Both the author's own words and the quoted ones use big words to make the writing appear more intelligent and insightful that it really is.
The gist of the concept seems to be that a utopian future predicted long ago never came to pass, and despite globalization, fast communication, and free movement of goods and sometimes individuals, people devolved into narrowly scoped groups instead. There's contention about control of institutions, control of capital, fruits to the gains of economic activity, so these groups are often at odds, and traditional solutions to their conflict are either too ineffective (government, compromise) or too drastic (protests, unrest, warfare), creating an awkward passive-aggressive state of pervasive discontent no one is happy with.
And all of the author's quote-mining seems to be a response to another overwrought essay that noted that tools like protests, angry mobs, identity politics, and the Internet, that were used by progressives to further their causes, did real damage to the credibility of institutions, and both the tools and that mistrust are now being repurposed by nationalists and fascists. This seems like non-news, and is completely to be expected, but somehow the author implies they find issue with the thesis, yet arrives at a very similar conclusion.
All these are too many words to say people will opportunistically group together and machinate towards a local betterment for their in-group above most others. Technology has generally lowered the cost and drawbacks of this opportunistic behavior, and free discourse and free assembly laws enable much of this in parts of the world, even when for-profit surveillance is prevalent. In other places, authorities have cracked down on dissent against the regime, so people who have more to lose than gain are too afraid to make waves online. But the factor limiting unrest is their desperation, which has little to do with technology.
To me, all of the author's points seem closer to realism, than technorealism. Technorealism tries to have a nuanced conversation about the things that change and the things that stay the same while living in an Internet-connected world, while this writing raves a lot about the decline of society itself and the supposed fault of a loose mob of electing a demagogue for the laughs. It's hardly deserving of the attention it's getting.
What's going on is not just in-groups operating towards local betterment. It's a disintegration of national consensus from the decline of mass (industrial) media. Democracy can't work without at least a rough consensus on what the truth is. The filter bubbles we increasingly inhabit lack conflict resolution and the bubbles drift further apart. We end up with factionalism, leading to balkanization, and unless we find a way to resolve the underlying tension, we're on the way to violence, IMO.
In the face of complexity caused by global integration people are turtling into the culture of their micro-ecosystems. And perhaps rightly so. Local conditions might beg for this behavior as being the most efficient. Eg: If you have a majority culture of people who are anti-gay, than trying to forcefully apply globally gay friendly laws is just going to cause confusion and chaos.
To be fair to Toffler, I don’t know if this could be obvious except after the fact. To be less fair, I am not sure I ever saw the value of vaguely trying to predict the future with overly broad linguistics.
Better I think would be to have a slightly ambitious and more humanitarian view of the future and figure out how to get their as fast as possible. Baby steps.
Such an approach is accountable and has goals which can be reasonably achieved. Anything else, IMHO, is just sci fi.
The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio.
Mostly the lesson over time has been that people don’t want to agree about anything with their rivals until absolutely forced to. The content of the argument is less important than the medium of argument.
Network TV didn’t create a realm of common facts exactly but a single forcing factor that compelled resolution because the system could not sustain a lot of competing ideas.
Of course this meant that better ideas would survive, and that very often meant good ideas that worked in reality—-though not always.
Now you have to show an idea is better by implementing it at a smaller scale and growing it rather than winning all at once at a national level.
It’s all doable but it is harder and takes longer. It is possibly lower risk and more dynamic.
> The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio.
But it wasn't felt.
Before TV and radio, the main method of communication was print and conversation, so that a random person picked out of a population might come in contact with only a few political or cultural opinions in a given day. This continued into the age of TV and radio because only a few such opinions were permitted by those controlling the broadcasts.
Now that people might easily come into conflict culturally or politically hundreds of times a day, the real diversity of opinion across a large population is apparent to a given member of that population, in a way that it wasn't before, even if we assume that the differences were really there.
That constant conflict is a few clicks away at any moment leads many people to internalize that they are constantly fighting for their ability to hold their political beliefs and perform their culture, and/or to shut out most large differences to the extent they can, while conforming themselves to minor differences.
