It's true that cyberspace and other recent developments are challenging our copyright laws and frameworks for protecting intellectual property. The answer, though, is not to scrap existing statutes and principles. Instead, we must update old laws and interpretations so that information receives roughly the same protection it did in the context of old media. The goal is the same: to give authors sufficient control over their work so that they have an incentive to create, while maintaining the right of the public to make fair use of that information. In neither context does information want "to be free." Rather, it needs to be protected.
What I think this misses is that the progress of technology has it made impossible to go back to the status quo 40 years ago. Copyright seems like a reasonable middle-ground if works are mostly published on physical media which you can own, play whenever you want or even sell of give away - but which are relatively rarely copied.
In today's world, that option is gone - instead, we have two opposite extremes:
One is anarchy, in which a popular work will almost instantly be pirated and distributed all across the world
The other is DRM and complete control, in which the consumer does not own anything except an ephemeral license to consume a work. But the rights-holder can suddenly control exactly who may consume the work, when, how often, under which circumstances, what the may or may not otherwise do with the work, etc - and all those circumstances may change at a moment's notice. In extreme cases, the rights-holder may even revoke the license and effectively erase all copies of their work at once.
- The present effective gate to the Internet is online service providers and mobile telephony / data providers.
- A combination of UBI (sufficient to support authors, musicians, and other creators) and reputation / merit-based compensation (for works of more substantial effort, notably jouranlism, investigation, and research) should be able to support creatives. Note that this is more a career than strictly performance ("units moved") basis. People don't turn out substantial work consistently, and much of what's turned out on a consistent basis ... is less than substantial.
- The "free Internet" already costs ~$800 billion/year, which divided amongst the roughly 1 billion inhabitants of North America and Europe (we'll include Japan and Australia by proxy) works out to ... $800/head, or $3,200 for a family of four, per year. That's the global advertising bill. And yes, it largely makes sense to allocate that amongst the OECD, the world's richest billion.
- A small fraction of that would support all existing journalism, music, and publishing handsomly, as well as much television and video production.
It's quite possible that there'd be some reallocation of compensation from the present mix. That might not be all bad.
I've largely come to the same conclusion. We want to support the creation of something that the physical universe treats as abundant and nearly infinite (information), but our economics are not currently aligned with possibilities that lead to win/win solutions for artists/consumers and the poor who often don't factor in to economic equations.
Nonsense. Never has everyone has more access, producing & receiving, whatever information they want - and nigh unto free. The issue isn’t cost, it’s inundation.
Much of what's freely-available is low-quality at best, propaganda (or worse) in the worst case.
Curation itself has value, and yet is constrained. This is in fact a major theme of Andrew Shapiro's The Control Revolution, and one of the tired arguments still encountered frequently today which was entirely anticipated over two decades ago.
Calories aren’t free. They’re not just there for the redistribution.
What is one’s fair share of what another has worked to produce?
Anyone can, for vanishingly low cost, distribute or access nearly any information they like. Yes, curation is important - and, like other work, has value worth trading for calories.
Why the insistence on devaluing work, insisting the caloric cost of productivity not be compensated per its value to others?
But curation is the work nobody wants to pay for now, isn't it?
"Calories" and "caloric cost" is a funny measure of value. Especially ironic given that from a nutritional perspective, they're what the poor get too much of and the rich do their best to avoid.
In the information-nutritional world, dross ("empty calories") is what FAANG throws at the plebeians to milk them of their money ("caloric value"?). So yeah, now it makes sense: You've got your "valuable" and "not valuable" bass-ackwards; what you come off as valuing highly is the offal that the rich throw to the poor.
Your own first comment rejected the claim that access to information was a problem, I addressed the additional concern that informational quality and relevance matter.
Compensation for that role still falls under my first comment, linked above.
I am anti UBI (but not welfare) for these reasons:
Can you calculate the cost of UBI, and how much it would take to live? What is it, and where does the money come from? The math never works, and we assume the government won’t steal it like they stole SS.
Do you expect the money to go to people that need it? I see administration costs taking most of it for themselves, the US department of education is spent mostly on administrative matters that do not go to teachers students or anything that helps education.
