Take the example you mentioned- cars. The Magnificent Ambersons garnered 4 Oscar nominations debating that very topic - should the automobile have replaced horses, and is it a net positive? Even at that time when the benefits of cars were clear, the audience found the film very compelling.

Similarly, Robert Redford starred as a barnstormer in Great Waldo Pepper, which made a strong case against the Air Commerce Act, the sole reason we even have airplanes carrying passengers & goods in the air. Redford’s character is like Linus, feels airplanes are a hobby for having fun doing stunts. But the government spots the potential for a quick buck, shuts him down for good & soon airplane “industry” becomes a real thing, with mail carriers & passenger planes. Redford has a line in that film where the commerce regulator asks him to stop the stunts & just take a job as a airplane mailman - I’m not a fucking courier, I’m a pilot! William Goldman, who studied that period & wrote the film, felt it was his best work & should have gotten the Oscar.

I am sure a decade down the line you will see a film about scientists harking back to the days when the internet was a curious lab experiment, not the giant teats of FAANGs from which the majority of this audience sucks it’s daily fill of milk while blissfully hawking knickknacks for the masses they would rather do without. Nigerian teaching himself Hindi, indeed.

The Internet has done wonders to democratize the world (as elsewhere on this thread). It's brought people together that would never have found each other. That gay and sad teenager in Somalia who would have killed themselves decades earlier now has online peers. I am not sure that gay Somalia teen is not castigated among their peers for being gay, and even if they aren't, I'm not sure it's not due to the US's cultural export. What I'm sure we will see, a decade out, is the kind of unrestrained communication GP expressed without any sort of disclaimer. GP's comment is seen much more favorably when analyzed as coming from someone whos first and native language isn't English, and doesn't live under some of the demagogory that plagues some other Western Nations. Hopefully we can cleanup the mess we've made in the interim.

Is it the democratization of the internet, or the commercialization? I think it's more the latter you're benefiting from.

On the other hand, let’s compare internet to nuclear fission. Clearly lot benefits can be drawn from the technology (assuming safety practices etc) but in our current world order it is primarily used as a deterrent.

So I don’t think OP is complaining unnecessarily. We must strive to ensure technology is used for beneficial purposes. And in that sense, the call to arms is justified.

Alas, lately I am becoming a Luddite. Feature creep is the enemy. I don't want or need an 'info-tainment' screen in my vehicle. I refuse to join the Apple or Google walled gardens. The warnings from Science Fiction have been ignored, and we are wage-slaves to corporation-governments.

There is a better way to live. We must take back our power.

When does a tool become a weapon?

When it inflicts harm.

The internet has been weaponized.

Ugh... I can't believe that I'm saying this but... I agree with you, wholeheartedly.

I am about as nerdy as you can get and a huge tech enthusiast and I'm just starting to hate the internet outside of a few sites that I visit to stay "in the know". I feel like every day I'm learning less and less valuable information and more and more pop culture, meme-ified information just because it makes money. It feels like the entire scope of the internet shifted away from individuals creating cool things to huge companies advertising for whatever their latest money-maker is. Some of it is still enjoyable (e.g., Hot Ones, musicians, programmers) but it's all just slowly getting swallowed up.

It seems like the only care being put into the internet is into monetizing and commercializing it.

-SWATTING of competitive Gamers.

-Cyber bullying (not just limitied to those instances that end in suicide)

-The stalking and death-threats to Black Lives Matter organizers.

-China's "social credit score"

-The need for Hong Kong protestors to hide their identity.

I don't have time to post specific URL's to substantiate my claims, but I feel I've given broad enough categorizes to convey my meaning.

The internet is a creation of the mind. Its impact is felt by the mind, and is capable of creating mental health problems in people. See the old Facebook story about how they manipulated people's feeds to provoke an emotion from them for an example.

The internet also enables mass communication. So you can massively communicate in such a way as to impact the mental health of a massive number of people. Most people who use the internet regularly are bombarded with this type of communication, mostly in the form of ads and sponsored content.

There are undoubtedly many parties who've realized they can use this to their own ends. By using the internet to actively impact the minds of other people using the internet, people have weaponized the internet.

I think focusing what it could be used for and what it has been used for isn’t the right way to approach thinking about it. The internet is by and large used for consuming content from a handful of corporations (disclaimer: I have no source to back up this claim), and a lot of negative consequences follow from that.

More consumers begets more producers. I would assert you have better odds of producing in a wide variety of areas.

everyone is just following the most popular producers and the rest are basically irrelevant.

Just look at the follower counts and how it drops off on any of the popular sites such as YouTube, twitch, patreon etc

We got more consumers than ever, but they're all following the same people, centralizing it even more

Furthermore in a direct to consumer world, incumbency matters way less. People had fewer options pre-internet (whatever was at their local store) and now brands largely compete on quality (reviews/ratings) rather than pure placement and marketing.

The internet enables centralization like never before as everyone all over the world uses the same services just like they're following the same people for entertainment.

Google decided to go with the masses and dumb down the results to only a handful.

Offtopic: The only day I tried a specific search with quotes in duckduckgo and google. Only duckduckgo had it. Makes me wonder what I've been missing using google.

You need to be a little bit tech literate in order to navigate the internet.

He thinks freedom is too dangerous, because I'd all the bad things that people do with their freedom.

Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative.

The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took it more seriously and made some big system design changes, but we haven't. We can also make the Internet a better place, but there will always be issue with all massive systems.

