Maybe worse for many people; 5 years notice gives governments time to make noises about how it’s all someone else’s fault (especially foreigners and immigrants), and to enact measures (like rationing, curfews, states of emergency, military rule, whatever) that limit the extent to which the plebians can prepare, at the same time as the powerful people making the rules feather their own nests as completely as they can.
People talk about MAGA. But no one talks about TATTOO. Trade America to the Old Ones. There might be a god reason for that, though.
More specifically, the beginning of the stampede was 1993.
(I don’t believe it was actually September. It was called September symbolically, comparing it to the time of year when clueless college freshmen would get their introduction to the Internet available on campus. Except that every day was indoctrination day for a neverending and never-learning herd of clueless freshmen.)
I’m not sure it would even be safer. There were plenty of mailing lists, which would be harder for the authorities to monitor.
The reason the pre-Web internet was so much better was that you needed half a brain to use it. Before there was domain addressing spam was a lot harder to send out. Access was limited to people in tech companies, the government, and universities. It didn’t eliminate flame wars. Bell Labs had a scheduled October flame war on mailing lists about putting Christmas decorations up in the lobbies of the buildings. But it was better.
Or, we can all go back to PLATO.
Can’t speak to that because I wasn’t there.
My experience with Usenet was not good. Basically a world where every rule that places like this develop out of necessity doesn’t yet exist. If you want to live through again trolls and all of that crap be my guest. Looking back mostly it was a waste of time.
Once in a while you could find a little niche were meaningful exchanges took place. Those were rare. Saw a lot of dysfunctional places, and no I don’t think it was all newbies, there were definitely some “established” cultures that I wasn’t impressed with. Based on what I saw, I am a disbeliever that any earlier version was some sort of Garden of Eden.
I was around for the great Derek Smart Usenet flame wars. Apart from some amusement akin to rubbernecking the scene of an accident, yeah, waste of time.
Apply for jobs, benefits, buy needed items, fill out employment forms, fill out government forms, file taxes, send mass invites to friends, find out about local disasters, such as threatening brush fires- hours before the news, write product reviews, work remotely, share scientific insights and discoveries… all that good stuff gone, just because some people cant skip over film spoilers.
It will be replaced, there are several out there already.
Now, if we are talking tiktok, then yes!
This is one of the subjects of a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas G. Carr. He spends a great deal of time on writing and the printing press with conjecture about how that influenced human neurology. The gist as far as the Internet goes is that we’re worse at contextualizing facts, and don’t really “read” in the traditional sense so much as scan the page for whatever we’re looking for, something that is arguably a cognitive deficit.
My feelings about the goodness or badness of the Internet stem in part from the way social media in particular exploits my ADHD brain. I cannot control it. I have to install blockers everywhere. There is a strong correlation for me between Internet usage and mental health and I suspect that is true of a lot of psychologically vulnerable populations.
But am I a worse thinker? I don’t think so. But I read a lot (books, on Kindle.) And I hang out here rather than Twitter or Facebook.
So there’s me.
But I also think of friends for whom it’s been life-changing. I think of the nonverbal autistics who populate r/Spicey_Autism and their ability to connect with other autistic people and express themselves and self-advocate really for the first time in history. I think of people with severe anxiety who can’t leave the house. I think of guys like blinkie - remember him? Despite having locked-in syndrome he was able to communicate with us and do volunteer research online. I think of LGBTQ people in red states who no longer have to wonder if there’s anyone else like them.
It’s all relative.
You probably was on the later Usenet, which I agree was a mess. I’m talking about the earlier one, where there was one alt.sex group which was low volume and where serious relationship discussions happened. No trolls. No spam.
Back then, and on PLATO, there was default moderation because you were probably using it at work and you didn’t want your management to see you be a dick. Moderation is the secret, which is why this Dope is tolerable.
Moderation is a mort—oh, wait, that is masturbation. Sorry.
