To me, the Internet as we know it is dead. I’m trying to build a new, better “internet”. Don’t know how, yet, but I have a concept of a plan.
My kids are getting old enough to get their own computers. I got them two mini-PC’s, put Mint on them, and for now a few DOS games. They are at the age where they still sound out everything they read or write, but it won’t take long before they’d like to go online. For now, though, they are happy with some of the games I used to play. Right now it’s Duck Tales, Dynablaster and Grand Prix Circuit, but I hope to introduce them to Sierra and Lucasarts adventures later, and Microprose strategies even later.
But I digress. I don’t want to let them onto the Internet, even if I disable access to some sites (they’re bound to find a way around). Instead, I’d like to self-host my own Internet. It would be largely static, with entire downloaded Web sites, and I’m currently compiling a list of what I’d give them. I’m also thinking of curating a selection of news articles, which I’d grab and present to them via my own server. As time goes by, I’d slowly immerse them in more, but my goal is to grow them to be discerning young adults, who’d know better what to believe and what to share than my generation did.
Other parents in my kids’ school have the same concerns. I was talking to some about my idea, and they’d like to join. Some of them are far more knowledgeable than me in the technical aspects of this undertaking (I’m still using a LAMP stack for all my needs). At the end, we may end up with a local “internet”, with its own dedicated message board, perhaps some social pages, and relatively harmless content. If we had this idea, you can bet that thousands of other communities already had a similar idea. I fully expect the human internet to eventually fragment into tiny local internets, and the traditional internet becoming a giant circle-jerk of AI’s in circular conversation.
The meat is living but the soul has been dead for years.
Yes
The best answer I’ve ever received was “yes.” Well summarized and quick.
I feel like it’s worth pointing out that we are really only talking about the World Wide Web (one of several software platforms on the Internet) and not the Internet (the hardware part) as a whole.
The old internet (small privately hosted websites and blogs, organized in web rings) still exists, and may have more content than ever. It’s just such a small subset of the internet now, and gets ignored by search engines, so it’s hard to find.
It’s more like a ghoul, neither alive but dead and feeding on humans to sustain it’s unholy existence.
Matter of perspective. Earlier today, I told a coworker how happy I am to have been born in the late 1980’s, because it spared me from the internet culture of today: shallow, exploitative, otherizing and it encourages short term dopamine kicks. It’s a breeding ground for media illiteracy, bigotry, xenophobia and narrow mindedness in general - which is ironic, since it also makes the culminated knowledge of human kind easily accessible, which has the potential to open your mind if you have internet access and if you use the internet wisely. Anyway, in a way, the internet of today is a crystalization of everything that’s making me have a gloomy outlook on the future and keeping me from wanting to have children.
I’m forever privileged to have been part of the crowd that got to know and experience the internet as it developed.
It was a much more colorful and sociable world. It was also a lot quieter, because people mostly kept to themselves and the internet wasn’t 24/7.
There’s a subset of gen z i see sometimes that are jealous we got to live that era. Damn shame the world kids have to grow up in now, no thanks!! So glad we weren’t born any later.
I’m younger than you (born 1995), but I share some of your feelings. The internet today is so different from how I remember it as a kid. I am immensely grateful that I got to experience some of that period of rapid change.
Totally !
I grew up with the knowledge that “Internet routes around damage”. In those days that referred to censorship and walled gardens.
I’m not sure if and how it would work with disinformation and AI slop as the damage to route around of.
I’m cautious but hopeful.
Yeh. It’s been a zombie for a long time. Depersonalisation, censorship, monetisation, trackers, bots, inability to search. Everything’s so clinically useless.
I’d say we’re not there yet, but yeah, LLMs and image generators have accelerated it to the point, where I expect it to only take a few more years.
Gonna be interesting. There’s definitely going to be some enclaves, like invite-only places (in particular messengers), and potentially the fediverse won’t be worth targeting directly. But we do get lots of second-hand content here from places which are worth targeting, so yeah, will probably still notice the change here in one form or another.
Online communities will need to evolve natural protective features and either become porcupines that are visible but not worth the trouble of botting, or small hidden communities that spread via offline or secondary means, rather than attracting traffic from the web at large. I’m not sure what those communities will look like and it will probably be a pretty rapidly evolving landscape for at least the rest of my natural life.
OR we’ll get our act together and pass some laws or treaties or other broad compacts that make the public internet a usable shared resource. It could happen, but I admit I don’t see the internet’s current trajectory intersecting that possibility for the foreseeable future.
Depends on your definition. The majority of internet traffic is already ‘bots.’ The big platforms seem very interested in creating AI chatbots that will give the illusion of community and friendship, or at least engagement. It’s unlikely the old ways will ever fully disappear. There are still a few BBSs out there after all, but it will likely asymptotically approach ‘dead’ from now on.
It’s hard to say on many levels. However, to keep things brief, I’d say that the “Dead Internet Theory” is no longer a theory, but rather… law.
Beep boop. No computers in sight, just fellow humans, fellow human! Boop beep!
fediverse kinda seems alive tho
It’s like we found a cute little pub down the backstreet. Let the outside fall apart.
It’s been a reality for quite a while. It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly we started seeing these, but I reckon to guess they didn’t start being a thing until the mid-2010s. We’ve had bots before on the internet, but they were regulated to being more like assistants like on IRC channels or chat rooms. Where their purpose was to be greeters or handle tasks the moderator needed to be automated.
I’d love to answer but there’s a Captcha preventing it.
