The older I get, the more I think that the internet was a mistake. It had a lot of potential for good and has delivered on that in many ways, but it has also unleashed an uncontrollable onslaught of radicalization, hatred, isolation, and mental illness. It’s harms have outweighed the good by orders of magnitude.
It’s getting worse too. The amount of people who watch YouTube like TV (on their TVs) instead of regular ass old TV shows is making it to where no one is ever unplugged from the internet. So much of the content people view regularly is steeped in internet drama, or very online stuff like streaming, or politics optimized for the algorithm. TV sucks, but goddamn I think it may be healthier for people to have a break watching Law and Order or something instead of just being entrenched in the internet and internet drama 24/7.
I mean, I watch YouTube all the time, way more than TV these days. Some of that involves politics yes, but mostly it’s just pretty innocuous. Science, technology, books, comics, gaming, D&D, sketch comedy, standup, animation, movie reviews, food, cooking, history, etc. By far the most political thing I watch on YouTube is Some More News, and it’s admittedly pretty rage inducing sometimes. But most of my viewing is just wholesome, nerdy, and/or makes me hungry. I don’t really live by the algorithm though. I primarily watch people I’ve specifically subscribed to.
Sounds like you have a healthier relationship with YouTube than a lot of people. YouTube really is a microcosm of the internet itself. A place where the innocuous and the poisonous exist side by side, and the difference between the two often coming down to where you let it take you.
Lots of things are fine when they are first introduced because we carry our lived experiences into it. But those who grow up with the new thing shaping their lived experience don’t bring that perspective to it.
I am an embedded developer so the LLM/AI is a omni-present talking point and one of my friends was saying that he loved LLMs because they could generate big chunks of code and he can go through it after and fix the mistakes.
He has the skills to fix the issues because he has a decade of non-LLM experience.
But someone that doesn’t have that experience will have a hard time finding the correct fix when the vibe code isn’t working as it should. They will rely on LLM telling them that they were right, so here is a new fix that doesn’t fix the issue.
I have such a hangup on this. Currently, a “tech journalist” in one of the big newspapers in my country is doing a series of articles about how he’s vibe coded an app that, apparently, has been green-lighted by the IT department and is very useful for his fellow journalists.
He admits to not being able to read or write a single line of code, and describes what he does as “leading a team” where he makes decisions about what kind of features to implement, when things are too slow and need speed improvements, etc. Apparently, this web-app is now 66 000 lines of code, and used in production (unclear what it’s actually used for). The LLM agents take care of everything from writing the code to setting up PR’s, reviewing, testing, and deploying.
I can’t help but see so painfully clearly that he’s created 66 000 lines of liability, that he has exactly zero concept of potential bugs in, and which no human in the world is likely to fix quickly if production goes down. He has no idea whether database rollbacks are safe or even possible if something is corrupted… there’s just so many foot canons waiting to go off. And this is just 66k lines. That’s not even a small web-app, it’s tiny (this guy can’t see the difference between generated files and written files, so I’m assuming 66k includes everything), and my personal experience is that LLM agents just get worse as complexity increases.
The biggest problem is that it’s painfully clear that this guy is oblivious to all the above. He’s happily chugging along as long as this looks like it’s working. I can only assume that other people with his level of experience (that is, none) see it the same way.
I agree to a certain extent, but also would point out that the longer something exists, the more likely it is to be exploited by capital and then just be objectively worse. A lot of the good things are still there, just pushed aside and hidden by people with ulterior motives. Plenty of queer youth still find a lot of community and comfort online when it’s absent in their lives. There is definitely something to be said about how things shape people vs how people shape things though.
The internet is just a way to get a message across. Overall, Gen Z (and further ones) are fucked in pretty much every aspect. No money, no housing and generally no real future. That leads to desperation and as a result you start asking yourself questions why up until the 1970s everyone had it better than the previous generations and now we’re constantly getting fucked. Then come the “saviors” of the internet that blame it on illegal aliens, women having rights etc because according to their logic we had it good in the 70s so we must reverse everything back to the way it was in 70s. If young people get some breathing room the trend will reverse itself in my opinion. But seeing as no one is coming to save young people, it will only get worse.
Then come the “saviors” of the internet that blame it on illegal aliens, women having rights etc because according to their logic we had it good in the 70s so we must reverse everything back to the way it was in 70s.
