Spent a bit of time this morning reading about the state of online content moderation. First I read the executive summary of the UK's Online Harms white paper, which contained very little in it aside from a tacit framework of viewing the Internet as a series of companies. Appropriately, I next looked at an interview with Trust team employees from various social media companies and platforms. These people were the companies the UK framework planned to entrust with content moderation. They seemed to be more confident in their ability to do the work, and the processes they had developed to do it, than they were the last time I checked in on this issue.
The thought I want to record is this: I think it kind of sucks that we had to end up recreating society online, but it makes sense.
Look, I'm a big believer in this Chesterton's fence-type idea of, if something exists in a certain way, and has long existed this way, you can't just chalk its presence up to the lack of imagination or the predatory motives of its managers. You need to ask yourself why those managers are allowed to be there in the first place. Exploitation and greed and arranging systems for disproportionate benefit is as old as the human imagination, and the instinct for seeking fairness and being indignant predates that. So if you have a Pharaoh, or a restrictive government, or an economic system that sends capital to the top, you can't decry it without looking at why its order was achieved. What is it sustaining, and are you so sure that's not something the general society wanted?
To take the Pharaoh example: I fully buy the idea that claiming the divinity of the ruler was more convincing to those people, yet to emerge out of the primordial epistemological soup, than some messy process of democratic decision making. We as a species have been growing into—earning—progressive levels of rationality, and those people just weren't ready. So a freedom fighter could not really succeed if they rode into the Old Kingdom and tried to eliminate the Pharaoh.
Right now we're experiencing something similar in cryptocurrency. This new type of money was supposed to unleash a radically new economy based on decentralization. Imagine! We're going to replace all the power brokers that have enriched themselves on our debt with a totally democratized financial ecosystem. Turns out no one wants that. Turns out the Day 2 problem of this is as predictable as the regulators said it was; that people are very willing to trade liberty for security, especially in monetary matters, where the risk of being victimized is far more real than the potential of benefiting from a free-for-all. In designing a monetary system, you want security above all else (which goes for volatility as well) and you want efficiency. I still think Bitcoin and maybe some other cryptos have a future, but it will be after centralized institutions take a decisive role in most users' experience of it. Like those primordial Egyptians, we're just not ready to make use of total monetary freedom yet.
In terms of online thought, I was naive. I used to hope that we would be able to sustain this split between this one sphere of existence—real society—occupied by our bodies and our paychecks and our governments, and the online sphere of existence, which would inform our tangible reality by basically presenting to us our id.
The internet is our id, of course, and my initial belief was that it was a good thing we could see it. Finally, after so much effort spent trying to understand the contours of humanity, here's a mirror. Pretty ugly, huh. But also full of amazing works of ingenuity that are so human, they rival the pyramids or the exploration of Polynesia or any other achievement you want to cite. Wikipedia, the open-source protocols of the internet, all of it is beautiful. And it made me hope that humans could handle an explosion of auto-generated thought.
As it turns out, that possibility died about ten years into the experiment. We are now committed fully to recreating society online, complete with its focus on private economic actors (companies) doing the heavy lifting, its need for policing, its transposition of the same sensibilities and sensitivities we enforce in the real world—many of which, I thought, were affected—to this open realm. It's a shame, and a loss, but I also easily link it up with my prior assumption that things are the way they are for a reason, and gloomily, it does seem inevitable.
If you were a European settler crossing the American plains in the nineteenth century, you probably wouldn't be thrilled to know that this vast expanse would one day recreate the same modes of impoverishment you'd managed to escape. But you couldn't really be surprised, either.
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