Plenty of good observations there. One thing I can say for sure is that social media, in any form, is not to be used, and ignored for good. Social media is causing politics to be shoehorned into so many things, it's the reason that mindset you mentioned is so common. It's all absolute bullshit, and people don't realize that. It's only people with strong opinons, thinking they are important, and others believing them. Combine that with constant access to a stream of bs (from phones) and the reach is as wide as ever. Computers and phones are definitely neat pieces of technology, never before could you do most basic things on a computer you can take everywhere in your pocket, but man the way they are used is just so stupid a lot of the time. The thing with people posting every bit of their lives online, though, is that if you don't use those social media platforms, you aren't going to notice people are doing it. Of course I notice while out that everyone is practically glued to their screens, but I don't see any of it so it's not something that crosses my mind much. I remember back in high school, when this sort of thing began with people, as more and more people had smart phones. I believe this behavior is most easily found in schools, or colleges. After I finished, however, I didn't have to observe them any longer. After that time I noticed a lot less of the online whore mentality. Thankfully, it is all voluntary. Thankfully, not everyone needs confirmation from their peers over little thing they do. If only it were a little less common.

It's a massive problem.

The companies in charge of these technologies make it so their product is as addictive as possible. Facebook is a particularly egregious example, utilizing the "Like" button to give users a sort of Pavlovian response to the everyday minutiae they're constantly posting, so they'll constantly use the service because of how good getting likes on their posts feel. It perpetuates a culture of narcissism, and (as we have seen with the hanky panky going on in the US) it also has an impact on political systems.

China, with their "social credit" system is an example of how bad things can get. The idea that you are going to be refused certain civic services based on what you say about the "socialist market economy" or the government on the web is actually dystopian.

They are literally getting people addicted to social media and there's zero accountability. You can't exactly blame the user when the company is using psychological manipulation to make them behave a certain way. It's having a highly negative impact on the world. The internet has merged with reality, which is something that should have never happened.

In addition to ALL of that, these same companies are taking data on the user and abusing that privilege for the sake of targeted advertisements, with no regard for what they're actually advertising, who exactly is behind the product they're advertising, or how shitty it makes their website look. It's all about the bottom line, which is money and control (so they can keep making money). They just don't care about the masses, very few people in the position to make life easier for us lesser folk do.

The pace at which we consume information has grown out of control. The most depressing fact is that it's a Pandora's box - It cannot be stopped at this point, this trend will continue and probably grow worse, until the decline of civilization and may very well be the cause of it.

I'm no Luddite by the way: I absolutely love the internet. It's a wonderful and nearly magical thing. However, I don't think we use the internet anymore, we abuse it and that fact is, in turn, being abused by the powers that be for the sake of money and social control.

>But apparently phones are lame if you don't have the absolute newest ones. Culture and purpose have been replaced with disgusting hyper-consumerism.

There is also an attempt to cover up that things have changed. I believe I've noticed that YouTube pushes the videos made in the first three quarters of its history out of the search results and recommendations. The top results are now the newest, and it definitely is something they changed, to cover up change. Assuming it's not paranoia, and others can see it too.

You just feel that way because you have been using the internet near constantly for several years and became desensitised. The internet is a much bigger place than a decade ago. That means more social media stuff you don't like, but it also means its far easier to obtain the things you do like, such as quality media, fansubs, niche communities etc. Look at hentai doujin from 2003, most of them are poorly drawn. If you wanted to commission art you would have to settle for a bad artist. If you wanted to download fansubs you would have to use horrible weeaboo fansubs with tons of watermarks, etc.

>>31928
> to cover up that things have changed
I'm pretty sure that's just youtube trying to stay relevant and show people what's fresh cool new and trending, which is what generally people want.

>>31928
>>31932
Youtube's ranking algorithms are gamed to hell and back. They've changed it from returning what used to be relevant results to returning videos that their memechine learning system thinks will maximize addiction, watch time, and revenue.

>>31935
Use an element hider to get rid of them completely, been doing it for years. Was even able to get the front page completely blank except for the search bar.

I'm bumping this thread because I feel as though a lot of people on this site have the same mindset as OP but haven't found the proper thread to complain in.
All of that being said, I absolutely agree 100%. I can't tell you how stressful it is being an internet addict nowadays. You have to watch everything you post 24/7 or your life is over. Of course, after I saw these problems in society, I started to hang out in political circles and started seeing the exact same bullshit you mentioned. And then or course, I'm so tired of going to a gaming or anime community and someone is talking about politics, but when you tell them to cool it and just talk about hobbies, they plug their ears and scream "CENTRIST!!11!!". They keep mentioning that politics is so goddamn important and that we should be focused on it 24/7, but I can assure that not even people living in third world shitholes are obsessed with politics to this extent, and they are the ones who have more problems than us politically speaking.
Another thing I would like to mention is the culture of bullying that seems to have become normalized on the internet. Of course, being a dick on the internet and making fun of people is nothing new (hell I did a bit of it myself back in the day), but we are getting to a point where we are seeing things like legitimate threats of violence and doxxing becoming the norm. I will even go as far as to say that social media is partly to blame for the increase in school shootings. Back then, if you were being bullied at school, You were usually safe outside of school when you were with friends or engaging in hobbies at home. But nowadays, you get bullied at school, and then when you come home, your phone buzzes and you find that some dickwad took an embarrassing photo of you or leaked your home address and you are right back to where you were, but maybe ten times worse. So it wouldn't surprise me if more and more kids feel as though there only way out is to kill themselves and take a few people with them (not justifying the act of course).
You aren't the only one by the way, I am seeing the concept of neo-luddism gaining a bit of traction, and I'm even seeing some mainstream media outlets talking about the concept. It just goes to show that society in general is getting concerned over this very topic we are discussing now.

>>32722
I know these issues exist, but they seem pretty overblown to me. I'm on the younger side for this site, and I don't notice it in my daily life. Don't use social media unless you have to. Don't use it to post anything personal if you do need it for work/school and max the "privacy" settings. Don't socialize with people that take selfies. Use burner emails for non-work related purposes.

>>32723
>I'm on the younger side for this site
I'm 21 so we are probably not to far off in age. That being said, even if you don't see it in your daily life, that doesn't mean it isn't happening. Automation is creeping in and we are seeing things like depression linked to social media use. Hell, we are even seeing riots overseas due to online services like Uber. There is something going on, that is for sure.

In social media, the intolerant minority wins...
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15#.cq32okfgf

This thread is essentially the complaints of social media users who insist on dragging their twitter & facebook world onto /tc/. I know all about the privacy issues on those other sites, thats why I don't use them.
If you know about the privacy problems and everything else that goes along with social media usage and you still insist on using that stuff and aren't technically knowledgeable enough to do it without exposing yourself personally, thats your own fault for failing to educate yourself. There is a very large contingent of internet users who are intelligent enough to do anything anonymously and all of the knowledge they have is freely available online.
If neo-luddites are gaining traction, thats because giving up entirely is less effort than reading the fucking manual. Nontechnical types will always be at a disadvantage online, if you're one of those people then just lol, because your willful ignorance will get you taken advantage of time and again.

