This article captures my feelings exactly, the internet used to be a wonderful place that fostered creativity and the exchange of ideas. Now, much like you said it is a hyper-invasive almost fascist entity that aims to dictate and shape our real world experiences. I very much miss the Frutiger Aero aesthetic and cultural relevance that it came with. We'll never see the old internet, because we'll never slow the capitalist machine down until our planet can longer support that economic system.
Shit, son. I remember when chat rooms were THE thing. My mom, who had no idea what the internet was, got hooked on a specific chat room on AOL. She still talks about it to this day, wondering what happened to all those people she talked to.
I was a member of a forum called Killthechildren.com in the early 2000s. The type of conversations there definitely aren't happening now, or I'm just older and cranky and nothing is new anymore.
I was born in 1969, so I have memories as a young adult of the emergence of the web in the mid '90s and of the text-only world before it. Yes, it was truly different then, and what we have now is definitely "surveillance capitalism."
I will add that, since then, we have also collectively lost a useful skepticism for claims about what the internet could be -- what you summed up well as "a true commons, a space for genuine connection and collaboration" etc. That's definitely how people had been talking about it since at least the '80s, but for some, that was problematic then and is problematic now. That is, though we have come to think about and talk about the internet as a place or a space, it isn't an actual place or space. It's 1s and 0s zooming between data centers, down cables, and through WiFi. As such, it cannot fulfill functions that only a material (IRL) space can. Prominent among those functions are the types of community and interaction that can *only* exist when people are physically present with each other. This is where we could discuss what "genuine" means.
The internet can also, conversely, offer things that no physical space could. No physical library could hold and make available the vast collection of research materials that are now easily available online. As a writer who often consults scientific literature, I'm super grateful for that.
I'm not throwing shade on your essay at all. I definitely appreciated it and your other work. I just wanted to throw this thought out there.
If you're interested, I wrote a full essay about this subject here back in 2019:
Good piece. As a Gen X'er, I grew up pre-Internet and came into adutlhood as the home computing / internet boom went supernova. The current state of the 'net is dreadful indeed, but I am heartened by the idea that there might be some way , some direction that the prole can take to return to the blinding excitement of the early 'net days. Someone just needs to clue me in as to what it is.
This article is a near verbatim sentiment of much of what corey doctorow has to say, and a decent propaganda piece for socialism, despite its secret goal of ending everything permanently.
I can tell you've been convinced, but you have clearly not studied the underlying problems with a rational mind; that or you actually want everyone to die.
The problem today is people in these groups, they lie, and they follow this structure made notorious by hegel which runs in a circle; its a blindspot we all have and it makes things that are completely irrational seem convincing.
Shock doctrine is another application for the same process. You claim if we can just do this, then all will be solved but it never gets solved. The only thing that gets solved is the increase of control over the people and eventually that gets to the point where violence erupts because one cannot live in slavery with no ability to self-determine. This is the promise of socialism, though as with all socialist movements any number of other words fits since they obscure the fact that it is socialism, in the hopes of muddying the water. I guarantee you that a good amount of your opinions are shaped by socialists because they have been targeting kids for decades; the teachers were taught pedagogy from marxist books, and used the same on the children they taught as any Marxist/Jesuit would, and what can a kid do prior to the age of reason where they can't recognize deceit?
Now socialism wouldn't be such a bad thing if one simple thing were true. Socialism is an economic system, economic systems are safety critical. That means if they fail, people die; and as such care needs to be taken so that doesn't happen. When you don't take care and ignore something that is safety critical, it is the same as planning for all those people to die. Centrally planned organizational systems have many single points of failure, they are brittle, and not resilient.
From an engineering perspective, if socialism were stable as an economic system over time there wouldn't be a problem; but the simple fact of the matter is that it fails. It fails in non-obvious ways, where you can blame the failure on something else because the failures have no distinct characterization (because its a hysteresis problem), so failures cannot be predicted in time except generally as an overall outcome. The economic calculation problem was coined in the 30s, and remains unsolved today, it is one of four major problems that have yet to be solved.
Instead of rationally trying to solve those problems socialists lie, they pass those lies to their closest relatives, and their children, they try to mislead and blind, irrationally, and without logic and hide these facts deceitfully because they get power by promoting this false belief system and they don't want to give up the power.
