Here’s a blog post about how everyone hates each other over politics more than before. Eliezer commented on it on Facebook, hypothesizing that it’s a slow-growing effect of the Internet.
I cursed aloud when I read that comment, because I’ve had that exact idea and an accompanying sick feeling for a while now, and this is the first time I’ve seen it repeated.
(it’s never a good sign when Eliezer Yudkowsky is the one to express your deepest fears about why everything’s and everyone’s brokenness is unstoppably accelerating)
I wish to read more about the “The Internet Is Why We Can’t Have Even The Few Nice Things We Almost Kind Of Once Had” phenomenon — hopefully from someone who thinks there’s a way easier than developing Friendly AI to put even one evil back in Pandora’s Box, but that’s probably wishful thinking, and I want to read about it in any case.
(Note: I’m aware that the entire LW-affiliated rationalist community writes about how things are broken, and desires to teach people to be less broken. But right now I’m looking specifically for things about how the Internet’s massive boon to free speech is way more double-edged than was anticipated.)
Before the internet: “Hey Bob, here’s why you’re wrong.”
On the internet: “Hey everyone, here’s my witty response to Bob, explaining why he’s wrong and evil.”
You can see how that kind of discussion would make people radicalized.
I’ve been thinking of an online discussion site based on exchanges of personal messages, which eventually get released to the public only if both participants agree. Maybe that would work. At least there would be no name-calling, because that’s useless in a one-on-one setting.
It seems odd to me that you’d think that way. Surely, before the internet there was radio, television, newspapers, books, and numerous other ways to say “Hey everyone, here’s why Bob is wrong and evil.”
I suppose the internet might have had a more democratizing effect where ordinary people can broadcast their opinions to the world. But I’d be curious to know how much that actually matters. It seems to me that it’s still the case that if you’re a ‘regular nobody’, nothing you post on your facebook is going to have an impact beyond your immediate circle of friends. At the end of the day there’s only a finite amount of supply of attention.
Maybe the internet has had a ‘reallocation of attention’ effect where people who used to recieve more attention previously (such as honest journalists) cannot reach as an wide audience as they could, and vice versa. But then, the question becomes: Who is getting more attention nowadays, and what effect are they having on people?
I suppose the internet might have had a more democratizing effect where ordinary people can broadcast their opinions to the world. But I’d be curious to know how much that actually matters. It seems to me that it’s still the case that if you’re a ‘regular nobody’, nothing you post on your facebook is going to have an impact beyond your immediate circle of friends.
How about Twitter? That’s where the problem is worst, and that’s where people are constantly in “talking to the crowd” mode.
It seems odd to me that you’d think that way. Surely, before the internet there was radio, television, newspapers, books, and numerous other ways to say “Hey everyone, here’s why Bob is wrong and evil.”
The difference is that now the Bobs can organize and start saying why clique of Alices in traditional media are the really evil ones. Of course, unlike the Bobs, the Alices isn’t used to being called evil so they completely flip out and start going after everyone, even each other, who appears to show the slightest deviation from the perceived party line.
If you went to a party (meaning a social event) and started loudly proclaiming that anyone who does not vote for your favourite political party is a selfish git, people would tell you you were being rude, and you might be asked to leave (unless everyone there shares your views).
But on facebook, this sort of behaviour is perfectly acceptable. And once you get used to this online, it carries over into offline life. Faced with this onslaught, people with descenting views either shut up about it or change their views to match the majority.
I dunno if I use anecdotal evidence too much, but from my experience, five years ago it was possible for people to have different political views, to have a civilised conversation about policies, to agree to disagree. Now virtually everyone I know has the same political views and no-one discusses policies (you can’t fit policies into a tweet, its too complex).
More generally I get the impression that even physical violence in the pursuit of political aims seems to be argued as justified more frequently, from rioting to throwing stones at politicians to angry jokes about arson against people who support the wrong party.
Tomorrow its the general election here in the UK. Five years ago I would have had several conversations about who to vote for, with no hard feelings on either side. This time, I’m not telling anyone I know in real life who I’m voting for, and all I can think is that all this anger isn’t worth it, that posting a picture captioned “We have people who need jobs, we have jobs that need to be done, why don’t we just print the money needed? Share if you agree!” is not a sensible way to determine macroeconomic policy, and that we would all be better off if people got into office through examinations or futarchy.
Probably, but I’ve just got sketchy memories of what people say, which seems to mostly be people on the left getting sick of hearing right wing views. I know more people on the left, so there might be just as much of the converse.
Personally, I’ve got a friend who doesn’t want me to defend rightwingers to her, and the friendship is worth enough to me that I’m not going to nag her about rightwingers being human, too. She can figure it out on her own—or not—without my help.
I dunno if I use anecdotal evidence too much, but from my experience, five years ago it was possible for people to have different political views, to have a civilised conversation about policies, to agree to disagree. Now virtually everyone I know has the same political views and no-one discusses policies (you can’t fit policies into a tweet, its too complex).
I think it depends on where you are; for example, ISTM that supporting animal testing, GMOs, and the like used to be pretty much taboo on Facebook in my country until a few years ago, and I would have felt very uncomfortable expressing ideas that could be construed no matter how broadly as speciesist on my Facebook wall, whereas today there is a sizeable metacontrarian current which is mostly tolerated except by extreme environmentalist wingnuts.
(it’s never a good sign when Eliezer Yudkowsky is the one to express your deepest fears about why everything’s and
everyone’s brokenness is unstoppably accelerating)
Here’s a blog post about how everyone hates each other over politics more than before. [And so on.]
So...I suspect my beliefs on this topic are out of step with the rest of LW, and even if I limit myself to the empirical aspects (i.e. set aside my normative differences) it’s going to take a bit of effort to explain & justify my disagreements/doubts.
The first thing I notice is that the blog post talks about political polarization, as well as hatred/intolerance. Something I didn’t realize until I glanced at the political science literature on polarization is that political polarization is multidimensional, so it’s risky to talk about a change in political polarization in general.
To pin things down, we can first ask whom we’re talking about: citizens in general, or politicians specifically? Then we can ask, polarization of what: specific policy preferences, or party identification? Finally, we can ask, is the polarization we care about variance in its own right (i.e. has the policy/party preference distribution spread out?) or covariance (e.g. has geographic sorting strengthened, which would be a rise in spatial segregation by political belief?) or attitudes between partisan groups?
There are therefore at least 2 × 2 × 3 = 12 conceptually distinct things we might mean when we refer to “polarization”, and they have very likely changed to different degrees over time. There is clear evidence of decreasing inter-party cooperation in the US Congress, but this doesn’t tell us much about the US public at large.
