Mass Consensual Hallucinations

April 19, 2018 9:42 AM

‘One Has This Feeling of Having Contributed to Something That’s Gone Very Wrong’ - VR pioneer Jaron Lanier on internet politics. Meanwhile according to Laura Hudson If you want to know how we ended up in a cyber dystopia, read Ready Player One
posted by Artw (51 comments total)

I'm 10 sentences in and it's brilliant from square one. (the Jaron Lanier link)
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:50 AM on April 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

I want to be wrong. I especially wanna be wrong about the March for Our Lives kids. I really wanna be wrong about them. I want them to not fall into this because they’re our hope, they’re the future of our country, so I very deeply, profoundly wanna be wrong. I don’t want their social-media data to empower the opposite movement that ends up being more powerful because negative emotions are more powerful. I just wanna be wrong. I so wanna be telling you bullshit right now.

So far it’s been right, but that doesn’t mean it will continue to be. So please let me be wrong.

My 14 year old son is marching tomorrow and I feel this so deeply.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:56 AM on April 19, 2018 [16 favorites]

I was just about to post ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’ from the same interview series, but the piece you chose has more insight.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:57 AM on April 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

Lanier makes a very important admission, I think:

And one of the things I wanna point out is that back at the time when Facebook was founded, the belief was that in the future there wouldn’t be paid people making movies and television because armies of unpaid volunteers organized through our network schemes would make superior content, just like what happened with Wikipedia. But what actually happened is, when people started paying for Netflix, we got what we call Peak TV — things got much better as a result of it being monetized.

This is one of the great tensions, I think. We need to kill the cult of the amateur, and acknowledge it for what it is - class warfare.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:01 AM on April 19, 2018 [26 favorites]

Laura Hudson's article taking down of Ready Player One is also making me nod my head quite a bit. Great post. Lots to chew on here.
posted by Fizz at 10:24 AM on April 19, 2018 [12 favorites]

From the second link: mired in the utopian misconceptions that defined the childhood of the internet as well. As the online world has moved into something more like middle age

Perhaps the only insight we can get from the current batch of observers of the Internet is that any attempt to predict the near future or even to grasp what's currently going on in the realm of TCP/IP needs to be taken with a grain of salt virtually immense size.

And I really find the apologists for the problems of the Internet utterly disingenuous, from the very beginning there was a strong if often misguided sense of social responsibility which continues. But along with good intentions all the foibles of humanity were there if one went looking.
posted by sammyo at 10:28 AM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I like Jaron Lanier's style, even though the first thing I remember on hearing his name is that he used to have some slightly nonsensical opinions about VR and zombies back in the day. But if the "nerdy insurgents" I was rooting for in 1992 had won, we'd all have cryptographically secure online privacy by now and Uber would be a ride-sharing app instead of a taxi service masquerading as a ride-sharing app to avoid regulation.

His proposal to make Facebook users start paying for the service seems good though. That of all things would surely allow at last something that's properly decentralized, federated, and generally well-designed to take over its niche.
posted by sfenders at 10:30 AM on April 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

Oh, I love this.
I don’t wanna make too much of my own contribution, but I was kind of the first author of some of that rhetoric a long time ago. So it kind of stings for me to see it misused. Like, I used to talk about how virtual reality could be a tool for empathy, and then I see Mark Zuckerberg talking about how VR could be a tool for empathy while being profoundly nonempathic, using VR to tour Puerto Rico after the storm, after Maria. One has this feeling of having contributed to something that’s gone very wrong.

I really love this post.
I want to be wrong. I especially wanna be wrong about the March for Our Lives kids. I really wanna be wrong about them. I want them to not fall into this because they’re our hope, they’re the future of our country, so I very deeply, profoundly wanna be wrong. I don’t want their social-media data to empower the opposite movement that ends up being more powerful because negative emotions are more powerful. I just wanna be wrong. I so wanna be telling you bullshit right now.

So far it’s been right, but that doesn’t mean it will continue to be. So please let me be wrong.

