I'm going to take issue with AI destroying the internet. Our short attention span profit driven culture was already well on it's way to trashing everything that was good. AI is only accelerating the inevitable.
> that's like saying we were going 10kmh, it's nbd that we accelerate to 1000kmh since we were gonna hit the wall anyways
Devil's advocate: folks will take that wall a lot more seriously at 1,000 km/h.
"At Jena and Auerstedt the backwardness of the Prussian Army became apparent. By 1806, Prussian military doctrines have been unchanged for more than 50 years—tactics were monotonous, and the wagon system was obsolete" [1]. They had been obsolete for some time. But they didn't break until they hit Napoleon's army.
Similarly, we have a lot of social plumbing that became–with the benefit of hindsight–obsolete with social media. It was possible to ignore, however, because the rate of change was slow. Now it isn't.
social media in uk law = any website with a message feature.
social media in common parlance = anything from whatsapp and discord to youtube and tiktok, even sometimes aliexpress. anything with a doomscroll feature. anything showing videos, messaging between users allowed or not.
its common usage is confused, the same as the common usage of trolling has strayed from its original meaning because normies picked it up and started using it to mean anyone abusing someone from an online account.
> because weve been able to send messages to each other on a computer since the 50s...
My first partner was born in the 70s and didn't even have a landline growing up.
Here's some stuff I think counts as "plumbing" (i.e. infrastructure) of social connections, which has been lost since the 50s:
• Local newspapers (everywhere, I think?), where an actual editor could (and to a limited extent was held responsible if they didn't) filter out the conspiracy theories.
• Village churches (that might be mainly a UK-specific thing, IDK?) and other similar local community groups, where your local decisions couldn't be brigaded and overwhelmed by fans of a billionaire living on a yacht, as those fans would need to travel to your village personally and most people couldn't be bothered. Now, even when the groups still exist and meet, they can be brigaded.
• Yellow pages getting replaced with Facebook et al insisting that their ad system is the only way any small business could possibly get their name out, when a significant fraction of ads are outright scams.
i feel like peter hitchens saying this, but i agree the british social life is decaying. i thought you meant something else by social plumbing. i cant argue other than i dont think the village churches actually do prevent brigading, locally anyway, and its that small minded middle-englander mindset that the internet actually smashes. my nan was all bout dat life, and they ostracized hetero divorcees, and you can imagine what they thought of gay people... so if you agree with them its fine, but if its your only choice of social group its not so great. ill take the point there is very little public space where people can even assemble to create a group in the first place though
> i thought you meant something else by social plumbing.
Check the names, for all I know JumpCrisscross did mean something else. :)
> my nan was all bout dat life, and they ostracized hetero divorcees, and you can imagine what they thought of gay people... so if you agree with them its fine, but if its your only choice of social group its not so great.
I'm not claiming the old way was perfect (IIRC my gran was a generation that thought it scandalous to change denomination), just that it wasn't so easily manipulated from different continents. Back then it took a lot of effort over an extended period to do what can now be had for a few dollars of LLM tokens, and 5 years ago could've been had for tens of thousands of dollar-pound-euros spent on people gig-economy-ing tweets while they work at something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
The difference I point to the effort required to pull it off, and adaption to it, not of existence.
Yellow journalism was when we had not yet adapted to print.
The satanism scare was when we had not yet adapted to international news.
We're in the "yellow journalism" phase of social media.
And there was nobody to push back against the satanism scare (straw men are so very easy to fight against, and it was at the time a straw man); a better reference for those eras would be the Hillsborough disaster where coverage by the Sun got it boycott in the region because it had become more difficult to get away with stuff like that than the newspaper itself could manage, and conversely the limited coverage of mistreatment of Mau Mau era Kenyans in UK press because their treatment was a national embarrassment and the highest levels didn't want that embarrassment.
> Yellow journalism was when we had not yet adapted to print.
people still believe whatever shit is in the daily mail even today. there are just far less yellow journals now... its in the collective memory that papers print shit for profit. maybe. i cant fully explain why it stopped
> The satanism scare was when we had not yet adapted to international news.
it was the late 80s wasnt it?