Even if we’re clear that we’re talking about the whole US public, not just politicians, much of the evidence adduced for polarization is consistent with multiple hypotheses. People often presume a null hypothesis that the public is pulling itself apart on policy, or that different partisan groups have more negative attitudes towards each other, but an alternative hypothesis I find plausible is party sorting: an increase in the correlation between party identification and policy preferences, which can take place even if policy preferences and inter-group attitudes remain constant. (The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, of course.)
Now I can finally turn to the evidence linked in the blog post. It links a National Journal article which talks a lot about Silicon Valley in the here & now, but much less about change over time (a line which leaps out at me is “Silicon Valley has long been a bastion of liberalism.”, which suggests stasis and not change). The blog post also mentions Brendan Eich losing his job, which is one anecdote (and even if it weren’t anecdotal, detecting a trend over time would call for two data points). Finally, it links systematic polling data from Pew, which I like. But with only one exception, every graph on that page is either (1) unable to tell us about trends over time because it only shows us results from 2014, or (2) consistent with party sorting.
Let’s close in on the exception. (I doubt Pew minds much if I hotlink one figure.)
Because the charts represent responses to “political values questions” rather than something party-related, I don’t see how party sorting can explain the widening of the distribution over time; this appears to be a parting of actual political views. Interestingly, there’s very little polarization between 1994 & 2004; over that period it’s as if the liberal & conservative sides of the distribution merely swapped places. Basically all the action happens after 2004, but even there the effect is not so great. The tails go from capturing 11% of people to 21%, not a negligible shift but not a radical one either.
I think the timing weighs against the idea that the Internet is to blame. Pew have asked US adults whether they use the Internet, and most of the change in Internet use happened in the 1995-2004 period (14% to 63%), not the 2004-2014 period (63% to 87%). One could tweak the Internet-polarized-people hypothesis so it better fits the timing, perhaps by invoking a decade-long time lag between Internet penetration and political effects, or by substituting something like “social networking” for the “Internet”. But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
In a way this is all prologue, because you (75th) are talking specifically about “hate” between different political groups, and that might be worsening regardless of people’s substantial political views. But I think it was worth warning about the multiple constructs lurking behind “political polarization”.
I also hope I’ve made it less surprising that I believe the typical LW poster probably has an exaggerated idea of how much inter-partisan hate/intolerance has worsened. Worsened in the US, anyway, since that’s the place I think most of us are talking about. (As Good_Burning_Plastic indicates, things can be different in different locales.) Given that actual political beliefs haven’t changed much, it would be a bit surprising if the level of partisan hate had blown up. I have two more reasons why my null hypothesis is that partisan hate & intolerance haven’t exploded.
One, I think of partisan intolerance as coming from the fact that political decisions can have big impacts on people’s lives, so people feel strongly about those decisions and readily employ cognitive biases when thinking about them. Since this has always been the case, I expect partisan intolerance has been a constant fixture of political life, and the outside view leads me to predict only gradual & small changes in partisan intolerance’s intensity.
Two, US writers have been making overblown claims of bottom-up “culture war” and such for years, so I now expect to see some Americans alleging unprecedented political polarization and partisan culture war regardless of the evidence. Some recent events do catch people’s eyes and get brought up as signs that American politics is becoming unusually hostile, but when someone mentions something like the Brendan Eich incident, I have to wonder what the old baseline is supposed to be. Do the 1960s not count? What about the 1990s, when people were inspired to coin the “culture war” phrase? Or, if we want a more specific and more recent analogue, the Dixie Chicks kerfuffle?
I think the timing weighs against the idea that the Internet is to blame. Pew have asked US adults whether they use the Internet, and most of the change in Internet use happened in the 1995-2004 period (14% to 63%), not the 2004-2014 period (63% to 87%). One could tweak the Internet-polarized-people hypothesis so it better fits the timing, perhaps by invoking a decade-long time lag between Internet penetration and political effects, or by substituting something like “social networking” for the “Internet”. But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
Online shopping or wikipedia isn’t going to polarise people. I’m sure many people here were early adopters, and hung out on usenet or mailing lists, but this was not the norm. It was around 2005 when myspace turned online socialising into something mainstream, and 2008 when not being on Facebook was actively contrarian, and a few years later when even the contraians gave in.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions. It was only with facebook and twitter that opinions boiled down to one sentence.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions.
Blogs can still express complex opinions. The political impact of a figure like Glenn Greenwald who writes long blog posts is much higher than it was 5 years ago.
All Facebook users can self-report their political affiliation; 9% of U.S. users over 18 do. We mapped the top 500 political designations on a five-point, −2 (Very Liberal) to +2 (Very Conservative) ideological scale; those with no response or with responses such as “other” or “I don’t care” were not included. 46% of those who entered their political affiliation on their profiles had a response that could be mapped to this scale.
As with my earlier comment, the data represent the US alone, but imply that the vast majority (95%) of Facebook-using adults there don’t care enough about politics on Facebook to put a recognizable political affiliation in their profile. This doesn’t contradict the experiences of the posters here who regularly encounter fighty partisans on Facebook (and real life?), but I’m not sure they’re typical.
Perhaps a selection effect helps to explain LWers’ encounters with Intense Facebook Politics: LWers may be unrepresentatively likely to run into (or even be) Facebook partisans. From the survey, we’re young (median age 26 — hence more likely to spend lots of time on Facebook than middle-aged technophobes), 37% of us are students, and over a quarter of us have consistently strong left-wing views on stereotypical contentious political topics (with a further 6% who simply rate themselves 5⁄5 on their interest in politics).
(The “over a quarter” comes from taking the 8 rate-this-from-1-to-5 items on “Abortion”, “Immigration” and so on, and summing each person’s ratings, reverse scoring the “Human Biodiversity” item because that’s the only stereotypical right-wing item. 272 people left at least one item unrated, but the remaining 1157 people had total scores between 0 and 40, higher scores being more left-wing. 402 people scored 32 or higher, which means 28% of all respondents had an average rating of 4+. Not one respondent gave similarly right-wing responses; the lowest score was 9. This is perhaps unsurprising in light of the political self-identification data.)
When I framed it to myself as “that’s a doubling of the tails!” it did sound impressive, but I remembered how easy it is to make modest changes in a distribution’s mean and/or variance sound extreme by focusing attention on the tails, where such changes have an outsized impact.
My reaction was to roughly translate that tail doubling into the corresponding change in the whole distribution’s standard deviation, and I got about 30%. Expressed like that, the change was clearly substantial, but it didn’t strike me as radical. Opinions may differ!
