/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I think the internet was a noble but flawed idea. You can't put all the world's information in one one book. The bigger the book gets, the worse the signal to noise ratio becomes, the more impossible it becomes to read it. Centralizing information is a bad idea, you're just putting all of your society's most precious eggs, its knowledge, in one basket that you can't get them back out of. The internet was supposed to be decentralized in theory, but in practice its privatization has turned it into one giant book owned by Google and the signal to noise ratio is so bad now that we have to train expensive wasteful AI models to just find anything on it, and it will only get worse as the AI generated slop begins to pollute the human-generated data. I think the internet will eventually become largely unusable and people will gradually move on and do something else.

>>2515878
I wish tech and online culture never advanced past like 2007, 2012 at the latest. Even if irl wasn't online at this point and "get off the internet" thus worked it would still be sad to have to say goodbye to a place where i saw so many cool and interesting things

>>2515865
But to answer your question
>"Multipolarist" Internet where each relatively "big" country de-facto owns and moderates a few of national social media sites, content platforms, and messengers?
is the most likely and fits with global trends. Of the many naive beliefs that pervaded the post-Cold War world one of the most naive was the, I guess, exceptionalism regarding tech? The belief that it was immune to the same patterns as other industries under capitalism and that the internet would usher in a new era of knowledge and global connectivity. When as OP said the reality was that it coincided with the end of the Cold War and modern globalization, and the "liberal internet" reflected that. As that world continues to separate into distinct imperialist blocs naturally the Internet will follow.

>>2515865
>What would come in its place? "Multipolarist" Internet where each relatively "big" country de-facto owns and moderates a few of national social media sites, content platforms, and messengers? Or fascist Internet where Elon Musk owns everything and Anglo-Burger moral guardians constantly bully (or lobby) him into banning the content they dislike?

both. the former will in practice look like variations on the latter. i dont think this is necessarily a bad thing in terms of long term prospects for resistance, though it will certainly be miserable and constraining to those of us who live through it. but it would by necessity fracture ideological hegemony, and increasing attempts to control and cordon off communication and expression will inevitably create sites of struggle at the same time that over-saturated tech sector becomes increasingly proletarianized, i.e. the tightening the screws of the internet as a system coincides with and reinforces an oppositional relationship to populations who are at least relatively more educated and aware of how that system works.

>>2517322
>the tightening the screws of the internet as a system coincides with and reinforces an oppositional relationship to populations who are at least relatively more educated and aware of how that system works
I think the relationship of people like us towards the internet will change relatively little. You could argue filesharing and niche discussion will return to a more embryonic form like it was in a less social-media saturated internet. When hosting was more expensive, there was also a smaller number of communities and these communities were more insular as a result, which i could see returning when having a large userbase would become an active liability.

The actual dystopian thrust of places like discord, xitter or traditional email is that every conversation is directly funneled into a surveillance system and you have real people actively poring over them. This, aside from copyright, is what most internet regulation is about. One response would obviously be to decentralize, coupled with retvrning to older mediums like IRC, forums with registration and high-volume, ephemeral messageboards, which are by no means secure but harder to integrate into the current surveillance apparatus while still being relatively ubiquitous.

I don't think the internet as an infrastructure will go away, but I think the web's days are numbered, at least this awful garbage iteration of the web. It will turn to shit and people will stop using it for most things. What takes its place is anyone's guess. Maybe nothing. Maybe society will go back to like it was pre-2010s, the internet will go back to being a means instead of an end; people will use it for talking to people they personally know or researching something or maybe online shopping, but the whole idea of it being some kind of shared meta-reality will be thankfully dead.

>>2517420
>>2517364
I hear people say things like this but could it really happen? If anything it seems like people only become more and more plugged in every year and attempts to separate them from the torment nexus have the same result as trying to tear any other addict away from their vice. Its not even just young people like it was before, the middle aged and up who castigated younger millennials/the first half of zoomers (as teenagers) for being phone zombies are now scrolling in public all the time too looking at god knows what. Plus sites that try to recreate the oldweb experience all seem dead and a poor imitation. Maybe the phone bans in American schools seeming to work is a hopeful sign, though.

In addition I don't know if the decentralized/privacy aspect will ever come back because since the early 2010s the hydra of Islamist terrorism, drug dealing, and CP sharing was used as a pretext to justify more and more surveillance/cracking of encryption.