The only people who experienced this kind of constant churn in the past were travelers, and mostly only while traveling. We are all travelers now.
You can have all those with just two sides. The difference now is that the attempt to corral all views into two main camps is breaking down, revealing the chaos of the actual landscape of opinions.
In an alternate universe where global communication had led to one single identity group, intellectuals would be decrying the death of the community and the alienation of individuals from their neighbors.
Very articulate and thoughtful. It makes me happy that level-headed people like yourself exist.
I'm curious, where do people like yourself linger? What made you into a person who can respond as such? Are you an engineer who reads a lot? An academic?
Pardon me if that's direct, I just feel like understanding that may lead to an understanding of how to promote more level-headed discussion.
“The election of 2016 was the absolute subversion of the idea and practice of legitimate bureaucracy and traditional media and all the Second Wave political science.”
Or, widespread Internet use decreased the ability of the traditional gatekeepers of information to manipulate voters.
Industrial media (second wave technology) generated consensus, or at least promulgated an appearance of consensus that the people could live with and didn't revolt against. Democracy can only function with some kind of consensual consensus.
What the third wave is missing (right now at least) is functioning conflict resolution for (re)newly discovered gaps in the consensus, beyond litigation and guns, just as the article says. If we don't figure out a way to resolve conflicts in world views, and come to some kind of consensus on what is, there's a risk laws and force will be used instead.
I'd ask people to read articles sympathetically rather than keyword-trigger on their current bugbears, but it's pretty much impossible in political topics.
It might be possible to mediate between groups who are at odds, but this seems to require a world-class diplomacy at a grassroots level.
I too can not see how centralized government can survive without a centralized source of truth. But what to do about it? It should be possible through other means to arrange public services, public works, and other things required for civilization to survive.
After a sympathetic reading of your comment, I cannot grasp this apparently contradictory sentence:
"Democracy can only function with some kind of consensual consensus."
After reading that sentence unsympathetically, I think that you mean that democracy cannot survive without an official priestly class mediating truth for the masses. Is that too cynical?
citizen A thinks roglob is gree
citizen B thinks roglob is purp
all citizens need to know what roglob is in order to function(live/make money/sleep/whatever) and to a certain extent have the same 'understanding' of roglob
So a "consensual consensus" means citizens A and B agree that in order to function(live/...) roglop starts with prue... the rest of the letters will be decided 'later', and that's enough for all citizens to function. (later being not fully specified out)
Implications are: A and B have to change the way they live, a bit, based on the "consensus" roglop.
And of course, it assumes that A and B accept to be 'a society' and accept that having a single roglop is good. (which, in itself, is another roglop,... it's roglops all the way down)
>Or, widespread Internet use decreased the ability of the traditional gatekeepers of information to manipulate voters.
Or, widespread internet used merely decentralized the means by which voters were manipulated, because voters were trained (in part by those traditional gatekeepers) to reject the mainstream and trust the fringe implicitly, rather than apply critical thinking skills to both.
>Or, widespread Internet use decreased the ability of the traditional gatekeepers of information to manipulate voters.
I think the opposite is true. In the 2016 election, we saw people get trapped in information-bubbles. The internet allowed far-right/alt-right information sources such as Breitbart/Infowars to manipulate people and gain a wide audience.
Similarly, there has already been substantial evidence that the Russian government used a variety of techniques to spread false information through the internet.
To say that the internet decreased the amount of false information in the 2016 election is misleading and false.
> To say that the internet decreased the amount of false information in the 2016 election is misleading and false.
That is not what is being said though, the amount of 'false information' increased for sure. The point is that the internet lets NEW actors manipulate minds outside of the standard 'mass media' channels. The 'mass media gatekeepers' did not have full control on the narrative at all times anymore. IOW 2016 made it clear that mass media is not in absolute control.
Now consider that these standard channels (tv, papers, etc) are used by everyone as the main means of transmitting messages from not only advertisers but also by interest groups pushing a cause and also government actors pushing an agenda (the 'buildup' to the iraq invasion springs immediately to mind). It should be no shock that everyone involved in these media channels is freaked the fuck out by the 2016 election. There is no longer any mass narrative. I think some actors realized this sooner than the actual media, which appears to have just woken up to it this year.