Thank you for posting this.
posted by Don Pepino at 10:39 AM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when somebody acts as if they aren’t powerful when they actually are powerful. So if you’re still reacting against whatever you used to struggle for, but actually you’re in control, then you end up creating great damage in the world.

This is one of those observations that makes a whooole lot of things click once it's pointed out.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:39 AM on April 19, 2018 [51 favorites]

His proposal to make Facebook users start paying for the service seems good though. That of all things would surely allow at last something that's properly decentralized, federated, and generally well-designed to take over its niche.

Millions of accounts would instantly go dead. Even more so with Twitter. Would that on balance be a good thing? Requiring payment would instantly kneecap the young and the poor's ability to participate on a more equal footing.
posted by leotrotsky at 10:39 AM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Requiring payment would kill Facebook overnight. Allowing optional payments for features - like chronological feed and the ability to see everything you've subscribed to - would solidify the platform just as people are starting to look around for other options.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:43 AM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Yeah I am not a fan of Facebook. Particularly today, having caught up on the latest Crypto-Gram this morning. It would probably be better if it went away by some means other than unspecified powers arbitrarily crippling it, but any disaster that befalls it seems likely to be a net good, yes.
posted by sfenders at 10:49 AM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

". . . the principle of unaccountability as a tool of liberation — often framed in the language of 'free speech' — remains a cornerstone value of the internet; never mind that this 'freedom' is widely and actively deployed to intimidate and silence others on a massive scale."

This needs to be everywhere until the false-equivalence free-speech absolutists learn to deal with some damn subtlety.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 10:50 AM on April 19, 2018 [15 favorites]

Jaron Lanier: Can I just say one thing now, just to be very clear? Professionally, I’m at Microsoft, but when I speak to you, I’m not representing Microsoft at all. There’s not even the slightest hint that this represents any official Microsoft thing. I have an agreement within which I’m able to be an independent public intellectual, even if it means criticizing them. I just want to be very clear that this isn’t a Microsoft position.

It's weird growing up believing that Microsoft was the evil empire only to now see them (along with Apple) as the lesser evils of the tech world. Instead of being replaced by Linux and open source, they've been replaced by even more virulent scumbags like Facebook. I mean, sure Microsoft wants to sell software and Apple wants to sell hardware, but they're not looking to commoditize me as a person.

It's like in video games where you think you defeat the boss but then he comes back even more powerful with a bigger health bar.
posted by leotrotsky at 10:50 AM on April 19, 2018 [15 favorites]

> It's like in video games where you think you defeat the boss but then he comes back even more powerful with a bigger health bar.

There's this thing in prestige television where from season to season characters who you previously despised become something like the "good guys," not because they become any more inherently ethical but because the show keeps introducing new characters who are tangibly more disgusting than the old disgusting characters.

I first noticed this pattern in Deadwood... and frankly, I'm glad that show got canceled when it did, because I'm not sure how they could have come up with a character even worse than Hearst.

Anyway, though, despite the progressive introduction of bigger and bigger monsters over the course of the series, Swearengen never really becomes anything but a loathsome pimp. Likewise, despite the tech industry's ability to somehow always get even worse, Microsoft's never really become a good company — just ask anyone who's ever worn an orange badge.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:08 AM on April 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

when will this song stop being relevant, c'mon world, let's get it together
posted by eustatic at 11:09 AM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

eustatic: turns out we've got a bigger problem now.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:14 AM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I gave up on Jaron when I read You Are Not A Gadget and he was arguing against online communities, since they didn't really allow meaningful interactions between people. But, of course, he cited his oud community as the one example of an online community that really did allow those connections, since it was special and different.

That, and he was arguing against the very idea of object oriented programming since it inherently limited how we might represent the glorious variety of humanity.
posted by ged at 11:29 AM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Somewhat of a double from 5 days ago: https://www.metafilter.com/173564/Were-sorry-about-the-Internet
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 11:43 AM on April 19, 2018

eustatic: turns out we've got a bigger problem now.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:14 AM on April 19 [+] [!]

ah, the problem is one and the same!
posted by eustatic at 11:52 AM on April 19, 2018

There's this thing in prestige television where from season to season characters who you previously despised become something like the "good guys," not because they become any more inherently ethical but because the show keeps introducing new characters who are tangibly more disgusting than the old disgusting characters.

