[samsquire]

In early 2000-2007 I felt technology optimism (things like Digg, slashdot) about new websites and there was a hopefulness about new technology (file sharing) The spirit of new technology that "there is something new" and the "this is how things work from now on" (WAP websites, floppy disks, guest books, simple 1megabyte web hosting, geocities, fan sites, myspace, WhatsApp on cheap phones).

In other words, every new thing was something that may have been before but it was "this is how things work from now on". The platform defines and upholds the character of interaction. Twitter and Reddit do that and as pg highlights how twitter recipients is by algorithm. (From OP: "where you don't specify the recipients.")

I have fond memories of writing HTML from magazines and in the eras before me it was handwriting text games into BASIC interpreters.

[ryandrake]

The optimism and hopefulness got crushed under the boot of money. The spirit of sharing got crushed under the boot of copyright. The joy and excitement got crushed under the boot of metrics and engagement. In an alternate timeline, things could have gone a different way, but because the same old money and same old power structures controlled the direction of progress, we got the timeline where the Internet turned into Addictive Pay-per-view Disney.

[energy123]

Not untrue, but also not the only thing going on.

The authoritarian movements of the 20th century wouldn't have been possible without mass media. But it wasn't the profit motive that was the prime culprit for this enablement.

Ideologues found they had a powerful tool at their disposal to channel people's grievances towards an enemy, and to bind a large group of people behind this ideology.

The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't intend for it to be used this way.

[mschuster91]

> The inventors of the printing press and the radio didn't intend for it to be used this way.

Well, at least the printing press was created to print the Bible - the "Gutenberg bible", named after its inventor, was the first mass produced book in the world [1], so it can be said that it was intended to get a large group of people behind an ideology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible

[krige]

Actually, no. The Gutenberg bible was not the goal of the printing press, although it might have been a business savvy move for a variety of reasons. We know that, possibly even before profitable Church orders of indulgences, it was used to print poem(s), of which one is still preserved in a museum, predating the bible by about 5 years.

[klez]

Let me nitpick here. The fact that something was printed before the Bible doesn't prove that spreading the Bible was not, in fact, the primary motive to invent the printing press. It could just mean that Gutenberg went with smaller stuff first.

[brink]

> we got the timeline where the Internet turned into Addictive Pay-per-view Disney

Call me a cynic, but I really think that was the inevitable outcome. It's just flawed human nature. Yes, there are outliers - good people who make and keep that vision to the best of their ability. But the overwhelming majority will always be there to drive it towards the dismal outcome you're witnessing now.

[ternnoburn]

I think it's human nature under capitalism. I think before the 1800s there were loads of different societies that valued things like community and mutual support over "got mine".

This is the fundamental assertion of anarchism -- people generally like helping each other and like feeling useful. If basic needs were covered, we'd use most of our time doing things that felt meaningful, and those things would make everyone's lives better.

[photonthug]

I mostly agree but propose another amendment: this is human nature under late-stage capitalism. Capitalism is pretty great in the beginning / middle, and can go on for a very long time in such a way that the interests of corporations, consumers, labor, and governments are all basically aligned. Late-stage is a very different game in all respects though.

One risk we are facing now is that when most of the people alive have only seen the perversions of unregulated and unapologetic late-stage capitalism, they will think this is what it always has to look like. The impulse to switch to a polar opposite or burn everything down is ill advised but becomes hard to ignore.

[ANewFormation]

So many modern problems can be traced to 1971. [1] That is the year that the US defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods effectively ending the system and causing currencies to become completely fiat, enabling governments to effectively print unlimited funny money.

This perverts capitalism so hard because you now end up with tens of trillions of dollars being dumped into the economy in horribly inefficient ways and so behaviors that make one likely to get some of this become far more economically relevant than just making the best product.

Our current economic system is obviously completely unsustainable at this point and may well end up being one of the shortest lived economic experiments ever. That's particularly ironic because, as you alluded to, for most of everybody alive today this is just how it's always been!

[1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

[mschuster91]

> So many modern problems can be traced to 1971. [1] That is the year that the US defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods effectively ending the system and causing currencies to become completely fiat, enabling governments to effectively print unlimited funny money.

Correlation != causation. Yes, the end of Bretton-Woods certainly played its part, but there are other independent causes for most of the things that can be seen in the graphs - first and foremost, the oil crises of 1973 and later and the impact of the policies of Nixon, Reagan and Thatcher, as well as simple but massive technological progress that made the economical shifts (such as the decline in agriculture and industry as a share of the economy) possible in the first place.