>>32730
I don't think you need to be a tech wizard to have common sense online. If a place sucks, avoid it.

Post edited on 25th Jul 2019, 1:44pm

I feel like I have a lot more free time in the day when I am not mindlessly surfing the web or video games. It’s just that I don’t have much else to do, as I don’t really like western books and LNs aren’t that good generally. Maybe I can put manga on my e-reader or something. Privacy feels more like a principals thing, as there are other powers that be spying on you besides your technology.

>>32730
Neo-Luddism is more about caring about the environment, spirituality rather than privacy or plain technophobia.

>>32730
The neo-luddites were right about just about everything. The only thing they were really wrong about was the possibility of changing course. It's like speeding down a steep bluff that terminates in a sheer cliff, stop taking steps and you'll tumble down and break your crown anyways, but keep moving forward and you'll live another moment. Each move makes sense in the local moment, but look at the whole board and you'll see we'll lose the game. Step by sensible step.


Take privacy for instance. It's something that won't even exist in a few decades. Companies like f*c#book and the dummies who use it aren't just shooting themselves in the foot, they're screwing you over as well. All those pictures people share, all those videos, audio, gps coordinates, tower data, likes, habits, metadata and so on. It's a patchy -but growing- global surveillance network that increasingly allows predictions of behavior. The only reason that it hasn't yet been turned against people like us is that analyzing the so much data is slow and cumbersome work that still mostly needs people. That won't last. Building systems that can do the same autonomously and robustly is possible right now but costly. Going into the future costs will only fall, cost of compute will keep falling, better algorithms and techniques will be developed. FB has already said they intend to do as much, and you can be sure goverements are trying to do the same and worse.

It's not a problem solvable by just reading the manual. I use tor and I2P and GNUnet, encrypt all my shit with veracrypt and PGP, use virtualized sandboxed systems on trusted hardare, but even with all that I doubt that I am not leaving my fingerprints all over when I use the net. Even a relatively computer literate person like me can't be expected to even know what best practices are against states or corporations that have higher income than most states. Hell even this long winded post is probably giving away my identity. Identifying the author of a post was possible long ago through statistical methods, but these days the sensitivity of these techniques is much greater and more automated. I only post on places like this using anonymized means, but can I be sure that some other datapoint won't tie me back to this post and others? No, I can't and I can't think of any solution.

There was a good line in lain, when the knights have all been killed, the men in black are told something to the effect of "if you want to survive, all you need to do is go somewhere not covered by satellite or network" The point being no place like that really exists anymore.

>>32826
Even if all of this becomes completely automated, it still requires ,energy, effort and organization. The whole thing will inevitably collapse under its own weight. Why even bother acting on this information in real life? How would they act on it? Eventually elites wont even need the masses, so why continue doing it?

>>32827
>It still requires energy, effort, and organization
True, but these things are already being expended on this task. Think about how much is already invested in government security apparatus, the NSAs and stasi and whathaveyou. Or how many people FB or goggle employs to do less sophisticated advertisement targeting. Now replace some of that with a more efficient automated system. They will get more bang for less buck. It will add complexity, but it will probably on balance reduce how much energy and effort needs to be spent for a given outcome to be achieved.

>Why even bother acting on this information in real life?
In the case of large companies, you're right they won't do much in real life, mainly it will be limited to manipulating you into lining their pockets. All the big tech companies are profitable almost exclusively because they have so far managed to do that better than anyone else. Sophisticated automated data could make such companies bottlenecks that can strongly manipulate people into not only sales, but also into distorting the entire market.
In the case of the government they'd act whenever they thought it would increase their stability. It's extremely unlikely they'll arrest every jay-walker or lolicon even if they could, because that would be a massive waste of time and effort. But certain types or classes of people, certain keystone people who drive social dynamics, those would be worth interfering with. The types who try to maintain privacy will be a small minority, one that will be watched closely.

>How would they act on it?
For the state it would most importantly be through traditional legal tactics and harassment, the courts that have always been used against the enemies of the state. The police and other armed civil forces are obvious methods as well. In another two decades or so you could also expect automated weaponry in some cases. The US has already killed citizens in war zones using missiles fired from drones, but future weapons will likely be smaller, closer range, and more targeted.

However the more interesting method will likely be through information manipulation using automated processes since those can scale to match the automated surveillance. Already much of the internet and the information that flows through it is controlled by simple algorithms. Sophisticated automated systems would be another step in this trend. For example many large companies are working on chatbots that can actually pass for human. Though they aren't there yet, recent advances in Natural Language Processing makes me think that in a decade or so it may be entirely possible to create bots that fool most people all of the time. It's already relatively easy to use extremely stupid bots to manipulate people and algorithms online. Now imagine a future where any rumor or hype for a product is as simple as renting server time and running a program. Other trends in this sort of tool are things like Generative Adversarial networks which are increasingly able to create realistic outputs like audio and video. Even old hat hacks like Man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks can become significantly more sophisticated if you know enough about your target. All of those sorts of tools and more will increasingly become capable of operating without a human making more than high level decisions and tweaks.

It's like the wired in SEL, if you can manipulate perceptions well enough people won't be able to tell your creations from reality. Control people's reality, and you can control behavior. Automated tools will increasingly be able to do this cheaply and at scale that humans likely won't be able to successfully defend against.

>Eventually elites wont even need the masses, so why continue doing it?
It's quite true they won't need us eventually, but until that point they will want to control us to their profit and manage risk. As long as we have any value, they'll obviously want to extract and secure it for themselves. And as long as we may end up aligned against their interests they'll want to manage that risk. For instance what if during the next economic downturn or economic depression if say the unemployed population went into revolt? Even if it isn't very likely and they they probably wouldn't win, it could still result in significant losses for some elites. Some of the them may even lose their fortunes or even their lives. Sure most of them probably wouldn't, and for every loser there would be a gainer, but without knowing the outcome they collectively wouldn't want to risk it. I am not saying that they'll rule over us forever with this technology, but that use it to tighten their grip on us right until they can finally throw us away.

Also, sorry if I'm aggressively ranting. I don't mean to argue or anything, just have a lot of opinions on the matter.

>>32833
With technological development, the first thing people think about is how those developments can be used as weapons or tools of control. How those developments are used for defensive purposes is much less discussed. Even if you're right about you leaving some fingerprints despite all your precautions, is anybody able to benefit from those traces of your presence? Wont even better ways of protecting privacy be created? Aside from that, if ai really will be able to perfectly replicate humans, wouldn't everybody know it? Why would you trust anybody online if you know an online person's word is worth nothing?

>>32835
>Defensive purposes
It is true that there are attempts being made at this. However the balance of power is asymmetric in this case. The side with the most resources is going to be the attacker. Further in many of the uses of these sorts of technology success does not require that all attempts are successful, only some subset. If you block a million attempts, but the million and oneth gets through, you may be just as buggered.

