[Note: I wrote this yesterday, but somehow forgot to hit publish. Still considering The Ultimate Blog challenge a success, even though this one is coming out a day late.]
I remember life before The Internet. I remember the time of bulletin board systems, which gave us a peek at interconnectivity. I remember my first web browser and my first email. I’ve seen a lot of changes, and I fully live on The Internet now. So, I have observations and opinions.
The Potential
The potential back then is the same potential today. We can be one people. The world doesn’t have to feel large and frightening. Our words can be translated, and we can share culture, stories, play games together, live, and laugh together, even if we’re on the other side of the world.
We can defy those that would try to control us by keeping us separated and ignorant. We can pool our knowledge, share our art and our science, work together to solve problems that we could never solve on our own.
It doesn’t have to just be about money.
The Reality
It’s all about the money.
We are interconnected and wired together, all the time. Everyone has a cell phone, and a cell phone is less of a phone and more of an Internet tether. I’m not sure very many people actually use their phones to make calls, these days. Texting, doom scrolling, a couple of games (usually filled with ads), the other half of a 2-factor authentication system, and apps built by corporations to track our consumption so that they can improve their profits.
Tech bros want to own The Internet and profit from it. It’s flooded with bots that crawl along, posting propaganda to virtual town squares and fanning flames to increase rage engagement.
Search engines summarize what you’re looking for, trying to give you the answer rather than encouraging you to visit the sources, so the sources start drying up because they no longer get traffic, and the answers your receive become hallucinations and low quality slop.
Cable was replaced with streaming services. Book stores evaporated next to the heat of the Amazon.
The rise and fall of social media was certainly something to behold. MySpace, replaced by Facebook and Twitter. Twitter, bought for and now populated by Nazis, became X, and I have no idea why anyone would still go to that rancid hell pit. Facebook, managed by the robotic Zuckerberg, tilting the scales of elections with lies and propaganda, paid for by bad actors.
Zuck wanted Facebook to be The Internet, blocking access to anything else unless you went through it first. That didn’t take off, so the company evolved into Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta also went all in on buying up VR companies, quashing them, and ruining that space before it could get too big.
I really, really hate Meta.
The Future
I don’t know. The potential of The Internet has been there the whole time, but we’re living in a cyberpunk dystopia, and not the one we were promised in the 80s. This is a boring, less sexy dystopia, in which we get constant scam calls by robots looking for people susceptible to their lies. We see videos now, and we have to wonder if it’s real or generated by a computer. The tech bros, that never understood art, have stolen art to feed to their machine so that the machine could replace the artists.
If we continue to let criminals govern us, start unnecessary wars, promote white supremacy, and attack our own citizens based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ability, then the future is fucked and I’m not looking forward to living in it. The Internet will continue to be a tool used and dominated by oligarchs and oppressors, in order to continue to consolidate wealth and security among the privileged few, while the rest of us fight each other over the scraps.
Or, something else can happen, and we can look back at that potential I described at the beginning, try to work towards that, and reject the evil.
Some days, I’m optimistic. Other days, I remember the last 10 years or so, and I can’t seem to find any hope.