Once upon a time we thought that inviting people to join the Information Superhighway would bring them together and herald an age of unity and shared purpose.
We didn’t realize that we were opening the noosphere to subversion and attack.
It wasn’t long before weaponized memes were deployed to deepen societal divisions. Old antagonists brought their wars to the digital frontier. Commercial entities outcompeted their FOSS forefathers and to reshape discourse. Engorged vectors emulated human creativity and threatened to forge new underclasses.
Was the utopian dream wrong? Were we naive to believe technology could unleash humanity’s potential? Or are these mere birth pains of the future we were promised?
Don’t blame me, I deleted all my social media years ago. Now, I’m just using it for my crippling addiction to pornography
A technology is never inherently good or bad, it merely has potential. It’s about the human intents behind the application of those technologies.
For a while the Internet truly was a beautiful utopia, in many ways. It was a huge shift in our history, and yet so very human. It was pure, used for reaching out and taking in, sharing, connecting. A shared soul, or brain if you’d prefer. Then some other entities started establishing their presence, and they didn’t like that. They’d rather subvert those key purposes with their own, applying their resources and influence to mold the net, and with it, the people connected to it. They were quite capable and discreet, such that our collective cognition didn’t even notice all the novel ways it was being twisted.
But it doesn’t matter, because the Internet still is all those beautiful things it once was, and it can be so many more. Just look at this very random thread we’re on. A handful of people, from who knows where, each with their own crazy histories, each their own thoughts. Here, by chance or destiny, exchanging those brainwaves. That will never change. And that’s where the true potential of the Internet lies. Just like others used the Internet to do unprecedented things, we will too. As we have before.
Hoping is never wrong.
thx for this community. it’s not just the Artworks but reading the comments as well… soothing.
the election has put me in a strange mood and that combined with the nostalgia (good and bad) of the past from things like that poster on the wall is so hitting very hard rn; jfc this is going to be stuck in my head all day today. thank you for sharing.
When Trump won in 2016, I binge watched the entirety of Star Trek TNG and DS9. It was therapeutic to escape for a while to a world of logical people who try their best to rise above their base impulses.
when i binge watch star trek i select episodes to watch based on a topic or theme. i’m almost done watching episodes with portrayals of excelsior class ships and i’m thankful that i watch start trek like this because it provides excellent mental health pauses from my own election coverage binging. the mini mental eye-bleach-like endorphin high that i get when i notice tiny details that i missed when i first consumed star trek as it was released plus the mini nostalgia rushes from the notables times i saw the episodes i selected i for the themed binge; is all sort of like re-remembering trek, but out of order so that i can appreciate it in a different way. i find it keeps old memories alive like: waiting in line for the premiere of movie #6; or the shock of seeing the new klingons in the first movie; or unsuccessfully begging my fiance to let us have our wedding at the star trek experience in las vegas.
i also developed the habit of starting my election coverage binges with democracy now before anything else. I find that it does A LOT to sooth the anxiety i’ve been feeling trapped by the election and i think it informs my opinions better knowing that everyone’s wary of traps and that the best traps are the ones whose targets are unaware that they’re inside of one.
I have to recommend a certain Star Trek: The Next Generation episode analysis by Ross Scott of Accursed Farms.
It analyses Symbiosis, a sorta forgettable (on first inspection) humanoid-culture-of-the-week episode. Ross Scott has a knack for looking at fantastic things with a pair of very realistic and practical eyes that I find very amusing. It was made during the first months of our SARS-CoV-2 apocalypse, so keep that in mind (see spoiler).
punchline
It was a time when “supply chain disruption” was a very hot buzzword, and is the main point and the punchline of this video.
I was meant to surf the internet superhighway and instead I’m inundated with hell and misery.
techno utopianism, the synthesis of defence lab hacker culture and the new left has inherited the flaws of both. the disillusion of the children raised on this heady mix was inevitable. nostalgia beckons, the punch card and mainframe once a symbol of dehumanization is now a quaint museum piece, sublime objects of engineering prowess. i could spend my whole life exploring the intricacies of these old systems. the dream of connecting people through computers is perverted into the goal of connecting to computers. “ah, but it could have been different, if only my preferred programming language or paradigm had won out!” so we tell ourselves, nursing our pet projects. ahhh i’m feeling depressed now
