[netcan]

It's kind of ironic that people educated in social science tend to have idealistic or just legible, few factor theories about something this complex. I mean complex in the strong sense.

Early theories were about "access to information unleashing a wave of democratisation." Current theories are about foreign and domestic intelligence manipulating social media.

The internet is an era. Eras have a lot going on.

The way we should (IMO) be thinking about this stuff is as complex systems, where the mechanisms can't really be understood to the point of predictiveness. Just like printing presses, mass literacy, radio and television broke political equilibriums... the internet breaks political equilibriums, for better or worse.

The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos. Despite all the centralisation, the facebook, twitter, google and such use extremism like an exploitation film uses sex and violence. If something is dangerous, sexy and naked... people are going to look.

[CryptoPunk]

>>The internet is, OTOH, obviously structurally inclined to being an agent of chaos.

Decentralization != chaos. On the contrary, it can be far more stable for the forces of coordination, allowing for greater production of knowledge and intelligent action.

See Wikipedia.

[netcan]

I meant chaos in a more casual sense of "disruption of status quo." Old media was a lot less inclined to get behind any old revolution that comes along.

[CryptoPunk]

Not permanently though. A new status will emerge from the internet, and that may prove to be more stable than the more centralized one it replaced. Distributed power structures can be less fragile than centralized ones.

[netcan]

This is getting pretty far from the original point... but I'm dubious.

First, the internet isn't really distributed anymore. The media part, at least, is controlled by a handful of operators. It is a many-2-many medium, which is a strong distributed quality... but IDK. Idealism about the internet is starting to seem quaint and naive. I did think so, though, at one point.

[CryptoPunk]

I think one think that happens when society functions better is that things seem worse, because the improvement in information transmission that accompanies the improvement in societal function results in more light being shone on problems that for ages had been kept in the dark.

To give a concrete example: the late 1800s saw growing awareness of the miserable conditions endured by the poor, especially those working in factories in newly industrialzed cities.

Yet the quality of life of the typical person was much poorer before industrialization, with most people working as subsistence farming and facing the ever-present danger of starvation and diseases linked to privation.

It was the very resources unlocked by industrialization that increased the time people could expend on acquiring literacy and the ability of people to publish written work, that led to people communicating and becoming conscious about the misery that the poor endured.