As a follow-up, is there signs that the internet/technology may play a role in making a better society for all?
I’m old enough to have lived through the advent of the World Wide Web. I was so enthusiastic about the potential of these technologies. It was going to finally democratize information and do away with misinformation and pseudoscience, and promote critical thinking, freedom and democracy. I crafted an entire career around my optimism about this stuff. It’s now obvious in retrospect that none of that happened and we have collectively regressed on all those fronts. I’m not making a causal claim about damage that the internet might have done. I don’t know if this stuff would have happened anyway. But, it certainly didn’t deliver on the promise we were so excited about. IMO it all went wrong when we handed the keys to the whole thing over to commercial entities.
I’m guessing I’m probably slightly younger than you, but I’m still old enough to remember how things were before the web took everything over. I definitely agree with some of your point, but I think there’s some cause for optimism!
- finally democratize information - Information really is more democratized than any other prior time in human history. There is a bunch of bad information mixed in as well, but that doesn’t negate the benefits that the internet has brought in this regard. If I have the time and the motivation I can give myself a college level education just using free resources on the internet.
- do away with misinformation and pseudoscience - this is definitely a problem on the internet, but I think if we didn’t have the internet it would still be a problem. We have whole news networks that were founded specifically to pump out misinformation. That just happened to start around the advent of the internet but was not caused by it.
- promote critical thinking - yeah, I don’t think the internet has helped much on this front, but again I don’t think it has actually made it much worse. People are overall much more educated today than they were decades ago. Their ignorance is just also much more visible.
- freedom and democracy - the internet has enabled a new rise of fascism which is horrifying, but it has also enabled unprecedented coordination and strength in minority communities on a global scale. I think we would be much farther behind socially if the internet hadn’t appeared.
That’s also my perspective, speaking as someone who also remembers the early days of the Net.
How much can one attribute the skill of the worker to the tools available to them?
A hatchet can cut down a tree or kill a man. Do I attribute either action to the hatchet?
I see the forces as more or less balancing, while there are many other aspects that have happened in the same space of time.
I would argue that authoritarianism and neo feudalism are the inevitable outcome of the shift to venture capital, although the alternative of a military spending based economy is worse.
I think that the web had great potential to help, but I think that it has had that potential heavily damaged by the profit-oriented web 2.0. The vapid ad-and-clickbait-saturated web we’ve created is exponentially less knowledge-dense than it was before. We really do need to go back to a web that’s built by communities of people rather than profit-crazed tech giants.
I also feel like the bloating of CSS and HTML code, video-sizes, and uses of servers has been a bad idea. It feels like we’ve done these things for consumerist reasons rather than for genuine benefit.
video-sizes
I’m confused as to your meaning here. Current codecs are miles ahead of what we had in the past. Unless you mean typical resolution (eg. 4k, 8k, etc).
Yes, the codecs currently used are a good thing, and yes, I think 4k and 8k should just be left to downloading. I think videogame streaming should have shifted over to demo file formats years ago, so that your gameplay wouldn’t be sullied by video compression (very big issue for games like squad and tarkov, where everywhere is covered in woods.
I think it’s nuanced. The internet did democratize information and even societies. It allowed communication. Twitter was a key part of the Arab Spring but Facebook was used to spread misinformation during multiple genocides.
Really, when the web was young — “Web 1.0” — it was all decentralized and required some knowledge to use. Then, social media companies created closed networks and governments were able to fight back (or co-opt them). That was “Web 2.0” (which isn’t a technical term). I think it was a huge mistake. “Web 3.0” won’t ever involve the blockchain, which is useless except for naive people. But the concept of decentralized communication platforms is a good idea.
Basically, we need a better version of “Web 1.0” without the VCs, Monopoly money, and NFT horseshit. Give users control of who they follow, break up monopolies, and let censorious governments play whack-a-mole while still being able block harassers and bots.
Yeah. Web 2.0 was the beginning of the death of the democratized internet. When corporations took over, it all became about getting people addicted to platforms to then try to make money from those users, usually with targeted ads.
Web 1.0 was really the golden age, although that definitely also had its fair share of issues, like the majority of the internet relying on proprietary software like Flash or ActiveX plugins, although that isn’t much better nowadays with proprietary js running the web. Also pop-up ads weren’t exactly fun, and nowadays, sharing video is a lot easier, although it’s still mostly centralized to websites who have the capitol to host and distribute the video, like YouTube, TikTok, etc., which comes with the corporate issues.
I have hope in the fediverse, though.
I think the corporatization of the internet (marketed as Web 2.0) made making people addicted to platforms as the end goal. Best way to make people addicted to platforms is to piss them off, as Facebook showed with their psychological testing. Couple this with targeted advertisers being able to pay to promote their content over others, along with the fact that right wingers have more money to spend on this than left wingers (for obvious reasons), and it points to more authoritarian/fascist views becoming more prominent.
I think there’s hope with the fediverse, but I think it will take a lot of time to become more popular than the corporate internet. The corporate internet has been seen as the default for so many people for so long, so it will also take a lot of effort to kill it off.
Imagine the internet as you would dynamite. It is very powerful. You can use dynamite to clear land and build roads or kill others and take their stuff. The internet is simialar in different ways. It all depends on the bent of the users.
Pretty much like any tool can be used to do harm in fact.
The republic has already fallen you just can’t see it yet.
We see it. Right now the only thing to do is damage control. Eventually it won’t be enough and climate change or some other external force will bring us to an impasse. Until then it’s damage control and spreading the word.
The only thing to do is insist upon free speech and fight back against authoritarianism regardless of who or why.
For sure internet helped a lot for the rise of arab spring
