Flash Mob Gone Wrong | Tom Scott | Ignite

You seem unreasonably grumpy... take a breath, chill out. I enjoyed the video and upvoted it - as did many others, clearly. It's of interest to hackers. Tom Scott is also "one of us" - a geek comedian. Probably one of the reasons why others have been upvoting this. You might enjoy this excellent video of his talk at Ignite a few years back: ▶ this video

I'm similarly unclear on what sort of response you expect. There weren't many comments when I replied. My criticism was tailored to a fairly specific phenomenon: asymmetrically imaginative doomsaying that appeals to a vivid vignette / sketch of an adjacent possible future featuring some hyperbolically elaborated extension of trending tech, like Flash Mob Gone Wrong[1] and Slaughterbots[2]. HN flagging and points are irrelevant to me. ____________________ [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link

These are some interesting points. You're absolutely right that the anonymous and distributed nature of 4chan means that the "/b/" entity can react to perceived slights (trolling, mockery) in a radically disproportionate way. If the individual provoker annoys /b/ with "strength" 1, and (e.g.) 10 000 /b/ denizens are each sufficiently annoyed to push back at the provoker with equal "strength" 1, that means that the reaction to the individual is profoundly out of proportion to the original attack. By a factor of thousands. It's like burning someone's house down with their family inside because they dented your bumper without leaving a note. But as you point out, few individuals were all that nasty - the culpability is distributed across a large, anonymous mob, with a few critical nodes, such as those persons who leaked the individual's contact information, or made prank phone calls to her work place. The crowd / mob dynamics gives massive strength to the anonymous group that is absolutely unmatched by the individual. Mob dynamics in physical space are understood well enough, and police have had various means of dealing with large groups of disorganized people in town squares and so forth. This is not the case for internet-distributed mobs, which are still relatively new. The process is like leaderless, decentralized, crowdsourcing of cruelty (cf. "Anonymous: because none of us is as cruel as all of us"). And of course, the greater the crowd, the greater the possibility of someo