Villain Decay

I read something pretty recently about how this applies to Dubya, among others.
posted by Foosnark at 12:18 PM on April 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

One time Jello Biafra yelled at me. That is all.
posted by runcibleshaw at 12:23 PM on April 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when somebody acts as if they aren’t powerful when they actually are powerful. So if you’re still reacting against whatever you used to struggle for, but actually you’re in control, then you end up creating great damage in the world.

The essential reactionary is a grown man sitting amidst a kindergarten class, determined to throw the loudest, most violent tantrum.
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 12:28 PM on April 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

And one of the things I wanna point out is that back at the time when Facebook was founded, the belief was that in the future there wouldn’t be paid people making movies and television because armies of unpaid volunteers organized through our network schemes would make superior content, just like what happened with Wikipedia. But what actually happened is, when people started paying for Netflix, we got what we call Peak TV — things got much better as a result of it being monetized.

Paying for the work of artists is a UI problem more than a money problem.

If we could pay writers per page, with a system that could not be used by hackers to drain our bank accounts, and which did not take up our time and attention every time we paid a writer, well, we'd have Netflix for the written word.
posted by ocschwar at 12:33 PM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

The "We're changing the world for the better" rhetoric is how you get attention and money to do the thing you want to do. People have used the same rhetoric to sell every new product category since the birth of advertising. Things go off the rails as soon as someone who has to use that rhetoric begins to believe that rhetoric and willingly blinds themselves to the dangers and bad side-effects of what they've created.

I've read a piece by some tech manager type who suggested every product team have someone play the role of "professional asshole" (or Devil's Advocate, to be more polite) whose job is to find ways to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate the product idea for evil ends. The goal is to force the product team to think about unintended consequences, bad actors, malicious intent, and all the possible ways things can go wrong before they happen. Imagine if Facebook had that when they were developing their newsfeed algorithm! "We know people are more likely to click on and share stuff that creates an emotional response. What if some malicious actor uses appeals to negative emotion and tribalism to spread false information across users feeds?" Life would be a lot different if product designers and developers had to think these things through.
posted by SansPoint at 12:53 PM on April 19, 2018 [8 favorites]

Capitalism can't be trusted with computers.

A society can have capitalism, or it can have digital computers. If your society has both capitalism and digital computing, the acceleration will have its way with you. Your only hope is that after it passes you can salvage something decent from the wreckage.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:54 PM on April 19, 2018 [8 favorites]

> Imagine if Facebook had that when they were developing their newsfeed algorithm! "We know people are more likely to click on and share stuff that creates an emotional response. What if some malicious actor uses appeals to negative emotion and tribalism to spread false information across users feeds?"

You are making a key mistake: you are assuming that Facebook isn't itself a malicious actor.

"They trust me. The dumb fucks."

(Facebook, here, is a synecdoche for literally every tech company. The only thing special about Facebook is that their CEO was hubristic enough to call his clientele/victims "dumb fucks" out loud, instead of just thinking it.)
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:58 PM on April 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

There’s this question of whether what you’re fighting for is something that’s really new and a benefit for humanity, or if you’re only engaged in a sort of contest with other people that’s fundamentally not meaningful to anyone else. The theory of markets and capitalism is that when we compete, what we’re competing for is to get better at something that’s actually a benefit to people, so that everybody wins. [...] But if it’s a purely abstract competition set up between insiders to the exclusion of outsiders, it might feel like a competition, it might feel very challenging and stressful and hard to the people doing it, but it doesn’t actually do anything for anybody else.

