/cyb/ - cyberpunk and cybersecurity

>>3377

In some sense yes. It does cause people to realize a lot about the world and alienate us. To be more precise I would say that when we found information whether it's good or bad people change based on the information they receive. Since the quantity of information is always growing because of the revenue it create we found our self submerge in information and we cannot differentiate things anymore. This is why people stop carrying about a lot of stuff. s

>>3377
remember https://xkcd.com/1289/
but also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf2VxeIm1no

Anyone who thinks this way is absolutely pathetic. While technology makes it easy to isolate yourself, ultimately you are the one making the call to cut yourself off from everything. "Capitalism" and "consumerism" are not forced upon you, and don't have anything to do with being glued to your phone at the dinner table.

Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn't understand what is going on or aims to pull you down to feel better about themselves.

>>3382

very true. the internet is just a information medium much like how books are also. the only problem is that it's an addicting medium if you abuse it (youtube, facebook, online games, etc). that's where i think >>3377 gets his idea of isolation from but don't blame the medium, blame the content.

if you use the internet as a tool, instead of an entertainment platform you are fine.

>>3382
me when i voluntarily McStarve to death

>>3377
100% yes. People who are saying that it shouldn't cause that as a general trend are pretty deluded and narcissistic imo. It causes an addiction/reliance to it, to the point where you just realize that using it will give you that dopamine release easier than anything else. Things like the internet have very clearly outpaced the development of humans and made things quite a mess. People weren't meant to be connected on this kind of scale. We were in small, spread out tribes for as long as we even resembled humans, and our biology is suited for that.

>>3382
But now all my friends are glued to their phones and I have no one to play with.

>>3377
>The classes with most internet access have very damage psyches (middle and upper)
I personally think that the damaged psyches of middle and upper class come from the fact that these classes do not have to deal with everyday struggles. In a sense I think that for poor people the goals are much more obvious since they live in a world where the satisfaction of basic needs is not taken for granted. Get a job, work hard so you can feed your kids and all that stuff. There is not enough time between this for philosophical discussions about the meaning of life.
Middle and upper classes on the other hand are living in a world where basic needs are always satisfied so now they have to look for a new meaning of life. And I think not all of them are successful.
I dont think this has something to do with the internet. People like Kurt Cobain for example didnt have a lot to do with the internet.

It's not the web, it's The System.
Look up Technological Slavery: Collected Writings. Tis could be eye-opening for some.

>>3395

Eh I feel like you need to look at this as an example:
So normal people in a big group of friends from work or school/frat etc hang out with each other all day everyday or whatever and only use phones as a tool to help maximize their connectivity to their IRL friends for the most part. If they are on their phones it is to connect to people they actually know.

Then on the flipside you have people like me who have IRL friends but we don't hang but maybe once or twice a week, and when we do hang they talk about soykaf I dont care that much about, and I ramble about functional programming, cryptography, infosec, politics that they don't care at all about.
When I go home from hanging out with my friends I feel like I could sitll talk til I was blue in the face about those topics, so what is the solution here? In the olden days you would have to deal with soykaf like this where you live in a smaller area, and my weird interests dont match up with their weird interests but we hang out by virtue of the fact that we are people in an specific physical area that have at least a sembalance of similarity.

Back in history you just make due with what friends you can get if you are interested in non-normative topics. Now you can get your fill from the internet.

So what does this actually mean? In my opinion the internet doesn't make people lonely or less social, in reality it is lonely/less social people that gravitate toward the internet in the first place because of the disjoint between the people around them and their interests.

i think this mostly has to do with how our current platforms are set up: if we seperate the layers of materiality of the data in soc. media sites like fb, the lowest layer_that is, the basic unchanging unit_is the individual. on fb for instance the individual is represented by the profile page and although there are 'groups' these really are nothing more than sets of relations between their atomized parts. our current networks fail to let us organize around any type of actual collective, which would be a group that is indivisible, that holds up as a digital object of its own.

what we really need are ways to collectively individuate, to "become" not just through strictly personal forms (although this is a necessary part) but through collective organization. this means a ground up reassembling of digital social structures.
what we have now = disindividuation.

>>3382
no. capitalist cybertime isnt some soykaf you can just opt out of, but a symbiotic machine process that restructures our space time and social relations. it is very much forced upon you. sure, maybe some can choose to live without their phones and soc. media, but this does nothing to stop capitals circuits of control from restructuring how we see the world.

Very interesting topic, the Unabomber wrote a ton about this.
Here's a compilation/book containing everything he ever wrote about

Kurzgesagt recently posted about this phenomenon about "Loneliness"

pretty interesting stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA

>>3377
Connections are not strengthened but weakened by the Internet, people have the freedom to chose who they discuss with, what information they get access to among other things, for most people, this translates to "I only want to see the things I like". This leads people to run away from things they dislike, and taken to the extreme this leads to social isolation

I wouldn't say it's necessary like this. I'm more introverted and a lot of contact I have with other human beings is through the internet. Without it, I would definetly feel more lonely because I wouldn't be outgoing anyway, I would just read books or something all day long.

