[danielodievich]

I post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it. I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration. I don't know what it will be but I would expect some adversarial stuff. Trying to keep clean is what I'd prefer for myself and my kids.

On other hand, the Neal Stephenson's Fall or, Dodge in Hell book has an interesting idea in early phase of the book where a person agrees to what we now know "flood the zone with sh*t" (Steve Bannon's sadly very effective strategy) to battle some trolls. Instead of trying to keep clean, the intent is just to spam like crazy with anything so nobody understands the core. It is cleverly explored in the book albeit for too short of a time before moving into the virtual reality. I think there are a few people out here right now practicing this.

[DrewADesign]

> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration.

I don’t think you’re wrong, but the fact that people consider it inevitable we’ll all have an immutable social acceptance grade that includes everything from teenage shitposts to things you said after a loved one died, or getting diagnosed with cancer, makes me regret putting even a moment of my professional energies towards advancing tech in the US.

[monksy]

I think he's wrong and I'm willing to say that. The ability for people to move beyond the fundamental attribution error is well known and takes major resources to correct that. For anyone that posts a comment, assuming you want to have easy attribution later is that you must future proof your words. That is not possible and it is extremely suppressive to express yourself.

For example: "Ellen Page is fantastic in the Umbrella Academy TV show" Innocent, accurate, support, and positive in 2019.

Same comment read after 1 Dec 2020 (Transition coming out): Insensitive, demeaning, in accurate.

[Nevermark]

That we identify social media as "tech" is very strange.

Yes, they have a lot of servers. But that isn't their core innovation. Their core innovations are the constant expansion of unpermissioned surveillance, the integration of dossiers, correlating people's circumstances, behavior and psychology. And incentivizing the creation of addictive content (good, bad, and dreck) with the massive profits they obtain when they can use that as the delivery vector for intrusively "personalized" manipulation, on behest of the highest bidder, no matter how sketchy, grifty or dishonest.

Unpremissioned (or dark patterned, deceptive, surreptitious, or coercive permissioned) surveillance should be illegal. It is digital stalking. Used as leverage against us, and to manipulate us, via major systems spread across the internet.

And the fact that this funds infinite pages of addicting (as an extremely convenient substitute for boredom) content, not doing anyone or society any good, is a mental health, and society health concern.

Tech scaling up conflicts of interest, is not really tech. Its personal information warfare.

[cucumber3732842]

A huge amount of western society and the way we run institutions is based on pretending everything meets some quasi victorian moral standard and is all proper, everyone consents to and supports how everything runs and everything is fine and dandy when that is very much not the case and people put up with a lot of it because they have no better option.

In light of that what I see happening in the short term is that every institution will start screwing people based on information that basically doesn't matter since that's kind of what they're already set up to do with that information but don't except in exceptional cases since those are the cases in which that information makes it back to them.

Imagine some business owner opening a new location, some social worker renewing their license, some civil engineer creating plans on someone's behalf. All those people need to deal with institutions that in the "normal" case pretend to not have large discretionary components in order to get the public to put up with them, but do in practice have such ability. Now say those institutions pay for some LLM based "who am I dealing with" service that finds everyone's pseudonymous posts and whatnot.

Well, all of these people wind up getting given the run around because even though they do fine work that meets the rules, knowing how the sausage is made has made them jaded and given them opinions that make the institutions they have to deal with want to screw them. The business owner gets given the run around because it turns out he believes the institutions he's seeking permission from are a corrupt racket who's members ought to be hung from the overpass. The social worker gets denied because their career has turned them into a "defund it all and when faced with real consequences most of these people will shape up" type. The civil engineer's plans get rejected and he has to go around in circles because he's been posting about how in light of what corporations with good funding can get approved and the impact thereof it's unconscionable the stuff they try and enforce upon individuals and engineers ought to pencil whip anything that isn't clearly F-ed up.

And so, all these people have to waste time and probably a low five digit sum of money fighting the BS. This would be fine perhaps if these people's conduct was so egregious it made it back to the institutions on it's own (like say some doctor who's preaching quackery on youtube may get his license yanked if he amasses such a following the board hears about it, that's the kind of stuff institutional discretion was set up for) but no real good social interest is served having an LLM dig up petty dirt on everyone. However, the LLM service peddlers stand to make a buck. The institutions stand to make a buck while washing their hands of responsibility. The lawyers who'll fight on wronged parties behalf stand to make a buck. And in the process they can all pretend like society somehow benefits from this enhanced scrutiny when in fact they're just making mountains out of mole hills.