(For this reply, I thought I’d try estimating a standard deviation for each distribution in a more systematic way. From Pew’s appendix I worked out the mid-interval value for each of the 5 ideological-consistency bins, then calculated the standard deviations using those mid-interval bin values. This is still inexact, but hopefully less so than my original back-of-the-envelope guesstimate. For 1994 I got 3.90; for 2004, 3.91; and for 2014, 4.80. That gives a 23% increase in standard deviation from 2004 to 2014.)
Upvoted for question dissolution and thorough analysis; one thing:
A binary Internet-use question seems like a bad metric; people were primarily consumers in the past, now everyone is producing content, or actively sharing the content that others have produced. Furthermore, a lot of people on this thread seem to be talking about Twitter and Facebook; even if everyone’s using the word Internet, clearly they mean social media (blogs included), and that’s what we should be talking about anyway. We wouldn’t expect considerably more polarization from people switching their consumption habits from TV and newspaper to big Internet news sites; that’s just a change of medium. (That is, unless a bunch of people who weren’t getting news from anywhere started using the Internet during that time.) It’s often through extended social interaction that we get various forms of polarization, and social media offers more opportunities for that. And indeed, Pew’s social media use data lines up well with the hypothesis that growth of social media use positively correlates with polarization of policy preferences in the US.
But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
Seems like I’ve tripped this clause but I don’t really get it. Did that count as the sort of argument you were looking for?
Also, I don’t have a strong position either way on this, just pointing out what I perceived as a weakness in what seems like an otherwise good argument.
My guess is that more and more of us are living in Ellen Ullman’s”Museum of Me”:
It is in this sense that the Internet ideal represents the very opposite of what democracy is, democracy being a method for resolving differences in a relatively orderly manner, through the mediation of unavoidable civic associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. Where all needs and desires are equally valid, equally powerful, I’ll get mine, you get yours, no need for compromise or discussion, I don’t have to tolerate you, you don’t have to tolerate me, no need for messy debate or the whole rigmarole of government with all its creaky, bothersome structures. No need for any of those. Because now that we have the world wide web, the problem of the pursuit of happiness has been solved. We each click for our individual joys and disputes may arise only if something doesn’t get delivered on time.
Combine that concept with one from Alexis de Tocqueville, 167 year earlier:
Inside America, the majority has staked out a formidable fence around thought. Inside those limits a writer is free but woe betide him if he dares to stray beyond them. Not that the need fear an auto-da-fé but he is the victim of all kinds of unpleasantness and everyday persecutions. A political career is closed to him for he has offended the only power with the capacity to give him an opening. He is denied everything, including renown. Before publishing his views, he thought he had supporters; it seems he has lost them once he has declared himself publicly; for his detractors speak out loudly and those who think as he does, but without his courage, keep silent and slink away. He gives in and finally bends beneath the effort of each passing day, withdrawing into silence as if he felt ashamed at having spoken the truth.
On the internet, he need not withdraw into silence. He needs merely to find where everyone else who stated his particular opinion has withdrawn to. Further and further towards the edges of Pew’s graph, most likely.
(it’s never a good sign when Eliezer Yudkowsky is the one to express your deepest fears about why everything’s and everyone’s brokenness is unstoppably accelerating)
You should be dubious about “unstoppably accelerating”—prediction is difficult, especially about the future.
It’s conceivable that people could get sick of the current level of nastiness.
I think the article makes some sweeping and unjustified statements.
Just a few generations ago, everyone knew that there were two subjects not broached in polite company: religion & politics.
This is not true; in many parts of the USA for instance it was (and is) a quite common question to ask someone which church they go to. This might sometimes literally be the third question you get asked right after “what’s your name?” and “where do you come from?”
And, of course, many other parts of the world openly debated politics and religion in public and with strangers, and in some places quite often. This is well-documented, and I have personal experience with this since I used to (in the 90′s) live in such a country.
I think you (and the following chain you have gathered) are wrong on your prediction on this matter.
I would not be unwilling to say that Eliezer’s prediction (in your direction) is also an inaccurate prediction of the future.
(before I go on; I should warn that this very topic has developed a gang opinion; with echo chambers where it is possible for many people to share the same view on the topic without being disputed)
I believe that the world is still growing in its understanding of what is this internet thing. In doing so; I believe we are yet to get to the “less caring” point of time. if we look at politics ~40 years ago; there was a big politically active shift. Many joined in; many cared! Many protested. And then it all cooled off again. People cared less; people wanted to continue with their lives more and spend less time talking about politics.
I predict many of the public are soon to hit the there is too much politic and not enough living in my life, at which point; people will care less of politics and share less politics. everyone will still have pet issues; and dagnamit! if you can’t anger a dog-lover by telling them that dog-lovers are inferior; then it wouldn’t be planet earth.
Instead of; “this is all getting worse”; I predict its about to get better.
I like Venkatesh Rao’s perspective on this, in his blog post about “escaped realities”. He argues that our games and mental models of the world are becoming closer to reality over time, “less escaped”, rather than more escapist. He points out that geography is a much bigger filter than online groups regarding the variety of ideas that a person is exposed to. If anything, the internet, overall, seems to be widening people’s perspectives. (Although it also lets people get better organized with their tribalism.)
I think the United States is undergoing a sort of cultural civil war right now, which I think makes the perspective of people living there somewhat different than people living in other parts of the world. I don’t think that it would be as easy to make the case for “the internet encourages tribalism in politics” in other countries. I don’t think that the internet is the reason for the social tensions in the United States right now, (and there are many.)
Except that I would say this political hatred has taken off over the last five years, correlating far more with social media than with the world becoming safer. Has the world become safer over the last five years?
Alternative hypothesis: it’s about young adults from rich families, seeking status in the muggle world.
In real life, if you are a spoiled rich kid, the best way to enjoy your wealth is to do things that most people don’t do. Buy a private helicopter or a yacht, organize a huge party in your mansion, etc. You are invisible to the muggles, and the muggles are invisible to you; that contributes to social peace.
However, this does not work on internet, because on internet the fun is where people are. Imagine that someone would create an alternative “Reddit Platinum” website where you would have to pay $1,000,000 every day to have an account. If you have more money than you can count, you could isolate yourself here from the muggles. The website would be wonderfully designed, and all bugs would be fixed immediately. The only problem is that there would be almost no interesting debates, because there would be not enough various people to bring new ideas.