Nonetheless, the outcome of those systems is same; destruction for everyone that depends on it. Everyone will be made to depend on it too as a corruption by dependency.
This is a problem you cannot fix with a bandaid. It starts with rational thinking and getting at the core of the underlying problem. The underlying problem here is socialism, because socialists fall into two camps. You have the camp that cry's foul about all the horrible things in the world trying to rabble rouse, and then you have the camp that goes out creates these companies to make these horrible things happen, and its all enabled by the bankers that can print money.
It is all by degrees of indirectness but if you look at it rationally, the marketplace has shrunk in sieving fashion since the 1970s. What happened in the 1970s? Two things, currency was taken off the gold standard, and banks started providing loans for leveraged buyouts without risk management for the top corporations. Since then the market has consistently shrunk in participants, bailouts have occurred, which are just a nice way of saying nationalize.
For a communist, before you can get rid of capitalism, you have to concentrate it in only a few hands. Once it is in the few hands, its simply flipping a switch and taking/nationalizing those assets. If the FED were actually doing their job they wouldn't be the ones actually concentrating the sectors and forcing the larger banks to absorb the smaller ones.
You can say all the nice or horrible things in the world, and nothing will change until you start at the original problem. Most times you will simply just perpetuate the lies you were told which you see as the truth, and that will continue until it can't at which point everything fails.
The gift of socialism is destruction. Mises wrote about the 4 major structural flaws in the 1930s. Economics following Keynes was very convincing in a front-loaded ponzi but it lost its sound basis when currency started being printed as fiat. It was a front-loaded benefit for the silent and baby-boomer generation, just like any standard business S curve, you have two inflection points. Initially blockbuster growth and benefit, then Stability (for awhile facing diminishing returns), then collapse or ruin, or enshittification. Take your pick.
When one looks at socialism in general, you have to ask yourself if it really ends in destruction, why is it still around. The simple answer is it utilizes the double bind. It destroys any potential alternative so the only choices are slavery or death, but since they haven't thought it through to the logical conclusion its first slavery, then death.
Sounds quite evil, that's because it is, but people have forgotten what true evil looks like. They have not been taught to recognize it, they simply see it as people doing bad things.
Evil is the people who have taken falsehoods into their heart as truth, hopelessly blinded to the fact that they are doing those bad things indirectly over and over again. They do this in every day of their life, a willful blindness and work that pushes towards their own destruction (and by extension their families as well).
To be blunt, this is a social order level problem that's gone largely ignored for over 100 years.
You certainly aren't going to solve it, and promoting socialism as a replacement for distribution of labor economy is promoting destruction.
You clearly haven't had a classical education, so how will anything you've said actually fix things?
This last question was rhetorical, the answer is it won't. Its a convincing lie meant to mislead. The underlying frameworks and system's would need to be reverted, but two generations of goose stepping only ever forward blindly is what has gotten us to this current point of near collapse.
There are also bad actors (destructionists) just about everywhere these days. Many that don't even know the origin of their false beliefs.
That false belief system will continue until it brings about everyone's death. If you think it can't happen here, you haven't been paying attention, capitalist markets don't have prolonged or self-sustaining shortages such as the baby formula shortage in Florida.
Any centralized authority structure has the exact same flaws Mises described in the 1930s. In the absence of an equitable distribution of labor in exchange economy, you have corruption. Those are the only two things capable of providing incentives to produce. When the former has been tied down so it can't move, the latter becomes common place until things become intolerable, and often these things take several generations of children just letting the snowball roll down hill.
The mistake you made was in claiming capitalism was the problem, when in reality you should look closer to your own side.
No, your statement would only make sense in a completely magical thinking world devoid of logic, and that kind of world only lasts until logarithmic error from reality ends up killing all the inhabitants of that civilization, and any survivors would remember you as a true evil person.
You are either horribly mistake, or you are being intentionally deceitful.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell which because you don't say what parts of what I mention you disagree with, in fact you don't communicate at all aside from your credibility attack.
