this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Please don't get me wrong: I have the greatest respect for all those who try against all odds. I just think that the idea of the Internet utopians was that the Internet would promote enlightenment, understanding and education. I simply have the impression that the opposite has generally happened.
It's not perfect, by any means, but it's definitely having a net positive effect. Traditionally, the right has sustained themselves by getting the next generation "on their side" through various tactics such as messing with education and such. It worked pre-internet because small towns were somewhat isolated and the flow of information easier to control.
Gen Z, the first generation to grow up entirely online, has proven they aren't buying their shit this time around and I'd argue it's because of the Internet and all the information they can access regardless of if they're in some podunk town in bumfuck nowhere with like 300 people or a major city with millions
At the time, the Internet was also a hope to break the power of the extremely powerful print media (not originally Tim Berners-Lee's intention, but that was the idea of most early Internet utopians). In theory this still works today, but in practice I think it has gotten even worse: Opinions can probably even be spread more cheaply today by well-funded think tanks via a few, all the more powerful players - a prominent example is Facebook/Meta's collaboration with Cambridge Analytica. That's probably the reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter.
I know I thought that...but I was wrong.
There are these tiny villages in Africa, where people take laptops or tablets and a huge stash of DVDs, and often there isn't even a roof just like 4 sticks poking up from the ground, maybe a tarp above it or possibly not even that. People come from hundreds of miles away, even walking, and they can watch videos from literal Harvard/Yale/etc. professors on whatever subject - engineering, lessions on how to speak English, biology, physics, etc. The barriers for people who truly WANT knowledge are pretty much entirely gone now, world-wide.
Which lasted it seems for about a minute, while instead now, misinformation flows even more freely. Those setups that I mentioned above took DECADES to create, leveraging the technology available at each timepoint, and more than a little prep work to discuss with the recipient culture to let them know it is an option. And even then, situations such as Boco Haram continue to threaten their continuation, bc girls (& women) learning things is considered bad in that case.
Thus, I learned that ignorance is extremely easy to cure (barely an inconvenience, if you know that famous YouTuber's catchphrase;-). Entire courses are available freely online, such as the Crash Course series...of series (US History, World History, literature, biology, chemistry, physics, check it out!), and nowadays the most dumbed-down explanations of extremely complex topics as you could ever want, see e.g. this video.
The barriers nowadays to knowing things are "different". See e.g. the movie WALL-E, where the humans all just gave up and sat down... but then were never able to get back up again.
The same was said about books, but have you ever read a dollar-store romance novel? Or newspapers, but there's also The Sun.
Everything that can be used for good, will also be used for evil. It's all there, but you have to wash out the shit yourself. That's what seperates the chaff from the wheat, so to speak.