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Tim Berners-Lee Says World Wide Web Must Emerge From 'Adolescence' (venturebeat.com)
The fraying World Wide Web needs to rediscover its strengths and grow into maturity, its designer Tim Berners-Lee said on Monday, marking the 30th anniversary of the collaborative software project his supervisor initially dubbed "vague but exciting." From a report: Speaking to reporters at CERN, the physics research center outside Geneva where he invented the web, Berners-Lee said users of the web had found it "not so pretty" recently. "They are all stepping back, suddenly horrified after the Trump and Brexit elections, realizing that this web thing that they thought was that cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well," he said. "It seems we don't finish reeling from one privacy disaster before moving onto the next one," he added, citing concerns about whether social networks were supporting democracy. People who had grown up taking the internet's neutrality for granted now found that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump had "rolled that back."
needs to do it first....
If there's something particularly chilling, technologists thinking their task is to "solve" politics is pretty high on the list. (Among politicians and politically motivated public commentators the parallel approach is to claim their political stance is pure scientific truth without a whiff of political stance.) My personal take on such approaches is that the cure may be more dangerous than the problem that has been framed to be the problem.
Politics is politics. There are no solutions that turn it into something else. Or at least solutions that would really fix it, but there are plenty of "solutions" which break things that actually work as a side effect, while mostly replacing the problem with another, trendier problem...
voted for the politics they wanted and for the UK to exit the EU.
Humanity enjoys the freedom to vote.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I think we prefer having adolescent humor.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
If only there was something Tim Berners-Lee could do about privacy vulnerabilities being included into web standards...
Tim Berners-Lee: World Wide Web, you must emerge from adolescence ...
WWW: I didn't ask to be born!
Tim Berners-Lee:
WWW: You're not my real parent anyways!
The man who gave us a closed-source DRM blob in our browsers.
Power brokers and the "learned scholars" seem to always think the system is broken when normal people get more information and then don't bend to their will. Maybe the solution you envision from your ivory tower surrounded by your walled gardens isn't the world we want to live in.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Berners-Lee is so fully disconnected from reality now that he's no longer credible. He talks about the Web "saving humanity", yet he has personally participated in crafting standards for it that serve corporate interests rather than the rest of us. Under his "guidance", the Web has transitioned from a network where people participated in its development and had control over how they consumed it to one where they no longer participate, have no control, and have become passive consumers. Corporate Web developers now view their target "useless eater" audiences with the same disregard as eugenicists of the last century.
He's lamenting his own utter failure to guide his own creation in the way that he claims he really wanted it to progress, while doing the precise opposite? What a bloody hypocrite.
TBL is not the old man yelling at the cloud. He's a highly intelligent person who cannot believe, with all this internet-provided freedom of information, people still make such ignorant decisions. Common failure of the reasonably well educated.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Berners-Lee is clearly an optimist but his great power is in starting the web, he only has the slightest influence after it exploded out of control so it is not fair to say he has guided us to where we ended up today. He's not responsible for human nature and our culturally ingrained evils; he can go around saying don't use my invention for evil/weapons etc like most every scientist throughout history. He can wish he never gave us the ideas but somebody would have eventually done something similar. Since humans stopped evolving, when doesn't matter -- humanity will never get past our adolescence!
The 80/20 seems to apply to a great many things. Benefits of technology seem to fit 80/20 in that 80% of it is bad and 20% of it is good; in the end. The majority of people have the optimist bias gene which at this point exists in statistics until we find the gene. Tech people have an emotional bias to be optimistic about tech. Like a handyman always buying a new tool. (The master carpenter having matured to realize 80% of the tools are not beneficial haul around.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The human nature to do stupid things always is ingenious in finding new ways to fuck up. You just can't stop it, if you baby people too much some authoritarian takes over and makes a bigger mess of it (it only works if the "parents" are super human... I wish for an A.I. take over in the distant future.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Well fuck him. He sold out the www to the Disney crowd.
I am neither stupid nor ignorant and I consider Trump and Brexit to be positive developments. The idea that somehow Russia tricked voters into these choices is wilfully stupid. You are placing the blame for your disappointment nowhere near the true cause: your own narcissistic delusions of how the world should be and your rightful place in forcing your will on others who disagree with you.
