Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

Great talk! Wanted to add a few thoughts that came to mind as I read it:

1. The radio history lesson is great, and I'd agree is appropriate for our current situation. It reminds me a lot of early US history and the use of newspapers in the colonies. James Callender is one of many interesting people from that time. [1] He was Thomas Jefferson's to go muckraker.

2. Reed's Law [2] also came to mind. Radio and Newspapers are mass mediums, which the internet is not (only). Reed's law isn't perfect, but it's a good filter when trying to apply pre-internet lessons to the internet.

4. Just a theological aside: Ecclesiastes is traditionally ascribed to King Solomon, which the Bible also calls the wisest man who ever lived. It was likely not actually pre-exilic, but it's interesting/helpful to read it as if it was given by the wisest man who ever lived who happened to have absolute power.

[1] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/jam...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%27s_law

Is the premise of Reed's Law relevant to the sorts of social control problems that the author is discussing, though?

I think it's more the ability to do individual targeting that matters, from that perspective. And Reed's Law doesn't say anything about that (other than in the trivial "subnetworks of size of 1" sense)

I think the internet is fundamentally different from the old broadcast media, but not because of Reed's combinatoric observation.

In particular, notice that the radio also allowed these subgroups; e.g., the interference issues in the USA leading up to WWI seem like an apt historical example.

> the interference issues in the USA leading up to WWI seem like an apt historical example.

It's a good question. I think you need to apply Reed's law at scale, not in the formative state. For example, the initial internet in 1969 was limited to a small group of universities, and not accessible like it is today. My point is you can't cherry pick a point in time for the technologies and compare them. Early radio vs. mature internet aren't the same thing.

My original point was that radio and newspapers were one way mediums that limited control to a small group of people. A different way is to say the internet enables platforms, as opposed to gatekeepers. Both can be megaphones to the savvy and powerful, but they are fundamentally different in other ways.

The recent #MeToo movement is an example of this: that never would have happened if we were limited to traditional mass media, because there was no way for people and have their voices amplified. This is a good example of how the combinatoric effect of Reed's Law relates the social control argument.

It's a bit dated, but Small Pieces Loosely Joined lays out some of these ideas very well. http://www.smallpieces.com/

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