LibreWolf: Issues so far

Yes, it runs faster than Firefox, and it doesn't "phone Google."

 That means two things.

One: Things like highway route numbers don't render on Google Maps. So, you have to use something else.

Two: Google Images does not work AT ALL. 

There's some lesser issues, but those are the biggies. 

==

Update: It doesn't like Bing or Yandex on their reverse image lookup any more than Google. I don't know who "backbones" Yandex, but I assume, like the search engine itself, it's Bing and thus ultimately Microslob on Bing.

Also? Won't let me copy-paste something out of a Word document into Goodreads. (I'll check on that again, by accident if nothing else, in the near future.) I can type in the review box, but can't paste anything there. Is this because Goodreads is Amazon? Unknown. 

We may be at a final farewell for me and Firefox

I have long used Firefox as my primary internet browser. It was pretty much the original non-corporatized browser. Today, for PCs, it's definitely "do evil" Chrome by Google, or else Edge by "do evil and also make crap" Microslob.

On Macs, which is what I am normally on, it's those or Apple's own "do a fair degree of evil and turd-polish yourself" Safari.

There are other older browsers, of course, like Opera, and newer ones like Brave.

But, I have generally stayed with Firefox.

Until it has problems from time to time.

Like being a memory hog.

Or slow.

Or now, busting stuff.

A week ago, on my office Mac, I got prompted to update Firefox. Not a problem.

Until the restart, then yes a problem.

Substack is broken.

And, it's worse in various ways.

I commented on Shitter, from the office, tagging both Firefox and parent Mozilla. No response.

I then went to Mozilla's website, to the bug-reporting page.

You can do it anonymously, or through GitHub. No account with it, and don't want to bother. But, the fact that they don't even ask for an email is problematic.

Even more problematic for them as a tech company?

They asked if the problem was on Mac OS X 10.15. (That's the way they wrote it, redundancy and all.)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I'm on Ventura, specifically 13.5, at the office. (I get prompts to update to 14, but I hesitate to play with electronics not my own.)

Anyway, I am NOT NOT NOT on Catalina!

And, if you're getting that wrong, how fucked up are you?

Anyway, at home, I thought I would go on Facebook.

Nope.

Mozilla's account there dead since 2018. Won't even take FB messages.

Firefox's semi-dead since 2022. Takes FB messages, as far as still having a "post" feature, but no response.

Speaking of messages? 

Went back to Shitter.

Thought I would DM them there, rather than tag them.

Nope. Both Mozilla and Firefox have Shitter messaging turned off.

So, at least at work, if I ditch FF, it is likely permanent this time. 

So, I looked up alternatives to FF at home.

LibreWolf got high remarks. The worry is about it being such a tight fork off FF that it might break Substack, too.

Anyway, I downloaded it at home.

Problem?

Wouldn't import a thing from FF. Didn't even show it as "available," only Chrome and Safari. 

==

There's other reasons NOT to like FF 139. If you're a FF user do NOT NOT NOT update to this.

One issue is that it has an AI chatbot option that's embedded in a narrow left-hand rail. The fact that that's the top icon on the rail shows that FuckFox is trying to shove this down our throats. 

How Mozilla screwed the pooch on Firefox, in my opinion

And, everybody knows they DID, but, per Wiki and others, it's fallen off the cliff. 

Let's start with the nice big graphic Wiki has from Stat Counter. It is only through 2020, so no Brave.

 

The biggie is the spike in Chrome, even more than the drop in Firefox. 

What about smartphones? Well, Android is counted separate from Chrome. As for smartphones vs. desktop and laptop computers? They got the majority of browser share in November 2016 and haven't looked back.

I first thought that was the problem, but, Firefox's sagging starting in 2011. That said, not anticipating a Google-based option to an iPhone didn't help.

Given how buggy, and how insecure, an Android phone is, something cheaper than an iPhone, possibly cheaper than an Android, and maybe "locked" like an iPhone with some narrow, specific apps could have taken off like hotcakes. I would have bought one when my last flip phone, or "dumbphone," crapped out and Sprint told me smartphones were all it had available.

A second graph has more food for thought:

As you can see on it, mobile passed both Firefox and IE in 2013.

Had Mozilla put out an APB by the end of 2014, it probably could have had something to market by 2016. Partner with Samsung or someone else that got into Android smartphones early. Maybe try to resurrect a Nokia from the semi-dead by getting it to reverse engineer an Android.

But, after that, it might have been too late. By the end of 2016, Firefox was at 15 percent (and IE dying at 10 percent).

But, nobody sounded the "all hands in deck" in 2014 or even 2015.