Listen, these elections are what you get instead of violent revolution.
This is entirely the point of democracy, and it mostly worked. In Roman times, an ambitious guy like Trump would have tried to raise an army.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
He doesn't control the standards; if the W3C took a position against industry they'd just make their own "standards" and either claim to be a standard by monopoly or lousy published specs which they wholly control for their own unfair advantage (MS.)
WHERE ARE THE DISCUSSIONS ON MOB BEHAVIOR? All the worst social human nature is being amplified by social media. Virtual lynch mobs are terrorizing people to the point where we are changing our behaviors lest they come at us.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Obviously I meant the common ones that all children get in most developed nations. Trying to force people to define every word they use and always assuming the worst, most ridiculous interpretation is just a stifling tactic.
I'm happy to have a discussion about vaccines, but only if you behave like a grown up and make some minimal good faith effort to understand what I'm saying.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's neo-feudalism. That's what the wealthy globalist elite seem themselves as; a small group of people with a god-given birthright to educate the plebs as to who really should be in control. In addition, that "freedom" and "democracy" is just a tempest in a teapot, but the teapot you shall remain.
Yeah, well, a whole fuck-load of people just got "woke" and realized there's a whole universe outside that teapot!
Life is not for the lazy.
da, come get new rant sheet from Boris
What ignorant decisions?
The economy is growing faster than Obama and Paul Krugman (NOBEL PRIZE WINNING ECONOMIST!!!!!) said was possible 2 years ago. The Korean War, which lasted 70 years, is officially over and the dictator of North Korea is talking with the President of the US. Again, something that supposedly wasn't possible just a couple of years ago. Amazing that Nobel Peace Price winner Barack Obama wasn't able to do that.
Yes, TBL is "old man yells at cloud". It's sad, because he's a smart man. The idea that electing Trump was a disaster because he personally doesn't like it, or that Brexit is a disaster because he personally doesn't like it, just doesn't cut it. He's simply part of the authoritarian left who want to force their will on everybody because they think they're smarter than anybody else.
Do you have ESP?
It's almost as if their core beliefs don't include the welfare of their governed citizens.
There's no "almost" about it, they DON'T. In fact, the global elite honestly thing in order to maintain their standard of living, the vast majority of humanity needs to be purged and replaced with AI/Robotics. The human disconnect is so vast, it won't end well for anyone truth be told.
Life is not for the lazy.
Democracy needs an informed population to work.
That is correct, and in why only in recent years has it really started to work.
People trying to subvert democracy often attack it by misinforming the population
Indeed that has been happening for a few decades now by a central core of media that withhold and shape information.
in the last few years by convincing people that everything is fake and a lie
And how did they do that? By in fact showing people directly, what were fakes and lies.
simply choosing their own preferred truth is a valid choice.
That's the thing though. Now anyone can really get the whole picture. They can see the actual video of what people did, and judge them on that instead of what the media claims they said or did.
People complain that Trump voters ignore the "Truth" that Trump is whatever - racist, homophobic, etc. The reason Trump never has much impact from those claims, is because for the first time you can really see the falseness of them - you can see how Trump behaves now and in the past around women, around people of color, even around supporting gay marriage.
Trump is unique compared to a lot of current politicians in that there is a lot of prior video of him and so people already had a sense of him before the media started trying to craft an alternative image.
But going forward, more and more politicians will have the same thing apply - people will judge them based on what they have actually said and done instead of what the media claims about them. You can even see that with newer politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - she gets a lot of flak from the right, but you can watch a lot of video from her that is fairly reasonable, so the calls that she is crazy do not really stick.
She has some ideas about socialism that I and others find wrong, but you can actually go see what she says and judger her based on that instead of by what others sat about her. So how is any of that a "lie"? People can be better informed now that at any point in history - the real problem is that the professional political class by and large suck giant donkey balls, and now that is easy for anyone to see. In the end that is not a "problem" at all, that is a solution and the world is undergoing a correction based on this new fact...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You'll have to enlighten me. How has the EU been punishing the UK? From where I stand it looks more like a whiny cunt trying to leave the club whilst stilling having access to the equipment and the cheap members bar.
If the EU wanted to make it hard they would just say 'you're out, you get nothing, all treaties are void, goodbye'.
