Original article http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/an-apology-for-the-internet-from-the-people-who-built-it.html
Did Al Gore think it would come to this when he invented it?
I just want to get ahold of the SOB that invented pop-ups.
They may be identifying a problem that needs a solution. But they don't have the solution.
>>”Those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created,” argues a new article in New York Magazine titled “The Internet Apologizes”. Today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being “weaponized.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he lamented recently...
If people in the future are literate enough and thoughtful enough to even write history, the Internet will probably be remembered as the greatest monster ever invented by man.
Addictive my asterisk. I’ve spent most of my waking hours on the internet for years and I haven’t even come close to getting addicted.
With Regrets
“The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. The fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to weaponize the web at scale.” —Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web
“We really believed in social experiences. We really believed in protecting privacy. But we were way too idealistic. We did not think enough about the abuse cases.” —Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook
“Let’s build a comprehensive database of highly personal targeting info and sell secret ads with zero public scrutiny. What could go wrong?” —Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
“I don’t have a kid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are some things that I won’t allow; I don’t want them on a social network.” —Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” —Sean Parker, first president of Facebook
“I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, What did we bring to the world?” —Tony Fadell, Known as one of the“fathers of the iPod”
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. This is not about Russians’ ads. This is a global problem.” —Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of user growth at Facebook
“The government is going to have to be involved. You do it exactly the same way you regulated the cigarette industry. Technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and product designers are working to make those products more addictive. We need to rein that back.” —Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce
We are the internet, the internet is us. Most people are idiots. They always have been and always will be. Technology is a double-edged sword that unveiled that fact at the speed of light. Shallowness just a click away, stupidity at your fingertips.
You ever notice the relatively recent phenomenon and rise of school shootings started around the age of the Internet, like took off in the 1990s? In an era of “Instagram celebrities” and e-celebs who’ll do anything for attention, it must be attractive to some deranged teenagers to shoot up a school for quick widespread notoriety. I certainly think the Internet and 24-hour cable news have played a bigger role in it than guns, which were prevalent in the U.S. in the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, etc., and kids then weren’t shooting up schools left and right. To say guns are the main cause almost implies that the possession of guns in the United States wasn’t legalized until the 1990s.
Now it is very difficult to host content content on the Internet. Most users don't realize that they are not directly connected to the Internet. ISPs using something called NAT (network address translation) which corrals you into a private unroutable network. Even though your computer has an "Internet address" assigned by your ISP, it is meaningless outside of your "jail".
In the early days of the Internet, if you wanted to make files available to others, you just ran an ftp server on your machine. Today that is no longer possible unless you pay recurring fees to your provider for a "real" Internet address. Just look at your network speed. It might be something like 30 Mbps down, and 5 Mbps up. This asymmetry is not the normal way the Internet was meant to work. Up and down speeds were the same. But now you ISP stands as a mediator between you and the real Internet.
There has been talk of creating an Internet 2. It is still nascent, but it will fix what has been broken and corrupted by the present system. The current Internet has become a one-way street for corporations to track you and to flush their video toilets into your living room. They have turned the Internet into something worse than cable TV. The censorship imposed by Youtube, Google, and Facebook is appalling to all those who remember the early days of the Internet and its promise of the free flow of information and ideas.
Did the inventors of radio and TV feel the same way? They must have.
This isn't actually about the evolution of the Internet, it's about the post-partum depression over the advent of social media, which is not the same thing at all. It is rather amusing to hear the cyber robber barons bleating for more government regulation as the answer to their own excesses. In the face of such regulation they wouldn't be in a position to demand it.
"Don't gather the data" is probably the least workable of solutions, since it's unenforceable and not really the source of the problem. It's what is done with the data that is the problem. In the face of this, Google's notorious corporate slogan "Don't be evil" is certainly the most cynical bit of post-modern irony ever constructed; "be evil and revel in it" only requires the additional caveat "and blame somebody else" to be a perfect formulation of the actual activities of the self-named gatekeepers of information flow. In fact, the pendulum has swung from a pretense that perfect objectivity is possible to the present conviction that any objectivity is impossible and irrelevant in the face of the accretion of power.
This may swing back to a slightly more acceptable middle ground, but it's making an awful mess in the meantime. One of the most unintended results of the empowerment of the common user to communicate to millions of his or her peers is not the freedom it confers but the ruthlessly enforced groupthink it allows. The answer to that is not, unfortunately, more regulation.
It’s Tim Berners-Lee’s fault, if not for him we’d be swapping text files via Gopher.
I don’t want social philosophy from the people who design my communications protocols anymore than I seek legal advice from the dog groomer. Just do your stinkin jobs and twiddle bits.
From the article “The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being “weaponized.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he lamented recently...”
The same can be said of TV media, homowood, and the archaic old media empire.
What brought on this apology? Per the article, it was the election of President Trump.
There is no apology for child pornography and abuse, other forms of sex trafficking or any of the other criminal activity that the internet enables and protects.
The other thing is that they really think that they are the cause of Trump’s election. They have no idea that “we the people” exist. They actually believe their own lies and that people can be so easily manipulated by them.
I wish them well and hope they find a way to liberate themselves from their own feedback loop of outrage.
The internet has created irreversible changes in how we interract, even how our brains work, but their real lament is that the leftist overlords do not have complete control over it and, by extention, us.
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