The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

we're living in full communism, it just hasnt been distributed yet

idk what you mean by communism

the end result is everyone living in pods deep in converted abandoned big box stores on the far edge of suburbs, jerking off to their ock rifts, soylent flowing into the epidural

but employed and better off than ever, don't forget.

what the knowledge economy is working on is deploying all possible knowledge within its frame, that's the real singularity imo

xp also rich investors aren't losing money.

I wonder what Ned thinks? I think of him as "the watcher" of the Internet, like plugged into every network

no one has a job anymore!

very few ppl are currently doing necessary or productive work anymore but i feel like thats super different from 'no one has a job anymore!'?

Maybe I should start one of those twee donut places

very few ppl are currently doing necessary or productive work anymore but i feel like thats super different from 'no one has a job anymore!'?

― affluent white (Lamp), Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:07 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a seldom acknowledged but very scary & fucked up trend is that demand for jobs that make intensive use of workers' "cognitive skills" has been declining since the turn of the millenium in the US http://www.nber.org/papers/w18901

without really knowing how any of this is going to shake out or if any of it will change i think the big things on the horizon that could make things better/worse/both are like

- apple, google, and facebook essentially teaming up to fully kill most online advertising--the big meme in the Best and the Brightest-type tech circles right now is about page load time--apple building adblock into mobile safari and facebook trying to swallow external content, etc.

- the consequent & real death of web sites in favor of apps--yr home screen turns into a notifications scroll

- the block chain idk???

the end result is everyone living in pods deep in converted abandoned big box stores on the far edge of suburbs, jerking off to their ock rifts, soylent flowing into the epidural

― max, Thursday, July 16, 2015 6:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't get the killing online advertisement stuff, don't google and facebook sell info to online advertisers? why would they want to kill them off just so pages load faster? i don't really understand the big deal with the facebook native content thing either, just doesnt seem like it would work

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

that's pretty accurate, i'd say.

big business has been wanting to automate content for a long time now, and they've reached their limits. most of the sports news you see instantly published is about the only thing that is automatically generated that looks somewhat deceiving. stock stuff, as well. anything data-driven or number-heavy basically.

in the end, they know they need one dweeb proofreading that stuff or fact-checking things to make it look more organically written and more enticing to read. what's saddening is content is being produced to game a system where more clicks means better conversion rates. so you get english majors writing seo'd buzzfeed listicles. so companies pay them $10 an hour or per article and they end up barely scraping by. the bar is just really low.

and it's just safari that will be blocking ads, as far as i know. google is essentially an ad company, so it's difficult to imagine they'd want ads to disappear completely.

change is a constant. i was bitter for a couple years after usenet drowned in a sea of garbage. then i changed enough to not be bitter anymore.

at the time, '95-'00, there were plenty of people bemoaning the "imminent death of the net", and i wholly embraced any change that broke down cliquishness, opened discourse to anybody who wasn't a computer nerd. i didn't see, probably couldn't foresee, that the internet would turn into a replica of a high school.

the problem with the internet is, i believe, a basic one of design. the people who designed it were technologically and not socially oriented. they were, fundamentally, optimists. they believed in the cold war ideology of freedom, that if we broke down the barriers dividing people we would make a better world. they believed that people and computers alike were fundamentally trustworthy.

these basic assumptions are unsustainable in the face of current reality. professionally, i deal with privacy and security. right now on the internet we do not have either in any meaningful form. this has devastating social consequences. the social consequences are not the worst problem right now.

the paradox of privacy and security is that without security, privacy is impossible, but to implement security, the existing models of privacy will have to be utterly destroyed. we're not just dealing with the close of the internet's golden age, but of its iron age.

if we design a system that is, by its nature, paranoid, we may reach a point where we stop requiring human beings to be paranoid to use the internet at all. imagine a world where you could speak your mind without fear of reprisal. now think about how different that is from the internet today.

but i think where there used to be a kind of janky framework of interconnected personal tilde-fronted pages and janky geocities and listservs and whatever else

but this was always a small group of people compared to today's 3 billion internet users ... and probably there are more of them now rather than less? (if you include blogspot / wordpress blogs.)

but i mean, yeah. i get it. the direction looks bad. i'm actually considering implementing some geeky decentralized social web shit just ... because. in my optimistic moments i talk about pendulum swings.