>>2517674

I'm mostly just basing this on my personal anecdotal evidence - I was an early adopter of the internet and these days I'm mostly sick of it, I don't even look at my phone anymore if I can help it. When I'm sitting in a waiting room or something, I just sit and do nothing and it's great. I love doing nothing. I love just sitting and thinking and staring at the wall and not having a constant onslaught of stupid useless information blasted into my face 24/7. If I was an early adopter and I'm this burned out now, maybe in a few years maybe everyone else will start getting burned out too.

>>2517674
>the middle aged […] are now scrolling in public all the time too looking at god knows what
My boomer parents almost always browse various MSM news sites. Every time i see them they're yapping about muh democracy and cuckraine, yet their internet usage is probably not making it much worse than only watching TV would be. Ironically my dad is part of a biker forum, which had regular meetups, but split because some rightoid-coded people stirred up drama.
>sites that try to recreate the oldweb experience all seem dead and a poor imitation
That's because they are, in addition to spiritually being deeply reactionary looking at you houdinifag. If anything i'm interested in the infrastructure of the "old web":

2channel and futaba offer fascinating site concepts and how long their model has endured is a testament to that. Keeping a consistent userbase, despite appearing hard on its surface, more or less seems to be a solved issue. An already formed group of anons generally likes gatekeeping and policing themselves. There is a small net of slow-to-medium activity boards, that amounts to a substantial amount of people to select from regardless; every time Patch advertises his new site he always pulls a similar user pool from there. Raids, mod drama and waning interest in the main topic seem to be the only confounding factors here.

Forums aren't quite as elegant, consider though how the gatekeeping access behind an account could deter official investigation, at least for a while. Personal pages were great and practical when everyone wanted an "Internet Address", before they were integrated into forums or social media. Even neocities has some of these for discovery; it's a social medium for website building enthusiasts, because who else would want to be on neocities?

Blogs are currently at this weird intersection where they're idiosyncratic enough that social media can't yet eat their lunch despite what people who make twitter threads claim and not far enough in their own niche that they're often shared. The fact that they're easy to roll on your own and you can't "discover" shit on medium, blogspot, etc. probably else. Then there is the need to actually talking your time to format something similar to a legitimate essay, instead of whatever it is i'm doing right now, filtering out a lot of people who don't have the time or routine. Luckily you can also avoid any meandering corporate essayslop, as you can see it coming from a mile away, and through the power of skimming might even extract a few useful sentences from it.

If anything seems destined to disappear from today's web, it's youtube. We know google has been running it at a loss since forever. In the future serving the kind of content it does will only be feasible over something like torrents. Any sensible webmaster/mistress will pick two of length, compression and video for their site. High-definition video is just a uniquely terrible distribution format for many things found on youtube.

>>2517683
>When I'm sitting in a waiting room or something, I just sit and do nothing
I've been doing the same for years. If you're really "sick" of it, do you no longer search for books, music or films in your freetime then? I honestly couldn't engage in most hobbies without the context of the internet, when it tells me things i wouldn't know otherwise and even with relatively mundane things an hour of scouring forums can spare me a lot of uncertainty.

>>2517773

I just have old tv shows/movies/music on as background noise these days, I rarely seek out anything new. I read books sometimes, but usually I'd rather be doing something productive, I'm kind of sick of consumption and would rather be painting or writing or raking the leaves or doing carpentry or whatever.

>>2517806
>writing
Bad example, as you'd probably want an audience for that, unless you do something like making graffitis of your poems, which i can respect.

>>2517815

There used to be a time when people did creative things for fun and not for attention or money. I miss that.

>>2517824
I kind of get that, being inherently appreciative of something, but i also see myself as part of a greater whole. Writing fanfiction for my own satisfaction is different from writing a grace x alunya story to post on here and the latter is far more satisfying. Not only because of the attention dialogue, but also because i'm furthering something outside my own immediate environment. In short i see myself more as a memetic than a biological lifeform and while i wouldn't approach it as something as barbaric as a pissing contest, i do want to create things others can appreciate.