The trouble with Brexit is that no-one who supports it actually has a realistic plan or even an inkling of what's involved. Not that that stops them moaning about how everyone's against them (I wonder why)
We need a new internet because there were some election results he didn't like? Seriously?
This feels like the classic case of a technologist so enamored with his vision for how his creation would be used that when people don't use it as intended, he can't understand why. While I'm not one of those people who believe in the liberal arts mantra of having them involved in technological development, there is a case to be made that it helps to get a different perspective on how technology might ACTUALLY be used versus their creators' utopian vision. After all, technology rarely changes human nature, it simply amplifies it, a force multiplier. So when you create a powerful technology, why is it a surprise that people will do whatever they can to make money on it / get stuff for free, hunt for porn, politically mobilize which includes propaganda and spin, and then ultimately, draw the attention from and be regulated by the dudes with guns?
Because tech is all about making the world a better place, right? Not about competitive, amoral, unbridled, unregulated, unfettered money making, whatever it takes at all, right?
So Berners-Lee thinks that tech can solve political problems, as opposed to sustaining & augmenting them & making money out of it?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
The internet/web is a mirror of humanity. No matter what kind of control system you try to impose on it, human nature will be reflected and sometimes magnified by the tools we use. The Web, and the social media system that grows on it, are a great example of the fun-house mirror result you get when people's thought processes and discrimination ability lag behind technology. I first wrote about this in 1999, as the net.sheep effect. People have been conditioned by 100s of years of text-as-truth to trust anything they READ (because putting things down in writing was once an epic effort, requiring not only a great deal of money, but also the expectation that the quality of the words would be worthy of the effort to put them down and publish them). It's only when a small portion of the user base begins to leverage that habit, that the abuse of being able to reach the entire planet with a rumor begins to become clear... not because gossip is new, but because making gossip seem not only true, but authoritative (by virtue of being written/published/repeated by thousands of sites) is. The only way to address that with technology is by bringing back the one thing that makes a modern society civil : Personal Accountability. Virtual Reputation needs to not only be a 'thing', but a 'thing' that has consequences. Facebook has been a little slow on this, because they recognize their site is a huge rumor mill... if they start squashing rumors, what will that do to their numbers? All in all, the answer to this issue is the same as it was when the printing press was invented, when radio came out, when TV came out: People who are going to report/spread information have to be held accountable for the accuracy of that information as well as the damage they create by doing rumors instead of facts.
Nice how you slipped that "impeach Trump for nothing" bit in there. Obstruction of justice isn't nothing. Neither are illegal campaign contributions to shut up former lovers. If it were nothing, why all the lying and obstruction - which, basically, is what led to the Mueller investigation in the first place. The FBI was investigating Russian interference (which happened, and needed to be ferreted out) - having nothing to do with impeachment (unless, of course, they were in cahoots with the campaign). But Trump fired Comey, specifically (if his own statements can be believed - but then, isn't that kind of the point) to shut down that investigation, which rang all the obstruction alarm bells.
Now it's quite possible that all of the obstruction and lying were merely Trump's attempts to preserve his pretenses of having won in a huge landslide, that he's a self-made billionaire, that he knows anything about anything... I'll grant you that. His narcissism and lying are that basic to his personality - and his actions may well have had nothing to do with attempts to cover up a Russia connection. But faced with all kinds of incriminating facts, should the DOJ just do nothing - because you say it's nothing? Clinton was impeached (wrongly, of course) for a consensual blowjob or two, and Trump's blown past that 'standard' a hundred times over...
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Tim Berners-Lee simply laments the balkanization of the Web community, the creation of walled gardens, and the death of net neutrality. Who can blame him? It is the open standards and open borders that have given us the World Wide Web as we know it today. I shudder at the idea of an alternate timeline where the only sites I could reach are the ones are on whatever network I've sworn allegiance to, be it AOL or CompuServe.
Nice how you slipped some DNC talking point bullshit in there.
"Obstruction of justice isn't nothing." -> yes it is when there is no evidence of it at all, besides the firing of an FBI director who has been revealed to have gone way way outside his role and excepted norms for a law man over and over again.
