Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Dis-intermediating & making tech real again, a genuine experience, feels like the only conceivable path through. I think you're both super on key here, but the analog mentality feels like trying to gear back down when I strongly think the only way out is through. Give the luddites control of the machines, don't smash them!

> solid couple years of effort, to build human interaction with various forms of consumer tech intermediating all the interactions, and it's been an unmitigated disaster in no shortage of ways.

You've hit on so many issues, recapped well, but the huge blank this article leaves, that Rushkoff's abandonment ask, is what could we hope for?

Right now we are beholden to software. We need to figure out how to make the rawer real experience tractable, interesting, & engaging. Something between coding & systems will emerge that lets us not just be ignorant consumers. We can start to create a hypermedium which enables literacy, not merely enabling spectacle.

A while back I saw the original unveiling of the Next Cube, when Steve Jobs called computers a bicycle for the mind - it was so apparent in what they demoed.

A machine that helped people create rather than just consume, even simple things like having an inbuilt dictionary. We still have that but it is always running off to the internet to do what was done in 1987. And that leap to something external is not just for convenience, it is a leap of how we used these things.

Like Rushoff, for the last 15 years I have been trying to figure out ways to return a little of that of that isolated but functional style to computing. I no longer try. Every attempt has just been meet with further disappointment. Unlike others here advocating for pushing through, I don't think we can. In pushing through it is merely providing more fuel for potential missuse.

I still use modern technology but only that which is basically forced on me by the rest of society. Even then its impact is minimized - I think Hacker news is the last regular thing I really engage with in this space and that is slowing down with time as well.

Maybe there is a part where spectacle is the main driving force that allowed these technologies to become so pervasive in our world? That is to say that if we never went down this path computers would be treated more like we treated type writers. A neat tool but something few would get obsessed with.

I think we've become obsessed with the conservative, scared, frightened, what-about-the-potential-for-abuse viewpoint. Because, in large part, it's the only view we can talk about & sell. Everything else is esoteric & technical & speculative, is just some idea that may not work, & is mostly abstract.

But damage & harm is real, and it makes a powerful headline.

I really believe things would look different if we weren't all to at ends. If we could actually see & experience tech in a modestly reasonable, user-controlled way, if we could see the overlays of weights & pressures that make up our current upvote/downvote algorithm & tune it ourselves... if we had some post-consumer avenues for exploration we were walking, I think we could see society improve itself & make gains. Right now that's unimaginable. The harm & the bad is the only thing we can grasp. In part because computing is kept all in the cloud, in big data keeps, far off & remote, with us here as powerless agents simply receiving whatever signals it deigns beam at us.

Society, if given a chance to do so, would regulate & improve this world. But society's input has not been welcome. Computing has been getting less & less democratic, less and less part of the natural observable world, and more cloistered, closed & shitty, for decades. We cannot even imagine a progressive outlook, where we might participate, and it's hard to guess what things would be like, if we could.

I wrote an essay a few weeks back that has yet to be published (it was about AI but it applies here). It is starting to feel like everything is starting to feed back on itself. The output is being funneled back into input. Like a fractal. Interesting but you do not want to build a society on a fractal. Or a city on Rock and roll for that manner ;).

In that sense technology is becoming a feed back loop of society itself. Anxiety, can be an act of repeating the same nervous though again and again in a loop never moving on. In that way, this is were information technology had lead a lot of realms of us to.

To some degree I think this is what Jaron Lanier means when he says AI could drive us insane. This level of feed back is not going to work out well.

> In that sense technology is becoming a feed back loop of society itself.

I had a discussion recently with somebody about how it feels as though the 70s, 80s, 90s had a distinctive style but from the early 00s onwards there appears to be no distinguishing character to the recent most decades.

Their conclusion was that it was due to 'the increase in technology use, less creativity - more sat about consuming media in one way or another'.

I wonder if that's true - we no longer have to suffer silence or boredom thanks to an endless stream of 'content' available to us.

It prevents rumination and leads us to have every thought impressed upon it variations of patterns from the past.

I think it's an open question as to if we can turn our current tech into something human-centric and not violently human-toxic at some level or another.

And I'll argue that it's really not. And that, yes, we should "gear back down," and stop using nearly as much. I've been on a gradual trip that way over the past half decade or so, and it's pretty darn nice. Tech has been my entire career. I look forward to the day I can put a computer down for the last time.

You're arguing that "something like what a lot of people hoped computers and the internet would become" can still happen, and I think the time window on that has closed. Within a rounding error of "nobody" understands computers deeply anymore - and most who still can keep up with the low level stuff are in their 40s or older, grew up in the ISA era, and generally are looking to retire. An entire generation doesn't know how computers work now, for an awfully wide range of definitions.

But unfortunately, even if you could "give the luddites control of the machines," most of those neoluddites don't want control of the machines. They've tried them for a few decades, and have found an awful lot of it wanting. And if you do insist on asking them, you'll find out that most of them lurk on IRC, and are quite happy with the 80s level of interaction IRC allows. :)

Computing needs new paradigms forms & structures to become legible. Your timeline is absurd to me. How long did it take for writing to become useful? Yet you expect the world will adapt & become competent... in this?

What we have now will not be the way. I suspect the web will probably be the platform that a user-agency enabling computing will come from, but it will come from making pages with entirely different ethos, pages designed not by and for developers to develop on, but pages designed to surface & raise the hypermedium. People love themselves some hypercard, & I don't 100% get it, but that idea of combination visual / programmatic experiences, that notion of making computing more tactile & rooted, I think is what has to happen. Data and declarative systems are such shit now, nothing affords us our data, it's all burried deep inside code, and the hypercard world, the web/dom world is about an inversion, a juncture where the abstract code falls below the surface of a more general information platform of which code is just a part.

There's no timeline here. There's no past due, time's ran out. Iteration, and back & forth can keep happening. The frontier isn't defined & circumscribed by the mainstream, by the popular. Good ideas have plenty of opportunity to take root & grow. If anything, I think the desperation & starvation society knows it's undergoing emphasizes how rapidly better could take hold.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com