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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"
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.