I'm genuinely interested in the world around me, and I like being entertained as much as the next person, but the problem with social media for me is that it creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.
I would go further and say that social media is just another kind of "news". The News, essentially, takes an incomprehensibly complex world and distills/simplifies it into something you can understand. In the same way that one creates a mental model for how a complex system works in order to better understand it. That's a useful thing!
But the distillation/simplification process introduces biases and distortions in its model of the world, which can lead to the model being extremely inaccurate. And with social media that inaccuracy extends to representations of your friends, family, and your self.
To the extent that The News, and Social Media, creates a reasonably accurate model of the world around you they're useful, but I take it all with a heavy dose of skepticism.
> It creates a simulacrum of the world which does not correspond to the tangible reality I see around me.
5–10 years ago I would have agreed: “The real world is so different from the terminally-online space.” But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world. For example, I have traveled the developing world a lot in the last two years, and it’s unbelievable how many young men want to talk to me about Andrew Tate and related things when they see I’m a man from the West. Even in countries with shaky English skills, certain online memes are big.
Or take when I bikepacked a remote route down Mexico that is popular with Americans: in spite of this route being largely a two-month break from being always online, the conversations when those American cyclists met up were often indistinguishable from the social or political outrage that engagement-maximizing platforms stoke. Even if you disconnect, you can’t repair the damage.
This is a really important comment, and I think people don't understand just how much the "call is coming from inside the house." We have really, really polluted our minds with all this trash outrage content. TV might have been stupid, but watching too much Cheers or Simpsons just never did this kind of damage.
A minor point might also be that TV was far less addictive (non-linear, personalized,...) and consumption was significantly harder (carrying a TV is difficult, even in watch format)
Back in the day, when you went onto the internet, you exited the Real World and went into the Internet World. I remember when like, there was one internet-connected device in the household, it was a computer with a keyboard that you sat down on. And it worked like you would "log on" to AOL instant messenger, and then when you "logged out" you'd have an "away message" that would indicate that you were offline, living your life, IRL. How quaint, right? You'd never have an "away message" nowadays -- you're never "away"!
These millenial terms of art have almost entirely disappeared. When's the last time you heard IRL?
Now, you (the general 'you', I mean, who spend 5-7 hours a day on social media) are always online. So when you log off, you're entering the Offline World, where you have to do some stupid BS that is totally boring and unstimulating. You wait to log on to figure out what happened in the Internet World, which actually has inserted itself and taken place of the Real World. Before, the important stuff, socially, culturally, politically, happened offline. Now, it's inverted; the important stuff socially, culturally, and politically, is happening online.
Unfortunately, this happened without any of us consenting or really knowing that it was happening. And like, parent comment put it perfectly: it's a simulacra of reality, with deeply bizarre/non-human scale rules, some explicitly built (algorithms, content policies, video filters etc.) and some totally implicit (viral behavior, memes, misinformation, AI).
The AI thing is also fucking crazy and it's happening in the Internet World. Y'all ain't seen nothing yet. It will get so much weirder. imho, it's horrific. The internet is like an alien facehugger for your mind, it will just totally fuck you up; the more you use it, the more mentally fucked up you will get. Most people have the alien facehugger totally strapped to their face and they don't even know it.
I feel like cyberspace was never meant to use your real name and identity. The entire point was that you were free from the constraints of the real world to be something else.
Cyberspace is still alive and well though at the individual level. The only social media I have is twitter with no followers and I have never posted anything. I don't cultivate any kind of online "brand" of my real world self. My twitter is basically an art machine that shows me wonderful works of art. Even the slightest mention of political nonsense, I block the sender no matter who it is.
Society is a lost cause in this regard but the individual can still enter cyberspace if they want to.
The real lost cause is even the word "simulation" is lost to a science fiction computer internet fantasy as opposed to the process of creating and sustaining simulacra like most people are spending their lives doing on social media.
