this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024

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Are We Watching The Internet Die? (www.wheresyoured.at)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

insightful question,
it isnt just the internet, in case you hadn't noticed, it is ALL civil-rights that are being gutted, in the enshittocene.

"once the infection has moved the 'fulcrum', the balance between the involuntary-host & the infection, far enough, it can then switch from symbiosis to totalitarian rampaging growth-at-any-cost, excluding-all-vital-functions, enforcing its parasitic & fatal consumption, killing the patient"

A tipping-point is being crossed, though it's taking a few decades ( planets are slower than individual-animals, in experiencing infection ).

It's our rendition of The Great Filter, in-which we enforce that we can't be viable, because factional-ideology "needs" that we break all viability from the world.

Or, to be plainer, it is our race's unconscious toddler setting-up a world-breaking tantrum, to "BREAK GOD AND MAKE GOD OBEY" its won't-grow-up.

Read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow", & see how the imprint->reaction mind, Kahneman1 ( he calls it "System 1", but without context, that's meaningless ) substitutes easy-to-answer questions for the actual questions..

The more you read that book, the most important psychology book in the whole world, right now, the more obvious it is that Ideology/prejudice/assumption-river/religion/dogma is doing all it can to break considered-reasoning ( Kahneman2 ) from the whole world, and it is succeeding/winning.

"Proletariat dictatorship" the Leninists want, "populist dictatorship" the fascists want, religious totalitarianism, political totalitarianism, ideological totalitarianism, etc, it's all Kahneman1 fighting to break considered-reasoning from the whole world, and the "disappearing" of all comments criticizing Threads from the Threads portion of the internet .. is perfectly normal.

It's simply highjacking of our entire civilization, by the systems which want exclusive dominion.

Have you checked your youtube account's settings section, in the history section, to see what percentage of your comments have been disappeared??

Do it.

Everybody do it.

Discover how huge a percentage of your contribution to the "community" got disappeared, because it wasn't what their algorithm finds usefully-sensationalistic, or usefully-pushing-whatever-they-find-acceptable.

I spent a few hours deleting ALL my comments from there, after seeing that around 1/2 of what I'd contributed had been disappeared.

There are a few comments now, but .. they'll be removed, either by yt or by me, soon.

No point in pretending that meaning is tolerable, anymore, you know?

Only fakery & hustle remains, for most of the internet, & that transformation's going to be complete, in a few years.

1984, but for-profit.

Sorry for the .. dim .. view, but it's been unfolding for a couple decades, & it's getting blatent, fast.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Liked the article but the end was kind of a letdown for me. If capitalism-driven AI is ruining the web even further why would demanding that AI is better today already and not in the future help with any of the problems this article has described?

For me the solution is obvioisly rejecting corpo-spam social-networks and going back to the selfmade small-internet, the fediverse etc. Sure that's not a solution for humanity as a whole but neither is demanding better AI now.

Are have I completely misunderstood something?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Personally I read it as a general "demand better", "don't accept crap wrapped in gold" as an offensive principle against (de)generative AI. Perhaps I'm inserting my own positive spin on their words, but it seems to me that their point is "don't let the hype win"; if these companies are pushing AI, forming dependencies on bad tech, then we need to say "not good enough" and push back on the BS. Deny the ability of low quality garbage to 'fulfil' our needs. It's not a directly practical line to be sure (how do we do this exactly?), but it does drill down past "AI is bad" to a more fundamental (and arguably motivating) point - that we, all of us, deserve better than to drown in a sea of crap and that's still important.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ok, yeah, but I still think that totally misses the point. At least for me even fully functional AI will still be a desaster and would be used for the most heinous stuff, eroding democracy worldwide even more and it obviously changes nothing of the social-media-silo capitalist hellscape most people live in comfortably (or less comfortably if it gives you eating disorders, depression and stuff).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I can't disagree with you on that, you're absolutely right - I suppose my read just gives the author the benefit of the doubt that it's not 'better AI' that we deserve, but a better internet (i.e. with no AI whatsoever).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Recent big sites that closed down: Jezebel, Pitchfork, Vice, Popular Science, and my hopes for the Messenger were dashed when they announced their demise: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

LA Times and the like are hit with layoffs and -- worse -- Sinclair heavyweight added the Balitmore Sun to the list of 'compromised' media outlets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/01/15/baltimore-sun-sold-david-smith-sinclair/

That said, there are always new sites, but gaining trust and reputation takes time.

