I Miss the Internet (2024)

> But the platforms enabling this activism have also shown a disconcerting indifference to these struggles. After all, their priority is to keep users engaged – to keep us clicking, scrolling, and reacting. This drive for engagement has often led to the commodification of activism, reducing profoundly personal and political struggles to hashtags and trend cycles.

Yes even HackerNews Which i really love. Discussion is great but short-lived on to the next best thing. Designed to keep us moving and prevents us from being contemplative and forming groups that can address the problems of modern society. We need to move away from these systems that are designed around trends. Discussion needs to be threaded by topics that need addressing and stay relevant until there is a a resolution or choice-point. But its hard when our society is built around these structures. I don't see a way out at the moment.

BTW. Thanks to the author that posted this. This topic has been on my mind as well. Ill keep it archived for future reading, when we find ourselves in a authoritarian state that's much worse than it is now. If anyone has a links to organizations that are focused on combating our current social and political trends, post them.

I have been looking at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities[0] as of late, looking into ways I can help create a new world with others who care about humanity. Hannah Arendt was a American author that wrote about totalitarianism during WWII. IMHO its relevant today as we are moving towards stonger forms of authoritarianism.

[0]: https://hac.bard.edu

I share a lot of the sentiments expressed in the post, but the reality is that the people who feel this way are a tiny, tiny niche compared to the general population, and we probably can't expect anything widely used and available to the population to cater to that niche.

But on an internet mostly oriented around mega-platforms, it will likely become increasingly hard for the niche players to survive. I now understand how old people felt when the places, experiences, and cultural trends they understood died out.

>Back then, the internet was a largely untamed frontier, a boundless expanse waiting to be discovered. You didn’t so much surf the web as explore it, encountering unknown territories and unexpected gems.

This is the part that for me, hits the hardest. Is there such a similar "untamed frontier" left in 2025?

Every single one of these posts are the same.

The old internet was there when you willingly and voluntarily left it.

It may or may not still be there, but it was.

"I cheated on them with the hot and popular person and then left them and now I'm sad and I want them back."

I believe the author conflates the Internet with the Web. I mean, it's not just websites and platforms, there are protocols beyond HTTP...

Counterpoint - I don't really miss the old internet as in wanting to go back there. There is so much more content now of a high quality. Back in the old days not so much. And you can still find odd places to chat. I do miss the old Facebook a bit back when it was a place to see what your friends/family were up to without being drowned by infinite clickbait.

its like anything. a small town, peaceful, quiet, then suddenly gets flooded, gentrified, prices go up, becomes an expensive urban hell.

whenever soemthing becoems discovered it goes to shit. some kind of law.

And if I told you that from now on, and after the end of the wars and the beginning of a new era with a new generation, the science of "Its Me Pal" will become a fundamental pillar for the return to the real era, the era free from agendas, from the drawings that are harmful to the eye and the desire for perfection and control over everything, an era free from a Machiavellian, arrogant, haughty, domineering class that has the money, that orders and controls, and a class that obeys, exerts effort and time, endures humiliation, races against time, and turns into a zombie whose sole desire to get printed papers and sexual euphoria by any means, who does not care about any standard of honor and morals, an era in which there is an internet that enables you to do electronic prostitution and pornography, but it will be fought by everyone because the inverted pyramid will be straightened and the minds will become stuffed with awareness instead of being filled with the waste of pornography and its encouragement of foolishness and degeneracy, , a promise from me, my friend, and I tell you that everything they invented and tried to set limits for has not been shackled throughout the ages, and technology is the best proof, for they knew that limits are only made inside the minds, if the conscious minds are victorious, they will be freed from all false limits and will become limitless. Our weapon is the mind, science, and technology. And history does not forget,

The primary goal now is, to try to evaporate the idea of the great and giant companies that have the latest of everything, and making the society understand that we are capable of making anything and everything to be in our service and at the same time a real source of livelihood, not for there to become a monopolistic, controlling class under the pretext of "the latest techniques and the latest technology." And the question is, how is the industry made in the first place? The answer is from me and from you! From our minds, our effort, and our time in learning and research. And the disaster is that all of this is poured in the end for the benefit of the companies, not for the benefit of freelance and constructive work, because we grew up on the idea that Google and Facebook etc. are the greatest, the biggest, and the best companies. All the fakes from the owners of the giant companies were never employees, but they were doers! And after they took the positions, they started promoting their companies as the only biggest dream just to attract the minds and the educated! That's why you will see in the end every emerging generation, instead of thinking how he will invent or change the game, you see him thinking how will I join FAANG, how will I please the the shark in tank so that he funds my project and uses me!!!! Nikola Tesla is a real example of freedom of thought and that ideas, trying, and learning do not die! But on the condition of liberation from the slavery of the monopolists and money.