Yes, I think the "bubble" explanation is actually too simple. It's clear that the American people disagree with the powerful bureaucrats who control Washington on various policies. I see Trump's election at least partially as a repudiation of the status quo on a variety of policies which Washington has been busily ignoring for decades.
It ruined the safe guard of using the time tested tool of fact checking and having credible sources of information. And opened the flood gates to bad actors acting on irrational actors.
The internet is not some magical haven for information and knowledge. In its current form, it's comparable to information anarchy. It's not tenable.
>It ruined the safe guard of using the time tested tool of fact checking and having credible sources of information
The same fact-checking that got Nixon and buried McGovern, or elected Raegan twice, or George Bush of CIA and Iran-Contra fame, or the war mongering Clinton and Bush Jr., or the more-of-the-same Obama?
The same fact-checking system that got Nixon impeached, that revealed the Iran contra controversy, and the one that lead to one of the largest protests against a war in American history (the Iraq war protests).
You took events that transpired and then placed the blame on the system that allowed us to correct for these events in the first place (or at least attempt to). I'm sorry your criteria for a functioning and healthy media system is one that A) Never makes mistakes B) Can preemptively stop government officials from doing bad things.
I'd be interested to see you expound on the statements you made.
At the time the media was the only way people could hear about those things, just imagine the number of smaller leaks and investigations that came to nothing because they were not reported.
The system didn't correct anything. Not one of those presidents went to jail, not one of those who followed them learned anything, and none of the issues were stopped because of it, their had either already happened or are still an ongoing issue.
While you are correct, one could also make the (likewise correct) argument that pre-Internet information was not necessarily always fact-checked and true, but simply the version approved by the authorities.
In any case, I think we need a return to some sort of expertise or trusted authority system. Hopefully the internet allows for this to be independent of the political and corporate establishment.
[For the most part] I think Wikipedia embodies the growing of what you mentioned earlier.
It is still affected by bad actors, but has improved substantially from what it was by a growing community of oversight. Not a perfect model, but an interesting one in my opinion.
"Fact-checking" is itself vulnerable to political bias. Outside of the truly ludicrous (i.e. things like "pizzagate", and all sorts of conspiracy theories in general), I don't think you can call people 'irrational actors' merely for seeking alternative sources of fact-checking and "non-fake" news media. Even the New York Times acknowledges that there is such a thing as an "intellectual dark web", which goes to prove that "information anarchy" is occasionally useful and worthwhile.
God I love these clean blogs whenever they pop up. Looks great on the phone, nice and high contrast, loaded in about a half second on my parents terrible internet. Wonder if they just hand wrote HTML or used some sort of generator?
Sometimes on HN a comment will pop up on a biology article from a Ph.D biologist, or the sort. There are lots of severely brilliant people here whose familiarity with web tech is well below average, but who nonetheless add immense value to the community.
For that reason it's a mistake to assume that everyone on this website is evenly skilled just because you have the wherewithal to check whether the TLD is a web service or a private domain, or to intuit that the name in the footer might be a company and not a random string.
So while perhaps this person could check for themselves in the most literal sense, it's uncool to use a tone that implies their inferiority for not having done so.
When you make people feel bad for asking questions, you teach them not to try and get smarter, and that's a bad thing for everyone.
By all means, let us understand the world through the sweep of grand theoretical terms, without too much reference to quantitative data, free of the muddling influence of specialists busy complicating their painstaking little fields of knowledge and endeavour; let us do this lest we larp somehow a life of inferior concerns: let our vision and mastery remain clear and effortless.
This article,instead of starting at first principles, starts at a hypothetical idealized future and works its way back to reality through narrowly focusing its attention, gaslighting and selective amnesia. I guess that what journalism is these days: an attempt to reconcile ideology with reality.
Captivating, well-written piece. But who is the author of this? No credits, no info: very intriguing! I'd be interested to see what else they've written.
[Edit: looking at submissions from that domain, I think the writing in a couple of the other articles seem very similar.]