I think this cuts to the heart of it: capitalism views everything through the lens of competition, and so when there aren't enough productive avenues of competition available it turns inwards, and grinds people against each other in negative-sum competition for rank and status in an increasingly pyramid-shaped society. I don't think this is a uniquely tech-related issue, but the computer-aided ability to quantify and monetize human interactions at ever finer levels of granularity has multiplied the speed and breadth of this destructive kind of competition.
posted by Pyry at 12:58 PM on April 19, 2018 [15 favorites]

Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon: You're right, in that it's possible higher-ups at Facebook would consider that a feature, not a bug, but if you have the lower-level staff charged with implementing this think it through, rather than just follow orders, there could be enough pushback to force management to reconsider. Of course, this would work better if Facebook's developers were organized and could collectively bargain.
posted by SansPoint at 1:01 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

techies could be the longshoremen of the 21st century: a relatively small class of workers perfectly positioned to, if they so desired, shut the whole show down.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 1:12 PM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

There's a weirdly... what, "manifest destiny" thing going on with a lot of the techies I talk to around here? Like the fact that they're doing things and getting rich doing them means they MUST be doing the right thing, the right way, and must be doing it better than everybody else.

I find it kind of troubling and shortsighted that people with that perspective have such a hand in building (and dismantling) vital infrastructure, but in my limited understanding of how the railroads and telecommunications networks got built, it's also not new that those kinds of pursuits attract or maybe cultivate that kind of incautious self-righteousness. Maybe it's the money, maybe it's the scale. I don't know.

I don't have a good solution, but I think about it a lot. Anyway, to whatever degree he's right about his predictions, Lanier is tremendously insightful and I appreciate his thoughts.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 1:51 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

techies could be the longshoremen of the 21st century: a relatively small class of workers perfectly positioned to, if they so desired, shut the whole show down.

Only eeeeeeeeevil longshoremen?

I mean, I have pretty positive feelings about longshoremen, who have historically been pretty left-leaning in the US. The only way I can picture tech people "shutting the whole show down" would be to extort more from the rest of us.
posted by Frowner at 2:00 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Longshoremen were/are powerful because it's easier to organize small groups than large groups, and they're a small group that can create outsized amounts of pain for the capitalist class by making transoceanic trade impossible.

Tech workers are likewise positioned such that a small number of workers can shut down the circuits of global capital. This is why, for example, back in the 50s and 60s a chief concern among executives contemplating computerizing their companies was about whether it was wise to trust their core business processes to a bunch of people who work on machines.

This is one of the reasons why software developers have historically been compensated so well. It's also one of the reasons why mid-20th-century computer manufacturers went out of their way to replace the women who made up the first generation of computer programmers with socially awkward white men from upper-middle-class backgrounds — a demographic carefully selected to be least likely to recognize the power of collective action.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 2:15 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when somebody acts as if they aren’t powerful when they actually are powerful. So if you’re still reacting against whatever you used to struggle for, but actually you’re in control, then you end up creating great damage in the world.

This is one of those observations that makes a whooole lot of things click once it's pointed out.

I wonder if the entire history of how-revolutions-go-wrong is encapsulated in this notion. AKA, be careful what you wish for, you might get it, and if it's power, watch out, because power can be very bad for you, and everyone around you.
posted by philip-random at 2:24 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

And further, from the Laura Hudson piece:

... considering how firmly nerd culture — video games, computers, comic books — has moved into the mainstream, and the massive economic and cultural influence it wields. We don’t need to create fantasy worlds where nerds are some of the most powerful people in the world and their predilections are constantly catered to — they already are. And yet for so many influential men in games and tech, the personal mythology of the underdog persists, even when they have achieved power and wealth beyond imagining.
posted by philip-random at 2:45 PM on April 19, 2018 [14 favorites]

I gave up on Jaron when I read You Are Not A Gadget and he was arguing against online communities, since they didn't really allow meaningful interactions between people.