So even for a spoiled 1% kid, the muggle Reddit would be more fun then the “Reddit Platinum”. On the other hand, the muggle Reddit would be frustrating for them, because they wouldn’t receive the respect they get in the real life where everyone tries to kiss their assess. Instead, if they tried to pull the status card, people would make fun of them. The natural response would be to use their real-world resources to buy minions, and somehow use those minions as a support in online battles.
And this is a problem that cannot be solved, because the parts of the online world where the rich kids can feel really good become boring as hell for everyone else, so most people move away, and the fun moves away, and the rich kids will try to conquer yet another part of the online world. It is a love-hate relationship towards the arrogant muggles: can’t withstand their non-humble behavior, yet can’t live online without them.
EDIT: A weak-evidence datapoint: In Slovakia there was a website “booom.sk”, something like Facebook for rich kids. You could pay money to get a small subset of Facebook functionality. You also got some extra functionality in real life: you didn’t have to create events, invite people and upload photos, because the site owners added all important events and sent there photographers who uploaded the photos; you merely tagged yourself in the photos. When I was teaching at a school for rich kids ten years ago, most students used this website, and they pretty much didn’t know anything about the rest of the internet. Now I looked at the website again, out of curiosity, and it still exists, but some sections were not updated since cca 2010. My explanation is that Facebook got widely popular, and the rich kids realized they would ultimately have more fun in the muggle world.
I think programmers helping each other on Stackoverflow is an example of people being nice by helping each other.
It’s possible to create any kind of social norm in an online community.
Often the problem is that there’s often no moderation that enforces any community norms. Most newspapers don’t invest the necessary resources that would be required to get decently moderated comment threads.
You’re referring to the problem with people being mean to each other within a given online community. I’m thinking more of people hating each other more in real life because the Internet lets them seek out unfiltered outrage from people with similar beliefs, with nothing tempered by gatekeepers as in the days before the Internet and the rise of cable news.
I don’t have the feeling that it’s hard to speak about politics in the social circles in which I move in real life. But then I don’t live in the US but in Germany.
More likely that means your opinions align with your social circle. As an example, do you think someone who supports the PEGIDA protests would feel comfortable expressing that support in your social circle?
When was the first time you got online? For me I think, 1994-1995-ish. And it was a surreal place largely because the Internet was and still is a lawless anarchistic Wild West. Nazi types set up their Geocities websites because hate speech laws were not enforced. Restrictions on pornography in certain countries were overriden by looking at it from abroad. Age verification, a fairly important rule, was overridden so much that lately many porn sites don’t even care anymore and now minors can access it. Hoax websites scammed people out of money. Socially inept nerds became millionaires. Filesharing and piracy. Uncontrolled free speech and under pseudonyms, so you are not only allowed to wear a smear campaign against a political big dog but even they don’t know who you are. It was the Wild West where Anything Goes.
I and many “old-timers” got attached this anarchy online because freedom. It is at some level romantic in the Samizdata / Doctorow sense and of course in many things even useful.
But look, can we realistically happen it will always stay an uncontrolled Wild West or sooner or later the Real Powers in the Real World will bend the Internet to their world? I think they will. We will probably lose this marvelous, crazy, anarchistic freedom. But we will probably also overcome these problems as well, as in the longer run it will be corporate controlled, almost like a somewhat more interactive TV. For a lot of people, the Internet basically became Facebook. Much of what they are interested in is controlled by one corporation. And Facebook AFAIK is trying to become more media like.
I don’t think we will lose the anarchistic freedom; it’s too powerful. The internet has toppled enemy regimes; to shut down the anarchy would be to lose an incredibly potent weapon. Given that it’s a weapon that can be used without significant diplomatic issue, I’d guess the internet is a more powerful weapon than nuclear bombs at this point, and anybody who actually takes significant steps to shutting down that anarchy is at least to some extent disarming themselves. A foreign state can’t do much of anything when your citizens are fomenting revolt among their citizens. With anarchy, a state actor is indistinguishable from a citizen.
But a hacking attempt comes from China. Does anybody -not- think it was the Chinese government?
Me.
China is big. In particular it has lots of people. Lots and lots and lots. And then some. A bunch of them are hackers for the same reason there are many hackers in Russia and Eastern Europe, for example. Some work for the government. Not all do.
In EE it tends to be connected with a certain… not openly rebellious but still anti-authoritarian attitude set, of gaming the system, getting away with bending or breaking the rules and going in the window when the door is closed. This is very similar to the Latin American https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeitinho and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malandragem although I don’t know of a specific name. I don’t know if there is anything similar in China. They look like a very disciplined type of culture… Also this thing should deserve an English name now. Perhaps System D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D
But if they truly shut the anarchy down—prevented VPN and proxy connections to external anarchy—would that still hold?
No, not really, because you can’t “truly shut the anarchy down”.
Consider, say, the night streets of New York City. Is there anarchy there? Certainly not. And yet there is some level of crime, you can buy drugs, you can get mugged, etc. If you get shot in the Bronx, it doesn’t mean that a government agent shot you (though sometimes that is so).
“Shutting down the anarchy” means getting it down to meatspace level.
Meatspace analogies don’t apply to bitspace. Autonomous government agents are expensive in meatspace, but have only a marginal cost in bitspace if you prohibit secure-against-government-search communications, which is easy to do once you’ve committed to creating said autonomous agents to identify anybody attempting to engage in them.
if you prohibit secure-against-government-search communications
That’s a very big IF and I’m fairly optimistic that the cryptography genie will be hard to stuff back into his bottle.
Even if you try to enforce plaintext-only communications (which by itself leads to a host of issues), I can stuff a wide communication channel into the lower bits of cat videos (and such) after which we are off to the arms races and your “marginal cost of governement agents” becomes not so marginal after all.
In any case, if we get to THAT totalitarian society, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than the freedoms of the internet.
You don’t need to catch every secure communication. Even a 1% identification rate is enough; less if you’re willing to toss in some traffic analysis into the mix. Your goal, after all, isn’t to prevent secure communication, or even to identify what’s inside it, it’s to identify the people doing it, because the secure communication itself, rather than the contents of the communication, are what you’ve banned.
But I don’t think anybody -wants- this level of control. The Internet is too powerful a weapon.
I’m aware that the entire LW-affiliated rationalist community writes about how things are broken, and desires to teach people to be less broken.
Personal opinion: less has changed than people think. The walls of Pompei have preserved graffiti on them that amounts to 4chan trolling. Political parties once published their own newspapers and newsmagazines that pushed an explicitly partisan viewpoint and served as people’s only access to information about world affairs.