The nice thing about rational thought is support doesn't rely on credibility or opinion. You can go to the books I've mentioned, make the same rational deductive connections following logic, and come to the same conclusions. That's why rational thought, critical thinking, and logic are why you exist today. in the first place.
So, go read some Mises, or Carl Menger, or actual academic literature that hasn't been written by people who have claimed membership in communist/socialist groups themselves.
Regardless of the fact that what I've said has quite a lot of expertise and support from people far more qualified and importantly, rational (Mises), you make a false claim that its just me. You are an idiot.
All you are really saying, in a backhanded deceitful way (nullification, fallacious rhetoric) is that you disagree (in sentiment) and you know what; disagreement is totally fine but you have to say so directly, and you have to say what you disagree with specifically.
Failing to do either, when it is common courtesy, and required to mean anything rationally, shows your actions and intent.
Nullification is not fine, its deceitful and fallacious, and your act itself is crazy-making because it distorts reflected appraisal in the communication process (intentionally).
In other words, you are committing grave evil every day you do something like this response, regardless of whether you believe you are doing so or not the facts don't change. That behavior leads to societal destruction, evil are acts that lead to destruction, and evil people are blind to their acts.
If you have something that actually follows rational principles, please say it. I am always up for vigorous rational discussion but otherwise you are just contributing to the noise which prevents organization to solve societal problems which leads to destruction (again).
I look forward to your refutation, but I will not expect it. Thank you for providing a perfect example of the evil we face in our lives today.
Edit:
For the readers who would like to educate themselves more to know about thought reform (of which nullification is one such technique), I refer to Robert Lifton's work on the Psychology of Totalism written in the 1950s. It covers case studies of PoWs from the Korean war investigating the structural elements that made up Xinao, or what has become known as brainwashing. More recent discussion can be found on New Discourses youtube channel.
Influence by Robert Cialdini will cover the perceptual blindspots in communication (and how they can manipulate the uninitiated [those not taught rhetoric, almost all US students]).
This article captures my feelings exactly, the internet used to be a wonderful place that fostered creativity and the exchange of ideas. Now, much like you said it is a hyper-invasive almost fascist entity that aims to dictate and shape our real world experiences. I very much miss the Frutiger Aero aesthetic and cultural relevance that it came with. We'll never see the old internet, because we'll never slow the capitalist machine down until our planet can longer support that economic system.
We peaked with Frutiger Aero, man. Well said.
Shit, son. I remember when chat rooms were THE thing. My mom, who had no idea what the internet was, got hooked on a specific chat room on AOL. She still talks about it to this day, wondering what happened to all those people she talked to.
I was a member of a forum called Killthechildren.com in the early 2000s. The type of conversations there definitely aren't happening now, or I'm just older and cranky and nothing is new anymore.
I was born in 1969, so I have memories as a young adult of the emergence of the web in the mid '90s and of the text-only world before it. Yes, it was truly different then, and what we have now is definitely "surveillance capitalism."
I will add that, since then, we have also collectively lost a useful skepticism for claims about what the internet could be -- what you summed up well as "a true commons, a space for genuine connection and collaboration" etc. That's definitely how people had been talking about it since at least the '80s, but for some, that was problematic then and is problematic now. That is, though we have come to think about and talk about the internet as a place or a space, it isn't an actual place or space. It's 1s and 0s zooming between data centers, down cables, and through WiFi. As such, it cannot fulfill functions that only a material (IRL) space can. Prominent among those functions are the types of community and interaction that can *only* exist when people are physically present with each other. This is where we could discuss what "genuine" means.
The internet can also, conversely, offer things that no physical space could. No physical library could hold and make available the vast collection of research materials that are now easily available online. As a writer who often consults scientific literature, I'm super grateful for that.
I'm not throwing shade on your essay at all. I definitely appreciated it and your other work. I just wanted to throw this thought out there.
If you're interested, I wrote a full essay about this subject here back in 2019:
The Absurdity of “Online Community”
https://macskamoksha.com/2019/12/the-absurdity-of-online-community
I’m afraid the fun is WAY over 😢
Good piece. As a Gen X'er, I grew up pre-Internet and came into adutlhood as the home computing / internet boom went supernova. The current state of the 'net is dreadful indeed, but I am heartened by the idea that there might be some way , some direction that the prole can take to return to the blinding excitement of the early 'net days. Someone just needs to clue me in as to what it is.
