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Veteran author and longtime Silicon Valley resident Andrew Keen has stepped up his criticisms of the Internet. Describing the net as a platform that has devolved from its initial ideals and promise into a vehicle of monopolistic, manipulative and exploitative practices, a Guardian article summarizes views now gaining traction. By using Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber or any other online giant, are we striking a Faustian pact, behind which lays a mass of suffering, surveillance and ruthless harvesting?
Keen supports his arguments by mentioning that even online businesses that cite individual collaboration, those of the 'sharing' economy, are mere cynical fronts for firms already valued in the billions. As money has been sucked out of retail, transportation, photography, research and other industries into the coffers of new Internet giants, the net result has been losses of jobs and the compromise of working conditions. As for the Internet's much-touted 'individual empowerment', Keen counters with the rise of mob mentality - “Rather than creating more democracy, it’s empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it’s unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network". Keen's book - The Internet is not the Answer - is, a touch ironically, available on Amazon.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:44PM
Man, I hate all these /code-powered "mere cynical fronts for firms already valued in the billions."
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:47PM
I can't really believe that Dice is valued in the billions. It seems more like a hundreds of millions range at the most.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:57PM
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ADHX&ei=LYnaVMntJ9GSsgeqz4HoAQ [google.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by frojack on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:10PM
I think he manages to throw in just about every cause celeb and buzz-phrase you can come up with, and chooses to have himself photographed which a sneer [guim.co.uk] worthy of a Jeff Dunham's Walter [sodahead.com]
The man drips with get off my lawn.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 11 2015, @04:34AM
(Score: 5, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:47PM
Keen's book - The Internet is not the Answer -
So what was the question? I'm guessing it wasn't "Siri, where can I find pr0n and warez?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:54PM
The question was "What material possession can quell my human need for meaning?"
Because that's pretty much what everyone one of these books seems to want.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:51PM
The Internet has NEVER lived up to those supposed "initial ideals". It is is what it is.
By using Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber or any other online giant, are we striking a Faustian pact, behind which lays a mass of suffering, surveillance and ruthless harvesting?
Pretty much yes. But we don't HAVE to 'use' those services. We are free to create and use others. Hell, SoylentNews itself is an example of that.
Now google and facebook in particular do seem to have their hooks into almost everything and avoiding them is harder than it should be, and that does strike me as unfortunate. I'm not sure what the solution is; regulation seems the only possible solution. America at least lacks the stomach for that, but I think Europe and other countries are slowly moving. (And will inevitably make missteps and overreaches along the way...)
Keen supports his arguments by mentioning that even online businesses that cite individual collaboration, those of the 'sharing' economy, are mere cynical fronts for firms already valued in the billions.
I agree with this - the sharing economy is often (but not always) a complete joke. But the only 'con' is in the name: 'sharing economy'; which conjures some sort of benevolence and reciprocity. "Crowdsourcing" is more accurate, call it that, as in to source resources from crowds. If you want to really drive it home call it "uncompensated crowd sourcing". Its not inherently exploitative; although it certainly can be, but so can anything. I think Walmart exploits people who are right on its own payroll. That doesn't represent total failure of the "employee-employer model" though.
As for the Internet's much-touted 'individual empowerment', Keen counters with the rise of mob mentality - Rather than encouraging tolerance, it’s unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network"
Anyone whose been on the internet from its beginning knows that this is not new. It was there from the start. And its not just women that were targeted. Gays. Minorities. People who like emacs more than vi regardless of their creed or the color of their skin. Anyone can be targeted. As the internet has moved mainstream its just become something that affects the mainstream instead of being limited to a smaller subculture.
But Keen is wrong about one thing. It HAS created more democracy. That is the problem. Raw democracy IS mob rule. We are just re-learning perhaps that raw democracy isn't all its cracked up to be. Because lots of people are ignorant, corrupt, or will lie, or are assholes. And when you give them all a voice... their vocal diarrhea will flood the place and any imaginable minority will be trampled on.
THAT is the promise of true democracy. The Internet is just an object lesson of the truth of that.
(Score: 3) by VLM on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:25PM
created more democracy
I thought it strange that the dude used language for political decision making, instead of something that fits the topic, like publishing language or cultural language.
The dude is just full of weirdness like that.