Honestly there's no way this is true. How many people would die if they couldn't use an ambulance? How many people are surviving on goods shipped to them via trucks?

Of course things can be improved, but there's no way the automobile was a net negative on humanity.

Also, our shipping system is backboned by freight rail and ocean shipping, not trucks. In particular, the US has a really robust freight rail system for moving massive amounts of goods across the country.

There's "no way" that 60 million people would have died in the 20th century if there was no such thing as an ambulance. I'm positive we would have invented a workable replacement.

It's actually rather absurd to suggest automobiles were a net negative. They are one of the greatest inventions in the history of humanity. It's like saying electricity is a net negative.

Even in transportation, only 60% is due to light duty vehicle, the other 40% being trucks and planes mostly.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Cars have had a huge impact on mobility and availability of goods.

It's easy to just see the downsides since all those benefits can be taken for granted nowadays, especially when living in a city where cars are less important for personal use.

Those hoaxes, those political ideas, those agendas, arab springs. You can't measure the fallout of that.

I would also agree the internet has been a huge net positive.

I thought that not terribly long ago. I have to admit, though, that with every passing day I become less sure that it's really a net positive.

While the average internet user will just trust the sites and apps they use, there's nothing stopping those who are able from designing/building/using/sharing technology which they can reasonably trust. The building blocks are there (crypto / networking libraries etc.).

When open source software gets outlawed, I'll be worried.

And yet there are lots of ways road-builders can design roads so that they're safer.

Of course, sometime things areactually bad, so that's to to say you're wrong. Just a good bias to keep in mind.

You determine whether something is a net positive or net negative by listing all of the negatives and positives and seeing how they balance out. With the internet, there are clearly both negatives and positives. The "evidence" either way is the full list of these factors.

Do they balance out in the positive or negative direction? The answer to that depends on how you weight the various factors, and I rather suspect that different people will weight the various factors differently. In other words, this is more a judgement call than some sort of hard objective truth regardless of whether you consider the net effect to be good or bad.

Obviously, cars are essential. But here is short a list of completely unnecessary issues brought on by greed and industry:

* The health and societal cost of leaded gasoline and the industry resistance to transitioning to unleaded.

* The Automobile industry purchase and subsequent removal of train and light rail tracks in the United States.

* The Automobile industry resistance to requiring airbags.

* The oil industry and it's war against global warming science.

There are many more, these are just the ones off the top of my head.

Point is, it isn't the technology but the industry around the technology that is the issue. Cars are useful and essential just like the internet. But right now, we have a situation akin to the early automobile industry.

I hope that, with this technology, we can get some privacy laws/worker rights/better standards before we have another half-century before anything gets done about the Big Bad Corporate takeover of the Internet.

There's two sides to every coin and some sides have a lot deeper grooves than what can be seen at first glance.

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...

It is the same as the DoD making interstate highways to allow troops to move across the country quickly. Everything else that sprung up along those routes was just a byproduct of the interstate highways. The good, the bad and everything in between.

Wanting to be something does not automatically make you that thing.

Kinda like the minitel. It didn’t “go wrong” but it also went nowhere.

I don't think that's a fair or apt analogy at all since, in most places around the world, there's still several barriers to entry for using a car - you have to be licensed, you have to be financially able, and you have to live somewhere where it's a benefit to have access to one.

I think the central complaint is not that the internet has been democratized but, conversely, that, much like the United States and several other nations, it's become commercialized rather than democratized which is exactly the opposite of what was the hope for the internet.

I think a more apt summary of the article is that, at the beginning, there was a barrier of entry to the internet that meant that the content was mostly educational, technical, informed, and a bit altruistic. The goal was to propagate knowledge. Now, literally anyone can put their thoughts online, no matter how banal, without any technical skill, education, or barriers and commercial entities have far more capability than the average person to control the flow of information. DMCA requests on YouTube can be abused by huge corporations to protect their profits but individual users have no such ability. This leads to a platform that, unlike its initial intent, is full of low-quality, low-effort information with the exception of content that is meant for sale and consumption.

Unchecked capitalism may have ruined the internet but, hopefully, not past the point of return.

You're minimizing the amazing benefits created by near instantaneous transportation (or communication, in the case of the internet). How many lives were saved because ambulances exist?

It's easy to cherry pick the pros and cons of any invention, but at the end of the day any attempt to do so is inherently biased.

Society continues to evolve with nearly every economic and welfare indicator scoring better than 10, 50, 100 years ago. On average, inventions like automobiles and global communications must be contributing to this net positive societal gain. There's nothing glaringly bad about the internet or automobiles. Even if the internet is used for bad things at times, it's also created a shitload of good. Regardless, it is but a means to an end. People would do go on to do good or bad things even if the internet didn't exist, so we can't blame this one invention for the actions of humans.

But yea, the overall idea here that this guy had the ANY IDEA of what the internet would/could become when he worked on it is ridiculous. It doesn’t make his opinion worth too much other than for a clickbait headline.

Again, these are poor examples. It's not terribly easy to learn a language for free using just the internet. Everything is freemium and it's only getting worse. It's arguably easier to go to your local library and use their resources.

Many people have this idea that some things would be impossible if not for the internet, but that definitely isn't the case.

Between tools that provide Spaced Repetition learning, to websites that are basically textbooks, to youtube videos both meant to teach and others that are native media, and finally people who curate all these materials, this is way better.