Predictably, I see a lot of concern being expressed here about how this will be implemented and enforced. There is an underlying assumption, which seems fairly reasonable, that the government is going to use this opportunity (à la Louisiana) to overreach and require people to provide their identity to access these services.
One question I have for other HN commenters though, does it necessarily need to happen this way? Political realities aside, is there a way for the government to set up an age verification service in a way that preserves privacy?
If so, the time is ripe for this community to put forward such a solution and advocate for it loudly. If current sentiment is any indication, social media age restrictions are going to go global and Australia is going to set the precedent for the rest of the world.
It is not possible aside from getting everyone an internet ID, which most will probably reject for good reason.
Governments should not get this power. This is the basic tenet that separation of powers is based on. The only measure that helps is to just take away the means.
I am uncertain it will go global at all or go very far even in Australia as there are at least some companies that try to benefit their customers. And there still is the private web anyway that isn't affected.
Australia should be made fun off for their attempts, it isn't their first rodeo.
Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here.
Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of entertainment.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
Viewed that way, the YouTube algorithm and TikTok represent a natural progression of the way that TV news has already primed us to consume information. In fact, almost all of the arguments made in Amusing Ourselves to Death have only become more relevant in the age of social media. More than ever, we are losing our ability to place information in context, to think deeply, and to tolerate what makes us uncomfortable. No doubt these things would be reflected in test scores.
On the other hand, the one possible saving grace of an internet world vs. a TV world could be the relaxing of the restrictive time and ratings constraints. I would argue there are niche content producers out there doing better contextualizing, deeper thinking, and harder-hitting investigative work than was ever possible on TV, and that this content is hypothetically available to us. The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it? On the contrary, I think most of us are getting swept up in the firehose every day.
One thing that stuck out for me was his description of TV news as a "psychotic" series of "Now... this" context switches, where each event had to be over-simplified into a basic narrative that people could grasp within 15-45 seconds, and where the most disturbing story (e.g. a gruesome rape and murder) could be chased up in the next second by a fluff piece about a group of grannies having a bake sale, with no ability of the viewer to reflect on and absorb what they just saw and heard.
David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.
Both composing text and reading map closely to thinking.
The physical act of writing , especially with pen, pencil, or quill, involves planning and structuring (both on-page planning and grammatical construction).
For generations of learners to have lost this ability must eventually have a heavy social cost.
The only question is: are we able to withstand the firehose of highly available, highly irrelevant short-form dopamine hit entertainment in order to find it?
Simple but effective solution:
1. You bring news or debate? You will have to comply with a journalistic code.
2. You want to optimize revenue? You think about infotainment, click bait etc? You better not, because you will have to comply with the journalistic code. No pretending here.
3. The board of journalistic media should be 100% separate from any commercial interests.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "simple":
- News reporting is straightforward insofar as requiring a code. Opinion about news is where it gets messy - if someone has a TV or radio show where they render their opinions or thoughts about news events, that's first amendment territory.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates the above assertion "effective":
- Journalism probably must be scalably funded to scalably exist. We see currently that people are not willing to do that and that opinion heads pervade the "news and information" space. So requiring compliance to a code in order to profit off of journalism doesn't work for the same reason minimum wage doesn't really work - people can just choose not to interact with code-compliant journalism much like companies can just not hire people.
The following item counters and possibly invalidates both the above assertions "simple" and "effective" at once.
- You cannot separate any board of X from political interests, which are much more important if commercial interests are explicilty separated from X.
> Or democracy will perish eventually.
None of the above counters or invalidates this statement.
(Although the response is not gibberish, I can´t feel certain that I reply to a chatgpt response (?))
You take it too static. If you are waiting for the type-safe, leak free hammered approach, you will achieve nothing.
I want you to take this approach to get you going in the right direction.
Opinion pieces
- Opinion pieces are indeed a way where editorial boards go cheap, outsourcing meta thinking to external entities/influence. Those editorial boards going of the rails there is not an act of nature, but like in the case of the NYT a consequence of commercial ownership. As part of the code any opinion piece should be clearly marked as such, as well as the interests of the author.
Journalism probably must be scalabe
There is no need for scalable mega media corporations. In countries with 1) public news organizations[*] and 2) required independent editorial boards, commercial titles are not as going overboard as in the US.
You cannot separate any board of X from political interests
You can, but you can never be absolute 100% perfect.
A peculiar, mindset has been programmed that ethics in society is defined in what what terms the lawyer wrote. A good society is all about what you collectively allow or disallow, no scheme, no law can perfectly defeat all bad actors all the time.
The social part of "society" is an activity. If you as normal people don't show up, then it will be a Murdoch party.
From 2010-2017, I observed young men in cafes who were housing- and economically-insecure retreat into video games, conspiracy theories, scapegoating groups of people and organizations they knew nothing about, unhealthiness, and sleep deprivation. So much for the utopian delusion of automation "freeing up people for leisure", instead addiction and escaping from reality are becoming more commonplace.