Another example is talking about the crony capitalist system of winner takes all, but describing it as a "digital economy" as if magically going back to vinyl LPs would make the record companies act civilized.
OR "Meanwhile, the internet’s inherent “1% model” is functioning perfectly" No that model has been around in music and pro sports since my grandpa was a little kid. I assure you "the internet" didn't invent it.
He may be suffering from a blurred vision, a variant of the religious problem of evil, if god exists and is so great why does evil exist, etc. Well, if the internet is everywhere and evil is somewheres then obviously correlation being causation, the internet must cause evil. After all, everywhere a puppy gets run over in the street, there's probably wireless internet access, so the internet obviously kills puppies.
Or maybe its just 1984 / brave new world style agitprop doublespeak.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:17PM
Another example is talking about the crony capitalist system of winner takes all, but describing it as a "digital economy" as if magically going back to vinyl LPs would make the record companies act civilized.
OR "Meanwhile, the internet’s inherent “1% model” is functioning perfectly" No that model has been around in music and pro sports since my grandpa was a little kid. I assure you "the internet" didn't invent it.
Seems like that is the point of calling it a con. The utopian internet was about decentralization, but it isn't living up to that, instead it is enabling more concentration of wealth and power.
I remember back in the 90s, disintermediation was the big buzzword, but now all the big money is in the form of intermediation. Amazon Marketplace, Uber, Facebook/Instagram, SnapChat, Ebay, etc. They are all services that get between individuals and extract money from being middlemen in ways that ought to be little more than automation that could be handled with a distributed/p2p system. I still hold hope that faster symmetric internet connections will bring that about, but given the hundreds of billions of dollars concentrated in the current regime, it is going to be a fight 100x worse than the MAFIAA's war on the internet.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @04:04AM
When literally anything and everything can be bought, of course it will all be bought by those who are able to. The solution is for money to no longer be the most powerful force known to man.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 11 2015, @02:56PM
The solution is for money to no longer be the most powerful force known to man.
There will always be trading of power and the ability to make things happen. By making the medium of exchange something other than money, just means you won't be a part of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @07:53AM
The fact that it is money means 99.9% of people can't be part of it already.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:15PM
The fact that it is money means 99.9% of people can't be part of it already.
I disagree, of course. You can obtain money. And 99.9% of people is a lot of people, should they decide to pool their money for something.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday February 11 2015, @04:01AM
The Internet has NEVER lived up to those supposed "initial ideals". It is is what it is.
Considering it was initially developed as a network that could withstand a nuclear holocaust, I'm OK with that.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:52PM
You never need to tell people your gender or post pictures of yourself. You'll still get insults, but they're just insults. Stop taking everything so personally. Stop posting mundane details of your life online. People never walk up to random strangers and tell them everything about themselves, so why do they think doing it online is somehow better?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:58PM
Because it's easy to pretend that faceless individual on the other side of the screen is whatever we want them to be. A friend, a confidant, someone who cares, a lover, it doesn't matter.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @08:59PM
You must be a woman, now shut the f*** up and let the men handle this.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:40PM
You never need to tell people your gender or post pictures of yourself.
Pretty much this. A lot of folks will assume you're a guy, but what does it matter?
I also don't understand why so many girls don't know where the /ignore is at… or expect 4chan to be somehow not 4chan.
Maybe I'm just not playing the right video games or going the right places, because the internet doesn't seem to be a hostile place for me at least.
I can think of a few names recently that have been in a few headlines, and I'm certain in those cases they were being harassed and threatened not because of anything between their legs. I'm pretty sure if I got on global chat on a MUD that appealed mostly to guys and started calling “all men” immature misogynists who couldn't get laid, then that might become a hostile place for me. Or maybe I'd just get banned and leave it at that instead of going to Twitter to turn it into a sob story.
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:46PM
It's probably because a lot of people (men and women) actually *care* about what random strangers thing about them. I don't get this either, but it certainly seems to be the case. People get upset when other people don't like them or disagree with their ideas. Some of us are able to tune out the noise, but a lot of people never learned to do so. It certainly doesn't help that our current society seems hellbent on trying to keep everyone's feelings from getting hurt.