I cannot see in any way it would be a net gain. Perhaps I lack imagination. For all the bad it has, the good far outweighs it from my perspective.
It’s not exactly a new idea.
It’s akin a very watered down bit of neo-Luddism. Sensationalism can’t be avoided in this case, but it’s also mildly akin to some of the things the Unabomber was thinking about modern society and where technology fits into that picture and how that affects the human condition.
The Web by itself going down doesn’t go to those lengths, but it’s a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind.
“The internet sucks. We’d be better off without it!” ~Internet post, circa 2023
Personally and professionally, I certainly would not want to go back to a pre-internet time, for all sorts of reasons–most of which have been listed here.
I do want to underscore the benefits to people with health issues and disabilities. My wife was an early adopter of email because it was a hell of a lot easier on her than writing letters, and found zoom and its cousins to be way more satisfying than phone calls for keeping up with people. Online shopping was a game changer for her when she was not really able to go into stores any more. The internet allowed her to share medical information with her doctors in real time (and doctors to share her medical records with each other with a minimum of fuss and bother). And on and on.
For people in my wife’s category, the end of the internet would be similar to the end of wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking spaces. An awfully high price to put on the backs of some people so that others can…avoid movie spoilers?
I went and watched Top Gun Maverick at the cinema about a week after it came out with effectively zero foreknowledge, so it can be done, and it is definitely the best way to watch a movie. It helps that I don’t watch TV, have a small team in the office, and told friends and family that if they spoiled it I’d murderize them on the spot. Joking in case someone ever makes the mistake of taking me seriously.
Awesome movie btw!
Oh and on the topic the Internet has been good for society and the world but far from unalloyed. Now twitter and it’s ilk we could and should get rid of for the good of all.
Also to add for introverts like myself the internet is the best thing ever.
Oh my God CK stop editing your post - it’s also fantastic for the curious and people who like learning things.
I dont think the internet or the web is the problem I think unlimited access isn’t necessarily a good thing
i remember when you paid to use aol and the like there was a difference in chats and discussions You could actually have a civilized discussion because it was more valuable you weren’t paying 3.95 an hour to be an idiot …well ok you could still be an idiot in an argument but the spazz ness wasn’t there really …
At that time though, you also couldn’t find stuff you needed like encyclopaedic information, tutorials, manuals, recipes, reviews, historical and geographical information etc, because the whole model where anyone can create and post information for free hadn’t taken off; the internet was great for chat, but not so useful.
This zinger has made the rounds zillions of times, and it has never zinged anyone.
We have the internet now, and everybody is on it now. If you want to make yourself heard now, you put it on the internet. Now.
Books and magazines were for those things, and they worked fine, though.
Sure, and libraries existed to make them available and somewhat indexed, but you couldn’t find the information you wanted within mere seconds - sometimes you couldn’t find the information you wanted at all - either because the library isn’t indexed down to the individual words and phrases in the books, or because the book wasn’t there, or just didn’t exist (publishing books has a cost that is greater than the free-to-post-whatever-you-want model of the web)
(Random example) A regular library isn’t likely to contain a book on stripping down and repairing a Hotpoint washing machine - you would probably have had to try to order a service manual, which you would pay for, or perhaps your enquiry would just be refused unless you were in the trade.
Edit: When I left school in the 1980s, I had an idea for a business that would be a sort of look-up-anything service; the web didn’t exist in anything like even the barely-searchable form we had in the 1990s. I thought there was a potential market for a service that would take a customer question - any question on any topic - and later deliver a report, researched to whatever depth the customer requested and could afford - and the report would reference the books and other sources it quoted, and how to access them.
At that time, if you had a curious question about something, you probably just weren’t going to know the answer unless you were lucky to stumble across it in a TV documentary or magazine, or you were prepared to invest some significant time and legwork finding the answer.
I thought there might be a market for selling that time and legwork as a service. I never really developed the business idea and it’s as well that I didn’t, because the web would have just cut the legs out from under it.