"Neither are illegal campaign contributions to shut up former lovers" -> Yeah its just terrible that someone would use his own money to keep a mistress quite to avoid embarassing his family further. Oh yeah when John Edwards did it; that was fine. Face it was not campaign contribution you can't prove that it was without reading Trumps mind; I can prove Cohen has a history of lying and is not reliable whiteness. Wake me up when you look at Cortez's relationship with her PAC and her boyfriends companies, or Warren's fundraising with 1/8th the level of scrutiny. Right you wont because you know they illegally converted other peoples money and ethically you know that is much worse.
"The FBI was investigating Russian interference (which happened, and needed to be ferreted out)" -> No the FBI was running political hit job based on BS shopped around to anyone who would listen by Clinton campaign operatives. If anything needs investigating its that! That is an actual threat to democracy, as opposed to few tens of thousands of dollars in Russian facebook ad buys.
"Clinton was impeached (wrongly, of course) for a consensual blowjob" -> No Clinton was impeached for lying under oath. Sure the investigation that lead to that was a bit of farce, but no more so than the farcical partisan investigations into Trump. Briging up Clinton's impeachment is whataboutism at its worst. The only thing it proves is Trumps people are smarted than good'ole boy Bill and know enough to keep at least POTUS out of perjury trap.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I don't want to blow up the system. I want to save the system by stopping a foreign invasion of people who don't share American values and are at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to the people living here. I think the people trying to flood the country with foreigners are the ones trying to "blow up the system."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
There's been a continuous stream of "fuck you" proposals from the EU.
From here it looks mostly like the Irish border is the only real gamestopper. The EU has a duty to the Republic of Ireland, who is a member, and wants to stay that way. They have no duty whatsoever to Britain, who really no longer matters at all.
Really quite shocking nobody apparently thought of this before.
The end result will almost certainly be a "no deal" Brexit. Everyone agrees that's the worst possible situation
The worst for Britain, but why should the EU care about that? Some people in the EU will be hurt to be sure, but they are also gaining all those jobs and capital that are fleeing the UK in droves.
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
The UK has never had any winning cards in their hand. Completely amazing if anyone thought they did.
You don't think rich people were able to get out of military service in Roman times?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Whether it's obstruction of justice or not is what Mueller is tasked to determine. When Nixon did it, it was. Trump could've fired Comey with his phony excuse about the Clinton email investigation, but then he went on TV and basically said he did it to end the Russia investigation. How is that not obstruction of justice. Even if the Russia investigation had turned up nothing (though it has turned up much more than nothing), that doesn't mean that serious allegations of foreign election meddling don't demand investigation. And shutting down that investigation to shield yourself is pretty much the definition of obstruction of justice.
Edwards may or may not have paid off his mistress as a campaign expense, but whether or not he did so (and whether or not he was found to have done so), doesn't mean it can't be a campaign expense. That says nothing about what Trump, Cohen and AMI did. And attempting to prevent us from finding out exactly what they did is also obstruction of justice. And if you think it's not a serious offense, well, you don't get to make that call. There's a law, passed by Congress and as far as I know, still in effect that says you can't do it.
Crimes are crimes. I'm not convinced he should be impeached for them, but I'm certainly not delusional in thinking he may have committed them. There's an investigation to find out. You seem not to want to know - and call me delusional for wanting to know. Neither of us knows for sure. But yes, I do know that the man lies constantly, and yes, I think that makes him a pitiful excuse for a human being. Not necessarily a criminal, but more likely than average, shall we say...
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The reaction of people to Trump describing a situation they will never encounter always amuses me, because most people would act with hardly more honor in similar situations.
So you are saying most if not all rich or famous men have no respect for women?
I think you are wrong, but I'm happy to see the Me Too movement dealing with at least some of them.
we have countless women working for Trump before he was ever president, and working with him now - along with having daughters
Sure, rampant nepotism surely demonstrates his underlying respect.
That's the real problem with society and especially with liberals today, they cannot separate sex from ability. It's why they also shamefully attack sex workers and slut shame women left and right with the slightest pretext...
Right, it's liberals who have all the hangups about sex. The right are all about women's rights and free love. ROFLMAO.
You truly do live in a alternate universe,
people who don't share American values
Welcoming immigrants is an American value.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
They have no duty whatsoever to Britain
Actually they do. They also have a strong interest in an orderly exit with ongoing funding of prior commitments.
