highlights & comments

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  one persistent dark side of industrialization is that any skill, no matter how difficult to acquire, can become obsolete when the machines improve.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  But once you have the basics of a given technological leap in place, it’s always important to step back and focus on the people for a while.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  The fancy web 2.0 designs of the early twenty-first century start off by classifying people into bubbles, so you meet your own kind. Facebook tops up dating pools, LinkedIn corrals careerists, and so on.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Facebook Is Similar to No Child Left Behind

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  To get online in those days you usually had to have an academic, corporate, or military connection, so the Usenet population was mostly adult and educated. That didn’t help. Some users still turned into mean idiots online. This is one piece of evidence that it’s the design, not the demographic, that concentrates bad behavior.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Those who disagree with the ideology of violation are said to subscribe to a fallacious idea known as “security through obscurity.” Smart people aren’t supposed to accept this strategy for security, because the internet is supposed to have made obscurity obsolete.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  There will always be a new exploit, because there is no such thing as perfect security

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Based on those data, you could conclude that it isn’t exactly anonymity, but transient anonymity, coupled with a lack of consequences, that brings out online idiocy.

  3 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.

  3 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  The Beacon episode cheered me, and strengthened my sense that people are still able to steer the evolution of the net. It was one good piece of evidence against metahuman technological determinism. The net doesn’t design itself. We design it.

  3 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Christof Dorner

    Facebook Beacon

    3 months ago
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

  3 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  One of the first printed books that wasn’t a bible was 1499’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or “Poliphili’s Strife of Love in a Dream,” an illustrated, erotic, occult adventure through fantastic architectural settings.

  3 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share

  • 
    Christoffer Klang

    Wait, so porn was not only the reason for internet becoming a thing, but also books?

    2 months ago
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  People, not machines, made the Renaissance

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  We are accused of fearing change, just as the medieval Church feared the printing press

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  People already tend to defer to computers, blaming themselves when a digital gadget or online service is hard to use.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Whenever a computer is imagined to be intelligent, what is really happening is that humans have abandoned aspects of the subject at hand in order to remove from consideration whatever the computer is blind to

  3 months ago · Like · 1 like · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Chess and computers are both direct descendants of the violence that drives evolution in the natural world, however sanitized and abstracted they may be in the context of civilization

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us, but we cannot look away.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  The digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality.

  3 months ago · Like · 1 like · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  As long as you are not defined by software, you are helping to broaden the identity of the ideas that will get locked in for future generations

  3 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  We have to think about the digital layers we are laying down now in order to benefit future generations. We should be optimistic that civilization will survive this challenging century, and put some effort into creating the best possible world for those who will inherit our efforts.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors.

  3 months ago · Like · 2 likes · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

  3 months ago · Like · 2 likes · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Lock-in makes us forget the lost freedoms we had in the digital past.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Science removes ideas from play empirically, for good reason.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Because computers are growing more powerful at an exponential rate, the designers and programmers of technology must be extremely careful when they make design choices.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  The web as it was introduced was minimalist, in that it assumed just about as little as possible about what a web page would be like

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith.

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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction

  3 months ago · Like · 0 likes · Share
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  Christof Dorner highlighted

  The words in this book are written for people, not computers.

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