It's probably best its authorship is (for now) unknown, this way people can make judgements on their own rather than thinking is right or wrong based on how they perceive the author(s).
The writing style is very early 2000s, which kind of narrows it down. Based on the content alone there is no obvious reason to publish this anonymously, so maybe someone caught up in #MeToo or similar?
Based on the writing style though it sounds clearly like it's from someone associated either with Technorealism, the Cluetrain Manifesto, the Berkman Klein center folks, the Data & Society folks, or the handful of other prominent early bloggers who aren't closely associated with any of those. No one less than 30 or older than 70 writes like this though.
This is about where the article lost me: "It was Facebook, not Russia, that caused the election of Donald Trump."
The margin of election was small. A few tens of thousand of votes in a few states. Every factor that produced an effect that size can be said to be causal. And there were many, many factors that qualified.
Anybody who says that Trump's election had a single cause is, at best, selling something. And I'm not buying.
This is missing the point that cable news always gave Trump a huge share of attention even when he was a fringe candidate. During the campaign Fox would interrupt programming to show him speak live. Lots of candidates of all ideologies would love that. Why did they do that for him? Ratings.
Fox? That is probably not why Fox does it. Fox is owned by a right wing ideologue, and Fox News was started and run by Nixon's former TV guy. Profit matters to them, but ideology definitely is primary.
Hillary had 1.2m more votes in the election than Trump. That's not a small number. It indicates that the problem is more related to flaws in the election process than it is to Facebook having it's finger on the scale. This is the single cause of Trump "winning" this particular election.
Again, I think a single-cause model is unhelpful for this. It's an approach used to push an argument, not to understand.
This strikes me as particularly dubious. Trump won because of some decisions made before his grandfather came here? Sure, I guess, if you want. But it's not the only way to analyze it.
This is backwards. Countercultures are dead. There is only one Facebook. There's no hippie Facebook, no goth Facebook, no punk Facebook, no right-wing Facebook. Not with any market share. The Village Voice and the rest of the alternative press are gone. So is Tribe.net, which was briefly the goth Facebook. Even the Weekly Standard just went bust. Instead, there's one big system which automatically caters to the interests of its users.
whether we are legally or physically on the same platform (facebook), has little to no bearing on whether we are cross-exposed to content.
So yes tribalism can absolutely exist on facebook. It is a digital platform, not a supermarket. There is no guarantee you ever bump into someone you don't want to bump into, and completely isolated communities can be formed on the same base-structure. Reddit has made this sort of design explicit.
>It's pretty apparent that the reason Trump won wasn't Russian intervention (note the extremely Second Wave nature of the explanation: nations playing at geopolitics).
Ah yes, a nation pouring an immense amount of resources into propaganda targeting a specific subsection of american society and having close contact with the currently elected administration definitely wasn't the reason they got elected.
Let's Correct the Record (don't spritz all over your keyboard HN):
Russia abused Twitter/Facebook. But Twitter and Facebook aren't _the_ reason he got elected though. Facebook and the like are useful tools because you can post anything and have it reach a large, "odd"/targeted audience. But without that audience, without that sounding board, the information is nothing. Facebook and Twitter, and all the other social media platforms have significant design flaws with their raison d'etre: the spread of information across some social graph.
Assuming that the social graph is comprised of rational actors is a question that keeps getting begged in these discussions. There is no evidence for this being the case and all the evidence against that assumption. So we should correct for it. Just like the existing media platforms do (well, with the exception of one notable media giant who loves abusing that fact who's had a hand in creating the absurd situation we find ourselves in today).
We need to fix the problems we know about. That's all. It wouldn't hurt to remember why the media is structured the way it currently is (or was). In any system that gets re-implemented, there is always a duplication of efforts and lessons learned. These New Media systems will be no different.
The U.S. had a useful law for dealing with the problems of "today." And it's sad to say we've basically created problems where there never needed to be. Time to re implement the Fairness Doctrine -- across the board.
>But the core of the "brain-force economy" is politically retarded - it has a low political IQ and has not achieved political self-consciousness. The old smokestack barons and trade union leaders who dominated during the second wave are still running rings around you guys in Washington."