I think there is an assumption being made of the pre tv “informed person” that either never really existed as such, or merely modernized into someone who might consume their internet content in the form of Atlantic articles over tick toks and pod casts. Most people have always been poorly informed and driven to emotional content over the plain facts. A tale as old as the first chieftain we chose to emotionally believe as sacred and elevate above fact and ourselves in the premodern times.
Naively, I would think the same. But in the first part of AOTD, Neil Postman argues pretty convincingly that America in the 18th and 19th centuries was the most literate, bookish society on Earth and in the later parts of the book that that heritage was lost with the invention of the telegraph, radio, and later TV.
In other words, TV and the internet as technologies are not "neutral" in their effect on society, they have actually made us dumber in a real sense.
They were still speaking of subset of americans. One should look up the literacy rates of poor white or black americans of the time to get a better understanding of where the headspace of the average person might have been. There is a reason why politicians had to campaign by actually visiting and orally presenting their positions.
Is there any other viable method for organizing TV?
I doubt even the median HN reader can hold a dozen complex ideas in their head at the same time, certainly not for longer than 45 seconds without starting to confuse them.
You can stop pretending that the contents of the news-show has any relation to reality.
IMO, the entire problem comes from this one lie. But you see... a lot of people wants this propaganda machine.
Also, nowadays you can stream deep journalism that people can adjust to their time availability. We usually call those "documentaries". Most of the stuff that carries that name is psychotic garbage too, but informative ones do exist.
Probably not, as long as we continue the requirement that all information conveyed to the public must be done in a way that is maximally profitable to the producer. As long as information must be profitable, it will inevitably cease to be information and turn into entertainment soon enough. When was the last time you saw a TV Station that wasn't majority ads?
At the same time its not like the harder information isn’t available. One can find factual news and pieces of information. This is what the policy wonks who craft policy that the pr wonks spin into soundbites have to be able to find and read to understand the world after all.
Its simply not fun nor satisfying for most people. News isn’t to be informed for most people. It is for entertainment like any other fodder content shoehorned into some free minutes of your day. And that’s ok because as long as some technical people need to actually get things done, there is good information and data out there for you to actually learn about the world. It just will be in some dry .gov website or some other source perhaps instead of distilled down to a 2 min article written to a 6th grade reading level with a catchy headline on cnn.com, but thats OK. You will learn to appreciate the dryness and technical language.
I will say though we shouldn't underestimate habitual inertia in all things. My dad will probably watch Cable news till he dies. There's arguably far more interesting and entertaining things on the internet, that i have showed him to access and explore on his laptop, that he uses frequently. But his main source of news appears to be Cable still, and it doesn't seem like it's gonna change.
Then there was the great culling of newspapers and magazines. It was probably the last thing longer than a paragraph that my dad actually read consistently. They mostly went online, stopped being delivered and he was forced off of the reading experience. Sure, you can seek things like that out but it was serendipitous, they got less funding, raises prices, fox continued to foxify, i don't know that he's really read anything since! I, myself, am trying with some difficulty to begin reading more. I need the concentration back
The evolutionary transition from single-celled to multicellular life has actually been repeatedly accomplished in vitro [1]. So highly unlikely to be a Great Filter.
The study in the article suggests that these early multicellular organisms failed to take hold. So there was probably something needed that was missing. And it still took billions of years for complex live to emerge, whereas single celled life appeared almost immediately once the earth cooled down enough to have liquid water. Whether it took two billion years or 3.5 doesn't matter so much when you think of it as a potential filter.
Not loud at all but it gives you a distinctive feeling like you've been slapped in the base of the skull by God. The Carl G was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the article.
Should read *has brought*. As in the present perfect tense, since we are still on the brink of annihilation, more so than we have been at any time in the last 60 years.
The difference between then and now is that we just don't talk about it much anymore and seem to have tacitly accepted this state of affairs.
When I first heard that the gov't is trying to protect children from online harm, for some reason I thought it meant we were going to regulate their access to the highly addictive forms of social media that have been destroying their experience of childhood and setting them up to be a failed generation. But I guess they decided instead to go after the politically low-hanging fruit of hate speech, bullying, and sexual exploitation, as if the heavy hand of government speech regulation is somehow going to solve these problems this time around in history at no major cost to free societal norms.
This is currently our biggest unsolved political issue IMO. Without a focus on the supply side, all of our current consumption-focused climate change policies (carbon tax on consumption, electric vehicle mandates, most recently infrastructure issues etc.) effectively amount to weak virtue signaling that has mostly succeeded in dividing voters and provinces against each other, when we should instead be tackling the 500 lb gorilla in the room (Alberta’s oil sands). Hence the well-deserved Greta Thunberg snark towards Trudeau a while back.
How do we do that? Some think we should just leave the oil in the ground. Others think we should avoid building further export infrastructure (i.e. pipelines). These options strike me as politically unpalatable, and even our current government stepped in at one point a few years ago to bail out the troubled Trans Mountain pipeline.
