It's a small piece of a wider process, but Jaron Lanier is having such a global impact; probably much more than what Anglos imagine.

not just jaron lanier! there are multiple thinkers who are fellow travelrs. Cal newport, Tristan harris, Nicholas Carr...

Tristan Harris, founder of the non-profit Center for Humane Technology (CHT) [0] has been quite successful at high government circles and board level of big tech companies.

At the time Mark Zuckerberg didn't want to testify in the UK, he testified to the UK House of Commons commission to inform them about Fake News [1]

In the corporate world the strategy is to 'Engage employees', make them aware of the harms of technology and philosophy of Humane Tech. I found it enlightening to see him address the opening keynote at Dreamforce 2018 "How to Stop Technology from Destabilizing the World" [2] to a hall full of SalesForce customers.

The CHT now focuses primarily on fake news, disinformation, political influencing problems that arise from tech - i.e. the topics where the risk for civic breakdown is highest, but they have also played a role in bringing the concept of 'Time Well Spent' - focussed on healthy tech use - across at e.g. Google and Apple (but much to be done still in this area).

PS. I represent the Humane Tech Community, which is affiliated yet operates independently of the CHT, as a grassroots movement [3].

[0] https://humanetech.com

[1] https://community.humanetech.com/t/witness-account-of-trista...

[2] https://community.humanetech.com/t/must-see-video-explaining...

[3] https://community.humanetech.com/t/who-we-are-what-we-do-and...

The other day I heard Time Well Spent get thoroughly mocked in The Culture podcast, but I was too out of the loop to understand why. Still am.

Not sure if this was about the CHT then, as there exists still the Time Well Spent movement (as a FB group). But it could well be. The CHT realize quite well that TWS constitutes only a small part of what makes tech humane. Also the way that companies are adopting it, has a great deal of marketing to it (akin to 'greenwashing'). So you could say that regarding TWS some tiny steps were made in the right direction.

I'm also concerned that the fight against political influencing by fake news and whatnot quickly becomes a tool for political influencing itself. I've seen it first hand. I've just seen it happen in the third world: elections are actually well regulated and at the decisive last week, the incumbent party A who has been in power for 15 years accuses the outsider of using fake news (they even used a picture of Steve Bannon) spread through Whatsapp to influence the election. In due time the social network companies actually answered to department of justice probes and said nothing out of the ordinary (mass forwards, etc) had happened at all. This, of course, was after the election.

They "stole" quite a few points from the then-frontrunning outsider too. It wasn't enough because it was too-late-too-little; they were too far behind. And yet, the narrative that the outsider won because of fake news steve bannon donald trump russia stuck. International press reports of it are still around. What, is Glenn Greenwald going to own up to dirty maneuvering?

I think the green-washing comment is definitely on-point. co-opt the opposition and there is no opposition.

Tim Wu makes the case for breaking up tech giants, and FB specifically, at book length

Are you referring to master switch or attention merchants? been meaning to read both.

They're likely referring to The Master Switch, but I'd definitely recommend both. They're fantastic books, and Tim Wu really goes into significant depth in each.

I've been following Nicholas Carr for a while. It's just that Jaron Lanier specifically is making quite a splash in the "developing world". His message particularly resonate with our banana-republic election season online panics.

"Fellow travelers?"

Been a while since I've heard that.

everything old is new again

No. More than a quarter of Americans and half of "young people" have not reported anything about Facebook.

In point of fact, a quarter of the 4,594 people surveyed by Pew Research between May 29 and June 11 report deleting the Facebook app.[1] Of those, half who qualify as young deleted the app.

Stop getting your statistics from news. This kind of casual stats citing frustrates me beyond belief. Audit your sources.

________________

1. http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/201...

>In point of fact, a quarter of the 4,594 people surveyed by Pew Research between May 29 and June 11 report deleting the Facebook app.[1] Of those, half who qualify as young deleted the app.

For a population of 330 million, if you want a 95% confidence level and a 2% margin of error, you need only 2401 people in your sample. This is assuming the survey sampled appropriately (i.e. random selection methodology).

It is standard to take well executed surveys and extrapolate to the population. Calling it out is calling the whole field of statistics out.

Nice try. I'm well versed in the statistics but I'm not blindly criticizing the sample because it's small.

I'm criticizing exactly what you called out as an assumption - the methodology of the sample; namely that they survey's distribution matches the population distribution.

So thanks for the lesson in p values, but it has nothing to do with my point. I take issue with blindly citing sources without doing due diligence, especially when the survey was collected over a very small window of time across a population that most likely doesn't match Americans in toto.

> I'm criticizing exactly what you called out as an assumption - the methodology of the sample; namely that they survey's distribution matches the population distribution.

Yeah, I’m reading your previous comment, and I’m still not seeing it.

You're not seeing the issue with extrapolating a survey that lasted barely a week, from Pew Research, to an authoritative statement about the zeitgeist of the entire country?

Okay. I specifically called out the date range issue in my original comment. But it seems like people can't move past the impulse to (in)correct me about pop statistics. I never said the issue was small sample size.

The reason you're getting downvoted is that your argument is basically "well what if they're wrong?"

Pew has established a reputation as an organization who conducts polls regularly and properly. You are a throwaway account on HN. To be Bayesian about it, the priors are way better for Pew than for you.

If you have specific, substantive criticisms of how Pew conducted that particular poll, by all means, share them and folks can discuss that.

I don't really care why I'm being downvoted, nor did I ask. It's not relevant. I'll continually double down on this point regardless, unless you can actually refute what I'm saying instead of (like the others) trying to point out perceived inconsistencies in what I'm saying, or attacking points I didn't make.

I already made my substantive criticism. You cannot extrapolate the results of a survey evaluated over a 1 - 2 week period to the modal opinion of the American population. To spell it out for you: I vehemently disagree that you can adequately randomly sample a representative subset of the American population in a two week period.

Do you have a substantive rebuttal to that criticism? Evaluate my point on its own merits, not whether or not it's coming from a throwaway account (which this is not).

To put it bluntly, I'm a little stunned no one else is considering that survey as critically as I am. Even if it's ultimately a sound methodology, it's pretty frustrating for that to be taken as an uncontroversial fact without any challenge.

> I never said the issue was small sample size.

> a quarter of the 4,594 people surveyed by Pew Research between May 29 and June 11 report deleting the Facebook app.

Emphasis yours.

Yes, that was an element of what I stated. Now re-read the rest of what you quoted. See the bit about the date range?

Yeah—too bad that wasn't the part you put in emphasis, and the part that you did put in emphasis is something you're claiming wasn't your criticism at all.