As long as we have internet, we will be complacent. I believe the internet has fragmented our minds so far and wide that with it, nothing will ever get done. The internet is the worst invention of the 20th century. I wish the internet was regulated purely for education, not gaming, not buzzfeed, or facebook, or any such bullshit distractions.
If interests were kept local, issues would become local, and communities form. The internet allows us to pick and choose our own communities, so while we're together, we're further apart than ever. We'll never have a common localized goal.
If we live on the internet, we do our "activism" on the internet, our communications, our entertainment, everything.
Until either the internet dissolves or becomes regulated/boring, and/or the governments policies physically affect us, nothing will ever happen.
I remember as a young boy my Grandmothers only wishes her entire life was to dip her feet in the ocean and see a mountain in person.
Our desires became more contrived with the endless information stream we experience every day. There's no communities. There's no real passion or ideology anymore. Just cynicism, ego, competition, and sarcasm.
The internet lets you vicariously live through every body, and we lose that essence of what it means to be human, the passion to discover what is unknown.
Once you are exposed to how truly chaotic everything really is, that everything operates under the illusion of a master plan but is really just one headless blunder, you realize you are completely helpless and stop caring, You seek to drown out that underlying passion for something with bullshit because you don't know what it is, because you haven't given yourself the time of day to try until one day you're nothing but a sum of your plugs, like a swiss cheese without the cheese, just the holes, just a skeleton of who you should have otherwise been.
This is a very extreme point of view. Asserting that education is the only worthwhile use of the Internet is dogmatic and an unfair generalisation. Is entertainment and pleasure not a worthwhile and fundamentally human thing to pursue?
While I agree with your point of view that there is a lot of "bullshit", I don't believe it's for any one individual to control. You have to trust people to regulate their use.
Your post also states that all forms of entertainment are Internet-based, but this is simply untrue. What of people who read, cook, rock climb, play instruments. The list goes on.
Perhaps if your Grandmother had access to the Internet, she may be have been inspired by a "pointless bullshit" YouTube video to actually a climb a mountain, not just see one?
Additionally, you say that there aren't communities, but there are. Reddit, HN and many other sites connect thousands (and more) of people with similar interests, possibly more than could ever hope to meet in real life.
As I mentioned earlier, you have to trust people to regulate the balance of online and "offline" activity.
a) Yes it is, but when the never-endingness and unregulated internet is a thing, most people lack the self control to stop.
b) Nearly everybody I know wastes their time. I can’t find a single person who doesn’t go crazy on the internet. People are not to be trusted at the most basic level. They are duplicates of each other, consuming the easiest of material day in, day out, relaying it to each other, discussing it, embodying it. Questions like "what book did you read last?" and "discover any new albums recently?" do not exist in their universe. They have no concept of shame, only ego. If you asked them "why don't you read books?" the answer will be "because I'm not into books". The real reason is because they were distracted from the good things in life, to a point where the bar has been brought down so low that books become "hard" not "fun". Math becomes hard, doing anything exerting effort beyond consumption becomes hard.
c) Those are GOOD forms of entertainment. Reading false news, engaging in internet shit throwing, all things that don’t actively increase your “human capital” are detrimental.
d) I mentioned my grandmother and those simple goals precisely because she will never realize them or strive for them if she had internet, which she won’t, which is the whole premise of the hopes in the first place (meaning her situation is so bad that if she could enjoy even those simple pleasures everything would have been worth it).
e) That is literally my exact point, the fact these communities exist is awful, it dupes the mind into believing you are connected. You aren’t.
I don’t trust people at all until they give me a reason. We are all fundamentally scum. The only reason we aren’t is because infrastructure and quality of life fill our voids enough where we don’t rely on killing one another. Take a mans meals away for 3 days and he’s a different person.
We are fundamentally weak, and to break that curse it takes a lifelong journey of dedication and struggle. If you picture this journey on a timeline, the internet becomes a little hole early on in the journey, a booby trap of sorts.
I realize the irony in posting this, but HN is the only website I go on besides reading documentation directly related to my job + sideprojects.
Do you see where I'm going with this? The net effect of the internet is negative, not positive. You may say that everything is sped up, and everything is, but the side effect of that is that it made us shittier humans, not to each other, but just at being ourselves. Being comfortable in our own skin.
I find it hard to believe that the possibilities are purely negative, but I understand where you're coming from.
Coming back to the idea of personal connection and community - is this not connection right now? Yes, there are numerous things that a real-world connection has that are missing, but there is still a connection that allows two people to discuss their views. Nothing like real life, but still something, no?
Given that, would you agree that the Internet has increased the range of human experience at both the good and bad ends of the spectrum? As in, it has simultaneously increased an individual's options for both learning and connection (even if "virtual") but also indolency?
My personal take on the Internet and all the communication tools that sit on top of it are that they are just that, tools for communication. How people use those is up to them. And inevitably they will be used for both "valuable" and "invaluable". Value to one person is a waste of time to another, so judgement on what tools have "worth" ends up being a subjective personal view.
We are more connected than ever, but instead of in clusters, we're fragments of small communities existing within each other, unaware of each other.
If we can take a step back to before the negative/positive potential has taken effect on an individual, it exists purely in potential. It tilts either way with every click you make. You can endlessly consume garbage, or you can choose to grow yourself. The potential is there, but we don't grasp it for a variety of reasons, one of which is crap not being filtered.
The internet is like living in a society that has no rules. You wouldn't have the same conditions we're living in now in a lawless society.
I disagree. While there is no objective measure of "worth", you can quantify worth against any medium. If I asked you if buzzfeed had journalistic integrity, you'd most likely say no. Then I ask you why does it exist then? What would you say?
I see things like this as a mutation. A negative effect as a byproduct of not being filtered out. What that filter would be, or could be, I don't really have any idea.
If interests were kept local, issues would become local, and communities form. The internet allows us to pick and choose our own communities, so while we're together, we're further apart than ever. We'll never have a common localized goal.
If we live on the internet, we do our "activism" on the internet, our communications, our entertainment, everything.
Until either the internet dissolves or becomes regulated/boring, and/or the governments policies physically affect us, nothing will ever happen.
I remember as a young boy my Grandmothers only wishes her entire life was to dip her feet in the ocean and see a mountain in person.
Our desires became more contrived with the endless information stream we experience every day. There's no communities. There's no real passion or ideology anymore. Just cynicism, ego, competition, and sarcasm.
The internet lets you vicariously live through every body, and we lose that essence of what it means to be human, the passion to discover what is unknown.
Once you are exposed to how truly chaotic everything really is, that everything operates under the illusion of a master plan but is really just one headless blunder, you realize you are completely helpless and stop caring, You seek to drown out that underlying passion for something with bullshit because you don't know what it is, because you haven't given yourself the time of day to try until one day you're nothing but a sum of your plugs, like a swiss cheese without the cheese, just the holes, just a skeleton of who you should have otherwise been.