The internet is already over

This guy's slurping the slop off the top of the mob and complains it's fecal and watery, while invoking alchemy to try to explain why.

There's more deep, weird, genuinely interesting stuff than ever, just usually not on twitter. Actually, yeah, the author is conflating Web 2.0 with the internet.

Definitely an entertaining read, so in that matter it "won" its place here. Now in regards to the actual content I am torn.

On one hand you could say he is bored, bitter, "old" dude who is tired from keeping up with the advancements and declares the end of progress.

On the other hand, you could argue that there is some genuine insight there. Internet is not an internal part of being a human. I even subscribe to the idea that it many ways it goes against being a human (social and physical detachment, desensitized emotions). And in the end of the day, no matter what is said and done on the internet, our existence is primarily physical.

Maybe the internet will not die, but maybe there is a regression to the mean. It feels like the excitement of the "digital self" is past its peak and people are slowly re-discovering that offline life is "cool again". Or if not "cool" a necessary plane to exist in order to effect changes. I think the Floyd example was on point; change happens on the street, not online. The stakes are simply not high enough there.

The internet is over because we have to start subtracting sh*t off it, like pop ups that returned in cookie notices and sign up fade-in boxes. We need to subtract off the bot spam, the copy & paste blogs that haunt google. We need to subtract off posts like this one that dare to fill the readers mind with hopeless garbage glossed up with red hot cultural molasses.

The internet is the khala from starcraft, it connects our thoughts and emotions to our internet brothers and sisters. An interconnected web of points.

We don't need a gustav dore inspired horror cluttering up the place. Subtract out the froth at the bottom of a crashed beach wave, and you'll have the best internet there's ever been.

I guess I think very differently from the author and you. I fundamentally see "online" and "offline" parts of the world as two parts of the same whole with fading distinction. The offline is the online; the online is the offline. The Floyd protests were significantly organized on social media and activist discourse happened all over social networks.

Some people will spend more time online than offline, some the opposite, just like some folks spend more time playing sports or reading books. That doesn't mean they engage in separate lives, though probably do have different circles of community and friends.

The author makes a lot of witty, erudite References – a method that has annoyingly become popular and is often mistaken as "good writing" – but I think he has missed a simple and obvious truth: culture is determined by fashion. Not fashion as in clothing, but fashion as in ideas and things that are trendy for a time then fade away, replaced by the next thing. The next thing is often an indirect reaction to the previous thing. Sometimes it's the exact opposite.

Culture has been very online for the last decade and extremely online for the last 3 years. We are just witnessing a cultural shift away from this and toward ideas like real, physical, human, touch, outside, present, etc. being trendy. The Internet isn't "over", it's just adapting to a new cultural fashion. The technological immaturity of stuff like VR is also a factor.

By 2040, we'll all be extremely online again.