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

nah things are definitely bad for online publishers, who pretty much operate like print publishers for a long time. online ad spend is getting more and more automated, the supply of online ad space is ever expanding, everyone is looking at your page on their phone now which is not a great place to show an ad, your entire company's fate is in the hands of fb and google and who knows what next year (and btw zuckerberg is wondering if you want to just stop making a website).

who pretty much operated*

not to be THE MONEY RUINED IT MAN but the money ruined it, man

I feel like the money-was-coming side of this was inevitable, but one thing I wonder is if the corporate monopolies were natural. was only-one-search-engine inevitable? could we be living in a world w/ 5 pretty good search engines right now? people could rib each other for their search engine choices at parties?

one fb-type social network of record does seem like it was kinda inevitable, but lots of aspects of how it developed that just seem like a part of the world now - 'likes', the newsfeed as it exists weren't.

I work for a digital publication that's never been print and therefore never had to deal with that transition but regardless, the ad revenue is down, probably 50% of what it was five years ago. So the revenue crisis is not just about the transition.

Basically what happened to the Internet is that it matured into google/facebook/apple, with each of these being a virtual monopoly in its field, as is the way of late capitalism. The big things have happened. Start ups will continue to be sold for millions or billions, but you'll never have two guys in a garage becoming google or facebook or apple again.

Personally, I think it's pretty scary the power these guys have over content. If all content ends up being read in a Facebook app then that gives them enormous power over what content gets most visibility. In my company we had an entire business that was destroyed when Google changed its algorithms.

i don't get the killing online advertisement stuff, don't google and facebook sell info to online advertisers? why would they want to kill them off just so pages load faster? i don't really understand the big deal with the facebook native content thing either, just doesnt seem like it would work

it's hard for me to imagine things taking a drastic turn for the worst wrt online media. i feel like a lot of the pain from the transition out of print is behind us now. maybe that's naive idk just a feeling

― flopson, Thursday, July 16, 2015 7:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think i mean web advertising specifically; obviously facebook and google sell attentive users looking for specific things, without advertising they wouldn't make money! but facebook notices that when you click off of it to another page, especially from your phone. it takes x microseconds faster to load than it would if it were hosted on facebook itself; over the long term users associate that slow load time with facebook, spend less time on facebook, etc.

i dont think facebook native content will work either, but until the internet shifts again toward decentralization and away from platforms and all-in-one apps, some kind of hosted content product will become prevalent. probably not the norm but not odd to see. ny times reporting on iran via decayed minions macros on instagram.

I feel like the money-was-coming side of this was inevitable, but one thing I wonder is if the corporate monopolies were natural. was only-one-search-engine inevitable? could we be living in a world w/ 5 pretty good search engines right now? people could rib each other for their search engine choices at parties?

one fb-type social network of record does seem like it was kinda inevitable, but lots of aspects of how it developed that just seem like a part of the world now - 'likes', the newsfeed as it exists weren't.

― iatee, Thursday, July 16, 2015 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i wonder this a lot too! i jokingly argue for the nationalization of google and facebook but i kind of do think they should at least be declared some kind of common carriers. i REALLY think the post office should launch its own endearingly janky "public option" social network.

We had three or four search engines before Google too, but (my recollection is) only one at a time, they would come up and crush all opposition, but Google seemed good enough to stick. I think you'd at best end up with "Safari's default search engine" vs "Chrome's default search engine" vs etc etc - in fact you kind of have that now (assuming that IE's is Bing?).

I think that Google being that big has actually been crucial to surviving the dotcom crash (a major contributing factor to which was the realisation that the conversion rates for online advertising was TERRIBLE, when a lot of business models had been built around it). One Search Engine = one target for SEO optimisation and one reliable source for ad sales (at one point Google AdSense was making half of the global profit on online advertising - more money than Microsoft was making selling Windows).

I think you'd at best end up with "Safari's default search engine" vs "Chrome's default search engine" vs etc etc - in fact you kind of have that now (assuming that IE's is Bing?).

soon we will have siri vs google now, probably!

vs Cortana, too.

