“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Datalinks
Alpha Centauri pertinent as ever.
We have abundant free flow of information today and yet I see a rise of tyranny.
"This is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause." feels more grounded in reality.
Peak free information flow was in 2010. When "social" media had its big break through, and nobody had learned how to control it yet. That time gave us the occupy movement, the Arab spring, and lots of hacktivism for the social good (mostly under the Anonymous umbrella).
Then the counter movement happened. And let's just say by 2016 social media was firmly under control and became a force against the people
I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss.
Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest. (from S2 Andor)
The loss of objectivity is one of the greatest losses. People who are online to want their trench to “win” are advocates for loss. People who abuse their position to only proclaim their side is the best, the all-knowing, the superior, or whatever the flavor is of the day, are advocates for loss.
And as we have seen, we are losing a lot by losing objectivity.
Yeah. I was saying "twitter gives you a revolution whether you need one or not". It's not automatic that the revolution will be progressive. And in the case of the Arab Spring, a liberal revolution gave rise to elections which brought in a much less liberal government, which is why the whole thing collapsed in short order.
But social media is also uniquely good at developing "negative polarization". Some of the counter movement was organic simply because people hated the progressive wins they saw.
> We have abundant free flow of information today and yet I see a rise of tyranny.
We have an abundance of allowed information today, there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information. Social media censoring, takedown requests, shadow banning, government censoring.
We went from restricting the sharing of information to making information sharing unpopular.
If you ban or censor a book, you immediately make the book seem more valuable. Because governments aren't omnipotent and all restrictions can be overcome (see the war on drugs as a particularly recent and pertinent example), you just Streisand-effect yourself.
If, on the other hand, you take away the popularity and social status of those who read that book, branding them as gullible idiots in the popular imagination, people will have an aversion to reading it. You don't need to ban access to the book, in fact you shouldn't do that, just make sure that talking about it will get people to lose all their friends.
Social media are the modern arbiters of popularity. If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
You pretty much described why I quit “social” media wholesale. It’s a turf war and nothing goods comes from it that cannot be got elsewhere at a vastly higher quality.
> If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
Isn't this basically just a form of forced compliance ? I agree it's happening, but its happening because the ideas/information is not beneficial for the one who can control the distribution. Before anyone could post on usenet, add their own tinfoil hat blog if they wanted, but take the UK for now, if there is any discussion or interaction with people on your website, the government wants your ID and your users'. It's exhausting.
This is essentially how das kapital got discredited in the public consciousness.
If you browse any CS career forum though, at least 60% of the complaints about "the industry" happen in most capitalist industries and typically have one or more corresponding chapters in das kapital (e.g. one of the various forms of alienation, treadmill effect, capital accumulation, the creation of a reserve army of labour).
>there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information
I don't think it sounds true. Pre-internet, information distribution required access to specific technical tools, and physical transportation efforts. As one of USSR dissidents noted, risks of distribution grew almost exponentially with amount of pages (and it's about imprisonment, not account deletion). For comparison, emailing so far works even in very repressive countries. And even narrowing the issue to the West, while free speech suffered a lot recently, shadowbanned account is probably still works better than hectograph.
> there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information.
There's an endless source of information if you look for it. Just because social media doesn't stuff them in your face doesn't mean they're censored.
On the other hand, you can shove proof in people's faces and they'll still find reasons to argue against it. Information availability is not the problem. It's more energy consuming to search and filter information so people largely avoid doing it.
There's a trope in movies where the antagonist is secretly recorded and broadcast so regular people finally see the truth and wake up. I've seen journalists risking their carriers to expose corruption only for people to shrug and look the other way.
Do we, or are a lot of people who may or may not be on the side of tyranny doing a lot of work to control how the information actually flows.
Not entirely true. Many science is gatekeeped, as well as other types of information. May books require illegal services to be obtained, or money (when available). Information about facts is buried in a lot of misinformation. Free flow is very hard to obtain!
We have peak flow of propaganda and disinformation to a cartoonish level.
Unfortunately we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack on information consumption.
It is trivial to concoct believable lies as compared to the effort needed to debunk them in a way that is effective at social scale.
Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary? Those who have the resources to do that do not have sufficient motivation. Often the motivation to do the opposite is stronger.
> Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary?
_Most_ developed countries do invest in the education and teaching of critical thinking. It's not even that expensive.
In most countries, if a political party prefers an uneducated voter base, they don't win elections. Or if they do, there are enough working checks and balances (and parties in the opposition) to prevent serious harm.
> we do not have a solution for countering this kind of a 'denial of service' attack
Umm, wouldn't a simple solution be going back to linear news feed that only includes updates from people you follow rather than the algorithm deciding what content to push to you?
We have the solution.
Indeed. And with AI and video generation, it's now (or within months) literally undetectable. The closer we get to US midterms, the more we'll see how bad it really can get this time around.
And the US elections in 2028? I can barely imagine.
And the massive problem is, most people I talk to still think what they see on youtube is real. But of course, people thought the TV show Survivor was real, too. It's not a new phenomenon.
But it is at crazy levels. I like your 'denial of service' designation, because even knowing the problem, maybe you can't find real info still.
While true, i don’t see how you can have one without the other.
“Fighting disinformation” is the banner under which free flow is necessarily interrupted.
