Comment by heresie-dabord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heresie-dabord | Hacker News Reader

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The OP's complaint:

> The magic disappeared and our optimism has since faded. > Our websites are slow and insecure; > our startups are creepy and unprofitable; > our president Tweets hate speech; > we don’t trust our social media apps, webcams, or voting machines. > And in the era of coronavirus quarantining, we’re realizing just how inadequate the Internet turned out to be as a home of Mind.

That's a mixed bag of laments about products and sociological phenomena. People using computers and software were supposed to solve all these problems?

> this mess, this tool-assisted speedrun of accumulation and exploitation

This is all of human history. It's a hard course in the frequent application of inhumane principles and failure to understand scale and sustainability. "Software" was never going to change human nature.

> Where did it all go wrong?

So, the OP's question itself is, at best, not an unworthy question but an incomplete question. The software industry was never going to "go right". You may as well ask "where human society went wrong".

Or whether human society has ever gone right, at scale.

The glass is half-full or half-empty. We have websites and can do things I never dreamed of as a child. When I had to do product research when I was younger it meant going to a book store and pursuing a rack of magazines. Google was a startup, Amazon was a startup. I would not call them unprofitable. Back when I was young you had companies like SUN, SGI, MIPS as startups, where are they now? Our president tweets? Direct communication to people without it being filtered by N layers? I bet every president has said hate speech behinds the scene at some point. Now the curtain is being lifted. I consider that good, actually, incredible. If you think sitting in your house alone during COVID would have been better without having the internet, then just turn it off. But I don't know anybody who came to that conclusion.

In the modern world people seem to criticize things that are not perfect. That is fine to notice those things, but to let them sway your entire outlook is unhealthy and, in many cases, wrong.

Can we do better? Yes, I think so. But I don't think we are doing nearly as bad as the picture you paint.

I think the biggest problem is that the Internet accelerated change to a speed that people are not accustomed to. It might take a couple generations to adapt.

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