[YazIAm]

"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?"

I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.

A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became optimized for engagement (ie: emotional reactions), and so are disproportionally rewarding sensationalist content over content that actually promotes understanding of other perspectives.

[kyleyeats]

Imagine saying this about writing, or the printing press. It's not just reductionist but cynical.

Optimizing for outrage is a mass communication problem, not an internet problem, and unfolds roughly the same in every new medium from town criers on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

[bilbo0s]

You guys have all missed the point of the comic.

We still have social problems despite having a printing press, or radio, or internet. In fact, at root, we have the exact same social problems as existed prior to Gutenberg's birth. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, etc.

Why have they not been solved? Because they are human problems. The problem is within us and the problem is us. It's who we are on an animal behavior level. This is the reason the boy believes we must also be "stupid". Because surely we don't think an information transfer protocol would change the animal instincts of a human being? Let alone billions of human beings?

That's really the point of the comic. Wherever we go, there we are. It's still just us in a new place.

[amadeuspagel]

It seems to me that life today is a lot better then it was when the printing press was invented, and that the printing press probably has something to do with that.

[tanseydavid]

>> That's really the point of the comic. Wherever we go, there we are. It's still just us in a new place.

If that's the case it seems a poor choice of words for the child character in the comic to frame it as "Was everyone stupid back then?" followed quickly by affirmation, "So yes."

[mcphage]

Well, that's children for you.

[fragmede]

They haven't been solved because we're still living as if we're in a scarce world. Scarcity is what drives human problems. There are two sheep, three families, and one sheep can only feed one family. How do you decide who goes hungry when no one wants to be?

The reason that we, naively perhaps, thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems, is because information; anything that can be encoded digitally, is now post-scarcity. But we never reformed society around the invention of the digital realm, and only adapted our old ways around it. This furthered inequality and unrest, rather than healed anything.

With digital distribution, there are now infinity digital sheep for three families and every person, every man woman and child can have infinity digital sheep for their own. It wasn't naive to think that would reform the world because up until that point, scarcity drove and still drives everything. Macroeconomics has us plot supply and demand on a graph, but doesn't tell us how to reform society when supply goes to infinity. Instead of reforming society like we must, we try and artificially limit supply, enacting intellectual property laws trying to deny the copyability of bits, which is like trying to make water not wet.

Why do we have capitalism? It's a long story, but it was invented to distribute the two sheep among three families with as little war as possible. No one wants to go hungry. And to state the obvious, you can't eat digital sheep. Nor are they created like organic sheep. Many someones have to come together, intentionally, working very hard, to lovingly create digital sheep like Disney's latest masterpiece from raw ones and zeroes.

Those someone's exist in a pre-scarcity world. They need pre-scarcity money to buy non-digital food to eat and pay rent on non-digital housing to live in. Digital sheep don't exist without the hard work of people who need non-digital money to exist in a pre-scarcity world. So we still need the old economy to pay those creators in pre-scarcity money. But once that digital sheep exists, there can be infinity copies of it. Every single person on the planet with a cellphone or computer can have their own copy of that digital sheep for a mere pittance in bandwidth costs.

Until we reform our whole society; the economy and the government; to realize that we live in a post-scarcity world for all digital goods - and are effectively post-scarcity for some physical goods, it's always going to be us in the same place. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, they all exist online, but they are different online. People are different because of the Internet.

The reformation we need is going to be radical, because it has to be. Supply and demand just got shot in the face because there's an infinite supply on digital goods. My proposal, in all its earnestness, has a few steps.

1) We abolish copyright. I said it was going to be radical, didn't I? We change systems around so that copying is allowed, but that it tracks what people are watching, and where it came from. But we abolish the system that's trying to make bits not copyable and water not wet.

2) We track what people are watching, and give out points based on that. Every day I'm granted 86400 attention cents, or ACs, and if I watch a two hour long Disney movie, Disney gets paid 7200 ACs by me. Disney gets to further distribute those 7200 ACs however they see fit to the individual creators who made that movie. If I spend 3 minutes chuckling at a tweet or a YouTube or TikTok video or Instagram video, the creator automatically gets 180 ACs from me, which they can pass on to whomever they see fit, literally crediting their sources.

3) We establish an VAT luxury tax, anything that's more than 3 orders of magnitude more expensive than the cheapest one, effectively creating a price ceiling on goods relative to the cheapest version of that same good. The $10 bottles of wine at my local store mean that bottles of wine now top out at $10,000. Anything over that is taxed and goes into an AC fund. Remember, capitalism is just some silly system we've come up with to decide who goes hungry and who gets to eat the sheep. Other such systems include feudalism, where a lord decided who went hungry and who was fed.

