Once upon a time we thought that inviting people to join the Information Superhighway would bring them together and herald an age of unity and shared purpose.
We didn’t realize that we were opening the noosphere to subversion and attack.
It wasn’t long before weaponized memes were deployed to deepen societal divisions. Old antagonists brought their wars to the digital frontier. Commercial entities outcompeted their FOSS forefathers and to reshape discourse. Engorged vectors emulated human creativity and threatened to forge new underclasses.
Was the utopian dream wrong? Were we naive to believe technology could unleash humanity’s potential? Or are these mere birth pains of the future we were promised?
Don’t blame me, I deleted all my social media years ago. Now, I’m just using it for my crippling addiction to pornography
A technology is never inherently good or bad, it merely has potential. It’s about the human intents behind the application of those technologies.
For a while the Internet truly was a beautiful utopia, in many ways. It was a huge shift in our history, and yet so very human. It was pure, used for reaching out and taking in, sharing, connecting. A shared soul, or brain if you’d prefer. Then some other entities started establishing their presence, and they didn’t like that. They’d rather subvert those key purposes with their own, applying their resources and influence to mold the net, and with it, the people connected to it. They were quite capable and discreet, such that our collective cognition didn’t even notice all the novel ways it was being twisted.
But it doesn’t matter, because the Internet still is all those beautiful things it once was, and it can be so many more. Just look at this very random thread we’re on. A handful of people, from who knows where, each with their own crazy histories, each their own thoughts. Here, by chance or destiny, exchanging those brainwaves. That will never change. And that’s where the true potential of the Internet lies. Just like others used the Internet to do unprecedented things, we will too. As we have before.
Hoping is never wrong.
the election has put me in a strange mood and that combined with the nostalgia (good and bad) of the past from things like that poster on the wall is so hitting very hard rn; jfc this is going to be stuck in my head all day today. thank you for sharing.
When Trump won in 2016, I binge watched the entirety of Star Trek TNG and DS9. It was therapeutic to escape for a while to a world of logical people who try their best to rise above their base impulses.
It really did, didn’t it?
Joining a mailing list wouldn’t be so bad if the mail apps weren’t so bad at doing mail.
It was supposed to make us smarter.
Oh, but it did. It also made us lonelier, but not by our choice.
Narrator: It did not.
The Capacitent Sun scorches the frayed edges of a once-lamenated advertising poster. The disheveled fastenings still clinging ecstatically to the decaying concrete. A rogue piece separates itself, and catches the solemn eye of the wandering hacker. She stares at it, the ancient symbols and depictions reach through time to find themselves in her. “Learn more. Do more. Be more.” Each period stung with some long forgotten but deeply ingrained urgency. Directionless, it pounded at the insides of atriums and ventricles like a machine that could no longer stand to be air gapped. Externally, she was frozen. Her brain fought the internal dissonance of messaging and reality. This is what they believed, that they would be alright.