Honestly, it doesn't matter what gender, race, creed, religion, etc you are. There is someone out there that hates you, and they are willing to let you know in no uncertain terms. You can cry and whine about how unfair it is, or you can learn to ignore it. No, it doesn't make it right. No, I'm not excusing it. If you want to waste your time crying about and and shouting how unfair it is, go ahead. But ultimately, the only way to keep it from damaging/ruining your life it to learn to accept it and let it go. You will never make everyone nice. Never in a million years.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @11:56PM
> No, I'm not excusing it. If you want to waste your time crying about and and shouting how unfair it is, go ahead.
Hey, crying about it and shouting how unfair it is is my *business model*, you insensitive clod !
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:34AM
+1 sad but true
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by GeminiDomino on Wednesday February 11 2015, @01:23AM
Please go away, Ms. Sarkeesian.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @02:16PM
(Score: 2, Informative) by WillAdams on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:05PM
Rather than selling the book, he should've made it available under a free license and posted it to wikibooks.
Moreover, he's ignoring opensource efforts which are individual driven or otherwise exist purely for the good of humanity:
- reprap.org
- shapeoko.com
- http://opensourcecureforcancer.com/ [opensourcecureforcancer.com]
- http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ [might.net]
- http://opensourceecology.org/ [opensourceecology.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:12PM
archive.org
github
freebsd
The nicer parts of 4chan meet your criteria. Nobody hangs out in /diy or /out because they're whoring for karma and upvotes and internet fame, they just hang out there because they like the topic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:17PM
There are some other bright lights in the darkness. A couple off the top of my head:
https://www.freecycle.org/ [freecycle.org]
http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites [craigslist.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:14PM
Rather than creating more democracy, it’s empowering the rule of the mob.
wtf does keen think democracy is if not mob rule?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mtrycz on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:23PM
"Democracy" is just an elaborate scheme of the few to govern the many, by making them actually *participate* in it.
Genius.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:39PM
This is a great insight. You can get out the pitchforks and torches as long as there is a dictator you can dethrone but what if it's supposedly yourself you have to be angry at? That's the real kicker of democracy.
And it gets even more silly if there are basically two rotten parties you can choose between...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 11 2015, @06:47PM
Interesting...and very true.
If you are choosing between multiple parties you don't have a Democracy, you have a Republic. Of course that first insight can be applied to both (as well as a few other systems probably.) Which is worth pointing out I think because the entire point of a republic is supposed to be to mitigate some of those problems of democracy. If you read some of The Federalist Papers you'll see that America's founders put a hell of a lot of thought into how to prevent the problems of mob rule. The solution they came up with kinda sucks too, but they did put a lot of thought into it...and at the time it might well have been the best solution available. We can do better today, but raw democracy still is not the answer.
I do actually think raw democracy is perfectly fine on the internet though. It's not quite what actually exists there, as a lot of companies have far more power than other individuals. And decisions are most often based on dollars, not votes. But when you're just talking, democracy is fine. It's when you start looking at decisions about where to send troops or who to lock up in prison where things start to break down. Mob rule is only a problem IMO where it becomes impossible for people to simply disagree and walk away. Mob rule is a problem when it starts violating peoples' basic human rights, but it's damn hard to do that with TCP/IP packets alone...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:02PM
Yes, so it seems more and more. Give the rabble the illusion of participation, but not real decision-making power. Then you get to have your cake and eat it, too. No more pesky rebellions and coup attempts, just herds of sheep rushing the entrance to Walmart to get in on the 2-for-1 deal on Cheetohs. Every once in a while you pick out a sacrificial lamb from your ruling circle (usually the guy who laughed insincerely at your escargot joke) and railroad him, to both show him and give the rabble the illusion that you have the rule of law and that the rest of you are really good, honest guys who are obscenely wealthy because you're [smarter|harder-working|hotter|more talented|beloved of Jesus].
I think the successor political system to this must screen out sociopaths and other amoral actors.
But between now and then it would be helpful for the people of the world to have a full and transparent accounting of how the world really works, and the anatomy of every lie. Opensecrets.org and Wikileaks have part of it, but tech people can also play an important role because the villains of the world rely upon our skillset more than any other now to carry out their schemes. We can refuse to help, expose them, and take away every scrap of the very privacy they have already taken from us (for starters).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:54AM
I read a good article the other week about how truly democratic that ancient city-state was and how the USA's founding fathers had turned the notion into an oligarchy (by specifying a republic with a tiny number of individuals who form the actual inner circle).