This is a cool perspective. I never really considered that there were that many people for whom there's no difference between Internet Life and Real Life. We used to call these people "chronically online." To me, Internet is still something I sit down to deliberately do. I don't carry my phone around with me unless I plan to use it for something. Otherwise it sits in a drawer (and often has no battery left by the time I get around to needing it for something).
Nothing that happens on the Internet really affects my life. Someone could be flaming me on Twitter right now, and I don't know and don't care, and it will never reach into my real life. When I log off for the day and someone replies to this thread telling me I'm wrong, I won't know it until tomorrow morning when I log back in, and it won't have affected my sleep or anything. You can still keep Internet and IRL separate.
> But the terminally-online space has seeped into real life all over the world.
That's Baudrillard's point, who popularized one sense of the term "simulacrum." Not quite real, but not quite fiction either - something that straddles the boundary between the two as "hyperreality."
I know that HN culturally frowns on video links and unexplained references, so to be explicit:
The seeping of the internet into the real world is an important theme of the anime Serial Experiments Lain, which is excellent, and if you generally like anime and resonate with the kind of stuff that people are bringing up in this subthread, then I recommend giving it a watch.
I think the experience of jumping between destinations where people might be specifically interested in a sort of retail American culture is probably quite poluted unfortunately. I'm Canadian, but I don't feel the same sense of "lost cause" when I just talk to people I know in my community or at the gym where conversation goes marginally deeper than the most superficially relatable bits of sensational media.
I talk to my friends in their 30s about their relationships or lack of, the hobbies we enjoy, adventures we could go on, difficulties or success at work, family life, economic stuff, random ideas. Online stuff comes up almost only ironically at this point. Granted, I do specifically narrow the people I maintain ties with to only those I can engage with at that level and/or who are otherwise fun to be around. If even a noticeable minority of conversation was chronically online garbage or fake culture war crap, they just get muted/blocked like the rest of them and a friendship doesn't flourish, usually because in real life we can work through our real disagreements if they come up at all, but if it's derived from a presumption we should both be more mad or more aware of nonsense we don't need to think about, it's far more difficult.
I think this is true but the original point still stands. Online world now definitely plays a bigger role but I'd still suspect that for the majority online issues/drama are still a small % of what their real world looks like. Despite the media (social or news) bombarding the space with their 'model' of the world.
It has always felt to me like an amped up version of what the news is. As someone who has largely spent most of life as an immigrant, from a family of mostly immigrants all across the world, we always find it amusing how you get messages from people about the big x thing going on in whatever country you are, as per what is going on in the news/social media, and the person you're messaging is literally unaware that that is a big deal or is affected by it even indirectly enough for it to register. Anectodally, that happens far more frequently now than it did 5-10 years ago
We reshape reality to match the mental models we create. To the extent this has always been the case I have to accept it, but it feels like we're in a logarithmic curve of that pattern becoming faster and more powerful.
This resonates deeply with me. I don’t have any social media accounts, I’ve never been on tiktok or instagram, and the one social media I did have (facebook), I deleted 10 years ago. Yet I still can tell when there’s a new meme or trend. This is new though. Only in the last year or two have I felt like social media has really invaded offline spaces.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about bikepacking (GDMBR, various others) was that when you really get out in BFE, you meet people that live very different lives than you. They were also almost always quite nice, which was a pleasant surprise to this coastal city dweller.
Yup. Interacting with the Mexican rancheros was really nice. But so many of the American cyclists I shared the BD with were almost caricatures of highly-online, outraged people. Why do I need to hear from people I just met talk about “TERFs”, or other Tumblr- and Twitter-disseminated memes, or be asked to take sides in political races I had never even heard of (because I’m not even from their country and state and don’t follow their local politics)? It was something that we foreign cyclists noted and wanted to get away from.
My recent experience with social media has been very different. These days I'm mostly active on the Fediverse, and in contrast to the News, my timeline doesn’t feel like a model of the world at all. All I see are little snippets. Many individuals are sharing their feelings, creations, thoughts, or seeking advice. The posts don’t feel like a collage meant to capture the state of society as a whole, but rather as windows into different people’s lives.