Automation and IT in general are the largest drivers of the latter - more efficient and powerful diesel engines made a lot of farm labor all but redundant, and IT enabled constructing and orchestrating ever larger and larger things, all the way from machines to global sized corporations, and the resulting efficiency gains of scale were mostly looted by the rich elites.

[camgunz]

This comes up on HN all the time [0] and it's complete garbage. Japan has a fiat currency; how have they dodged inflation? Where are the successful non-fiat economies? If there's some kind of moral hazard with printing money, why is one of the Fed's 2 mandates to keep inflation at 2%? Why aren't they constantly printing money? Why isn't inflation 1000%? How long do we have to wait for this conspiracy theory to prove out?

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[kmeisthax]

The end of the Bretton-Woods agreement is not the root cause; that in and of itself is downstream of the US government prosecuting a bullshit war in Vietnam for the last decade and change. To be clear, this is not the US government "perverting capitalism", this is the capitalist class abandoning a fiscal constraint they found inconvenient in order to continue a pissing match against the existential threat of communism. There is no world in which capitalism stays under a "sound money" gold standard, stops fighting interventionist wars, and doesn't immediately either get cornered by the Soviet Union[0] or obliterated by an ascendant American left.

With few exceptions, the government in the US acts on behalf of the capitalist class, not in opposition to it. There is no "pure" capitalism that would exist if the government just left free markets alone. Capitalists won't leave the free market alone. Capitalists will take ownership and control over the chokepoints of the economy, government or no[1], granting them their own sovereign territory they can levy taxes on. This is a state - a monopoly on the legitimate use of force - whose territory is not of a city or a nation but of a market niche.

This system is sustainable in some ways and not in others. Yes, the market is distorted, which means it sucks for us, but the people who own the market-state don't actually feel that punishment. Which means they won't stop. Something has to actually force them to stop.

[0] Analogous to how the PRC has cornered the modern neoliberal west today.

[1] To be clear, nation-states are also culpable in this process, both through sins of omission (failing to enforce antitrust law) and sins of commission (creating legal monopolies that form new economic chokepoints to conquer)

[zanellato19]

Since the beginning of capitalism involved owning slaves, I find that very hard to believe.

This romanticization of early stage capitalism is awful. What is late stage capitalism? Because civil rights and women rights have been pretty recent in the grand scheme of things, so in that sense Capitalism was upheld and had most of its lifetime in a scheme that crushed the majority of its people I find the theory of:

> Capitalism is pretty great in the beginning

really hard to swallow.

[__MatrixMan__]

In the early days of capitalism there was plenty of authentic scarcity for it to work against. Its problems probably weren't any less, but the juice was plausibly worth the squeeze because the alternatives were terrible.

Now, most of us are working to maintain artificial scarcities, rather than mitigate authentic ones, and there are a lot more of us. So the a randomly chosen effect of our system is more likely to be negative because it's being chosen in a context that's very far from that long lost age when capitalism seemed necessary.

I think that's what makes it late-stage, when it's found to have more side-effect than desired effect. Like a yeast which started turning sugar into alcohol at a prodigious rate but then later the alcohol concentration is toxic to it and more effort is spent trying to filter it out than anything to do with its original purpose.

[isk517]

Not a die hard defender of capitalism by any means but this is a gross over simplification. If you look at all of the alternatives during the early stages of capitalism the vast majority had oppression as a built in feature. It didn't bring about utopia but it did offer the best advantages over the competition, up until the competition all went under.

[photonthug]

> Since the beginning of capitalism involved owning slaves, I find that very hard to believe.

If you look into this a little bit more, I think you’ll find that the institution of slavery doesn’t strictly require any particular system of economics, government, or religion.

Anyway, you are misunderstanding what I meant by early / late capitalism.. it’s not just about specific calendar epochs like 1950-present. What I’m referring to is that any new market will have early/middle/late stages that are pretty distinct from each other. A new market might be created by new policy (say a change in import/export restrictions) or by new technology (like the internet or AI) or by new frontiers (like the East Indies before, and outer space soon). Late stage here just means the real ideation and competition is basically finished and now it’s time for consolidation, M+A, integrating vertically, optimizing exploitation/extraction, enshittification, etc.

[error_logic]

They're not the majority. The majority is simply overwhelmed by the blind focus of the dedicated few willing to burn anything they don't see as having immediate value. That means trust goes out the window.

Duverger's law is to blame, the idea that only two parties were viable because any third option would just split the vote and make the former majority lose. It became just as effective, if not more effective, to undermine the opposition and destroy competition itself.

