World Wide Web (www or W³): (between 1992 and 2042) Technological economic subsystem designed to monetize the intelligence of a few to produce ignorance in many more others. Internet is a fertile space for baseless or futile controversies (see "nihilistic relativism"), bad faith arguments (see "trolls") and personal attacks (see "DOTA 2"); it's been shown to warm up populations to authoritarianism and speech control (see "Xiism"), and to generate the cannibalistic stock-splosions of the early 21st century. It was eventually replaced in 2042 by radioweb, a quantum mesh network which ultimately spanned forty-eight thousand stars centered on the Sun by the year 4000. The only remnant of the World Wide Web in use today is Javascript. Replicas of the W³ circa 2020 are commonly used in airgap VR settings, to train soldiers to resist torture, or as horror depiction in movies. Psycho-history estimates that the human race would have gone extinct by 2145 at the latest if the W³ "experiment" hadn't been shut down prematurely by the Pixies.

The worst kind of satire is the kind that is dead wrong in its' own motivation.

The internet did spread ideas. The spread of ideas can bring certain philosophical freedoms. 'Democracy' is too loosely defined in this context.

The entire attitude is really offensive to me only due to the sheer fact that I am amazed at the accomplishments we've made as humans in the short time that I've been around -- and the internet is one of those huge accomplishments that leaves me in awe every time I stop to think about it.

Previous history was widely categorized and considered by the data storage methods thought of during that time, and the dissertation of that information over the world -- the internet blows all previous methods out of the water by many orders of magnitude, while simultaneously lowering the barrier of entry to these stores of information down low enough to where even the most destitute human can usually find a method to participate.

Did the printing press have as many detractors? Have humans always expected the tools to do the entire job, rather than facilitating it?

'Can someone call up The-Internet and mention that they're late to a 3 o'clock democracy spreadin' gig?'

I joke, 'the internet' is a tool, a network -- not an entity. To anthropomorphize the tool into a lazy being that hasn't solved the promised problems would be silly.

but, you're right, humans have done a lousy job using tools, like the internet, to create equality; thankfully we seem to have a long enough future ahead of us to remediate such laziness on our own part.

I still think it will, but its also created opportunity for other innovators less devoted to liberalism.

In my area, every spring as the days get longer and the frost subsides my yard springs up weeds. Within a month the turf crowds it out despite its slow start. Every year the same thing - the weeds are just quicker on the draw than the grass.

I think we're in the spring dawning of massive global connectivity - the nodes are online but they aren't good at resisting infection, the networks are vast but not resilient to abuse, truth struggles against the speed and virality and appeal of propaganda - but humanity's good at inventing approaches and institutions to improve on those things.

Asteroids, pandemics, and climate change on the other hand....

I hold a very similar view. It’s not a given however and we must fight tooth and nail for a good outcome.

Doubtful. Adoption of honest liberalism requires some baseline intelligence to understand the parameters. The internet has shown that most people are very very stupid.

Not to mention neither the right or the left which have the biggest voices seem to actually care about true liberalism. They both have very narrow world views that they want to force everyone else to behave by.

I agree with you - it doesn't seem like we're smart enough in aggregate to actually pull it off.

And the counterpoint of "but look how far we've come" isn't satisfying because we all advance due to the absurd excellence of the few (researchers, inventors, philosophers, organizers, etc...) and what you're talking about seems to require excellence from the many.

But I also believe that the internet can be the solution to that problem. A bigger bunch of the kids that come behind us are much much smarter than we are, and I think it'll be the same for them and those that follow.

Drowning in information, awareness, and interaction from such a young age is going to promote rapid and broader smartening and wizening. The nodes will have an opportunity to slide up the competence gradient now that its apparent and the resources to exploit it are abundant.

Youth won't be wasted on the young in an environment where the young are already wise.

> where the young are already wise.

Could you elaborate on this?

It's paraphrased from famous quotes that lament "when I had the energy/enthusiasm/optimism (of adolescence) I didn't have the wisdom/resources (of adulthood) to do anything consequential with it, and once I overcame the poverty of youth (in wisdom/resources) I was too spent/cynical/weary in adulthood".

It suggests a constraint on humans' impact - an inverse correlation between will & power that yields a flattened curve when plotted against time - and implies that we're restrained by nature.

But if that constraint were broken...

"The internet has shown that most people are very very stupid."

A extremely elitist and arrogant comment. Where is your evidence?