> is anybody able to benefit from those traces of your presence?
Possibly but it is hard to quantify the risk. Big data is sort of like a mystery image jigsaw puzzle. Any piece may not actually let you know what you are looking at, but sometimes all it takes is one more piece to know what the whole is. Maybe this post could somehow provide the last bit of data needed to link me to something incriminating. Probably not though...

>Wont even better ways of protecting privacy be created
Unfortunately I don't think so. The current methods of protecting privacy are pretty much as good as they are going to get, as they are all in essence the same thing, encrypting and obfuscating data. However only some types of information can be well protected this way. Digital stuff can be made reasonably secure, but anything physical is nearly impossible. You can't really hide where you live, or where you drive in your car, or what in your DNA. Well you can try, but you won't have much success, and many of the ways of doing so are already illegal (hiding your license plates or your face for instance). Everything you do leaks some data, and the more data you have the more you can use it to reason about the data you still don't have. If people started all using the tools available to protect privacy they would probably be able to hide their communications and some other things. It would probably help a lot truthfully, but at the same time as long as other types of data are leaky and insecure it's going to be a losing battle.

> if ai really will be able to perfectly replicate humans, wouldn't everybody know it?
Maybe. There's plenty of interesting work going on in AI right now that most people know nothing about even though it's all public. A combination of choosing to keep a low profile and people's general disinterest can be powerful. It's also possible that it might be kept as a trade or state secret for a while after such a thing is developed.

>Why would you trust anybody online if you know an online person's word is worth nothing?
The problem is that you wouldn't necessarily have to trust anyone. Psychologically there are all sorts of ways to manipulate people who don't trust you. One example is that people tend to think something is more true, the more they hear it said. This is the case even when they are absolutely aware the information is false and that they are being manipulated. People also have a hard time maintaining distrust of systems that seem human, tending to anthropomorphize them. Even if everyone starts distrusting everything they see on the net, that may actually benefit the adversary. If you don't believe anything or trust anyone, it's difficult to actually change anything.

The best way to make sure one doesn't get manipulated by such theoretical systems would be to avoid using the internet for information or to connect with others, or at least only doing so with people they physically know and can verify. However I doubt that will happen, largely because people are already very invested in the existing internet ecology of social media, mass media, and mass connectivity. Though it is possible I suppose.

Something tells me the latest shooting is the last straw for imageboard culture.

>>32885
What are you talking about? I'm out of the loop with that stuff.

>>32886
This gives a good enough overview: https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

It's only a matter of time before one of the nations in its infinite wisdom passes some new regulation banning anonymous forums.

>>32887
When will people learn that adults are acountable for their own actions? You can't blame a website for the crimes its users commit. When you do that, the meaning of adult becomes lost. Imageboards will be fine. They were always part of the counter culture and there will always be ways around the moronic regulations put in place by nanny states.

>>32885
>>32887
No offense, but it’s 8chan. If anything it’s a net-gain for imageboard culture.

>>32889
I thought about saying this, but they'll probably just change hosts. Also, 8chan is great for containment. You wouldn't want them leaking out, right?

>>32889
It's not a good precedent.

>>32890
This is such a ridiculous attitude. Imageboards are open and anonymous, it's not possible to "contain" anyone. The only way to keep them out is either harsh moderation (costly) or just trying to make sure they don't know about your chan. All "containment" boards and chans do is make the second one impossible

>>32892
If they're spending most of their time on one chan, and that chan disappears or changes in a way they can't tolerate, they move on to other places. It's happened before.

>>32891
8chan is (at least temporarily) dead. Their hosting provider nixed service this morning. Unfortunate since there were some decent smaller boards there. It's probably going to become a cat and mouse game now.

Post edited on 5th Aug 2019, 12:03pm

>>32892
I think 8chan facilitated echo chambers to a greater extent than other chans, because people could split off into their own boards. /leftypol/ was a pretty big board there, for example, so that's a whole group of Communists/anarchists/whatever who weren't present on its main /pol/ to push back on any of the neo-Nazi shit.

The death of 8chan means nothing to me. But threat against imageboards and imageboard culture worries me greatly. Will we see the final death of the old internet in the 2020s?

>>32901
>>32700
There was a thread about older otaku on /so/ too, the general consensus is maybe. But for example, sites like this has existed way longer than people thought they would so who knows.

>>32902
Only because, for the most part, this site was made BY older otaku FOR older otaku. This may very well be the highest concentration of oldschool otaku in the west outside of some forums which may or may not still exist. I certainly wouldn't count places like 4/a/ and 4/jp/, or even most of the other alt/a/s. They are largely populated by "ironic weebs", and people of varying levels of that description.

>>32901
>Will we see the final death of the old internet in the 2020s
I hope not, but maybe. I visited twitter recently just to see people's response to this (I don't visit twitter that often) and I was honestly horrified to see how many people were cheering on the death of 8chan and even calling for it's users to be doxxed and arrested. I know it's been said flippantly a lot but I am saying this with absolute sincerity: We are living in a dystopia.
>The death of 8chan means nothing to me
It should. 8chan's shutdown is merely the beginning of a slippery slope. Next, more and more tame websites will be shut down, until we get to a point where the only things available on the internet anymore, are teenage bloggers on youtube and social media websites. If we don't do something now, the elite will finally win and control the narrative. It seems the only hope we have now, is waiting for it all to collapse in on itself, which is honestly inevitable at this point.

>>32905
I wouldn’t look at pearl clutching twitter users as an example of the trend. Not even Redditors like that crowd.

>>32905
>horrified to see how many people were cheering on the death of 8chan
One thing that surprised me was that in all this discussion of 8chan – the cloudflare post, twitter, news articles, etc., – almost no one draws a distinction between 8chan's /pol/ board and the other boards. I had to double check that I wasn't being gaslit and thinking of some other fork. This sheer disregard to the collateral damage of taking down 8chan as a whole is perhaps more concerning than their views on the /pol/ itself.

>>32911
I don't think they know there is a distinction, or are even all that clear on what the site is because all they've seen is the news articles. I browse some of the hobby boards and see very little of what people hate about that site there, so I don't like seeing people react that way, but it can't be helped.

>>32912
I know what you mean. It genuinely left me feeling a bit distressed seeing those twitter replies. Those political nuts on twitter though probably wouldn't listen even if you explained to them the distinction.

>>32912
8chan had some decent boards that were unfortunately crossboarded by /pol/tards a ton. Though, they all either are non-English or have this samey quality to them. 8/a/, for example, which has very strict rules which I like, doesn’t bother to ban the abusing of the quote function or non anime pictures. What is even the point then?

>>32901
I wouldn't worry it. As long as boards dedicate themselves to niche interests and hobbies, the mainstream won't care, and people will be left in peace.

>>32911
You shouldn't be surprised. Most people are ignorant about imageboards--even the ones who pride themselves in being "internet savvy." This wouldn't be a problem, of course, if it weren't for the fact that they talk about imageboards as if they were some authority on it. Reading some shit article from some shit publication doesn't make one knowledgeable about a myriad of websites, their culture, and their users. But, since these people have to have an opinion, and it has to be heard, they start typing their diatribes and their loquacious posts.

