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I think I hate the internet

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Re: I think I hate the internet

#31

Post by viccis »

roenxi wrote: post #6

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to... There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can. Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by…

I think you are ignoring McLuhan's very very famous point ("the medium is the message") which is that new forms of media do more than just allow us to extend ourselves in new ways; they change our mindset by enabling those new capabilities. It's not so much what we're using the media to communicate as it is what kind of communication that medium encourages. Television had disastrous consequences on what would seem to be unrelated behavior [1], including an increase in general antisocial behavior among children.

1: https://justinharter.com/my-god-it-was-awfulmy-husband-and-i...

Re: I think I hate the internet

#32

Post by t43562 »

grebc wrote: post #3

The internet isn’t the web/social media. People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame. Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.

I have to insert a quick joke: "guns don't kill people - people kill people."

Re: I think I hate the internet

#33

Post by pjc50 »

mrweasel wrote: post #28
pjc50 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cars Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.

While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.

Oh, indeed. There's been a real public reversal in tolerance for open racism, over the past (see date) almost exactly 25 years.

This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#34

Post by zip77 »

boesboes wrote: post #20
michael0church wrote: post #9

The “good” news is that, if LLMs really do reach AGI, and if we still live under this same economic system that ruined the Internet, there won’t be this decades-long grieving process. It will be a short one, if we’re aware of it at all.

please end the suffering XD

seconded -- end it here and now :)

Re: I think I hate the internet

#35

Post by hypfer »

The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.

Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.

It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#37

Post by pjc50 »

derbOac wrote: post #24
arjie wrote: post #16

Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff: > I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable No one is going to connect you to a network fro…

I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires. Sure you can still go into a physical loc…

We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#38

Post by lolakutty »

Gareth321 wrote: post #22

I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store. On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest…

Internet and 24x7 connectivity is like humanity collectively having a seizure.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#40

Post by JKCalhoun »

hypfer wrote: post #35

The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that. Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape. It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even tho…

And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up).

It's perhaps why I loathe it so much.

For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)

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