Having been online for most of my life, I've recently concluded that I've never had an online relationship that was anywhere as close or as trusting as the relationships I've had with people I can physically see in the real world. Filtering a relationship through text, through conversations mediated by pressing an Enter key or a Submit button, allow you to avoid vulnerability, and project a part of yourself that you choose to share rather than the whole of you. You're never honest online. (Also text is an extremely lossy form of communication, which is why we've had to reinvent ways of injecting the facial expressions, tone of voice and body language that make up the majority of our communication >_>)

This might be a privilege thing. Maybe people who don't have anyone they can be vulnerable with get something from internet relationships. I still think it's a simulacra, and they need to get out somehow and go to a place where they can.
posted by Merus at 5:51 PM on April 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

I used to read critiques of Star Trek that gleefully pointed out how the writers failed to foresee the internet and social media, and now I think it really says something that they got to Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism without either of those technological developments.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 6:01 PM on April 19, 2018 [6 favorites]

I've read a piece by some tech manager type who suggested every product team have someone play the role of "professional asshole" (or Devil's Advocate, to be more polite) whose job is to find ways to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate the product idea for evil ends.

Where do I apply? I'm looking for a job and I would be great at this. Seriously.

Anyone?
posted by thedward at 6:50 PM on April 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

people get into this kind of mob mentality and they become unkind to each other. And those two things have happened all over the internet; they’re both very present in Facebook, everywhere.

Not to defend the behavior, but I wouldn't hold the internet responsible for that 'meanness'. That (in the US at least) is built into our culture. Did it facilitate that expression by offering anonymity? To some extent. But as 'Hellmouth' showed, that meanness is pervasive across our high schools ... and the meanness in HS students comes from ...

all around them.

So. The internet has also fostered a climate in which there's a lot of very manifest support for oppressed minorities. Because that oppression couldn't be hidden any more.

Yes, the tech world needs to look at itself in the mirror - and to protect our mutual values; that's a good thing. The spotlight was turned on -everywhere- and -everyone-, and has disrupted our previously limited experience of the world. It has let us more clearly see where we were at, and empowered us to mutually decide where we want to go.
posted by Twang at 6:52 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Facebook, here, is a synecdoche for literally every tech company. The only thing special about Facebook is that their CEO was hubristic enough to call his clientele/victims "dumb fucks" out loud, instead of just thinking it.

Okay, Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon, I really like your novels, but I think you maybe went a bit too far there. Literally every one? So, including Metafilter Network Incorporated? Decrying the various types of egregious bullshit that go on in mass quantities in large parts of the Internet is one thing. Taking those things as representative of the whole of the Internet is another, more obnoxious thing. And then extending it to the entire tech industry is somewhat excessive.

Some of the prominent social problems faced by users of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other such places that naturally dominate the discussion are not the fault of any specific policy those sites have adopted or action they've taken or not taken, they're the natural result of trying to put all the users in one place together as is inherent in their fundamental design that aims to run the entire show in one big centralized megasite. You let everyone in, the noisy voices will dominate.

You want more civil discourse to persist there's got to be either much smaller scale, where smaller communities can form and maintain themselves, or else some serious gatekeeping and moderating like here at Metafilter. The small-scale solution can happen by accident, as it does on many an isolated subreddit for example, but it isn't only capitalism that makes expansion and conglomeration a process that happens if you let it. For things to run better in this respect without direct intervention would require some source of dynamism and renewal that it's hard to imagine taking shape at the big social media monsters. Of course most of them do seem busy busy pushing things in the opposite direction in the name of getting people to look at more advertising, but it wouldn't necessarily be a problem they could solve even if they were inclined to try.

What we might call the Metafilter strategy also seems as if it's going to have a limit as to how far it can scale up. Maybe we're not at that limit yet, but I'll wager it will be hit well before the site gets a billion active users. If people can go wrong when they acquire too much power, so can web sites and indeed companies in general. You don't get a healthy economy if everything is run by oligopoly, and you don't get a healthy Internet it everything is run by a dozen giant corporations.

