The Internet has failed - Important warnings regarding social media abuse and our future

[Pluvious]

Whew !!

This was a hard-hitting read, I'm compelled to share this forward with DU.

I was an early evangelist of the nascent internet back in the 90's, and reading this was a sobering and troubling read. Tho I've been coming to realize of the recent years, something's very wrong been going on, now abundantly clear with the CA/Russian/Trump debacle of 2016.

This presentation from SXSW keynote really breaks it down, but also lays out a plan and path to redemption

This should be required reading for all of us !!

In The New Yorker’s Feb. 25, 2019 report titled “Private Mossad for Hire,” Uzi Shaya, a former senior Israeli intelligence officer, said, “Social media allows you to reach virtually anyone and to play with their minds. You can do whatever you want. You can be whoever you want. It’s a place where wars are fought, elections are won, and terror is promoted. There are no regulations. It is a no man’s land.”

Here is a quote from [Sir] Tim Berners-Lee, who drew the original diagram for the world wide web on a napkin, and who now has Dr. Frankenstein’s remorse.

“We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places. [The Web] has ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform — a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

By now, it is clear that what was begun as a mission to connect and unite mankind has mutated into a pernicious distortion machine that has disconnected mankind and put us at each other’s throats, and in doing so has destroyed and is destroying institutions and knowledge that have taken centuries to develop.

To stay human, to survive as a species, we have to wrest our communications out of the control of the lust for power, the avarice, larceny, hubris, deceit and self-delusion of the heads of Google and Facebook.

SO MUCH MORE at:
http://buzzbands.la/2019/03/13/t-bone-burnetts-keynote-speech-at-sxsw-dire-warnings-vs-the-goal-of-art-to-create-conscience/

[DontBooVote]

1. I was an idealistic child of the 60s/70s who dreamed of things like communicators (nod to

Star Trek) which we call cell phones. When I would write pen pals in Africa and Spain, I would dream of a way we could communicate and learn from each other that didn't involve stamps and wide gulfs of time in response to one another. And I was very excited by the advent of the Internet.

Today, I lament their very existance. I despair at the complete failure of both to unite the world and long for the days of stamps and the opportunity to think through each and every word, because it would be a while before a response arrived. If it was really important, perhaps a long-distance call was in order. But it has to be important and, when it was, the cost of a call was always a consideration.

I hate to say this, but the genie is out of the bottle and the chance for redemption has slipped beyond our reach. And we, and certainly our children, will suffer the consequences.

[smirkymonkey]

2. Kicking for later reading!