I don’t think that’s how everyone feels on the Fediverse; browsing the federated timeline or viewing the public posts on some large instance doesn’t feel much different from the other big sites. But your own experience on your personal timeline is truly your own, and you decide what to make of it. I keep seeing personal snippets because I choose to follow people who post a lot of personal snippets that I’m interested in seeing. I get a relatively low amount of global politics and polarising topics because I seldom follow people who talk about those a lot. I quite literally get what I ask for—no less and no more.
At the end of the day, I think the key is understanding your network and adjusting your expectations. Following someone means you’ll be seeing their posts. So if you don’t want someone’s posts on your timeline, for whatever reason, just don’t follow them. Problem solved, easy as. (Then again, I imagine getting to see only the content you want to see might be more difficult on the more corporate networks, so if that’s the case, you might need a better social network.)
… and perhaps I should add that seeing only what you want to see won’t help you avoiding a simplified view of the world if such a view ultimately is what you want to see. Being in charge of your social experience is only useful if you're in charge of yourself. If you're not, you might need to change that before any social network, no matter how user-friendly, will be able to benefit you.
If you have customized your fediverse experience to avoid big social themes, you are arguably using it wrong. Several major founding figures of the fediverse have stated that they want trans and disabled advocacy to always remain central in the fediverse even as it grows larger. If people are able to use the fediverse without seeing issues of political concern to their community, then that represents a failure or abuse of what they created.
I think that’s a stretch. They may have hoped for the Fediverse to be used a certain way and/or by a certain kind of people, but the network itself and the design thereof don’t really reflect, support or enforce this in any way. (I also haven’t read any statements by said figures on this, although I know some of them do care about these topics a lot.)
In practice, there is no authority nor built-in mechanism to decide what people should be talking about on the Fediverse. Everyone is free and even encouraged to host their own server and make it about whatever they like. I’ve seen guides explain how federation works and encourage newbies to pick a server they like and try to have a fun experience, but I’ve never seen them present specific topics as inherent to the Fediverse, much less mandatory. And that doesn’t feel like abuse, but the way it’s intended to work, and has been advertised to work from as far as I can remember. And frankly, I find it disturbing to think it should work any other way.
I'm not 100% clear myself but I think that the criticism is that what was supposed to be a non-profit delivering world-changing technology for the public good was bullied/manipulated into a for-profit entity that would enrich investors and consolidate power among the wealthy.
So the "theft" is the wealthy stealing the benefits of AGI from the people. I think.
I'm so genuinely confused by all this. It seems that Altman has a lot of detractors here, and I'm not sure why (my fault for not keeping up I guess). But a company that wants to spend trillions of dollars on AGI infrastructure and hopes to re-shape the entire global economy surely needs to plow a staggering amount of money into its operations and not into a non-profit. I get that there is controversy over redirecting profits of a very successful business from a non-profit entity (which would be great) to private parties, but... that was always going to happen right? Am I just too cynical?
What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious.
Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?
> Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?
I never understood these sorts of statements. I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.
Adjusted for inflation, wouldn't Alexander the Great's plundering of Persia, which at the time comprised 40% of the world's population, be the greatest theft in human history, using your logic?
> I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.
It was always theft. Having been done in the past does not make them less theft. The reason East India Company is shown as example for such things is that it is the first human organization that did those on an industrial scale and genocidally.
It was already starving Indians by forcing them to plant opium instead of food crops to sell to the Chinese to kill them for money (20 million/year estimated dead from opium) in the late 18th century. And when the Chinese finally tried to stop it, Opium wars happened. The justification shown for that war was 'Free trade'. The justifications still havent changed, neither the practices. This should tell you why East India Company is specifically evil, because it is the first large scale application of the evil you see today and it invented a lot of its methods.
The article tracks some good historical quotes. But it doesn’t seem to try and steel man the other side, that is, what’s oAI worth without its workers and an attached for profit company?
To the extent the answer is ‘much lower’ then he could have spent a whole blog post congratulating California ag and Sam for landing the single largest new public charity in real dollar terms maybe ever.