The two solutions are about accountability and prevent bloat. One idea is a cryptocurrency or other ledger that prevents skimming.
My favored solution is a negative income tax, making below a certain amount entitled you to recieve cash when you file taxes. It doesn’t go through the cycle of government workers slicing the pie before expecting them to give it back but with more money, it keeps it in your pockets, rewards tax filing and will help the neediest people, creative or not, and also anyone who is down on their luck.
What is artificial scarcity? I don’t disagree with funding arts, in fact I think that STEAM would be a superior system to STEM, but we don’t even fund STEM research enough today, even though many of the best scientists had artistic abilities: not full inference.
In history it has been the most productive and innovative, because research and development takes time and money. The wright brothers are patent trolls who prevented the US from making plane designs, but without them we wouldn’t have modern flight. If we took away this incentive I doubt the world would be better. Currently you have this system where countries that don’t respect patents will just make it anyway, the US did against Europe and China does against the US.
Asia did not have patents and Europeans did. If my ideas aren’t my own and anyone can copy it, I wouldn’t want to put efforts into something others will clone.
I think patents are a necessary evil at least enough of it to make innovations, but foreign copycats and bootlegs serve this market well.
Don’t they? Free and open source stuff is often an implementation of closed source or commercial goods.
Without Bell labs, there’d be no Unix, no BSD, no Linux. Commercial can run by itself, but free systems cannot. Linux isn’t GPL3, so the rights still belong to the programmers.
> (...) It is important for each of us to consider the biases of various technologies _and to seek out those that reflect our values and aspirations._
(emphasis added)
This couldn't have aged better. I'd argue the issue is with finding anything that doesn't reflect your ML-inferred "values and aspirations", at least when lurking on the big platforms.
> 4. Information is not knowledge.
> We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom.
This is very important, and I wish I had learned this much sooner. Chul-Han, who was featured around here a few days ago, devotes a lot of attention to this point in several books. I wish I had grasped this earlier TBH.
information is knowledge packaged for transport. converting information into knowledge is just called learning when humans do it. spreading information you don't understand is a service or a disservice depending on your intent.
Information isn't just knowledge packaged for transport. Knowledge is always subjective and a representation of some information as it holds meaning to a subject that interprets it.
Simple example, a gazillion string long DNA segment holds information, but without actual understanding and organization in some context (which importantly differs depending on who interprets it for what purpose) it holds no meaning.
Saying that this process of creating knowledge is "just" learning might be the most loaded "just" in history because that process is probably the most complicated, mysterious and least understood thing on earth.
It really isn't "just an idiom" -- DNA holds information even in the very most rigorous definition of information as defined by information theory by Claude Shannon and others. Computing the entropy of sequences is actually a useful way to predict if they are likely to have a function.
information theory equates information with data (bits), it's the spherical cow in a vacuum and in that context the "information" that DNA "holds" is just a jargon referring to the bits.
it's not because "atom" isn't a technical term, it has always referred to the indivisible bedrock (greek root a-tomos or "not-cuttable").
equating information with data outside the context of information theory is precisely wrong and definitely not the same information being discussed in tfa. bits do not comprise information, you could say data reduces to bits. data != information. data is objective by definition. information must be able to inform/influence the metaphorical ledger backing ones ability to know, transferring knowledge. not all knowledge can become information and not all information can become data.
> That said, the proliferation of data is also a serious challenge, requiring new measures of human discipline and skepticism. We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom.
Incredibly true, and since the web2.0 we have our nose into that problem on a daily basis.
Note that the page and site material was first published in 1998, though it's been updated since. Dating the submission is somewhat complicated in this context.
archive.org has a pretty good collection of snapshots for this site, going back to Dec 1998 (I'm guessing ~6 months after it was first published based on the Mar 12, 1998 date on the site).
I'm largely going off the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. I wasn't confident enough to drop the "1998" tag on the story itself, and thought I'd leave that to the mod team to assess. I did feel it was worth mentioning in a comment to acknowledge ...
