new era of democracy in the middle east!
But today, the growing backlash against big tech has a very personal flavor to it. People around me are ditching their Alexa's and Siris and pushing their kids to have more fun the park. Not all people do it, since software has seeped so deep into our lives, but I guess I sense a broad sense of distrust that translate to people still using apps and online services, but at least, perhaps, trying to use them less often. Or maybe giving meatspace experiences more chances.
In a gist, I think our culture is developing an immune response to the attention-stealing gadgets we've been producing for the past 10-15 years. If my view is correct, where "correct" exists on a spectrum, we should start seeing these cultural artifacts bubble up into explicit things like regulations (eg. age limits on social media use) or customs (parents getting good at parental controls on tech) in the next 5-10 years.
I will admit that I'm completely blind to what people between 10 and 25 are doing with tech. I don't know anyone in this range. Some signals I'm getting are worrying, some are astonishing in a positive sense.
This is an interesting point. But I think you're contrasting two very different things. Hackernews, despite the name, has little to do with actual hacking. And, being a regular lurker for 10 years now, it feels to me that the spirit of hackernews has turned decidedly away from its start-up'y roots and toward boring everyday tech news. Sure, there are still stories about startups and sometimes interesting announcements (like Nystrom's "Crafting Interpreters"), but more often it's a piece about a new nuclear reactor or something for a bored, 25-45 yo techie to read on their break. Maybe we've all gotten older, started families, and aren't just interested in stories of pizza eating and late night coding.
But, what I'm getting at, is that there is still very much a wild, interesting coding scene. Absent from this scene are these highly paid Google and similar employees because, well, they're the people who opted to go corporate, to get regular, comfy pay for jumping through very tight hoops. I've dipped into this scene a few times, and every time I was astounded by how smart these people are... but also how well-socialized. I would describe their vibe as people who still think they're in school, aiming to get high scores, play within the rules, collect all the medals, etc.
Maybe the reason why we see fewer console cowboys these days is because the whole group of coders has grown, mainly filled by people drawn by the good pay & benefits. Because of this, the people producing wild and cool work are that much harder to make out in the crowd, their signal getting lost in the noise.
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After reading the linked post, I find your associations strange. To me, it's not at all about understanding how routers work, it's all about the social aspects, trends, fashions, services, the gig economy, the fake ess of online interaction. None of this changes much if you understand TCP/IP.
The nerd likes tech for the sake of it, the enjoyment of the tinkering, the fiddling. To see the machine do a thing. Once it's figured out and it works, it's no longer interesting. Like the data hoarder who endlessly organizes and categorizes tens of terabytes of media but watches none of it, the nerd builds and mods things for the process itself, not for prolonged enjoyment of its use. And so this has little impact on whatever happens to the social significance of the internet.
Richard Stallman already said in the 80s that if users can't control their computing, the software makers will control the users. But general users have little interest or capability to control any computation.
So how are things changing? In my tech bubble I see a lot of anti-tech sentiment as it relates to modern tech companies' practices, the criticism of walled gardens, censorship, locked down devices etc. People who understand tech seem to want none of the smart home stuff, they keep their kids away from gadgets. The new status symbols are logging off and being physical, appreciating ancient literature etc. There's also a different type of tech person, the fan boy who is loyal to big tech brands, loves the prospect of the metaverse, fills his house with proprietary automation tech and lives his techiness via owning the latest iPhone at any given moment.
But nerds, tinkerers and tech enthusiasts don't matter so much in the big picture. The question is how the mass of consumers will react. Is there something in humanity which will reject the matrix and turn away from the algorithmic dopamine machine? Will people get exhausted or can the machine adapt and transform to keep people hooked?
I mean when have we ever seen large scale voluntary rejection of tech, except for deeply religious communities like the Amish or orthodox Jews? I don't really see a way around AI seeping into your coffee machine, your dishwasher, the fridge. Rejecting it might become a hobby for some upper class people, like having a fancy fireplace in your mansion just for the aesthetic. But for the gen pop...
People don't Münchhausen their way up to self-reliant rugged tough people without external pressure. There has to be a crisis big enough that it forces people.