But yeah, in ten years kids will probably look back in the same wonder (about SOMETHING) that kids today feel that you couldn't just type stuff into the title bar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJ6IhY9lzo

pls to confirm tht by using adblock i am helping bring down capitalism thx

yeah i wonder this a lot too! i jokingly argue for the nationalization of google and facebook but i kind of do think they should at least be declared some kind of common carriers

― max, Friday, July 17, 2015 7:28 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://twitter.com/fl0pson/status/527588884012892160

i think this by brad delong in 2000 was pretty prescient

http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/726/635

The case for the market system has always rested on three implicit pillars, three features of the way that property rights and exchange worked:

Call the first feature excludability: the ability of sellers to force consumers to become buyers, and thus to pay for whatever goods and services they use.

Call the second feature rivalry: a structure of costs in which two cannot partake as cheaply as one, in which producing enough for two million people to use will cost at least twice as many of society's resources as producing enough for one million people to use.

Call the third feature transparency: the ability of individuals to see clearly what they need and what is for sale, so that they truly know just what they wish to buy.

...

There is every indication that they will fit the 21st-century economy relatively poorly [7].

...

In the absence of excludability, industries today and tomorrow are likely to fall prey to analogous distortions. Producers' revenue streams, wherever they come from, will be only tangentially related to the intensity of user demand. Thus, the flow of money through the market will not serve its primary purpose of registering the utility of the commodity being produced. There is no reason to think ex ante that the commodities that generate the most attractive revenue streams paid by advertisers or by ancillary others will be the commodities that ultimate consumers would wish to see produced.

...

[I]f goods are non-rival - if two can consume as cheaply as one - then charging a per-unit price to users artificially restricts distribution. To truly maximize social welfare, we need a system that supplies everyone whose willingness to pay for the good is greater than the marginal cost of producing another copy. If the marginal cost of reproduction of a digital good is near zero, that means almost everyone should have it for almost no charge. However, charging a price equal to marginal cost almost surely leaves the producer bankrupt, with little incentive to maintain the product except for the hope of maintenance fees. There is no incentive to make another one except that warm, fuzzy feeling one gets from impoverishing oneself for the general good.

...

Thus we have a dilemma. If the price of a digital good is above the marginal cost of making an extra copy, some people who truly ought (in the best of all possible worlds) to be using it do not get to have it. The system of exchange that we have developed is getting in the way of a certain degree of economic prosperity. But if price is not above the marginal cost of making an extra copy of a non-rival good, the producer will not be paid enough to cover costs. Without non-financial incentives, all but the most masochistic producer will get out the business of production.

More important, perhaps, is that the existence of large numbers of important and valuable goods that are non-rival casts doubt upon the value of competition itself. Competition has been the standard way of keeping individual producers from exercising power over consumers. If you don't like the terms the producer is offering, you can just go down the street. But this use of private economic power to check private power may come at a high cost if competitors spend their time duplicating each other's efforts and attempting to slow down technological development in the interest of obtaining a compatibility advantage, or creating a compatibility or usability disadvantage for the other competitor.

One traditional answer to this problem (now in total disfavor) was to set up a government regulatory commission to control the "natural monopoly." The commission would set prices and would do the best it could to simulate a socially optimum level of production. On the eve of World War I, when American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), under the leadership of its visionary CEO, Theodore N. Vail, began its drive for universal coverage, a political consensus formed rapidly both in Washington and within AT&T that the right structural form for the telephone industry was a privately owned, publicly regulated national monopoly.

Google should totally be nationalized and regulated like a utility imo

xp

idk despite tweeting that i think it's p obviously a terrible idea. like, at what point should we have nationalized google? when it had a monopoly on search engines? after gmail? would we now have all kinds of sick shit like maps, streetview, scholar etc if we had then? obviously not. google isn't really a "utility" cause it keeps producing new crazy shit, and spending tonnes of money on r&d for stuff that doesn't pan out. from today's pov we can't imagine the future stuff their r&d might produce, how much shittier products would be if nationalized etc and i don't think those losses would outweigh the benefit from nationalization

vs Cortana, too.

But yeah, in ten years kids will probably look back in the same wonder (about SOMETHING) that kids today feel that you couldn't just type stuff into the title bar.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, July 17, 2015 12:52 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idg cortana, afaict you ask a question and it looks up some of the words you said on Bing and shows you the search results

xp You are aware that, say, NASA was not actually a for-profit company?

I am pretty sure there would be a good online maps company in a world without google. youtube, gmail, maps and the search engine could totally be torn into separate companies without the world ending.

