future of ~the internet~

In the future, the internet's massively interactive computing and information sharing capacity will enable humans to both form and expose conspiracies with breathtaking speed.

http://www.slate.com/id/2289342/

So in another vein let me share my automobile analogy a bit

we're like 30 years in to the history of the personal computer - rounding up, but not really, 20 years in to the Internet

now 30 years in to cars, you still have all the major manufacturers within 50 miles of one another. More importantly, they only really have to compete with one another, and nobody gives a fuck about safety

it wasn't until the late 50s or so (~40 years of mass automotive growth and adoption), with overseas competitors like Volvo leading the way, that anybody cared about safety features, and even then it took leverage from insurance companies to get American manufacturers to take it seriously

Massive adoption of seatbelt laws and legislative requirements for things like airbags are really recent developments, overall; it's relatively terrifying to think about how many years people spent behind the wheel of what we would now consider deathtraps, although it's important to consider that traffic wasn't nearly as bad for most of those years (less humans around, and certainly a lot fewer cars on the road)

Computers and the Internet ostensibly should adapt to the circumstances at a much faster rate, given the speed of adoption and the population of users, but:

- seriously, there's like four companies driving the bus: apple, adobe, google and microsoft, MAYBE two of which have half-decent patching programs, summed together, so I guess that's like saying if one of them was rock solid, or if they were all .25 of the way there (the latter seems accurate)

- nobody is getting killed or even filing claims for losses against these companies, so there's no reason for insurance brokers to bother stepping in to prove a point

On the other hand, car accidents happen because of driver errors and random chance/malfunction; Internet shit happens because of those same kinds of things PLUS common, outright malfeasance. Should I feel better because we're right in line with the auto industry's slow crawl towards safer engineering, or worse, because while we're not actually killing people outright, we're still making everything more difficult and risky than it has to be?

Internet of the future looks like your iphone, not because apps will kill the web, but because the web is a hellhole. Apps and App Stores are service whitelisting at nearly its best; jailbreakers are hot rodding jackasses asking for it on the drag strip (much props though)

Apps and App Stores are service whitelisting at nearly its best

This is a really interesting analogy, I like it.

IMO the dark spots of the internet are the large, large data systems powered by software that's almost completely run on intranets and only pops up as data sources for web tie-ins and the occasional consumer application. I mean, commercial entities like IBM and SAP are still ungodly huge, make software and sell services, and they're virtually invisible unless you're a large business. Microsoft lives in this realm too, but their products aren't really that different in that area.

^ the dark spots on the internet are the info aggregators who buy and trade your personal info and browsing habits. they may be storing that info in IBM or SAP systems (more like oracle or w/e) but that's neither here nor there.

True, true. Maybe I mean grey? There's still a hell of a lot of info in the backwaters, and defining "the internet" at the consumer, individual level and the companies they work with directly is a little short-sighted.

I mean, what about your health insurance company? They're (semi-)legitimate in being a repository of personal info, but if someone breaks in or if they use it wrong, they have the possibility of being worse than the commercial aggregators.

I guess I look at it like the info your insurance company has is as secure as it's ever been, and industries like those have a long history of regulation and oversight. however there's still a wild west out there when it comes to tracking consumer info + behavior. I have been in meetings where companies have pitched matching consumer purchases via credit card info across a variety of websites to figure out their aggregated purchase profile. it's still not clear what the total fallout is going to be from the epsilon data breach.

That sort of thing makes me cringe because it's more about your identity as a person, as far as what you consume can provide, and can result in some really insidious marketing and being creepy. Then again, you can always cancel credit cards, right?

"as secure as its ever been" is kind of slippery when you consider no one was ever really that secure, and now all their records are in modern computers that aren't supposed to be internet connected but may be. Dumping databases has never been more lucrative.

I'm just thinking of people I've talked to/worked with who were at places like Progressive and Sprint and the ridiculous security holes they said existed around ten years ago. People are generally better now, but...

Then again, when I started college, posting your test score next to your SSN (a "secret identifier" that wasn't your name) on a board outside the lecture hall was normal, and *that* wasn't much more than a decade ago.

one of the things that comes up a lot in certain conversations I have with ppl is that the cloud is actually going to be a fantastic thing for security, because now you have to pay attention to enforcing your controls instead of letting it ride because the server lives in a building you rent. The false sense of safety from physical (or "kinetic") aspects of all these logical services is finally going to go away, meaning that CIO/CISO types may have to finally own up to the fact that so much of this bullshit has been a paper tiger slash consulting racket for the last decade.

Outsource everything you do, then tell me exactly what's different about your security profile other than you maybe don't know the first name of one of the sysadmins because you see him on the elevator a lot. Control and state assertions are only more important in cloud country if you were an idiot in the first place and thought your inventory stickers on the servers were helping you avoid some kind of risk.

I mostly agree, but people will still be dumb.

please, please i urge you, do NOT WATCH THIS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x96KP1wfbpY

ok

you've seen it already, hush.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen

Of course, since bitcoin transactions are untraceable, you would have zero recourse if you sent a dozen bitcoins to someone for a couple of tabs of LSD. Just like you might lose your $10 if you gave it to a kid in the school yard for a dime bag and he never came back.

