> For example, we now know that the Internet has a corrupting influence on civil society that's stronger than its capacity to uplift it.

You believe the Internet is a net negative for society? I think it's easily one of the greatest inventions in all of history.

it certainly is possible. in the old days, the elite kept power over people using things like religion, and still do although to a lesser degree. however, now the internet has provided the power to control and manipulate like no other thing before.

sure, the internet has enabled some huge things. but if i step back to my life before the internet was a central component of daily life, i can't say definitively whether the internet has provided a net positive effect on my life or not. and i feel more and more that it has kept me from fulfilling myself by capturing my attention and time.

look at the way youtube has progressed. it used to be a platform filled with authenticity. now, it's been overwhelmed by what is described by leeches that try to manipulate and siphon off its users.

much of this is covered by adam curtis in his documentaries, and i would start by watching "all watched over by machines of ever loving grace". the internet started out as an authentic place but not has turned against its users in its powder to control and manipulate.

> I think it's easily one of the greatest inventions in all of history.

Really? I'm surprised you rank it above inventions which allowed the agricultural, industrial or transport revolutions to happen.

Personally the Internet as an invention would rank way below the automobile, wheel, plough, spinning jenny, telegraph, telephone, broadcast television, aeroplane, etc.

I'd rank it well above all of your list except the wheel and the plough. It's just that we haven't seen the full effect of the Internet yet. There are likely innovations yet to come that will reshape society on a greater level than any of the others. We haven't had an information-age war the way that WW1 was an industrial-age war, for example. Large areas around drones, satellites, smart clothing, augmented reality, crypto-finance, etc. remaining untapped.

I'd rank the Internet (and software, in general) up with agriculture and mass-production as a fundamental technology for society. These both ushered in totally new eras for humanity (the agricultural and industrial revolutions, respectively) and new forms of wealth (land and capital, respectively). Similarly, the Internet ushers in the information revolution, where data becomes a fourth fundamental factor of production.

do you think if the internet had somehow existed prior to these inventions, their creation would have been hastened?

No, the inventors would become influencers selling CBD oil.

Granted it's a great invention for the highly educated and computer literate. I rather depend on it myself!

But that is a tiny slice of the world. Which, as I said, is largely out of touch with the rest of it.

I think it was a wonderful thing until people figured out how to efficiently exploit people with it. It just turns out to be incredibly good for exploiting people, and I think this bell can’t be unrung.

I think it's all too easy to take the positive aspects for granted.

...while ignoring the negative aspects and pretending they don't matter.

But it's not really the Internet as an abstract mechanism, it's the fact that the Internet is a very effective tool for algorithmically propagating and enforcing political, social, and economic conformity - camouflaged as this freewheeling anarchic thing that will save us all from exactly the things it's promoting.

People want conformity, and they rewarded the vendors who gave it to them, no one forced it upon them. People choose to gravitate towards like minded people, and choose to consume things most other people like. The only reason it didn’t happen before on such a scale was that it wasn’t as economical.

The positive of being able to communicate with anyone at any time and/or lookup information almost instantaneously are worth the downsides (which we need to collectively fight against) in my opinion. It’s like any other tool, it’s made life a hell of a lot easier, but you can also cause damage with it, but that’s up to the person.

You're right. And this is where human psychology can and is being manipulated for financial or political gain, hence the internet has become the largest and most effective tool for such in the history of humanity. I don't underestimate the net benefits internet has brought to the table but same goes for the negatives.

All the algorithmic propaganda is entirely optional. If your view of the internet is only what you see on FB, twitter, and instagram, then sure it's pretty terrible. But you aren't under any obligation to sit there and scroll through advertising, Zuckerberg isn't holding a gun to your head. Social media is an echo chamber that seems much larger than it is, with far less voices contributing than it might appear (1).

1. https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-use...

The internet is great, the problem is mostly ad-networks and so-called "social media" riding on it.

Let's not blame the road for the idiot-drivers ;)

Road design and construction is regulated. Automobile function is regulated. Drivers are licensed. Roadways are policed.

Even so, they're not that safe. Imagine what they'd be like without all the oversight.

I'd assume he meant the "internet" in this regard. It's hard to see things such as Facebook, Twitter, and the increasingly dystopic efforts to get people to click on ads driven by companies such as Google, as being anything but a serious net negative for society. And these sites for many people, and I think it's probably safe to say the majority, effectively are the internet.

Obviously it's an unprecedentedly amazing invention. You have access to an infinite amount of information that is mostly free or can be made to be free. For instance if you want to learn astrophysics in your spare time, you can - for $0. And not just learn it but receive access to instruction from the most well regarded instructors at the most well regarded institutions, alongside supplemental materials. And all for $0. That is just such an incredibly radical shift in society.