Most people are fine, provided that you get them in the right circumstances and mindset. What’s amazing about the world’s problems sometimes is how you occasionally find out How Problem X Happened, and while it wasn’t a conspiracy of card-carrying villains in a smoke-filled room, it often was one person in an office who was feeling particularly malevolent or uncaring, and was able to make up rationalizations they could spout in public without actually being fired from their job.
Like racism. Maybe there’s an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.
The war on drugs seems to have been the result of a small number of people. So far as I know, the trail of Tears was something Jackson pushed through that the rest of the country didn’t especially want.
Like racism. Maybe there’s an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.
Or maybe populations with low IQ’s are simply more prone to violence. Especially, when there’s a reluctance to punish them the same way as high IQ people for fear of being “racist”.
Here’s a blog post about how everyone hates each other over politics more than before. Eliezer commented on it on Facebook, hypothesizing that it’s a slow-growing effect of the Internet.
I cursed aloud when I read that comment, because I’ve had that exact idea and an accompanying sick feeling for a while now, and this is the first time I’ve seen it repeated.
(it’s never a good sign when Eliezer Yudkowsky is the one to express your deepest fears about why everything’s and everyone’s brokenness is unstoppably accelerating)
I wish to read more about the “The Internet Is Why We Can’t Have Even The Few Nice Things We Almost Kind Of Once Had” phenomenon — hopefully from someone who thinks there’s a way easier than developing Friendly AI to put even one evil back in Pandora’s Box, but that’s probably wishful thinking, and I want to read about it in any case.
(Note: I’m aware that the entire LW-affiliated rationalist community writes about how things are broken, and desires to teach people to be less broken. But right now I’m looking specifically for things about how the Internet’s massive boon to free speech is way more double-edged than was anticipated.)
Anyone have any good links?
Here’s my diagnosis of the problem.
Before the internet: “Hey Bob, here’s why you’re wrong.”
On the internet: “Hey everyone, here’s my witty response to Bob, explaining why he’s wrong and evil.”
You can see how that kind of discussion would make people radicalized.
I’ve been thinking of an online discussion site based on exchanges of personal messages, which eventually get released to the public only if both participants agree. Maybe that would work. At least there would be no name-calling, because that’s useless in a one-on-one setting.
It seems odd to me that you’d think that way. Surely, before the internet there was radio, television, newspapers, books, and numerous other ways to say “Hey everyone, here’s why Bob is wrong and evil.”
I suppose the internet might have had a more democratizing effect where ordinary people can broadcast their opinions to the world. But I’d be curious to know how much that actually matters. It seems to me that it’s still the case that if you’re a ‘regular nobody’, nothing you post on your facebook is going to have an impact beyond your immediate circle of friends. At the end of the day there’s only a finite amount of supply of attention.
Maybe the internet has had a ‘reallocation of attention’ effect where people who used to recieve more attention previously (such as honest journalists) cannot reach as an wide audience as they could, and vice versa. But then, the question becomes: Who is getting more attention nowadays, and what effect are they having on people?
How about Twitter? That’s where the problem is worst, and that’s where people are constantly in “talking to the crowd” mode.
The difference is that now the Bobs can organize and start saying why clique of Alices in traditional media are the really evil ones. Of course, unlike the Bobs, the Alices isn’t used to being called evil so they completely flip out and start going after everyone, even each other, who appears to show the slightest deviation from the perceived party line.
If you went to a party (meaning a social event) and started loudly proclaiming that anyone who does not vote for your favourite political party is a selfish git, people would tell you you were being rude, and you might be asked to leave (unless everyone there shares your views).
But on facebook, this sort of behaviour is perfectly acceptable. And once you get used to this online, it carries over into offline life. Faced with this onslaught, people with descenting views either shut up about it or change their views to match the majority.
I dunno if I use anecdotal evidence too much, but from my experience, five years ago it was possible for people to have different political views, to have a civilised conversation about policies, to agree to disagree. Now virtually everyone I know has the same political views and no-one discusses policies (you can’t fit policies into a tweet, its too complex).
More generally I get the impression that even physical violence in the pursuit of political aims seems to be argued as justified more frequently, from rioting to throwing stones at politicians to angry jokes about arson against people who support the wrong party.
Tomorrow its the general election here in the UK. Five years ago I would have had several conversations about who to vote for, with no hard feelings on either side. This time, I’m not telling anyone I know in real life who I’m voting for, and all I can think is that all this anger isn’t worth it, that posting a picture captioned “We have people who need jobs, we have jobs that need to be done, why don’t we just print the money needed? Share if you agree!” is not a sensible way to determine macroeconomic policy, and that we would all be better off if people got into office through examinations or futarchy.
Consequences of being rude to people who disagree with you about something:
in real life—lose friends
on internet—gain pageviews
I’ve found that there’s a risk of losing real life friends if you aren’t careful about what you say online about politics.
Does the risk vary with position on the political spectrum?
Probably, but I’ve just got sketchy memories of what people say, which seems to mostly be people on the left getting sick of hearing right wing views. I know more people on the left, so there might be just as much of the converse.
Personally, I’ve got a friend who doesn’t want me to defend rightwingers to her, and the friendship is worth enough to me that I’m not going to nag her about rightwingers being human, too. She can figure it out on her own—or not—without my help.
I think it depends on where you are; for example, ISTM that supporting animal testing, GMOs, and the like used to be pretty much taboo on Facebook in my country until a few years ago, and I would have felt very uncomfortable expressing ideas that could be construed no matter how broadly as speciesist on my Facebook wall, whereas today there is a sizeable metacontrarian current which is mostly tolerated except by extreme environmentalist wingnuts.
Interesting—where do you live?
What’s his track record with these so far?
So...I suspect my beliefs on this topic are out of step with the rest of LW, and even if I limit myself to the empirical aspects (i.e. set aside my normative differences) it’s going to take a bit of effort to explain & justify my disagreements/doubts.
The first thing I notice is that the blog post talks about political polarization, as well as hatred/intolerance. Something I didn’t realize until I glanced at the political science literature on polarization is that political polarization is multidimensional, so it’s risky to talk about a change in political polarization in general.
To pin things down, we can first ask whom we’re talking about: citizens in general, or politicians specifically? Then we can ask, polarization of what: specific policy preferences, or party identification? Finally, we can ask, is the polarization we care about variance in its own right (i.e. has the policy/party preference distribution spread out?) or covariance (e.g. has geographic sorting strengthened, which would be a rise in spatial segregation by political belief?) or attitudes between partisan groups?