Something that is interesting to think about is how our personalities change over time when we use text-based communication as our primary method of conversation.
The way we converse IRL and online are much more different from each other than people realize.

I'm very well networked in my city's hospitality scene and a learned extrovert through my job, but I have periods where I don't have any work and after using purely the internet for communication during those periods I have trouble adjusting back to fit in with regular conversation even though it was incredibly easy to present myself as enthusiastic and social before.

This happens fairly frequently and I can't help but to think about what will happen in the long term when I stray too far into either the normal person side or the wired side.

Won't say that you are completely wrong but there is more fault of a human mind there that just wants to see what he likes and remain isolated in real world. I am okay with occasional socialization and I might even like it (but just occasional ones, dude even some voice calls with my classmates make me exhausted) but people here are probably most toxic ones you might find in world so I end up isolating myself and shut in my room for months, I might change myself once I get some good job or admitted into a good university with a good environment, but for now, eff that

Back in the day, most social activities you did with people who didn't share your special interest, but since it was the only social activity you got, you learned to focus on and enjoy that aspect of it. Whereas your own personal interests were things you did alone, and then you learned to focus on and enjoy just that aspect of the time spent.

This changed when people suddenly had access to other people with a similar interest, as they got a preview of what it's like to be social with others who share your interest… but it's just a preview. You cannot actually progress this preview into something IRL as this person lives far away, has a completely disjoint set of friends, different culture or heritage, and is probably bound to that place by family, other friends and housing.
So being social with this other person has drawbacks: you can only meet a few times a month, it's extra costly, and you can't just meet spontaneously or accidentally. You can't really talk about personal issues related to people and events in your hometown without explaining it all. To make these things possible, one person has to move to where the other lives, or maybe go to a common university - which is a huge commitment with almost certified losses.

So what you have now is an acute awareness that you could have both things at once: a social life with people you share interests with. This overshadows both your social experiences (these people suck/are boring) and your interests (this is so lonely). Naturally you are drawn to the closest thing you know as "both" which is talking online, making your ever more aware. I wouldn't say that this is quite significant though, expect maybe for a few people predisposed to introverted behavior. To most people this is just some slice of their free time.

I wouldn't say people actually have it worse - the time we spend on entertainment, people back then would have done that if they could. The only difference is the extra awareness that we could have a better time than what we're having.

It is never right to blame the technology or tools, the people are always to blame. If you gave this technology to people that lived some decades ago most of them would not be glued to phones as it is now. So I think today's people are to blame for their misuse of technology.

>>3824
Technology does not spontaneously appear out of thing air, it is the conscious design of human beings. Smartphones are designed to be addictive, they are not "neutral."

>>3825
True but i believe it's people that are to blame for getting addicted to them, their flaw. Who doesn't use them like that and thinks for themselves, there are people like that.

capitalism

>>3827
I don't think it is fair to blame people for falling for something that was specifically designed to exploit their flaws. Maybe you might be able to convince yourself that you are somehow superior to them since you are not glued to your phone but it won't help you understand how and why they are glued to their phones.

What really needs to be addressed is the fact that despite all the efforts to bend the natural environment to the human will, all we ended up with is an artificial environment that is almost as hostile to human life as the original was.

>>3831
You are right. Really I was using it to say how it's about humans but not the technology but i just used it to justify myself when i too stare at a pc screen, maybe i wanted to just show this perspective but it won't help me to learn anything about these problems as you pointed out. Also your second point is really good. This is the point where some balance of urban and natural environment would be the best, since we today can spend time in nature comfortably and live in city, but city life only is not healthy physically nor mentally. I admit this way I only pretend I don't have the same problem. Thank you for helping me realise all this.

>>3379
Watching CGP Grey's video, I'm given the impression that another factor is that we can only process communication at some maximum rate, and this rate does not increase with the number of connections we have. Not that there aren't any issues arising from the way we conduct economics, but even ignoring that, the more technology allows you to easily connect with others, the more pressing the need to carefully parcel out the attention given to all those potential connections.

I'd say this also relates to people moving to smaller websites/secret clubs. If the average writing speed in a discussion is higher than your own reading speed, you can't say anything without taking the risk that you're just repeating what was already said. If social pressure exists to participate anyway, this can lead to a state much like the chatter of popular Twitch channels. Conversely, if this issue deters one from writing, then it makes activity self-limiting, and might even cause a community to burn out if people give up on being able to add to conversations.

https://ncase.me/crowds/ covers some related ideas, in that it explores the way having more connections within a group can prevent complex ideas from spreading between groups if we judge the state of the world by extrapolating from the set of people we directly interact with.

>>3716
>>3823
Also these. I guess fragmented attention and personal loneliness are intertwined but distinct problems to deal with?