There are people who've built their entire identities around convincing themselves and others that the world is getting worse, when the problem is just that they're getting older and less relevant. Cory Doctorow is doing it to the Internet and Jane Jacobs did it to cities.
@Colinvparker Yeah, and I'm still not going to NIMBY new construction. At the time my parents complained to me about Ramat Aviv NIMBYs blocking the redevelopment of Sde Dov, they were the same age, give or take a year, as Jane Jacobs when she published The Death and Life.
@Alon@Colinvparker not about the communities but about the owners of the silos and the anti-humanity algorithms they refuse to solve.
After seeing FB used to derail democratic elections, the Brexit vote, fire up the Rohingya pogroms and used as a terror effect multiplier for the Netanyahu massacre, I think Doctorow's criticism is quite relevant.
@ia42@Colinvparker The Facebook-Rohingya link is a great example of what I'm talking about. Burma denaturalized the Rohingya in 1982. The junta was brutally oppressive toward all minorities, but especially bad toward the Rohingya. Present-day Rohingya human rights activists don't even talk about the role of Facebook in the genocide, it's just not that important. But to the techbloggers, Facebook is all that matters; they don't even bother speaking to Rohingya human rights activists.
@Alon the thing that stuck me in Cory Doctorow’piece about tech and disruption is how little the EU is mentioned. Just as DMA and DSA are in full swing.
@thias Yes, and likewise, Jane Jacobs' urbanism is both internationally incurious (to the point that Israeli urbanists who like her have to asterisk her claims about garden city urbanism, which has been successful in Tel Aviv) and indifferent to big issues like racism, fair housing, etc. The Death and Life is a paean to the era of cold water tenements; Doctorow's oeuvre is a paean to the era when everyone on the Internet was a middle-class first-worlder used to jank.
@Alon Unfollowing because you don't know what you're talking about. Cory Doctorow is one of the few people I admired in college who is possibly more relevant and effective today than he was around the turn of the millennium. He has continued to learn and tackle issues that aren't identical to his past areas of interest, such as the climate crisis. He continues to crystallize concepts for easier communication. He continues to actually do stuff instead of resting on his laurels.
@skyfaller Complaining about how the Internet is getting worse because it's accessible to people outside his core audience of technically adept users who are used to jank is not actual relevance. The online spaces he loves (like this one, frankly) feel stuck in early-2000s techblogging; everyone else bypasses them, and they seem uninterested in the world (as I keep pointing out, I write more Rohingya human rights content here than I read and it's like a tertiary interest for me).
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