One option I am strongly in favour of is nuclearizing the oil sands. AFAIK right now the process for extracting crude from the oil sands is very energy-intensive and is currently powered by nat gas since the producers have it on hand. There was a proposal a while back to power this process by nuclear energy, which failed because: a) nuclear energy was scary, and b) crude prices took off and reduced the economic incentive for cost savings.
I imagine that the nuclear option could be resurrected now alongside government investment in LNG infra as well as a supply-side carbon tax to provide extra incentive to push producers on board. Since we’re not going to leave the oil in the ground anyway, this would allow us to extract it in the cleanest possible way, while actually creating jobs and making our energy exports more competitive overall.
Now, if only Canada could elect a visionary government that actually cared about climate change and not just about virtual signaling…
A carbon tax is not 'weak virtue signalling', a sufficiently priced carbon tax changes the composition of supply and demand for all goods to account for carbon emitted.
> Without a focus on the supply side, all of our current consumption-focused climate change policies (carbon tax on consumption, electric vehicle mandates, most recently infrastructure issues etc.) effectively amount to weak virtue signaling that has mostly succeeded in dividing voters and provinces against each other
This is a very bad-faith read of what actually happened. There’s been decades of interest in the supply side, but this isn’t happening in isolation: the fossil fuel industry is massive and has enormous political clout, and they know that there’s no path to a better world which doesn’t involve the fossil fuel industry making trillions fewer dollars. That means that supply side improvements have both been prevented or steered in infeasible directions which conveniently mean fossil fuel consumption won’t drop in the slightest until decades in the future when something very hard finally happens (hydrogen, nuclear). Any time you’re about to repeat a right-wing trope about virtue signaling, know that you’re contributing your time and credibility to assist their propaganda campaign entirely pro bono instead of doing anything which could help.
Re: tar sands, nuclear takes too long to construct and if you did get a plant through you’d want to use it to decarbonize usage directly rather than encourage more oil consumption.
Q: Who decides whether the policy focus is on the supply side or consumption side?
A: The government and its voters.
That’s it. That’s who I am going to hold accountable.
Now, the point I am making that you seem to miss is that in Canada, the supply side is the larger issue. This is because we are a net energy exporter. So hence why to most Canadians outside of Alberta, blaming the consumer while giving the oil sands a pass feels like cheap political theatre.
OTOH Albertans feel very threatened any time the government starts to talk about doing something supply side, and I think many are actually very happy to go along with the political theatre of the demand side focus because they know it doesn’t directly threaten their jobs.
What should we do in an ideal world? Target both. But if I were designing an effective climate policy and had to pick only one, I would do supply side first.
On a side note, studies have estimated that the current carbon tax levels are 5-10x too low to effectively price in the externalities due to releasing the carbon. So yes, it’s virtue signaling.
Do they operate in an ideal state of perfect knowledge or have they possibly been influenced by the billions spent by fossil fuel companies trying to deny or minimize the problem, and massively overstate the economic cost of reducing carbon emissions? By all means, hold people accountable for bad decisions but also recognize that they’re not making those decisions in a vacuum. If you think the carbon tax is low, start your blame with the people who strenuously opposed it more than the people who got you the current tax.
Overall you’re right about fossil fuel interests blocking progress. But you’re wrong about nothing changing until “far in the future” as well as the part about “hydrogen, nuclear”* being key drivers. China has now built so much solar PV and wind that their emissions are set to peak and enter a structural decline this year. Similar trends are occurring everywhere in the world, just a couple of years behind. It’s just taking time for people to realize this is happening, because the exponential phase of an S-curve produces such fast change that even being one or two years out of date is like reading news from last century.
* As a note, hydrogen and nuclear will be relevant, but only for the last (hard) fraction of it. Ironically, promoting hydrogen and nuclear as the “only viable technology” seems to be the latest PR campaign pursued by fossil interests.
I think we’re actually in agreement. All I meant by that was that the fossil fuel companies have been happy to support things like an envisioned transition to hydrogen, biofuels, or nuclear power when that means it’s business as usual for decades until [hypothetically] some major change happens and our emissions will drop precipitously. Toyota is similarly happy to talk about how green they’ll be in 2040 while heavily advertising that you need a $60k ICE Tundra to drive to the office in the meantime since those have a much higher profit margin than the few hydrogen vehicles they can sell.
I strongly agree that nuclear is relevant for some last n% stuff but am hoping that the renewable boom will buy enough time to deploy it. As you noted, the capacity there has been on a reassuringly massive growth curve with no barriers to stop it other than politics.
One question I have for other HN commenters though, does it necessarily need to happen this way? Political realities aside, is there a way for the government to set up an age verification service in a way that preserves privacy?
If so, the time is ripe for this community to put forward such a solution and advocate for it loudly. If current sentiment is any indication, social media age restrictions are going to go global and Australia is going to set the precedent for the rest of the world.