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by bradfordarner
4748 days ago
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I completely disagree with your statement. Maybe there is a bigger question: 'Is crossing the chasm to widespread adoption always a good thing?' Maybe we should be trying to build platforms that are high-quality instead of high-quantity. We are caught in a world that is obsessed with inclusion rather than exclusion. Is that, by necessity, the default position? Should it be? The internet contributed to building support for the Arab Spring throughout the world but it was tyrannical regimes that were the root cause. Wikileaks is not new. We used to have a little thing called 'investigative journalism', a profession in which people would put their live's on the line to reveal scandals and uncover secrets they felt the world should have known. Technology does not motivate moral growth. People motivate moral growth. Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world when they invaded Poland and set the course for World War II. The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN. |
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We still do. And, historically, it never got us anything as important as cablegate.
> Technology does not motivate moral growth.
Technology enables moral growth by reducing the amount of morality-crushing cruelty we're exposed to on a daily basis and allowing our natural morality to flourish. It's easier to care about others when you haven't just lost your child to smallpox.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
> Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world
They were, at best, on a par with the rest of the Western World, and, frankly, mismanaging themselves into defeat due to the very nature of their society.
The idolization of the Nazis as being so efficient and so advanced is due to what some Western observers thought before the war, when Hitler was using basic Keynesian-style pump-priming in the form of military spending to get the country out of the Depression, mixed with a few largely worthless wonder-weapons, such as the V2 rockets and the early jets, which did nothing to win the war.
> The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
This is true but it misses my point: Everyone can have their little niche space, which is amazing if you're not an upper-middle-class heterosexual cissexual white male who would have niche spaces anyway.
Gays can have spaces where being gay isn't weird. Trans people can have spaces where being trans doesn't mean you get your head kicked in. That kind of social interaction was pretty well impossible before the Internet, especially in places like Iran or Alabama, where advertising that you are 'a certain way' could be an invitation to violence.
The Internet is both a network of linked networks and a community of linked communities; both aspects are vital to what it is and what it can become.