We're Reaching Peak Internet

Count me in the group of tech loving luddites.

It should be no surprise though. The internet was comandeered by social networks, ecommerce and advertising. It struggles to survive online if it doesn't make money.

Those same commercial interests are what drive the evolution of the devices inside our homes and pockets.

Home automation imagined by futuroligists before the internet had a much more clear and pure idea of what it could look like in my opinion. We wanted to ask our home to preheat the oven or start the car in the morning. What we got was a telephone connection to a concierge service. Where a mobile phone was a communication device it is now an advertising platform in your pocket, and a kernel interupt for your brain.

If I could pinpoint a difference in the way we looked at technology in the past versus the way it has played out, the key seems to be externalities. We spend more time thinking through our screens out into the world. About other things, other people and other times. So we spend less time thinking about what is around us and less time doing things around us. From that light it's no surprise that in home digital assistants do very little interaction with your home and life around you. Because we are less interested in that.

But I think we forget to turn that mode of thinking off, then end up at concerts amongst the loud music and friends and somehow managing to wonder if you've got a notification or how your post about arriving at the concert is doing.

The title put me off, but the author has really achieved something here. Two things that stayed with me:

>Smartphones will no longer show you a candy-store-like spread of apps when you unlock them. You will tell it which tools you want to use, not the other way around.

>Compare [Netflix] to something like Twitter, as it exists today, which is essentially a randomized, infinite rolodex of hot takes from strangers on every possible issue, from elections and wars to McDonalds’ newest menu item. It’s hard to imagine a machine more efficient at shredding your time and mental energy into tiny, useless pieces.

Insightful stuff!

I don’t think we’re at peak internet. So far, being on the internet tends to distract one from the surrounding world: you have to turn your attention from the environment around you to your phone, and some people are resisting that. But with augmented reality gradually taking off, I think we’ll see more of people’s everyday lives as they walk around being somehow integrated with networking.

I know quite some people who already do that: Aggressively delete messenger applications from their phones, being hardly reachable.

However, I don't think the world already reached "peak internet". The author probably did. IoT everywhere is still a way to go, from my feelings.

tl;dr: we're having too much internet, we should start limiting it out of our lives back where it was in 1993, as a mail and info lookup tool.

Wanting toothpaste back into the tube may feel natural, but is quite unlikely to happen.

Nothing interesting here, move along.