Please Let the Internet Die. It's Time to Start Over
wired.com
wired.com
But really who can blame them? Housing, health, cars, everything is unaffordable. Who can afford to be not greedy? People who would have otherwise lived quiet, content lives are now clamoring to get to the top of the hill just to survive before it all topples over.
If someone is willingly engaging with the latter things in your post, that's not an argument to burn down the entire thing along with the good things.
I'd wager a hefty sum that most newspapers in say 1890 were also absolute garbage filled with drivel and advertisements, but that doesn't mean they weren't useful or that the average person had to read them page to page.
The sad thing about his misguided statement is that I think society nurtured an entire generation of twitter journalists.
There's nothing to discuss here, but I'll try anyway...
I don't think we've ever burned down a city and "started over" just because of obnoxious salespeople harassing and soliciting, antisocial loitering, open air drug problems, homelessness, or even the unregulated food carts making people sick. It's extremely easy to see that these problems are as old as civilization and the parallels with social media, ecommerce, advertising, etc.
We solve them by ousting the old and bringing regulation. Tough shit if you don't like it. It's not a question of "if", but "when". It happens when people get fed up enough. We're not quite there since it's still mostly unproductive whining.
Perhaps what we need is a new community, tied to an actual human being from birth or you could become naturalized into it. But no more randomness at the core-level which weeds out the bots. And moderation is for CSAM or other illegal things at the government level. But the community moderates its own, either through voting on posts, or perhaps the community elects its own moderators to serve a term. A constitutional republic if you will...
And once we have a concrete plan to replace the internet, what's preventing it from incubating parallel to the existing internet?
An we aren't making much to better the web either. We really need new ideas before it's too late and the web just surrenders to be net negative for the people or just boring.
I don't entirely disagree. While we're at it lets let played-out Internet culture (memes, etc.) die and lets do something new.
The Internet is wires, routers, switches, and IP.
The web today sucks but i'd rather have it than only static sites.
I miss the niche little websites, the ones built by people just trying to share something creative without trying to sell you something.
Also, how do you plan to start over without inviting all the same people problems that existed before?
Ah, never mind, forget the whole thing.
The social and technological infrastructure for a digital 'state' doesn't exist at the moment but there's no reason it couldn't.
Well, one could argue there is a state at present, just, that it is not a very good one. In which case the necessity is the digital equivalent of a 'revolution' against it.
For some specific examples, it is not hard to imagine a parallel-universe internet which punishes fraudulent behavior by banning actors from all of its territory. Or which imposes transaction costs on things that are presently free (email, etc) to prevent spam. Or which coordinates micropayments in lieu of advertising/manipulation funding. Or which guarantees that the equivalent of domains never change hands, to prevent the problem of domains being taken after they expire and used for nefarious purposes..
Of course this raises all sorts of other concerns (cf how incensed people become by the idea of using real identities, age verification, or any other threats of censorship). But that is the same problem as the question of what makes physical states 'legitimate': how do you build an institution which has enough legitimacy that people buy into it instead of rejecting it? By guaranteeing rights, having good leadership, having good constitutional processes, whatever else... it is 'the' hard problem of civilization, and probably there is no perfect solution, but that doesn't mean you get to get away with not solving it by ignoring it; refusing to face it directly means just defaulting to a particular outcome without getting to even debate the tradeoffs of the choice you have made.
(Which may say more about how low the bar is these days with our enshittified Web.)
Lol.
This reminds me of "Don't complain about the traffic: YOU are the traffic".