There are therefore at least 2 × 2 × 3 = 12 conceptually distinct things we might mean when we refer to “polarization”, and they have very likely changed to different degrees over time. There is clear evidence of decreasing inter-party cooperation in the US Congress, but this doesn’t tell us much about the US public at large.
Even if we’re clear that we’re talking about the whole US public, not just politicians, much of the evidence adduced for polarization is consistent with multiple hypotheses. People often presume a null hypothesis that the public is pulling itself apart on policy, or that different partisan groups have more negative attitudes towards each other, but an alternative hypothesis I find plausible is party sorting: an increase in the correlation between party identification and policy preferences, which can take place even if policy preferences and inter-group attitudes remain constant. (The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, of course.)
Now I can finally turn to the evidence linked in the blog post. It links a National Journal article which talks a lot about Silicon Valley in the here & now, but much less about change over time (a line which leaps out at me is “Silicon Valley has long been a bastion of liberalism.”, which suggests stasis and not change). The blog post also mentions Brendan Eich losing his job, which is one anecdote (and even if it weren’t anecdotal, detecting a trend over time would call for two data points). Finally, it links systematic polling data from Pew, which I like. But with only one exception, every graph on that page is either (1) unable to tell us about trends over time because it only shows us results from 2014, or (2) consistent with party sorting.
Let’s close in on the exception. (I doubt Pew minds much if I hotlink one figure.)
Because the charts represent responses to “political values questions” rather than something party-related, I don’t see how party sorting can explain the widening of the distribution over time; this appears to be a parting of actual political views. Interestingly, there’s very little polarization between 1994 & 2004; over that period it’s as if the liberal & conservative sides of the distribution merely swapped places. Basically all the action happens after 2004, but even there the effect is not so great. The tails go from capturing 11% of people to 21%, not a negligible shift but not a radical one either.
I think the timing weighs against the idea that the Internet is to blame. Pew have asked US adults whether they use the Internet, and most of the change in Internet use happened in the 1995-2004 period (14% to 63%), not the 2004-2014 period (63% to 87%). One could tweak the Internet-polarized-people hypothesis so it better fits the timing, perhaps by invoking a decade-long time lag between Internet penetration and political effects, or by substituting something like “social networking” for the “Internet”. But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
In a way this is all prologue, because you (75th) are talking specifically about “hate” between different political groups, and that might be worsening regardless of people’s substantial political views. But I think it was worth warning about the multiple constructs lurking behind “political polarization”.
I also hope I’ve made it less surprising that I believe the typical LW poster probably has an exaggerated idea of how much inter-partisan hate/intolerance has worsened. Worsened in the US, anyway, since that’s the place I think most of us are talking about. (As Good_Burning_Plastic indicates, things can be different in different locales.) Given that actual political beliefs haven’t changed much, it would be a bit surprising if the level of partisan hate had blown up. I have two more reasons why my null hypothesis is that partisan hate & intolerance haven’t exploded.
One, I think of partisan intolerance as coming from the fact that political decisions can have big impacts on people’s lives, so people feel strongly about those decisions and readily employ cognitive biases when thinking about them. Since this has always been the case, I expect partisan intolerance has been a constant fixture of political life, and the outside view leads me to predict only gradual & small changes in partisan intolerance’s intensity.
Two, US writers have been making overblown claims of bottom-up “culture war” and such for years, so I now expect to see some Americans alleging unprecedented political polarization and partisan culture war regardless of the evidence. Some recent events do catch people’s eyes and get brought up as signs that American politics is becoming unusually hostile, but when someone mentions something like the Brendan Eich incident, I have to wonder what the old baseline is supposed to be. Do the 1960s not count? What about the 1990s, when people were inspired to coin the “culture war” phrase? Or, if we want a more specific and more recent analogue, the Dixie Chicks kerfuffle?
Online shopping or wikipedia isn’t going to polarise people. I’m sure many people here were early adopters, and hung out on usenet or mailing lists, but this was not the norm. It was around 2005 when myspace turned online socialising into something mainstream, and 2008 when not being on Facebook was actively contrarian, and a few years later when even the contraians gave in.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions. It was only with facebook and twitter that opinions boiled down to one sentence.
Blogs can still express complex opinions. The political impact of a figure like Glenn Greenwald who writes long blog posts is much higher than it was 5 years ago.
True, its possible the political influence of blogs has increased, but as a percentage of online politics blogs have massivly decreased
That has some plausibility. Contrarian that I am, however, I have some more opposing evidence in my pocket.
In one of life’s little coincidences, a potentially germane Science paper appeared on the same day as your comment. I’m less interested here in the paper itself (though it has some relevance) than in a snippet from its supplementary materials:
As with my earlier comment, the data represent the US alone, but imply that the vast majority (95%) of Facebook-using adults there don’t care enough about politics on Facebook to put a recognizable political affiliation in their profile. This doesn’t contradict the experiences of the posters here who regularly encounter fighty partisans on Facebook (and real life?), but I’m not sure they’re typical.
Perhaps a selection effect helps to explain LWers’ encounters with Intense Facebook Politics: LWers may be unrepresentatively likely to run into (or even be) Facebook partisans. From the survey, we’re young (median age 26 — hence more likely to spend lots of time on Facebook than middle-aged technophobes), 37% of us are students, and over a quarter of us have consistently strong left-wing views on stereotypical contentious political topics (with a further 6% who simply rate themselves 5⁄5 on their interest in politics).
(The “over a quarter” comes from taking the 8 rate-this-from-1-to-5 items on “Abortion”, “Immigration” and so on, and summing each person’s ratings, reverse scoring the “Human Biodiversity” item because that’s the only stereotypical right-wing item. 272 people left at least one item unrated, but the remaining 1157 people had total scores between 0 and 40, higher scores being more left-wing. 402 people scored 32 or higher, which means 28% of all respondents had an average rating of 4+. Not one respondent gave similarly right-wing responses; the lowest score was 9. This is perhaps unsurprising in light of the political self-identification data.)
Seems pretty radical to me (assuming it’s real and not a measurement artefact, of course).
When I framed it to myself as “that’s a doubling of the tails!” it did sound impressive, but I remembered how easy it is to make modest changes in a distribution’s mean and/or variance sound extreme by focusing attention on the tails, where such changes have an outsized impact.
My reaction was to roughly translate that tail doubling into the corresponding change in the whole distribution’s standard deviation, and I got about 30%. Expressed like that, the change was clearly substantial, but it didn’t strike me as radical. Opinions may differ!