The problem isnt just the “saviors” and their message. Those people have always existed, always had the same blaming strategy. The problem is that the internet has made it easier for those messages to reach a global audience, has made the messenger faceless and unaccountable and given the presumption of legitimacy, has made it easier to get absorbed into isolated communities saturated in this kind of messaging, and made it easier to warp the worldview of the community to something antithetical to reality. If you run into a dude saying wacky shit in a bar, and he just seems to be some drunk asshole, you’re not likely to give him much credence against all of the other messaging around you. But if you find an entire community saying the things he says, and they welcome you in, and you get a sense of comradery and purpose from it, that same messaging holds a lot of sway over you.
Isolation has always been the secret sauce to radicalization. Exposure is the antidote. Humans have always had cultural feedback loops that reinforce a specific worldview. And meeting with other cultures often causes conflicts when those worldview collide. The promise of the internet was a more global culture wherein we have a shared reinforced world view. But that didn’t really happen for everyone. What we are seeing now is that same feedback loop phenomenon in a digital space, but often with dramatically different worldviews, even within the same local physical space. That still causes conflict when those communities collide, both online and in the real world, but now that conflict happens everywhere, even in your own household sometimes.
We’re losing physical communities, friends and family for our online echo chamber communities. People are definitely driven more into those digital communities as their physical life is more of a struggle financially, socially, etc. Relieving those struggles would certainly go a long way in remediating the problem, but it won’t go away.
The good potential was lost when the old wild west Internet, where any random person could build a site and start a community. Now that there’s enough money and corporate presence on the Internet, they build up all the sites and tools that places use to socialize with others and, lo and behold, they implement algorithms to make sure reactionary beliefs are spoonfed to as many people as possible.
They understood the meta on what communication and community building was going to look like, and now, the only hope to get people out of these pipelines into reactionary echo chambers is either to pray all the big social media platforms decide en masse to stop promoting these views out of the goodness of their hearts, or we all just give up the poison and go back to living like it’s the late 90s and the Internet is just a thing you maybe check a couple of times a day at home and you otherwise live in the real world.
100% agree. The weaponization of information has made the dumbest people not only dumber, but just outright worse humans than they would have ever been.
The older I get, the more I think that the internet was a mistake. It had a lot of potential for good and has delivered on that in many ways, but it has also unleashed an uncontrollable onslaught of radicalization, hatred, isolation, and mental illness. It’s harms have outweighed the good by orders of magnitude.
It’s getting worse too. The amount of people who watch YouTube like TV (on their TVs) instead of regular ass old TV shows is making it to where no one is ever unplugged from the internet. So much of the content people view regularly is steeped in internet drama, or very online stuff like streaming, or politics optimized for the algorithm. TV sucks, but goddamn I think it may be healthier for people to have a break watching Law and Order or something instead of just being entrenched in the internet and internet drama 24/7.
I mean, I watch YouTube all the time, way more than TV these days. Some of that involves politics yes, but mostly it’s just pretty innocuous. Science, technology, books, comics, gaming, D&D, sketch comedy, standup, animation, movie reviews, food, cooking, history, etc. By far the most political thing I watch on YouTube is Some More News, and it’s admittedly pretty rage inducing sometimes. But most of my viewing is just wholesome, nerdy, and/or makes me hungry. I don’t really live by the algorithm though. I primarily watch people I’ve specifically subscribed to.
Sounds like you have a healthier relationship with YouTube than a lot of people. YouTube really is a microcosm of the internet itself. A place where the innocuous and the poisonous exist side by side, and the difference between the two often coming down to where you let it take you.
I always say
“The Internet is for anyone! …But it should never have been for everyone.”
Lots of things are fine when they are first introduced because we carry our lived experiences into it. But those who grow up with the new thing shaping their lived experience don’t bring that perspective to it.
This is going to be very true for AI.
Thanks for putting it in such concise words.
I am an embedded developer so the LLM/AI is a omni-present talking point and one of my friends was saying that he loved LLMs because they could generate big chunks of code and he can go through it after and fix the mistakes.
He has the skills to fix the issues because he has a decade of non-LLM experience.
But someone that doesn’t have that experience will have a hard time finding the correct fix when the vibe code isn’t working as it should. They will rely on LLM telling them that they were right, so here is a new fix that doesn’t fix the issue.