In political science terms, I want an adjective stronger than "revolutionary", in the same direction. "Radical" has more punch, but wrong direction.
The Internet accelerated consolidation, not challenge it.
Back in 1998, I had no awareness of "preferential attachment" and "winner takes all". I currently believe that reducing transaction costs accelerates consolidation and therefore inequity.
Many technotopians thought the Internet would be the great liberator, toppling the gatekeepers and elites. Disintermediation! That certainly happened.
But what happened was gatekeepers killed off the old guard, feasted on their corpses. The larger trend was a massive consolidation, an unprecedented power grab, and ridiculous transfer of wealth. And previously inconceivable command of our collective attention. Masquerading as personalization, mass customization.
Also true is that more heterodoxy is sneaking into the zeitgeist (popular awareness) than ever before.
Paradox. How can both phenomenon be simultaneously true?
David Graeber in The Democracy Project might have the crucial insight. He's the "We are the %1" guy. He rejects revolution and advocates opportunistically sneaking in reforms in the margins, beyond the awareness and control of the power elites. He claims that authorities cannot control all uses of their mediums. That the very levers of power become the means of dissent.
The only metaphor I have for this paradoxical situation is the hands of power trying to grasp fistfuls of sand. The tighter the grip, the more sand leaks out. (Thanks Princess Leia!)
> Many technotopians thought the Internet would be the great liberator, toppling the gatekeepers and elites. Disintermediation! That certainly happened.
> But what happened was gatekeepers killed off the old guard, feasted on their corpses. The larger trend was a massive consolidation, an unprecedented power grab, and ridiculous transfer of wealth.
So, yes and no: Disintermediation happened, but the erstwhile disintermediators turned out to be / became the new gatekeeper elite.
(Also, to some extent, they were probably the exact same old gatekeeper elites who just adapted to a new role.)
I'd love to learn more about the disintermediation thesis. Especially: Did it even happen? Or was it just merely the defunding of news institutions?
The best notion I've come up with is reapplying Chomksy's five filters of mass media model to social media. My hunch is the Owners stole the Advertisers lunch money. But I'm no media critic (academic), so it's just a guess.
It'd also be cool if someone "followed the money", as you suggest. It'd be pretty wild if the shareholders behind the Owners remained the same.
Huh. Writing this out, it's now obvious that Flak stole almost all of Media Elite's power and money.
One of the authors (Andrew L. Shapiro) wrote the 1999 book The Control Revolution. It's something of a sibling to Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Shapiro was a student of Lessig's), though its focus is somewhat different.
The first part reads (intentionally) archingly technophillic. That's balanced by the following sections.
The number of currently-extant issues identified with piercing accuracy is ... large. I strongly recommend the book.
David Shenk's Data Smog is similarly pioneering and insightful.
Other signers are better known. Douglas Rushkoff's current project is his Team Human podcast, he's also known for his book Cyberia, both of which are strongly critical of tech trends since the late 1990s. Steven Johnson has written several books on technology. Paulina Borsook wrote Cyberselfish.
I agree with everything except 5. I don't see why you can't replace the majority of teaching with automation. There's the aspect of learning social interaction, but that's among the kids themselves to figure out. The teacher doesn't have to be a literal person.
Lets translate knowledge to "integrated affirmed information, which is recognisable as such". (In other words, a concept of resonance.) This can't be accomplished by a lone kid, since it's a social artefact.
It’s utopian, but the tools exist today and can and are utilized. The problem is complexity, of computers can teach it won’t be as in depth as a tutor, but can be better than teachers.
You can also do this online. In chess you don’t have complexity so the best bots can beat the best experts. You can learn languages with tapes and digital materials.
In an increased complex environment, this is not realistic until/if they catch up which is possible.
It's a pretty big claim to state that social interaction is 'for kids to figure out'. Social interaction, one of the most important facets of life, requires teaching and guidance as much as anything else. In fact proper socialization if anything requires more guidance by responsible adults than some technical subject.
Given that the manifesto takes a decidedly humanist stance on technology its not surprising. Education isn't just about 'learning stuff' its about having institutions that form citizens and instill some sense of virtue and values, and that can't be done in front of a screen, or replaced by technology. Very relevant today with the amount of covid-related lack of socialization outside of the home.
