> Imagine if this was 20 years ago wondering whether ads would infect search engines or the web would be flooded with sites which are ads masquerading as actual content
Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process.
I guess it's similar to how a lot of white folks thought racism was over until Obama came along and brought the bigots out of the woodwork.
> lock away that toxic waste
The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.
> Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process.
Sure, maybe so. But now with hindsight we can see what happened and we should realize that it's going to happen again unless we do something.
> The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.
I think both bad and good are part of humanity. In a sense this "toxic" part is not that different from the part that leads us to, say, descend into drug addiction, steal when we think no one is looking, leave a mess for other people to clean up, etc. We can do these negative things on various scales, but when we do them on a large scale we can screw one another over quite egregiously. The unique thing about humans is our ability to intentionally leverage the good aspects of our nature to hold the bad aspects in check. We've had various ways of doing this throughout history. We just need to accept that setting rules and expectations and enforcing them to prevent bad outcomes is no less "natural" for humans than giving free rein to our more harmful urges.
Many of us - naively, in hindsight - really did hope this wouldn't happen at the scale it did, and were appalled at how many big players actively participated in speeding up the process.
I guess it's similar to how a lot of white folks thought racism was over until Obama came along and brought the bigots out of the woodwork.
> lock away that toxic waste
The jarring conclusion I keep trying to see a way around but no longer can is that the toxic waste is part of humanity. How do we get rid of it, or lock it away? One of the oldest questions our species has ever faced. Hard not to just throw up your hands and duck back into your hidey-hole once you realize this.