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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
We’re heading toward a Library of Babel scenario where virtually every permutation of text, video, and audio will either pre-exist online (Borges style) or be artificially generated on the fly (as on https://libraryofbabel.info/) to drive engagement for cheap. Which means that every most brilliant piece of insight will be out there; but they will be drowned out by vastly many more orders of magnitude of trite platitudes. Like in the Library of Babel, no index exists to tell them apart. There is no “key” to finding the needles of greatness in the haystack of slop. Brute forcing discovery would take literal eons, as in Borges’ story. In turn, insightful dwellers of the internet like @riotgoools give up, log off, and go touch grass, leaving ever more of the space to be filled by bots that not only author the content, but also pretend to be consuming and engaging with it. It’s the most recent embodiment of the Dead Internet Theory. How do we course correct from here? 1/3
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@sprofane
At the risk of sounding like another Luddite/grass botherer, I truly think that Web Rot runs deep, the noise has overshadowed the signal and, at least what we think of as the web, is beyond redemption. However I suspect the downfall is a misapprehension, based on our own category mistake of what the internet is. The web has always been a potential, never an actuality, the freedom of communication, instant connection and access to knowledge, always was a path we hoped for rather, than the technology we experienced. Always flatland, the wall behind the fire in Platos cave, or the description of a colour absent from qualia. Adore that Borges comes up, one if my favourite blind magicians of all time. Have you read "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by him? Perhaps the thin, entropy prone content of the web are slow cycles of memetic stretching. Maybe the questions of authorship, reliability and humanity are not the right questions, maybe the internet isn’t the right arena, maybe it never was a space at all
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@sprofane
Sorry, this above reply is a ramble with no arrival. But I really like your post and thinking. I think more and more that the internet needs to be approached rather than rescued, as the Borges story observes, who is the author of Don Quixote is a question that disappears when faced with Don Quixote.
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Yours is not a meandering ramble — I kind of agree with it (and yes I’ve read most if not all of Borges, also one of my all-time favs; see my cast below on réalisme fantastique). There was a brief period in which I felt the web did deliver on its promise, though. I got on in 1993 and until, say, the mid-2000s, what the web lacked in standardization, it made up in signal-to-noise ratio (even more so on Usenet, even for some time after Eternal September). Then the barrier to entry was made even lower with the emergence of walled gardens and subsequent social media platforms, and the SNR started slipping. 1/
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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Over the last 10 years the SNR got exponentially worse due to malice (political weaponizing / propaganda, Cambridge Analytics, etc) and bots that make content creation cost asymptotically approach $0. So yes, perhaps the web as we know it is beyond rescue (in fact — is it a web anymore? Do the predominant social media platforms still qualify as web just because they use the HTTP protocol? Clearly scrolling is not the same as surfing). Which means that the solution may need to be re-invented from the ground up. https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0x04554459
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