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The Public Interest Internet

(berjon.com)
113 points recifs | 2 comments | 18 Jun 24 05:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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recifs ◴[18 Jun 24 05:37 UTC] No.40714372[source]▶
Allow me to open with a wildly speculative question: What if the internet were public interest technology? I mean "internet" the way most people understand it, which is to say our whole digital sphere, and by "public interest" I don't mean tinkering at the margins to reduce harm from some bad actors or painting some glossy ethics principles atop a pile of exploitative rent-seeking — I mean through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good.
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imagineerschool ◴[18 Jun 24 07:43 UTC] No.40715101[source]▶
We'd start with a group of people centered around agreement on "credible, pragmatic definition of the common good"

I'm in.

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its_ethan ◴[18 Jun 24 16:28 UTC] No.40719627[source]▶
And history has no examples of times when a group of people centered around agreement on their version of common good going poorly, right? Right??
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digging ◴[18 Jun 24 17:06 UTC] No.40719962[source]▶
Better then to just not work toward the common good?
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its_ethan ◴[18 Jun 24 17:48 UTC] No.40720341[source]▶
Better to let ideas compete and build consensus than to surrender decision making abilities that effect everyone over to some arbitrary group of people that we are just told to trust (but don't worry they have good intentions).

We don't currently have a select group of people who share a vision of "common good" making decisions for us, and yet things keep improving. So I'd advocate we stick with what we know is working, rather than the above surrendering of autonomy in exchange for the promise of some utopia..

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digging ◴[18 Jun 24 18:10 UTC] No.40720536[source]▶
Ok, I suppose we were arguing different points, but I disagree with your arguments.

> yet things keep improving

I mean, that's just obviously not true.

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its_ethan ◴[18 Jun 24 18:48 UTC] No.40720827[source]▶
I have no doubt you could find some metrics to show a recent decline in, but (on the whole) is the average human not better off in the year 2024 than they were in 1954? 1924? 1824?

I do have a feeling we're not talking about the same thing here, so could you clarify how it's "obviously not true" that things have been/are improving?

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1. digging ◴[18 Jun 24 20:22 UTC] No.40721840[source]▶
I'm referring to the internet, not the whole of human existence. That would be too complicated a subject to make any such simplistic statements on. But actually I also disagree with your premise that we don't have small corrupt groups already deciding what's "best" for everyone, WRT the internet or life as a whole. Just because they're openly motivated by greed doesn't make them less harmful. It's the cabals atop Google and Facebook which ushered in an age of absolute surveillance on a mass scale, how cool and fun.
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2. its_ethan ◴[18 Jun 24 21:42 UTC] No.40722415[source]▶
I never said anything about corruption one way or another, I said we don't have groups with an agreed upon definition of "common good" - look at basically any healthy decision-making group (government, party planning committee, whatever) and you'll find two sides with differing definitions.

I think we'd maybe both agree that Google and Facebook ushering in "absolute surveillance" probably came about from a single-minded view of "common good" within those companies - aka an example of a group of people aligned on a common good leading to things going poorly.

But it's silly to think that some other group with a different (but also single-minded) definition of common good is going to somehow fix all the problems and not cause new, potentially worse, problems. That's what I was attempting to get at with my initial comment.

Given that we weren't even really talking about the same thing from the start, and that I don't care enough to continue, I'm gonna opt out from this convo. Have a nice day though.