(For this reply, I thought I’d try estimating a standard deviation for each distribution in a more systematic way. From Pew’s appendix I worked out the mid-interval value for each of the 5 ideological-consistency bins, then calculated the standard deviations using those mid-interval bin values. This is still inexact, but hopefully less so than my original back-of-the-envelope guesstimate. For 1994 I got 3.90; for 2004, 3.91; and for 2014, 4.80. That gives a 23% increase in standard deviation from 2004 to 2014.)
ETA: Just noticed skeptical_lurker’s comment.
Upvoted for question dissolution and thorough analysis; one thing: A binary Internet-use question seems like a bad metric; people were primarily consumers in the past, now everyone is producing content, or actively sharing the content that others have produced. Furthermore, a lot of people on this thread seem to be talking about Twitter and Facebook; even if everyone’s using the word Internet, clearly they mean social media (blogs included), and that’s what we should be talking about anyway. We wouldn’t expect considerably more polarization from people switching their consumption habits from TV and newspaper to big Internet news sites; that’s just a change of medium. (That is, unless a bunch of people who weren’t getting news from anywhere started using the Internet during that time.) It’s often through extended social interaction that we get various forms of polarization, and social media offers more opportunities for that. And indeed, Pew’s social media use data lines up well with the hypothesis that growth of social media use positively correlates with polarization of policy preferences in the US.
Seems like I’ve tripped this clause but I don’t really get it. Did that count as the sort of argument you were looking for?
Also, I don’t have a strong position either way on this, just pointing out what I perceived as a weakness in what seems like an otherwise good argument.
My guess is that more and more of us are living in Ellen Ullman’s”Museum of Me”:
Combine that concept with one from Alexis de Tocqueville, 167 year earlier:
On the internet, he need not withdraw into silence. He needs merely to find where everyone else who stated his particular opinion has withdrawn to. Further and further towards the edges of Pew’s graph, most likely.
You should be dubious about “unstoppably accelerating”—prediction is difficult, especially about the future.
It’s conceivable that people could get sick of the current level of nastiness.
Heh, I know. I chose that phrase to express despair more than to describe objective reality.
I think the article makes some sweeping and unjustified statements.
This is not true; in many parts of the USA for instance it was (and is) a quite common question to ask someone which church they go to. This might sometimes literally be the third question you get asked right after “what’s your name?” and “where do you come from?”
And, of course, many other parts of the world openly debated politics and religion in public and with strangers, and in some places quite often. This is well-documented, and I have personal experience with this since I used to (in the 90′s) live in such a country.
I think you (and the following chain you have gathered) are wrong on your prediction on this matter.
I would not be unwilling to say that Eliezer’s prediction (in your direction) is also an inaccurate prediction of the future.
(before I go on; I should warn that this very topic has developed a gang opinion; with echo chambers where it is possible for many people to share the same view on the topic without being disputed)
I believe that the world is still growing in its understanding of what is this internet thing. In doing so; I believe we are yet to get to the “less caring” point of time. if we look at politics ~40 years ago; there was a big politically active shift. Many joined in; many cared! Many protested. And then it all cooled off again. People cared less; people wanted to continue with their lives more and spend less time talking about politics.
I predict many of the public are soon to hit the there is too much politic and not enough living in my life, at which point; people will care less of politics and share less politics. everyone will still have pet issues; and dagnamit! if you can’t anger a dog-lover by telling them that dog-lovers are inferior; then it wouldn’t be planet earth.
Instead of; “this is all getting worse”; I predict its about to get better.
if you disagree; feel free to discuss.
I like Venkatesh Rao’s perspective on this, in his blog post about “escaped realities”. He argues that our games and mental models of the world are becoming closer to reality over time, “less escaped”, rather than more escapist. He points out that geography is a much bigger filter than online groups regarding the variety of ideas that a person is exposed to. If anything, the internet, overall, seems to be widening people’s perspectives. (Although it also lets people get better organized with their tribalism.)
I think the United States is undergoing a sort of cultural civil war right now, which I think makes the perspective of people living there somewhat different than people living in other parts of the world. I don’t think that it would be as easy to make the case for “the internet encourages tribalism in politics” in other countries. I don’t think that the internet is the reason for the social tensions in the United States right now, (and there are many.)
Here’s my half-baked idea.
Since the world is becoming safer, we have less real threats to prevent general ennui and so petty status games start to take on more importance.
Except that I would say this political hatred has taken off over the last five years, correlating far more with social media than with the world becoming safer. Has the world become safer over the last five years?
Alternative hypothesis: it’s about young adults from rich families, seeking status in the muggle world.
In real life, if you are a spoiled rich kid, the best way to enjoy your wealth is to do things that most people don’t do. Buy a private helicopter or a yacht, organize a huge party in your mansion, etc. You are invisible to the muggles, and the muggles are invisible to you; that contributes to social peace.
However, this does not work on internet, because on internet the fun is where people are. Imagine that someone would create an alternative “Reddit Platinum” website where you would have to pay $1,000,000 every day to have an account. If you have more money than you can count, you could isolate yourself here from the muggles. The website would be wonderfully designed, and all bugs would be fixed immediately. The only problem is that there would be almost no interesting debates, because there would be not enough various people to bring new ideas.
So even for a spoiled 1% kid, the muggle Reddit would be more fun then the “Reddit Platinum”. On the other hand, the muggle Reddit would be frustrating for them, because they wouldn’t receive the respect they get in the real life where everyone tries to kiss their assess. Instead, if they tried to pull the status card, people would make fun of them. The natural response would be to use their real-world resources to buy minions, and somehow use those minions as a support in online battles.
And this is a problem that cannot be solved, because the parts of the online world where the rich kids can feel really good become boring as hell for everyone else, so most people move away, and the fun moves away, and the rich kids will try to conquer yet another part of the online world. It is a love-hate relationship towards the arrogant muggles: can’t withstand their non-humble behavior, yet can’t live online without them.
EDIT: A weak-evidence datapoint: In Slovakia there was a website “booom.sk”, something like Facebook for rich kids. You could pay money to get a small subset of Facebook functionality. You also got some extra functionality in real life: you didn’t have to create events, invite people and upload photos, because the site owners added all important events and sent there photographers who uploaded the photos; you merely tagged yourself in the photos. When I was teaching at a school for rich kids ten years ago, most students used this website, and they pretty much didn’t know anything about the rest of the internet. Now I looked at the website again, out of curiosity, and it still exists, but some sections were not updated since cca 2010. My explanation is that Facebook got widely popular, and the rich kids realized they would ultimately have more fun in the muggle world.
I don’t think that playing status games online is reserved t people with parents rich enough to buy a helicopter or a yacht.