Instead, in early 2022, we get Mozilla trying to backdoor paid search on us if we use the nav bar for searching, until it got busted at that.

Mozilla might take consolation in having a steady 10 percent of users. Should it?

The browser is a bigger memory whore than Chrome or Safari. (Never used Edge. Haven't used IE for 15 years. Opera is not as much a whore either. Haven't used Brave; downloaded but didn't install after its early kerfuffles.)

From what I've heard from friends (I haven't used it in years) recent iterations of Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird, are even more craptacular.

All of this should make you wonder how much of a player the Mozilla Foundation will be in the future world of the internet in general.

I think it’s time to nationalize the Net

I live in Deep East Texas, a densely rural land that may have the charm of smaller towns for some, but also lacks some amenities levels.

Among them, and arguably not an amenity, but a “need,” is reliable, quality Internet service.

So, the two most recent, frustrating major bouts with Internet access in this area — with smaller mini-bouts in between — has me saying, at a minimum, “We should be seriously considering it,” on the issue I mention in the header.

I had once thought that simply regulating the Internet as a common-carrier type utility would be enough, but now, I don’t think so

Yes, I hear cries of “socialism” in the background from not just conservatives but those not that liberal.

And, you know what? From the early days of our nation, we had socialism — as in corporate socialism government of a business, and not welfare-state benefits socialism — at the heart of the government.

Specifically, before 1971, we did not have a quasi-government, quasi-private United States Postal Service.

We had the United States Post Office. It was a Cabinet agency, with the Postmaster General sitting there with the Secretary of State, Treasury Secretary and others.

Indeed, the Constitution even expressly says that insuring delivery of the mails is a requirement of our government.

Specifically, Article 1, Section 8, says: “The Congress shall have Power … To establish Post Offices and post Roads.” And, for nearly 200 years, that was interpreted as the government directly doing all of this through a government-owned post office.

And, to further improve on that, late in the 1800s, Congress adopted Rural Free Delivery, which means that the price of a letter to a county road address is the same as one to Dallas or Houston. Before then, people living on farms or otherwise isolated either had to go to a distant (in pre-automobile days) post office, or else pay a private carrier to bring the mail the rest of the way to them.

Anyway, per that Constitutional requirement? I think a reasonably broad, but certainly not overly broad, interpretation of the mandate for our government to insure delivery of the mail, or more specifically, to “establish … post Roads,” one could argue that the Internet is today’s functional equivalent of the mail — and, the delivery thereof.

Nationalizing the Internet would solve several issues.

First, with an Internet equivalent of Rural Free Delivery, the backwoods of America wouldn’t be poor stepsisters to the big cities in terms of online communication. That applies to both Internet speed and, to get back to the starting point, Internet service and reliability.

Related to that, it might mean that the U.S. has top Internet speeds that at least approach those of other developed nations. (Right now, we don’t, in case you’re wondering.)

Second, this would work around the whole issue of “Net neutrality.” Folks like AT&T would like to put the squeeze on third-party content providers, like, say, Netflix, and make you pay more to get your Netflix movie faster.

Third, with a non-capitalistic focus on short-term profit, the Internet could be really addressed as a long-term infrastructure issue.

Some people might offer counterargument.

The first might be fears of government censorship, government snooping, or other similar problems.

On paper, that sounds like a legitimate worry. In reality?           

Either as the fully public USPO before 1971, or the public/private USPS, this hasn’t happened to the U.S. Mail in any great degree. Second, courtesy of the Patriot Act, if not censoring, the government may be spying on your email and other Internet use as delivered by private businesses even as we speak. (And, no, that’s most definitely not an argument for keeping the Patriot Act around.)

So, that one’s not a game-killer for me.

Others may point to electric deregulation.

First, I’m not sure electric dereg is all its cracked up to be. Second, electric dereg hasn’t addressed rural-urban differences in electric reliability. (Nobody’s paying to bury electric lines underground, safe from wind and ice storms, out in small-town America, for the most part.)

But, I actually have a better idea.

Let’s selectively nationalize the Internet, in a way that addresses most current service concerns, but government control worries at the same time.

Washington takes over the infrastructure. The flip side is that ALL companies get to ride down what used to be AT&T’s wires here, or somebody else’s elsewhere.

One caveat would exist — all Internet companies would have to offer some sort of good-faith equivalent of Rural Free Delivery in the old mail.

But, this system would force that, anyway. This would be what electric dereg was supposed to do, and really didn’t. If A&T had to compete with Verizon, and Suddenlink, and maybe even out of nowhere, Comcast, they’d all reduce prices closer to hose of other modern developed nations. (The feds would have to enforce antitrust legislation on mergers, of course.)

