The New Internet is garbage.

[Iconoclast]

Too many normies. Way, way too many normies.

I’ve been browsing since the days of Dialup, on fucking 56k. America Online, NetZero, Juno, and so on. I remember when people back then, people who’d been around since the 2400 baud era, thought that we were the invaders. Apparently, we ruined Usenet with our stupid, uninformed opinions.

Now, I recognize the truth. Us late 90s dialup users were downright erudite scholars and nerds compared to the next wave of stupidity that would smother the internet with the rise of broadband and wireless and user-friendly web apps. Now, everyone and their grandmother walks into a Verizon Store and then walks out with hundreds of dollars of hardware, and they spend all day tapping their thumbs on their stupid phones over their data plan. Tapping stupid shit into Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube comments, and all these other monopolistic, centralized platforms.

It’s the great garbage patch of the internet, and you have Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Alphabet to thank for most of it. People think it’s so amazing. User-generated content. So wonderful. You’ve got millions of these tepid, crappy videos with no cameraman, with selfie-shakeycam and a single, unedited cut of some dumbshit walking through his house and mumbling about politics and random, irrelevant snippets of home life.

Look at my dog, look at my cat, look at my aunt and her big gut fat!

Nobody with an attention span longer than two nanoseconds gives one single fuck. Unfortunately, we are a dying breed.

People wonder why our political sphere lacks sanity, muttering dumpster fire this, worst timeline that. Well, how is it even possible? How is it even possible to have sane politics when people constantly and voluntarily bombard themselves with so much bullshit?

Discussion forums and imageboards are the last bastions of the old internet. Social media is a lost cause. I warned people over a decade ago. These fuckers invade your privacy - or rather, you turn around and willingly present your asses to them like a baboon - and they turn around and give you this wonderful experience of being constantly bombarded by other users’ useless trivia about their own lives. Meanwhile, they’re profiling you. Figuring out what you like and what you dislike. Selling your information to advertisers and letting government agencies scrape all of it so that they can compile dossiers on everyone. I told people this shit over a decade ago, back when LiveJournal and MySpace were still a thing, and Tumblr and Twitter were still new. They acted like I was crazy, or paranoid, or something. They were addicted to the dopamine hit of the like, the retweet, the reblog. They couldn’t even vaguely comprehend what was happening to them.

Social media is a Skinner Box. Press the lever, receive the cheese. You’re not an agent. You’re an object. And yet, people were lured into this shit, and they thought it was just fine and dandy to use your real name online instead of a pseudonym, when there are fucking crazies everywhere. Social media with your real name and real photos and descriptions of your daily events is an open fucking invitation to be stalked.

And yet, these dildos still do it, making excuses like, “It’s just like face-to-face social contact. What’s wrong with you? Are you anti-social? I need this.”

These platforms are jam-packed with sub-90-IQ extroverts presenting their herniated sphincters and their trifling, trivial little lives to the whole goddamn planet. It makes me want to puke.

The only hope for the internet is if we evict all these normies from it, and the only way that can be done is if the big social media monopolies suddenly find their business model impossible to sustain. We have to destroy Facebook, destroy Twitter, destroy Reddit, and destroy YouTube. All of them have to go. Now. We can do it if we push for more online privacy. Privacy is antithetical to the way targeted ads work. Go peer-to-peer, go encrypted, go blockchain, use adblockers and script-blockers and cookie-blockers judiciously. Force these giant, stupid platforms and their mouth-breathing users out of business.

 

[ShieldWife]

No need to get worked up over this. There are countless dumb people in the world doing dumb people things. If they didn’t have the internet, I’m sure they would be watching something dumb on TV.

The beauty of the Internet is that it gives everybody a voice and a platform, so that if you’re willing to look for it, you can find some profound knowledge and insightful commentary. That is something you might not get anywhere else.

 

[Arch Dornan]

I sure do miss this sound sometimes.

 

[Brutus]

Ah 56k Modems, Those were the days.

It's getting hard to remember a time when people actually talked to each other instead of the absolute silence of a room full of people staring at their phones.

 

[Hlaalu Agent]

Ah 56k Modems, Those were the days.

It's getting hard to remember a time when people actually talked to each other instead of the absolute silence of a room full of people staring at their phones.

People keep getting more isolated from each other, as the world is supposedly brought closer together.

 

[Arch Dornan]

Ah 56k Modems, Those were the days.

It's getting hard to remember a time when people actually talked to each other instead of the absolute silence of a room full of people staring at their phones.

