Forums like this are still a bright spot on the internet. But the dynamic of the never ending scrolling social media universe is both hegemonic and toxic. Political discourse on all sides is shattered and toxic.
I think I posted earlier, but the thing I have learned to really like about TB is precisely that there's no algorithm. That leaves the exchange of information and opinion much freer here than it is on most social media. Also, the fact that it's a private forum dedicated to a specific activity - bass playing - enables it to have pretty firm rules and moderation. The goal here is not to allow anyone to say anything about anything, but to support a healthy environment for discussion about bass.
But there's also a certain luxury of being niche. Politics is important stuff to talk about; but this is not the place for it, and we enforce that. That enables us to wall off a huge potential source of mayhem.
I've been an information junkie my entire life. Never has there been such easy access to such an immense wealth of diverse information as there is right now.
I love books. I read actual paper books every single day. But more than 95% of the information I get these days comes from various online sources. I'm constantly amazed at what I can find with just a little bit of rather effortless searching.
I believe that the real problem lies at the user end. Most people only seek information from sources that make them feel good or validate their preconceived biases, so when there is such a richness of sources available, it's tempting to select only the ones that don't challenge you or make you feel uncomfortable.
I know that it's not fashionable to blame the common folk for any of the faults of society and instead blame Big Business, Big Government, Big Religion, Special Interests, or just "The Man", but sometimes it's just human nature to be lazy and ignorant.
Oh, I'm happy to blame everybody. I adore JRR Tolkien, but one thing I think the internet has done is to explode any myth of "hobbit sense," the notion that ordinary folk have an inherent inner decency that guides them to the right thing to do. Ordinary folk are just as capable of horrors as any non-ordinary folk, whoever they are (and the "Scouring of the Shire" chapter in LOTR tacitly acknowledged that - lots of Hobbits proved eager enough to turn the Shire into knockoff Mordor). In fact, social media algorithms have made it abundantly clear that we have these deep inner faults that are easily exploited for profit, with dreadful consequences.
Authorities and institutions - all the "Big" things you mention - are also equally flawed. I have no illusions that they'll naturally be virtuous, benevolent, and just. But I do think there is a need for them to manage the mayhem of human society, in order to create conditions in which we can function.
As is usually the case with your thorough and thoughtful posts @hrodbert696 I pretty much agree with it, and even enthusiastically so.
But I think what's missing from your post is the the fact that the IT genie is out of the bottle and there's no possibility of going back to the pre internet days of information sharing from the source to the masses.
The new reality is that in every free secular democracy on Earth (and even in quite a lot of the less free ones) there are oceans of information available to anybody, virtually instantly, with almost no effort or cost.
This information can be true or false, good or bad, benevolent or sinister, useful or hazardous, and everything in between.
There is nothing stopping anyone from accessing any of it. However, there are a great many special interests that want very much to guide as many people as possible to their bits of information because they'll either profit for it or gain power and influence from it.
That's here to stay, and it's pointless to wish for some kind of internet police force that will be able to automatically recognize bad information in a truly objective manner and shunt information consumers away from it and herd them towards good information.
If you know of a way to accomplish this, then I'd be ecstatic to hear it. But I don't bekieve that it's possible. From my perspective, the ONLY solution is for society to admit that the problem is at the user end and to start teaching ourselves how to think critically - starting with our kids. The next generation should ideally be a lot less gullible and so easily led by charlatans, cranks, and demagogues.
I teach the next generation, and they're amazing kids. But I think it may be a little utopian to imagine that because they're "digital natives" they somehow have an innate immunity to algorithmic exploitation that their elders lack. They're exposed to it at an early age and are more likely to wind up raised on tarot cards and Area 51 theories than critical thinking and philosophy. You can find all of the above on the internet's plentiful information, but guess which you'll have served up on a silver platter and which is in a back corner somewhere if you search for it. And, as always, it pushes people to extremes, without any realization how extreme they're being. I won't get into the specific issue involved, because politics, but it amazes me how quick I see a lot of young people being to rush to calling current violent conflicts "genocide," when that's actually a very tendentious word that proves difficult to define and apply to specific situations. But like I've been saying - algorithms reward the extreme and provocative, not the nuanced.
I totally agree with you that the genie is out of the bottle and won't get put back in, rather like nuclear weapons that you can't just uninvent. It's a reality we have to live with now. And no, I didn't lay out a set of policy proposals for what to do about it, because this all originated with what we think of Elon Musk and the prospect of him founding an educational institution, for which his handling of Twitter/X is the main evidence. Whatever policy approach turns out to be best, it's clear that what Musk did was to remove what few guardrails had been put in place for what was already a very toxic environment. He chose to move the needle in the wrong direction.
Nuclear weapons aren't a perfect analogy, because hordes of people have smartphones but hardly anyone has an ICBM in their back yard. But still, they are somewhat useful to think with. We can't put the Bomb back in the bottle, but what international organizations and diplomats have done over the decades has been to
manage them, with non-proliferation treaties and so on. It hasn't created utopia but it's allowed life on Earth to continue. Ultimately I think we need to do the same with the internet, not just leave it to do anything whatsoever, but to take on the task of setting some guardrails in place and managing it.
). Brand spanking new(s). Loving kindness. Service to the community, beyond themselves.