Mapquest would have had a multi billion dollar IPO by now.

FWIW the integration is actually one of the things I really dislike about Google - it seems much more designed for optimal advertising and data harvesting than optimal user experience. And stop trying to get me to do shit on google plus already!

xxp i am aware nasa was not actually a for-profit company (however a lot of early developments in space were privately funded, and the vast maj only became public during the cold war--although that's just a historical tidbit.) my argument (that google offers & develops lots of services and products many of which don't exist yet and shouldn't be regulated the same way as electricity) applies to google specifically. FTR i think governments should spend way more on r&d than they currently do, but i don't think nationalizing the companies that spend a lot on r&d is an obviously good thing, i would have to be convinced i guess

the alternative (ie, the one we currently have) seems p shitty to me

republicanson

google isn't really a "utility" cause it keeps producing new crazy shit

as iatee notes, this is hardly an obstacle - nationalize the utility part (ie, the search engine), they can keep their ridiculous R&D shit

(if you can't guess I'm not exactly impressed with their self-driving cars and facecomputers etc.)

there are similar arguments about the most efficient ways of doing drug research, and who benefits

BBC Radiophonic Workshop is another example - there is absolutely nothing about innovation which requires a private company.

kinda tangential but something that 1000% should be nationalised, imo as a branch of the library of congress, is the internet archive. like it should just be funded at arm's length because it is holding the internet up.

this is kind of a tangent though

the carles article identifies the nut of the problem posed by the thread, the difficulty facing us now

as iatee notes, this is hardly an obstacle - nationalize the utility part (ie, the search engine), they can keep their ridiculous R&D shit

― Οὖτις, Friday, July 17, 2015 12:23 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think is simple and probably not feasible. they use the money from utilities to fund the R&D shit

m@tt- i'm not a republican >_< there is no party whose platform is to nationalize google and there never will be. i even said in another thread i thought nationalizing uber would be a good idea! i just don't think you can make the case as easily for goog. also i just posted a long thoughtful thing about how to regulate markets on the internet when excludability & rivalry no longer apply, i'm not anti regulating shit in the least i just think u gotta think about it

there is absolutely nothing about innovation which requires a private company.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, July 17, 2015 12:26 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree 100% that the state has a huge role in innovation, and that they should pursue that role way more aggressively than they currently do. but private companies also have a role

particularly in turning innovations into products ppl can use, which was exactly my reason for not nationalizing google

flop - honestly i was just joking there!

the reason they can fund their ridiculous R&D shit is because of their obscene monopoly-derived profits. It's true my proposal isn't "feasible" from Google's POV - it would destroy their company - which would be fine with me. Company has created enough billionaires that could go off and fund their own R&D-oriented startups anyway.

Google should totally be nationalized and regulated like a utility imo

xp

― Οὖτις, Friday, July 17, 2015 11:28 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk despite tweeting that i think it's p obviously a terrible idea. like, at what point should we have nationalized google? when it had a monopoly on search engines? after gmail? would we now have all kinds of sick shit like maps, streetview, scholar etc if we had then? obviously not. google isn't really a "utility" cause it keeps producing new crazy shit, and spending tonnes of money on r&d for stuff that doesn't pan out. from today's pov we can't imagine the future stuff their r&d might produce, how much shittier products would be if nationalized etc and i don't think those losses would outweigh the benefit from nationalization

― flopson, Friday, July 17, 2015 11:45 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not to be the guy who always brings up the Bell System, but that would be a nice example of a privately-held monopoly that while never (permanently) nationalized (nor ever a complete monopoly in all of its fields) was super super heavily regulated, and whose R&D arm still produced much sicker shit than google ever has: transistors, digital switching, cell phones, lasers, fiber optic transmission, and apparently evidence for the big bang (?!). they did this within the specific profit margins/dividend payouts they could get away with under the regulated system; the monopoly on long-distance underwrote both the research efforts and the provision of low-rate local service. so there are models that stop short of nationalization, but offer provisions for, as i was rambling about on the uber thread, "the public" or policy leaders to assert "this is the kind of technical infrastructure we want to have. if you can provide that, then great. if not, no dice." so the bigger question would have to be what kind of technical infrastructure do we want to have, and in what specific ways does google exceed the boundaries of this, and will that ever be a big enough issue that the political climate would allow government to step in. privacy issues seem like a potential big one. the paradox is that it would, i agree, have been more feasible for the public to assert this control a long time back, but until google was an effective monopoly it would not have seemed necessary.