>>32950
I remember /tech/ being good on one point, but I didn't use it often.

>>32962
>I remember /tech/ being good on one point, but I didn't use it often.
8chan boards were decent in the first or so years but /tech/ very quickly got filled with paranoid extremists and paranoid criminals.

>>32966
Is 8ch still off-line?

Mobile smartphones gave internet to anyone anywhere and people are stupid.

>>35560
Unfortunately true...

>>32962
>>32966
What is a good /tech/ at this point?

>>37002
I assume you've already checked lainchan? There's also /g/ on nanochan, but I haven't tried it.

>>37004
>>37002
Nanochan is decent. It's 8chan's /tech/ exodus that started way before the site died, if that gives you any hint.

To be fair, it's not like the internet/what people did with tech was ever high art. Go back and read stuff from the 90s/2000s, it's a lot of stupid shit regurgitated, pages of flame wars and people looking for piracy.
We just got older.

>>37008
It was more genuine. Back in the personal website days, people wrote sites because they were interested in a topic and wanted to share. Nowadays they do it for internet points, which brings in the attention-seeker demographic.
It also used to be more free than in-person communication because you could speak your mind without worrying about losing your job over it.
Above all, there was a lot of self-selection going on, in the 90s/early 0's only people who were somewhat competent at tech really used the internet. That doesn't mean there was no stupidity, but there was a different kind of it. For example, you rarely had to deal with people incapable of following simple instructions: If they had been, they wouldn't have been here in the first place.
The darknet has a lot of promise in getting back that old feeling, but we'll see.

>>37011
In the personal website days, most sites made by average people were "personal pages". Just somewhere for people to post their pictures and blog posts, not inform anybody on esoteric subjects. They'd show it off to people, "look, I'm on the internet". Livejournal and myspace then hit the scene and offered a free alternative.

>>37011
>Nowadays they do it for internet points
Nowadays they also do it for ad revenue. In addition to the demographic changes you mentioned where the tech-savvy base was gradually diluted, companies realized the value of having silo'd in systems and made every effort to usurp and control the communication platforms. And the people went along with it: first those less tech-savvy who were wooed by the ease of use and rounded edges, and then eventually even the tech-savvy were forced to concede and move to discord/twitter/whatever.

>>37007
> is decent.
decent may be an overstatement. I just checked it out, and it's not not some fabled eden. The lounge board is mostly filled with talk of 3D, and /g/ is underwhelming in the breadth and depth of topics talked about. The posters are also nearly indistinguishable from those on current imageboards, so if you're hoping to escape the lingo and image macros that have taken root on those boards, then it's not much of a panacea.

>>37042
E.g. attached is a screencap of what was probably the most interesting thread (also relevant to this thread); some good thoughts there, but also a lot of noise.

>>32887
Second time they've done the exact same thing: pretend to be neutral and against deplatforming one day [1] and then when nobody's looking quietly reverse course on a sunny saturday [2]. I don't even particularly know much or about (last I checked it was primarily a place to discuss the activities of 3D people) or care for why there's controversy all of a sudden (given what they did last time with 8chan though my prior is for this being some sort of media effort to shift blame) but I hate Cloudflare's duplicitous dealings as they pretend to be some neutral bastion of the internet while in reality acting as extortionists (they have no problem serving as a cdn for ddos-for-hire services) and leaving collateral damage in their wake.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-approach/
[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/

Post edited on 3rd Sep 2022, 3:52pm

>>40385
Yeah, it was quite a whiplash for me since they made that initial blog post relatively recently. Should have known they were going to bow to the pressure, whether it be internal or external.
As for kiwifarms, nothing much was lost, but don't mess with trannies I guess.

>(they have no problem serving as a cdn for ddos-for-hire services)
Doesn't incur bad press.

>>40385
>This is an extraordinary decision for us to make... a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with... we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before.
>This is a hard case and we would caution anyone from seeing it as setting precedent.
You'd have to be pretty dumb to believe this, all things considered.

The internet is increasing tremendously

>>40385
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS
Fucking great news.

>>40395
Not really. It's a win for even worse people. Also, they have a new domain.

Post edited on 4th Sep 2022, 7:13pm

>>40385
Never thought I'd ever side with Kiwifarms
These last 8 years have been nothing but a waking nightmare to me. Everything I thought was immutable and sacred is no longer safe. The concept of the freedom of anarchy regarding information on the internet was something I took for granted, and something that I thought everyone who frequently used it valued. The price of losing that freedom would be too great compared to any reward, but I guess we're way past that now. Every value ever held by a truly liberal society is gone and replaced with a sickening, pointless tribalism without even the biological necessity to rationalise it. The entirety of civilisation has gone insane, and I'm forced to live in a world predominantly influenced by people that I share no common goals or ideals with. I. JUST. WANT. TO. BE. LEFT. ALONE.

>>40398
>>40397
>>40398
>The concept of the freedom of anarchy regarding information on the internet was something I took for granted
Well said. The way I view it, at it's core, it's less about "kiwifarms vs. twitter mob" (because really no one cares too much about Kiwifarms in particular) and more about the implications of an Internet infrastructure that's becoming increasingly owned by a small set of parties and the increasingly popular view that it's alright for those parties to become arbitrers. The entire schtick of the Internet is that the intermediary hops (ISPs et al.) have relatively broad safe harbor laws and so are free to route packets without being responsible for their content – only the endpoints were the ones that were subject to any legal liabilities. In the past endpoints were only investigated by glowies and taken down for black/white illegal activites that would result in physical courtroom proceedings and heavy jail time (hosting pizza, etc.). But over the years and influence from media companies we got DMCA and the scope of activities that could jeopardize an endpoint's status widened. Soon the scope of takedown widened from not only the direct endpoint (i.e. hosting provider) but also the domain registrar (as seen in how many domain names pirate bay had to go through).

The Cloudflare stuff goes one step further in desecrating the principle – now you have someone that's not even the endpoint and merely a caching proxy arbitrating in an arbitrary manner.

>>40398
Remember when SOPA and PIPA were universally loathed all over the Internet and the outrage caused the bills to be shelved? That was a decade ago. If that happened in 2022, anyone who tried to complain about the bills would be censored and accused of spreading "disinformation," and all the Big Tech monopolies would be supporting them.

Post edited on 5th Sep 2022, 9:10am

>>40400
I think those acts were too disadvantageous to companies, which is why they were shelved. On an unrelated note, there's something very funny about Google using their logo as a stand-in for a thing being censored.

Post edited on 5th Sep 2022, 9:31am

Society is continually progressing. Even with tragedies like the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, they carried the seeds of improved online learning and greater use of nuclear power. The idea that this world has become a dystopia or is in a state of decline is a commonplace lie pedalled by academia and other pessimists. In truth, people are living longer lives than ever before, receiving improved medical care, and having a higher standard of living. People just a century ago could only dream of what we have today.
People fearmonger about the lack of privacy, but more data gathering will help with solving criminal cases and preventing crimes, giving people the suggestions they want, etc.
Even with the environment, its use as a resource is necessary for economic growth and to benefit humanity, including the impoverished. The idea of ascribing value to the environment independent of its utility to humanity or ascribing value to privacy while neglecting the tremendous benefits of its end is naive.
The tech critical attitude is nothing more than a brief cultural anomaly that will fade away.