> a better reference for those eras would be the Hillsborough disaster where coverage by the Sun got it boycott
national newspaper. could still happen now.
> The difference I point to the effort required to pull it off, and adaption to it, not of existence.
yes. the printing press had similar effects. IE lies could now travel much faster than before, much easier. im sure people made similar grumblings about gutenburg as you have done about AI. are you slagging the printing press the same way though?
This is exactly how we collectively "solve" so many problems today though, its far from unique to this topic.
We over medicate people, especially the elderly, because each new med has side effects and they're dying eventually anyway. We print more and more debt to paper over massive budget surpluses because the unspoken reality is that we're financially screwed either way. We pile more and more regulations on because we'd rather further grow the government and kick the can a few more times. We bolt one new emissions system after another on our diesel engines because they're already unreliable, who cares.
We don't consider how we got here, only what the next step we take should be. And don't even ask where a step should be taken, progress requires changing things constantly and we rarely give ourselves time to look back and retrace our steps.
Your examples are not supporting your premise. Over medication is from all the attempts to fix all the various medical conditions found. Adding regulations are to fix all the problems of people finding new ways to abuse the system.
This is entirely opposite from accelerationism, which would advocate for less medication so that sick people die quicker, and less regulation so that society would be exploited faster and collapse faster.
Well, then our disagreement is that I feel we were already going at 1000km/h. Nowhere did I say we should keep doing this or it was a good thing or we should ignore it. My point is simple: we already needed stop a long time ago.
Let me re-use your analogy. We were already driving off a cliff, and we are trying to blame the fact that we're pushing on the gas and accelerating however we're ignoring that we were already heading that way and brake lines were cut.
Beat me to it. Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Google/YouTube, and TikTok have done quite a bit more damage to the Internet than AI.
The future of the net was closed gated communities long before AI came along. At worst it’s maybe the last nail in the coffin. But the coffin lid was already on and the man inside was already dead.
AI is, I think, more mixed. It is creating more spam and noise, but AI itself is also fascinating to play with. It’s a genuine innovation and playing with it sometimes makes me feel the way I did first exploring the web.
I can download uncensored models pretty easily. There’s even uncensored frontier models. My machine isn’t big enough to run those but you can rent power to run them pretty cheap if you want.
Are you kidding? Look at who runs and funds OSI. It's a revolving door. The main purpose of OSS for the last 20 years has been to "commoditize your compliments" and/or dump on the market to destroy competitors. Any license that attempts to restrict this behavior and prevent billion-dollar companies from simply strip mining OSS is "not OSI compliant."
The entire OSS "cloud native" ecosystem is an on-ramp to expensive managed cloud. It's intentionally designed to be complicated and arcane to sell managed services. Sure you "can" run it yourself, but wouldn't you rather Google or Amazon run it for you?
The main role of OSS in the ecosystem is as a parts yard to support SaaS. SaaS is the most closed model of software development and sales, far more closed than closed-source commercial software you run on your own system.
The OSS mindset is generally stuck in the 1990s and has not updated its understanding of the world since then.
Agreed: The Internet has long been up-to-your-eyeballs with low quality content (i.e., bullsh-t). Blaming LLM software for it is ignoring the well-known reality of just a year or two ago.
Nope. You just miss the millions of SEO websites that was normally easy to spot and to ignore. Now you have millions AI generated SEO webites that are difficult to spot and only contain slop that doesn't help to find the information you search.
This is the same stupid reasoning that told us Trump would be a good outcome because the system was imperfect and ruining it fully would magically create a better one.
I didn't say this was a good thing, I only said things were already fucked. And Trump is also a symptom of a deeper rot in our system. He just happens to be the asshole who took advantage of it.
If you don't fix the deeper issues, it doesn't matter what's going to happen. Blaming AI is blaming a symptom, not the cause.
Stating that we need to fix the deeper problem isn't even close to the same thing as whatever this nonsense is you responded with.