Unfortunately the UK parliament are doing their best to overthrow democracy.
the UK doesn't want to be in the custom union and it doesn't want an open border, but it wants to preserve the Ireland/Northern Ireland open border
You've used the same term ('open border') to describe two very different things there.
Then the UK wants to preserve its trade relationship with the EU, but doesn't want to follow EU regulations. Which means trade treaties, which takes years normally for any country to do.
The trade agreement talks are already in planning.
you don't need some cabal to explain why Brexit negotiations are going badly
No, it's because the Government are fucking incompetent and/or maliciously sabotaging the process.
Brexit is going badly because leaving the EU means leaving the EU, and the UK voted to leave the EU, but doesn't want to lose all of the benefits.
That isn't why Brexit is going badly, it's merely a negotiating start point. This is not unexpected and is not a barrier to successful outcomes from those negotiations.
The barriers are elsewhere.
As long as anonymity is a staple of the Internet, it will never 'grow up' or mature.
It's that very anonymity that encourages people to be on their worst behavior because there's absolutely no consequences to that behavior.
As much as I love the anonymity afforded to internet users, I can freely admit, it's a root cause of a lot of the trouble we're having.
It probably needs to go away. Humans have shown they can't behave in a responsible civil manner with anonymity on the table.
"Obstruction of justice isn't nothing." -> yes it is when there is no evidence of it at all, besides the firing of an FBI director who has been revealed to have gone way way outside his role and excepted norms for a law man over and over again.
And perhaps that'd have been excuse enough - except for the fact that he admitted to having done it because of the Russia investigation - on TV and to the Russian ambassador. I.e., Comey isn't the only witness.
Paying to shut up your mistress may not be a campaign contribution, but getting a third party (the National Enquirer) to do it - in order to disguise the source of your payment may well be. That's under investigation. You may think it'd have been okay to just pay them off, but even so, he didn't do that. He conspired to hide it - and got others to help him (and in the case of the Enquirer, that was only the tip of the iceberg of their lying to promote his campaign).
I believe all your FBI 'hit job' conspiracies have been debunked - along with the pizzeria child prostitution ring conspiracy and the rest. But, sure, keep repeating them. Oh, there is still the bit about Popadopolis bragging about stuff he wouldn't have known about according to the conspiracy timeline...
I didn't bring up Clinton to say, "because Clinton was impeached for less, Trump should be impeached". I was bringing him up because, yes, he was impeached for crimes committed in covering up non-crimes. Just like Trump may well be... It's cute that you think it's smart for Trump's lawyers to keep him from testifying to prevent his committing perjury - but what they really said is that he can't help but commit perjury, because he's lied on so many occasions that whichever answer would have to amount to perjury, if only because it conflicted with 5 other different answers he's already given to the same questions. But that doesn't concern you one bit. I wonder why... You seem to like the guy, but why do you not get that much of what you liked about him was a lie too?
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They have no duty whatsoever to Britain
Actually they do.
Only in the Brexiters imagination. All they owe you is your right to take your ball and go home.
You couldn't be pressed into a legion. Those were really good jobs! You actually had to be able to buy a bunch of military hardware to qualify, and you had to be from a family that was rich enough that they'd trust you to be able to resupply yourself.
If you were pressed into the military, you'd be light infantry, and would not even be mentioned in most of the accounts of battle. You would be provided with a sling or light javelins, and you would generally go up against light cavalry trying to flank the heavy infantry.
Back then all it took a rich person to avoid military service was to avoid bribing anybody to get a slot!
Things were a bit different back then. The Romans were a warlike people, like most people were. The idea that the rich avoid having to fight in the wars is very, very recent. In the old days, people fought in wars hoping to become rich! It was one of the very few ways to advance yourself in society. And the rich fought in wars to gain fame and increase their position.
You can't have a no-deal Brexit, it violates the peace treaty in Ireland.
The backstop is already required under UK law, because they have Treaty obligations that prevent a hard border inside Ireland, and they also have obligations to themselves to enforce some sort of customs regime.
Voting on Brexit without having a solution for that was fucking idiotic in the extreme. It was a farce of a vote, and was only an opinion poll anyways, not a binding resolution.