It's not so much as a new wave, but a new class of citizens who desperately need to become actively engaged in the political process. And understanding that the systems they're creating has lead to new power structures and information conduits, and with power comes responsibility. A responsibility to ensure the consumers of their platform are not unduly influenced by incorrect, false, and misleading information (Facebook tried doing this but was lambasted by the right, can't imagine why). A responsibility to support good governance and to support policies that provide a continued foundation for a functioning, healthy, productive, peaceful society.
The situation we're in isn't a technological problem. It's a social one.
"Fairness Doctrine" is part of the problem; it obliges media to bring in someone from the "absurd lies" side and treat them in the same way as the "less wrong" side.
How could it be part of the problem if it doesn't exist anymore? If you're just talking about some sort of "fairness doctrine" ideal that still lies in the minds of the producers of network content, why do you assume that any particular network doesn't have a preference for the "absurd lies" side but still feels obligated to have a representative on to at least parody the "less wrong" side? (Remember there are only two sides, and they each have a headquarters.)
>Ah yes, a nation pouring an immense amount of resources into propaganda targeting a specific subsection of american society and having close contact with the currently elected administration definitely wasn't the reason they got elected.
Here are a few questions for you: Why did Russian ad-buys during the 2016 campaign fund both extremist sides of the political spectrum? For an example, why did they try to simultaneously organize pro- and anti-gay rallies in Kansas?^1 And just who is Vladislav Surkov?^2
>The U.S. had a useful law for dealing with the problems of "today." And it's sad to say we've basically created problems where there never needed to be. Time to re implement the Fairness Doctrine -- across the board.
Okay, now where is the threshhold to qualify for consideration in the Fairness Doctrine, particular in a society with manifold subcultures? Is it party members? Is it adherents? Is it hashtags? Who gets to be on the Fairness Board? How are violations handled? Who gets to determine what speech is acceptable (because clearly revolutionary parties exist)? When is a platform accountable? Are foreign platforms accountable? Are personal servers broadcasting or narrowcasting?
>It's not so much as a new wave, but a new class of citizens who desperately need to become actively engaged in the political process. And understanding that the systems they're creating has lead to new power structures and information conduits, and with power comes responsibility. A responsibility to ensure the consumers of their platform are not unduly influenced by incorrect, false, and misleading information (Facebook tried doing this but was lambasted by the right, can't imagine why). A responsibility to support good governance and to support policies that provide a continued foundation for a functioning, healthy, productive, peaceful society.
In so many words, you're advocating for fixed fortifications in an age of Blitzkrieg.^3 Or to paraphrase Toffler, instead of automobiles, we need to just make stronger and faster horses.
>The situation we're in isn't a technological problem. It's a social one.
The notion that it's a monocausal issue of social policy has been addressed thoroughly for decades by luminaries such as Marhsall McLuhan and Jacques Ellul. The Medium is the Message. For a more up to date take, I strongly recommend that you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death.
>you're advocating for fixed fortifications in an age of Blitzkrieg.^3 Or to paraphrase Toffler, instead of automobiles, we need to just make stronger and faster horses.
I'm sorry, there is nothing to respond to here if you're going to make that kind of equivocation. Reread my post and respond in a non-disingenuous manner.
I know it's hard for tech people -- who generally have no kind of appreciable liberal education -- to appreciate social systems (even though people on "hacker" news should definitely be intimately knowledgeable and interested in how these systems act). Asimov was right, technology is moving faster than our social practices and wisdom know how to handle.
> that you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death.
I have, and your post makes no use of your superficial use of this source. Your entire post is basically responding to a straw man. Try something substantive.
In order to remain in the Second Wave (industrial age), the following would need to happen:
9. Families will become non-nuclear.
Many say the family is falling apart today. They define the family as a husband-breadwinner, mother-housekeeper, and a numebr of children. This is the "nuclear family" which was created and idealized by the Second Wave. It is falling apart, because the Second Wave industrial complex system is falling apart.
If we really want to maintain the nuclear family, here's what we would have to do:
* Freeze all technology in its Second Wave stage to maintain a factory-based, mass-production society.