Fortunately it isn't as bad as all that, there are still a multitude of places, things, and resources not run by douchebros and fuelled by surveillance capitalism. The Internet is still not Google, it is not Microsoft, it is not AOL, it is not god damn Facebook, and it is not dead yet, however many people seem to think otherwise.
posted by sfenders at 6:52 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

> Okay, Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon, I really like your novels, but I think you maybe went a bit too far there. Literally every one? So, including Metafilter Network Incorporated? Decrying the various types of egregious bullshit that go on in mass quantities in large parts of the Internet is one thing. Taking those things as representative of the whole of the Internet is another, more obnoxious thing. And then extending it to the entire tech industry is somewhat excessive.

wait are you saying i might be paranoid?!?
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 7:05 PM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

Well I don't know about that, but as they say: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to monetize your feelings.
posted by sfenders at 7:16 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

This is one of the reasons why software developers have historically been compensated so well.

socially awkward white men from upper-middle-class backgrounds — a demographic carefully selected to be least likely to recognize the power of collective action.

These things feel truthy in retrospect, but are they actually true? Like I'd be interested to hear what steps were taken to ensure that second thing played out like it did.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 8:34 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

A society can have capitalism, or it can have digital computers.

Oooh, can I pick? Because computers are pretty neat.
posted by Foosnark at 8:44 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

Slate asks a good question: where were all the usual privacy advocates when it came to Facebook?
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:32 PM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

The worst effect that technology has had on me personally is that it has decimated my attention span. I am always scrolling, always trying to get to the end of a feed. I'm a rat pushing the lever, and I hate it. Some days the only thing that stops it is forcibly blocking sites (StayFocusd for Chrome). I wish there were a way to participate in the world without the internet, but it's become as necessary as food unless you don't need to work and don't care about politics or socializing. Obviously I've got some predisposition; it's not the technology alone or everyone would be like this. But there are hundreds of articles about struggling with smartphone use, etc. so I'm definitely not alone. Even aside from all the political and financial manipulation, it's changed us.
posted by AFABulous at 3:59 PM on April 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

AFABulous : c.s. lewis is on the whole kind of... bad. but this bit from Screwtape explains the internet well.

(background: this passage is in a letter that Screwtape, an apprentice demon, has received from his uncle, a demon much more experienced in the ways of corrupting souls. Screwtape's uncle refers to the souls he's corrupting as his "patients").

"As [his] condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, 'I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked'."

posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:03 PM on April 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've recently concluded that I've never had an online relationship that was anywhere as close or as trusting as the relationships I've had with people I can physically see in the real world.

OTOH, I know people who struggled for years IRL to find someone to share their 'real life' with, and finally found one. On the internet. The likelihood they'd have met otherwise *is nil*.

I'm not saying that there's such a thing as an 'online relationship', if there is such a thing. But one of the net's best features is that it lets many of us 'normal oddballs' find one another. And that's a damned fine thing. Can't hurt their children, either.
posted by Twang at 3:50 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

This Lanier interview is shit-hot.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:37 PM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

OTOH, I know people who struggled for years IRL to find someone to share their 'real life' with, and finally found one. On the internet. The likelihood they'd have met otherwise *is nil*.

I don't think this is incompatible with what I'm saying; how it started is not what the relationship is built on. A relationship that starts online and moves into the real world is on much stronger footing than a relationship that starts offline and moves into texts and Skype calls and other things mediated by screens and editing and pauses.
posted by Merus at 8:12 AM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]

Techno-Fundamentalism Can't Save You, Mark Zuckerberg - "Moderation is hard because it is resource intensive and relentless; because it requires difficult and often untenable distinctions; because it is wholly unclear what the standards should be; and because one failure can incur enough public outrage to overshadow a million quiet successes."

thank mods!

If I'm a banana in your grocery store, am I the product? :P

also btw...
-Whither Facebook Regulation?
-This Is the Most Important Number in Business
-Apple's co-founder believes the future of tech is people
-An Alternative to Mandatory APIs: Let Me "Hack Myself"
-We Need Mandatory Enduser APIs for Social and Search Systems
-From Advertising to Subscriptions and the Evolution of the USV Investment Thesis
posted by kliuless at 9:48 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]