Blog post by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-editor of ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.
Yes, I believe it’s a bad thing.
I also believe that patterns in communication emerge on large scales, and I believe most of those patterns are noxious, or at least that the noxious patterns disrupt most of the positive patterns, even without maximizing for engagement (but especially when maximizing for engagement). It is fundamentally different to engage communication personally than through broadcast media than through peer to peer social media. The behaviors each generates are not the same and the results of letting that communication run over time are also different.
We have historical examples of this. Changes brought about by mass media first, then social media. It’s not philosophy, it’s sociology. It can be measured.
Also, you keep trying to make this sound optimistic and making it creepy. “Kickstarting the hive mind” and “planetary scale thinking” aren’t as bad as “that’s like saying food is bad”, but they’re up there. I extremely don’t want those. I have started blocking US media actively in my feeds to avoid those specifically. And hey, turns out it’s pretty healthy. I feel a bit better.
The hypothesis is that shutting down all social media would be even better, but I haven’t tested that one since 1994.
As for the optimism you keep trying to attribute, please stop. I’m disagreeing with some of what you claim, not that things are shit and will continue to be shit. I fully agree there. People like to eat trash, and will continue to do so.
Telling you salads exist, isn’t exactly optimistic when I’m fully expecting the diets of most people to consist of 100% trash for the foreseeable future.
But there IS an option besides not eating at all. Which, when it comes to communication, same as food, isn’t optional. For you individually, sure, modern society, no.
To be clear, I’m not pessimistic overall. I’m by and large not a technophobe and I don’t think we’re worse off now than we were any arbitrary number of years in the past, all things considered.
But social media was a mistake. People waited to be enraged about the impact until they could attribute it to artificial intelligence, but the vast majority of the objections to generative AI are simple iterations on processes invented by social media, from the mass copyright breach to the dramtic increase in data centre power consumption and additional vectors of disinformation. In most of those areas AI has been barely a bump on the line started by “web 2.0”.
You honestly think there is no way to have the good without the bad, and that if we survive it, we’ll opt to leave it behind entirely, rather than figure out how to apply it to do good, the way we have done with every technology before it?
I disagree. I was seeing the problems and thinking it needed to work differently from the day I started using it. The main reason I abandoned Facebook for Reddit over fifteen years ago was that Reddit was the most suitable platform to apply towards what I thought social media should actually be for.
Well, you are not people, then. But people did wait.
The warnings were there from the start, and experts in sociology and communication were warning from pretty much the full suite of effects since day one. Nobody listened, though. Mass media was fixated on the downsides of TV until two billion people were on Facebook using their pictures to train facial recognition and being roped into misinformation-driven frenzies.
And yes, I think the core mechanics of this stuff are inherent to massive, instant peer-to-peer communication. I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but we’ve had a long discussion about this because we disagree on it. The attention economy patterns are at play right here, with no algorithm, in a distributed network with no central owner. We have the same incentives and disincentives. It’s not min/maxed, but it’s not working fundamentally differently.
Something people around here like to forget is that a bunch of that “Facebook incited genocide” stuff didn’t happen through algorithmically selected posts, it happened through Whatsapp and Facebook chatbooks that aren’t driven by their centralized engagement engines. The toxic patterns are built into the tech when applied en masse.
I’ll quote my other comment here: Some things only change once every person who ever shared that thought, is gone. That takes several hundred years, at least, if it happens at all.
The stuff I think is at play here, is the part of human collective consciousness that is really, really, really slow to change.
Not the tech. Us. This stuff happens, because that is how humans work. It’s where the word “meme” comes from. How we conceive ideas, spread them, and then alter them as we spread them, optimizing the idea to spread as effectively as possible, to the point it may no longer have anything in common with the original thought.
This stuff happens using the very first form of communication we ever used as a species. Word of mouth. How in the world can it be inherent to mass media, except in the way it amplifies it?
Overcoming our own flaws and the biological biases of our brains is one of the challenges we face as a species, and another trial that cannot be opted out of.
Do you consider book authoring to be social media, then? Should print be abolished? How is modern social media more than just a supercharged version of writing down your ideas, printing a shitload of copies, and handing them out in the street?
I’m fully aware. I’m not exactly excited about it, rather it’s something I think is necessary for human society to function at the scale it has grown to.
And we’re not going to become an actual hive mind. But unless it becomes “normal” to make decisions in a way that doesn’t screw someone over on the other side of the world, down from us as individuals, up to our representatives in government, the world will continue to be shitty. That’s what I’m referring to when I say “hive-mind” or “global” thinking.
We used to be able to live our lives within the confines of a tiny plot of land, and nothing you did within that plot of land affected anything outside that plot of land.
That is no longer the case. The materials of our homes, clothes and devices are made of, and the labor to assemble them. Our food, and the immense logistics around producing it just in time for us to consume.
All these things and so many more, and how they are achieved, have global implications.
As a species, we don’t get to go back to the simple life anymore. We have responsibilities now. Ones we will likely fail to live up to, sure, but responsibilities nonetheless. And I don’t think we can even attempt to function as a species without global broadcast communication, or whatever you want to call it.
That actually doesn’t mean individuals can’t opt out. If we can figure out how to make every t-shirt cruelty free, then yeah, you don’t need to think about which one you wear anymore. And even before then, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with some living life as passengers in society.
That’s fine. The social media I think would be best for us is one that nowhere near everyone needs to engage with. Not everyone needs to connect globally, the same way you don’t need to know everyone at work, or every person in your city.
Everyone using it all the time is something commercial social media strives for. Because it needs to make money. And not just some, but ALL the money.
When it comes to communication, there IS such a thing as too much. If you only ever talk, then you never do. And if you refer back to my original comment, the kind of social media I want to see, takes very real effort to properly engage with. That kind of social media can’t be something you use every day. Or even the kind every person wants to, or needs to, use.
