Reflections on the Internet

The Real Problem

Just a few minutes ago, I thought, man, the Internet seems awful. What would it take for the Internet to end? I fantasized about the idea that the world would be like something from old books and movies again, people would be out living their lives instead of spending them all on imaginary things. For once the part of me that has an unshakable faith in progress and just wants a spaceship was questioning whether more technology is absolutely always better even though I didn’t really want to go to the past, I wanted to go to the future with a spaceship and not have everyone on their phones all day when I’m on a spaceship.

It didn’t take very long for me to realize the Internet isn’t the problem. I put this question into Google and people on the sites supplying answers said things like “What do you plan on getting rid of? Even phone lines? Because the Internet used to run on phone lines. The Internet is mostly decentralized.” This made me realize absolutely nothing about the technology of the Internet was inherently a problem, and in fact all the component parts seem to be quite old. You have the parts that send signals which are basically just like phone lines and radio, both of which are quite old, never mind their precursors telegrams and fax. It’s a meme that a samurai could’ve faxed Abraham Lincoln. The screen to a computer is basically the same as a TV screen, and before that we had “motion pictures” including the old silent films which weren’t completely silent anyway seeing as they had music, they just didn’t have the technology to line up recordings of people talking with pictures of people talking reliably accurately. Absolutely none of the component parts of the Internet are all that old, and most of them didn’t really cause any widespread social changes when they came out. In fact, the Internet itself was originally just a thing used by universities and the military for research, and that seems like it would’ve been a net positive. So what happened?

I realized what happened was really a social change. The Internet isn’t a problem, but people definitely equate the Internet with corporate stuff. We wouldn’t need cyberpunk as a genre if corporations and technology didn’t become so intertwined. Dijkstra pointed out that back when Babbage tried and failed to make a computer with mechanical means, no one really cared. This is despite the fact that, even if people didn’t know it at the time, we’ve already had a mechanical computer for nearly 2,000 years, that’s what the Ancient Greek Antikythera was. Computing is really cool and even the Internet itself is really cool, the problem is literally Google, TwitterX, Facebook, ROBLOX, Discord, and all those kinds of corporations. The World Wide Web might be a problem, but that’s because the World Wide Web and its associated search protocols precisely aren’t the Internet. New things like Gemini Protocol are not either. A lot of those things might be somewhat misguided, because if you turn one centralized system into another that just seems like the part of Lord of the Rings where they’re debating whether Gandalf should have the Ring and he says if he did that there’d be a new Dark Lord on the throne of Mordor.

Substack seems relatively harmless like YouTube does to me at the moment. There’s lots of insane stuff on Substack and YouTube, but they both seem like they’re just providing a service like the cable, plumbing, and electric people are. There’s nothing wrong with long-distance communication, which really has been around forever. As one of my aunts pointed out months ago, people used to send letters to each other. That’s fine. The problem just seems to be that, psychologically, people have overall come to expect lots of corporate garbage everywhere. Most people are also under Sturgeon’s Law, most people suck, so it’s also good not to follow what most people do even if you might want to take a little mental note from a distance for whatever reasons.