Comment on What are your technology mispredictions?
xenomor@lemmy.world 3 days ago
In the mid-nineties I passionately believed that the internet would democratize information and usher in a wonderful new era of well-informed critical thinking and general enlightenment. Basically the opposite has happened.
I often think about an Arthur C. Clarke book—I think Songs of Distant Earth?—that has a colony of humans that solves all the big debate questions facing their society anonymously through the internet, which has completely solved the problem of judging ideas based on who said them.
Bless the optimists.
In the mid-nineties I passionately believed that the internet would democratize information and usher in a wonderful new era of well-informed critical thinking and general enlightenment
The profit motive kiled this dream. Capitalism seems to wither anything it touches.
It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.
It kinda did that for a few wonderful years.
came here to see this
It wasn’t just you, this was the general sentiment in the west. Cory Doctorow (now of “enshittification” fame) wrote “The Net Delusion” about it
considers
I’ve been in a couple conversation threads about this topic before on here. I’m more optimistic.
I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways. I mean, if you have an Internet connection, you have access to a huge amount of information. Your voice has an enormous potential reach. A lot of stuff where one would have had to buy expensive reference works or spend a lot of time digging information up are now readily available to anyone with Internet access.
I think that the big issue wasn’t that people became less critical, but that one stopped having experts filter what one saw. In, say, 1996, most of what I read had passed through the hands of some sort of professional or professionals specialized in writing. For newspapers or magazines, maybe it was a journalist and their editor. For books, an author and their editor and maybe a typesetter.
Like, in 1996, I mostly didn’t get to actually see the writing of Average Joe. In 2026, I do, and Average Joe plays a larger role in directly setting the conversation. That is democratization. Average Joe of 2026 didn’t, maybe, become a better journalist than the professional journalist of 1996. But…I think that it’s very plausible that he’s a better journalist than Average Joe of 1996.
Would it have been reasonable to expect Average Joe of 2026 to, in addition to all the other things he does, also be better at journalism than a journalist of 1996? That seems like a high bar to set.
And we’re also living in a very immature environment as our current media goes. I am not sold that this is the end game.
There’s a quote from Future Shock — written in 1970, but I think that we can steal the general idea for today:
It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves.
Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.
That’s just to drive home how extremely rapidly the environment in which we all live has shifted compared to how it had in the past. In that quote, Alvin Toffler was talking about how incredibly quickly things had changed in that it had only been six lifetimes since the public as a whole had seen printed text, how much things had changed. But in 2026, we live in a world where it has only been a quarter of a lifetime, less for most, since much of the global population of humanity has been intimately linked by near-instant, inexpensive, mass communication.
I think that it would be awfully unexpected and surprising if we would have immediately figured out conventions and social structures and technical solutions to every deficiency for such a new environment. Social media is a very new thing in the human experience at this scale. I think that it is very probable that humanity will — partly by trial-and-error, getting some scrapes and bruises along the way — develop practices to smooth over rough spots and address problems.
I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways.
unfortunately the internet democratized the creation of information, which is the problem. Now everyone and their angry uncle can say whatever they want and post it everywhere. People are not equipped to deal with that, especially with for-profit social media algorithms involved too.
Yeah. Didn’t we all. Although I’ve met several smart young people that self educated themselves in to a impressive degree.
Then again I’ve met dozen times more dumb-dumbs that have made their idiocy much much worse and are spreading it around.
Polarizing as always. Sorry to say on average for the worse.
Same, except mid-00s.
Yeah I never thought how it would be the hot bed of spreading misinformation…
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Man I think all of us mistakenly thought this. The early internet had such promise.
thelivefive@startrek.website 2 days ago
I think the Internet still has lots of promise. We just did a capitalism on it. If we can get the cancer out it’ll be an amazing thing again.
But I do think some of that early promise was overestimated, because mostly smart people were on it then. We thought it was the medium, but it was just techies or people with hobbies or interest that made it that special place, now that your average Joe is there it’s mostly shit, but go somewhere with a little barrier to entry (like Lemmy) and it is pretty cool again.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 day ago
I really think social media algorithms+profit motives are a big part of what did it. Suddenly there’s both the desire and the means to manipulate users into whatever pattern the business wants. Engagement-based algorithms pushed incendiary content creating a feedback loop of more and more extreme and hateful views being normalized, but also engagement-based algorithms plus monetization encouraged new forms of farmed content like brainrot and AI boomer slop which has zero (or realistically net-negative) value to society as a whole.
I’m really hoping the analogue/physical media trend continues because that might actually be what breaks the cycle. Normies may have simply had it with social media platforms owning them
kevin2107@lemmy.world 1 day ago
it was like that for a few. now AI will definitely make people braindead, how many years of brainrot can the mind endure?