* Block the rise of the service and professional sectors in the economy. White-collar, professional, and technical workers are less traditional, less family-oriented, more intellectually and psychologically mobile than blue- collar workers.
* "Solve" the energy crisis by applying nuclear and other highly centralized energy processes. The nuclear family survives better in a centralized society.
* Return to mass media, and ban cable television, cassettes, local and regional magazines and radio programs. Nuclear families work best where there is a national consensus on information and values, not in a society based on high diversity.
* Forcibly drive women back into the kitchen. Reduce wages for those who insist on working. The nuclear family has no nucleus when there are no adults left at home.
* Slash the wages of young workers to make them more dependent, for a longer time, on their families.
* Ban contraception. This makes for independence of women and for extramarital sex, a notorious lossener of nuclear ties.
* Cut the standard of living of the entire society to pre-1955 levels, since affluence makes it possible for single people, divorced people, working women, and other unattached individuals to "make it" economically on their own.
* Resist all changes in our society which lead toward diversity, freedom of movement and ideas, or individuality. The nuclear family remains dominant only in a mass society.
This is the only explanation of provincial US populism, Trumpism, the Alt-Right, etc etc etc that makes any sense to me. I think that the yearning to go back to a memory of how things were is an instinctive desire deeply rooted in the psyche like sexuality, religion or political affiliation that can't be changed. It may not be mine, but I sympathize with aspects of that sentiment.
The great tragedy of it though is an inability to imagine something akin to the nuclear family in a post-industrial society. They don't imagine a coal miner doing subsurface work on the moon. This is why I think that the current hardline focus on escaping the reality of a changing world is going to be short-lived. At some point, as traditionalists get more of what they want, the idealists of the world will pull away to such an extent that their new normal will have the wholesome things manifested rather than just shadows of what once was.
Can you expand more on what you mean by “this is why I think that the current hardline focus on escaping the reality of a changing world is going to be short-lived. At some point, as traditionalists get more of what they want, the idealists of the world will pull away to such an extent that their new normal will have the wholesome things manifested rather than just shadows of what once was.”
Ya sorry my comment was kind of vague. I just meant that times are changing so quickly now that fundamentalism is becoming increasingly harder to maintain.
I think that a sustainable Third Wave culture akin to the Federation on Star Trek that embraces true technology that improves lives (as opposed to the distractionary and zero-sum vulture capitalism that we have now) will feel tangibly real in a way that authoritarianism can never be. Like how the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it but in a physical reality where everyone has renewable energy and makerbots.
The gist of the concept seems to be that a utopian future predicted long ago never came to pass, and despite globalization, fast communication, and free movement of goods and sometimes individuals, people devolved into narrowly scoped groups instead. There's contention about control of institutions, control of capital, fruits to the gains of economic activity, so these groups are often at odds, and traditional solutions to their conflict are either too ineffective (government, compromise) or too drastic (protests, unrest, warfare), creating an awkward passive-aggressive state of pervasive discontent no one is happy with.
And all of the author's quote-mining seems to be a response to another overwrought essay that noted that tools like protests, angry mobs, identity politics, and the Internet, that were used by progressives to further their causes, did real damage to the credibility of institutions, and both the tools and that mistrust are now being repurposed by nationalists and fascists. This seems like non-news, and is completely to be expected, but somehow the author implies they find issue with the thesis, yet arrives at a very similar conclusion.
All these are too many words to say people will opportunistically group together and machinate towards a local betterment for their in-group above most others. Technology has generally lowered the cost and drawbacks of this opportunistic behavior, and free discourse and free assembly laws enable much of this in parts of the world, even when for-profit surveillance is prevalent. In other places, authorities have cracked down on dissent against the regime, so people who have more to lose than gain are too afraid to make waves online. But the factor limiting unrest is their desperation, which has little to do with technology.
To me, all of the author's points seem closer to realism, than technorealism. Technorealism tries to have a nuanced conversation about the things that change and the things that stay the same while living in an Internet-connected world, while this writing raves a lot about the decline of society itself and the supposed fault of a loose mob of electing a demagogue for the laughs. It's hardly deserving of the attention it's getting.