this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Content-wise, I think we aren't in a bad spot. There's a tonne of information available online that wasn't accessible before. Wikipedia is a pretty great example, but the millions of howtos scattered across Instructables, YouTube, and other sites are also pretty amazing. Yeah, there's monetization and SEO crap, but I think (hope?) it's a net positive.
Application-wise, I think we're also in an okay spot. Almost anyone can publish videos, text, and opinions on corporate publishing tools. If you want, you can spin up a private server with just a credit card, and do whatever you want with incoming traffic. Web browsers aren't quite Neuromancer/Shadowrun decks, but they do allow anytime to run untrusted code safely on a local machine.
Did all this free information bring us together? No. Not yet, at least. But I think that's what the early tech utopians got wrong. We aren't insufferable jerks because we don't know any better, we're insufferable jerks because we know better and choose to do it anyway.
That's true, of course. I didn't mean to say that the internet doesn't also have very positive effects. It's a blessing that knowledge is now much more accessible. But on the whole, it seems to me that people don't really make use of it - quite the opposite. It seems to me that many more people are now confusing their uninformed opinions with scientific knowledge. There is no other way I can explain this strange hostility towards science that a not inconsiderable number of people are displaying - this is a phenomenon of the recent (internet) past, or is my impression wrong?
I don't know. My bias is that human nature is constant over time. As such, I think we're using the Internet the way we used other resources in the past: cherry picking statements that confirm our existing beliefs, and dismissing statements that challenge them.
I grew up at the end of the Cold War. Without the Internet, people were able to convince themselves climate change wasn't a thing, planetary annihilation with nuclear weapons was an ok risk, and smoking was yucky but got an unfair bad rap.
The Internet hasn't caused people to be idiots, it's just given idiots another platform.
I'm not at all sure either - it's just a feeling. Perhaps those who make up the world to suit their fixed oppions have become more adept at using the media available to them and thus appear more influential than they actually are. It's just that I simply can't understand how people can cling to the most absurd claims and even aggressively propagate them when it's actually easier than ever to check facts today. That's just mind-boggeling to me.
Definitely a net positive. My friend and I were discussing something similar the other day. He rides motos and I ride downhill and we both learned via youtube. What used to be restricted to people who could afford private lessons or coaching are now available to people even in third world countries. It's opened up a lot of new horizons for people.
That's the unsung hero of all this. A friend and I were able to build RC planes with the help of a couple of YouTube videos and a printer. It would have been possible before the Internet, but it would have been harder and more expensive.