No censorship by the private companies.

Adequate federal regulation (itself perhaps a bit of a pipe dream) addresses the rest of the issues.

A lot more about Net Neutrality, monopoly, quasi-monopoly, privacy and related issues are at this longform piece. This issue is yet another reason we need to look at the idea of at least partial nationalization, I think.

Before using social media to fan controversy flames ...

Read Ken White's "Ten Short Rants about Gamergate." They apply to far more than that.

Moving somewhat beyond his immediate circle of targets, Ken's observations, his 10 points, apply to a lot of situations, especially ones where social justice warriors, or SJW folks are involved, and especially ones where doctrinaire anti-SJW folks are also involved, not just Gamergate.

As for that next circle of hell?

Without being offensive just for the sake of giving offense, other people shouldn't be passive, either.

Spades can and should be called spades, or, per Ken:

I'm going to call out idiots and assholes and thugs.

And, per Ken, and the particular issue at hand or related ones, both social justice warriors, or SJWs, and men’s rights advocates, or MRAs, have a fair amount of people fitting at least one, if not all three, descriptors. I’ve “met” online people in both groups who do that. And, to the degree either SJWs or MRAs are organized, they do a shitty job of self-policing. Both of them.

And, I myself have experienced being called an MRA just because I won't cosign every line of SJW bullshit. And still am, right now, by an SJW on Hardball Talk, NBC's sports blog.

That person claimed that SJW:MRA was like ACLU:KKK.

That's laughable on two counts, as I said.

First, neither the ACLU nor the KKK was created in the Internet era, per Ken's link and my header.

Second, the SJW movement is in no way equivalent to the ACLU. (And, welcome here, anybody clicking on my name at Hardball Talk. I deliberately redated this post to pin it at the top of my blog.)

And, having run into said person before, I know that they know that I'm not alone in these observations. But, it's part of the martyrology to act like anyone who doesn't 100 percent agree with you is your enemy.

Beyond that, as a Facebook friend of mine said, they really should be a kind of "user's manual" for anyone posting anything online, especially in social media.

That's because, as this screen capture about third-party trolls in Gamergate shows, there's trollery everywhere. Let's all get better at not abetting it, at cutting it off at the pass, and at reporting it. And, let's patronize websites, etc., that do that themselves.

The Internet wasn't originally "built" to be a libertarian cesspool of foul-mouthed, foul-minded, "gotcha" thinking and writing any more than it was meant to be a hypercapitalist cesspool of ads bombardment, putting a dollars cost on everything, virus-bombing URLs and other things. Unfortunately, it's become both.

Like the worldwide eradication of smallpox, getting rid of, or even just adequately containing, both problems won't be easy and it won't be quick. But that's no excuse not to do what we can.

Post-SOPA: From censorship to propaganda

The music industry switches gears, post-SOPA, from censorship to propaganda. Throw in a bit of "jobs" fears and a dash of "terror" fears, and cook it up until you get a big, steaming pot of bullshit.

This column does have its good; the record industry and allies clearly are not giving up on passing something like SOPA, and spell this out. If you thought the drumbeats of PR propaganda were strong either before SOPA, or 15-plus years ago, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you probably ain't seen nothing yet.

At the same time, Cary Sherman and the RIAA are right in that the Googles of the world are upset in part because it's their ox that's being gored. If China, ironically, passed something similar to SOPA, Google would surely, after reflection (allowing for its China presence being via Hong Kong), acquiesce. For Google, Twitter, et al, their stances on this issue are also about money first, principles second.

It's too bad neither side will admit this; the more educated public already knows that anyway.

Science news: Unemotional #Botox? Internet addiction?

It's becoming recognized that Botox's facial wrinkle elimination also cuts down on users' facial expressions. Does that, in turn, cut down on users' abilities to empathize with others' emotions and expressions?

Initial research says yes.

The "gorilla unawareness" problem with focused human psychology is well known. But, can we also miss real-life situations, not just staged ones?

Again, initial research says yes.

It turns out people focused on some compelling issue can miss something as serious as an assault on a city street.

Psychologist Ira Hyman of Western Washington University in Bellingham says the new findings illustrate people’s tendency to overestimate their awareness of immediate surroundings. “We don’t yet know how strong this illusion is,” Hyman says.

Stay tuned on this one.

Meanwhile, speaking of psychology, traditional ideas of free will may be taking yet another hit.

Did "the bacteria made me do it" sound real? Maybe it should. After all, it's well known what the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis can do to cats.

