Here's one from the draft archive. Originally set for sometime in 2022.
The idea may be better delivered in this SLASHDOT post without needing to read the whole book.
Maybe I will get a copy.
Thanks for tuning in.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/03/0557244/a-professor-warns-the-internet-is-not-what-you-think-it-is
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2401.05 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3108 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/03/0557244/a-professor-warns-the-internet-is-not-what-you-think-it-is
A Professor Warns the Internet 'is Not What You Think It Is' (lareviewofbooks.org)
Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of the history and philosophy of science. Princeton University Press has just published his new book — titled The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. (Definite internet as "the part that we are glued to for most hours of our waking lives" which in its current usage "hinders the exercise of attention, which, indeed, in the book I try to argue is crucial to a thriving human life.")
Smith recently answered questions from the science editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Some radically condensed excerpts:[T]he "crisis moment" comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That's when the crisis starts....
You identify as another contributing factor to our crisis moment the internet's addictive nature. How do algorithms play a role in addiction...?
[T]he reason why they abandoned the fire hose and started nudging us this way or that is because the social media companies are private for-profit companies, and the more they can nudge us to watch or to keep looking, to keep refreshing, the more money they're going to make. So that's not a philosophical problem. It's just a massively concerted effort to streamline and maximize our screen time..... [E]verything seems to be geared toward harnessing attention and exploiting attention on the designers' parts, rather than in cultivating attention on the user's part....
You could also ask, however, of social media... are you really conversing? Are you really debating? And I think the answer is, almost always, no. What's happening on social media is rather a simulation of discussion and debate. Or, as I like to put it, Twitter is a debate-themed video game, in the same way that, say, Grand Theft Auto is a stolen-car-chase-themed video game.... [S]ocial media [is] more like a false suffocation or a perversion of the thing it pretends to be.... [T]his is a real problem because there's no other game in town. At this point, if you have any lingering hope for the prospects of deliberative democracy, the idea that you need to find a neutral public space to pursue it in, it's just so obvious that the only possible setting is online. I mean, you can go print pamphlets in your basement if you want but that's not going to get your movement very far.
So we only have one choice as a public space, and it's a spurious one. It's one that can't be a public space because its raison d'être is something quite different....
In different government/enterprise meshes in different systems throughout the world, including the United States, but also significantly, China, we're seeing one and the same thing slowly emerge, again, under very different legal systems in very different cultures with different historical legacies. And that is, namely, a system in which algorithms constrain and define and limit our identities rather than enabling us to cultivate our freedoms.
The interview (and the book) re-visit 17th-century German philosopher/early modern polymath Gottfried Leibniz — who built a gear-and-wheel-driven "reckoning engine" — as the first incarnation for the tech utopian dream of outsourcing our reasoning.
"[I]t goes from the mid-1670s to precisely the mid-2010s, by which point it became painfully obvious that such outsourcing of reason was actually causing problems even as it was solving old problems. It was certainly not the path to world peace and stability that one might have hoped for in an earlier generation."
Smith recently answered questions from the science editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Some radically condensed excerpts:[T]he "crisis moment" comes when the intrinsically neither-good-nor-bad algorithm comes to be applied for the resolution of problems, for logistical solutions, and so on in many new domains of human social life, and jumps the fence that contained it as focusing on relatively narrow questions to now structuring our social life together as a whole. That's when the crisis starts....
You identify as another contributing factor to our crisis moment the internet's addictive nature. How do algorithms play a role in addiction...?
[T]he reason why they abandoned the fire hose and started nudging us this way or that is because the social media companies are private for-profit companies, and the more they can nudge us to watch or to keep looking, to keep refreshing, the more money they're going to make. So that's not a philosophical problem. It's just a massively concerted effort to streamline and maximize our screen time..... [E]verything seems to be geared toward harnessing attention and exploiting attention on the designers' parts, rather than in cultivating attention on the user's part....
You could also ask, however, of social media... are you really conversing? Are you really debating? And I think the answer is, almost always, no. What's happening on social media is rather a simulation of discussion and debate. Or, as I like to put it, Twitter is a debate-themed video game, in the same way that, say, Grand Theft Auto is a stolen-car-chase-themed video game.... [S]ocial media [is] more like a false suffocation or a perversion of the thing it pretends to be.... [T]his is a real problem because there's no other game in town. At this point, if you have any lingering hope for the prospects of deliberative democracy, the idea that you need to find a neutral public space to pursue it in, it's just so obvious that the only possible setting is online. I mean, you can go print pamphlets in your basement if you want but that's not going to get your movement very far.
So we only have one choice as a public space, and it's a spurious one. It's one that can't be a public space because its raison d'être is something quite different....
In different government/enterprise meshes in different systems throughout the world, including the United States, but also significantly, China, we're seeing one and the same thing slowly emerge, again, under very different legal systems in very different cultures with different historical legacies. And that is, namely, a system in which algorithms constrain and define and limit our identities rather than enabling us to cultivate our freedoms.
The interview (and the book) re-visit 17th-century German philosopher/early modern polymath Gottfried Leibniz — who built a gear-and-wheel-driven "reckoning engine" — as the first incarnation for the tech utopian dream of outsourcing our reasoning.
"[I]t goes from the mid-1670s to precisely the mid-2010s, by which point it became painfully obvious that such outsourcing of reason was actually causing problems even as it was solving old problems. It was certainly not the path to world peace and stability that one might have hoped for in an earlier generation."
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2401.05 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3108 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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