> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...
There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.
Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].
Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.
Oh, indeed. There's been a real public reversal in tolerance for open racism, over the past (see date) almost exactly 25 years.
This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.
Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)
I think you are ignoring McLuhan's very very famous point ("the medium is the message") which is that new forms of media do more than just allow us to extend ourselves in new ways; they change our mindset by enabling those new capabilities. It's not so much what we're using the media to communicate as it is what kind of communication that medium encourages. Television had disastrous consequences on what would seem to be unrelated behavior [1], including an increase in general antisocial behavior among children.
Roads are neutral, social networks are not. Twitter is run by white supremacist openly trying to stroke racial violence. Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side before the genocide. And it continues to favor outrage stroking groups.
Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:
> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.
But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.
But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.
I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.
This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.
Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.
A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.
Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.
Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.
Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it.
Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
You know why? Because Acton and Koum arranged the carrier deals prior to the acquisition. That's what Zuckerberg bought, to enlargen his war chest. It's not his product, it's something he effectively stole
Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.
The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.
Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.
It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up).
It's perhaps why I loathe it so much.
For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.
On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.
Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.
I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself?
I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.
The “good” news is that, if LLMs really do reach AGI, and if we still live under this same economic system that ruined the Internet, there won’t be this decades-long grieving process. It will be a short one, if we’re aware of it at all.
Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy.
High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet.
Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable.
Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.
> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.
The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor).
Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me.
But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that.
> Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone?
It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time.
I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is.
Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept.
But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction.
I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones.
And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls.
P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
It's becoming an increasingly bad time to be hosting anything on your own, having to worry about whichever 0-day the clankers are going to find and/or exploit within minutes of it being patched. I'm not sure even nginx is safe in all of this. I used to think there was software that should be basically safe but I'm not sure hosting anything (open-source) yourself anymore (i.e. directly participating in the Internet on a personal level) is a good idea.
Having to go through 3rd party services (and rely on them to stay on top of things) to participate is not fun.
The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections.
That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel).
I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.
I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.
41 comments:
> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...
There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.
Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].
Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
> cars
Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.
While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.
Oh, indeed. There's been a real public reversal in tolerance for open racism, over the past (see date) almost exactly 25 years.
This is now coming full circle in the UK; the Daily Mail (!) has a rightwing extortion mob outside their offices right now led by a "Danny Tommo". And we all know who Elon Musk is.
Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)
I think you are ignoring McLuhan's very very famous point ("the medium is the message") which is that new forms of media do more than just allow us to extend ourselves in new ways; they change our mindset by enabling those new capabilities. It's not so much what we're using the media to communicate as it is what kind of communication that medium encourages. Television had disastrous consequences on what would seem to be unrelated behavior [1], including an increase in general antisocial behavior among children.
1: https://justinharter.com/my-god-it-was-awfulmy-husband-and-i...
But social media is like a car that drives faster if you’re racist.
Their algorithms promote the wrong posts for the wrong reasons.
Roads are neutral, social networks are not. Twitter is run by white supremacist openly trying to stroke racial violence. Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side before the genocide. And it continues to favor outrage stroking groups.
Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:
> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.
But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.
But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.
I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.
This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires.
Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me.
A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it.
Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses.
Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.
Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it.
Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
You know why? Because Acton and Koum arranged the carrier deals prior to the acquisition. That's what Zuckerberg bought, to enlargen his war chest. It's not his product, it's something he effectively stole
Internet and largely tech is a tool. How you interact with it and how pervasive it becomes to the point of genuine hate towards a tool comes largely from choices on how you interact with it.
Sure. But it didn't used to be as pervasive or hateful.
The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.
Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.
It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up).
It's perhaps why I loathe it so much.
For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years.)
Social media is a subset of the web, and the web is a subset of the internet. Don’t lump the entire internet into your hatred of social media.
> He was a good coder ...
Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.
I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.
On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.
Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.
I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)
Internet and 24x7 connectivity is like humanity collectively having a seizure.
Was I the only one thinking that the author of Careless People was careless herself?
I felt that she is much closer in values to the Facebook executives than she was trying to make it seem. Yes, she failed at her job because it was an impossible one, and she got no shares because she was too late to the party, but the bravery and carelessness she showed were absolutely mind-blowing, for my taste at least.
The “good” news is that, if LLMs really do reach AGI, and if we still live under this same economic system that ruined the Internet, there won’t be this decades-long grieving process. It will be a short one, if we’re aware of it at all.
please end the suffering XD
seconded -- end it here and now :)
It is quite sad, isn’t it.
Internet has become both tool of mass mind destruction and tool of joy.
High bandwidth connection, mobile phones without keyboard - this combo has changed the way people use internet.
Anxiety among kids when they can’t use phone and some of highly addictive apps (TT, WA, IG… you name it) is what concerns me more than what we do with phones (boomers, 90s kids, whatever :) And elders who are vulnerable to all scams (money, political) imaginable.
Is there a way out? IDK. Everyone has to start inside as OP did.
I'm not a doomer, but when it comes to the internet, I only see things getting worse.
Nope, you hate what capitalism has done with it, not the internet itself.
> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.
The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor).
Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me.
But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that.
> Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone?
It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time.
I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is.
Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept.
But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction.
I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones.
And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls.
P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
I think they hate the commercialized Internet, and I do too.
It's becoming an increasingly bad time to be hosting anything on your own, having to worry about whichever 0-day the clankers are going to find and/or exploit within minutes of it being patched. I'm not sure even nginx is safe in all of this. I used to think there was software that should be basically safe but I'm not sure hosting anything (open-source) yourself anymore (i.e. directly participating in the Internet on a personal level) is a good idea.
Having to go through 3rd party services (and rely on them to stay on top of things) to participate is not fun.
well said
The term "actor" should be reserved for thespians.
most actors have never even visited Thespia
them state thespians are the worst
The internet isn’t the web/social media.
People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on them that drive. Idiots that drive get the deserved blame.
Words matter. The internet rocks but social media sucks, apps suck, elected representatives suck.
The internet that people miss was deeply interrelated with the real world. Blogs were read widely enough, even by an elderly non-techie audience, that in real-life meetings with people in a shared community (music-band fandom, a religious denomination, a literary scene) you could feel common ground with other people by following the same web content that was a locus for the community. You might even meet new IRL friends through forums, IRC channels, or blog comment sections.
That is all gone now. Followers of the indie web now are a tiny demographic, and indie-web fans are unlikely to know people in real life who read anything they read. Everyone else is on the big social-media platforms (and, for some communities, dedicated phone apps, like Komoot and PolarSteps for travel).
I think that's why people feel so nostalgic. The world and society has changed even if the HTTP protocol and webhosting at your own domain are still there.
I see where you're coming from but I don't think the analogy really works because most peoples experience of the internet is entirely 100% mediated by facebook, google, ticktok etc. It's would be like the road network if you needed to rely on a drunk driver to deliver you to your destination.
I have to insert a quick joke: "guns don't kill people - people kill people."
> People don’t complain about roads & gutters because there’s idiots on that drive.
We do complain about roads and infrastructure, and try to improve them so the inevitable idiot's impact is lessened.