Was the internet a good thing overall?

[skykiii]

So minor PL, but for years I didn't have internet at home--I had to always go to friends or to restaurants with public wifi to get on. That changed when the Fire Nation attacked around the end of last year when cheap high-speed came to my area.

It's been feeling like a mixed bag though. On one hand, its easier to look up information and find things I need...

... But....

Well first, I've always had issues with internet addiction, its so hard to pull away. This was bad even in the 2000s. My old circumstances made it easier to decide "today I'm gonna actually beat Super Ghouls n' Ghosts" but now its like, I'll die a few times then just look up a speedrun.

I also feel like my old circumstances kept me based. Its hard to get onboard with any sort of ideology when you're a guy who mostly has/collects media from the 1980s/1990s and that's really most of what you have offline, so that coming back after a week absence the way the world has changed constantly feels like you've pulled a Rip Van Winkle and woke up in a world where things are similar but the shifts always strike you as "wait, what?" (I don't just mean the SJ stuff either--trying to be coy about this but I've even seen takes on KF that strike me as a bit of going too far).

And if its affecting me this badly...

I worry about my niece and nephew. Already both are in a mode where if I ask questions or they want to know something, they just whip out their phones. Usually this isn't so bad--for example they usually just look up obscure references I make when I'm joking around with them, and that's fine... but like, if I introduce them to games like Riven, my fear is that rather than try to solve the puzzles, they'll just whip out their phones and look up the solutions.

And then there's a third recurring thought I've had.

The big advantage of the internet is it gave everybody a voice.

The big problem with the internet is that it gave everybody a voice.

And we've seen how that goes: Now every instance of dumbass teenage boner thinking gets a day in the limelight and can sometimes even mobilize to change society for the worse. In the 1980s if you tried to advocate that it was okay to molest children, you'd get drawn, quartered, and fed to the bugblatter beast of traal. Now? Its normal and even encouraged in some places.

but it also lets me get anime easier, so who knows.

What do you think?

 

[Grub]

The internet is a tool. Like any tool it can be used responsibly or irresponsibly. It's not inherently good or bad.

 

[Tren Shapiro]

Imagine if internet access was treated like voting was before 1920. Imagine an information superhighway where women aren't allowed to drive. Imagine there's no zoomers. It's easy if you try fr fr no cap.

 

[Neo-Nazi Rich Evans]

i think the internet itself is fine, the problem is easy access to the internet. it is when the average person is given easy 24/7 access to the internet that things go down hill. the internet in the mid - late 90s was pretty nice. when the internet was limited to a single family computer using dial up the itnernet was used way more by the average person as a tool for research, it wasnt this all pervasive thing you sat around using on your smart phone all day.

but it also lets me get anime easier

that's actually a bad thing my dude.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

Not to be a knob, but do you mean Internet, as in Interconnected Network of computers or Internet as in world-wide-web launched in 89 by Sir Tim Berners-lee?

Both the internet and www are brilliant inventions and a way for people all over the world to communicate and share ideas. alongside that sharing of communication, art, music and film from each country should have been and should be shared for free as an example of what makes each country and area unique.

Unfortunately, it was taken over by corporate faggots, retarded faggots and wine mums, first when facebook came out and then entirely when the smartphone first launched; giving retards access to something that they were locked out of before due to their inability to operate a PC and reluctance to be labelled a social-outcast by doing so.

Now we have the worst version possible of interconnected communication, where we don't share out of love and interest, and instead bitch-slap and argue like fucking retards about the most dumb shit. The www has been more divisive over the last 10 years than the 30 years before it.

It makes me mad that I have to come to a 'hate site' to sat nigger and faggot if i wanted to. That the Internet has lost its' passionate nerds and now cowtows to trannies and faggots who have their fee-fees hurt because of mean words, yet still demand that they have a RIGHT to access said internet.

TL;DR - Twas a good idea, ruined by normies, faggots and corporations.

 

[AnonymousKot]

The internet is overall a good thing, without it we would have mostly been oblivious to the degeneracy of the world and elites, i know people say it makes people act like retards, but tbh, most retards and lolcows were probably assholes either way and would have been infamous with or without it... besides, if not for the internet, it would be easier to cover up the karlegi plan for europe and the states, and I'd rather deal with all the bullshit of censorship and redditors than live in ignorance

 

[Epic Fail Man]

It was good when women and people in 3rd world countries didn't know how to use it.