I do like those phones if they were introduced in my youth. I wouldn't be as bored but it does take a lot of your time. A result of this consumer culture and I can't help but think a prelude to a corporate dystopia since if the sheep is distracted a government can pass what it wants until it's too late.

 

[Brutus]

The Internet has been turned into a Digital Opium Den.
We are losing our general knowledge: like knowing how to read a physical map for example.

Someone needs to start a thread asking. "What have we forgotten due to the internet?"

 

[Iconoclast]

The Internet has been turned into a Digital Opium Den.
We are losing our general knowledge: like knowing how to read a physical map for example.

Someone needs to start a thread asking. "What have we forgotten due to the internet?"

Reading a physical map? Hahaha, if that’s all we were forgetting. I hate to sound like a Luddite, but digitized machinery is replacing so much of our lives that humanity is shriveling.

Math. Who needs to know math when a phone calculator or Wolfram Alpha is just a few taps away?

Welding and sheet metal working. CNC mills and Solidworks take all the guesswork out of everything, and for everything else, there’s precision casting. Nobody cares about the art and architecture of metalworking anymore. It’s a dying art form. As a result, modern metalworking is bland trash where somebody let a CAD program do the designing for them.

Architecture in general is degenerating right before my very eyes. We have no great architects and designers like we did in the mid-century. No Frank Lloyd Wrights, no Bucky Fullers, and no Raymond Loewys, only armies of disgusting charlatans and dabblers. Everything today is flat, brutalist prefabs or postmodern trash. Cars on the road look uglier than ever before, due to a combination of regulations and unimaginative, computer-driven design where virtual stress analysis and virtual wind tunnels take precedence over aesthetics. It is harming us psychologically to be constantly bombarded with architecture and design that lacks the essential property of beauty.

Mechanical knowledge and repair work. So much modern tech is solid-state and so small and convenient as to be imperceptible as technology. Slate-format smartphones have no obvious moving parts aside from perhaps a slider to engage silent mode. When you lift the hood of your car, you’re confronted with a black plastic shroud. Everything is increasingly portrayed as being operated by magic pixie dust, with the mechanisms hidden from sight. As a result, people are developing pernicious and unacceptable ignorance of the workings of everyday devices.

Electronics. If you use a smartphone, you ought to comprehend at least a few of the vaguest elements of electrical engineering and electronics, like what transistors are, how logic gates work, what diodes, capacitors, and resistors do, and how to operate a soldering iron, but the ignorance is so widespread that the number of people knowledgeable on these subjects is a tiny, tiny percentage of the total population.

Personal fitness. Modern devices incentivize exercise and dieting through gamification, but all it takes for someone to succumb to their social media addiction is to disable their push notifications for all their fitness apps and then proceed to sit on their ass for the next twelve hours while getting dopamine-high. All these wonderful tools for getting fit are provided to us free of charge, but people take the path of least resistance.

Music theory. People are bombarded with crappy, degenerated pop music with no melody and nothing but borderline sexual pulsating tribal rhythms, and they emulate this crap by firing up tracker software and punching in tuneless, noteless crap, even when they could, in theory, use those very same tools to compose a whole fucking symphony in their basement.

Reading. People have access to a near-infinite library of books with the internet, many of them public-domain and freely accessible. We have all the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, we have Beowulf, Homer’s Odyssey, and countless others, but do people read them? No. Like in Huxley’s Brave New World, they’re too distracted and too blissfully drugged to care.

Technology is a crutch. We are leaning on it harder and harder, and our own bones are becoming embrittled. Nobody in developed countries knows how to do anything for themselves anymore. When a part of their theme park ride breaks, they call a technician to fix it for them. Humanity is decaying right before my eyes. The warnings of Idiocracy and Wall-E are not hyperbole. That is what we are becoming. The way we are going, the human of the 2100s will be a sessile anemone glued to a chair and drinking from a beer helmet with VR goggles plastered to their face, and the human of the 2200s will be a hunter-gatherer.

 

[Deleted member]

*raises her 2.4k hand*

 

[GoldRanger]

Was there any point to this rant? I don't see much harm in anything you've mentioned. I especially liked the paranoid "invitation to be stalked" ramblings.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Our minds are atrophying, that is a fact, but it didn't start with new internet, though it acclerated the process greatly. There was already TV before, dulling the brain either through barrage of endless mindu numbing telenovelas or through repetitive channel hopping for hours and hours (caught myself doing that number of times). And there were many other technological aids that were making us dumber, when we were allowed calculators in high school, my classmates soon forgot to do even the simplest calculations in their heads.
And with the great dumbing coming from the social media and other technical advances, we will eventually reach the point where for most of population the technology will be indistinguishable from magic, partially due to technological advances and partially due to mental devolution.