If the point is “it sticks in my craw that the team won’t keep working how they used to plan on working even when the team has already left” then, fair enough. But I disagree with theft as an angle; there are too many counter factuals to think through before you should make a strong case it’s theft.
Put another way - I think the writer hates Sam and so we get this. I’m guessing we will not be reading an article where Ilya leaving and starting a C corp with no charitable component is called theft.
Are you saying that because you're cynical you thought Altman would always go for the biggest money grab possible, and so you won't criticize him on that basis? I'm cynical enough to think a lot of people will always go for the biggest money grab possible, but I still will criticize them for doing so.
No, I'm saying I'm cynical because I assume that whenever this much money is involved there's no way events unfold in a fair, ethical, utopian way. It always turns into a knife fight in the mud.
I should have structured my sentences a little better. I'm not confused about why he has detractors, I'm confused as to why people thought it would go any other way with this munch money on the line.
But, you're right, that's no reason to refrain from criticizing them for it.
It seems a bit strange to me that we as a society have agreed to arrest everyone in the knife fight in the mud despite very little risk of innocent parties wandering into the mud to be hurt, but if you put on a dress shirt..
Hot take: hereditary kingdoms were a reasonably successful solution to curbing constant civil war in a time when representative democracies might not have been viable (for various reasons).
I don’t think you could call it reasonably successful. For example, much of European history consisted of war and succession disputes. The entire system of aristocracy was prone to instability and shifting alliances. It turns out hereditary succession is not a good way to choose a competent political leader.
> this book also shows that the development and spread of primogeniture - the eldest-son-taking-the-throne - mitigated the problem of succession in Europe in the period after AD 1000. The predictability and stability that followed from a clear hereditary principle outweighed the problems of incompetent and irrational rulers sometimes inheriting power. The data used in the book demonstrates that primogeniture reduced the risk of depositions and civil war following the inevitable deaths of leaders.
> The predictability and stability that followed from a clear hereditary principle outweighed the problems of incompetent and irrational rulers sometimes inheriting power.
It doesn't though, incompetence is more dangerous than uncertainty. If someone wants to be a hereditary head of state as a formality, then ok that is one thing. But if we look at the most successful nation in the 1000s it is probably the UK, who haven't allowed the monarch to be in the room where the big decisions get made since Charles I was executed in 1649. From that point it is a stretch to say that the monarch is inheriting power. The power to agree cheerfully with what their government tells them to do, perhaps.
The Prime Minister meets the monarch every week. It's very, very naive to assume they only talk about the weather.
The Queen was known to object to legislation that affected her personally. And the monarchy - as the head of the aristocracy, the biggest land-owner, a major influence on the Tory Party, and a private corporation with significant business interests - can always use back-channels and cut-outs to have its say.
The British specialise in this kind of indirect hinting and insinuation. It's part of the culture at most levels, and it drives foreigners insane, because until you learn the subtext you'll completely misread what's being said.
How can you have a democracy when 90% of the populous is working 12 hour days 6-7 days a week just to pay the bills? How are they going to have an opinion on anything, other than “Stuff is too expensive”.
Note that the Ancient Greeks very often had democracies, when their standard of living was rather lower than what you describe. Life expectancy at birth was often below 30 years.
Note that in the Ancient Greek democracies, the people who worked 12 hour days 6-7 days a week and had a life expectancy of 30 years were called "Slaves", and they were not allowed to vote.
Non-laboring, land-owning males were the only ones allowed to participate in the democracy, and they lived to ripe old ages just as in modern times, even allowing for the occasional hemlock ingestion.
The Old Greeks cannot be trusted with historic matters. They were victims of indigestion, you know.
For most of human existence, life expectancy at birth was dominated by half of all kids not reaching puberty, and a quarter of all infants not making it through their first year.
Republics, like Venice and San Marino (oldest Republic still in existence), endured for a millennia.
I'll accept they don't have a good track record for defending themselves from hereditary monarchies. e.g. Nizny Novgorod to Muscovy, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (technically elected monarchy) to Prussia-Russia-Austria.
