Slashdot Mirror
Internet Is Having a Midlife Crisis (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The rise of cyber-bullying and monopolistic business practices has damaged trust in the internet, pioneering entrepreneur Baroness Lane-Fox has told the BBC. The Lastminute.com founder also called for a "shared set of principles" to make the web happier and safer. She said the internet had done much good over the last 30 years. But she said too many people had missed out on the benefits and it was time to "take a step back". "The web has become embedded in our lives over the last three decades but I think it's reached an inflexion point, or a sort of midlife crisis," she told Radio 4's Today programme. Baroness Lane-Fox co-founded travel booking site Lastminute.com in 1998 before going on to sell the firm for 577m pound seven years later. She described the early days of the internet as being "full of energy and excitement," and akin to the "wild West". "There was this feeling that suddenly, with this access to this new technology, you could start a business from anywhere," she said. However, she said that while technology had become a hugely important sector of the UK economy, it had not fulfilled its early potential.
pioneering entrepreneur Baroness Lane-Fox
Who?
The Lastminute.com founder
What?
You have not established who the fuck this person is, what they fuck they've done, or why the fuck I should care.
I'm going to assume it's some egotistical rich busybody that has achieved nothing of significance by their own hand and is looking for some more ego stroking.
Western civ is not crumbling. The failures who you mention being unable to cope are a tiny minority. Albeit very loud but still tiny. They have no idea how they've destroyed their own causes recently.
The internet has become too corporatized, monetized, and regulated! The internet is nothing more than a tool for corporations to reach their customer bases. It's lost the glamour of innovation and fun. The internet used to be far more open and the barriers to entry far less. Now that big telecom got its ugly mitts on it, you have to pay a minimum of 50.00 a month for a connection. Certainly it is at a higher speed and with today's technologies you need more speed but prices are still high enough to block out access for the poor. The poor need to visit a library with big brother Librarian and Government watching their every move. It is time to fork the internet into a community maintained network to take it out of the hands of regulation and corporate interests.
It's not just that people are unable to cope. It's also their apparent inability to disengage from a conversation they find hurtful or upsetting. If a person gets into a flame war and just keeps going, maybe they should just... stop? I dunno, maybe that's a coping mechanism in itself. If a Facebook chat made me want to actually hang myself, I'd probably stop using Facebook. But a lot of people, especially young people, don't seem to have that.
Younger people interact more online than in person today, even when they're sitting in the same room with each other. They still have the same peer pressures to conform and belong, and on various web sites and apps they can get a quantified measure of how well they do so. They go on sites like Reddit and post stuff, much of it not original thought but memes (not just of the graphical variety, but also textual memes like Slashdot's old Natalie Portman/hot grits bit), and they are desperate for people to upvote so they feel like they're part of the club. They may delete a post if it's not popular enough. And, of course, some young people's cliques have always rewarded them for being cruel to people, so that continues.
It's not just younger people. Middle-aged people do it, too, going on Facebook with "1 like=1 prayer" and posts that virtue signal to whatever group they belong. But it's all just people speaking into the echo chamber they've chosen and hoping they've posted at the right moment for their groupthink to be validated by repetition and points from the rest.
With various points systems, we've gamified social status, and people are biologically wired to like to win games. Even on Slashdot, many years ago, we had visible numeric karma scores, and people got into stupid e-penis contests to see who could get a higher number. It wasn't so much fun when karma turned into classified ranges, and people stopped. We're not at the point depicted in that episode of Black Mirror yet, but we can see the seeds of it.
It's a social problem, partly caused by the fact that we have this new technology for social interaction without many generations of behavioral norms, partly caused by the fact that anonymity and distance seems to encourage people to be shittier and more confrontational to each other. Likely with many other causes. But the solution almost certainly isn't a technological or legal one.
Those on the political right have consistently shown that they support free expression for all.
As long as they're "Christian" and not leftist.
And which party's president is busy trying to discredit and stifle the free press at the moment? Hmmm.
Since the moment it becomes illegal to say certain things. Not only is your opponent wrong when he says it, he should be prosecuted for saying it. That's when.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.