Comment by steveklabnik
6 hours ago
I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll have to chew on this. I certainly felt some shock on the IP questions when all of this came up. I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old.
Also I'm not a fan of billionaires, obviously, but I think that given I've worked on open source and tools for so long, I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think.
(Also, I didn't say this in the first comment, but I'm gonna be thinking about the industrial revolution thing a lot, I think you're on to something there. Scale meaningfully changes things.)
I feel the future includes the sentiments you describe. It was a little before my time professionally, but I grew up reading that kind of thinking.
I do think that the open web stuff, decentralized, or at least more decentralized than currently, is the path forward. I've been reading about the AT protocol and it recently becoming an official working group with the IETF.
I feel a second order effect of making decentralized social networking easier, is making individuals more empowered to separate from what they don't believe in. The third order effect is then building separate infrastructure entirely.
As sad as that can be - in my personal opinion it runs the risk of ending the "world wide" part of the web - it appears to be the only way society can avoid enriching the few beyond reason.
> I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old.
Me too, 100%. But that was during a moment in time when that information was more likely to be enabling a person who otherwise didn't have as many resources than enabling a billionaire to make their torment nexus 0.1% more powerful.
> I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think.
Yeah, I've mostly made peace with that too.
The way I think about it is that when I make some digital thing and share it with the world, I'm (hopefully!) adding value to a bunch of people. I'm happiest if the distribution of that value lifts up people on the bottom end more than people on the top. I think inequality is one of the biggest problems in the world today and I aspire to have the web and the stuff I make chip away at it.
If my stuff ends up helping the rich and poor equally and doesn't really effect inequality one way or the other, I guess it's fine.
But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it.
> But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it.
This observation doesn't really clash with "information wants to be free." You just have to include LLMs in the category or "information," like Free Software types already do for all software. You don't need to abandon your principles, you should shift your demands. A handful of companies can't be allowed to benefit from free information and then put what they make behind a wall.
> the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion
That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.
No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.
> it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick
That's not the whole story, though. There have been many community-driven projects to bring convenient access to copyrighted works to the masses in a convenient way. You may recall the meteoric success of Popcorn Time. Law enforcement shut them down. Without the hand of the state beating down any popular alternative to legal distribution it absolutely would be the dominant mode of media consumption.