>>40403
This post reeks of dismissiveness. I'm not sure whether it comes from disingenuousness or naivete. There are problems people are discouraged from acknowledging and they are worth discussing.

>>40403
> people are living longer lives than ever before, receiving improved medical care
This is not a good metric to judge by. As seen in the "lay flat" movements across Japan/China, satisfaction with life is at a low, and despite rising "GDP" younger generations are unlikely to partake in their share of that wealth. If you believe kaczynski, technology is the fundamental problem that gives rise to this gap.

Moreover as >>40404 said what you've described is orthogonal to the problem in question. You can have a society where people live "long lives" but have little freedom. In fact, the well-known "you will own nothing and you will be happy" and related quotes from WEF basically demonstrates that: a society where people have long-lives and are "healthy" but where people have little genuine agency, as everything else is controlled to an extent. Basically a situation like in [1, 2] (3D warning)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrEUzKTt7j0
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0

Post edited on 5th Sep 2022, 1:10pm

>>40405
My issue with it is that all those elderly people living such long lives are a burden for everyone else. There's overpopulation, but also an aging population. It's very blatantly an issue. Nobody wants to admit the problem because it would be ethically wrong. Naturally it's going to be difficult to have children and live a normal life when resources are spread thin.
Sure it'd be sad for them to croak, but they serve no real purpose. They're living simply because not doing everything in your power to keep someone alive is ethically wrong or whatever.
I once wanted to study medicine, but it's such a shitty fucking industry. People bitch about pharmaceuticals, but hospitals aren't really any better. Doctors don't have to be any better than some scumbag mechanic beyond washing their hands. Hippocratic oath is meaningless. Anyone can repeat words and then do whatever they want.

>>40406
The economics of current society is fundamentally built upon a pyramid scheme where the number of people in each generation keeps increasing. We're reaching a point where this is no longer true for populations in 1st world countries, which is why they're so desparate to import immigrants by the boatload, to try to eek this out for as long as possible. When it finally collapses (within the next few decades or so, perhaps) it will collapse spectacularly.

>>40404
That may be true with individual technologies, but seeing people debate technology as a whole is absurd. Moreover, you focus on the rusty side of a coin while neglecting the silver of the other side.
https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/12/power-so-great-it-can-only-be-used-for.html
"We do not have the option of doing without technology, with all due respect to Amish refuseniks. As a civilization, a species, we've built ourselves a technological layer that we now live in and can't get rid of (unless we are prepared for an order-of-magnitude dieoff). The question of 'is technology good or evil' is a stupid question, frankly. You can talk about a particular bit of technology and what its effects are and what human interests it serves or subverts, but to try to put a moral valence on technology as a whole is like a fish giving a lecture on 'water: threat or savior'?"

>>40405
Freedom, an abstraction, means different things to different people. I've yet to see you define what your version of freedom is. At any rate, even hunter-gatherers had relatively little power over their own lives. They were subject to the paterfamilias, the climate, and to the other forces of nature, just as people today are subject to corporations and governments. Even Ted Kaczynski acknowledges this:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-afterthoughts-to-technological-slavery

>>40404
Here's more.
https://nav.al/pessimism

>>40411
It seems this has turned into an optimism vs pessimism sort of thread, which I don't really care to comment on much further. Ultimately no one knows the future, we can only extrapolate from the past – whichever between {optimist view, pessimist view} is closest to that predicted future is the correct viewpoint.

The scott adams piece itself falls prey to this by disgenously only painting one side of the picture and completely leaving out the other side. Yes, the rise of smartphones might possibly lead to a utopia where all criminals will be caught and punished. It might also lead to a dystopia where all dissidents are punished for wrongthink. Which way will it go? We can only extrapolate from the past, and to me that leans more towards the dsytopic view. A lot of the points scott adams makes also only hold if we make the assumption that achieving some technology is a given. But there's no guarantee of that (e.g. fusion energy, "carbon engineering").

Similarly for your other article
>So far, most of the pessimistic predictions have turned out to be false. If you look at the timelines on which the world was supposed to end or environmental catastrophes were supposed to happen, they’ve been quite wrong.

Of course there are shades of pessimism. Yes the more severe of those were wrong, but many of the less extreme ones were right (most of what Stallman ended up saying). You could equally say there were many optimistic predictions that were wrong: just go all the prediction threads.

Post edited on 5th Sep 2022, 3:46pm

>>40410
>you focus on the rusty side of a coin while neglecting the silver of the other side
How do you know that what I focus on? The "other side" is not relevant to this specific conversation. I'm not going to couple every negative thought with a positive one.

>>40410
>I've yet to see you define what your version of freedom is. At any rate, even hunter-gatherers had relatively little power over their own lives.
That's some nice, relativistic bullshit. I can compare today with 10+ years ago, because I was alive all that time and directly observed a change.

>>40413
>that's some nice, relativistic bullshit
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fc-industrial-society-and-its-future
>"But because 'freedom' is a word that can be interpreted in many ways, we must first make clear what kind of freedom we are concerned with."
>"Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a 'free' man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s 'free' man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simón Bolívar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-Min: 'An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights.' By community Hu meant the whole society or the nation. And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsun Chang (Chang Chun-Mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed."

>>40414
That's a nice wall of text written by a luddite murderer.

>>40403
God I hate the concept of "showing people suggestions they like" so fucking much. I know how to surf for information on my own, it's like 90% of the enjoyment of browsing the web. When it just shows up at my front door as a mandatory gift by the website and other information is pushed away because they assume I don't have a variety of different interests, it's just terrible. My biggest problem with the direction of technology is that it more and more discourages taking any actions on your own. It's too a point where young adults today simply refuse to read about something themselves because they know some faggot is going to make a youtube video on it and explain the most memed aspects of whatever it is. Niche hobbies are shipped en masse straight to the frontal lobe of every gen-z on earth, where they can pretense interest in things that their predecessors spent months upon months trawling the web and physical libraries for just a decade before them. Everyone is so fucking infantilised, we're at the point now where any bill raising every adult-age law currently existing at 18 up to 21 would pass without obstruction. I've met 20 year olds who were as helpless as a fucking middle schooler 10 years ago, and with so little self control that they work paycheck to paycheck even though they have zero monthly fucking payments. I've seen it happen in real time and it's disgusting, I was digging ditches with an excavator and living on my own at 19. The masses have become retarded, and there is a clear link to the enabling and encouraging of tech. More and more, people simply pawn off some task to the fucking algorithm, or even having to know that it exists to the algorithm, to the point people get "suggested" applications that will simply remember and calculate everything for them in such a simplistic way that they may as well simply get quest markers every time they need to do something. I hate it, I want to burn it all down. I just want my real fucking world back.

