Why the Internet Is "Dangerous" (1995) | Hacker News Reader

Why the Internet Is "Dangerous" (1995)

spectacle.org

The idea that crazy people couldn’t communicate and meet up before internet is bs.

You can find countless crazy people grouping up under religious cults or racist groups or countless other useless and harmful things waaay before internet.

Allowing ideas to circulate freely doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Before the internet, crazy people and the spread of their ideas were limited by current communication paradigms. Mass communication was owned by corporate interests (yes far more so and far more centralized than the web is today) so word of mouth and maybe zines and fringe talk radio tended to be the only ways such ideas could propagate.

There was such a thing as "normal" back in those days which, for better or worse, provided friction to the spread of unorthodox ideas.

Now, and because of the web, there is no more "normal." QAnon started as a joke on 4chan and has become the predominant political and cultural movement of the Western world entirely because the internet provides a near frictionless medium for the acceleration of bullshit. Random people start boutique cults on TikTok and get more followers than most pre-internet cults could ever have hoped for. A dozen or so accounts can entirely dominate the COVID misinformation space on Facebook. The scale and speed of travel is transformational. The world in which travel across the ocean takes weeks is fundamentally different than the world in which it takes hours.

I disagree with the thesis of the article in that I believe governments are a part of the problem, and that regulating the internet at that level would destroy the only de facto public mass communications medium in existence, and only usher in a massive global surveillance state (and it has.) But I disagree with your implication that the internet has had net zero effect on the harm that the spread of bad information has had on society. The "good memes" the article refers to have not prevailed.

It is baseless to think QAnon wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t internet.

There were fascist movements and crazy people directing entire countries since history exists.

Having more ideas isn’t bad. Some people thinking covid is a conspiracy is a very good thing. Everyone just thinking same things will never happen hopefully.

I never claimed that QAnon was the only fascist movement that rose to power, or that the internet was the only way that any fascist movement could rise to power. But QAnon as a phenomenon would never have existed nor would it have metastasized in the body politic as it did without the internet. It is probably the first truly internet age political movement, at least the first I'm aware of.

And those pre-internet fascist movements were the result of years, if not decades, of creeping effort and required the power and infrastructure of governments and control of the media to take hold.In a world without the internet Trump never makes it past the primaries. But Trump went from a joke of a candidate to Christ incarnate for half the country in a matter of months, almost entirely due to memes. Again - the salient point is the way that the internet allows these movements to galvanize and accelerate and control people's reality in a way that wasn't wasn't possible before.

>Having more ideas isn’t bad. Some people thinking covid is a conspiracy is a very good thing.

Believing in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories kills people, full stop, and the people who believed in covid conspiracy theories literally made things worse for the rest of the human species. Ideas don't exist in a vaccuum. It's unfortunate you think this is a good thing, or you can't see a relationship between the ideas and their consequences. Or that you don't care.

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