The internet is only as important as what we make it, but abstraction layers don't directly provide shelter or food, and while real human connection can be foun

The internet is only as important as what we make it, but abstraction layers don't directly provide shelter or food, and while real human connection can be found online, most of still really like a hug sometimes. At this point (I'm in my 40s, grew up with computers starting with the Commodore 64) I'd be okay switching/progressing to the internet not being so prominent. As a parent of a child with disabilities, the internet has made communication around medical needs easier, both with doctors and with other people in similar situations. On a global scale, beyond my family though? This speed at scale may be doing more harm than good to life on earth. We're already planning to move back to a city (mainly for our child's benefit), and we'd never have left if the internet didn't exist. "Definite future state" - hah, not even gonna bother with that one. As for the rest? Passing fads, but also reflective of human social nature; we will always find ways to entertain ourselves. A more interesting question to me is what life on earth might look like in ten thousand years, and what role we now can play in shaping it in such a way that a person then, having grown up with stories about "pocket monoliths" that contained all the stories in the world, might with their rich imagination dream up this thread and chuckle as they go about picking berries (but not all the berries), weaving baskets, catching fish (but not all the fish), and all the other healthy* lifeways that have served us well for so long. *Yes, I'm including violence in there, too (we're territorial animals at heart), just not the mechanized, industrialized violence that took off in the early 1900s