Social sites seem doomed to crest and then fall. Digg? MySpace? Friendster? Who remembers the good old days of (moderated) UseNet? Do we want any of those back? Would any of them have remained were it not for spam/bad-actors?

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The internet, no. The world wide web, yes.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Betteridge's law of headlines answers this succintly: no

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The headline is 6 words. The article is 3,606 words. Expressed as a percentage, the amount of content you have decided to address comes to a grand total of 0.16%.

If you have no interest in interacting with the content, it would be simple enough to state that. But to dismiss the entirety of the article based on 0.16% of the content seems rather short sighted to me. Do you have any thoughts to share about the article?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Nah, I'm allergic to clickbait. If it had a better, more serious title, I'd read it.

If you're the author of the article, you have to find that line between interesting and clickbait. Sensationalist titles like that are like smearing a distasteful substance on the cover of a book. No matter what you write in that book, I'm not picking it up.

Possible titles (without even reading the article) that would make me click with an open mind

Threats to the open web
How much has the web changed since $date?
Where does the web go after $event?
The future of the web - an opinion
How do monopolies affect the internet?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I would not have clicked if it had any of those titles. And I do actually agree with the title. We are watching the death of the internet. It will never be again what it was. And what it is now is a clean white washed drip fed version of the expansive and deep knowledge of everything that it once was.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I find that way too dramatic. There was once a firefox extension that randomly clicked on links starting from a randomly generated search term. It went to so many different websites and blogs that I had never seen before. There are still link registries grouped by category out there and they are marvelous to discover on lazy afternoons. Searching for home directories is of course a trip of randomness where people unwittingly expose so many personal thing. Entire music and video collections, family albums, art projects, etc. There is still a massive deep web out there.

There's also of course the dark web (I only know of I2P and TOR). It's smaller and more difficult to find, but there's a bunch of stuff on there too.

The fediverse is also growing, but not only that. There are self-hosted instances of many different things gitlab, gitea, nextcloud, owncloud, wordpress, and so much more. I'm not worried about diversity.

Going down the protocol stack isn't worrying either. Sure, multinationals buy up IP space and have their own AS and require BGP to route between them, but there are still many internet exchanges out there and at least in Europe, every country has multiple ISPs with some countries quite strictly regulating that there must be competition. IPv4 address space is supposedly full, but somehow getting a temporary IP in existing classes isn't a problem. I also doubt switching to IPv6 would "kill the internet".

As a major pillar of our modern society, for the internet to die - not just for a day but for years - the interconnected networks would all have to stop communicating with each other. To reach that level of disconnect, something truly major would have to happen. Infrastructure would have to be destroyed or shut down or legally prevented from transmitting to certain parties at a massive scale.
The world's economic system would come to a grinding halt.

Given this world is heavily influenced by business, I highly doubt killing the internet would be in their interest. Neither in the short, nor long term. This is not like climate change where business as usual can continue for a few decades. Without the internet, changes will be seen very quickly - maybe even immediately.

As I said, overtly sensationalist and clickbait title with an article behind it that probably blows everything out of proportion. No way am I reading that.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

That's more like it, this is a discussion that people can actually interact with! I am not the author, and I agree with you that the title isn't great, but I am interested in discussing what they wrote and appreciate that you've now at least opened the door to a discussion on clickbait titles rather than just leaving a one sentence "gotcha".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Dude. The 4th sentence of the page you linked says it doesn't apply to this type of open ended question.

The only possible answer to this (admittedly silly) headline is, "it depends what you mean by die". An answer yes or no could easily be rebutted.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.

But this is a strict yes-no question

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Did you not bother to read the 3rd and 4th sentence of my comment?

The question is open ended. It's subjective, dependent on the definition of "die". It's not answerable with merely yes or no.

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