Once upon a time we thought that inviting people to join the Information Superhighway would bring them together and herald an age of unity and shared purpose.
We didn’t realize that we were opening the noosphere to subversion and attack.
It wasn’t long before weaponized memes were deployed to deepen societal divisions. Old antagonists brought their wars to the digital frontier. Commercial entities outcompeted their FOSS forefathers and to reshape discourse. Engorged vectors emulated human creativity and threatened to forge new underclasses.
Was the utopian dream wrong? Were we naive to believe technology could unleash humanity’s potential? Or are these mere birth pains of the future we were promised?
Don’t blame me, I deleted all my social media years ago. Now, I’m just using it for my crippling addiction to pornography
Now, I’m just using it for my crippling addiction to pornography
Bless you for keeping the spirit of our forbearers alive.
A technology is never inherently good or bad, it merely has potential. It’s about the human intents behind the application of those technologies.
For a while the Internet truly was a beautiful utopia, in many ways. It was a huge shift in our history, and yet so very human. It was pure, used for reaching out and taking in, sharing, connecting. A shared soul, or brain if you’d prefer. Then some other entities started establishing their presence, and they didn’t like that. They’d rather subvert those key purposes with their own, applying their resources and influence to mold the net, and with it, the people connected to it. They were quite capable and discreet, such that our collective cognition didn’t even notice all the novel ways it was being twisted.
But it doesn’t matter, because the Internet still is all those beautiful things it once was, and it can be so many more. Just look at this very random thread we’re on. A handful of people, from who knows where, each with their own crazy histories, each their own thoughts. Here, by chance or destiny, exchanging those brainwaves. That will never change. And that’s where the true potential of the Internet lies. Just like others used the Internet to do unprecedented things, we will too. As we have before.
Hoping is never wrong.
thx for this community. it’s not just the Artworks but reading the comments as well… soothing.
Joining a mailing list wouldn’t be so bad if the mail apps weren’t so bad at doing mail.
I feel like the capital has taken the internet away from us. Everyone is locked up in shit holes now and the free internet feels like some post-apocalyspe wasteland (Lemmy is cool but damn there are like 20 people here fr).
It really did, didn’t it?
It was supposed to make us smarter.
Narrator: It did not.
Oh, but it did. It also made us lonelier, but not by our choice.
I was meant to surf the internet superhighway and instead I’m inundated with hell and misery.
The Capacitent Sun scorches the frayed edges of a once-lamenated advertising poster. The disheveled fastenings still clinging ecstatically to the decaying concrete. A rogue piece separates itself, and catches the solemn eye of the wandering hacker. She stares at it, the ancient symbols and depictions reach through time to find themselves in her. “Learn more. Do more. Be more.” Each period stung with some long forgotten but deeply ingrained urgency. Directionless, it pounded at the insides of atriums and ventricles like a machine that could no longer stand to be air gapped. Externally, she was frozen. Her brain fought the internal dissonance of messaging and reality. This is what they believed, that they would be alright.
I’ve recently been watching a recreation of a old .nsv IPTV channel called RantTV. Most of the stuff on there is like from 1999-2005. Very old, even before YouTube. Most of the content revolves around this man called Sean Kennedy. Very fun to watch him yell and rant comedically into the mic. Mostly talks about government control, coperations, how great hackers and internet pirates are for society, “our current culture/society”, paranoid-esque shit, etc. (And it has a Bad Religion song at the end of one of the shows, which I love)
Can’t help but see how the landscape has changed in 20 years. How newspapers and TV and entertainment used to be so centrally controlled and limited, but now it has become so decentralized, you can literally find anything on the internet. How bunk conspiracies theories are now so prevelant, that QAnon has worked its way into office. How anti-vax rhetoric is so prevelant now that the U.S. government used it as a psy-op against foreign nations.
Anyway, I can’t help but think of RantTV when I read this quote. Hits real hard.
COME JOIN US!Happy to see this mentioned here. RantMedia basically invented the whole idea of podcasts before the term even existed and they played a major role in establishing the hacker sub-culture. AFAIK their online radio ran basically non-stop for 20 years until 2019.
Patrolling with Sean Kennedy (both seasons) is on archive.org and still worth a watch today. Some of his tips are still applicable, (to this day I still go by his sanitize your products, you’re not getting paid to promote a brand) and the rest just makes you sad, seeing how things changed over the decades.
Sometimes I wonder where
the fucking manended up. I know he wrote a few books but basically disappeared from the internet in the 2010s.