>>40416
>Niche hobbies are shipped en masse straight to the frontal lobe of every gen-z on earth, where they can pretense interest in things that their predecessors spent months upon months trawling the web and physical libraries for just a decade before them.
Those damn zoomers don't have inconvenient enough lives. They're not actually interested in anything!

>>40417
>inconvenient
Social media, content recommendation algorithms and their "convenience" actively encourage you to not think about anything and just consume whatever is put in front of you "because it's convenient" for the benefit of advertisers.
So yeah, some inconvenience is a good thing

>>40403
I agree in some ways. Technologically speaking, we are better of in every way and things only get better(touch wood). But my issue is that these are technological improvements only, societally we are getting worse.

As for the environment I can see what you are getting at but it is a double edged sword. Yes, usage of the earths resources does improve economic growth and such but it also takes away the ability for people to enjoy that nature. Where one day you could walk through woodland, now you are walking through urban sprawl.
It's unsustainable as well.

>>40415
My point was that the person who initially responded to me, mentioning the lying flat movement in China, brought up Kaczynski in criticizing technology, so I quoted him back to show him how Kaczynski himself sees the conception of freedom as relativistic. I strongly disagree with Kaczynski on many things, but when someone else mentions him to argue something, then I can use his own arguments against some of their views.

>>40413
>>40415
I would like to see you argue your conception of freedom (or type of freedom) and your observations in its decline rather than throwing around insults or dismissals; if you've observed major changes in ten years, then you should have something interesting to share that could contribute to this thread that stagnated from the start in narrowing and narrowing in its focus to certain parts of the internet rather than broadening to discuss technology and society as a whole and the countless non-internet tech topics. The point I'm making is firstly, that freedom has different meanings for different people based on what they value most or what they are deprived of most, and secondly, that (if one defines freedom as "control" or "power") people never had control over the circumstances and fate of their lives to any more than a modest extent.

>>40421
>if you've observed major changes in ten years, then you should have something interesting to share
I assumed these were shared experiences, and the conclusions fairly obvious. I'll spell it out for you, even though I do think you're full of shit for pretending not to already know.

The internet was an unprecedented and unique environment in which people could express themselves without "consequence". Over time, traffic became more centralized, moderation became more strict, and focused on keeping advertisers happy, and a chilling effect has caused people to increasingly self-monitor. Hordes of people who do not value what the internet once was, have flooded in since at least 2007, and constantly pressure others to follow "the rules" of society. The internet became more closely tied to the real world and its social restrictions.

What people did in tribal societies is so far removed, it has no relation to this topic. There's no need to "broaden it". I'm not going to put up with any pedantry either.

Post edited on 6th Sep 2022, 5:33am

>>40422
I expected your experiences to pertain to society in general, not just the internet. After all, this is an "internet and technology" thread, not a mere internet thread. You explained the obvious, yet I expected something more, not just about the internet but about the way society functions as a whole, everything from the mainstream media to the behavior of agencies like the FBI.
I guess I could craft such an explanation myself, but I'm too busy currently to do so.

>>40422
In regard to "broadening" it: When most people hear "technology," they think of highly advanced gadgets like their phone and robots, yet this is a tiny, tiny aspect of what technology really is. Everything from the most primitive spear to the pencil to the printing press to power plants to laptops to clocks (the clock itself being one of the most important technological inventions ever) to the compass... one could even argue that "techniques," like the techniques of engineering, chemistry, biology, science in general, even magic and alchemy (though those were irrational techniques), etc., fall under the category of "technology."
So a thread on "the internet and technology" with an exclusive focus on the internet would make no less sense than a thread on "history and technology" where mainly historical events were discussed and technological advances across the millennia were mostly left out of the discussion.
Of course, there were a few good comments in here on technology in general, but I feel that the ratio is totally skewed.
The people on here in this thread remind me of leftists who attack "capitalism" and think they've nailed it when the things they blame for capitalism really stem from technological advances that they themselves support.
Likewise, you see people on here limiting their spectrum of criticism largely to the internet rather than (while still discussing the internet to a decent extent) expanding it to full-on discussion of mass mental illness induced by technological advances, of the risk of engineered pandemics and the problems of geoengineering, of environmental damage, and so forth.
It hurts my soul to watch people be so confined in a topic so broad.

>>40424
So now you're being pedantic about the OP's wording of the subject.
>an exclusive focus on the internet
Because that's what most people care about here.
>mass mental illness induced by technological advances
Are you the same person as >>40403 ? So you want a causation versus correlation debate. Blah blah blah, the world is complicated, here's a bunch of quotes written by "authorities" on the subject.

>>40424
>When most people hear "technology," they think of highly advanced gadgets like their phone and robots, yet this is a tiny, tiny aspect of what technology really is.
Also, you realize how broad, "technology" is, yet you still want to generalize and debate the effect on society "technological advancement" has.

>>40422
It's not really about advertisers. The Internet was plastered in ads even in its Wild West days - ad-blockers exist because of the Web 1.0 plague of pop-ups and banner ads that played annoying sounds.
The real reason for all the censorship is twofold: the first reason is to please governments, NGOs, and investors; the second reason is that most people these days are so sheltered, closed-minded and immature, they WANT censorship.

>>40427
>The Internet was plastered in ads
Smaller companies don't care as much, and larger ones may have tolerated the state of things before, but it wasn't an ideal situation for them. What they want is television 2.0.

>>40403
I don't actually think we are advancing that much. I really feel we have this "progress" idealogy, but at the same time stopped being interested in progress. It results into this weird mish-mash where one has to justify horrors because one does not want to step out of the zone. You can tell me that people half a century ago saw progress. After all, someone born in 1900 by the age of 80 saw real progress all their lives. They lived to hear about the first plane flight, to in few decades see commercial jets flying around. He saw the man taking to the moon and other planets, just as he saw the first digital computers. He lived through the civil rights movement, just as he lived the whole restructuring of geopolitics around the world. He saw the invention of different forms of art. Can you imagine playing beetles in the 40s? Or can you imagine Billy Idol playing in the 60s?

You don't have that now. Last 20 years I don't know what I saw. Nothing politics wise changed, and the only technological changes I actually experienced is the current AI craze and the smartphone. First one for me is wasted opportunity, and other one is just a toy made for consumption. It's only real innovation is the touch screen, because outside of that it's just a small unix laptop without a keyboard.

There are actually many things you can mention that went down in quality. Houses are unaffordable nowadays, when it was pretty normal to be in your 20s and move out. People have far less autonomy today too. Think of all the papers one has to fill in his life, all the expenses that need to be paid which just weren't there. People also live more and more isolated. If you go search, nowadays people call themselves more lonely than before too.

I think really this anti-tech standpoint reaches from it too. I just find it funny when people say they hate technology. And you push them around a bit and it comes down to "I hate environment destruction" and "social media". The first one takes pretty much place because there's no regulation. There is nothing in technology that says it has to be unsustainable. Ours just is because we didn't bother to make sustainable technologies. The anti-social media argument is weird too. Social media only exists because of how disconnected we are nowadays. No one was interested in communication technologies outside of a phone just 30 or 40 years ago, because it wasn't needed. People had bonds and interesting lives for which they didn't need to get on phones to escape them.