>>2517834

I show off some things I make to other people, but only if I think it's good or interesting or worthwhile and I'm curious to know their opinion about it. Or as you said, for the dialogue, not attention. When I was young like in my early teens and just started discovering stuff like flash animation and webcomics and whatnot I had the initial urge to splurge every dumb thing I made onto Newgrounds or whatever but over time hindsight and crawl-out-of-your-skin levels of embarrassment at seeing my old work taught me the value of self-editing.

>>2515878
Same process happened with the printing press.

>>2515865
>There is no easy way to scale the Web 3.0 model to billions of users and circumvent massive ethical, legal, technical, and economic challenges that arise from that. Heck, the West was probably only able to scale its social media models to 100s of millions of users only because the rise of the Internet and social media had coinceded with liberal-capitalist post-Cold War triumph.
Aside from the ethical which was never a concern to the people who can actually affect this, what exactly about these problems has changed in the past few years that they're suddenly insurmountable?

>>2517683
You have to consider that as an early adopter you have a vision of the good version of the Internet that most people don't.
Also, the current Internet is like this on purpose, all the bad things about it are deliberate to maximize engagement, do we really think everyone will just get over it eventually apropos of nothing?
This is an inherently cringe thing to say but the current relationship of many (not confident about saying most) people to the Internet/phones is a public health issue and should be seen as not dissimilar to drugs, sugar and other unhealthy habit. There's decent proof that phone addiction is real and bad for your health. Now, drug addiction isn't exactly a solved problem socially either, but acknowledging it is a necessary first step for doing anything about it.

>>2515878
>You can't put all the world's information in one one book. The bigger the book gets, the worse the signal to noise ratio becomes, the more impossible it becomes to read it.
I was just reading about this:
<Subsurface crystal engraving for data storage is a "5D" technology that uses a femtosecond laser to write data into nanostructured quartz glass, storing information in five dimensions: the three physical dimensions of height, width, and depth, plus two more from the nanostructuring. This method allows for a high-capacity (up to 360 TB) and incredibly durable storage solution that can last for billions of years, making it ideal for archiving humanity's knowledge. The process uses specialized lasers to create microscopic structures within the glass, which are then read back by a specialized device to retrieve the data.
<Unlike conventional 2D media like CDs, 5D storage uses the three spatial dimensions, along with two additional dimensions derived from the size, orientation, and position of nanostructures created by the laser.
<A femtosecond laser, emitting incredibly short pulses of light (280 femtoseconds), is used to create these nanostructures inside the quartz glass.
<A separate process is used to decode the data from the glass by reading the stored information from the nanostructure patterns.
<Researchers estimate a single 5-inch crystal disc could hold up to 360 terabytes of data.
<The storage medium is extremely resilient, able to withstand temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Celsius and having a "virtually unlimited lifetime" at room temperature.
<The technology is seen as a way to preserve humanity's knowledge, history, and culture for billions of years, far outlasting current storage methods.
<Its durability makes it a potential safeguard against natural disasters or other threats that could destroy digital or physical records.
<It can serve as a robust time capsule for future civilizations, ensuring that the last evidence of our civilization will not be forgotten
relevant:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2019/07/31/report-jeffrey-epstein-wanted-to-freeze-brain-spread-his-dna/

>>2520555

As someone who used the internet since like the late 90s/early 2000s, I don't know if i would go as far to say that it used to be "good" but it definitely wasn't as bad as it is now in terms of centralization and commercialization and overall sleaze. But these problems were all there from day one, people seem to forget that. Like before Google there were a few search engines people used, Altavista or Lycos or Yahoo or one of those "web portals" which were always blanketed with ads and clickbait bullshit to the point of almost being unusable. And without them there was no way to really find anything, people tend to forget that too. You can have all the world's information on the internet but if there's no point of entry, no index, then all the information is just useless noise, tv static.

Things like the internet and the web really need to be treated as public infrastructure and not as a business. Search should have been treated as an integral part of the internet infrastructure from day one, with some national or international consortium dedicated to indexing the web and maintaining a public index of every known website and link with some pagerank-like relevance algorithm to make it useful. There's nothing that says the public-sector could not have accomplished what Google did. We've seen services like Wikipedia and Archive.org and know that people can build useful things on the internet without a multibillion dollar profit motive. Companies could have still started their own private for-profit search engines but at least they wouldn't own the entire fucking internet.