There’s a tendency in this heated political climate to simply reject people who are saying false things and to write off conspiracy theorists writ large.
But as the US approaches the third straight election in which misinformation — and the fight against it — is expected to play a role, it’s important to understand what’s driving people who don’t believe in US elections.
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I talked to O’Sullivan about the documentary, in which he has some frank and disarming talks with people about what has shaken their belief in the US. But he paints an alarming picture about the rise of fringe movements in the country.
Our conversation, conducted by phone and edited for length, is below:
WOLF: What were you trying to accomplish with this project?
O’SULLIVAN: So much of mainstream American politics now is being infected and affected by what is happening on what was once considered the real fringes — fringe platforms, fringe personalities.
And I think really what we want to do in this show is illustrate how these personalities may be pushing falsehoods, but they’re no longer fringe. This is all happening right now. And it is having a big effect on our democracy.
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it sucks so bad that the internet initially looked like this thing that would enlighten the world and allow for us as a species to make incredible gains in sciences and culture and morality. instead it seemed to do the opposite.
I feel like the Internet has gone through three distinct phases. The first phase was primarily driven by individuals and a small handful of businesses. Content was highly limited, but generally positive. Lots of niche communities formed and most things had a very amateur feel to them, but everything was new and interesting.
The second phase was the rise of big corporations and the almighty ad. This was the first arms race between ad tech and ad blockers and gave us such evils as the pop up and pop under. A lot of the early charm of the internet was lost here. Everything started to become much more polished and commercialized, but we also saw a rapid expansion of content and functionality. This phase was heavily driven by corporations, and most of the early individual content was killed at this time.
The last and current phase is the social media phase. It’s kind of a hybrid of the previous two. We have individuals generating most content again, but it’s controlled, filtered, channeled, and exploited for commercial gain by the corporations. This has somehow lead to things being worse as corporations discovered that catering to people’s worst impulses is the most profitable decision.
You’re forgetting the pre-Web internet: 99% students & academics. It was largely awesome. When you did get trolled, it was by someone who could spell and form a cohesive argument.
Yup I was there at the edge of that (about a year before Mosaic released on a Mac).
Aol added usenet in 93 and we got on a lot of college servers, also with FTP, gopher and a little later, Hotline. So much warez and shareware games! I was in 8th grade then, had a 14.4 modem and life was pretty great.
The current phase is equivalent to reality tv. Made with people you don’t have to pay much, if all, and run by faceless corporations.
honestly im talking a bit further back pre www when it was basically education institutions.
Gopher!
I honestly never got the hang of gopher. usually looked for an appropriate alt newsgroup.
Usenet and FTP were how we did it. Then we found Hotline in highschool (we had a Mac and a modem back then), and found some pretty sick servers to grab 3D software and games.
True story: I made a Gopher implementation that sits on top of Apache. When I first met my wife, this happened to come up in conversation, and they mentioned that being from Minnesota, they used Gopher a lot in school. I thus married the first woman who came along who knew what Gopher was.
Yeah OP is missing the whole pre-www era. I was on the internet with a modem and a BBS account long before browsers were a thing.
I’m not quite old enough to remember that first phase you are talking about, but I’m well old enough to remember the other two, and frankly, during them I don’t think the independent niche communities really ever went anywhere. But they are really dying or dead now, and it was discord that killed them.
Only those seeking enlightenment or open to it will find it anywhere. The internet has done more to pierce echo chambers. Than any other invention of the last 200 years.
The problem is. It was dropped onto a largely unprepared populous. That was born into propaganda, misinformation, and confirmation bias. Without the skills to move beyond it by design. They vault over the enlightenment at their feet. Working hard digging through mountains of shit to find things to confirm their biases.
I was about to say the same thing applies to AI. But AI is fucked right out of the gate. There’s not even a brief window of hope for it being used to better society. Anyone with any awareness on the topic knows these AIs are already corrupted and compromised because they’ve been using the Internet to train all their LLMs.
Well if you go back to the use of algorithms they did have this massive potential but they all to quickly got involved with advertising and social media and yeah. it was yuck already at that point. But like computer vision and such gave it so much promise.
algorithms could help people. they could, for example, help you find relaly cool obscure stuff on netflix/spotify that you might like. They worked like this for awhile and ti was great!
But that doesn’t make money. the algorithm that shoves netflix’s latest trash content does, so that is why it shows up in every suggestion an takes up so my screen space. the vast majority of my spotify ‘feed’ is podcast trash i have never or never ever will listen to, and i can no longer use it to find some obscure band playing weird music like I did 8 years ago.
Have you actually used them? I’ve been shocked at how well they respond to almost everything I’ve thrown at them. From my experience, they give accurate medical advice, they demonstrate appropriate emotional intelligence, they are good at coding, they give sound advice, they’re good at summarizing, they can write complicated papers on niche topics, the list goes on. I’ve never encountered something controversial or offensive, nor anything bigoted, or racist, or ignorant, or elitist, etc. LLMs are shockingly robust and, quite frankly, incredible at what they do.
Yes, I’ve used them. And for some things they are okay (for example, their responses on programming questions can be hit or miss).
But given that there have been active disinformation campaigns and election meddling attempts (with several countries being both the victims and the perpetrators of this), I’m not convinced they will be reliable on some topics. Not least because the companies behind them have been slow to take the topic of information fidelity seriously.
Uh… where did you get that idea from?
The internet has allowed greater collaboration, and the faster spread of information.
It has also allowed the village idiots to find each other and band together…
Trash in, trash out
While true, the bigger problem is how many people would rather believe the trash because it gives them someone to be angry at instead of learning empathy for other people.
I was more referring to the unfortunately naive hope that came from the early Internet. I am reminded of this quote by Charles Babbage,
I was also hopeful, but I now realize how silly that was.
It was easy to be hopeful because in the beginning it was fucking magical and then just got better and better until capitalism got involved and sunk their teeth into the veins of love and hope and sucked it dry until its dead decaying husk and then zombified by AI.
Exactly, and early on it was being led by people with radical ideas. Things like Wikipedia shouldn’t exist, but crazy people who believed in humanity and the free exchange of information made stuff like that.
Eventually the internet replaced the commons, but capital sees the commons merely as unclaimed land so they outcompeted it then enshittified it.
The solution is unfortunately we have to make normie friendly options. A home server is that just works and is cheap and easy seems like exactly the sort of shit that could help. Federation may very well be the solution
those people also believed in freedom.
not social control.
more and more and more the internet is become about social control. especially in totalitarian states, but also in the west more and more.
It always starts with the marketeers…
Then we are the garbage bin.
The internet wasn’t on the 1%s leash back then. We can’t be free, even digitally. To dangerous to allow such feelings in the wage slaves.
Because the 1st wave of people on the internet were nerds and geeks. People driven by hope and optimist to make the world a better place and using the internet to do things they were already inclined to do… learn and share. You had to read, and write and things were generally long form interactions. Chat rooms required that you write sentences and paragraphs. It was also largely hosted by universities and other non-profit interests. The philosophy of Open Source and Freesoftware was rampant in the 2000s, and then declined as the big 5 took over the internet.
Now the internet is driven by corporate greed and the exploitation of the LCD’s lazy monkey-brain interactions. EVerything now is a blurb, a meme, a click, a reaction emoji. A 8 min youtube video is ‘too hard’ now for the average internet user.