The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun

Finally reading this, really great stuff.

I would start the golden age of the internet with the late 60s and end it with the iPhone. Reading about early computer history you keep running across the question "But what do they DO?" as if this new technology was being created because it was possible, because some visionaries and psychedelic engineers envisioned a vague path to the holodeck. Rather than tools being created for a specific purpose, the personal computer was created and the purpose was to be worked out later. Possibly the purpose was completely up to you. External brain enhancer?

I wonder if you traveled back in time to XEROX PARC and told them in the future everyone will have their own personal computer on them at all times and it will have have a single button you would have blown some minds.

it would be fun to travel back in time and speak only in a language that you make up on the spot

if you went back in time and told me neil hamburger would star in a commercially successful adaptation of ant man, i'd be like waaaaaaat?

the computer stuff might be less mind-blowing to 50s, 60s nerds who had already cobbled together working demos at that point. conceptually we're not really that far advanced from that doug engelbart demo.

instead tell them the rolling stones are still on tour.

wikipedia is horrible if you are using it to try and find information on a topic you are already quite knowledgeable about ("these claims Wikipedia is making about Walli Elmlark are spurious in the extreme") or if, god help you, you wish to contribute to the knowledge pool, at which point you quickly become enmeshed in all sorts of grotesque nerd power games. on the other hand, if you want to learn more about something you know nothing about, it is fucking AMAZING.

since people keep arguing about wikipedia, i thought i would test my assumptions. i decided to look at a sample article, on an issue that has political resonance today: slavery in the united states (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States). this is an interesting topic because it's one on which the popular consensus belies the historical debate. because historians, like the public, believe "slavery was bad", but their professional duties mean they can't stop there.

i'm going to focus in particular on the "treatment" section. this is actually pretty fascinating. the first thing you see is the famous photo of a badly whipped slave from the 1860s. frankly, after that picture everything else in the section might as well just read "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet". nevertheless there are certain apologists clearly fighting the good fight here, as the caption indicates that "the guilty overseer was fired", implying that there was justice under slavery, ignoring the fact that the very existence of that picture is a direct and visceral denial of that claim.

as far as the text, the first sentence of the section is a mealy-mouthed non-statement that treatment of slaves "varied widely". the overview paragraph ends with the unsourced statement "It was part of a paternalistic approach in the antebellum era." i fully expect this sentence to be shortly deleted, because it's clearly added by an editor arguing with the previous (sourced) sentence which claims that "some slaveholders improved the conditions of their slaves after 1820". i wouldn't be surprised if this section looked entirely different tomorrow (for reference, the text i'm referencing is as of noon gmt on 2015-07-23). this is unusual, to say the least, for an institution which was abolished 150 years ago.

there are nine paragraphs in the section, with the first section being the overview i mentioned, and the other eight addressing various aspects of treatment of slaves at random with no coherence whatsoever.

of these nine, paragraphs 5, 7, and 9 contain open apologism for slavery. these apologies all follow the same pattern, in that they lead by naming a respected historical source, and continue on to cherry-pick a statement out of the context of a longer and more comprehensive work of theirs to make it look as though slavery was "not that bad". these paragraphs are all very short, two sentences at most.

paragraphs 6 and 8 are thorough and damning indictments of the practice of slavery. paragraph 6 begins "Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding, and imprisonment." these paragraphs are the longest and most compelling in the section. paragraph 8 deals with sexual abuse of slaves. the tone is npov, but the content is heart-wrenching and sickening. this paragraph is wikipedia at its best.

paragraphs 2 and 4 deal with how american slaves were forbidden to read and prohibited from associating in groups, except for churches. though brief, each paragraph contains mitigating codicils.

paragraph 3 deals with medical treatment of slaves, and is flatly bizarre. unlike all the other paragraphs, it contains no reference whatsoever to their owners. given that this was the defining feature of slavery, it seems wholly inappropriate. perhaps in one version of the article it may have held relevance, but it has no place in its current position in the article it stands today.

there is also a link in this article to a lengthier article entirely devoted to "Treatment of Slaves in the United States", which i am sure is also fascinating and worthy of deeper analysis, but i don't have time to address it right now, except to say that wikipedia's ability to self-contradict is one of it's fascinating eccentricities. one of the things i kind of love about wikipedia is that it actively punishes the tl;dr impulse by feeding you skewed misinformation on the summary page. frequently summary sections of longer separate articles will contain information not in the longer article; more frequently these summaries will deliberately distort the content of the longer article.

in conclusion, this section is terrible. utterly, utterly, terrible. you could get more accurate information on slavery from a texan history book than you can from wikipedia. i love wikipedia dearly, i believe in their mission, i have learned and continue to learn countless incredible things from it. however, looking at this article, i am forced to conclude that it represents a serious failure of the wikipedia content creation and editing process. if the wikimedia foundation hopes to contribute to a more knowledgable world, as opposed to simply stuffing us all with trivia, it has a great deal of work to do.

Regardless of what you think of Wikipedia's current state, it doesn't result from the various ills discussed upthread - SEO gaming, content mills, popup ads, likes, click-throughs, or corporate malfeasance.

On the surface, Wikipedia's ethos is pretty much the ethos of the "web that was" championed by the pastopians. Volunteer-driven, democratic, a labor of obsessive love, crowdsourced, and (theoretically) open to quirky monomaniacs and people with huge amounts of knowledge about obscure topics.