It's a coordination problem. We've begun to solve it in training of AI models, having both a capability coach (model of purely what are valid patterns) and a moral coach (model of how those valid patterns affect the feelings of human observers). It creates compromise between capability and human goals, but creates at least a basic level of alignment, with more layers of filtering and iterative generation as options to catch mistakes at time of inference instead of training.

In politics, the "left" is the raw capability, but it focuses so much on being accurate that it can lose track of the goals that really matter, and the strategy necessary to reach those goals. The "right" is dedicated to a particular goal, sometimes so much so that it denies "obvious" reality in order to focus on blind faith to its cause.

The two "sides" NEED each other. That wisdom has been lost. Moloch, the idea of a demon representing the outcome of selfish incentives benefiting the individual but hurting everyone as a result, reigns supreme.

The only way out that I can see is a voting system with partial weights and moderately more expressiveness. Give too much expressiveness and you create a purity test ruled by a single party and scoring points on how "American" or $MyState they are. Give too little and you get what we have now, the frying pan and the fire trying to herd people into their camp until everyone lands in the fire anyway.

If instead of voting for {+1, 0, 0, ...} without repeats, we used a system with {+1, +0.5, -0.5} without repeats (no double scoring of candidates, no duplicating scores) each district should end up with a dynamic stability of maybe 3-5 parties. The negativity would be in the hands of the voters. The candidates would be incentivized to use constructive campaigns, because negativity would be diluted, and if they went negative they'd attract even more negativity to themselves.

Even more fundamentally if you apply those weights to the outcomes of a Nash Equilibrium, such as nuclear war, armed standoff, or even destructive war between economic powers, the win-lose outcomes are on parity or lower than the win-win outcome if such a win-win possibility exists.

I really think this problem represents the Great Filter. If we can't learn from it, we're doomed, whether to ourselves or to our AI systems learning and inheriting the selfish form of the logic from us. Government needs to be the result of win-win interactions or it will be unstable.

The founding fathers, the framers of the US Constitution, recognized the need to balance greed against greed, self-interest tempered by respect of that in others. The government was split into 3 branches, and Washington warned us of the dangers of partisanship. We didn't have the math to solve it, then, but now we do: Partial votes at the state level creating healthy, constructive, honest competition. The principle that actually Made America Great, enabled by opportunity itself.

[mongol]

I don't think it easily could have gone another way. Progress follows incentives, and money is a strong incentive. Only very fundamental changes to copyright and "publishing accountability" legislation could have put us on another path.

[agumonkey]

money and the realization that this "new" web was half computing half society .. and we now get the same need for rules, safety, morality as in the real world

[alliao]

it's a shame we can't recreate it somehow and even kept the optimism in a snapshot format. things weren't pretty, a bit clunky even. Unicode wasn't around, so encoding itself was a big deal all by itself. Internet was slow but it somehow retained the most critical part of application. there were many search engines, the first 5yrs or so when google arrived was the height of tech optimism for me, the search works so well it felt like magic. and most articles online were very personal. it felt like a village where people moved there voluntarily and were very eager to share with other villagers. alas.

[jillesvangurp]

The only thing that changed is that the people that were there are now grumpy middle aged people complaining that things have changed around them. Not realizing that it's they that have changed the most.

For technology optimism, look at younger generations. You are not going to find it in older generations. It's not a technical problem; it's a problem with aging. Young people are still expressing themselves online. Mostly not using any of the tools used by us older people. And good for them.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s. I don't have a lot of patience for people of my own age these days. Not a lot of creativity there. Lovely people but just not very inspiring. Most of their great achievements are in the past. I try to keep some young people around me to keep me a bit more engaged. Much more fun. Young people haven't changed at all. I'm at risk of sliding into old age and being all grumpy about it. But I refuse to. Doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

It's not technology that's stopping people from expressing themselves but the fact that they no longer have the mental agility to make the most of what at the time were very primitive tools. If it was there (again) would you use it? Hint: it's still there and you are not using it like you used to! All the old tools still work. And there are some newer ones that work even better. The tools are there. But you aren't.

[graemep]

I would say that is young people have different, and IMO lower, expectations.

People of our age group expected internet technologies to be democratising and empowering. Instead they have become centralised and controlled.

PG is is right that Twitter's advantage was that it did not feel like it was owned by a private company. The problem is, that that feeling was entirely incorrect. Unlike open protocols things controlled by private companies are inevitably enshittified.

[photonthug]

> I would say that is young people have different, and IMO lower, expectations.

This is obviously true, despite young people and old people who want to argue against all reason that nothing of significance has changed. If you don’t want to be perceived as old/cranky there’s huge pressure to lower your own expectations, stop pointing out problems, to actively make excuses for problems and to shout down anyone else.