 

[Terthna]

Okay, that's it; we have not lost nearly as much as Train Dodger is lamenting, nor is what we have lost nearly as valuable as he seems to think. Technology is fire, it is the wheel, and it has always been abandoned the moment something better has come along. You're lamenting how people can't read maps anymore? What about all the other outdated tools we discarded, like sextants? I don't see anyone lamenting how nobody knows how to use one of those anymore; and why would they? We have better tools at our disposal.

Technology is at the core of the human experience; always has been, always will be. If it's not cellphones, it's newspapers; if not that, then whatever else occupied our minds besides each other. We may be social animals, but there's a difference between communicating with each other, and obsessing over each other. We communicate just as much, if not more, than we used to; we just do it in different ways than we used to, and with wider groups.

Most people did not know how to shoe their own horse, along with literally thousands of other things that they needed to survive, but left to specialists like Blacksmiths, Brewers, Farmers, Tanners, Bakers, Potters, Weavers, et cetera, et cetera. In short, we've always been ignorant of the things we didn't need to know, and to pretend otherwise is itself ignorance. If anything, we know more now about how the world around us works, and the technology that is the foundation of our civilization, than we ever have; because that knowledge is actually available, and isn't being hoarded and kept hidden by tradesmen, trying to protect their livelihoods.

Honestly you sound like my mother; the world has changed, but you're still stuck in the past.

 

[PsihoKekec]

It's not just the knowledge, todays children and adolescents have much shorter attention span than their counterparts two decades ago and other cognitive skills are on the decline as well.

You're lamenting how people can't read maps anymore?

I do plenty of hiking and mountaneering, so I'm in touch with news in this regard and there is significant uptick in mountain rescue service having to deal people who, without basic map reading skills go into mountains blindly trusting their smartphones then get stuck or get lost. Hell, some of these smarthpone zombies can't even comprehend that the white stuff at the top of the mountain is snow and they are supposed to have proper equipment for it. MRS resources are getting stretched and it will keep getting worse.

 

[Terthna]

It's not just the knowledge, todays children and adolescents have much shorter attention span than their counterparts two decades ago and other cognitive skills are on the decline as well.

Is that even a thing? I'm not sure, but if it is, I could point to several other more likely causes than technology; the current state of public education for one.

I do plenty of hiking and mountaneering, so I'm in touch with news in this regard and there is significant uptick in mountain rescue service having to deal people who, without basic map reading skills go into mountains blindly trusting their smartphones then get stuck or get lost. Hell, some of these smarthpone zombies can't even comprehend that the white stuff at the top of the mountain is snow and they are supposed to have proper equipment for it. MRS resources are getting stretched and it will keep getting worse.

Ever heard of the Donner Party? Ignorance and stupidity are not new things, and people have gotten themselves killed because of both throughout human history.

 

[PsihoKekec]

People need help at increased rate than in the past. Between 2013-18 there was 36% increase in MRS interventions while there was 15-20% increase in visitation to mountains. Now considering that equipment of mountaneers is improving, along with education initiatives, the increase in accidents should be below the increase in visitations. Since it's the opposite, there must be some reasons and according to mountain rescue members I talked to, the biggest reason is smarthpone induced stupidity.

 

[ShadowsOfParadox]

smartphone induced stupidity

I think you mean "Service providers having bad service maps to imply they provide more service than they actually do."

Be honest, would it have been stupid if they'd had coverage the way the ads imply?

 

[Iconoclast]

Was there any point to this rant? I don't see much harm in anything you've mentioned. I especially liked the paranoid "invitation to be stalked" ramblings.

People used to understand the value of privacy. Hell, we used to shred envelopes and unwanted correspondence so people wouldn’t pick addresses and personal information out of our trash. Now, people display their bare asses to everyone on the internet, even people thousands of miles away. It’s insane. The imprudence of using social media to advertise everything about yourself boggles the mind.

Okay, that's it; we have not lost nearly as much as Train Dodger is lamenting, nor is what we have lost nearly as valuable as he seems to think. Technology is fire, it is the wheel, and it has always been abandoned the moment something better has come along. You're lamenting how people can't read maps anymore? What about all the other outdated tools we discarded, like sextants? I don't see anyone lamenting how nobody knows how to use one of those anymore; and why would they? We have better tools at our disposal.

