[anateus]

There are a lot of interesting societal effects caused by the internet and social media, many of them very problematic. But when was this time in the past when people agreed about facts? Is it during the period of time when we lionized science after WWII and before the 80s but during which smoking was still healthy? Or was it when the Church decided what was true? Or was it when Hearst could print what he wanted and make it so? We have been in the Miasma since the dawn of civilization.

Neal Stephenson had a hand in sparking my interest in cuneiform and I've read many tablets myself (mostly Ugaritic and some Akkadian). The same effects are evident all the way to the beginning of recorded history, and likely predate it. The Miasma is the result of any indirect epistemology combined with human proclivities. There is a certain scale and swiftness that is novel, but it's not yet a brand new thing: much as flash crashes on the stock market are a new side-effect of high frequency trading, the crash of 1929 happened just fine without it.

The Miasma is us, not the tech we use to connect us.

[coldtea]

>But when was this time in the past when people agreed about facts? Is it during the period of time when we lionized science after WWII and before the 80s but during which smoking was still healthy? Or was it when the Church decided what was true? Or was it when Hearst could print what he wanted and make it so? We have been in the Miasma since the dawn of civilization.

I see this fallacy quite often. Just because we had something in the past doesn't mean we e.g. don't have it 10x now.

It's like arguing that nuclear weapons are nothing special, we had spears and arrows since forever...

Scale matters, degree matters, automation matters, and technology is a multiplier. At some point amassed quantity becomes a new quality.

A government could have someone followed for example in the past, for example.

That was true even in ancient Rome. But 24/7 tracking of everybody, everywhere, made possible with mobile phones, GPS, facial recognition, plate recognition, and so on, is a totally new ballgame, not even available to the Stazi or KGB. A dictatorship with those tools at hands can do much more damage than one that just can tap into few phone calls with manual labor, or have someone followed. We can't dismiss it as "governments could always track someone if they wanted it".

Similarly, we can't dismiss the effect of the internet, because we had yellow press and smoked...

[blub]

Fortunately we have a real-world example to demonstrate the effect of technology on surveillance: China. Let's see if they ever manage to become a democracy.

On this topic I've noticed something quaint on HN: people making excuses for China's "special" situation or even arguing against democracy itself.

[zamfi]

Thank you. There were tabloids and conspiracy theories and alternative facts long before Facebook's newsfeed.

But: there is the question of whether the tech somehow amplifies it, makes it worse in a way that we are somehow less equipped to handle.

[drewcoo]

Are humans capable of detecting and understanding what that amplification means? Even though our pattern-matching is a wonderful skill, it doesn't always serve us well. We exaggerate local effects. We are known to be terrible at understanding risk. And I've even heard that nine out of ten dentists are bad at statistics.

I'm not saying we shouldn't ask the question. I'm saying we need a way to answer it that factors out human perceptual error.

[dr_dshiv]

There is the sense that we are losing control. Of course, we never had it.

[NeedMoreTea]

> before the 80s but during which smoking was still healthy

That's perhaps US-specific but it's certainly a strange view. Europe was issuing anti-tobacco advice and government health warnings in the fifties. The rise in lung cancers was noted pretty much immediately after the war. The US was late to that party, but even so was clear on the link between smoking and health in the sixties. We had anti-smoking and lessons on the effects of tobacco in UK schools in the 1960s, perhaps earlier. I sat through them in the 1970s - they weren't especially effective, but they were there.

That's despite all the free tobacco sent under the Marshall Plan to ensure Europe was good and addicted to Virginia leaf.

> Or was it when the Church decided what was true?

So what, the middle ages? Or the Victorian resurgence?

[pjc50]

> any indirect epistemology combined with human proclivities.

This sounds interesting, could you expand this please? It sounds a bit like Plato's cave.

[goto11]

Thank you for saying that. There have always been lies, propaganda, myths, sensationalism, urban legends and plain ignorance.

The internet does have an effect that non-mainstream narratives can easier spread, for better or worse.