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Utopian thinking almost never comes to fruition because by definition it discounts a lot of negatives. It rarely comes from a place of first-principles reasonin
by arcturus17 5y ago
Utopian thinking almost never comes to fruition because by definition it discounts a lot of negatives. It rarely comes from a place of first-principles reasoning about human behavior. And above all, human beings cannot see into the future so any vision is always incomplete and flawed.
Nevertheless, as much as there are heaps of shit on the internet - digital surveillance, bottomless wells of inane addiction, hateful discourse, etc. - I’d say there is a net benefit overall, and where the 90s techno-optimists were merely wrong was in degree and concrete detail.
- pessimizer 5y agoThe only real benefit I see is 1) Wikipedia, Sci-Hub, Archive/LibGen, and 2) the increase in general literacy that came from people commenting/posting. I think 2) gets underestimated a lot - 10 years ago you could recognize a lot of stupid comments by the fact that they capitalized every word or the grammar and spelling were horrific. Those people didn't stop posting, they learned how to express themselves well through practice.
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoNo, they outsourced orthography to smartphones.
- sempron64 5y agoThere are SO many more valuable things on the internet than academic sites with genuinely useful material, even if you're not considering commercial transactions "useful". Forums, blogs, public libraries, newspapers, even if you don't consider the titans which we use so much we take them for granted (Google (Scholar, Books, Maps), Youtube, Amazon, Ebay, etc. etc.) Just because there are parts of the internet like social media of questionable net positive impact, the sum total utility of the web for humanity has been an overwhelming positive. It's hard to see good things when you're thinking about bad ones. Take a step back.