N.B. I'll add that the Citizens United SCOTUS decision was the coup de grace.
What would it be like if we really lived in a democracy? [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [dissidentvoice.org]
...and, getting back on the original topic, most online places are a dictatorship where you can get banned/deleted on the whim of 1 guy.
The paywall'd and members-only-even-to-read sites are a meme all their own.
At other online places with comments, it's more of an anarchy ("without rulers"), bordering on the common (but incorrect) connotation of that word: "chaos".
None of those is democratic to my way of thinking.
The Slashcode mod system is the most democratic meme I've seen, specifically the recent S/N update that includes a no-points-off Disagree moderation.
...and a big High 5 to the guy that made sure Slashcode offered a threaded presentation; I HATE flat forum presentations.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 11 2015, @02:15PM
First, gewg_, if you sign your posts, why bother to post as Anonymous Coward? It doesn't make sense.
But I do agree that the Slashcode mod system is the best way I've yet seen to boost the signal-to-noise ratio. For me it supplants Robert's Rules of Order, which is the nah-nah-nah tyranny of lawyers from the 17th century that persists to this day among those of that ilk, and MUNUC enthusiasts.
There is still room for improvement on Slashcode. One that occurs to me is to borrow an idea from hackathons, whereby you post your project idea, the kinds of help you need, and have functionality whereby people can pile on with you. It doesn't really work so well with hackathons because those mostly tend to be one-off affairs, but here it could work brilliantly. It's also a more structured version of what Linus did originally when he asked people to help him build Linux; that turned out pretty well and I think many other excellent projects could likewise develop here.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 11 2015, @03:35PM
N.B. I'll add that the Citizens United SCOTUS decision was the coup de grace.
It's just a natural defense of the First Amendment. The rule of law doesn't always swing your way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @09:29PM
First Amendment
A supermajority of Americans disagree with that position.
If you were to poll a group of USAians, I'm pretty sure the numbers would come out with about 97 percent saying "Money is not speech; corporations are not people."
The rule of law doesn't always swing your way
True--in the short run.
Dred Scott (1854)
The black man has "no rights that the white man is bound to respect".
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
"separate but equal"
Brown v Board (1954)
"separate is inherently unequal"
Bad Supreme Court majorities come and bad Supreme Court majorities go.
...and people need to remember what happened in France in 1789 when the system had become so lopsided and unfair.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fadrian on Wednesday February 11 2015, @01:26AM
Immoral actors will be with us always. And any control system can be corrupted given application of enough power. Although one can ameliorate these two factors, one can never eliminate them. As such, one must always have a non-bypassable way to limit the amount of relative power ever aggregated by any one group. Right now, this is done, but at high cost, by revolution. It would have been nice if the founding fathers would have ensconced this as a founding principle, as well as individual liberty. I don't think they ever thought that networks of bad actors could take down a system this quickly. Where is the scalable governmental system for the world that avoids this? That minimizes exploitation while maximizing benefit? Communism may not have been the solution, but the oligarchy we have now as a result of (unfettered capitalism, corrupting influence of government on the free market, take your pick) isn't either. Our system did not scale in the face of technical change. Leverage granted by technological capabilities and associated network effects continued apace while the systems of governance lagged behind, allowing too few to exert economic control and lay virtual serfdom on the many. What system to use? Who knows. It must allow individual success to be rewarded while limiting power to those who are so successful that they gain enough power to destroy the system? Myself, I think setting an arbitrary limit on what anyone can own works best. Make it something large enough to let someone live his life out in almost absolute luxury - I don't know... pick a number. Index it to the overall wealth of the nation. After anyone obtains this amount, fuck, I don't know how you make him redistribute it, but redistribute it he must, lest he accumulate too much power over his fellow man. In the end, if you want a stable system that destroys neither freedom nor the system that provides prosperity, you must have some form of redistribution to limit the amount of power any one actor or coordinated group of actors can obtain because otherwise, you do get revolution.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:02PM
Yes, and it should reward innovation and meaningful contributions to the common good. No more worthless bankers sitting around playing number games that don't actually produce anything. No more bond traders getting obscenely wealthy in the circle jerk that is the debt market. In fact, we should replace every class of financial worker with a very small shellscript.