I’m not even sure what to point out as evidence here since it’s so ubiquitous, but for a simple example.. surfing the internet is a hilarious anachronistic metaphor since it implies a free and frictionless experience that takes you anywhere. We browse fewer sites owned by fewer companies, using way more effort and tactics to dodge all kinds of thirsty and user hostile bullshit, even before we discuss things like AI slop and misinformation. It’s not surfing as much as lurching horribly, like riding on a bike uphill with square wheels.

We also pay for more things that in the end we own less of. Sure you can still hack your phone to act like the unrestricted computing device that it actually is, you can spend a bunch of effort ripping the drm off the ebooks, audiobooks, and music that you “own”. But it’s a constant time and energy suck that you eventually get tired of revisiting. Despite or perhaps because of AI, even autocomplete on my phone is worse than it was 5 years ago (apparently it prefers “Horta” as the complete for “hier” instead of “hierarchy”, presumably because brand names have been weighted more than English? Good thing we’ve advanced beyond simple dictionaries, hurray for progress?)

Realistic techno optimism is kind of predicated on things gradually improving instead of on steady decline. Anyway, the decline wouldn’t be so irritating if we could at least agree to curb this whole “same as it ever was!” commentary.. it’s naive and not enlightened. We can’t begin to fix problems that we won’t acknowledge.

[graemep]

I know young people who acknowledge this, but they do not see changing it as a realistic aim. They may be right.

I think that like many other things, this reflects political and cultural expectations at large. The west has become centralising and centrally controlled. Unlike the Soviet Union that control is shared between the government and big business, but it is still far more centralised and regulated than the west was a few decades ago.

This also relates to things like privacy, policing and security, education (the Act the British government wants to pass at the moment is a good example of the state taking more control, both from individuals and centralising its own institutions), economic policy, building infrastruture...... pretty much everything.

[arkh]

> People of our age group expected internet technologies to be democratising and empowering.

*People of your age group who knew and had access to Internet

30 years ago, most people were not using internet. They did not expect anything from something they did not know anything about.

Nowadays internet is a daily tool for billions from all age, from most countries and from many economic levels. It has been democratized. It has empowered a lot of people. And I'm sure many would like it to help do more of it. I'd bet more than during your time.

[graemep]

> Nowadays internet is a daily tool for billions from all age

Which we expected

> It has been democratized.

Anything but. More people using it not democratising it. More people sharing control is democratising.

> It has empowered a lot of people

Not as much as it should have, not anywhere like as much.

[bryanrasmussen]

It has been democratized in one angle, that of the technical ability to use the internet being taught and disseminated wide enough that people can use it, it has been privatized in another angle meaning that while people can travel through the internet it is through private grounds they travel, and private tolls they must pay.

[camgunz]

> It has been democratized in one angle, that of the technical ability to use the internet being taught and disseminated wide enough that people can use it.

The platforms work really hard to make it seem like you're using them, but in truth they're using you.

[camgunz]

I was born in 83, and yeah this drives me nuts too. My cohort will be like, "I hate social media; it's done bad things to kids, society, and me personally, but I have accounts on all the major platforms, I spend at least 2 hours a day on them, I might even work at one or even aspire to be an influencer."

Good lord it's so annoying. We're in charge now! We're literally writing gushing posts about Bluesky when it's solved exactly zero of the problems Twitter had (I guess it won't automatically switch you back to algorithmic feed, but honestly probably just give it time to enshittify).

Maybe I'm making too much out of what is essentially a collective action problem, but it's kind of heartbreaking to watch my generation sleepwalking into this weird social media abyss. Just don't keep walking! Quit making the abyss deeper!

[satvikpendem]

Sounds like you just grew up. I hear lots of people romanticizing the good old days not thinking about all the people who thought those good days were actually their current bad days, they were simply older than you; and similarly, I see lots of young people saying that these recent times are the good days while older people lament their downturn.

[ANewFormation]

This is not necessarily just a matter of perception if society is indeed generally on a downward arc.

This sounds melodramatic yet it's quite trivial to list countless things that have become much worse, while it's somewhat more difficult to list things that have become much better.

It's the issue with economic/technological development as the main milestone. Would you rather live as an aristocrat in Ancient Greece, or in poverty in the US today? Basically nobody would pick the latter choice but by the things we would typically list as better, a person in poverty today would have while our Ancient Greek could only dream of such. But it seems there's more to life than smartphones, medicine, and air conditioning.

[shombaboor]

bots, perpetual scams, enshittification, walled gardens, ai slop make me think things were better back in the day objectively content wise. no doubt the speed and general base tech has improved though