We don’t need to connect every person to every other person. But I think there does need to be systems that connect some people in every community, to a couple other people in every other community. And each connection doesn’t even need to be the same few people.
The part that matters is that if done right, I think social media could teach us to stop playing the prisoners dilemma by endlessly defecting on a planetary scale.
That’s something communication of all kinds achieves on a daily basis in millions of tiny instances. No-one has really built a system of communication around aiming for exactly that. In fact, most modern platforms very deliberately do the opposite.
Do I consider book authoring to be social media? No. That’s mass media. Single origina, broadcast destination. At least once books started being printed industrially and sold as commodities. The definitions of these things are not new and are pretty well established.
And it had its share of fundamental changes compared to prior communication methods. People died. A LOT of people died.
Now, I used to think the people at the time saying print was bad and had to be controlled (and there were many) were the equivalent of modern social media naysayers and the Internet would bring a similar expansion of human consciousness past the growing pains.
I started being less sure about that maybe halfway through last decade and I was pretty convinced it wasn’t true during the pandemic. Didn’t even need the whole Musk/Trump stunt to get there. I don’t necessarily think we can go back but I also don’t think that the upsides are nearly as many as with print. Plus a bunch of the people that are gonna die this time are not dead yet, so I have a bit more empathy for them.
Yup. And they have, and will continue to, this time, too. Mankind has not found a way to integrate a new technology into the way it functions without finding the no-no buttons by actually pushing them. Except maybe with nuclear weapons, and I’m still not sure we pulled that one off.
They were right though. Lives absolutely would have been spared, in the short term, had the printing press remained uninvented. We only know for sure that it probably ended up being for the better, because we get to look at it with a couple hundred years of hindsight.
And even then we probably CAN find a bunch of ways it could have been done with much less blood spilled!
We literally can’t know. And it’s a pandora’s box type problem, we are doing this, there is no undo. I think there’s a bunch of positives that social media can realize. I have absolutely no clue whether they will be.
All I’m saying is, social media isn’t its problems. Nuclear technology isn’t just bombs and waste, it’s also cleaner energy and life-saving warmth, and so many other things.
I don’t take issue with you saying modern social media is doing bad things (even beyond what commercial social media does). I do take issue with the kind of claim that goes along the lines “insert technology” is wrong in the first place.
Yes. That is like saying food is bad. Can it be? Yes. Does it have to be? No. Is it optional? No. This stuff isn’t going back in the box.
So then why attribute good/bad to the concept itself? Either you eat well, or you don’t. Not eating, isn’t one of the options. This has been true for every major paradigm shift in history. And not a single time has mankind pulled off not having a big bite of absolute trash while figuring out which is which.
I try to be one of the ones who figure out which parts are safe to eat. The more people are like that, the sooner we can stop chowing down on the poison. I hope.
No, we can know. Again, this stuff is measurable.
Books resulted in a mass expansion of literacy, tools for mass education where before culture had been distributed through apprenticeships at best. It eventually enabled news distribution at a scale that just wouldn’t have been possible before, which in turn is a key element of liberal democratic revolutions.
Social media has been in place for almost half a century now and it’s done none of that. None.
I’ll give it this, it was easier to work from home during the pandemic than in the last pandemic. That was a thing. I won’t even give it full credits, because honestly the biggest improvement there was point to point logistics making it so we all got back to having toilet paper pretty fast.
Every now and then something gets crowdsourced in a way that would have been difficult before, but it’s not widespread and not the main use of the tech, if it involves social media at all. There is no revolutionary upheaval of the socioeconomic system anywhere, beyond taking the semi-oligarchic gatekeepers we had before and removing the few limitations on fact checking that used to go with them being able to decide the official version of reality.
If we find a revolutionary application of social media now (and again, it hasn’t happened yet), it will be something else. We’d certainly label it differently. Many techbros think it’s AI. I think they’re probably wrong. But it’s certainly not gonna be social media of any kind.
50 years is nothing. Its not even a generation. Tech might move faster than ever, but collective human culture, the REAL core of it? The truly basic stuff, like “anyone can learn to read”, is as slow as ever.
Some things only change once every person who ever shared that thought, is gone. That takes several hundred years, at least, if it happens at all.
Did you not understand when I layed out how global communication can facilitate learned compassion on a global scale, allowing for world peace? As well as the kind of decision making that doesn’t destroy the planet? That’s my “revolutionary application”.
How if, we can stop caring about whatever men like Putin and Trump care about, on a cultural level, then the way people like them navigate society can become utterly unacceptable on a socially fundamental level.
And before you say, “that’s stupid, it’ll never happen” that’s probably what the nobility thought about peasants learning to read.
I think that every person on earth has the capacity to be raised into a compassionate being that would not sacrifice the well being of others to enrich themselves beyond their basic needs. Or at least enough of us can be, that the ones who can’t, are too few to matter.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Or maybe, in a couple hundred years, it will be untinkable that children ever worked in sweatshops.
Yeeeeah, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere here. Let’s leave it there.
Fine.
I’ll leave you with this. Modern media might go through a hundred times more content every passing year.
But I think the average speed at which people can change their minds, or the number of times the average person does it throughout their life, is exactly the same as it was ten thousand years ago.
There is a maximum speed at which collective humanity can figure certain things out, and while some things are happening faster than ever, others, are happening at a fixed speed and at a scale no-one alive today will live to see.
I want you to think about what that means when it comes to the way mankind learns to apply something like social media, or any other technology, towards doing good.
The change I hope social media can facilitate, isn’t the kind that happens in 50 years. It’s the kind that happens over several hundred. Maybe more.