I have such a hangup on this. Currently, a “tech journalist” in one of the big newspapers in my country is doing a series of articles about how he’s vibe coded an app that, apparently, has been green-lighted by the IT department and is very useful for his fellow journalists.
He admits to not being able to read or write a single line of code, and describes what he does as “leading a team” where he makes decisions about what kind of features to implement, when things are too slow and need speed improvements, etc. Apparently, this web-app is now 66 000 lines of code, and used in production (unclear what it’s actually used for). The LLM agents take care of everything from writing the code to setting up PR’s, reviewing, testing, and deploying.
I can’t help but see so painfully clearly that he’s created 66 000 lines of liability, that he has exactly zero concept of potential bugs in, and which no human in the world is likely to fix quickly if production goes down. He has no idea whether database rollbacks are safe or even possible if something is corrupted… there’s just so many foot canons waiting to go off. And this is just 66k lines. That’s not even a small web-app, it’s tiny (this guy can’t see the difference between generated files and written files, so I’m assuming 66k includes everything), and my personal experience is that LLM agents just get worse as complexity increases.
The biggest problem is that it’s painfully clear that this guy is oblivious to all the above. He’s happily chugging along as long as this looks like it’s working. I can only assume that other people with his level of experience (that is, none) see it the same way.
I agree to a certain extent, but also would point out that the longer something exists, the more likely it is to be exploited by capital and then just be objectively worse. A lot of the good things are still there, just pushed aside and hidden by people with ulterior motives. Plenty of queer youth still find a lot of community and comfort online when it’s absent in their lives. There is definitely something to be said about how things shape people vs how people shape things though.
The internet is just a way to get a message across. Overall, Gen Z (and further ones) are fucked in pretty much every aspect. No money, no housing and generally no real future. That leads to desperation and as a result you start asking yourself questions why up until the 1970s everyone had it better than the previous generations and now we’re constantly getting fucked. Then come the “saviors” of the internet that blame it on illegal aliens, women having rights etc because according to their logic we had it good in the 70s so we must reverse everything back to the way it was in 70s. If young people get some breathing room the trend will reverse itself in my opinion. But seeing as no one is coming to save young people, it will only get worse.
The problem isnt just the “saviors” and their message. Those people have always existed, always had the same blaming strategy. The problem is that the internet has made it easier for those messages to reach a global audience, has made the messenger faceless and unaccountable and given the presumption of legitimacy, has made it easier to get absorbed into isolated communities saturated in this kind of messaging, and made it easier to warp the worldview of the community to something antithetical to reality. If you run into a dude saying wacky shit in a bar, and he just seems to be some drunk asshole, you’re not likely to give him much credence against all of the other messaging around you. But if you find an entire community saying the things he says, and they welcome you in, and you get a sense of comradery and purpose from it, that same messaging holds a lot of sway over you.
Isolation has always been the secret sauce to radicalization. Exposure is the antidote. Humans have always had cultural feedback loops that reinforce a specific worldview. And meeting with other cultures often causes conflicts when those worldview collide. The promise of the internet was a more global culture wherein we have a shared reinforced world view. But that didn’t really happen for everyone. What we are seeing now is that same feedback loop phenomenon in a digital space, but often with dramatically different worldviews, even within the same local physical space. That still causes conflict when those communities collide, both online and in the real world, but now that conflict happens everywhere, even in your own household sometimes.
We’re losing physical communities, friends and family for our online echo chamber communities. People are definitely driven more into those digital communities as their physical life is more of a struggle financially, socially, etc. Relieving those struggles would certainly go a long way in remediating the problem, but it won’t go away.
The good potential was lost when the old wild west Internet, where any random person could build a site and start a community. Now that there’s enough money and corporate presence on the Internet, they build up all the sites and tools that places use to socialize with others and, lo and behold, they implement algorithms to make sure reactionary beliefs are spoonfed to as many people as possible.
They understood the meta on what communication and community building was going to look like, and now, the only hope to get people out of these pipelines into reactionary echo chambers is either to pray all the big social media platforms decide en masse to stop promoting these views out of the goodness of their hearts, or we all just give up the poison and go back to living like it’s the late 90s and the Internet is just a thing you maybe check a couple of times a day at home and you otherwise live in the real world.
100% agree. The weaponization of information has made the dumbest people not only dumber, but just outright worse humans than they would have ever been.
1000% agreed.