On the other hand there's always some cyclicality to the generations. The sexual revolution, drugs, free love and tolerance led to metoo, low levels of risk taking and sex and drug consumption among young people, the wokescold moral police etc. But just as the original social rebels rejected conservative Christian moral authority, new generations may reject the DEI religion.
It cycles but stays the same. One can argue that the original matrix that made us prisoner slaves was agriculture and the settled life. That true life is living off the berries of the forest, fighting mammoths and facing the beasts of the night, and watching your children die, that that's what chisels a firm soul.
The heart flies high like this author's, but he, like many before, imagine some cataclysmic realization by humanity of their own need for true freedom and agency, but it never comes.
I think this is your central point. And I think the answer is yes, just like we tamed other unhealthy forces in our environment like alcohol or fast food. Meaning, my bet is that we'll develop social rituals, habits, taboos around software tech (social media first, probably) that will limit its unhealthy effects and eventually steer it toward something useful and acceptable. But we'll never be completely free of its side effects, just like we'll always lose people to alcohol or fast food.
I don't think high tech and self-reliant ruggedness are at odds. Instead of fighting mammoths and faces the creepy crawlies at night, we're fighting against surveillance, addiction, and control. It's a very real fight for survival, perhaps less physical and more about soul/agency. But it's strenuous, demanding both instant action and long-term strategic thinking.
Maybe, just maybe, this is actually the escape hatch from our all too comfortable physical lives--being forced to fight for your the life of your soul and agency, your very humanity, against a growing, sly, unthinking machine.
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I’m a techno-pessimist. Technology has enabled all sorts of terrible things, or at least it has accelerated and amplified the previous low-tech versions of those things. Doxxing and public shaming. Digital vaccine passports. Mass surveillance. The scourge that is social media and online dating.
Like you, I also write code for a living. But my pessimism has nothing to do with my knowledge or lack thereof of how technology functions. It’s the effects that are the problem, not how it works.
And this is just pessimism about what we have here, right now. We haven’t even gotten to the abuses that will likely be possible in the not-so-distant future. I live in fear of the day when the last manual car has been taken off the road and only self-driving cars are legal.
Fellow code monkey, why are these things worse than the vices of yesteryear? Is it because they're novel?
It seems to me that we've traded one set of abuses for another. Today, instead of being called out for eccentric behavior and socially shunned, you get doxed or canceled. Today, instead of being invigilated by the local priest (and his fans around town), you're surveilled by all the devices around you. But, like then, you have options to defend yourself, at least to some extent.
In other words, this is just another episode in the eternal fight between the collective and individual. Everything you're saying truly exists. But is it really more awful or is it nostalgia?
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It's not the tech, it's the distrust of your rulers. But rulers have always had ways of preventing or eliminating protests even without rerouting self driving cars. It involved blood but at a time when people were more used to it anyway. Yes, the AI will serve the ruling class but so did law, religion and much of what we call civilization.
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Re: the Sam Kriss piece: I have to wonder if he just needs to be taken back to the Internet That Was, a time when you could make stupid Flash animations and YouTube videos that contained whatever, when you could put in a copyrighted song without it getting nuked off a platform or claimed by some anonymous person/bot/corporation, when you were free to be transgressive. Perhaps the Internet looks sterile and dying to him today because, in a sense, the managerial Powers That Be decided to smother the global citizenry's id under a blanket on pain of lawsuit.
Even before Web 2.0 tried to consume the world, the mainstream was already aware of the wacky things people got up to on the Internet.
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I more or less already feel this way about the transition from Desktop to Mobile. I can sit down to my desktop and program it; my phone can only be programmed with a special SDK running on a desktop, and the program can only be shared with permission from the powers that be. We already lost, we lost years ago, and everything sucks now.
Oh yeah 100%. Mobile sucks ass compared to a desktop in every respect except portability. If I'm at home, I'm never going to use a phone rather than sitting down at my PC. It blows my mind that people actually use phones (or tablets) as their primary device, I would go insane.
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You aren't wrong that we don't all have knowledge of how to deal with car problems, or how to use file systems or whatever. But I'd point out that we build things often precisely so we don't have to think about these things.
