Now this is the kind of comment I was hoping to find in this thread.
I'd like to highlight what I think is one of the more insidious "challenges we have to prepare ourselves for": bad-faith communicators.
I have faith in the ability of people to have a meaningful discussion given that all participants are taking part in "good faith". That is, I am trying to convey an honestly held idea or question using language to you, and you are trying to parse that communication in a manner to grasp my intended meaning. This is the hard problem in all communication as language is inexact and none of us perfect. But if we all buy in to this system, it's amazing at how well it works at building consensus and fostering useful debate. This good faith buy-in lies at the heart of functional democracy.
We all know that it's harder to communicate over the web. As OP mentioned, lack of eye contact and physical presence reduces the available bandwidth we have to get our point across. But the fact that we can talk to so many more people than before seems to make up for the deficiencies.
But we're seeing more and more bad-faith actors abusing this system. They don't want to explain a point so that it can be discussed and debated. They want to implant a thought or idea in an audience in order to alter behaviour in a way that benefits them. We're seeing nation states conducting manipulative campaigns against their rivals' (or their own) population. If you're a democratic nation this kind of campaign is tantamount to an attack against you (it's degrading your nation's capability to make the best decisions it can, doing real harm). But even if you're not a democracy, having a foreign nation convince your population something like COVID isn't real causes real-world harm to you.
Combined with our highly connected social media networks these attacks are growing increasingly effective. How does anyone fight this?
I'm somewhat cynical that education will turn out to be the solution. Is there really any way to train a population to spot and negate bad-faith communication with such proficiency that these attacks are nullified? When nations start hitting each other hard enough to do real damage, but not enough to unilaterally wipe each other out, my bet is that they're going to fall back to the historical solution for balancing power: demarcating zones of control, ie "borders".
...and this is why, despite sharing the same concerns as the author of the article, I think I still come down on supporting the decentralized web. We're in a unique point of human history where we can communicate irrespective of borders, and I would hate to lose that capability because of hordes of trolls. Maybe if we just keep the UX real shit we can avoid another eternal September? (only half joking)
I actually have a reversed view of what you say about good/bad faith. I think bad-faith communicators are a group small enough that if enough people actually had the ability to have meaningful discussions (which requires being able to focus on the communicative intent behind the words), then bad-faith communicators would be left without targets. I don't think the biggest obstacle to meaningful discussion is a lack of good faith or excess of bad faith or available technologies, but rather that communication is hard and most people suck at it, making it basically a game of confusion. I mean, for most topics we only come up with "rational" arguments in order to try to validate our own perspectives, but rarely think rationally about them. We have feelings and impressions, accumulated through our life experience, which help us develop our "intuition"... and I value intuition very highly, but it's also very often very wrong, and I personally find that almost everyone practices communication as a very lousy rationalization game of attaching bad arguments to honest intuitions. Large scale consensus is not possible under this situation, and in my opinion, changing this requires far more than good faith.
I'd like to highlight what I think is one of the more insidious "challenges we have to prepare ourselves for": bad-faith communicators.
I have faith in the ability of people to have a meaningful discussion given that all participants are taking part in "good faith". That is, I am trying to convey an honestly held idea or question using language to you, and you are trying to parse that communication in a manner to grasp my intended meaning. This is the hard problem in all communication as language is inexact and none of us perfect. But if we all buy in to this system, it's amazing at how well it works at building consensus and fostering useful debate. This good faith buy-in lies at the heart of functional democracy.
We all know that it's harder to communicate over the web. As OP mentioned, lack of eye contact and physical presence reduces the available bandwidth we have to get our point across. But the fact that we can talk to so many more people than before seems to make up for the deficiencies.
But we're seeing more and more bad-faith actors abusing this system. They don't want to explain a point so that it can be discussed and debated. They want to implant a thought or idea in an audience in order to alter behaviour in a way that benefits them. We're seeing nation states conducting manipulative campaigns against their rivals' (or their own) population. If you're a democratic nation this kind of campaign is tantamount to an attack against you (it's degrading your nation's capability to make the best decisions it can, doing real harm). But even if you're not a democracy, having a foreign nation convince your population something like COVID isn't real causes real-world harm to you.
Combined with our highly connected social media networks these attacks are growing increasingly effective. How does anyone fight this?
I'm somewhat cynical that education will turn out to be the solution. Is there really any way to train a population to spot and negate bad-faith communication with such proficiency that these attacks are nullified? When nations start hitting each other hard enough to do real damage, but not enough to unilaterally wipe each other out, my bet is that they're going to fall back to the historical solution for balancing power: demarcating zones of control, ie "borders".
...and this is why, despite sharing the same concerns as the author of the article, I think I still come down on supporting the decentralized web. We're in a unique point of human history where we can communicate irrespective of borders, and I would hate to lose that capability because of hordes of trolls. Maybe if we just keep the UX real shit we can avoid another eternal September? (only half joking)