iyo did the internet ruin the world?

did electricity ruin the world

the Internet was good and has become bad, but this was inevitable so the badness was baked in from the start so perhaps it actually was always bad. but the badness is largely due to human selfishness and inability to organise and regulate large scale projects for the benefit of all so in fact the badness is in us and the internet is just a useful tool we have misused.

how could the internet have been designed so it didn't go bad?

Remove all comment sections.

how could the internet have been designed so it didn't go bad?

― ledge, Tuesday, 25 June 2024 16:15 (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think that if social media companies + Google had been heavily regulated or even publicly owned (I know, "which public?") from the start then we would be in a much better place today.

The internet is good because it draws shitheads out into the light.

Voted 7 of course, it’s either a) mankind is tainted by original sin and therefore incapable of doing good without God’s grace, or b) capitalism

capitalism ruined the world

capitalism ruined us, the world is going to be fine

how could the internet have been designed so it didn't go bad?

keep the money out of it

in other words, map otm

I hesitated between 2 and 4 and went with the latter. But maybe that's just a case of "not a day goes by...".

How would climate change be going in a non-internet world? I think it would probably be at the same level, possibly worse.

my personal hunch is that it's been a climate change accelerant but i'm sure there are lots of papers on that that i don't want to read lol. delivery infrastructure is hyper in ways it wasn't before thanks to the internet, right? i have this vague feeling that it's probably led to fewer nation-state wars, but that blood is still feeding the machine, just in new ways.

I think like hyper delivery infrastructure is not necessarily due to the net, but globalization in general, which also conveniently sort of “ended” the primacy of the nation state.

im not even sure the world is bad, let alone worse

everyone is just older and imagines more innocent carefree days

like every generation

Every technological innovation has hastened humanity's ruination (beginning with the advent of agriculture/sedentism). As map says, the world will be a-ok as long as nukes aren't a factor in the inevitable extinction of humanity.

capitalism. it's capitalism.

The beginning was the end : the truth about de-evolution

im not even sure the world is bad, let alone worse

everyone is just older and imagines more innocent carefree days

like every generation

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Tuesday, June 25, 2024 9:19 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i agree with this more and more. suffering has known so many forms and has always been overwhelming, who's to say it's better or worse now?

i mean speaking as someone who was 18 years old and trans in 1994, saying the world is "worse" is something of a broad statement

the world is kind of a big place

im not even sure the world is bad, let alone worse

everyone is just older and imagines more innocent carefree days

like every generation

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac), Tuesday, June 25, 2024

What I've been noticing more lately is younger people being, if anything, more pessimistic about the state of the world than anyone able to remember carefree days.

This might also have always been the case tho.

Anyway yeah, I think of AI, right wing populism, misinformation, etc as problems of our age in the same way as every era has its own. Climate change tho...feels like it's something bigger than that, and that even existential terrors of yesteryear (nuclear war, for instance - not that that couldn't still happen!) are inadequate as points of comparison. And it does indeed affect the entire big place, tho obv the regions already fucked over by our current system most.

"carefree days" lol, look at all the shit that hasn't killed me yet more like

There are parallel tracks of pessimism.

First world problems - even as so many things (socially in domestic terms and internationally in general - eradication of diseases, lower global rates of hunger) are objectively better, the prevailing sense (in the US) is that this is as good as it gets, the myth/idea of eternal progress was popped. The best our leaders will promise is to partially obstruct the speed with which life gets shittier. Life in a declining empire - rising tides do not life all boats under capitalism, you can't maintain the US/western standard of living without holding down significant parts of the world.

Then there are nukes and climate change - I hate when people dismiss pessimism as eternal millennarianism, 'every generation has feared the end of the world.' The possibility of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan opening up a hole in the ozone layer and the reality of boiling oceans are pretty different from fearing the Antichrist IMO.

to whom

Well, people are dying right now because of climate change and millions will die yearly in the near future, whereas the Antichrist has yet to put in an apperance. Pretty much the same, really.

millions of people have certainly died based on what was happening around the antichrist and associated questions, and whatever similar version of associated questions were being raised locally at whatever time

fundamentally those were resource and territory wars too, regardless of whether your steering committees were druids or bishops or climatologists

im not sure it made a lot of difference to them how real you think it was in the end, is kinda my point

who knows what anyone will think of the major issues of our time in half a millenium, if indeed theres anyone to think of it at all (nb, ftr and tbvc this is not about denying that climate change is real in any way, its about people always having shit they can't control hanging over their existence- its a human condition and always has been)

"iyo did the printing press ruin the world?"