Sure, there's an argument to be made that if you don't have the knowledge to do something, you don't have the agency to do those things. But nothing stops you from trying to learn in the first place. It's not as if car manuals are extinct and you can only fix a car if you have a college degree (some work requires special tools, but that's not the same thing).
On the other hand, you know what the internet gave people the agency to do? Organize with like-minded people at a speed and scale never before imagined. Like, just look at video game modding. There's many, many people in the modding communities for many different games, and they'd never have been able to have the success they did if the internet withered away.
Or look at the power of social media! Lowering the cost of speaking on the nominally same stage as world leaders has proliferated the functional freedom of expression, even if it brought other problems associated with speech more than technology.
Technology can reduce agency, but it can also increase it, and I've seen far too many people concerned for the latter than the former in a real "the grass is greener" fashion, where they ignore the bountiful amounts of agency they have.
Twitter doesn't have to be a place where you only see people fight. Facebook doesn't have to be a place where you only see politics. You can do a great deal more. You just have to be willing to try in the first place.
Yeah, totally! What I was getting at is that if this digital world feels foreign or "wrong" to you (or the author of that blog post), you might lock yourself out from all of this.
I'm an optimist. I see all of these amazing things happening. People finding each other, coming together, creating something cool and fun. Sometimes, even useful. I'm glad that many more people today find value in the Web compared to ten or twenty years ago.
So apparently there are many optimists out there, but perhaps we don't hear too much from them because they're busy modding, learning, sharing instead of ranting at how bad everything is.
I too am a professional software guy and nerd-from-birth much like yourself, and I basically agree with the emotional thrust of the Kriss piece. I'm not sure why you think his attitude comes from ignorance of how things work; you simply assert this as being self evident. I've been helping to build the shit machine for the past 20 years and I can see quite clearly what I've done.
It's a stab at understanding techno-pessimism. I can't be sure where the author's attitude comes from truly. But the fear/lack-of-agency is my main hypothesis.
Why is it shit?
Yes, it's kludge on top of kludge. Duct tape and bubble gum. Layers and layers of it, going back decades at this point. Yet, it works. Between everything from router buffer bloat to stupid bugs in JS libraries, thanks to layer and layers of fallbacks, including the fallback of last resort when the user has to refresh the page or reload the app--it works.
Or is your take more about what the machine is being used for? Porn. Funny cats. Surveillance. Social media addiction. True, that's all there, but there are also people doing incredible things. Plus, one does not rule out the other, since a person might spend 6 hours a day browsing stupid stuff on Reddit, then go ahead and make helpful videos on youtube.
That's my view more or less. Why do you think it's a shit machine?
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I'm with you. I've been locked into the technophagus practically since birth, and everything in that piece has resonated strongly with my own waning interest in the Internet. The past year-or-two for me has been demarcated by an increasing desire to withdraw from online interactions and disillusion with big platforms inevitably turning to shit. Hell, even Google Search these days feels like a cheap advertising gimmick - nowadays, if I have a question I need answered, I use the Reddit site search instead of google.. because that way I find responses written by humans instead of soulless, mindless auto-generated "blog posts".
In a way, it is my understanding of technology that precisely is what makes it so awful for me. Because I know what technology is capable of. And instead, I see it used for.... this. Another skinner box designed to make humans miserable. I'm sick of it and want it to die, for the real life to be revived.
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That's just the end result of having the world change under your feet, I think. A generation prior had the same comfort with classical ohysics - everyone had a rough layman's understanding of how Newtonian physics and the ICE "worked", at least enough to jump-start a battery and probably change a belt of the mechanic was too spendy. And then along comes Shannon and information theory and the Internet - Holy Shit! - and nothing that's worked their entire lives matters anymore. It's not even table stakes!
Imagine that when you hit 55 or 65 quantum-whatever takes off, and information theory is now the Last Big Thing that everyone thought underpinned the universe, which is now looked at as a quaint period of human advancement, like geocentrism. Nothing you've invested your time in - which were good investments, thatpaid dividends! - is relevant any more. No one but the inventors could have prepared for such a development, and their cohort is barely in their 20s and, you know, "you had to have been there".