> Ultimately, the answer is simple: reinventing AI is essentially reinventing the smartphone.
I don’t think this is true at all. The smartphone is not some kind of endgame device after which there is no future. No more so than the train was the endgame of transportation. Why are we limiting our imagination about the future to only include what is true today?
AI obviously doesn't need a dedicated hardware device to succeed. It's having massive success already as people access it from any of the devices they already own.
Smart phone, laptop, headsets, VR goggles, AI can work with all of these just fine.
I think part of Apple's struggles with AI is they can't find a way to tie it to their hardware in a differentiating way. Since it's so cloud based and there are few compelling use cases for running worse models locally, "AI" works just as well on any device.
I don’t agree with that. I see people carrying around iPads, clipboards, physical books, sheets of paper, paper notebooks, dedicated cameras, even walkie talkies. All of those people have smartphones in their pockets as well.
While I love Douglas Adams, and there's a hint of truth there, I don't think it works well here. By that logic, anything invented after 2005 would be abhorrent to me. Yet, there's tons of new tech invented since that I find/found "new and exciting."
My dislike of GenAI stuff is based on practical, ethical, and economic concerns.
Practical: GenAI output is bland and untrustworthy. It also discourages thought and learning, IMO. Lest folks line up to tell me how wonderful it is for their learning, that may be true, but my observation is that is not how the majority uses it. Once upon a time I thought the Internet/Web would be a revolution in learning for people. Fool me once...
Ethical: So many problems here, from the training data sets, to people unleashing scraper bots that have been effectively DDoS'ing sites for going on a year (at least) now. If these are the kind of people who make up the industry building these tools, I want nothing to do with the tools.
Economic: Related to ethics, but somewhat separate. GenAI and other LLM/AI tools could benefit people. I acknowledge, for example, there's real promise in using various related tech to do better medical diagnostics. That would be wonderful. But, the primary motivation of the companies pushing AI right now is to 1) get people hooked on the tools and jack up prices, 2) sell tech that can be used to lower wages or reduce employment, and 3) create another hype technology so they can stuff their pockets, and the coming crash be damned.
Again, what is driving AI/LLM is not well intentioned. Ignore that at your own peril. Probably everybody else's peril, too.
Adams no doubt knew people who were aghast at PCs or mobile phones because they were not around when they were younger. I get it. But, well, I wonder how Adams would feel about GenAI tools that spit out "write blah in the style of Douglas Adams" after being trained on all of his work.
I think you could make identical arguments about any new technology. Amazingly expensive computers were once not very practical, it’s easy to point at any massive world changing tech and call it unethical, you can find these arguments about oil, railroads, 24 hour news, etc. and the same is true for economic incentives. Rubber barons and railroad tycoons were not well intentioned from this point of view. I don’t think there’s anything about AI that is inherently different from previous tech.
And isn’t that the entire point of the quote?
I’m not trying to be dismissive of your point, just to pose a counterpoint.
Other people have said this, but I don’t think it’s going to be any different than living in a world where people can spread rumors orally or print lies with a printing press. We’ve been dealing with those challenges for a long time.
Our ways of thinking and our courts understand that you can’t trust what people say and you can’t trust what you read. We’ve internalized that as a society.
Looking back, there seems to have been a brief period of time when you could actually trust photographs and videos. I think in the long run, this period of time will be seen as a historical anomaly, and video will be no more trusted than the printed or spoken word is today.
I would go further and say that social media is just another kind of "news". The News, essentially, takes an incomprehensibly complex world and distills/simplifies it into something you can understand. In the same way that one creates a mental model for how a complex system works in order to better understand it. That's a useful thing!
But the distillation/simplification process introduces biases and distortions in its model of the world, which can lead to the model being extremely inaccurate. And with social media that inaccuracy extends to representations of your friends, family, and your self.
To the extent that The News, and Social Media, creates a reasonably accurate model of the world around you they're useful, but I take it all with a heavy dose of skepticism.