I think I should clarify. Kids have to figure out social interaction, but generally like you say, the adults make sure that it’s in a relatively controlled environment with supervision. A mostly hands-off approach with some guidance/nudging is probably the best way of teaching (in my opinion).
Sure, we live in a society. I think we all understand that. Technology is there to facilitate the transmission of teaching. There will always be a group that creates the curriculum, but students don’t necessarily need to have an actual person at the intake point. So while I agree that you can’t rely solely on technology, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in it, which I fear is what’s being implied by your statement.
As a purely practical example, right now the average current ratio between teachers and students is still somewhere around 30:1 or 20:1, which pretty much makes it impossible for consistent individualized attention. Ideally we could get to a 1:1 ratio, but that’s unrealistic. Effective use of technology though can be used to dramatically improve the leverage and reach of a teacher such that a lower ratio could be simulated in some sense. Not perfect, but it sure would help a lot.
This reads like a reaction to the unibomber manifesto. It addresses the same issues but in a progressive way rather than a criticism that it should all be destroyed.
Wow.. This reads like a list of my top-5 pet peeves/recurring frustrations with prevailing opinions. Maybe throw something in there about the value of journalism and how the guy ranting straight-to-webcam on twitch isn’t going to be a comprehensive replacement for your local paper.
…then I saw the date and now I’m wondering how likely it is that this was the first text I ever read on the internet, and if my brain might be using a strict first-come-first-serve policy for hot takes.
It’s funny how cohesion in under represented groups communities barely mattered, but the perceived end of capitalist economics, American civic life as the mainstream knows it… omgurd
Human society shifts with literal priorities, not politically or socially preferred. We rebuilt after WW2 and churn around repainting, but a lot of folks need to get over the narrative not being about their tribe specifically
I include myself in this; if tech salaries implode because ML, oh well. I am not just a utilitarian gig
One of the values of the Internet generally strongly endorsed by the Technorealists, techno-optimists, and techo-pessimists (or neo-Luddites) is that the Internet should be a forum for free expression especially of minority views.
Which is precisely what they are doing: freely expressing what at the time was a distinctly minority view.
You'll have to use the Wayback Machine on many of those links, though HN readers who've followed this debate should recognise at least some names. I've highlighted a few in an earlier comment.
Several (and perhaps most) of the signatories have written books (either before or after the launch of Technorealism), and/or articles in the tech or general press.
They represent the concensus amongst themselves, as technorealists.
As technorealists, we seek to expand the fertile middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism. We are technology "critics" in the same way, and for the same reasons, that others are food critics, art critics, or literary critics. We can be passionately optimistic about some technologies, skeptical and disdainful of others. Still, our goal is neither to champion nor dismiss technology, but rather to understand it and apply it in a manner more consistent with basic human values.
It's true that cyberspace and other recent developments are challenging our copyright laws and frameworks for protecting intellectual property. The answer, though, is not to scrap existing statutes and principles. Instead, we must update old laws and interpretations so that information receives roughly the same protection it did in the context of old media. The goal is the same: to give authors sufficient control over their work so that they have an incentive to create, while maintaining the right of the public to make fair use of that information. In neither context does information want "to be free." Rather, it needs to be protected.
What I think this misses is that the progress of technology has it made impossible to go back to the status quo 40 years ago. Copyright seems like a reasonable middle-ground if works are mostly published on physical media which you can own, play whenever you want or even sell of give away - but which are relatively rarely copied.
In today's world, that option is gone - instead, we have two opposite extremes:
One is anarchy, in which a popular work will almost instantly be pirated and distributed all across the world
The other is DRM and complete control, in which the consumer does not own anything except an ephemeral license to consume a work. But the rights-holder can suddenly control exactly who may consume the work, when, how often, under which circumstances, what the may or may not otherwise do with the work, etc - and all those circumstances may change at a moment's notice. In extreme cases, the rights-holder may even revoke the license and effectively erase all copies of their work at once.