And yet. For all its virtues as an information source, it is a niche phenomenon. A domain of nerdy white dudes with lots of spare time, good internet connections, and the technical savvy to use them toward their own ends. So, again, rather like the internet in the alleged Golden Age.

yo did someone take wrong turn on the way to debate society or something

And yet. For all its virtues as an information source, it is a niche phenomenon. A domain of nerdy white dudes with lots of spare time, good internet connections, and the technical savvy to use them toward their own ends. So, again, rather like the internet in the alleged Golden Age.

― Ye Mad Puffin, Thursday, July 23, 2015 11:03 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like you've purposefully read past my post several times in this thread that i'm not necessarily talking about going back to usenet i'm more disturbed by what's happened in the last five or six years

puffin's post is too high-context for me. i don't know what they're talking about. are they replying to my post? or talking about wikipedia in general? is j making fun of my post or puffin's? i feel like there's a lot of people talking past each other in this thread.

i guess i should lay my cards on the table. my problems are more with Internet Classic(R), with the failure of the social and technological models the net was founded on, than with the evils of New Internet, which seeks to ameliorate those failures by reducing the internet to a greeting card factory. i've never had a great deal of interest in or fruitful interaction with New Internet. i'm an advocate of privacy and freedom of speech who has seen those principles catastrophically fail to scale, with the biggest threats to those values not infrequently coming from their fiercest proponents.

so i find myself advocating New Internet in the hopes that it might somehow figure out how to do something useful. worst comes to worst at least i don't have to worry about being doxed by people whose only interest in the internet is to post betty boop memes. it's an odd position to be in.

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/2/27645/871913-betty_boop.gif

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9099357/internet-dead-end

sorry for vox link

https://twitter.com/EnvGen/status/629007382513885184

Cute!

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This thread has made me go and check if the Phone Losers of America is still a site... to my surprise they are up and still update regularly!

Cactus! I still listen to their podcast on occasion.

I have thought many times about rushomancy's long post on the "Slavery in the United States" Wikipedia article. Super super OTM. Not to say I know exactly how you could fix Wikipedia, but it's super useful as an illustration of how the current editing process/population gives rise to stuff that looks NPOV but turns out to be either noxiously biased or just totally incoherent if you actually think about all the inclusions and exclusions taken together.

Using Wikipedia as anything other than a starting point for further research/inquiry has always been problematic at the very least.

which sites do you use besides ilxor? I can't find a single online blog/magazine/newspaper that holds my attention

facebook

i have become an email newsletter kind of guy

l-r: tracer, email newsletter editors

https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/500x/72711660/your-ideas-are-intriguing-to-me-id-like-to-subscribe-to-your-newsletter.jpg

websites are over

always feel like I'm wasting time when I check fb

email newsletters sound interesting, any recommendations?

depends on what you're into! for news i get beat the press (though he's just now gone on vacation). click on the envelope icon here: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/

and stephen bush's newsletter: https://www.newstatesman.com/staggers-morning-call

a lot of blogs have a newsletter option these days

cosign on staggers

cool, thanks!

websites are over

shut up brad this is stupid you're stupid websites are FOREVER websites RULE

they rule HARD

It's strange that so many sites I used to read 10, 15 or 20 years ago are still around, but usually in an unreadable form

RSS feed reading all the way!

which sites do you use besides ilxor? I can't find a single online blog/magazine/newspaper that holds my attention

― niels

so are you fishing for porn recommendations or what

seriously, though, just the Digital Antiquarian and my youtube subscriptions. the Digital Antiquarian RULES.

the golden age of the internet was Google Reader

Perfect Sound Forever is one I usually read it all when it publishes each month for seemingly forever.

RSS feed reading all the way!

the golden age of the internet was Google Reader

rss was the greatest internet thing that ever happened

i don't even understand why it has died -- i have subscribed to yr feed, i am interested in yr content, just fucking tell me what's new and i'll fucking click on it

Pocket!

pocket is good. it is not a replacement for rss

Pocket and Longform have replaced magazines for my lunch reading since phones got big enough to be comfortably readable.

Was thinking recently it would be nice to see a resurgence of personal websites/blogging that aren't Tumblr/Twitter micro-blogging and not attempts to monetize cooking or whatever.

"podcasting" the elephant in the room here no

I don't have the patience to listen to podcasts, but probably there's a move from reading to listening these years bcz smartphones

rss was the greatest internet thing that ever happened

i don't even understand why it has died

it... didn't? I never noticed any decline at least, just about every site still has feeds to subscribe to like they had a decade ago

Feedly+Reeder still works really well

ffs podcasts suck ass

i don't want to be mean and i know radio has existed forever and that they're useful for ppl who work deadening office jobs or commute a lot but when some people on here post about the 7 or 8 podcasts they listen to weekly i'm like, fuck that's depressing, listening to clucking smug men talk over each other for like 18 hours a week

I don't listen to any podcasts that even remotely fit that description, and I listen to quite a lot of podcasts

Yeah, you’re kind of off-base there. Smug, chuckling men are the morning drive-in DJs of the podcast world.

there are a LOT of them tbf

sorry sorry i don't want to be mean, and i actually even know the feeling of liking and anticipating the next episode of a pod; forget i said anything. but just, if podcasts are 'the good thing on the internet' in 2017 we're fucked

reading on the internet has just become so basically shitty most of the time, autoplaying videos, intrusive ads, anti-ad-blocker blockers, the uh.. writing itself.. podcasts feel relatively uncluttered and handleable somehow

well you can get people to subscribe, can't you