4) With that money, we establish an official way of trading ACs for pre-scarcity money, so people can use their ACs to afford non-digital food and housing and clothing and entertainment. Isn't that system going to be gamed and broken and create all sorts of arbitrage opportunities you ask? Yes but have you seen how broken the rest of capitalism is right now?

[torstenvl]

Agreed. The printing press is probably the second-most socially transformative development in the history of human kind, right after fire.

Tribalism and feudalism reigned for a millennium from either the death of Theodosius or Odoacer deposing the last emperor, depending on how you measure it. The invention of the printing press in the late 15th century led to an explosion of communication and education.

Perhaps most importantly, it arrived at a time when the Medici-funded artistic and humanist influences were at their peak, allowing those ideas to spread until they led to the Renaissance.

The idea that a new, cheap, fast global network of communication (the Internet) at the same time as a major global cultural moment (the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War) could lead to a flourishing of democracy, humanism, and reason... was not unprecedented. And it's not entirely clear that it failed, either.

[SergeAx]

But the internet is so much more effective in that due to dramatically short feedback loop. Your ranking algo may select most outrageous posts/topics in a matter of minutes and even seconds with large enough DAU, compared to days for radio/TV and weeks for printing press. It is 2-4 orders of magnitude difference.

[ajdegol]

It’s not a mass communication problem per se.

It’s that humans prioritise social instability because it could mean death in, or of, the tribe; the incentive to make sales, as your link alludes to, is the driving force behind co-opting that. If that incentive disappeared I suspect mass communication would not be the problem.

[xg15]

> I recognize that this is just a comic strip

Which is why I really don't like people who are disguising their opinions in a fictional story: You can do all sorts of shady rethodic maneuvers, such as presenting your opinion as some grand truth in-universe or - like here - putting it into the mouth of a character and absolving yourself from actually explaining it further.

Bonus points for adding another character who is impressed by the first character's statement to give the opinion an air of profoundness.

[spiffytech]

> The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.

The idealized version of the internet always looked to me like "everyone would get along if we just understood each other. Giving everyone a platform solves that.".

The internet is showing us that reality seems more like, "everyone would agree with me if I just knew the right thing to say to them. But they refuse to stop being wrong, so I need to be more vocal.".

[bragr]

>The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy.

Yes it is crazy and we need to wake up to that. Just look around, people have access to all sorts of information and divergent opinions but that doesn't help. Trumpers have access to CNN. Liberals have access to Truth. Antivaxers can go read all the vaccine studies and doctors and academics could lurk in forums skeptical of modern medicine. Simply making these available online does not force people to seek out the correct information or interact with people with diverging opinions.

[marcosdumay]

People do not have access to all sorts of information. They have access to plenty of cherry picked fact-less divergent opinions, a lot of it even counterfactual. But nothing with any quality.

Atntivaxers can't go read all the studies unless they are willing to push some tens of thousands of dollars into it or break some law.

[spiffytech]

Even when someone gets exposure to a competing viewpoint, it's rare for them to really give it thought if the topic is important to them.

People build their identities on what they believe about the world or on which people (dis)agree with them.

When their belief (and thus their identity) is threatened, people readily perform whatever mental gymnastics allow them to continue believing they're in the right.

The excellent book The Scout Mindset covers this in depth.

[lob_it]

Social problems == culture divide

It makes it funny when illiterates try to culture clump :)

[Shared404]

There's more than just culture divide.

People being manipulated by giant propaganda networks to hate each other more and more and prevent progress from being made is an age old social _problem_.

E: Removed comment about being a throwaway, appears to just be a new account. Sorry about that.

[bilbo0s]

Social problems are not only culture problems. They are also economic. They are mental health problems. They are education problems. They are industrial (logistical and infrastructural). And so on and so forth.

All things that would be problems even where you have only one culture. For instance, ask the average Japanese about Japan's social problems, from mental health up to and including the nation dying.

I think what you mean is that the cultural dimension is the only dimension you care about. Which is a valid view, but on the internet it won't be the only view. (Which kind of speaks to the issue the subject comic of this post was talking about.)

[lob_it]

No culture clumping whatsoever, you are correct.

Even the lifestyle divide and language divide define perspective. Lifestyle clumping is just as funny.