I love the internet
A love letter to modernity
[day 8/30]
It is truly baffling to think how different my life would be without the internet.
Basically all my interests, my values, my worldview, my friends, hell: every single person I’ve fucked.
All thanks to this beautiful interconnected graph of servers we call the internet.
Just reflect on that for a bit, who would you be without the internet? Can you even begin to imagine? (and how much of your current interests are because of recommendation algorithms?)
It’s obviously not all sunshine and rainbows. The internet does a lot of bad to society. That’s not what I want to talk about today, other people have done that plenty.
But I do think there’s an over-correction going on in our generation. Outrage mostly targeted at recommendation algorithms, overstimulation and misinformation has hit all 7 network layers as collateral.
I love the internet. I can basically access every piece of media that I want. For free. Every single concept I want to learn more about is 5 GET requests and a bit of concentrated reading away.
I think this is uniquely beautiful, and criminally underappreciated. It’s basically a superpower. You have the entire world’s knowledge at your fingertips (with many time-traps along the way), what will you do with it?
You used to be at the whims of your local librarian, whatever books he decided to stock were what you had to deal with. And then you just had to hope you could find something interesting. If you found nothing you were out of luck, the concept was out of reach of you, maybe forever.1 That is if you even had a local library, which wasn’t the case for like ~99% of humans that ever lived.
I can also find like-minded people very easily. If I’m being real with myself: without the internet, I probably wouldn’t have found out about being transgender, and medically transitioning. This is beautiful, not evil.2
Like so many other aspects of modernity. This all feels incredibly normal. It’s so easy to forget that a mere 30 years ago every sentence in this blog post would be absolutely ridiculous.
And remember: this is not just gonna stop. I can’t think of one technology we discovered and then put back into pandora’s box again. We will never live in a world without AI chatbots ever again. And this is the worst they’ll ever be.
In which the unemployed and lost 23 year old writes a self help book
Some minds are suffering greatly because of this. I don’t mean to go into evolutionary psychology, but it’s quite obvious we didn’t evolve for a world like this, and it’s quite obvious a lot of us are struggling to adapt. Hell, I’ve spent most of my 20s idealizing the life of a caveman.
I’ve personally found I cannot exist in this world without some rules. The freedom is simply too much otherwise.3 If you curious, these are my current rules:
Games and time-wasting sites go on my desktop, I don’t go on the desktop before 6 PM.
No social media on my phone.4
No short-form content anywhere
No algorithmic recommendation of content.5
Spending time not consuming will only stick around if you replace it with creating, therefore, spend as much time as possible creating instead of consuming.
Leave the house, for at least half an hour, every day.
Another word of advice. if you want to make rules for yourself: Make them exact. The real rules have no exceptions.
Be aware your media diet will influence your personality, whether you want it to or not.
These are very unprecedented times indeed, and I for one am so excited to see what’s next.
Born too late to explore earth. Born too early to explore the galaxy. Born just in time to be a trans woman, in computer science, blogging on my favorite interconnected graph of servers.
yes yes universities exist but it’s basically the same thing with the same issues
Fix your hearts or die.
I predict this will become increasingly common as more people start to critically examine their relationship with the internet.
currently, no social media anywhere
This one is especially tricky. Algorithms are so so so good at helping you discover new, interesting things. I haven’t found good alternatives (outside of talking to people) so I’m basically in a permanent war now where I flip-flop between algorithms and no algorithms every month or so.