Internet "addiction," or actual addiction? Now, while "process" addictions are different from chemical ones, and some people prefer the term "compulsion," they're still real. And, the fact that the Net, with heavy enough usage, can "rewire" at least younger brains, says there is cause for ... at least some concern, right?

The Dark Side of the Internet — spamtivism as well as slacktivism

Pardon the neologism in the header. I'll jump right in to explaning it.

I think most readers know what slacktivism is. Sierra Club, ACLU or whomever, sends you an e-mail alert (or 12, especially if it's an enviro group — more on that below, too). It often has your "suggested" comment for your Member of Congress, EPA Administrator or whomever already written for you.

Ditto on the occasional suggestion to call your Member of Congress — your talking points are already written out in the e-mail alert.

Now, let's be honest.

How often do you edit that "suggested" text?

If you're like me, the answer is "rarely," at best.

And, per my previous blog post in this thread, you KNOW that Congressional staffers — or, speaking of environmental issues, from which I am most familiar with this — staff for EPA, U.S. Forest Service, BLM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, National Park Service, etc., quickly become familiar with the pre-written text and so quickly start ignoring copycat e-mails.

So, slacktivism strikes out. And, if you're honest, you probably know that, too.

But, IMO, slacktivism is only part of the problem.

The base problem is "spamtivism."

Because such e-mail alerts make slacktivism easy, they also make it easy for nonprofits to see how easily you follow through on such slacktivist actions.

Why do you think Sierra Club, etc, send you "slacktivism confirmation" emails? It's a bit of a psychological carrot. And, it's the perfect way to say:

Now that you've sent that email, can you click this new link and send us $20 while you're at it?

And that, my friends, is "spamtivism."

I mention Sierra because enviros in general and Gang Green groups in particular are BAD about this.

They were bad about this back in the days of paper mailings, in the process, with the mounds of paper generated, undercutting some of their environmental cred.

They're also good at manufacturing and recycling crises.

For instance, since the start of the year, I've gotten more than half a dozen activism emails about uranium mining in the Grand Canyon. Realistically, is that worry (albeit a serious one) any closer to reality than it was four months ago?

You know that answer too.

So, why?

Gang Green will probably say, if it says anything, that this is because it loses so many members of its groups every year.

Ex-members will respond that they quit because of the bombardment, and seeing through the bombardment.

Unfortunately, though not as much, I think smaller enviro groups are creeping further down the spamtivism path.

The Dark Side of the Internet — military astroturf bots

In part 2 of this ongoing series, I called out Clay Shirkey (and boy extension, Michael Shermer, Jeff Jarvis and other Internet utopians) for their failure to wrestle with the idea that Western democracies, especially now that we are in a "War on Terror" will have little compunction about Internet-spying and games-playing on their own people. Beyond the history of 19th-century Europe, the First Red Scare and the War on Drugs in the U.S. would have provided enough food and information on those lines for thought.

In current times, I mentioned the HBGary Federal e-mail promoting its ability to set up cyberbots, or astroturfing bots, to "game" liberal blogs and other sites on the Internet.

Well, now it's happening.

The U.S. Army is devising software to do just that. Now, the Pentagon says it will be used only overseas.

Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: "The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."

He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.

Centcom said it was not targeting any US-based web sites, in English or any other language, and specifically said it was not targeting Facebook or Twitter.

Right. Remember the quaint idea that the CIA would only operate overseas? That one was shredded 40 years ago. And, we saw how the NSA shredded that overseas-local distinction with its warrantless domestic wiretapping.

Remember also this is the same Army that recently got busted for having brainwashed U.S. Senators about Afghanistan.

Notify Clay Shirky, Michael Shermer and other Internet utopians ASAP.

(Hat tip Discover magazine.)

The Dark Side of the Internet - Part 2 - political activism

Yesterday, I took a long look at whether the Internet lived up to the hype of cyberutopians Clay Shirky and Michael Shermer, and if not, how far short it fell.

Well, now, I'd like to take a bit more of a look at one particular issue within this, and that's whether or not the Net really empowers people politically, whether it primarily promotes slacktivism.

The entree to that?

Via a Facebook discussion, here's a dystopian take on Internet skeptic Evgeny Morozov as being over-dystopian.

Morozov thinks that the “ridiculously easy group-forming” that his leading nemesis Clay Shirky described in his recent book Cognitive Surplus is, in reality, leading largely to cognitive crap, at least as it pertains to civic action and political activism. Indeed, at one point in Chapter 7 (the creatively-titled, “Why Kierkegaard Hates Slacktivism”), Morozov speaks of the development of what we might think of as a “tragedy of the civic commons” (my term, not his). ...

