Who Broke The Internet? With Tim Wu | Why Is This Happening? – Ep 5 | MSNBC

From the rise of fake news and the troll farms pumping it out to the harvesting of our Facebook data by groups like Cambridge Analytica, Chris Hayes knows the internet feels pretty crappy these days. In this episode, Hayes examines how something once seen as a miracle of human connection became a free-for-all frenzy to get your clicks, and marvels at the lengths companies will go to keep your eyes to your screens. These are the ideas Tim Wu has spent a career, and two books, exploring. So, when we ask what created the conditions for this environment and angst surrounding our experience with the internet, we turn to Tim.
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Who Broke The Internet? With Tim Wu | Why Is This Happening? – Ep 5 | MSNBC

15 comments

    1. @casey massey It doesn’t…
      But if one’s 46 minute video has a line animation that restarts every few seconds as its *only* visual component, one can expect that minutia, however irrelevant, will be noticed.
      Indeed, if you stared at your screen for any more than a minutes and did NOT notice this, your capacity for visual discernment of potentially useful details should be questioned. Which is my message to either the artist, or the editor of this video who flipped the .GIF image without realizing it made a difference. Maybe his mom dresses him, or something.

  1. MSNBCannibals’ pedofile oligarch controllers not getting what they ordered trying to steer the American people to embrace MSNBCannibalHolocaust Agenda

  2. For social media to work, there has to be some equivalent to the consequences we face in real life when we interact with others. When people act in real life like they do on the Internet, they get punched in the face, lose friends, ruin relationships, get arrested, get sued, etc. There are no such consequences on-line. We need to work that out.

  3. I’ve been imagining for a while now what it might be like to have government-run Facebook that requires real ID to sign up to make people accountable for what they say/post. I would love to have a Facebook where I could easily find and talk to people in my community. Unfortunately I don’t trust people not to use it against others to discriminate, shame, or worse. Then, when I’m done dreaming of utopias and Carebears, I just wish the internet would break and bad people would go away!

  4. The one concern I have about Tim Wu”s brand of neutrality is that he opposes a technology called “caching” that would speed up delivery of all internet content. Companies like Akamai already provide that kind of service, which stores local copies of highly demanded content so that user requests for that content don’t require the content to be retransmitted over the internet backbone. By reducing competition for backbone bandwidth, ALL content is sped up… a “win win win” for users, large content suppliers, and small content suppliers. Wu’s extreme form of neutrality would keep everyone slower than necessary in order to keep everyone at the same speed… a “lose lose lose” result.

  5. There’s been a major missing piece to Chris Hayes’ techno-utopia dream, that’s been feasible since the early computer age (1960s), that Chris never learned about. It’s an “industrial strength” voting method for aggregating voters’ preferences to make collective decisions (typically which one of many candidates to elect to a public office). It’s a truly majoritarian method based on two fundamental principles that are rarely taught: (1) Preferences are relative; for example a voter can believe Biden is better than Trump and also believe Warren is better than Biden. (2) There’s more than one majority when there are more than two alternatives; for example a 55% majority may believe Biden is better than Trump, a 54% majority may believe Warren is better than Trump, and a 53% majority may believe Warren is better than Biden. An industrial strength majoritarian voting method would count all the majorities by using the information in each voter’s “order of preference” vote, and then construct the order of finish a piece at a time by considering the majorities one at a time, from largest majority to smallest majority, placing each majority’s more-preferred alternative ahead of their less-preferred alternative in the order of finish. This voting method, known as Maximize Affirmed Majorities (MAM), would tend to settle issues in a way similar to the collective choices that the voters themselves would make in a direct democracy, and would quickly end political polarization. MAM would minimize “spoiling” and thus make it unnecessary for political parties to winnow their candidates using primary elections. It would make politicians much more responsive to voters’ preferences on many more issues, and less responsive to the preferences of wealthy special interest minorities like Wall Street and defense contractors.

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