5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*

ok I watched that vid and now I believe in 5/21

The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.

And as a result, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.

I feel it when I'm wading through a stack of emails, keeping up with an endless Twitter feed, accepting Facebook "friends" from a past I prefer not to remember, or making myself available on the Web to readers to whom I should feel grateful — but instead feel obligated. And it's not a matter of what any of these folks might want me to do, but when. They want it now.

This is not a bias of the Internet itself, but of the way it has changed from an opt-in activity to an "always on" condition of my life.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/rushkoff.html

Man needs to discover the concept: "no, thanks".

can you expand on that, aimless

The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.

Sounds just like talking to people face to face to me.

http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

sorta touches 12 different subjects, but what do we think of dis guy?

he doesn't seem to understand marx particularly well but he does have some interesting things to say here and there

like I'd never thought about this:

But Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. It's just a little tiny minimalist link, and basically what they're selling is not advertising, they're not selling romance, they're not selling communication, what they're doing is selling access. What they're doing is they're saying, "You give us money, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is up to you."

love lanier, have the new book sitting uncracked on my couch atm

already had this open in another tab lol but haven't read it yet

we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did.

But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less.

not really sure what 'monetizing more and more' vs 'less and less' means but i'm interested in this idea that thinking all we deserve is 'reputational currency' there's a surplus value thing happening

nice profile of dude in the nyer last month btw

The answer, as I see it anyway, and the path to Jaron's "third way," is new media literacy. People need to know how to work with this stuff. We have to teach programming in our schools – not just because Chinese hackers are going to take down Citibank, but because this is the landscape on which we are spending an increasing amount of our lives. It is the territory on which – and through which – we are going to create and exchange a good portion of the value humans have yet to create for one another.

<3 rushkoff <3

he uses 'hearts and minds' a few times without getting specific, which is a shame

but I like the idea that we can save the middle class by paying people to use facebook

also the idea that what the internet needs is "monetizing more and more" is weird, if Lanier's whole argument is that "digital share cropping" etc. is bad and wrong.

or yes what iatee says

http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647

^ the aforementioned book btw

btw for ppl interested in the thread subject 'edge' is a really good regular read too

they had fun light thing the other day on why economics is a lot like pro wrestling

hoos, have you ever read the early 90s brigade's books and magazines and articles on networked culture and ~the future~? To me, most of it seems really hokey now and they spent a lot of time barking up irrelevant trees but it was a big deal at the time.

I think a lot of people who really built things in the mid/late 90s were not really connected to any of that, and a lot of the connection with sociological writing came later.

this is the first thing i've read by Jaron Lanier, and i'm totally absorbed. thanks for the link. where's a good place to start with Lanier?

ok starting now you guys have to pay to read my posts, 2 cents is reasonable I think

this is really going to add up

Lanier's position is that humans may not be considered to be biological computers, i.e., they may not be compared to digital computers in any proper sense, and it is very unlikely that humans could be generally replaced by computers easily in few decades, even economically. While transistor count increases according to Moore's law, overall performance rises only very slowly. This is because our productivity in developing software increases only slightly, and software becomes more bloated and remains as error-prone as it ever was.

kinda wish someone would point this out to Kurzweil so he would shut the fuck up already

i wish the future of the internet was this:

https://www.editorsguild.com/userfiles/image/Village%20of%20Damned.jpeg

To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They're like, "Well, sure we can't get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet", or something. "Let us tweet!"

lol

lol @ "let us tweet"

o i c u just said that

I really liked Lanier's essay in Harper's, and I agree with a lot of what he says, but I got a bit worn out reading his book. My problem was mainly that he couldn't resist slipping a little bit of opinion in among some more inarguable truths, and that colored his arguments a bit. But I often have that problem when a good essayist writes a book.

Anyone who wants a heavily monitized Internet should look into late Eighties and early Ninties shareware culture sometime--a similar wave of amateurish sludge, but with guilt-tripping, vindictiveness, scamming, and people threatening to put hexes on you for not buying the full version of their bug-ridden software.

I think that's a misleading comparison. at this point the value of Facebook/YouTube/etc comes from the user input, not the code or service. it's like if we were paying for cable tv just to watch our friends' crappy local tv show.

whereas back in the day, code for basic functional programs was harder to get / more valuable than it is today. the smartphone world today is prob comparable to that era - we'll pay a few bucks for a program on our phone that we'd expect for free on our computer.

I mean that's how I'm reading his argument, tho i can't think of any real means of getting from point x to point y.

BITCOINZ

ha

I still can't see the difference between a YouTube video of someone making their cat dance the Macarena or a badly drawn handmade sign of a tired office worker with the caption "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps." There has always been lots and lots of bad user-created crap floating around, and the Internet is just the latest pipeline for it. And I don't see how things would get better if money was introduced into the equation--look at all of those car stickers of Calvin pissing on things or wooden cutouts of fat women in bloomers bending over.

btw for ppl interested in the thread subject 'edge' is a really good regular read too

I've listened to Geoffrey West's talk on the metabolic theory of ecology extended to cities and companies at least once a week on avg for the past few months. Mind go boom,