 

[Dom Cruise]

The internet has had a terrible impact on the world, but it very easily could have been the opposite, it could have been as much a force for the truth and good as it's become a force for evil and lies.

Somewhere out there maybe is an alternate universe where that happened and 2023 is near utopian instead of dystopian.

The trouble is if that had happened it would have been game over for certain evil people in power, so they did all they could to misdirect things, Woke started off organically but it only has had the impact it's had due to older institutions throwing their weight behind it and censorship campaigns against dissenting thought.

Personally, I feel robbed, I remember the vibe there used to be online and the feeling of potential, the fact that everything has instead turned into a nightmare is awful.

But as for whether it's a good thing overall, it's a hell of an uphill battle, but I guess I'll be optimistic and say it could still have a positive impact in the long run? As @Grub said, the internet is just a tool at the end of the day and whether a tool has a positive or negative impact is all in how it's used.

 

[gang weeder]

The big advantage of the internet is it gave everybody a voice.

The big problem with the internet is that it gave everybody a voice.

But remember who had a voice before the Internet: The people that we now think of as "mainstream media." And who didn't have a voice: Everyone else.

This means the Internet is a net positive because alternative viewpoints besides soypozzed regime approved faggotry can actually exist to a much greater degree. Of course the Internet has given voice to some retards. But the people who were allowed to speak before it are so irredeemably awful that a broadening of the public square was bound to be an improvement.

Does it have some bad effects, of course, everything does. For instance the spread of cars almost certain contributed to obesity. But was it worth it overall for us to have cars? Obviously yes. One of the main problems with the Internet that I think can be addressed as people's awareness increases is that it's bad for young people to sit on social media all day long. Children/minors should have their social media access severely limited IMO. And of course there is also the big problem of trannies and other retards having too much power online, but that is a problem of the regime in charge being pozzed, not necessarily a flaw inherent to the Internet itself.

 

[WickyWickyWoW]

Well first, I've always had issues with internet addiction, its so hard to pull away. This was bad even in the 2000s. My old circumstances made it easier to decide "today I'm gonna actually beat Super Ghouls n' Ghosts" but now its like, I'll die a few times then just look up a speedrun.

This makes me think of people describing TV when it became big in the 50s, the newest hit form of addictive entertainment that injects information directly into brain at an unparalleled rate. The difference between TV and the internet is that with TV only a select few are able to control what is broadcasted on television, versus the internet where as every other poster as said everyone has a voice. With older media the manufacture of consensus is a trivial affair, especially now with how badly monopolized media is, now with the internet anyone with a keyboard can write their stances and opinions for the masses to see with ease, or with a microphone and video editing software have their own commentary on whatever it is they feel like yakking on about. As it was said this is a double edged sword.

That and being able to have the answer to practically any question with the combined knowledge of all of humanity at your fingertips alone is a strong argument for the good that the internet can do, being able to free much of the information of the deeper mechanisms of how the world and society function away from the hands of the academics and whatever ideological filth they feel like spreading, ignoring that the convenience of answering any question alone is pretty good.

Some of the more minor benefits, music/art/literature being able to be created and proliferated online without the need for producers and the like, where anyone exploring the infinite maze of tubes that is the web could find a new genre or style they enjoy, who could say no to that? Corruption, incompetence, and other potential gaffes by politicians being recorded, archived, and readily viewed by the masses? Why wouldnt that be a good thing?

Ultimately I think its an invaluable breath of fresh air to spread information around easily without the censor and its potential benefits outweigh its risks, however with the internet being increasingly consolidated under megawebsites which have over the last few years flexed their muscles, we risk ending up back at square 1 with the web turning into TV and academia, a plantation where the niggercattle are forcefed a slurry of manufactured consensus completely negating all the benifits of the web posted. We will have to wait and see what the future holds.

 

[Spob]

Sometimes feel like a legalized age limit on internet access (16? 18?) would be so nice.