But most people don't do things like this. The internet is also a source of endless mindless entertainment, the ability to engage in echo chambers based on your preferred views, and to otherwise engage in pointless bickering and gossip. And this behavior is heavily driven by companies who profit extensively off this form of "engagement." Who's making money when you download and sit around watching Susskind's videos and engaging in the corresponding course work? Nobody. Thus, there is a strong disincentive by many to discourage this sort of behavior in lieu of passively consuming crap interleaved with as much advertising and 'messaging' as can be jammed into it.

It's ironic. The internet was going to be the great equalizer in society. But I think it's probably driving a bigger divide in society than ever before. Because now for those with intelligence, drive, and motivation there's less than ever stopping them from achieving great things. At the same time for those who do not have drive or are easily distracted there are now more ways to mindlessly waste an unlimited of time in self indulgence - and mostly for free!

It can be both.

Oh stop with the gloom, this is like using tabloids as an example of how the printing press ruined us all. Ignore the tabloids, or in the case of the internet, low effort ad content. You can read good journalism from around the world if you put in the minuscule effort it takes to vet a source. The academic internet never went away, in fact it gets exponentially more powerful every year, and nearly all of human knowledge is at your fingertips for free* from Wikipedia or tools like pub med (everything funded by the NIH becomes open access after a year).

The internet has only ever been one thing: a time sink. Why waste your free time making someone else money? Cut out the commercialized internet from your life. Sink your time by learning something, keep your neck well above the irrelevant noise of social media, keep your eyes fixed on well written information from good journalists and experts in their fields, and suddenly the internet is beautiful and everything that everyone hoped for.

Is there /any/ part of the nation in touch with the rest if the nation's concerns, aspirations, feelings, values and needs? I seriously wonder who would rank best there given the fact the nation is a big place and even those who travel a lot are in their own bubbles. Are farmers out of touch for considering owning many acres normal when they are less than 2% of employement - let alone that most don't own their own land?

As for the corrupting influence I must disagree.

Many groups try to keep a finger on the pulse everywhere: journalists, filmmakers, politicians, manufacturers (e.g. automakers), retailers, social scientists...

Many of these groups are concentrated in a handful of locales, e.g. Hollywood, D.C., Madison Avenue.

Do you find that the people responsible for making the Internet "a corrupting influence on civil society" — the people who run Facebook and Twitter and so on — are influenced by Republican Party ideologies and concerns?

Not particularly.

The issue with our currently large companies seems to have become that the goals of shareholders are not necessarily aligned with the goals of society.

And there needs to be a long conversation about that.

> The Internet is the single biggest repository and distributor of human knowledge the world has ever seen.

This is true, but I worry about the quality of the information and it’s longevity. We may yet lose a huge amount of information because we take it for granted that the internet will save it all, when it doesn’t. The term for this is “digital dark age”.

> If you wish to find the truth, you can.

I mean, aside from all the people learning lies. A lot of utter nonsense has found its home on the internet too.

> the problem is that ... Republican

I’m going to stop you there. While I might agree politically, philosophically this is a bad road. It tempts you to think that everything is fine if only you could defeat your political foe, which I just don’t think is true.

>From the US perspective, the problem is that the pile of excrement that is the Republican party in the US

It never ceases to amaze me that people can say something like this with a straight face. As if "the Republican Party" exists in a vacuum, and that the Democratic Party is some bastion of widely held ideals. This is why some people, like me, consider Silicon Valley hopelessly out-of-touch.

Nobody claimed the Democratic party was a bastion of ideals, you added that straw man.

Why is it that someone criticizing the Republican Party immediately makes you want to attack the Democratic party? It seems they are their own entity and can be criticized as such, no both-sides-ism needed.

It’s a pretty ignorant comment considering Nixon and the Republican Party was the one who got the US out of Vietnam and the Democratic Party was the one that escalated the conflict.

I'm not from the US, but the republican party is always held up as the "bad guy" in these conversations. Let's not forget that the original Obama campaign was the first to really leverage social networks and online advertising to great effect, the republicans then turned around and did the same but better with Trump. When the Democrats did it, it was praised as innovative and clever the future of election campaigns, when the Republicans did it, it was apparently the end of the world and the internet should be burnt to the ground for facilitating this terrible thing to happen.

==when the Republicans did it, it was apparently the end of the world and the internet should be burnt to the ground for facilitating this terrible thing to happen.==

Here, you have proven my point by creating yet another straw man. Ignoring that, you never established that they actually “did the same” thing, you just make the claim. I don’t remember seeing evidence of foreign bot farms supporting the Obama campaign on social media.

That said, maybe the comment was more about net neutrality, municipal wi-fi or expanded rural broadband. All actions to bring cheaper internet to more people that US Republicans have historically been against. You know, policies that actually impact the internet and it’s access/usage.

Roger Ailes built a media empire with the explicit idea that the reason why the "elites" (read: Republican politicians) had their hand forced on Vietnam was that they didn't control the propaganda around it sufficiently.

He is quite explicit and straightforward and is on the record about this.

If you don't acknowledge that Ailes set out to build a propaganda empire, you are already behind the 8 ball before we even start discussing the Internet.