[txrx0000]

Do you want culture to be frozen and instant digital communication with anyone else in the world to become a privilege of the few? Because that's where "clean" leads. And all you get is a little bit of temporary safety.

Here's a different vision for the future:

Let information filtering become each individual's own responsibility. We have LLMs now, and they'll get more efficient, so why not use them locally to filter incoming feeds according to each of our own preferences, but remove all of the filtering/moderation for posting info out. Build systems to decentralize and anonymize the Internet so that people can discover anyone and aren't afraid to post anything. Make it so that everyone can get a message out to the world and nobody can be arrested or assassinated for it. This will put an end to most violent conflict because they'd be replaced by online discourse.

Let the Internet be flooded with trash and gold at the same time. Let each individual decide what info is/isn't valuable to them. Let those individuals self-organize. Let ideas compete freely, so that the best ones may prevail.

[tclancy]

I have lived my life on the web under the assumption the other Tom Clancy will leave enough chaff in my wake to make things hard. But probably not because I make the same 5 or 6 jokes over and over.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

>I post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it.

I do the same thing, and I think I'm a much better person for it. The Internet is not, in my final analysis, some indiscriminate dumping ground for my personal issues and moods. It's a place where I can relax and practice putting forward a more prosocial form of myself, even when what I actually have to say is uncomfortable.

While we can't predict how the adversary will read and respond to our moves, I suspect the easier marks are the people who choose to publicly drench everything they touch in negativity and cynicism. It's a sign of an already compromised social immune system.

[rudhdb773b]

I view posting online with a real name like getting a permanent tattoo.

My values or priorities may significantly change over decades, especially as a child, so why would I want to jeopardize the reputation of a potential future identity with something I may post today?

[hiAndrewQuinn]

One could just as easily make the opposite argument. Given that your values and priorities may change significantly over the decades, a smart investment now into a solid, stable, and prosocial public identity may reap considerable and wide-ranging benefits in ways you couldn't even predict. This is especially true if you take seriously the idea that it's not what you say but how you say it that matters in the end.

[ryanjshaw]

You can also argue that posting with a real name encourages you to reflect on your identity.

Or do both. Also post anonymously to see what kind of a person you are when masked, and compare.

[sponaugle]

I am similar in that all of my interactions are with my real name and it is unique enough that just putting it into google will instantly identify me. There is one other 'jeff sponaugle' but I think he is far more annoyed with my presence than I would be with him.

On the plus side, someone will sometimes say while talking to me - oh your are that Subaru guy, or that youtube guy, or whatever and that is fun connection.

[qsera]

> as clean of a footprint on the internet

The only winning move here is not to play.

[pavel_lishin]

That whole book seemed like a collection of interesting threads that ultimately go nowhere.

I honestly don't even think I understood the ending. Or the middle, if I'm being extra honest.

I think Anathem addressed the "flood the zone with shit" much better in something like three paragraphs.

[hliyan]

I've come to a similar conclusion. I now almost exclusively post under my real name online, and before writing something, I ask myself whether it's something I'd say to a person's face and whether I'm comfortable being quoted on it. If not, I look for a more neutral, stronger version of the argument I'm trying to make (stronger, as in strong enough to stand without rhetorical devices or fallacies), or, I qualify the statement as an opinion or something I consider to be a possibility.

[croes]

> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration.

You don’t know what information about you can bring you in trouble in the future.

[rapnie]

Data poisoning your own online profile is all nice and well. But in a society that goes beyond itself to cram AI into about every imaginable system, it may not be smart at all. Already in early adopter phase the average person gives way too much authoritative weight to what LLM's come up with. If complex societal processes become basically AI-driven you may get into a world of hurt. "I am sorry, we can't give you that passport right now, until we investigate potentially fraudulent behavior our AI flagged us about".

[culi]

Yes it's basically data poisoning. It reminds me of the approach the Adnauseum extension takes. It hides ads from you like traditional adblockers but under the hood it's actually selectively clicking them to fool advertisers. I don't know if it's smart enough to create a "profile" for you (e.g. "soccer mom from Michigan") but that seems like the logical next step. Instead of just "flooding the zone with shit" you'd be more selectively/consistently misleading

[47282847]

> Instead of trying to keep clean, the intent is just to spam like crazy with anything so nobody understands the core.

I don’t think this is humanly possible against machine learning. After all, it is specifically designed to weed through noisy data and identify patterns. It may delay discovery, but will at some point easily fall apart, by something as simple as a “filter out shitposting and deliberate pollution” prompt. Even more so when you guide it towards specific attributes.

[slopinthebag]

I think as the younger generations come of age they simply will not care about that sort of thing. Like it or not, it's part of the culture and might just be accepted as the norm.