The dream of striking it rich is a good motivator, so a system that eliminates that won't thrive. A system that discourages hard work by taxing labor many times the rate of taxing capital will not thrive. A nation that transforms itself into a society of layabouts who collect handouts--and rents--from an increasingly hard-pressed middle will fail. If you siphon capital from the productive and hand it to the shiftless poor and shiftless ultra-wealthy, the pool of the future's entrepreneurs, engineers, and social drivers will starve.
So your idea of a cap on wealth could be an answer. Something on the order of, "Once you have $100 million, you can afford anything anyone would ever want."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 11 2015, @09:54AM
"Democracy" is just an elaborate scheme of the few to govern the many, by making them actually *participate* in it.
Given this interpretation of democracy, what do you think of people who wring their hands about "mob rule"?
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday February 10 2015, @09:34PM
Be quiet! You're letting everyone know our little secret!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:07PM
His basic assumption is crap. The Internet was not invented to liberate and empower its users. It was invented to connect computers together, what we do with them after that is up to us.
The fact that he can start his own Internet service, whatever that might be, using free software, and low cost hardware has not occurred to him?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:26PM
basically, he is addressing the 'sales pitches of the 90s' or hype of the 90s that the internet would be all these great things and make life wonderful for everyone. i do remember seeing a lot of messages from commercials and politicians stating things to that effect around the mid 90s.
basically, the internet was an austere paradise at first - like the New World when it was first discovered. it offered great amounts of opportunity and potential in the beginning - again, like the New World. well, it's no longer the New World. it's about the same as the old world now.
where ever man boldly goes quickly becomes like the place he left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:41AM
where ever man boldly goes quickly becomes like the place he left
very true
agent smith said it well too... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM1-DQ2Wo_w [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @02:20PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @06:34PM
Back in my day: "It [the internet] was invented to connect computers together."
Now its: "The internet was invented to liberate and empower its users."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kbahey on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:27PM
Every technology invented by humans will have its proper uses, misuses and abuses.
The flint blade, fire, metals, money, telephones, cars, and the internet.
All can be used for good, but can also be used for evil, be it killing, control, exploitation, or what have you.
The internet is a tool, and a medium. It will be misused and abused. Just the natural progression of things in human society.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning [2bits.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @01:13AM
Fire wasn't an invention.
Flint ignition could also be considered a discovery.
Now, the fire saw|fire bow were inventions.
Methods to mine, refine, and cast metals were inventions but "metals" existed before humans showed up.
/pedantic
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 10 2015, @10:30PM
Of course the internet is not the answer. The answer is 42.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @11:30PM
We need a new verb to denote the act of baselessly ascribing misogyny to $THING_YOU_DONT_LIKE.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 10 2015, @11:44PM
Gamergating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @01:53AM
This thread has been Sarkeesian'd.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:11AM
As money has been sucked out of retail, transportation, photography, research and other industries into the coffers of new Internet giants, the net result has been losses of jobs and the compromise of working conditions.
I'm pretty sure that every other victim of changing times felt the same. Sears Roebuck mail order, automobiles, industrialization, and more all had "victims" of their progress. Nobody wants to be the buggy whip manufacturer after cars gain traction but there you go. Nobody owes anyone else a living.
“Rather than creating more democracy, it’s empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it’s unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network"
Sure, mob rule sucks. People used to go around doing things like lynching, stoning, burning, etc to each other to death for all sorts of reasons. If the only flames you're feeling are from the internet, I would call that a net win to your freedom to express yourself. Moreover, there are support communities where you don't expose yourself to mob rule but still get a network of other people who share experiences you do and can help you figure things out. You have enormous information at your fingertips.
You may not be able to express yourself as publicly as you might like on the internet and not get SWATted if you piss off the wrong people, but the other advantages massively outweigh that drawback. Other than not using your real identity and having to be careful enough with your alternate identity to not be outed, you're free to express yourself in all sorts of ways that you've never been free to before. If you're "mainstream" and not controversial you will likely not even have those restrictions.
(Score: 1) by gmrath on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:35AM
"People used to go around doing things like lynching, stoning, burning, etc to each other to death for all sorts of reasons."
They still do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @01:49AM
Hopefully not too often in places where people are overly concerned with internet trolling though. ;o)
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:31AM
File this under, "No Shit, Sherlock".
