>That's all well and good if you never leave your mother's basement
This is uncalled for. People like me live an extremely healthy and social life without any traces of our identity online (excluding voter registration databases, people search websites, etc).
>But over time we stopped recognizing a difference between a real person and an internet account, now treating the people out in the real world like they are anonymous internet accounts.
I see where you're going with this, but I'll have to disagree. Most of the people being behaving like animals online are some of the most soft spoken and shy people in real life.
The article which sparked this discussion stands adjacent to my claim, as well. I've noticed a lot of people who are online a lot and using it as an escape are pretty socially awkward and neurotic in real life. Those people I just mentioned often use the internet as an escape, but don't realize it.
If there were no separation between the internet and real life, then those people would behave the same way online (shy, timid, avoiding confrontation). These people just don't realize the separation thanks to the "Please enter your first and last name" trend started by Zuck in the late 2000s.
> People like me live an extremely healthy and social life without any traces of our identity online
With respect, I think you've failed to grasp what is being discussed here. 'Attacking' people who post ill-conceived content anonymously on the internet has most definitely grown tired (case in point), but is not really a problem. It's not a person, it's just an internet account. It doesn't matter.
The problem is that the same behaviour has started moving out into real life, where you find real people with real identities. There is no hiding from it beyond an anonymous username. Your face is out there for all to see when you step outside. Certainly you may run in circles of older people who established that compassion for real people while the lines were still clearly divided, thus not feeling it as much, but there is a generation coming up – you know, the one the article is about – that do not know the world before Reddit. They fail to grasp that there is a difference, treating real people like they are Reddit accounts.
> 'Attacking' people who post ill-conceived content anonymously on the internet has most definitely grown tired (case in point), but is not really a problem. It's not a person, it's just an internet account. It doesn't matter.
If your internet account is a fictional identity it doesn't matter, but you're posting as you but just behind a pseudonym and someone attacks you it can be very upsetting.
Your so-called internet account, pseudonym or otherwise, is always a fictional identity – which is to say not an identity that is related to any real person. While our understanding of the technology no doubt assumes there is a real person pulling knobs and levers behind the scenes, that's just an implementation detail. If the software was updated so that the human lever pulling was replaced with a suitably advanced generative AI, nobody would notice. Nothing about the experience would change. It is not about people. In that kind of venue, it is all about the software. There is no attack on you, a person. For all intents and purposes, you don't exist.
Therein lies the challenge, though. Some people, especially people who didn't grow up before the likes of Reddit, fail to understand that people and software are not the same thing. The things that fly online don't fly the same way in person, but there is a prevailing shift, particularly with the younger generation, towards treating the in-person experience the same as the online experience; to see them as the same thing. That's where we see problems emerge.
> If the software was updated so that the human lever pulling was replaced with a suitably advanced generative AI, nobody would notice. Nothing about the experience would change.
The experience would change for the person pulling the lever. My "so-called internet account" absolutely is related to a real person, and that person is me. Attacks on the account are experienced by me as attacks on me
> Attacks on the account are experienced by me as attacks on me
Right. This is the 'Redditization' of the world spoken of earlier, where an increasing number of people are unable to distinguish the difference between software and people, thereby treating them as if they are one and the same. Which, as it relates to the broader topic, is problematic as they are not the same and that introduces all kinds of social issues out in the real world.
Logically, you know that the LLM behind the arbitrary forum account that attacked you is little more than a fancy random number generator, which is no more significant than a squirrel giving you the side-eye, but as you have anthropomorphized it as being human then you start to see it differently and experience it as if it were a person.
But to anthropomorphize it is flawed. Like seeing Google Maps as being the world[1].
> They fail to grasp that there is a difference, treating real people like they are Reddit accounts.
That's exactly correct, and now we are one step closer to understanding the precession of simulacra of identity.
The crude maps of the 16th century cartographer were of such low fidelity and accuracy that it became impossible to confuse them with the territory, with all its contours and nuances elided from the scribbles of ink on parchment. Contrast with Google Maps, that has captured the earth in such exquisite detail, down to the meter, that we now regard it as a more or less one-to-one representation of the Earth in itself; a simulacrum of the "first order," which "is the reflection of a profound reality" (Baudrillard 1981).
But the representation does not stop there; now with things like listings of local businesses, we have progressed to a simulacrum of the "second order," which "masks and denatures a profound reality" - does your business even exist, if I can't find it on Google Maps? If your road has signage calling it one thing, while Google Maps calls it another [0], which name is correct? How will your GPS navigate such a world when the map and the territory have diverged this far from one another?
The end game of the precession is the creation of entire virtual worlds and maps (think, de_dust2) that represent no territories at all, but are a territory in their own virtual right - a simulacrum of the "fourth order," or "the hyperreal:" "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum."
Alan Watts spoke of a similar phenomenon in one of his lectures on meditation [1]:
The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth,
and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.
We are now at a stage where the newer generations have confused these symbols of ourselves - Reddit, Facebook, Instagram accounts - with the actual people in themselves. It has become possible to capture, record, misrepresent, mask, and denature our lives and the people within them to such a high degree of fidelity, that, just as it has become possible to confuse Google Maps with the territory of the Earth itself, it becomes possible to confuse the Reddit account for the real person. The social media account, having "precessed" far past the point of "denaturing a profound [person]" through Photoshop and Instagram filters, has now achieved "hyperreality," where the Reddit account now _becomes_ a person in its own right. The real person _is_ the Reddit account, and the Reddit account _is_ the person.
If it happened with God in the quarrels between the iconoclasts and the idol worshipping iconolaters, it can happen with mere mortals, too:
This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose
millennial quarrel is still with us today. [...] that
deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever
existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own
simulacrum-from this came their urge to destroy the images.
- Baudrillard, 1981.
This is uncalled for. People like me live an extremely healthy and social life without any traces of our identity online (excluding voter registration databases, people search websites, etc).
>But over time we stopped recognizing a difference between a real person and an internet account, now treating the people out in the real world like they are anonymous internet accounts.
I see where you're going with this, but I'll have to disagree. Most of the people being behaving like animals online are some of the most soft spoken and shy people in real life.
The article which sparked this discussion stands adjacent to my claim, as well. I've noticed a lot of people who are online a lot and using it as an escape are pretty socially awkward and neurotic in real life. Those people I just mentioned often use the internet as an escape, but don't realize it.
If there were no separation between the internet and real life, then those people would behave the same way online (shy, timid, avoiding confrontation). These people just don't realize the separation thanks to the "Please enter your first and last name" trend started by Zuck in the late 2000s.