But this ignores many legitimate forms of social organization / protesting that have been facilitated by the Net and digital technologies. Despite what Morozov suggests, we haven’t all become lethargic, asocial, apolitical cave-dwelling Baywatch­ rerun-watching junkies. If all Netizens are just hooked on a cyber-sedative that saps their civic virtue, what are we to make of the millions of progressives who so successfully used the Net and digital technologies to organize and elect President Obama? (Believe me, I wish they wouldn’t have been so civic-minded and rushed to the polls in record numbers to elect that guy!)

The main takeaway I get from this review of Morozov is that the reviewer thinks he's being too dismissive of the possibility of the Internet transforming democratic action.

I disagree. I think, at least in the democratic U.S., governments have found new stasis or equilibrium, a la this"hype cycle" graphic.

Above the level of a small-town city council, do governments even take notice of e-mail action alert e-mails any more? Do you think they do? Do you, like me, assume they don't, and so participate in fewer such campaigns?

My guess is that staffers at congressional offices and such look at those e-mails, then go to environmental, civil liberties and other activist organization websites, and look at the "standard language" suggested by the agency, then discount all e-mails based on that.

I'm guessing that federal bureaus and agencies act similarly.

I'm also guessing that, in larger states, state elected officials' offices and state agencies are doing that more and more.

Ditto on Twitter feeds, if they see thousands of Tweets linking to the same bit.ly or tinyurl.com webpage.

In other words, government is screening you out.

That said, an old-fashioned phone call reaches either a real person, or a real-person's human-voiced voice mail. And, other than the higher tech of cellphones vs. landlines making it a bit easier to do the call, though no easier to speak, there's no tech advance here.

Or, are you a bit more skeptical of human psychology than that, even? Do you believe the ease of an e-mail alert is a salve for the conscience, an easy "indulgence" similar to buying carbon credits rather than taking real action against global warming? (See here for my thoughts on carbon credit indulgences.)

I do.

In other words, does the Internet have a tendency to foster "slacktivism"? Possibly, even quite possibly. Is that better than nothing at all? Yes. How much better will decide whether you lean toward Morozov or Shirky.

Now, I don't claim to have the answers for something more than that, but, I do think that's another fact that Net utopians don't address. In short, Shirky's utopianism about the Net is matched, possibly, by a utopianism about human nature.

But, not all governments are semi-transparent to transparent. What about authoritarian or totalitarian ones?

Again, from the review:

Morozov says modern China, Putin’s Russia and Hugo Chavez are embracing new digital technologies in an attempt to better control them or learn how to use them to better spy on their citizens, and he implies that this is just another way they will dupe the citizenry and seduce them into a slumber so they will avert their eyes and ears to the truth of the repression that surrounds them. Sorry, but once again, I’m not buying it.

Here, Adam Thierer seems ignorant of 19th-century European history.

I don't know about France, but, places further east, after the rise of daily newspapers in larger cities, provide an instructional parallel.

Rather than ban newspapers outright, or even censor them to near the point of being unintelligible, governments such as the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary let leading newspapers of the left stay on racks at coffeehouses and other high-traffic public places precisely so they could keep tabs on who appeared subversive, what information was getting the most reading, etc.

And, presumably, in exchange for letting such places stay in business, occasionally leaning on their owners to rat out a few patrons to stay in business.

Now, Morozov may be overstating the case with the idea that Chavez is, or can be, "duping" people. There, I would agree with Thierer. Somewhat. But, not nearly totally.

As I noted in my original post, a leaked e-mail from HBGary, one of the companies that wanted to spy on “Anonymous” and online supporters of it and Julian Assange, showed it has plans to ramp up corporate online sockpuppetry to a whole new level.

Now, Venezuela or Iran may not have consultancy companies with this level of expertise, or folks inside its government, to pull off something similar. But, you can bet Hu Jintao's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia do.

Speaking of, it now (3/20/11) seems China is blocking Gmail. Another nail in the coffin of Net utopians, as well as that of transationalists.

Again, Thierer should read some history of 100-plus years ago.

The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor to the KGB, was notorious for its use of human agents provacateur. They included the man who assassinated Prime Minister Pytor Stolypin in 1911.

The use of fake Tweeters, fake Facebookers, etc. to do similar by electronic means should be seriously considered by the U.S. foreign policy establishment when monitoring unrest, or apparent unrest, in these countries, in fact.

But, at the same time, we don't need to go abroad, or leave the land of democracy, to talk about governments abusing the Internet

I mentioned HB Gary above. We don't even need to do that.