>>40417
I am a "zoomer". I'm aware of how my generation, including myself, is being increasingly targeted with induced technological sloth and I'm disgusted by it. I think we've gotten so far removed from the real purpose for technology that we've forgotten what that purpose is and have become slaves to the neurological tricks that technology plays with our instincts, instincts which we evolved during a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with completely different priorities. These people would be incapable of fending for themselves in just a slightly older version of the modern socioeconomic world, let alone in a past civilisation or god forbid the wild. They're a bunch of sad, failed animals, and I can only see them as animals. What real progress have we actually made? Computing as a main focus seems to be a death spiral trap for civilisations, because we already had enough computing power to navigate the stars in the 60s. Everything since then is just making worthless toys for an increasingly helpless middle class propped up by third world cheap labor in or out of their countries. The Tesla? Self-driving cars? What fucking purpose does that even serve? What real genuine benefit does it provide to human civilisation? What, so people can watch a fucking marvel movie on their way to work? It's pointless. Transportation peaked in the mid-20th century along with a whole bunch of other things. The only net positives for technology since 1970 have come inn the form of better nuclear weapons targeting technology.

I really want you to tell me exactly how a generation of overgrown children coddled by the cradle of technology benefits humanity, because I don't see it.

Don't wanna ramble too much but I really hate 8chan's webring. That place is completely dead, and yet it somehow attracts the worse kinds of people. It reminds me of /v/ and other social media cultures put together. I think "branching out" to other sites, even if they aren't social media is so pointless. Web browsing feels soulless to me these days. Like I might as well be staring at the wall or thinking strongly of the past.

>>40385
Kiwifarms has now also been purged from Internet Archive.

>>40429
Not him but life actually has improved quite a bit in many fields like that. The Smartphone is an end result of the growth and progress made with the internet, it's just a way to access the internet in your hand.
This internet has changed our lives in massive and beneficial ways. We live in a world now where everything is available to us from our computers. I can buy any book in the world now(well not literally any) and have it shipped straight to me, I can buy niche products like medieval swords or anime merch as well. We are no longer restricted by what the stores in our area sell, the world is our marketplace now.

Even regarding paperwork. Everything can be done online now, even taxes though I guess that depends on your country. In my country my income is monitored by the government and they have a website that means because all the income is monitored, I just log in, tell them my tax file number, my income for the year comes up on screen, I browse through it, click accept and it's done, I just did my taxes.
The stock market is also far easier to get into now.

The effect the internet has had is huge. Though granted, it does come with negatives as well on a societal level and that is the issue I have with society, it's full of degenerate bots these days and highly politicised as well. But that is caused by how they use the internet and what sites and apps they use, not the internet as a whole. Nobody is making you use Tictok or Facebook or whatever, I never will use them.

Regarding house prices, it's a market that is what prices do particularly when everybody wants property in a certain location, but it's not actually that hard to get a house if you chose to live 30 minutes outside the city instead of in the city. We have also had very low interest rates for a long time now so that helps, well helped, not now I guess. But then that is what the market does it changes, as does the economy in general. In 10-20 years house prices will drop dramatically due to the way our demographics are going, wages will go up as well.
And prices have not all been bad, the price of electronics and other consumer goods has dropped by a huge amount over the years.

I would not say Social media exist because we are disconnected, Facebook was started as a way for people who already knew each other to connect online. We are incredibly connected now, not just with friends(if we have any) but the world as a whole, I think that is actually the problem. Society is becoming a hivemind.

Though something else I will mention that I thought funny. >>40403 says people are living longer than ever before. I just read that life expectancy in the US is now the lowest it has been since 1996. Luckily I am not American.

>>40436
>Not him but life actually has improved quite a bit in many fields like that. The Smartphone is an end result of the growth and progress made with the internet, it's just a way to access the internet in your hand.
I know what it, but the only difference it has between a laptop is it's size and a touch screen. Besides that it's the same device but worse, as laptop was designed for work. Just the nature of the phone UI makes it bad for anything outside of consuming. The screen is small so you can't use have many buttons on screen. There are swipe movements, but those are problematic. Think of a drawing app which would use swipe movements as "undo" command. It's asking for trouble.
>This internet has changed our lives in massive and beneficial ways. We live in a world now where everything is available to us from our computers
That's true, but it has been doable for nearly 20 years. Paypall was founded in 1998 and that was the first online paying service so far I know. By 2005 you could buy all sort of stuff online. Those aren't really recent changes, and I would say the whole internet really rides off the hard work that was done more than 30 years ago.
>Even regarding paperwork. Everything can be done online now
A better question might be, why does paperwork even exist nowadays? Computers are the best anti-bureaucracy machine ever created, as moving tables, calculating numbers, and appointing dates is something trivial for a computer. Yet the bureaucracy and paperwork have risen all over the world.
>Regarding house prices, it's a market that is what prices do particularly when everybody wants property in a certain location, but it's not actually that hard to get a house if you chose to live 30 minutes outside the city instead of in the city
Well, not the case where I live, but I'm from a country which says it has a housing crisis so there's that. But taking it as a whole, houses everywhere have risen. It may still be cheaper if you live further away from some city, but cheaper today was the same as expensive yesterday. And putting it just on demand and supply is hard for me to believe. UK population growth for instance is just a steady line, yet it's house price growth is exponential. So to blame it just on demand you have to believe for some reason magically all work got centralized in one location that people suddenly want to move there.
>In 10-20 years house prices will drop dramatically due to the way our demographics are going, wages will go up as well.
To believe that things will get better you have to believe something will change. And as it is, wages haven't been rising with productivity, and what wage you have means less and less. Be it because of inflation or inequality I can't think of moment in history where things just got better by themselves because the economy sorted itself out besides maybe before 20th century because there wasn't that much to sort out. When we look at the past, 30s and 40s had huge government sponsored job creation to keep the economy afloat in the world and a war, which lended itself well because there was lot of demand for work. I kinda hate how big and dramatic this sounds, but usually bad times don't sort themselves out if we look at it historically, and I would say we are going now or are in pretty bad times.
>We are incredibly connected now, not just with friends(if we have any) but the world as a whole, I think that is actually the problem. Society is becoming a hivemind.
Well, this is an view only someone could have today. Because we lowered expectations about what connection means. Imagine going to someone 60 years ago and telling that being connected with the world means "sitting in your room without friends while a screen on occasion gives you a pop up which reads some news completely unrelated to your life and probably written with intention of enraging you". It would sound like some dystopia. And this applies to eveyone nowadays. Since even in a family, it's not uncommon to have kids complain that their parents aren't available because they are on their phones. It leaves you with these "connections" which essentially are people you only will most likely read from only once in your life, speaking in sentences so short they lack any nuance or hold any meaningful information. Connections used to mean people you could count on and be intimate with. That's getting erroded more and more today. That's worse than just a hivemind.

