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Comment by fitsumbelay | Hacker News Reader

I _believe_ it was in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where a pair of 7 year old brother-sister twins used complimentary and contradictory postings -- sometimes assuming eachother's identities or creating new ones -- in newsgroups to influence public opinion. When disinfo on Facebook and Twitter went nuclear in 2015 -2016 those fictional siblings were first to mind

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In Orson Scott Card's "Enders Game" as well. Children had been bred and trained to be tactical so Ender's siblings applied their talents locally to manipulate geopolitics as a side story.

I think that's actually what I'm thinking of. I think they were Ender's siblings, actually Thanks, you saved me from re-reading Count Zero too

I think you are thinking of "Locke" and "Demosthenes" in Ender’s Game.

The reality of which was best summarised by https://xkcd.com/635/

It's ironic how that comic aged far more poorly than the original premise it made fun of.

By 2016, anonymous online political commentary was directly influencing major world events.

I mean only in the aggregate, only if you got a big community to do it or got picked up and amplified by a political leader. I can't think of any anonymous blog posts which changed the world. Movements like Anonymous have had an impact, but there's a more to that than online screeds. The closest analog might be Q, aka an anon like Ron Watkins, but that itself was swept up in a larger movement that pushed and pulled in all sorts of different directions.

To me the idea of kids posting on Internet forums and becoming major political leaders through their pseudonyms, through logical language like a modern-day version of the Federalist Papers, does seem pretty silly in 2024.

Heck, book-length political treatises by anonymous insiders barely got any traction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Hubris

Fair point about it being in aggregate would what an aggregation it was back in 2014, 2015 and 2016. And it was a mix of groups and goals -- some were partisans who intentionally disinformed while others were apolitical and driven by opportunism and greed. maybe there was some overlap, maybe some codependence. But they certainly changed the world imho by preventing what would've been a more responsible Clinton Administration from managing the pandemic in the US for example.

You should check out the Bitcoin whitepaper.

By 2016, we'd realised that the way to influence people with anonymous political commentary was to do the exact opposite of producing detailed, well-reasoned arguments...

Were there "detailed, well-reasoned arguments" before?

Just looking at political commentary from the 80s and 90s, it's mostly nonsense.

I'm a huge xkcd hater, but I would give that strip credit for unintentionally capturing a snapshot of the internet. Most anonymous WordPress blogs languished in obscurity, truly people's live journals that no one cared to comment on, let alone add you to their blogroll. That era of discourse has been superseded by far louder (and dumb and obnoxious) Mediums.

true

I think you have it backwards. Snow Crash was published in 1992. The article references things Ballard said in the 70's and 80's

I don't think GP is making a point about which came first or whatnot. Just sharing a connection they made.

My apologies then

thanks, no problem

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