*laughing at AI slop account on X (formerly known as twitter)* The internet is good overall and should still exist

People aren’t dying because forces are fighting about the existence of climate change, they’re dying because of climate change. Heatstroke and death by smoke inhalation aren’t caused by a debate turning to swordplay.

No one has died courtesy of the Antichrist, because the Antichrist isn’t real.

The possibility of wiping out humanity is new - famines were localized, diseases moved slowly (and when the Black Death raged, half the world was unreachable).

Handwaving away the idea that pessimists might have a point because suffering and fear are part of the human condition ignores that the human condition changed a great deal with intercontinental flight… and intercontinental missiles.

luckily nobody is handwaving that away

handwaving away the actual question - is shit worse because of x- isnt, to me, much better than telling peasant jakob f, killed under a pike in 1345, that the shit that killed him wasnt real tbh

and i cant and wont keep adding "yes the capacity for damage gets greater every generation" just tbc, thats baby-obvious stuff

It's not The Internet it's what unregulated capital has done to the internet, and what it has used the internet to do.

did electricity ruin the world

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 25 June 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Well no, but cars might?

and i cant and wont keep adding "yes the capacity for damage gets greater every generation" just tbc, thats baby-obvious stuff

well sure but the philosophical serenity that this is the case doesn't help things feeling less fucked to me anymore than the inexistence of the antichrist helps Jakob F

ah look if the point of the exercise is to make you feel better *today* then im not sure anyone itt is out to help you, not sure why id be singled out tho

also mods

can you please amend that to j_____ f_______ i already regret the indiscretion

It's not The Internet it's what unregulated capital has done to the internet, and what it has used the internet to do.

― This is Dance Anthems, have some respect (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Wednesday, June 26, 2024 5:10 AM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think this is it.

Liked this short post. Maybe this is how we get the internet back.

https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/fuck-up-ai

i keep thinking the next opioid crisis - uh other than the one still happening now - is going to be legal sports betting thanks to the internet. millions of dudes losing their jobs and homes because of their love for basketball or whatever. there are just so many ways that the internet can end up killing people because there are no laws to stop it. like, "the dark web". the government here doesn't even know what it is let alone have a way to stop what its doing. the whole thing is a runaway train. those show hearings where old men pretend to be mad about google are just the jokiest of jokes. there is a science and tech cabinet position but no dedicated internet czar or agency that controls the damn thing? or maybe there is. doesn't seem like there is.

the actual question - is shit worse because of x-

Well it is mainly a breeding ground for nazis and bots

scott otm about sports betting, it is absolutely unreal what's happening atm, and it isn't just betting; so much of online interaction is gamified, death by a thousand microtransactions and so on

I feel like I say this too often, and not just about the internet, but (to echo Scott): it seems ridiculous that modern technologies or processes that can drastically alter the lives of millions or billions of people don’t have a board to check them and shut them down if necessary

Instead we get a pathetic catch up effort every time

God forbid someone invents time travel, though you could argue that we’d probably know if that happened

well the problem there is that governments are no longer in charge of jack shit as far as tech goes

The Internet was good until social media came along, which opened pandora's box and inside a comments section that stretched to infinity.

