Solarpunk

Yea, no thanks. I don't want things filtered based on what someone else thinks I should see.

That's why I stick with platforms where hardline communist teenagers can curate what I'm exposed to.

Without wanting to be too aggressive, with only that quote to go on it sounds like that person wants to live in a safe zone where they're never challenged, angered, made afraid, or have to reconsider their world view. That's the very definition of an echo chamber. I don't think you're meant to live life experiencing only "approved" moments, even if you're the one in charge of approving them. Frankly I don't know how that would be possible without an insane amount of external control. You'd have to have someone/something else as a "wall" of sorts controlling your every experience or else how would things get reliably filtered?

I'd much prefer to teach people how to be resilient so they don't have to be afraid of being exposed to the "wrong" ideas. I'd recommend things like learning what emotions mean and how to deal with them, coping/processing bad moments, introspection, how to get help, and how to check new ideas against your own ethics. E.g. if you read something and it makes you angry, what idea/experience is the anger telling you to protect yourself from and how does it match your morality? How do you express that anger in a reasonable and productive way? If it's serious who do you call? And so on.

The real question then becomes: what would you trust to filter comments and information for you?

In the past, it was newspaper editors, TV news teams, journalists, and so on. Assuming we can't have a return to form on that front, would it be down to some AI?

Our mind is built on that "malware". I think it's more accurate to compare brain + knowledge to our immune system: the more samples you have, the better you are armed against mal-information.

Learn to practice good mental hygiene.

I think the right approach would be to learn to deal with any kind of information, rather than to censor anything we might not like hearing.

Reminds me of Snow Crash by Nealyboi

I think most people already have this firewall installed, and it's working too well - they're absorbing minimal information that contradicts their self-image or world view. :) Scammers just know how to bypass the firewall. :)

Sounds like we're reinventing forum moderation and media literacy from first principles here.

Reading, watching, and listening to anything is like this. You accept communications into your brain and sort it out there. It's why people censor things, to shield others and/or to prevent the spread of certain ideas/concepts/information.

Misinformation, lies, scams, etc function entirely on exploiting it

Not really. An executable controlled by an attacker could likely "own" you. A toot tweet or comment can not, it's just an idea or thought that you can accept or reject.

We already distance ourselves from sources of always bad ideas. For example, we're all here instead of on truth social.

Nah man, curl that shit into my bash and let me deal with it

We already have a firewall layer between outside information and ourselves, it’s called the ego, superego, our morals, ethics and comprehension of our membership in groups, our existing views and values. The sum of our experiences up till now!

Lay off the Stephenson and Gibson. Try some Tolstoy or Steinbeck.

We already have a firewall its our thoughts. The information can nudge us but it's fighting an uphill battle against everything we already know and believe.

Leaving aside the dystopian echo chamber that this could result in, you could argue that this would help with fake news by a lot. Fake news are so easy to spread and more present than ever. And for every person there is probably that one piece of news that is just believable enough to not question it. And then the next just believable piece of news. and another. I believe no one is immune to being influenced by fake stories, maybe even radicalized if they are targeted just right. A firewall just filtering out everything non-factual would already prevent so much societal damage I think.

Hüman brain just liek PC, me so smort.

I remember watching a video from a psychiatrist with eastern Monk training. He was explaining about why yogis spend decades meditating in remote caves - he said it was to control information/stimuli exposure.

Ideas are like seeds, once they take root they grow. You can weed out unwanted ones, but it takes time and mental energy. It pulls at your attention and keeps you from functioning at your best

The concept really spoke to me. It's easier to consciously control your environment than it is to consciously control your thoughts and emotions.

I've thought about this since seeing Ghost in the Shell as a kid. If direct neural interfaces become common place, the threat of hacking opens up from simply stealing financial information or material for blackmail; they may be able to control your entire body!

In a way, the job of a teacher or journalist is to filter useful and/or relevant information for interested parties.

You are responsible for what you do with the information you process. You're not supposed to just believe everything you read, or let it affect you. We don't need some government or organization deciding what can be shown online. Read history and see what follows mass censorship.

Yes, lemmy too is that. We need to meet people and then form groups online. I had devised a solution for exchanging public keys in person and verifying each content thereafter with that key.

I mean, this is just called censorship. We censor things for kids and all kind of people in or lives all the time. We censor things for ourselves when we don’t feel like reading the news or opening a text from a specific person. This is not some novel concept.

I look forward to factchecker services that interface right into the browser or OS, and immediately recognize and flag comments that might be false or misleading. Some may provide links to deep dives where it's complicated and you might want to know more.

I wonder if maybe it's more apt a comparison to say that allowing raw comments to affect you in a strong way is like running a random program as root. To a certain extent you have to let this kind of harmful content in.

P.s. the short story sounds cool - is it available to read anywhere?