Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by scc

You act as if the internet magically prevents this from happening, rather then potentially allowing it to happen whilst appearing otherwise.

I wasn't even particularly talking about the Internet; I was talking about communications media in general, saying that the same issues arise for all of them.

It also depends upon what you define as 'wrong things'. Are we talking about not pushing the party line? Or are we talking about failing to properly fact check their sources?

You can start out with a restrictive definition of "wrong things" if you like. But there will be interested parties seeking to expand the definition of "wrong things" so that whatever goes against their interests in "wrong." That was Heinlein's point, I believe.

If you want a future for the Internet, here's one idea: It used to be that saying certain things about people—for example, that they practiced sodomy, or were syphilitic—would result in their being utterly excluded from normal society, in a way that destroyed their lives; and such utterances were punishable as defamation by definition. But now we have a situation where the publication of certain assertions about people on the Internet—for example, "racist" or "sexual predator"—exposes them to viral hostility, and can end their jobs or even careers, break up their personal relationships, and even get them exposed to death threats, doxed, and so on. (See Kipling's remarks about printed news-sheets leading to mobs.) I could envision a future where concern with such threats led to draconian restrictions on online communication.

[AlexanderHowl]

The Internet is a perfect tool of disinformation. By using millions of bots, you can access every comment section or social media platform in a particular language and, through posting, you can gain a rough ideas of the algorithms that they use. When you understand the algorithm, you can control the placement of your information, allowing you to spread disinformation more efficiently. In a couple of days, you can have a lie spread through the Internet like wildfire and, through using millions of bots, you can overwhelm any individual who attempts to tell the truth. Since lies are profitable or, at the very least, useful, disinformation will always have an advantage over the truth in the Internet.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The Internet is a perfect tool of disinformation. By using millions of bots, you can access every comment section or social media platform in a particular language and, through posting, you can gain a rough ideas of the algorithms that they use. When you understand the algorithm, you can control the placement of your information, allowing you to spread disinformation more efficiently. In a couple of days, you can have a lie spread through the Internet like wildfire and, through using millions of bots, you can overwhelm any individual who attempts to tell the truth. Since lies are profitable or, at the very least, useful, disinformation will always have an advantage over the truth in the Internet.

Here is what Robert Heinlein wrote in "If This Goes On—":

They started with advertising and propaganda and things like that, and they perfected it to the point where what used to be simple, honest swindling such as any salesman might use became a mathematical science that left the ordinary man helpless.

And long before that, Socrates was warning about rhetoric and the influence of the sophists. So it seems to me that each new technology produces the sort of alarm you are expressing. For example, Heinlein's warning seems to have been inspired by psychometrically informed advertising campaigns like Paul Bernays's "torches of freedom" stunt. And yet you seem to dismiss that sort of advertising as old hat and not especially alarming.

I suggest that there are two ways to take this:

(1) Each new method of propaganda, from rhetorical trickery with words to social media, initially acts like a virgin field epidemic, infecting vast numbers of minds with no immunities, and it looks like the end of the world; but over time its virulence declines. After all, the same technology that you describe has given us the folk expressions "spam" and "phishing" and "clickbait."

(2) On the other hand, perhaps our minds are already enslaved by the older forms, and you think they're nothing to be alarmed at because you've accepted that set of "mind-forged manacles" as normal, just as nearly all Earth life has accepted the presence of toxic levels of oxygen as normal and even learned to use it as an energy source.

(I made use of the first idea in GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms, when I suggested that interworld travellers from present-day Earth might be given Resistant to Propaganda +3 as a standard trait.)

[Plane]

I can see many members of society quitting aspects of the internet so that it becomes less utilized for socializing. To have an entire society turn away from it would require banning it entirely, I think. Otherwise people would still use it for mundane things like checking research papers or the weather, even if they limited what they did on it otherwise due to mass surveillance.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Cybercrimes, ranging from digital espionage to swatting to virtual revenge porn, are crimes that would not exist without the Internet to facilitate them.

Swatting could still exist, that's just the concept of sending in a false accusation of imminent danger to the police causing them to send a SWAT team in hope that violence breaks out. That could be done via the phone, an anonymous letter, etc. The issue is more whether it is police policy to act on anonymous tips or not.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The Internet is a perfect tool of disinformation. By using millions of bots, you can access every comment section or social media platform in a particular language and, through posting, you can gain a rough ideas of the algorithms that they use. When you understand the algorithm, you can control the placement of your information, allowing you to spread disinformation more efficiently. In a couple of days, you can have a lie spread through the Internet like wildfire and, through using millions of bots, you can overwhelm any individual who attempts to tell the truth. Since lies are profitable or, at the very least, useful, disinformation will always have an advantage over the truth in the Internet.

This assumes people in general are rubes who won't catch on, rather than becoming educated about the situation and taking on a skeptical outlook about unreliable sources of information.

Also, bots can serve the truth as well, mostly by catching and countering the propaganda bots. Propagnda bots have an issue in that their messages always have greater uniformity and less variety than actual people that is apparent to textual analysis bots who can demonstrate credibility by admitting they are bots plus showing how botlike the propaganda bots' output is so people can judge for themselves.

[Anthony]

I think it might be worth clarifying what we mean by the internet. The physical internet is basically a phone system for computers; a computer on the network is like a human with a phone number, a computer on a subnet is like a human with an extension in an office building. It is technically possible to have multiple networks that don't communicate smoothly, and to some degree this already happens, but it's usually concealed (people have suggested that China might split its network entirely) and has efficiency costs; the main reason for doing it is if censorship is a more important goal than efficient communication.

However, a lot of this discussion seems to be about social media, which is just something that the internet makes possible (and is hard to prevent without extensive censorship). Social media goes through fads so it would be unsurprising to see some current stuff disappear, but the replacements will have their own flaws.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Plane

Swatting could still exist, that's just the concept of sending in a false accusation of imminent danger to the police causing them to send a SWAT team in hope that violence breaks out. That could be done via the phone, an anonymous letter, etc. The issue is more whether it is police policy to act on anonymous tips or not.

It's mostly that the internet's disintermedition makes it easy to get reliable contact information for people if you know their name, so it becomes a more frequent harassment option. This is also an area where it's possible to push back, for instance, one could use the same means to find the home addresses of LEOs and anonymously report them with selective information. "This person of interest is known to be armed at all times...they have frequent contacts with known criminals..." until it sinks in.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

However, a lot of this discussion seems to be about social media, which is just something that the internet makes possible (and is hard to prevent without extensive censorship). Social media goes through fads so it would be unsurprising to see some current stuff disappear, but the replacements will have their own flaws.

This kind of semantic blur is commonplace, though. We say "the press" and "freedom of the press" as if it meant newspapers, even though literally it means the physical technology that made newspapers possible—a technology that anyone can use, especially now that we have photocopiers and printers in every office and many residences.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

This kind of semantic blur is commonplace, though.

Sure, but when something has multiple meanings that can be confused, clarifying what meaning you intend is helpful.

[AlexanderHowl]

The Internet is the software, the physical infrastructure is the communications networks. Without the software of the Internet, the communications networks are no more dangerous than the electrical infrastructure.