Interesting how internet boosters in the late 90s/early 2000s told us the internet would revitalize democracy by making it so anyone could publish. I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out. Nor have I seen much of an attempt to revisit those early predictions.
> I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out.
Let's change that here and now! :)
I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it.
I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005 a version was published in a more academic context:
“Why the Internet is bad for democracy.” Communications of the ACM 48(10): 57–58 (2005).
RMS has seen our troubles with non-free software as early as in 80s. What he has not predict that the software has find even more cruel way of shipping - disservices which do not even allow the freedom 0.
BTW the statement about democracy is not a lie - everyone knows some big and small revolutions happened after someone's post in social networks. Also such things as anonymous news sources, torrents and bitcoin has democraticized a whole lot of things in our lives.
You should play Metal Gear Solid 2, or at least watch the last codec call[1]. See how much you can apply what it talks about to the current year. This game came out a month after 9/11.
Do you realise we have never had 'democracy' - we have 'representative democracy', a totally different thing. Thousands, perhaps millions of people, vote once every 4-5 years for one person to represent them on thousands of governmental decisions. That person is under no constraints to do what they said to gain your vote either - they can do the exact opposite with no repercussion.
Voting as we have it, is a highly abstract, meta "democracy", with 'the will of the people' effecting a meaningless level of force on the tiller. As per the design.
At least in the US, each person has a lot more than one representative they vote for, with multiple levels of government with different intended scopes. As much as that doesn't completely eliminate the problems you describe, I'd argue that that focus on only the first election listed in the ballot at the expense of the others is one of the (many) causes of how we ended in the state we are today. It's a lot easier for someone to be elected to represent you while ignoring your interests if you don't even know or care about the fact that they're running. If people cared more about local elections (and even federal elections other than for president), there would be at least some increase in pressure for legislative bodies to respond to the will of the people. Without that, the issue isn't even that they're going the opposite of what the people who voted for them want, but the the number of people who voted for them (or even for the candidates they're running against) aren't anywhere close to representative proportion of the population. We don't really know if representative democracy would approximate actual democracy because the people they're representing aren't the full population, but the small segment of politically active ones.
A new Strongbad email was published within the last month, to the surprise of probably everyone left who remembers Homestar Runner. The fun stuff is still out there; it's just not the only stuff there (and never was), and there's probably a lot more of that non-fun stuff too.
Fark and cracked in about 2007 were peak post development, profit motivated Internet. Homestar runner and albino black sheep (shout out to flashback for many fun dmt experiences) in about 2004 was peak fun Internet.
I remember when “browsing the WWW” literally involved scrolling through a categorized list of pages via a portal in Netscape. At the time, the only place I knew to get online was a single PC in the library at UNC Charlotte, where my mother worked. There was a sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web was. I taught myself to play the guitar using ASCII tabs on the OnLine Guitar Archive.
I used to work on a CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) integration for an in-house multimedia platform that was kind of like a game engine with distributed real-time rendering. We used https://html5zombo.com routinely to smoke-test: the animation and audio together made it easy to tell when machines were getting out of sync, or when we weren't pushing frames fast enough, or when the audio was broken (as pulseaudio and CEF version updates would often do). Good times.
I was hoping for more… maybe some ending cuts scenes, some recaps of adventures, maybe some cameos from developers… this just seems lazy and like my time/life was a wasted effort…
Readit News
For me the high point was Fark or maybe Homestar and the low point was obviosuly Facebook... or maybe the end of Democracy.
Let's change that here and now! :)
I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it.
I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005 a version was published in a more academic context: “Why the Internet is bad for democracy.” Communications of the ACM 48(10): 57–58 (2005).
Here's the FT version: https://www.citicolumbia.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Why-...
BTW the statement about democracy is not a lie - everyone knows some big and small revolutions happened after someone's post in social networks. Also such things as anonymous news sources, torrents and bitcoin has democraticized a whole lot of things in our lives.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA
History repeats
Voting as we have it, is a highly abstract, meta "democracy", with 'the will of the people' effecting a meaningless level of force on the tiller. As per the design.
Deleted Comment
http://endinter.net/
https://www.wired.com/story/weight-of-the-internet/
https://youtu.be/_uXtWIg_A7M?si=h0FSN79T5SDoUuGm