Under the Bush Administration (and perhaps still ongoing with Team Obama), the FBI spied on, harassed, and even arrested on flimsy charges individuals involved in peace/antiwar groups. How much of that was enabled by electronic snooping, or even electronic sockpuppetry?

And, let's not forget the Patriot Act itself and the Internet spying it allows.

For Shirky to write his utopian BS without even discussing that? Unconscionable. If the mainstream media did something like that, he'd be vomiting all over the Internet.

The Dark Side of the Internet — and social media

Now, I'm not a Luddite, either neo or paleo.

But, I'm also not a Kurzweilian, either, expecting technology to get us all living to 300 with Viagra-free perfect sexual activity. (And, that’s happening in just 30 years, says Kurzweil, with Time magazine dumb enough to give him its cover on that subject.)

So, while I appreciate making online friends, applying for jobs online, learning new things online, shopping online and more ...

I won't ignore that there IS a dark side to the Internet, even if not all of it is Orwellian. (Note: This may become a series — part 2 is here.)

Or, there's flip sides to coins, at least. And, the dark sides may be less harmful and more pedestrian than anything else. And, are in part "dark sides" only in comparison to a relentless, nearly fact-free boosterism of Internet utopians like Clay Shirky.

Take online shopping.

The flip side? Online ads becoming ever more pervasive. Online violations of private information growing and becoming more aggressive. And, in light of that, let me repeat my assertion that "Brave New World" is equally seminal as "1984,"if not more so.

And, I’m not alone in that.

“Is the Internet Changing the Way We Think?”, edited by John Brockman, the founder of the online science-and-technology site Edge.org, discusses a lot of these issues, as this Wall Street Journal review notes.

Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher, argues that the Internet isn't changing the way we think; it is exacerbating the deceptively simple challenge of "attention management." "Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life," he argues. The way we use the Internet today represents "not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se but also a mild form of depersonalization. . . . I call it public dreaming."

These are not the laments of technophobes. MIT professor Rodney Brooks, an expert on robotics, worries that the Internet "is stealing our attention. It competes for it with everything else we do." Neuroscientist Brian Knutson imagines a near future in which "the Internet may impose a 'survival of the focused,' in which individuals gifted with some natural ability to stay on target, or who are hopped up on enough stimulants, forge ahead while the rest of us flail helpless in a Web-based attentional vortex." …
The substitution of the virtual for the real is another common theme. Paleontologist Scott Sampson worries about "the loss of intimate experience with the natural world." And computer scientist Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, says that the Internet has "become gripped by reality-denying ideology." Several of the book's contributors, particularly artists and architects, make solid arguments for the importance of unmediated experiences to the creative process. …

(Update: At the same time, Lanier is himself some sort of tech-neolib, who is dumb enough, naive enough, or on the take enough to assume that Big Data will give you or I micropayments for using its services.)

Beyond worrying about the Internet, at least one person in the book tells us not to overrate it:

The neuroscientist Joshua Greene suggests, in a blunt but apt metaphor, that the Internet, for all its revolutionary pretense, is "nothing more, and nothing less, than a very useful, and very dumb, butler.

Clay Shirky, below, can't fit "butler" or "robot" in his cyber-utopianism. I'll get to that later.

Meanwhile, there's the dark side of Twitter.

Lee Siegel immediately notes one issue:

Just a few years ago, all anyone could talk about was how to make the Internet more free. Now all anyone can talk about is how to control it.

it's a good start to his review of Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion.”

He shows how American naivete and chauvinism have mixed to worship at the altar of Twitter:

He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that “the revolution will be Twittered.” The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media’s favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

Frank Rich knows the truth.

The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

Rich also implies that American teevee, as opposed to the effectively banned-from-America Al Jazeera, relies on foreign Tweeters out of collective corporate laziness:

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience.

Meanwhile, the Internet in America is not that ethical:

As Morozov points out, don’t expect corporations like Google to liberate anyone anytime soon. Google did business in China for four years before economic conditions and censorship demands — not human rights concerns — forced it out. And it is telling that both Twitter and Facebook have refused to join the Global Network Initiative, a pact that Morozov describes as “an industrywide pledge . . . to behave in accordance with the laws and standards covering the right to freedom of expression and privacy embedded in internationally recognized documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

So, let’s not expect the Internet to radically change the ethos of American business.

To some degree, I suspect early expectations of the Internet were in part a mix of American naivete, salvific technologism and American exceptionalism that all overlapped, and are now facing reality.

Yet more on the dark side of the Net from the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, reviewing Clay Shirky's new book, as well as Morozov's.

This is a great overview of a variety of books, some claiming this is the best of times for human psychology and more, some saying the brain in some ways just can't keep pace, and some saying its six of one, a half dozen of the other.