(But let's be honest, the vast majority of us have been surfing the web since we were kids lol)

 

[Idiotron]

The internet is one of the greatest human inventions of all time.
All of human knowledge and instant communication with anyone on the planet at our fingertips.
Being the last generation who grew up without the internet, it really changed everything.

It's just that the majority of human beings are too dumb to use it productively.

 

[Hyperbola]

I have something like 10k textbooks and a million scientific papers from the internet. I view them with a free operating system primarily developed and delivered over the internet. I've learned a lot about machining (beyond the basic operations that I was taught as a neophyte) by watching random youtube people. I've learned a lot about electronics because I can get datasheets for everything off the major supplier websites.

I'm trying to teach myself languages using google translate in addition to the usual textbooks - it's an interesting game to explore the sentences that *I* want to figure out as I go through some imagined interaction.

I do need to do better balancing my *output* with the input, and not wasting time. Internet addiction does get to me. Still working on it.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

It's a straightup double-edged sword. It's a powerful tool but the people in control of it are abusing it.

 

[AgendaPoster]

The Internet is good, humans are... less than good.
Our social norms are important. The "Freedom" people crave cannot exist inside anarchy and chaos. It requires social norms that protect it and restrict people that are destructive - as weird as that sounds.
So the actual problem is not the web itself, which worked quite well (with some issues, like the addiction you mentioned) while it was largely the domain of the European geek male. It worked well, because its lack of diversity meant that implicit social norms could exist.
That's just one example, there's far too much to talk about when it comes to the web.
Tragically, since we allowed so many people online, there might not be any path at fixing the web fully, so we have no way of going back, just forward and hell knows what lies ahead.

 

[Moja Zemlja]

The Internet is fine, its smartphones I have a problem with. I don't have high hopes for a future generation that is going to have a majority who grew up being connected 24/7.

 

[Timmy Jolsen]

I have to say bad just because of all the kids who get e-diddled online. It was a big problem when my generation were kids, and I'm sure it hasn't changed much for Gen Alpha. Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons why there is so much weird shit from my generation is because of the amount of us who were sexually exploited as young children online. We know childhood sexual abuse can lead to odd proclivities and mental illness, as well as issues with one's body (just look at all the trooning and other body alterations gen z does). Just a theory, but hey, food for thought.

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

I probably can't live without the internet, I'm not sure if that's good or bad

 

[skykiii]

I have to say bad just because of all the kids who get e-diddled online. It was a big problem when my generation were kids, and I'm sure it hasn't changed much for Gen Alpha. Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons why there is so much weird shit from my generation is because of the amount of us who were sexually exploited as young children online. We know childhood sexual abuse can lead to odd proclivities and mental illness, as well as issues with one's body (just look at all the trooning and other body alterations gen z does). Just a theory, but hey, food for thought.

This issue especially bothers me because even if its not traumatic, your childhood is kinda over once you're exposed to sex.

Like think of any friends you ever had who, say, used to tell campfire stories (or whatever your nearest equivalent was). I'm sure we all had that event where before, we were actually making up weird, interesting things that ran the gamut of ideas and concepts. But then you discover sex and suddenly all anybody ever talks about is women getting their clothes off. At first you might be fine with it, but after awhile you start to wonder why your imagination just isn't as fun as it used to be.

And you can see that in a lot of lefty shit--everything is a phallic symbol, everything somehow relates back to sex, its impossible for any idea or concept to not ultimately be Freudian. But of course these people justify it in part because they're getting their jollies off.

 

[ZazietheBeast]

While the normies see the internet as their new TV, I see it to be very useful as it allows people who seek knowledge and solutions to find them. As long as they know how to navigate between corpo pages made to sell you stuff and government regulated approved stuff.

Its thanks to the net you got third worlders finding the wonderful world of raising livestock in a shitty environment. Or being able to make a hybrid plant and fish farm. Long story short, if you want a solution, you can find it.

Tragically, since we allowed so many people online, there might not be any path at fixing the web fully, so we have no way of going back, just forward and hell knows what lies ahead.

One solution I can think of is let the normies have their shitty corponet while the truly initiated get a truly uncensored internet. Something along the lines of having to do some odds and ends to connect. Kind of like how dial up was the ultimate normie repellent back then.

Right now, that's TOR. But as made clear with the troubles this site runs into, it will be awhile before a second internet renaissance happens.