Technology is at the core of the human experience; always has been, always will be. If it's not cellphones, it's newspapers; if not that, then whatever else occupied our minds besides each other. We may be social animals, but there's a difference between communicating with each other, and obsessing over each other. We communicate just as much, if not more, than we used to; we just do it in different ways than we used to, and with wider groups.

Most people did not know how to shoe their own horse, along with literally thousands of other things that they needed to survive, but left to specialists like Blacksmiths, Brewers, Farmers, Tanners, Bakers, Potters, Weavers, et cetera, et cetera. In short, we've always been ignorant of the things we didn't need to know, and to pretend otherwise is itself ignorance. If anything, we know more now about how the world around us works, and the technology that is the foundation of our civilization, than we ever have; because that knowledge is actually available, and isn't being hoarded and kept hidden by tradesmen, trying to protect their livelihoods.

Honestly you sound like my mother; the world has changed, but you're still stuck in the past.

The world has changed. For the worse. People can’t see it because they’re blinded by the effects of technological improvement, not noticing that we’ve simply lost any pretense of discernment or taste. Read an architectural digest and look at how terrible everything looks compared to how it used to be. When NASA built the Saturn V rocket engines, they used slide rules and drafting tables and welding machines and hand-stitched them together. Today’s engineers have the finest CAD/CAM software on the planet, and most of them can’t find their ass with both hands. Hell, half of them are so stupid, they program tool paths that make CNC end mills go too deep into the workpiece and summarily shit themselves.

What about when the battery on your phone dies and you’re stranded at sea and you have nothing to charge it with? I bet you’d be wishing you had a sextant and a map, then. Electronics can fail. GPS satellites aren’t forever. In the event that our technological society collapses for some reason, next to none of us will be able to navigate.

Back in medieval times, everyone knew that a farrier nailed shoes on a horse and a blacksmith beat iron into tools and weapons. How many of them do you think are aware about the ubiquity of PHP, Ruby, and Java web apps, how a smartphone gyroscope works, or what the motor controller on their Tesla does when they press on the accelerator? We are failing to reckon with our own technology, and that is because technological improvement has outpaced the growth of human wisdom.

The end of the road that we are headed down looks something very much like H.G. Wells’ Eloi. People should find that disturbing, but they won’t. Not until the consequences are already upon them will they even think to act.

I’ve had people who were fellow engineers fail to understand how a Diesel-electric ship propels itself. This one tobacco-chewing dumbshit asked me why the handle position on a Diesel engine in a Diesel-electric plant changes if it’s always running at the same RPM and producing the same amount of power. He couldn’t even comprehend the difference between constant RPM and constant power. I had to explain to him, like a child, how the voltage and frequency are constant but the amperage increases with load, so the engine needs more fuel to maintain the same speed. One engineer, who was a licensed engineer and many years my senior, suggested that Diesel engines would one day be replaced by “zero-point free energy permanent magnet motors”, like the Searle Effect Generator.

If people in specialized technical fields are hopeless enough to profess a belief in perpetual motion machines, then what hope does the average dipshit on the street have?

 

[PsihoKekec]

I think you mean "Service providers having bad service maps to imply they provide more service than they actually do."

Be honest, would it have been stupid if they'd had coverage the way the ads imply?

I stand by what I said, people leave their thinking to smarthpone and blissfully follow the glowing screen into oblivion or act like headless chicken if said glowing screens fail. Many accidents could be prevented if people actualy did some preparations instead of just trusting smartphone magic.

 

[Arch Dornan]

I’ve had people who were fellow engineers fail to understand how a Diesel-electric ship propels itself. This one tobacco-chewing dumbshit asked me why the handle position on a Diesel engine in a Diesel-electric plant changes if it’s always running at the same RPM and producing the same amount of power. He couldn’t even comprehend the difference between constant RPM and constant power. I had to explain to him, like a child, how the voltage and frequency are constant but the amperage increases with load, so the engine needs more fuel to maintain the same speed. One engineer, who was a licensed engineer and many years my senior, suggested that Diesel engines would one day be replaced by “zero-point free energy permanent magnet motors”, like the Searle Effect Generator.

If people in specialized technical fields are hopeless enough to profess a belief in perpetual motion machines, then what hope does the average dipshit on the street have?

I feel like that even after graduating. Is that a result of not keeping in touch with my learning material?

 

[Iconoclast]

I feel like that even after graduating. Is that a result of not keeping in touch with my learning material?

That’s normal. Our society is full of endless distractions and our work is unchallenging. Nobody remembers anything from college because nobody needs to remember anything from college. About 98% of college students use calculus only once in their lives; when they’re in college. The other two percent are math majors.