it could alternately be an anti-trust "we just don't want this one company to run too many things" - like how AT&T was ultimately forced to get out of the computer business (ceding it to, it turned out, another effective monopoly in IBM. darn that military-industrial complex!). given the patriot act, etc., i'm not sure the government has much credibility on the whole "privacy" front but generally speaking i do sort of prefer the idea of there just being Email and Searching, like there was just Phone Service. some kind of hard guarantees that your correspondence is not being sold to third parties, etc. i honestly don't have any idea though - what's google's operating budget (versus R&D, marketing, whatever else they spend money on)? like how much does it cost just to provide all this email and searching infrastructure? i really have no idea whether in a nationalization scenario it would be like, the size of the post office or the size of the national park rangers or what. would be awesome if government email could balance the post office budget though. maybe they'd invent an app to figure out why the bushwick branch office is such a complete shitshow.

actually it's funny how much this thread is overlapping with the recent contents of the uber thread, re: 3-day workweek, etc.

also yeah the maps thing was happening anyway with mapquest. and the ready access to satellite imagery first appeared i think with microsoft terraserver. the funny thing is that google maps has obviously gotten much, much worse in the last year or two as the monetizable clicks (restaurants) are actually driving the UI. it's, i assume deliberately, become absurdly easy to click away from what you're actually trying to do and onto some stupid fast-casual concept taco operation, and absurdly hard to do things most people actually want. that's maybe a petty example, but the point is that the profit motive is certainly driving various inventions, but it's not clear that all of them are beneficial to the public. i wonder if google has any "we killed the electric car" type skeletons in their closet - amazing, useful inventions that would make the internet less shitty and more useful for everybody, but which cut into the bottom line. strikes me as totally plausible but it's a hypothetical i admit.

the funny thing is that google maps has obviously gotten much, much worse in the last year or two as the monetizable clicks (restaurants) are actually driving the UI.

Er, that depends a lot on what you use it for! I only need it to show me where a postcode is, how to get there from work, and how to get home from there. And sometimes how to peer around it in Google Street View* - all of those are fine. And all of them except the last could be done as well using the perfectly fine government-created Transport for London's website / app - except that when I see a postcode in Chrome, I can select it, right click, and there's a 'search for SE12AQ' option which leads me to a page, which will have a map on it. I think some folk in this thread are really undervaluing the integration of Google as regards being where you go to get information.

*curious as to whether it would have less coverage as Gubmint Street View.

Gawker, he declares, will always “report on married <...> executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives.” What about when the cheating executives are women and the spouse is a man? He doesn’t say.

In fairness, it's pretty clear from reading it that this isn't a Profound Ethical Policy that reveals Max as a misogynist - it's "what do I have to excuse today?" - it says wife because this guy has a wife.

Hah, wrong thread, sorry.

pls to confirm tht by using adblock i am helping bring down capitalism thx

― 2011’s flagrantly ceremonious rock-opera (Bananaman Begins), Friday, July 17, 2015 3:36 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

only skimmed the last few posts but just some thoughts.

adblock + ghostery do affect marketing/advertising companies. so keep doing it if you want to voice your opinion that way.

also an alternative to google is duckduckgo: https://duckduckgo.com/

it isn't perfect but it works pretty well.

i don't understand why people would want to nationalise a company that produces rigged results. obviously google has rigged search. so that page with no links/backlinks and no seo/optimization will never appear in your search, or, if it does, it'll be close to dead last. and even with all of that, if it's a popular keyword, you have to pay your way to the top. which is why search results are dominated by large companies/entities

search is one of the biggest things in tech that is prime for disruption, sorry to use garbage biz slang

Users of adblock, duckduckgo, etc. are a self-selecting population (people motivated to try to avoid advertising and savvy enough to do it in a non-stupid way). Which means advertising will be aimed more and more at reaching and motivating stupid people / nontechnical people.

Thanks a lot savvy jerks.

the thing that's always confused me about the entire modern web economy being based on advertising is...who the hell are these people clicking on ads and spending money based on them? obviously they exist, but it's hard to relate to.