[SchemaLoad]

I think it's kind of happened already. All the time we see news of politicians or famous people having their very old photos, comments, or reddit accounts found with distasteful takes. And it seems they can mostly just handwave it away with "Hey that was 10 years ago and I wouldn't make those comments today" and nothing seems to come of it.

[croes]

When the younger generation comes of age the new younger generation will have a different culture and norm what is acceptable.

People got in trouble for things they posted years ago where they didn‘t care but others did

[AlecSchueler]

They might not care about it themselves but what about their government?

[MengerSponge]

Vonnegut's Amphibians from "Unready to Wear"

[gambutin]

How would "flooding the zone" actually work in that case?

AFAIK the strategy is usually used to divert attention from one subject that could be harmful to a person to some other stuff.

Wouldn’t spamming in that case provide more information about you?

[croes]

If in one post you say you’re Jewish, in the next you are Christian, in the next your Hindu, in the next youre Atheist it’s harder to know what your really are.

You could even mislead people if you know the difference between your and you‘re.

[godelski]

While I think the strategy is effective it is also likely equivalent to the dark forest. To me that's a case of the cure being worse than the poison.

[ectospheno]

I expect more people over time to use local LLMs to write every single post they make online.

[shitloadofbooks]

At this point, where everyone is using an LLM to post and I'm having to use an LLM to keep up and summarise it, I think I'll just ...stop and go outside for quite a while...

[tlavoie]

At that point, why bother to make any posts at all?

[goatlover]

What would that accomplish? Just to keep their social credit score in the acceptable range while they go touch grass?

[pbhjpbhj]

>post they make

Will they realise their life has devolved to pretending an LLM is them and watching whilst the LLM interfaces {I was going to say 'interacts', not this fits!} with other bots.

Will they then go outside whilst 'their' bot "owns the libs" or whatever?

Hopefully at some point there is a Damascus road awakening.

[observationist]

Autonomous Proxies for Execration - spam bots whose entire purpose is flooding the internet with spam so as to make identifying anything true utterly impossible. If you can't differentiate between real and unreal information in online comments, then online comments stop being a significant factor in shaping public opinion. You need to abstract - identify reliable sources of information, individuals or institutions that do the work to collect and curate.

We're already seeing this as a side effect of the mishmash of influence operations on social media - with so many competing interests, mixed in with real trolls, outrage farmers, grifters, and the like, you literally cannot tell without extensive reputation vetting whether or not a source is legitimate. Even then, any suggestion that an account might be hacked or compromised, like a significant sudden deviation in style or tone or subject matter, you have to balance everything against a solid model of what's actually behind probably 80% or more of the "user" posts online.

There are a lot of aligned interests causing APEs to manifest - they're a mix of psyop style influence campaigns, some aimed at demoralization, others at outrage engagement, others at smears and astroturfing and even doing product placement and subtle advertisement. The net effect is chaos, so they might as well be APEs.

[KPGv2]

Fifteen years or so ago I read an article arguing that by the time Millennials are nearing retirement and have more political power, people will give less of a shit about what you did online in your twenties because we will have, out of necessity, learned that asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties.

When I was that age, you could tell the kids who had political ambitions self-censored online. But now every is buck wild so you have to ignore that when looking at people.

For example, a MASSIVE portion of Millennials and younger looking at the Main election are pretty chill about the leading Democratic candidate having a Nazi tattoo because of this very thing. Basically, "dumb, drunk, deployed Marines will get cool skull and crossbones tattoos in their early twenties, and so what if he said a couple ill-worded somewhat misogynistic things in his twenties, that was decades ago, and he's obviously a different person."

Contrast with Bill Clinton, where he literally had to explain away university marijuana usage TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE FACT.

Point is, I think we're witnessing this evolution happening right now.

[AtlasBarfed]

This isn't the dystopia we're worried about.

The dystopia we're worried about is a 1984 on steroids with llms and real 24/7 worldwide monitoring by the state.

Getting caught doing embarrassing things by teenage social standards doesn't threaten your life.

A competent version of Donald Trump could have walked into the office and we would have been worse than the third Reich.

Still could be today right now. The capability is TurnKey right now at the US government.

This is open research being discussed here. Palantir already has all of this and probably 10 times more.

[oska]

> asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties

Do people believe this? I certainly don't. How you behaved in your twenties is a good measure of the sort of person you are and will be for the rest of your life, albeit that you will (hopefully) mature and change some of your opinions and behaviours. So yes, you will have changed but you're also still that person you were in your twenties.