The web has walked a tightrope for the past two decades. Like a car that's accelerated to 300 miles per hour, there's an alternate reality where the road keeps going straight and doesn't crash. But, its unlikely, and I'm afraid we've driven off the road, irrevocably.
The idea that the internet is just a "town square" except "everyone on the planet" simply does not work. Period. Human behavior was never designed to scale like that; we can't handle the discourse, we can't handle using that power responsibly, or internalizing what we read responsibly.
Many are afraid of a rogue AI taking over the world. The internet, and social media specifically, is that AI. Every human is a neuron, programmable by exploiting flaws in human evolution, or even self-programmable by living in feedback bubbles where their own fears and doubts are amplified. Every human is an actor; capable of traumatic harm by executing on that programming and, say, storming the capital.
Even my fears about this reality we live in are a byproduct of the programming I've received via the sites I visit, and the feedback bubbles I decide to live in online.
I cannot believe that my programming, and the programming many of the people in this Hacker News bubble receive every day, is any more or less dangerous to the fabric of society than the programming the people on Parler received. I'm angry at what transpired in the Capital and on Parler. I'm angry at AWS, Google, and Apple for reacting the way they did. I'm scared that something like that could happen to the products I'm working on, even though that's crazy because I work on dumb data entry and not social media for revolutionists. My fear and anger comes from reactions to actions taken by other people who were scared and mad; their fear and anger came from reactions to actions taken by the left, from the right, from the left, from the right, this is the feedback bubble; not between revolutionists on Parler, but between Us and Them. Because, it is Us and Them; it shouldn't be, but it always has been. The comments I've seen here over the past few days just confirm this; Parler gets shut down then hacked, by-and-large we applaud it.
I think about the idea of the Great Filter, and I wonder if what we're seeing here is the most likely filter for civilization. What happens when you give a billion products of survival-focused evolution the ability to talk to each other, with no limits, filters, or self-control? What happens to society? I want to believe that, if a Filter exists, its at least something outside our control like a virus, or its something we did to ourselves like global warming. But, maybe its actually just Us. Maybe products of evolution can never work together well enough to reach any stage of science-fiction like enlightenment.
I no longer believe there's any course a company or government could take to stop this. Its happening too fast, and by the time anyone in power realizes how much damage this has done, and is doing, to our society, it will be too late. At the very least, we need to shut down Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, and every other platform which allows peer-to-peer broadcast-like communication between everyone on the planet. Even the act of me posting this and you reading it is part of the problem. But, that won't happen in the west.
I suppose the only course of action I can take is to remove myself from the equation. If everyone did that, then the world would be a better place. Not everyone will, but its the only step I'm capable of. I guess, to some degree, it was fun while it lasted.