Holy crap that's frightening. I've thought about similar things before, but he puts it into words much better than I would have.
Its more than a little discouraging though that he doesn't really talk about what to do about it. He says that right now people over-react to quickly, and that we'll be quickly moving to not just an overreaction in hours, but in real time. That instead of "ShirtGate" or a "Dongle Joke", we'll have people enraged in real time, with methods for interacting with the situation. Its discouraging to hear someone talk about something that I fear we're approaching fairly quickly, and yet not have a single answer, and even sound somewhat excited to see it happen.
I'm a fairly big fan of Magic: The Gathering, and we've actually had this crop up a few times recently. Magic tournaments, today, get fairly large, a Pro Tour event is invite only, and draws about 250-350 players (I believe they're on the lower end now due to some recent changes, but I'm not sure). Grand Prix events, an open invitation tournament which awards Pro Tour invitations in addition to other prizes regularly draw 2000 players. These tournaments also get lived streamed, with a handful of players chosen every round to play on camera in front of thousands of players.
Unfortunately, I can't find a good source for it, but in the past year there was an incident at a Pro Tour in which a player did something suspicious and it was originally ruled to be an accident, but after several players approached the head judge (after it was loudly discussed on Twitter, of course), the decision was reversed and the player disqualified from the event (I believe this was Filipe at the PT in April, but I can't find a source for this other than my memory at the time). More recently, a player was in the top-8 of a 2800 player tournament spark outrage because he was a convicted sex offender. He was convicted of a terrible rape case a decade ago and has since served the time he was sentenced. After someone turned this up on the stream, much outraged was formed, and he currently has a lifetime ban from organized play of the game.
At the same time, a lot of people are confronting the fact that government organizations are sucking up as much data about everyone as they can get their hands on. Despite the dangers of that, it's the point not too far in the future when the sort of data available just to organizations with billion dollar black budgets is available to the normal consumer that really scares me. 20 years ago spokeo would have blown people's minds. A decade from now, I fully expect for $30 I can get a dozen internet handles for any given individual, along with an autogenerated list of posts that person has made that may spark controversy. Maybe I'll even be able to get real time data on the person, such as location or even a video feed. The ability to incite rage against a person will never have been this strong, and I suspect it will only get worse.
I completely agree with Tim Scott: this will only get faster, and it scare the shit out of me.
Holy crap that's frightening. I've thought about similar things before, but he puts it into words much better than I would have.
Its more than a little discouraging though that he doesn't really talk about what to do about it. He says that right now people over-react to quickly, and that we'll be quickly moving to not just an overreaction in hours, but in real time. That instead of "ShirtGate" or a "Dongle Joke", we'll have people enraged in real time, with methods for interacting with the situation. Its discouraging to hear someone talk about something that I fear we're approaching fairly quickly, and yet not have a single answer, and even sound somewhat excited to see it happen.
I'm a fairly big fan of Magic: The Gathering, and we've actually had this crop up a few times recently. Magic tournaments, today, get fairly large, a Pro Tour event is invite only, and draws about 250-350 players (I believe they're on the lower end now due to some recent changes, but I'm not sure). Grand Prix events, an open invitation tournament which awards Pro Tour invitations in addition to other prizes regularly draw 2000 players. These tournaments also get lived streamed, with a handful of players chosen every round to play on camera in front of thousands of players.
Unfortunately, I can't find a good source for it, but in the past year there was an incident at a Pro Tour in which a player did something suspicious and it was originally ruled to be an accident, but after several players approached the head judge (after it was loudly discussed on Twitter, of course), the decision was reversed and the player disqualified from the event (I believe this was Filipe at the PT in April, but I can't find a source for this other than my memory at the time). More recently, a player was in the top-8 of a 2800 player tournament spark outrage because he was a convicted sex offender. He was convicted of a terrible rape case a decade ago and has since served the time he was sentenced. After someone turned this up on the stream, much outraged was formed, and he currently has a lifetime ban from organized play of the game.
At the same time, a lot of people are confronting the fact that government organizations are sucking up as much data about everyone as they can get their hands on. Despite the dangers of that, it's the point not too far in the future when the sort of data available just to organizations with billion dollar black budgets is available to the normal consumer that really scares me. 20 years ago spokeo would have blown people's minds. A decade from now, I fully expect for $30 I can get a dozen internet handles for any given individual, along with an autogenerated list of posts that person has made that may spark controversy. Maybe I'll even be able to get real time data on the person, such as location or even a video feed. The ability to incite rage against a person will never have been this strong, and I suspect it will only get worse.
I completely agree with Tim Scott: this will only get faster, and it scare the shit out of me.