[ben_w]

> because weve been able to send messages to each other on a computer since the 50s...

My first partner was born in the 70s and didn't even have a landline growing up.

Here's some stuff I think counts as "plumbing" (i.e. infrastructure) of social connections, which has been lost since the 50s:

• Local newspapers (everywhere, I think?), where an actual editor could (and to a limited extent was held responsible if they didn't) filter out the conspiracy theories.

• Village churches (that might be mainly a UK-specific thing, IDK?) and other similar local community groups, where your local decisions couldn't be brigaded and overwhelmed by fans of a billionaire living on a yacht, as those fans would need to travel to your village personally and most people couldn't be bothered. Now, even when the groups still exist and meet, they can be brigaded.

• Yellow pages getting replaced with Facebook et al insisting that their ad system is the only way any small business could possibly get their name out, when a significant fraction of ads are outright scams.

[squeefers]

i feel like peter hitchens saying this, but i agree the british social life is decaying. i thought you meant something else by social plumbing. i cant argue other than i dont think the village churches actually do prevent brigading, locally anyway, and its that small minded middle-englander mindset that the internet actually smashes. my nan was all bout dat life, and they ostracized hetero divorcees, and you can imagine what they thought of gay people... so if you agree with them its fine, but if its your only choice of social group its not so great. ill take the point there is very little public space where people can even assemble to create a group in the first place though

[ben_w]

> i thought you meant something else by social plumbing.

Check the names, for all I know JumpCrisscross did mean something else. :)

> my nan was all bout dat life, and they ostracized hetero divorcees, and you can imagine what they thought of gay people... so if you agree with them its fine, but if its your only choice of social group its not so great.

I'm not claiming the old way was perfect (IIRC my gran was a generation that thought it scandalous to change denomination), just that it wasn't so easily manipulated from different continents. Back then it took a lot of effort over an extended period to do what can now be had for a few dollars of LLM tokens, and 5 years ago could've been had for tens of thousands of dollar-pound-euros spent on people gig-economy-ing tweets while they work at something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

[squeefers]

> Back then it took a lot of effort over an extended period to do what can now be had for a few dollars of LLM tokens,

we are just prone to hysteria id say, predating the invention of internet, phones or even print media (though they certainly exasperate the issue)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria remember the US daycare/satanism scare... it made its way to england via TV, no mechanical turks required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism the common person manipulated by lies in print. old as print itself

[ben_w]

The difference I point to the effort required to pull it off, and adaption to it, not of existence.

Yellow journalism was when we had not yet adapted to print.

The satanism scare was when we had not yet adapted to international news.

We're in the "yellow journalism" phase of social media.

And there was nobody to push back against the satanism scare (straw men are so very easy to fight against, and it was at the time a straw man); a better reference for those eras would be the Hillsborough disaster where coverage by the Sun got it boycott in the region because it had become more difficult to get away with stuff like that than the newspaper itself could manage, and conversely the limited coverage of mistreatment of Mau Mau era Kenyans in UK press because their treatment was a national embarrassment and the highest levels didn't want that embarrassment.

[squeefers]

> Yellow journalism was when we had not yet adapted to print.

people still believe whatever shit is in the daily mail even today. there are just far less yellow journals now... its in the collective memory that papers print shit for profit. maybe. i cant fully explain why it stopped

> The satanism scare was when we had not yet adapted to international news.

it was the late 80s wasnt it?

> a better reference for those eras would be the Hillsborough disaster where coverage by the Sun got it boycott

national newspaper. could still happen now.

> The difference I point to the effort required to pull it off, and adaption to it, not of existence.

yes. the printing press had similar effects. IE lies could now travel much faster than before, much easier. im sure people made similar grumblings about gutenburg as you have done about AI. are you slagging the printing press the same way though?