That's probably what being Disrupted is like. Is it any surprise that nobody wants to get Disrupted, let alone twice?
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Thanks, that was a really enjoyable read somehow. Kriss is much more entertaining now that he's gone completely insane, although he still can't be forgiven for calling me an influencer.
Don't know if I agree with you about the cause being techno-pessimism and alienation though, because I found the essay relatable despite having a similar background to you. I can wire a network and feel comfortable controlling my routers, but understand like Kriss that if the holy firewards on your modem fail, brain-eating demonic spiders will pour out of your keyboard and up your arms into your eye sockets. Learning more about the internet just shatters more of the sanity-preserving ignorance normies are blessed with.
Since everyone is quoting Alpha Centauri today: "Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil"
Off topic, but do you think it's too late for us to get a new mission statement?
What makes you afraid of the holy wards failing? Genuinely interested.
Seeing it around me every day. The cracks appearing in the walls around the minds of my peers. Their thoughts and emotions slowly turning trite, corrupted. The full transformation into a perpetually-online zombie happening startlingly quickly, often in the span of only a few months.
I see that too. But I don't see how that's different than the minds of my peers--including friends and family--turning trite and corrupted, say, 30 years ago, under the influence of bad movies, sports programming, alcohol, mid-life depression, etc.
I wonder if these new forms of mind-cracking are adding to the old ones or displacing them. I weakly predict they're displacing them, because submerging yourself in porn/games/online mob hate is cheaper and easier than getting smashed with cheap alcohol. And you can do it with thousands of others like you!
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I mean I assume the brain-eating demon spiders kill you, or even turn you into an imgur user or something. But there are some horrors man was not meant to confront.
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I think it goes beyond just the human machine relationship to systems; but also and much greater throughout all the human systems that we come in contact with. We are subjected to numerous black boxes that operate on rules and systems too complex to understand. It's impossible to even understand the human systems on a meta level as subjects like economics and sociology etc are extremely imprecise and often proven wrong. It seems we are walking blindfolded whist tripping on LSD with only a peephole to see towards the future. A large part of what we see and hear is influenced or even created within this human / technological system, what we experience as human beings is dictated by editorial or algorithmic biases decisions outside of our control.
The reason why the 'Nigerian Prince' spam emails were full of bad grammar and spelling mistakes was not because the authors were stupid semi-literate Nigerians; it was instead because they used the mistakes to filter out the truly gullible and stupid from the rest of the population. If you're spamming 10,000,000 you only need 0.01% of the stupidest to find a lot of marks. Social media on modern algorithms already sorts people towards the content that they want to interact with, that suits their proclivities. The most commonly used social media platform by young people is Youtube, with 95% penetration, which is considerably higher than often maligned platforms such as TikTok, with the algorythm itself finding and feeding marks to the relevant content producers of all shades.
This is the environment that is shaping both our perceptions and the very world that exists around us at the same time. A machine/human system metacognition that is shaping our very sense of the world around us at the same time as it shapes that very world. As we increasingly integrate AI into our businesses, governments and other organisations, we are increasingly becoming a party to and a part of 'the machine'; however, this isn't a new phenom, but a continuation of an already existing one. We are vulnerable to this system because we accept it as part of our lives, so we must at least try to understand the consequences and risks of what we are plugging ourselves into.
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A common argument in the context of advertising is that most engagement is fake, such as fake Facebook likes, fake comments, fake clicks etc. There is probably some truth to this, but you cannot hide the fact that some people are hugely successful online such as popular substack blogs. Sure, phony engagement may outnumber real engagement by 10-1, but that is still a lot of real engagement too in absolute numbers. There is evidently huge markets for newsletters, for YouTube, for podcasts, for TikTok and other short video formats, etc.
The bot traffic is imputed into the price/bids for ads. Bot traffic lowers ROI, hence lower bid. If ads converted really well and were 100% human traffic, they would be much more expensive on a CPC or CPM basis than they already are (even though they are plenty expensive still). Evidently in spite of bots, companies still derive enough value to keep spending tons of money on ads and pay really high CPM and CPC rates.
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