(A)mong the new books about the Internet (there are three types): call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers.

In the first category? A book by new media fluffer Clay Shirky and an essay Pop Ev Psycher (yes, you are) John Tooby, both make ignorant claims about the early egalitarianism and humanism of the printing press, among other things.

Shirky’s and Tooby’s version of Never-Betterism has its excitements, but the history it uses seems to have been taken from the back of a cereal box. The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.

I'll pass on both. As for Shirky, if he can't get the founding instrument of media, and its early influence on society, right, how can we trust his pronunciamentos on media today? Of course, we can't.

Meanwhile, Shirky's naive wiki-touting gets demolished:

In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.

Gopnik then tackels the "Better-Nevers" In brief:

The books by the Better-Nevers are more moving than those by the Never-Betters for the same reason that Thomas Gray was at his best in that graveyard: loss is always the great poetic subject.

He doesn't review Morozov, but his book would probably fall halfway here, halfway in the Better-Waser group, which says the Net isn't a utopia, but we've heard similar complaints about other technology.

Chris Lehmann has a similar review of Shirky, with some Morozov, at The Nation.

Lehmann labels Shirky as not only a hand-waving utopian optimist, but a vignette-as-authoritarian writer of the same ilk as Malcolm Gladwell. It’s also clear that Shirky has more than a touch of the economic libertarian in him, deriding, or seeming to, much of the liberal-developed social contract of the last century or so in the U.S and elsewhere in the western world.

Meanwhile, a leaked e-mail from HBGary, one of the companies that wanted to spy on “Anonymous” and online supporters of it and Julian Assange, shows it has plans to ramp up corporate online sockpuppetry to a whole new level. So much for Shirky's alleged Internet egalitarianism.

Via Jim Lippard, here's a dystopian take on Morozov as being over-dystopian.

The main takeaway I get from this review of Morozov is that the reviewer thinks he's being too dismissive of the possibility of the Internet transforming democratic action.

I disagree. I think, at least in the democratic U.S., governments have found new stasis or equilibrium, a la the "hype cycle" graphic Lippard mentioned.

Above the level of a small-town city council, do governments even take notice of e-mail action alert e-mails any more? Do you think they do? Do you, like me, assume they don't, and so participate in fewer such campaigns?

Or, are you a bit more skeptical of human psychology than that, even? Do you believe the ease of an e-mail alert is a salve for the conscience, an easy "indulgence" similar to buying carbon credits rather than taking real action against global warming? (See here for my thoughts on carbon credit indulgences.)

I do.

In other words, does the Internet have a tendency to foster "slacktivism"? Yes. Is that better than nothing at all? Yes. How much better will decide whether you lean toward Morozov or Shirky.

Now, I don't claim to have the answers for something more than that, but, I do think that's another fact that Net utopians don't address. In short, Shirky's utopianism about the Net is matched, possibly, by a utopianism about human nature.

But, at the same time, we don't need to go abroad, or leave the land of democracy, to talk about governments abusing the Internet

I mentioned HB Gary above. We don't even need to do that.

Under the Bush Administration (and perhaps still ongoing with Team Obama), the FBI spied on, harassed, and even arrested on flimsy charges individuals involved in peace/antiwar groups. How much of that was enabled by electronic snooping, or even electronic sockpuppetry?

And, let's not forget the Patriot Act itself and the Internet spying it allows.

For Shirky to write his utopian BS without even discussing that? Unconscionable. If the mainstream media did something like that, he'd be vomiting all over the Internet.

Anyway, the reality is that 20 years from now, much of the Net will be Russian, Chinese and Nigeria spammers talking to each other anyway.

So, the portion of the Net that’s not foreign money spammers 20 years from now will be Big Biz PR spammers. Or, speaking of Russia and China, more and more of it will be cyberwarfare.

Update: Add alleged skeptic, but real pseudoskeptic, Michael Shermer, to the list of cyberutopians. He's so bad he believes Ray Kurzweiil's prediction that the Singularity will arrive by 2030.

I'm blogging again - and holiday cooking for 1

For any followers or others, apparently somebody hacked my account early today. Had to get an authorization code from Google, then reset my password after I logged in with that code.

Anyway, I'm copecetic now.

Holiday cooking? I found a boneless pork loin on sale for $1.99/pound last night. I sliced it up and made a marinade from cinnamon, a bit of allspice, ginger and glove, apple cider and worcestershire, all diluted a touch with water.

It's going to soak until I get home from work tonight, then slow cook for a couple of hours.

