gonna be honest: i agree with probably half of his points, but the majority of this keynote strikes me as at best alarmist and at worst actively ridiculous. there are many, many things that are...
gonna be honest: i agree with probably half of his points, but the majority of this keynote strikes me as at best alarmist and at worst actively ridiculous. there are many, many things that are problematic with the internet and many, many things we need to do about the corporations which by and large control it and the devices we use to connect to it. the web can be used to do many awful things, and facilitates many awful actions. i don't think i need to recite all of the ways the internet sucks, nor how we have put entirely too much faith in entirely too small a set of people to control entirely too much of the internet.
that, however does not mean that google and facebook are out to hybridize us with machines, it does not mean that these few people we have put faith in are suddenly going to render our every thing a public act no matter how private we want it to be, it does not mean that the internet is so devastating to humanity and its institutions that we may never recover, and it certainly does not mean that the internet is something which will lead to the metaphorical or literal death of our species. the internet, at the end of the day, is literally not even a necessary part of the human state of being. if you want to fuck off from this unenviable hellscape, you can starting five minutes from now by unplugging your router, logging off, and living just as people had for tens of thousands of years prior to the popularization of the computer. if this is truly a crisis of such magnitude as described within, it will perhaps be the easiest metaphorical or literal extinction event to avert in history, because the solution is literally to just stop using the internet.
reforming the internet is probably a necessity if you really want to address a lot of these problems which, to its credit, is a major feature of the keynote here. but honestly, a lot of the problems described within will always be problems with the internet in one way or another because of the nature of it, the nature of capitalism, and the nature of people. we can and should certainly minimize them, but even if you entirely reinvented the internet from the ground up, i just don't see how we'd avert a lot of the problems that have developed short of extreme, international standards that are enforced from day one. i see many of them (such as the struggle for privacy and what is an acceptable balance of it) as inevitable features of the medium that we simply have to grapple with and work with or around.
gonna be honest: i agree with probably half of his points, but the majority of this keynote strikes me as at best alarmist and at worst actively ridiculous. there are many, many things that are problematic with the internet and many, many things we need to do about the corporations which by and large control it and the devices we use to connect to it. the web can be used to do many awful things, and facilitates many awful actions. i don't think i need to recite all of the ways the internet sucks, nor how we have put entirely too much faith in entirely too small a set of people to control entirely too much of the internet.
that, however does not mean that google and facebook are out to hybridize us with machines, it does not mean that these few people we have put faith in are suddenly going to render our every thing a public act no matter how private we want it to be, it does not mean that the internet is so devastating to humanity and its institutions that we may never recover, and it certainly does not mean that the internet is something which will lead to the metaphorical or literal death of our species. the internet, at the end of the day, is literally not even a necessary part of the human state of being. if you want to fuck off from this unenviable hellscape, you can starting five minutes from now by unplugging your router, logging off, and living just as people had for tens of thousands of years prior to the popularization of the computer. if this is truly a crisis of such magnitude as described within, it will perhaps be the easiest metaphorical or literal extinction event to avert in history, because the solution is literally to just stop using the internet.
reforming the internet is probably a necessity if you really want to address a lot of these problems which, to its credit, is a major feature of the keynote here. but honestly, a lot of the problems described within will always be problems with the internet in one way or another because of the nature of it, the nature of capitalism, and the nature of people. we can and should certainly minimize them, but even if you entirely reinvented the internet from the ground up, i just don't see how we'd avert a lot of the problems that have developed short of extreme, international standards that are enforced from day one. i see many of them (such as the struggle for privacy and what is an acceptable balance of it) as inevitable features of the medium that we simply have to grapple with and work with or around.