Witness the election of Donald J Trump, and his adulation by the Idiocracy.

You do realise elitism is one of the major reasons why Trump was elected, right? You guys are driving people apart by declaring them morons instead of thinking, critically about what drove them to a decision. Not cool.

I already know whay drove people to that decision. You have a guy who inherited his money so he doesn't need sponsorship, and thus doesn't need to worry about the repugnant things he says costing him his campaign. That means there's a candidate who's saying loudly on global television that it's okay to be a racist, sexist boor with no critical thinking skills. In fact he thinks people should be proud of that.

So of course the racists, the sexists, and those without the capacity for abstract thought voted for him in droves.

We're long past the point where there is benefit in pretending that all ideas are created equal, and that my uneducated belief is somehow on the same level as your educated, evidence-backed opinion. To support Trump is to support the anathema of civilized society.

If you believe that all of Trump's voters were racist and sexist, then you do not understand the plight of middle America.

I can see we're not going to have a productive conversation, here.

You're right I don't understand the plight of middle America, and I bet they don't understand a thing about the problems the coasts face. Maybe we should split up and go be separate countries. They can take the south with them while we're at it.

It's important to use inclusive language to maintain the forum where we learn and share ideas with one another, but if your shelter's erected on a tentpole of anti-intellectualism (whether a reaction to others' elitism or not), you've already aborted the dialectic, left or right.

Perhaps at that point it's more fruitful to name it and to confront it as a cancer on civil society than it is to recruit it or appease it.

If you're caught in a propagandist's net it would seem to do you better to reach your hand out to the folks who notice in hopes they could fight with you for your liberty rather than to compound your shame by insisting you're there for your own good.

Nonsense. People are not as stupid or illogical as you claim. The decisions the Trump-voting electorate made were not anti-intellectualism just because the end result (Trump being elected) wasn't a great option. From many people's PoV, he was the _least worst_.

The internet used to be difficult to get to, we were playing with a loaded deck.

It did, didn't it? Facebook and Twiter took credit for creating a few democracies in the middle east during the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring lead to possibly one democracy (Tunisia), otherwise it lead to minor reforms, horrific civil war (Syria, Yemen, Libya), or a theocratic dictatorship and then a military coup (Egypt).

actually at that time almost nobody in those countries were using twitter/facebook

Syria is largely a result of foreign interference. Namely, Iran early on and Russia since 2015. Without them, Assad would've been done with 7 years ago. Libya, where international community did stop the dictator early, ended up infinitely better even with ongoing civil strife. It's like an A/B test for non-interventionism.

The coup in Egypt was so swift that there was no time for then hypothetical Islamist dictatorship to form.

>Libya... ended up infinitely better even with ongoing civil strife

Better how? In the 2 civil wars, tens of thousands of people got killed, millions got displaced, and oil production never recovered. Since the country is so fragmented, they can't do anything about the ongoing pandemic. Even Obama refers to Libya has his greatest mistake.

Libya is definitely not better after Khadafi... It was a reasonably stable place (despite the murderous despot, lesser evil etc) that was irrevocably fucked by the intervention. Surely you don't think the Western campaign was done out of the goodness of our hearts and love of democracy?

What makes one thing "foreign interference" and the other the "international community"? Besides that, I agree with you on Syria: many deaths could have been avoided if the US had refrained from sending billions of dollars of money and weapons to various armed groups there.

Lybia too the result of foreign interference. Europe and USA

Led by France.

Libyan prisons and camps have been called "concentration-camp-like" by Germany's foreign office. There are mountains of evidence of prisoners and refugees being subjected to systemic rape, murders, enslavement and forced participation to fight in the war. Ghaddafi's Libya was a terrible dictatorship. Libya now is in the middle of a gruesome civil war. Horrific human rights abuse is the absolute norm.

There is never going to be any major political upheaval without foreign intervention. Furthermore, foreign intervention is usually welcomed, it rarely just happens in a vacuum. Sometimes it's rebels, sometimes it's the incumbent government, it's usually both.

The fact is that a country undergoing a revolution or even just significant unrest is very weak, and weakness will be exploited.

It's tempting to be sarcastic here, so I'll just play it straight. The Arab spring turned out terribly for almost everyone.

Yes. I'm kind of pointing out how even that "positive" vision was naive because it actually did come true and it was still bad. Just creating democracies isn't necessarily a good thing.

I think the naive view is thinking that Arab spring was shaped by the internet and not plain old foreign intervention.