What sort of idiot country would put an issue that big, with that big of an (entirely negative) economic impact, up to a public vote that only needs 50%+1?! That's totally insane. A more rational idea would be to do something that extreme if you got over 2/3 of the vote.
If you can change the legal basis of your sovereignty with 50%+1, your country is destined to be a backwater, because crazy fads are a thing that easily can touch 50%+1 of the people. But at that point, other feedback loops kick in, and it is really hard to get over 60% on just a fad. If the UK had been putting their past decisions of this magnitude up to that sort of vote, there wouldn't even be a UK!
Wait, wait, wait, you're saying their stiff upper lips don't grant them Exceptionalism in the eyes of other Europeans?! Shocker.
But, but, but, they had Churchill! And Queen Elizabeth!
The internet was made by millions of people working in collaborative and adversarial manners. Stop trying to raise up some pope-of-the-internet to give decrees and kindly fuck yourselves (or unkindly.)
The C in W3C suggests that they already are industry, not some sort of regulator of industry.
Pedophiles are no more prevalent in the gay community that the straight one. And I doubt conservatives are underrepresented either, just throw some clergy in there.
Wait, wait, wait, you're saying their stiff upper lips don't grant them Exceptionalism in the eyes of other Europeans?! Shocker.
But, but, but, they had Churchill! And Queen Elizabeth!
I've been listening to the Queen a lot since I saw Bohemian Rhapsody.
Oh, wait...
What the fuck is with peoples' inability to tell the truth about the EU and the people that voted to leave it.
Let me quote Article fucking 50 itself:
"the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union"
So yes, the EU have a fucking obligation to negotiate and conclude a fucking agreement.
Now will you kindly fuck off and stop spreading your ignorance across the internet.
Let me quote Article fucking 50 itself:
"the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union"
Sorry, what in that line suggests they have to guarantee you something you like?
It's not in any way been an amicable process with the intent to make things as painless as possible.
LOL. Fucking duh.
Anyone who told you it would be, they were lying. Alternative facts perhaps.
When freedom of the press was limited to those who could afford a press, the conversation was limited to professional journalists and those who would go to the trouble of writing a letter to the editor. I used to have to read those letters, clean up the grammar, spelling, and punctuation, call the letter writer (phone number was required for publication) to verify they had indeed written the letter and make sure I understood what they were trying to say.
In addition to the fact that most people who could hold a job could read and write decent English (in the U.S.), there was a certain amount of effort required to write a letter to the editor--by the letter writer and those who handled the letter if it was approved for publication.
I met a fellow once, he lived in an old school bus and one of his primary pastimes was to write letters to the editors of several newspapers in our state. I would consider him something of a crank, but he also had a lot of time to read and research and think about the issues he wrote about. My opinion is that he made a much more valuable contribution to the discussions he participated in than a lot of the slapdash crap I see flung here and there around the Web. Hell, my own efforts fall pretty short at times.
My point is, you get what you pay for.
I'm not saying that there aren't lies all over the web, but as far as Brexit is concerned, I can point to all sorts of lies that newspapers have been printing, lies that take 10 seconds on Google to refute.
I think the web is far healthier today than it's ever been because the gatekeepers are getting destroyed. Remember when you went to see a movie because of a particular actor? You don't do that today. It's killed movie stars as a mark of quality. Movies can be massive or dead within hours of release as people post a thumbs up or down on Twitter. Films have improved as a result. You can't just hire stars, put them on sofas and get an audience for a month.
Bullshit articles are wiped out by counter articles from bloggers within hours. Careers of grifter journalists who know nothing are being destroyed, and this is a very good thing.
I am neither stupid nor ignorant and I consider Trump and Brexit to be positive developments.
Stupid is believing Brexit is a positive development when it hasn't even happened yet. Ignorant is believing Trump is a positive development when there is evidence to the contrary every day.
What sort of idiot country would put an issue that big, with that big of an (entirely negative) economic impact, up to a public vote that only needs 50%+1?! That's totally insane. A more rational idea would be to do something that extreme if you got over 2/3 of the vote.
This is exactly the scale of an 'alternative history' concept that I would expect to show up as a comic book limited-series premise. Like Kal-el landing in Nazi Germany, or the South winning the civil war and/or seceding -- not something you'd expect to see in real life.