This article is a near verbatim sentiment of much of what corey doctorow has to say, and a decent propaganda piece for socialism, despite its secret goal of ending everything permanently.
I can tell you've been convinced, but you have clearly not studied the underlying problems with a rational mind; that or you actually want everyone to die.
The problem today is people in these groups, they lie, and they follow this structure made notorious by hegel which runs in a circle; its a blindspot we all have and it makes things that are completely irrational seem convincing.
Shock doctrine is another application for the same process. You claim if we can just do this, then all will be solved but it never gets solved. The only thing that gets solved is the increase of control over the people and eventually that gets to the point where violence erupts because one cannot live in slavery with no ability to self-determine. This is the promise of socialism, though as with all socialist movements any number of other words fits since they obscure the fact that it is socialism, in the hopes of muddying the water. I guarantee you that a good amount of your opinions are shaped by socialists because they have been targeting kids for decades; the teachers were taught pedagogy from marxist books, and used the same on the children they taught as any Marxist/Jesuit would, and what can a kid do prior to the age of reason where they can't recognize deceit?
Now socialism wouldn't be such a bad thing if one simple thing were true. Socialism is an economic system, economic systems are safety critical. That means if they fail, people die; and as such care needs to be taken so that doesn't happen. When you don't take care and ignore something that is safety critical, it is the same as planning for all those people to die. Centrally planned organizational systems have many single points of failure, they are brittle, and not resilient.
From an engineering perspective, if socialism were stable as an economic system over time there wouldn't be a problem; but the simple fact of the matter is that it fails. It fails in non-obvious ways, where you can blame the failure on something else because the failures have no distinct characterization (because its a hysteresis problem), so failures cannot be predicted in time except generally as an overall outcome. The economic calculation problem was coined in the 30s, and remains unsolved today, it is one of four major problems that have yet to be solved.
Instead of rationally trying to solve those problems socialists lie, they pass those lies to their closest relatives, and their children, they try to mislead and blind, irrationally, and without logic and hide these facts deceitfully because they get power by promoting this false belief system and they don't want to give up the power.
Nonetheless, the outcome of those systems is same; destruction for everyone that depends on it. Everyone will be made to depend on it too as a corruption by dependency.
This is a problem you cannot fix with a bandaid. It starts with rational thinking and getting at the core of the underlying problem. The underlying problem here is socialism, because socialists fall into two camps. You have the camp that cry's foul about all the horrible things in the world trying to rabble rouse, and then you have the camp that goes out creates these companies to make these horrible things happen, and its all enabled by the bankers that can print money.
It is all by degrees of indirectness but if you look at it rationally, the marketplace has shrunk in sieving fashion since the 1970s. What happened in the 1970s? Two things, currency was taken off the gold standard, and banks started providing loans for leveraged buyouts without risk management for the top corporations. Since then the market has consistently shrunk in participants, bailouts have occurred, which are just a nice way of saying nationalize.
For a communist, before you can get rid of capitalism, you have to concentrate it in only a few hands. Once it is in the few hands, its simply flipping a switch and taking/nationalizing those assets. If the FED were actually doing their job they wouldn't be the ones actually concentrating the sectors and forcing the larger banks to absorb the smaller ones.
You can say all the nice or horrible things in the world, and nothing will change until you start at the original problem. Most times you will simply just perpetuate the lies you were told which you see as the truth, and that will continue until it can't at which point everything fails.
The gift of socialism is destruction. Mises wrote about the 4 major structural flaws in the 1930s. Economics following Keynes was very convincing in a front-loaded ponzi but it lost its sound basis when currency started being printed as fiat. It was a front-loaded benefit for the silent and baby-boomer generation, just like any standard business S curve, you have two inflection points. Initially blockbuster growth and benefit, then Stability (for awhile facing diminishing returns), then collapse or ruin, or enshittification. Take your pick.
When one looks at socialism in general, you have to ask yourself if it really ends in destruction, why is it still around. The simple answer is it utilizes the double bind. It destroys any potential alternative so the only choices are slavery or death, but since they haven't thought it through to the logical conclusion its first slavery, then death.