With that said, I feel I sound too negative. Not because I don't believe what is happening is bad, but because I kinda don't like "shouting" into someone how bad it is. It just feels wrong to me and I know I tend to write in a bit anger inducing tone, so don't take this as an attack on you, it's on the current situation.

>>40437
>I know what it, but the only difference it has between a laptop is it's size and a touch screen. Besides that it's the same device but worse, as laptop was designed for work. Just the nature of the phone UI makes it bad for anything outside of consuming. The screen is small so you can't use have many buttons on screen. There are swipe movements, but those are problematic. Think of a drawing app which would use swipe movements as "undo" command. It's asking for trouble.
I agree, I hate them, but the utility comes from the internet which they can access, not form the device itself.

>That's true, but it has been doable for nearly 20 years. Paypall was founded in 1998 and that was the first online paying service so far I know. By 2005 you could buy all sort of stuff online. Those aren't really recent changes, and I would say the whole internet really rides off the hard work that was done more than 30 years ago.
That's the nature of technology in general. There probably where things that needed to be worked out first as well, from a coding perspective, a business perspective and maybe a network perspective.

>Well, not the case where I live, but I'm from a country which says it has a housing crisis so there's that. But taking it as a whole, houses everywhere have risen. It may still be cheaper if you live further away from some city, but cheaper today was the same as expensive yesterday. And putting it just on demand and supply is hard for me to believe. UK population growth for instance is just a steady line, yet it's house price growth is exponential. So to blame it just on demand you have to believe for some reason magically all work got centralized in one location that people suddenly want to move there.
My country is said to have a housing crisis. Regarding London, more people do want to live there and are buying property there. London has always been a place where foreigners want to buy land. I heard that more Indians own property than English people there now.

>To believe that things will get better you have to believe something will change. And as it is, wages haven't been rising with productivity, and what wage you have means less and less. Be it because of inflation or inequality I can't think of moment in history where things just got better by themselves because the economy sorted itself out besides maybe before 20th century because there wasn't that much to sort out.
The reason I say this is due to the ageing population which will lead to a decline in peopel of working age making labour more valuable. This also makes houses cheaper as there are less people to buy them, old people already have them and as old people die they will be passed down to younger people.
We have never had anything comparable in history though, this has never happened.

>but usually bad times don't sort themselves out if we look at it historically, and I would say we are going now or are in pretty bad times.
True enough, I think things may get worse before they get better, well with what is happening with the sanctions war that is guaranteed now.
That is actually what worries me, because Europe is reaching the point where the working age population reaches a plateau, after which there is a drop off and the economy shrinks. During this time she is particularly vulnerable as she adapts to the new norm, the last thing she needed was to de-industrialise herself.

>Well, this is an view only someone could have today. Because we lowered expectations about what connection means. Imagine going to someone 60 years ago and telling that being connected with the world means "sitting in your room without friends while a screen on occasion gives you a pop up which reads some news completely unrelated to your life and probably written with intention of enraging you". It would sound like some dystopia. And this applies to eveyone nowadays. Since even in a family, it's not uncommon to have kids complain that their parents aren't available because they are on their phones. It leaves you with these "connections" which essentially are people you only will most likely read from only once in your life, speaking in sentences so short they lack any nuance or hold any meaningful information. Connections used to mean people you could count on and be intimate with. That's getting erroded more and more today. That's worse than just a hivemind.
I never had friends to begin with so it's hard to say, but my family members still all go out and do all the normal things that people do.

>With that said, I feel I sound too negative. Not because I don't believe what is happening is bad, but because I kinda don't like "shouting" into someone how bad it is. It just feels wrong to me and I know I tend to write in a bit anger inducing tone, so don't take this as an attack on you, it's on the current situation.
I don't take it as an attack at all. There are plenty of things I hate about the way the world is heading too, I just feel that technology is not really one of them, not in and of itself anyway.

This was bound to happen eventually. Either the corporations would take over to make a profit, or the government would step in after figuring out how the internet works, unfortunately both of them happened at the same time and in some way they both collided with each other. Cloudflare getting politicized and attacking Kiwifarms has some negative connotations about the future of these tech companies. It's not going to stop at cloudflare, VPSs and registrars have acted politically in the past but it's only going to get worse from here. The final straw would be if ICANN gets politicized, since there is literally no alternative to ICANN, they have complete monopolistic power over the internet's domain names, and they are a corporation, a non-profit yes, but they don't have a constitution to abide by or any regulations holding them accountable for censorship. They could in theory deny you a domain for your political beliefs.

Some people have said semi-ironically and unironically to just make a "second internet", but we don't need to go that far. The back-end for the internet, i.e. the lines of cables that are underneath the sea, can still be used, just with different protocols. I would say the solutions to these problems exist, it's just a matter of how many people use them. The fediverse decentralizes internet communication, solving the "single point of failure" websites like Twitter and Kiwifarms have. And as for domains, we can either say "fuck it" and just use IP addresses to access websites, use Tor, or use ENS, either way, there are options, it's just a matter of getting people to use them.

>>40445
Great post, and I'll just also add that Internet Archive deleting their archives of KiwiFarms has chilling implications for verification of provenance. One of the good points about the internet is that it has allowed you to get easy access to primary sources: you no longer need to trust that a random journalist has done due diligence and can instead dig through things yourself. With archives deleted, history can quite literally be rewritten: Imagine that you are a neutral party just finding out about this kiwifarms drama and want to investigate both sides. Because both kiwifarms and most accessible archives (*) are taken down, the barrier to investigating one side has risen considerably. Raise it high enough and it will be trivial to drown it out with "party-line" sources like wikipedia and news articles (**)


>just with different protocols. I would say the solutions to these problems exist
Distributed protocols face their own set of challenges. There's an inherent tradeoff between dyanmic-content and distributability. Serving a static set of resources is trivially distributable (you don't even need to go to ipfs, mere torrents are an example of this) and can be made pretty resilient. But if you start needing to serve dyanmic content (e.g. most traditional websites which are a crud wrapper around a DB) then distributability becomes a lot harder, and the anonymous nature of overlay networks like Tor can work against you in facilitating DDoS.


(*) I believe archive.today still exists, but unfortunately they are only single-page snapshots and do not crawl outlinks like IA did, so it's less suitable for exploratory purposes.

(**) In fact, we saw this scenario play out with the whole covid-19 debacle, where those who were willing to trawl through data realized that 1) estimated mortality was inflated and effects to young adults were negligible 2) effectiveness of the vaccines was overstated and 3) side-effects of vaccines were non-trivial when stratified by age and sex roughly 1 year before it was acknowledged by mainstream sources.

>>40445
>we can either say "fuck it" and just use IP addresses to access websites, use Tor, or use ENS
I would suggest yggdrasil, especially in place of plain IP addresses. Introducing a blockchain component would be over-complicated and tortuous in my opinion, which would make adoption an even bigger hurdle.

>>40445
>but they don't have a constitution to abide by or any regulations holding them accountable for censorship
Even if they did, I don't think that would help. Just look at any Constitution or governmental document, they get violated all the time.
It's all a popularity game.