I don’t think that a community leads to be big to have interesting debates. LW isn’t big.
Penny Arcade has just written about this as well. Comic strip, column.
I think programmers helping each other on Stackoverflow is an example of people being nice by helping each other. It’s possible to create any kind of social norm in an online community.
Often the problem is that there’s often no moderation that enforces any community norms. Most newspapers don’t invest the necessary resources that would be required to get decently moderated comment threads.
You’re referring to the problem with people being mean to each other within a given online community. I’m thinking more of people hating each other more in real life because the Internet lets them seek out unfiltered outrage from people with similar beliefs, with nothing tempered by gatekeepers as in the days before the Internet and the rise of cable news.
I don’t have the feeling that it’s hard to speak about politics in the social circles in which I move in real life. But then I don’t live in the US but in Germany.
More likely that means your opinions align with your social circle. As an example, do you think someone who supports the PEGIDA protests would feel comfortable expressing that support in your social circle?
I did read pro-PEDIGA posts on facebook from people where I wouldn’t have expected it.
When was the first time you got online? For me I think, 1994-1995-ish. And it was a surreal place largely because the Internet was and still is a lawless anarchistic Wild West. Nazi types set up their Geocities websites because hate speech laws were not enforced. Restrictions on pornography in certain countries were overriden by looking at it from abroad. Age verification, a fairly important rule, was overridden so much that lately many porn sites don’t even care anymore and now minors can access it. Hoax websites scammed people out of money. Socially inept nerds became millionaires. Filesharing and piracy. Uncontrolled free speech and under pseudonyms, so you are not only allowed to wear a smear campaign against a political big dog but even they don’t know who you are. It was the Wild West where Anything Goes.
I and many “old-timers” got attached this anarchy online because freedom. It is at some level romantic in the Samizdata / Doctorow sense and of course in many things even useful.
But look, can we realistically happen it will always stay an uncontrolled Wild West or sooner or later the Real Powers in the Real World will bend the Internet to their world? I think they will. We will probably lose this marvelous, crazy, anarchistic freedom. But we will probably also overcome these problems as well, as in the longer run it will be corporate controlled, almost like a somewhat more interactive TV. For a lot of people, the Internet basically became Facebook. Much of what they are interested in is controlled by one corporation. And Facebook AFAIK is trying to become more media like.
I don’t think we will lose the anarchistic freedom; it’s too powerful. The internet has toppled enemy regimes; to shut down the anarchy would be to lose an incredibly potent weapon. Given that it’s a weapon that can be used without significant diplomatic issue, I’d guess the internet is a more powerful weapon than nuclear bombs at this point, and anybody who actually takes significant steps to shutting down that anarchy is at least to some extent disarming themselves. A foreign state can’t do much of anything when your citizens are fomenting revolt among their citizens. With anarchy, a state actor is indistinguishable from a citizen.
Looking at places like China, it doesn’t seem like they are disarming themselves.
They didn’t actually shut the anarchy down, they just made it mildly inconvenient.
But a hacking attempt comes from China. Does anybody -not- think it was the Chinese government?
Me.
China is big. In particular it has lots of people. Lots and lots and lots. And then some. A bunch of them are hackers for the same reason there are many hackers in Russia and Eastern Europe, for example. Some work for the government. Not all do.
In EE it tends to be connected with a certain… not openly rebellious but still anti-authoritarian attitude set, of gaming the system, getting away with bending or breaking the rules and going in the window when the door is closed. This is very similar to the Latin American https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeitinho and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malandragem although I don’t know of a specific name. I don’t know if there is anything similar in China. They look like a very disciplined type of culture… Also this thing should deserve an English name now. Perhaps System D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D
“by hook or crook”? “whatever it takes”?
True.
But if they truly shut the anarchy down—prevented VPN and proxy connections to external anarchy—would that still hold?
No, not really, because you can’t “truly shut the anarchy down”.
Consider, say, the night streets of New York City. Is there anarchy there? Certainly not. And yet there is some level of crime, you can buy drugs, you can get mugged, etc. If you get shot in the Bronx, it doesn’t mean that a government agent shot you (though sometimes that is so).
“Shutting down the anarchy” means getting it down to meatspace level.
Meatspace analogies don’t apply to bitspace. Autonomous government agents are expensive in meatspace, but have only a marginal cost in bitspace if you prohibit secure-against-government-search communications, which is easy to do once you’ve committed to creating said autonomous agents to identify anybody attempting to engage in them.
That’s a very big IF and I’m fairly optimistic that the cryptography genie will be hard to stuff back into his bottle.
Even if you try to enforce plaintext-only communications (which by itself leads to a host of issues), I can stuff a wide communication channel into the lower bits of cat videos (and such) after which we are off to the arms races and your “marginal cost of governement agents” becomes not so marginal after all.
In any case, if we get to THAT totalitarian society, we’ll have bigger things to worry about than the freedoms of the internet.
You don’t need to catch every secure communication. Even a 1% identification rate is enough; less if you’re willing to toss in some traffic analysis into the mix. Your goal, after all, isn’t to prevent secure communication, or even to identify what’s inside it, it’s to identify the people doing it, because the secure communication itself, rather than the contents of the communication, are what you’ve banned.
But I don’t think anybody -wants- this level of control. The Internet is too powerful a weapon.
That’s why people are busy constructing dark nets.
Personal opinion: less has changed than people think. The walls of Pompei have preserved graffiti on them that amounts to 4chan trolling. Political parties once published their own newspapers and newsmagazines that pushed an explicitly partisan viewpoint and served as people’s only access to information about world affairs.
Most people are fine, provided that you get them in the right circumstances and mindset. What’s amazing about the world’s problems sometimes is how you occasionally find out How Problem X Happened, and while it wasn’t a conspiracy of card-carrying villains in a smoke-filled room, it often was one person in an office who was feeling particularly malevolent or uncaring, and was able to make up rationalizations they could spout in public without actually being fired from their job.
Like racism. Maybe there’s an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.
Examples?
The war on drugs seems to have been the result of a small number of people. So far as I know, the trail of Tears was something Jackson pushed through that the rest of the country didn’t especially want.
Or maybe populations with low IQ’s are simply more prone to violence. Especially, when there’s a reluctance to punish them the same way as high IQ people for fear of being “racist”.
And then the American Irish replaced their hardware from low-IQ to high-IQ in a course of 150 years. Wait, no, looks more like a software change: http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_2_a2.html
Your link says nothing about IQ. There are many ways to stop being poor other than raising your IQ.
See the recent discussion of echo chambers in here.