Sounds quite evil, that's because it is, but people have forgotten what true evil looks like. They have not been taught to recognize it, they simply see it as people doing bad things.
Evil is the people who have taken falsehoods into their heart as truth, hopelessly blinded to the fact that they are doing those bad things indirectly over and over again. They do this in every day of their life, a willful blindness and work that pushes towards their own destruction (and by extension their families as well).
To be blunt, this is a social order level problem that's gone largely ignored for over 100 years.
You certainly aren't going to solve it, and promoting socialism as a replacement for distribution of labor economy is promoting destruction.
You clearly haven't had a classical education, so how will anything you've said actually fix things?
This last question was rhetorical, the answer is it won't. Its a convincing lie meant to mislead. The underlying frameworks and system's would need to be reverted, but two generations of goose stepping only ever forward blindly is what has gotten us to this current point of near collapse.
There are also bad actors (destructionists) just about everywhere these days. Many that don't even know the origin of their false beliefs.
That false belief system will continue until it brings about everyone's death. If you think it can't happen here, you haven't been paying attention, capitalist markets don't have prolonged or self-sustaining shortages such as the baby formula shortage in Florida.
Any centralized authority structure has the exact same flaws Mises described in the 1930s. In the absence of an equitable distribution of labor in exchange economy, you have corruption. Those are the only two things capable of providing incentives to produce. When the former has been tied down so it can't move, the latter becomes common place until things become intolerable, and often these things take several generations of children just letting the snowball roll down hill.
The mistake you made was in claiming capitalism was the problem, when in reality you should look closer to your own side.
Perfect example of the modern internet cooking someone's brain to stew, time to log off buddy.
No, your statement would only make sense in a completely magical thinking world devoid of logic, and that kind of world only lasts until logarithmic error from reality ends up killing all the inhabitants of that civilization, and any survivors would remember you as a true evil person.
You are either horribly mistake, or you are being intentionally deceitful.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell which because you don't say what parts of what I mention you disagree with, in fact you don't communicate at all aside from your credibility attack.
The nice thing about rational thought is support doesn't rely on credibility or opinion. You can go to the books I've mentioned, make the same rational deductive connections following logic, and come to the same conclusions. That's why rational thought, critical thinking, and logic are why you exist today. in the first place.
So, go read some Mises, or Carl Menger, or actual academic literature that hasn't been written by people who have claimed membership in communist/socialist groups themselves.
Regardless of the fact that what I've said has quite a lot of expertise and support from people far more qualified and importantly, rational (Mises), you make a false claim that its just me. You are an idiot.
All you are really saying, in a backhanded deceitful way (nullification, fallacious rhetoric) is that you disagree (in sentiment) and you know what; disagreement is totally fine but you have to say so directly, and you have to say what you disagree with specifically.
Failing to do either, when it is common courtesy, and required to mean anything rationally, shows your actions and intent.
Nullification is not fine, its deceitful and fallacious, and your act itself is crazy-making because it distorts reflected appraisal in the communication process (intentionally).
In other words, you are committing grave evil every day you do something like this response, regardless of whether you believe you are doing so or not the facts don't change. That behavior leads to societal destruction, evil are acts that lead to destruction, and evil people are blind to their acts.
If you have something that actually follows rational principles, please say it. I am always up for vigorous rational discussion but otherwise you are just contributing to the noise which prevents organization to solve societal problems which leads to destruction (again).
I look forward to your refutation, but I will not expect it. Thank you for providing a perfect example of the evil we face in our lives today.
Edit:
For the readers who would like to educate themselves more to know about thought reform (of which nullification is one such technique), I refer to Robert Lifton's work on the Psychology of Totalism written in the 1950s. It covers case studies of PoWs from the Korean war investigating the structural elements that made up Xinao, or what has become known as brainwashing. More recent discussion can be found on New Discourses youtube channel.
Influence by Robert Cialdini will cover the perceptual blindspots in communication (and how they can manipulate the uninitiated [those not taught rhetoric, almost all US students]).
We hate the internet. We love the internet. We cannot live without the internet. ♥️