The term "Too Big To Fail" is probably inappropriate here (was it ever appropriate actually? banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008), indeed Facebook may well be replaced at some point (is Gen Z even on Facebook?), and AI might well replace Google's killer product: its search engine.
This said, I tend to agree with you, the power law exists and has to be maintained by big tech to control the content because a captive audience is soooo profitable.
Same feeling here, I loved the early internet, it played a huge part in who i am actually! This said, this is not the early internet anymore, where content was mechanically regulated by a sort of egalitarian rule. Social Media applies a power law to content, so that 80% of the viewers are aware of the 20% that's available and human nature being what it is, lowest common denominator content gets pushed to the forefront.
Hence all the attention seekers on FacebInstaTok...
This is further compounded by the pervert effects generated by these platforms one of them being the mimetism and the general wolfpack behaviour that can surge out of the madness of crowds. Online Bullying is real.
My kids (11 and 14) are stuck on feature phones for now and i'd like, as much as possible to keep them off smartphones and their constant Notifications for the foreseeable future, until they are not kids.
It's a commonly repeated trope, yet more often than not such concern being voiced was almost immediately followed by a period of severe decline for the commentator's civilization.
Aristotle saw the end of Athenian democracy and the rise of the Alexander the great, and the following Hellenistic period of mediterranean disorder. Horace was hardly the only one to discuss roman decline, look for Suetonius, Juvenal or Petrone for other examples of same era romans lamenting the decline of Rome.
As for Huxley, it is interesting that much of what is pointed out in this short commentary echoes Ortega y Gasset on the "Revolution of the Masses", Oswald Spengler also comes to mind.
Human history is that of the rise and decline of civilisations, we may well have already been on a downward slope for the past 100 years.
a little Off-Topic but if you ever get to visit Geneva, there is a permanent exhibition at CERN to show how the LHC work and what is the organization around it to collect information, keep it running... etc... it is rather kid friendly too.
If you happen to be there during a shutdown for maintenance or long shutdown, there is a great chance that you can get an on-site tour that will show you the machines itself. There are other tours too.
Saw this, they do massive maintenance every 5 years and do tours in various underground parts.
First of all, I never saw any place better organized, not a smidge of dust, thousands of cables arranged perfectly. And then you get to collider/detector part which is this massive maybe 15m wide long cylinder, opened completely, and it looks like from sci-fi novels.
Just the scale and evident competence of building such a hyper complex unique thing... I live in Switzerland, pretty used to well organized stuff but this was next level.
My old secondary school took the A level physics students to Geneva while it was shutdown, honestly the tour of the place is great. The Antimatter Factory (yep its a building full of horrifically complicated machines with ANTIMATTER FACTORY on the front) is really interesting too.
Indeed, i used to work for ANA, and my colleagues used to bring this up fromt time to time, with assorted creepy anecdotes. This disaster somehow struck a nerve in the Japanese psyche.
There were even novels written on this topic with a boarding pass for flight 123 included as a bookmark.
This is a nice website, with an interesting purpose. Though i suppose reviewing sci-Fi movies notions of interfaces will soon clash with the dryness of reality.
The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could literally drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and tv-series presented things thus.
The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the Matrix had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH exploit on a black and white terminal.
> The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could literally drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and tv-series presented things thus.
> The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the Matrix had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH exploit on a black and white terminal.
That's a wild contrast to try to draw, since the actual direct experience of the network in the Matrix (and which is the focus of the film) was an immersive virtual reality of exactly the type you are trying to contrast the portrayal in the Matrix with, and the “hacking in to a server with an OpenSSH exploit” occurred as a simulation within that virtual reality.
True enough, though if Trinity could jump between skyscrapers and run against a wall before disarming 5 machine gun totting henchmen, i imagine she could have enabled transparency in her Xterm in Enlightenment.
But in more general terms, the representation of computer interfaces, with avatars walking rigidly in 3d pastel coloured surroundings (as presented in a variety of examples, my favorite being the corporate network in the TV Series Profit) sort of fizzled out post 2000, when everybody got to owning a desktop and laptop and realised that the internet was just text in fact, and 3D environments were not so easy to navigate (remember Second-Life).
That is, of course, if your online life did not involve being an elf in World of Warcraft, or something.
~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several more years.
So transparency was arguably still something a true hacker wouldn't waste cycles on.
To your general point, it felt like there was a shift around 2000, when computers needed to be "serious business" and the whimsy of the 80s and 90s was scrubbed out of software.
Honestly, I think we all would have been better off if we'd turned the web to something more approachable for common people (especially if it inspired them to be creators).
Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most expression is limited to setting your background.
In the 90's even hackers loved some bling-bling. Maybe not with E16, but some WMaker with a nice backdrop and a transparent UXTerm was really nice and much faster than the emerging KDE in late 90's.
Also, heck, it was cool and pretty having some city at night while you were day and night with URxvt with links or lynx on it reading media and posting to fora.
Yup. Circa 1997, I switched from AfterStep to (then-new) Enlightenment briefly before settling on WindowMaker as a good balance between bling and performance.
My PC at the time was a hand-me-down white box AMD 386 (40 MHz) running FreeBSD 2.x.
I think the change you mentioned (2000) has to do with maturity of the tech, as well as, maturity of the acceptance of this tech, as part of everyday life.
As far as the state of the web today, you can thank commercial entities. Yes, they did/do contribute to the web's existance, but at the same time, they make it much worse.
"~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several more years."
and, Boy, did i waste cycles on enabling every eye candy possible on Linux/BSD on the only 150 Mhz Pentium pro with 32Mb of ram i could afford in 2001-2002...
"Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most expression is limited to setting your background."
Common people being creative was MySpace, remember the eyesore?
Just being sarcastic, i think the "Ugly" web of early HTML was actually wonderful, and we should encourage people to go back to it, but let's not delude ourselves too much, FaceStagram will always win the appeal of the masses.
Minority Report came out in 2002, and I can tell you, actually using a computer interface like that for an extended period of time would be pretty exhausting.
What it got right was swiping and pinch/zoom though; five years before the iPhone was released.
Those gestures were completely unknown in commercial UIs of the time; in fact you were lucky to find a touchscreen that didn't take three forceful stabs of your finger before it registered.
Humm, I have a feeling part of the story is missing here, even though i can relate as i was myself a minimum wage worker in the hospitality industry in Britain for a while (back in 1999, my annual wage was something like 8500 pounds). Long odd hours, not so pleasant interfacing with customers, 7 people sharing a flat in London, so broke at the end of the month that walking from Mayfair to Canada Water was reality because no money for public transport....
Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn't go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up.
Something isn't clear in this writer's account of the reason of her living in poverty, whether it is a story of mental illness, child abuse... things i witnessed years later when i bought a flat in Barking (poor white area of greater London) and this i feel would need to be clarified for me to be able to accept the conclusion that "poverty is largely accidental", especially coming from someone quite so articulate.
> Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn't go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up.
You didn't have kids though. That changes everything. I do agree from experience as well, a single healthy young person in good spirits can make it work. Knowing you're responsible for a little baby that can die or be hurt for life changes the stakes.
I assume there wasn't an extended family that was near enough, kind enough, or able enough to take them in for a few years. That kind of support is indispensable when you have kids and don't have a lot of resources. Generally material poverty is experience very differently when there is also social relationship wealth. But nowadays in US/UK, there is a lot of social relationship poverty. When combined with material wealth it is not great, but combine social poverty with material poverty, and you have a big problem.
WOW. That's incredible. Well, that explains it. Ignoring the foster part, it's not the same to have a parent for whom you're one of 100 chldren! I certainly would feel more like I was imposing too.
The passage where she runs and cowers in a corner from a random knock on the door hints at something gone really wrong mentally. Could be something developed as a result of poverty, but it’s certainly behavior that will perpetuate poverty.
I suspect, this author is driven in some peculiar way. I’ve seen it with other strongly artistic types, the drive isn’t to make money, and that allows them to do great things. Sadly, if they don’t align with value of the populace in a way that makes money, they will simply toil in poverty. Worse, is they are often easy marks to be take advantage of. I’ve even seen it in tech, people who should be making way more than they are, but continue to be underpaid because there’s a kind of playground for them to explore.
It's pretty clear if you read the article, and even more explicit in the news paper articles in her photos. She was a single mother with zero family support. She couldn't just work odd or long hours (and was forced to leave her existing better paid job) because there was nobody to care for her young child.
The article didn't say that - are you relying on another source of information?
She mentions her family, but implies she wants to remain independent:
Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum. I won’t fold the corners down on your books, Dad.
Without more info, hard to say how her family did or didn't help.
"My brother was in the RAF last time we spoke, a couple of Christmases ago, when he described Iain Duncan Smith as the best thing to happen to this country and told me I had chosen to have a baby outside of marriage so deserved everything I got. It’s fair to describe us as ‘estranged’ these days."
That's one member of the family not being supportive. Doesn't equate to zero support from the whole family. The paragraph quoted above seems to imply that going back to her parents was an option.
Checking the article again it might have been one, but not one she was capable of taking at the time.
"Back – or forward – to 2012, and as my world shrank into a tiny flat, as friends fell away and I started to isolate myself from my family in shame and self-loathing and depression"
When she got pregnant she tried to hide it from her family (parents in particular) because she felt shame and feared the kid would be taken away.
Her parents fostered lots of kids and so she saw lots of kids going into the system and didn’t want that for hers. I disagree that would have happened, but understand how from her life experiences she may have thought that.
Similarly, once her parents did find out, they bought her lots of food to help her during the pregnancy as during that time she was very underweight.
She also shares parenting her sons father.
Again, all this is based on info from the Guardian article.
I lived in the UK during the period of her rise to fame and honestly I don’t remember her in the news. But that bit about it costing £3300/month to run her home (rent + services + food etc) seems rather high. You could easily get a 2 bed in London for under £2000/month plus expenses, so seems rather odd to be living in such an expensive area outside of London yet still cry poverty and woe-is-me.
It feels like a lot of it is due to her mental health - not just the ADHD, but general insecurities, and also alcoholism (drinks as both a symptom and cause).
Thanks for pointing this out, his book title Diplomacy was very enlightening.
One thing of note in the spew of bile aimed at Kissinger in the HN comment thread is that it appears to emanate from people who were children or not even born during the cold war, and who seem to base their opinion on the comments of rock n' roll stars, cooks, leftist journalists/activists (sometimes turned neocon in their later life, surprise!).
I lament the decline of comment quality on HN whenever a somewhat controversial figure is brought up. It's almost as bad as Ars Technica in those cases, and closely resembles the what comes out of the comment section of the worst right wing news cloaca.
I'll order biography by Niall Ferguson in the meantime.
Yes, topics like these mask off that HN is only a step above uneducated right wing echo chambers. People would rather throw out Bourdain, Hunter Thompson, or Rolling Stones and Huffington Post quotes than read a history book around the 60s. In some part, I blame the Reddit like upvoting that reinforces people to regurgitate the current popular opinions for affirmation. Convinced their shallow take is right, unaware of how little they could actually tell you what specifically happened 50 years ago.
But that would be a fraction of what it is now