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SuperCharlie on Wednesday February 11 2015, @01:14AM
I've come to believe that like physics with its equal and opposite forces, that everything comes with an equal and opposite, a ying and yang.. Nuclear power? Nuclear bombs. Entire knowledge of humanity at your fingertips? Complete loss of privacy. Just about anything you can think of as good seems to have an equal and opposite bad... Just the universe keeping things balanced.
Remember..nature not only abhors a vacuum, but equally abhors excess.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by shortscreen on Wednesday February 11 2015, @06:02AM
The internet lives up to its promise of providing access to information and a means of communication. You can find out almost anything there is to know about culture, history, science, technology, geography, you name it. And you can add your $.02 by putting up your own website (I have a shared hosting account, it's much cheaper than my home internet connection and with a much higher monthly data quota).
Most people only use it to visit owmyballs.com run by EvilCorp? That's too bad for them.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday February 11 2015, @06:17AM
Instead, it has handed extraordinary power and wealth to a tiny handful of people, while simultaneously, for the rest of us, compounding and often aggravating existing inequalities – cultural, social and economic – whenever and wherever it has found them. Individually, it may work wonders for us. Collectively, it’s doing us no good at all. “It was supposed to be win-win,” Keen declares. “The network’s users were supposed to be its beneficiaries. But in a lot of ways, we are its victims.”
I think these basic premises are outright wrong. While I grant the internet has minted a new set of billionaires and given more power to entities like consumer tracking companies and intelligence agencies, it's not that useful for most existing wealth and power. Meanwhile the common man has access to more knowledge, trade, community, opportunities, entertainment, etc than they would have in the absence of the internet. For example, I can trade stocks online, play games with people from all over the world, look up any knowledge (it has to be remarkably obscure or provincial to not have a detailed presence somewhere on the internet), and trade all manner of things globally.
Part of the problem here, argues Keen, is that the digital economy is, by its nature, winner-takes-all. “There’s no inevitable or conspiratorial logic here; no one really knew it would happen,” he says. “There are just certain structural qualities that mean the internet lends itself to monopolies.
Except that's not actually true. Sure, there are some areas where persistent market dominance happens, but monopoly means no competition, not merely that there's someone with a lot of market share.
As for the Internet's much-touted 'individual empowerment', Keen counters with the rise of mob mentality - “Rather than creating more democracy, it’s empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it’s unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network".
Democracy is mob rule. That's just the way it is whether or not the internet exists. For example, this was a problem in ancient Athens (at least according to Plato who complained bitterly about Athenian democracy and the resulting politics on numerous occasions). They didn't have internet back then.
And as to "encouraging tolerance", even if that should be a high priority (with which I don't agree), what makes him think it's not happening? Even using his example, women are far more empowered on the internet. People are far more exposed to alternative viewpoints. What more does he want? Pull out the magic pixie dust and make everyone love each other?
And can't he come up with a better or more serious example? It's starting to sound like he was a sore loser of GamerGate or some similar meaningless cultural skirmish. Too bad for him.
This sort of crap bugs me because it starts off from a position of delusion and can't go anywhere interesting as a result. It's a comfortable myth to claim what we do makes things worse. If that were true, then how did we manage to get to this point? Similarly, it's been fashionable at least since the time of Plato to mock the common man in the guise of helping. That hasn't been productive, but the game still goes on, two and a half millennia later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11 2015, @12:54PM
I fully agree on the privacy issue, but most of the Guardian's article about Mr. Keen's book is in fact about the other thing: suppressing the intermediaries aka middlemen. Internet has always been about this, and on spite of its widely publicized upside of course it has always had a downside - sometime these middlemen were the shop owners in our neighbourhood.
Up to now, globalization has been concentrating mass production more and more. Electronics in China, shipyards in South Korea. Now Internet is concentrating the mass retail too. -Ignacio Agulló
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Wednesday February 11 2015, @08:40PM
Internet's got nothing to do with democracy; democracy is a social problem.
What do you need for a democracy? An active, educated population. Let's just cut out the "active" and say you need an educated population. Bam, there's your problem, come back again.
Considering that the value of an education is less than the value of your wallet and your consumer appetite (plus or minus your firstborn), and that the price of an education, well, just take a gander at those tuition numbers (in the US, anyway), and capitalism ho! let the market forces do their thing.
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