You ever watch interviews of people about the internet when it was first starting to become accessible to people?

Everyone was so optimistic it would unite the world. Bring peace and prosperity. Join minds to conquer world hunger. Homelessness. Cure diseases. Racism and all the other isms would disappear when we could no longer use physical features and physical location to subjugate and divide.

Knowledge and information accessable to everyone would spur more knowledge and advancements.

It was naive. But also. It's what it could have been. It had that potential once upon a time.

At some level I think, both are true, the frog's part is pretty obvious, but I do think there are a great many things that I would not have known, or even known enough to be curious about, without the internet, along with people, to include a number that I now know in person and am very close to, that I never would have met. Humans are biased to notice the bad side in something more than the good, and it's easy to take the benefits of the internet for granted as part of the "default" way things are, while noticing the harms it brings because, well, they hurt.

More to the point though, I think now that anything that does the blue part, will also get you the green part. The trouble is that the world is simply too big to comprehend. There are too many things to know, going on in too many places, to be well informed about more than a fraction, and too many people to know or feel kinship with all of them. Therefore, increasing information available and the number of people one can talk to will, and inheritly must, change you in a way that leads to a different sort of division.

Every faraway or global problem you become aware of and come to care about takes up time and attention from some other thing you would have done or learned or cared about instead. Every person you come to know takes up slots in Dunbar's number that otherwise would have been filled with someone else, and the fact that you get some choice over what slice of the world you come to know means that those people you associate with are likely to care about the same problems and ideas as you, and those who dont will seem almost alien by comparison, caring for strange and seemingly irrelevant or problematic things while seemingly being unable to understand that which you find so obviously important. You probably seem the same to them.

I don't even think anymore that this is necessarily a bad thing. The same happens without online connection after all, it's just defined by geographic region more than by the people themselves. Existing in a "forced" space with no alternatives can be problematic for those people who do not fit in well with their family or neighbors, who nowadays at least can find community with others like them, and when people from different "tribes" do have to work together due to physical proximity, the diversity of knowledge available in that group is greater than if they all shared one perspective.

There are of course genuine problems to be addressed with attention driven algorithm or with platform owners manipulating social consensus with their power, but doing so wont suddenly make humans not tribalistic, or suddenly all informed about everything, or even everything you, or me, or any other individual person finds important. They are worth solving, but realistically the benefits of doing so aren't creating a single global community whose members understand everything that it'd be beneficial for them to understand. Humans just don't have the bandwidth and time to facilitate that.

Aand now after typing on my phone for half an hour Ive noticed this is the shitposting community and I'm way overthinking it. Oh well, that's what I get for never bothering to pay attention to what community things are on I guess.

It's gotten weirder every year, and the pro-corporate horde grows every year.

people pay 200K for a wristwatch, and they're proud. Let's show it off on instagram! I'd be so ashamed I got suckered.

I remember the early 2000's being told exactly this was coming and retorting with naive idealism that information and global connection were exactly what we needed to bring a new enlightened world.

... man fuck reality

Humanity: Corporate short-form hyper-real entropic media

Me: gooooooooooon

Yes, we have to ban algorithmic selected content just like we do for most other drugs.