I’ve always wondered what Aaron Swartz would think of the internet now, if he was still alive. He had far-left politics, but also seemed to be a big believer in openness, free speech, crowdsourcing, etc. When he was alive those were very compatible positions, and Aaron was practically the poster child for holding both of them. Nowadays the far left favors speech restrictions and is cynical about the internet.
Would Aaron have abandoned the far left, now that they are censorious? Would he have become censorious himself? Or would he have invented some clever new technology, like RSS or reddit, to try and fix the internet’s problems?
Just goes to show what a tragedy death is, I guess.
I imagine he would have tried to do things like help people see separations in who has what opinion, so as to avoid people thinking of an entire group as uniformly exhibiting a single deleterious behavior; this might, for example, help amplify the parts of the group that do not exhibit that behavior, so that the things that that group has to offer which are good by the lights of humanity are not lost due to a negative behavior.
I generally find the left has a lot of useful and interesting things to say, if you’re able to get people to share their beliefs in ways that track the true coupling better, rather than being overcoupled due to being tangled with indicating political group membership indication. I do in fact find the left as a group to have a lot of weird ideas I disagree with; but I can at best say the same for other political groups. Many groups have deleterious behaviors. And certainly I don’t agree that the left stands out as unusually censorious, it seems to be a problem had in large part in many subgroups whose left-right dimension rates them “right” as well.
But I think being careful, when referring to groups, to draw out in your writing that some members of the group may be an exception to this, invites responses from those exceptions that I expect to be useful contributions to discourse. That’s my main point here, and that point applies across groups. Encoding signals that you’re willing to interact with people you disagree with into the disagreement statement itself seems to me to be a habit that, if it were to go culturally viral, would be an effective balm for a lot of the censorship-of-others and self-censorship-inducing patterns that various groups exhibit.
Yeah, I think there are a lot of underexplored ideas along these lines.
It’s weird how so much of the internet seems locked into either the reddit model (upvotes/downvotes) or the Twitter model (likes/shares/followers), when the design space is so much larger than that. Someone like Aaron, who played such a big role in shaping the internet, seems more likely to have a gut-level belief that it can be shaped. I expect there are a lot more things like Community Notes that we could discover if we went looking for them.
Most of the republican party wants to outright ban pornography. Full ban in project 2025. And they consider lots of LBGT representation fundamentally pornographic.
I’ve always wondered what Aaron Swartz would think of the internet now, if he was still alive. He had far-left politics, but also seemed to be a big believer in openness, free speech, crowdsourcing, etc. When he was alive those were very compatible positions, and Aaron was practically the poster child for holding both of them. Nowadays the far left favors speech restrictions and is cynical about the internet.
Would Aaron have abandoned the far left, now that they are censorious? Would he have become censorious himself? Or would he have invented some clever new technology, like RSS or reddit, to try and fix the internet’s problems?
Just goes to show what a tragedy death is, I guess.
I imagine he would have tried to do things like help people see separations in who has what opinion, so as to avoid people thinking of an entire group as uniformly exhibiting a single deleterious behavior; this might, for example, help amplify the parts of the group that do not exhibit that behavior, so that the things that that group has to offer which are good by the lights of humanity are not lost due to a negative behavior.
I generally find the left has a lot of useful and interesting things to say, if you’re able to get people to share their beliefs in ways that track the true coupling better, rather than being overcoupled due to being tangled with indicating political group membership indication. I do in fact find the left as a group to have a lot of weird ideas I disagree with; but I can at best say the same for other political groups. Many groups have deleterious behaviors. And certainly I don’t agree that the left stands out as unusually censorious, it seems to be a problem had in large part in many subgroups whose left-right dimension rates them “right” as well.
But I think being careful, when referring to groups, to draw out in your writing that some members of the group may be an exception to this, invites responses from those exceptions that I expect to be useful contributions to discourse. That’s my main point here, and that point applies across groups. Encoding signals that you’re willing to interact with people you disagree with into the disagreement statement itself seems to me to be a habit that, if it were to go culturally viral, would be an effective balm for a lot of the censorship-of-others and self-censorship-inducing patterns that various groups exhibit.
Yeah, I think there are a lot of underexplored ideas along these lines.
It’s weird how so much of the internet seems locked into either the reddit model (upvotes/downvotes) or the Twitter model (likes/shares/followers), when the design space is so much larger than that. Someone like Aaron, who played such a big role in shaping the internet, seems more likely to have a gut-level belief that it can be shaped. I expect there are a lot more things like Community Notes that we could discover if we went looking for them.
Most of the republican party wants to outright ban pornography. Full ban in project 2025. And they consider lots of LBGT representation fundamentally pornographic.
“The far left is censorious” and “Republicans are censorious” are in no way incompatible claims :-)