Per what I know of the early Internet, from the start it attracted and amplified people's worst tendencies. Social media only lowered barriers to entry and strapped jet engines to those tendencies.

yeah early internet was if anything even more nihilistic and weird than what we have now, at least now it's useful for a ton of reasons, I mean you can't discount just how efficient it's made people's lives

i agree that now between AI and everything getting quickly Nazified things are teetering towards 'bad' but I feel like that latter part has always been true of the internet to some extent, difference was it was mostly teenage boys online and not like actual Congressmen

in general, i'm pro technology and long arc of technology curving towards awesome but
re: guns, cars, social media being distinctly ruinous and toxic tech, who can't concede that?

so in the same way the advocate revoked peter thiel's gayness, can we revoke social media's identity as The Internet?

good lord

PETER THEIL IS STRAIGHT NOW? woah big if true

Riffing on the Advocate

i also think we are only at the dawn of the synthetic drug revolution. i can imagine completely normal-looking websites selling pills 1000X stronger than fentanyl or weed or stimulants and nobody will know what they are and they won't be illegal because they are unknowns and if they do get shut down they will just call them something else and start over. i go to the bong/lottery/cigarette/soda store next to my store and i stare at the gallon jugs of kratom and industrial-sized tanks of nitrous for sale and...i don't know what to think! nobody knows what's in them. how safe they are. that synthetic weed that people sell, the k2/spice stuff. its all so gross. and it really is just the beginning. and the internet sells massive quantities of unknown/untested drugs. its crazy. there is nobody who can control that. there is no way to do it. and its all because of the internet.

difference was it was mostly teenage boys online and not like actual Congressmen

How many of those teenage boys grew up to become members of Congress? Or assume other influential positions under capitalism as we know it?

One difference is the teenage nazis were by and large hanging out in their own forums, and if you ran a forum you could kick them out. In the social media era everyone ended up in the same spaces, and even if you curate your feed there's a lot more spillover.

Pre social media internet was where I'd go to read and talk to people who shared my interests, post social
media internet became reading and talking to EVERYONE, with a special focus on people I hate.

Not saying those nazis would've nec remained obscure without it, they were probably on their way to becoming members of congress regardless.

a lot more people in my sphere brainwormed in the internet age which is some of what spawned this poll (though the hyperbolic title was more of a parody of "iyo did facebook ruin the internet?" thread of years ago).

the amount of time we spend on it has drastically increased too, like kids got made fun of growing up for spending all day "on the computer", there are large numbers of people who spend unhealthy amounts of time in these dopamine-hit seeking sites and it can kinda warp your brain after a while. that happened to me during the pandemic after public health messaging started to falter and I started seeking information from experts.

was kinda like eating a giant Tootsee roll that is 99% sugar, 1% raw fetid shit

i also think we are only at the dawn of the synthetic drug revolution. i can imagine completely normal-looking websites selling pills 1000X stronger than fentanyl or weed or stimulants and nobody will know what they are and they won't be illegal because they are unknowns and if they do get shut down they will just call them something else and start over. i go to the bong/lottery/cigarette/soda store next to my store and i stare at the gallon jugs of kratom and industrial-sized tanks of nitrous for sale and...i don't know what to think! nobody knows what's in them. how safe they are. that synthetic weed that people sell, the k2/spice stuff. its all so gross. and it really is just the beginning. and the internet sells massive quantities of unknown/untested drugs. its crazy. there is nobody who can control that. there is no way to do it. and its all because of the internet.

― scott seward

just wait until you see what happens with ozempic

childish gambino to thread

Writing in Pandora.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/evil/images/7/74/Pandora%27s_Box.jpg

I guess I'll go to bat for one thing on social media, I think the memes people are making these days are ace, so many shitposting groups I'm in are constantly cranking out stuff that makes me laugh, there's a cleverness to a lot of the stuff that reminds me of prime Simpsons but even weirder. I don't think humor that abstract really existed before then. maybe I'm wrong but I'm kind of fascinated by the idea of beaming some shit 200 years into the past and seeing if they can understand at all why future humans found it funny.

200 years?! a lot of memes you could go back two years and people wouldn't understand why future humans find it funny

except when cats are involved, 1820s people would still get those

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Capitalism is just a more efficient way of organizing power-and-wealth seeking behavior, but humans living in large groups all tend to organize themselves in terms of power-and-wealth seeking behavior. The internet is just the newest and most efficient way of amplifying human and social design flaws. The world is still OK because it is much better designed than we are.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.