@p

>https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/seeing-like-a-data-structure.html
That was an excellent article! Very nice blog aesthetics too.

Also got me very interested in the book he mentions "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott.

Lately I've been trying to understand why I myself used to think so much in this type of abstractions. It takes conscious effort to reject abstractions and understand how things work down to a human level. I was always doing it, even before I started to extensively use the net. I'd blame it on my eccentricities but then everybody else does it too.
There must be some psychological processes going on here that eventually manifests themselves in all human built systems from the polis to the world wide web. And it is probably the same reason so many people seem to prefer online interactions and parasocialization than irl encounters, zoomers seem to prefer porn than actual sex.

There are economic reasons too, because in order to get to these levels of dissociation and treating each others like numbers you need to be wealthy enough to shield yourself from the various indignities of normal interaction, the consequences of your actions.

There's also the political situation that plays a role here. I've been increasingly embedding myself in Russian online spaces for the past couple of years and the difference in conversational quality is huge. No matter the specific platform, from imageboards to niche forums, to mainstream social media people can discuss and disagree over matters that cannot be openly talked about here due to extreme bad faith from moderators and their protected groups. The actual quality of information shared is also for the most part above and beyond what you find on Western sites and above all it is *legible* as Schneier says.

I've been thinking for a year now that most online spaces have turned completely unintelligible with people just shouting opinions that don't even make sense outside the context they originally heard them from. You read a thread on an imageboard or forum and the posts make zero sense, like reading a foreign language or something.