I made some homemade potato soup earlier in the week, so, got a good combo. Kept skins on the potatoes and threw in some brown rice and flaxseed for a bit of extra fiber. No milk, so I used a mix of butter, cream cheese and cheddar in the broth. Added about 3/4 an onion, healthy amount of black pepper and a bit of Italian herbs mix.

The Internet - is it destroying the ability to forget?

Jeffrey Rosen says that in some ways, the answer is "yes," with a variety of unfortunate consequences.javascript:void(0)

The Internet may be jacking with your TP

Cheap, soft toilet paper may be less and less likely. Why? The Internet reducing office paper and newsprint.

For broadband equality, just change the label

Seriously. It's arguable that's all the FCC needs to do to work around last week's circuit court ruling that it doesn't have the authority to regulate broadband internet.

Very interesting. So, will it get on the stick?

Kids online 8 hrs a day?

Well, I don't know if this study counted use of the Net, cell phones, etc., during school time, but adults -- at home, Net time at work for personal Web use, etc., are surely online just as much if you're my age or younger. So, this isn't quite such a shock, is it?

Driving while web surfing?

If this isn't driving while texting, on steroids, I don't know what is. And yes, it's shamefully irresponsible for companies like Ford and Audi to even consider introducing such hardware.

That said, in the EU, with its greater emphasis on communal responsibility and such, I'll bet Ford and Audi don't even consider doing this.

EU does Internet regulation right

Or at least, the European Union, and/or individual member states, do Internet regulation better than the U.S. does, as is more and more common. And Google doesn't like it. Well, boo hoo.

MUCH more on the dark side of the Internet

So, while the Internet may not be an unallayed force for good, in things like citizen journalism, consumer empowerment against big business, etc., it's a human, "allayed," but still powerful force for good, right?

Uhh, quite possibly not.

Big Biz? It's behind the growth of SEOs, Google-scrubbing companies, etc.

Corporations themselves have not been slow to exploit cyberspace for their own purposes, with many of them relying on “search engine optimization” (SEO)—a set of online techniques to boost their Google ranking--to make themselves easier to find.

Now, they have stepped up their efforts, hiring the services of dedicated SEO firms that can ensure that any online complaints about corporate misbehavior posted by the likes of The Consumerist will be almost impossible to find on Google.

ComplaintRemover.com, the most visible of such companies, advertises “Do you need negative information removed? We are masters at knocking bad links off the front pages of search engines!” boasts its front page. In some sense, cyberspace has made life relatively easy for companies: they don’t need to beat up journalists anymore; they just need to beat up Google. The latter can be done quietly, privately, and at little expense--to their finances or their reputations.

And, now that Big Biz does take this seriously, it's got a lot more money and "weight" than citizen journalists.

Pseudoscience is rampant online in the "educated" West; nationalism abounds elsewhere. Add in the amount of rumor-monging in legitimate protests against authorities and authoritarianism, and the Net has plenty of "issues" and "baggage." Can it overcome that?

Internet: A tool for empowerment, or tyranny?

Via Facebook and blogging friend Leo, I got to read this great essay, which a couple other Internet and blogging friends, who seem to me to tout too avidly only the plus side of the Internet, especially but not only in new media, also need to read.

A couple of its ideas conform ones I have, such as today's Chinese treating the Internet and its control just like 10th-century European autocrats did with books and newspapers -- allow enough to be published to let you know who to spy on, and over what issues.

And, it's not just problems in undemocratic countries. No, the Net exacerbates issues here at home:

Proof of the web's failure to inaugurate a new age, in which the alleged "wisdom of crowds" corrected the evasions of propagandists, comes from the US, where new technology has augmented rather than diminished the paranoid strain in American politics.

Not enough for you? New media guru Clay Shirky owns up to the flip side:

Shirky accepts that alongside the dissemination of knowledge and the building of new social and intellectual networks, the internet is producing masses of third-rate material.

He notes that Shirky then says:

We should not be surprised, he says, because history is repeating itself and vast amounts of rubbish followed Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the 1440s. But, he continues, we should not despair either because the Gutenberg revolution eventually allowed "the public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment and even literate women".

In light of my earlier comment about European autocrats, Cohen then soundly refutes Shirky:

The invention of printing certainly disseminated knowledge as well as nonsense, but his idea that print also produced political progress is absurd. The most striking political feature of Europe in the three centuries after Gutenberg was not the liberation of the newly-literate public but the rise of absolute monarchs, who wiped out medieval parliaments.

Yes, the Internet is "revolutionary." So was the printing press, and, at the same time he was getting his German bible published, Martin Luther was also, in print, calling on German rulers to kill "murdering, thieving hordes" of peasants.