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In retrospective, the internet has done a lot to stifle human progress or thriving through proliferation of extremist ideas and overwhelming addictiveness. Jus
by clnq 3y ago
In retrospective, the internet has done a lot to stifle human progress or thriving through proliferation of extremist ideas and overwhelming addictiveness.
Just take the recent events alone - COVID-19 would not have been as much of a threat to humanity if some people wouldn't have built echo chambers on the internet with tremendous influence over others where they would share their unfounded conspiracy theories and miracle cures (or miracle alternatives to protecting oneself).
But there is a lot more. The data collection through the internet has enabled politicians who have no clue how to lead to be elected through just saying the right things to the largest demographic they can appeal to. Total populism and appeasing the masses has always been an effective strategy for politicians, but at least they could not execute it effectively. Now, everyone with enough money can. And this definitely stifles human progress and enshrines a level of regression in our institutions. Potentially dangerous regression, especially when it involves prejudice against a group or stripping away rights, just because people talk about it in their DMs on social media and get binned into related affinity buckets for ads.
Then there is the aspect of the internet creating tremendous time-wasters for a very large proportion of the population, robbing humanity of at least a million man-years of productivity a day. It is too addictive.
It has also been used to facilitate genocides, severe prejudice in large populations, and other things that are extremely dangerous.
High risk? Maybe not. A risk, though, for sure. Life was significantly more positive, happier and more productive before the internet. But the negative impact internet has had on our lives and human progress isn't all that it could have had. When a senile meme president gets the nuclear codes thanks in part to a funny frog picture on the internet, I think that is enough to say it poses a risk to extinction.
- endisneigh 3y agowithout the internet more people would have died from COVID simply because the information wouldn't have been disseminated about what it is to begin with.
- clnq 3y agoMost governments have been disseminating the information in many other media channels along with the internet. Aside from one or two beneficial articles I read about COVID-19 on the web, I don't think I have received any crucial information there. The internet could have been used as a tool to mobilise people against gross government negligence involved in handling COVID-19 response in many countries, but instead most critical pieces of government response were just consumed as outrage porn they were, in part, written to be. Overall, I have learned nothing useful about the pandemic from the internet, and I have been consuming a lot of what was on there, reading all the major news outlets and big forums daily like a lot of us. This is not to say that one could not possibly use internet for good in COVID-19, just that it hasn't been used that way, generally.
- lb4r 3y agoI think your comment more or less summarizes and combines Scott Alexander's 'Meditations on Moloch', and Yuval Noah Harari's 'Sapiens.' Humans were arguably the happiest as hunter-gatherers according to Harari, but those who survived and thrived were those who chose a more convenient and efficient way of living, at the cost of happiness and many other things; you are either forced to participate or get left behind.