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.