Yes and no I think. If you analyse it, the censors will work to actually block channels where the truth can be shared. What's left over time is only the government sanctioned media, which over time becomes more and more corrupt with disinformation. So I think I agree with your second sentence but not your first, in that if we didn't pretend to fight disinformation, I think we wouldn't have so much of it.
queue Nina Janowicz at the piano
We don't. Search engines return a limited number of results from "trusted media" and dissident opinion, whether balanced or batshit crazy, is all lumped together as misinformation and conspiracy theory.
Search engines return a trove of SEO-optimized generated garbage. Search engines do not apply labels such as misinformation or conspiracy theory.
Try finding anything objective on the Ukraine war and you will find to have a constant narrative shoved down your throat
Actually they or at least social media does or used to do, peaking during the panny-d and dismantling the 'fake news' checks and balances during Trump II.
In Italy a left wing writer and historian declared publicly he was going to vote a certain way on a referendum and facebook flagged it as "fake news"… how could it be fake news if it was clearly just his own opinion and intent on what to do.
"We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding process--the childhood, if you will--that has the most far-reaching repercussions."
- Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Morgan Polysoft
Get off my land, you peacekeeping son-of-a-bitch!
Best 4x game of all time. The 2060 that game envisioned seems closer everyday.
GREATEST strategy and philosophical game I have witnessed in the past 30 years...
Peak of complexity and maturism in games...
I wish they would release a remastered version of the game with updated graphics and movies, with nothing else changed. The game mechanics were great. Beyond Earth was not good in comparison.
BE was so bland. Both in design and in terms of gameplay. Terrain affected like nothing.
I found the strat to go was to spam Scouts for resources, then get that upgrade that gave you Science per deal and spam every cheap deal as soon as you can.
As a child I never liked the AI's strategy to plop cities down right next to each other. I should see if I can understand that as an adult. If I was designing a remake/remaster it wouldn't even have updated graphics just change the AI.
[dead]
Is it really a safeguard?
"Already we have turned all of our critical industries... over to these... things... these lumps of silver and paste we call nanorobots. And now we propose to teach them intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need of us?"
Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
This game and its ideas are so timeless.
The "information wants to be free" discourse of just under 30 years ago feels so charmingly naive now that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow.
And who shall we appoint at the supreme arbitrator of what is lie and what is knowledge?
Some of us remember when they assured us that the novel virus in china was not to be afraid of.
And it wasn't, until it was. Before Covid-19 we had SARS and MERS, both of which were also watched closely but those didn't develop into a pandemic.
Some of us remember when they assured us ivermectin could cure it.
And hydroxychloroquine before that.
> And who shall we appoint at the supreme arbitrator of what is lie and what is knowledge?
Ask the parents of the Sandy Hook children, they'll tell you.
Truly something we still have to figure out. Attention budget is real and things can get buried. The really big problem of our time.
What exactly is this "information wants to be free" discourse? The arguments for and against freedom of speech as a foundational social principle span at least 300 continuous years.
popular refrain around the "Free Kevin" era ca. 1999 or so. See also "Boycott RIAA" etc.
I shared its optimism and naivete :-(
> What exactly is this "information wants to be free" discourse?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
> The arguments for and against freedom of speech
It’s not about freedom of speech but about access to information.
The discussions about intellectual property rights are quite recent, but the idea that "lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow" was well-explored over 300 years of discussions about freedom of speech (and not only discussions, but also jailings, executions, witch hunts, etc).
I think it should be pretty obvious that dissemination of information and lies today—when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country—is much different than 300 years ago. The “information wants to be free” motivation is much closer to the world of today than the one in your distant past.
More importantly, I don’t understand why you’re so hung up on that. What difference does it make? If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important? It doesn’t matter to the discussion, it’s only distracting from the point.
> I think it should be pretty obvious that dissemination of information and lies today much different than 300 years ago.
Of course, so what? If your implication is that none of the arguments made over 300 years are relevant today, I would say it is pretty obviously completely wrong.
> when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country
Did people in England and France use to know the authors of seditious pamphlets that were produced in the Dutch Republic and smuggled into those countries? Most of them were anonymous. Not only they didn't know the authors, the authors 100% were enabled by foreign actors.
> it’s only distracting from the point
The point: we've seen recently how damaging the fast spread of lies is therefore only naive fools would be against information control. My rebuttal: we've seen how damaging lies are for 300 years, yet it is a deep ongoing debate that many great thinkers contributed to, therefore it is not just a matter of fools believing into something.
Or do you see "the point" to be something different?
> If your implication is that none of the arguments made over 300 years are relevant today
No, the point is that for the purposes of this discussion it is irrelevant when the arguments were first made. And reread the original:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550066
Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea. It’s merely anchoring it to something recent HN readers have a good likelihood of being acquainted with. It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
I’ll ask again:
> If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important?
> No, the point is that for the purposes of this discussion it is irrelevant when the arguments were first made.
How is that irrelevant if the whole statement is literally about when the arguments were first made and supposedly disproven?
> Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea.
It literally says __now__ that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow, as if it is something recent.
> It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
If someone says that our views on colonialism were naive before Avatar 2 changed our perception of Avatar, of course it is fair to mention Pocahontas and 300 years of nuanced discussions of colonialism.
Why do you assuming only true information is information. Information can be anything not to mention that the definition of truths and lies can change with time and location.
My point is that in the late '90s that was the prevailing assumption about the growth of the internet. We have learned that this assumption was wrong.
> the definition of truths and lies can change with time and location
This is moral relativism.