20261101_153135 The New Internet
tags: rawblog, essaysThe internet that “was”
I know that I am yammering on about how things used to be better in my days. Like I had a child recently right, and I’ve been thinking like what is the world I want him to grow in y’know. Back in my day people thought the INTERNET was a place where all these nerds and weirdos used to hang out, and boy howdy I was a nerd and weirdo even as a kid. The internet used to be a place you go to, and now it’s more like a place where you can just yell into this void and go have a mental breakdown instead. Everything is a psyop these days. There is a new “Eternal September” going on, and it is indeed, the slopiverse is the another arsenal in the psyop for the powers that be.. I’m not saying it’s like the first of its kind, after all, the Eternal September is just a part of the cycle of the “internet culture” getting enchroached by tourists. My personal worst psy-op Eternal September was 2016, when all these alt-right tourists started saying the n-word on /pol/.
I don’t wanna say that the big cough and lockdowns were a good thing, but the people’s tolerance to bullshit have lowered a lot after that. I was talking to my coworkers and I said the word FAANG. I corrected myself and I said it’s now called “MANGA” - Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. They were like “huh, that’s not right. N is for Nvidia right?” Well, it used to be Netflix for like 5 years straight, but I guess the times have changed huh? Who has a NETFLIX subscription these days anymore? I guess nobody, because Big Mouth finally ended last year. Fucking Big Mouth, dude! All my favorite shows got cancelled after the second season (Inside Job, my beloved…), but not Big Mouth. It got a spin-off too, can you believe that?
Anyway, the main part of all this is that with the way how the Internet is becoming a hostile place. Japan is getting reamed big time dude, the poor old Galapagos Island is just getting hacked up the wazoo. Back in my day the worst thing that could happen was getting attention of some terminally online “special interest” having “person” and getting doxxed. But now, the internet is now straight up hostile: You wanna rent a car? The privacy notice is now more like a “privacy suggestions”. Protip if you are in Japan right now, just fucking accept that you might as well have put your driver’s license up for grabs.
The Internet that “will be”
I am envisioning it a bit, but I think we’re gonna move back from high-speed internet to this WAP (not the fun kind, I’m talking about Wireless Application Protocol), IRC and TELNET era of internet. Sure, it’s going to suck shit for all the dopagaki out there, and they can’t just doomscroll endlessly until the cows come home. I’m thinking that instead of having just “3 pages that you refresh over and over” (for me, it’s either 4chan, Reddit, or Youtube, with a side of err.ee), we’ll move away from all this “4K HD Always On-Line Live Streamed And Own Nothing, Get Hacked Fuckhead Send Me Bitcoin” shit to “low filesize, everybody is a server” standard mode of existence on the Internet. Straight up we’ll move back to BBSes. FOR REAL.
Now the big question is “why the hell are we going back to text-based mode of communication? I like having image previews etc.” I’m glad you asked. The answer is quite simple: it’s the money! The whole idea why we’re getting hacked and why are we being enraged and threatened all these days is that there is a direct financial incentive to do so. As long as you dance to some horror’s fiddle and empty your pockets, you will be kept unhappy and poor. You will be taught that you are powerless, and that you are surrounded by competition and enemies. And you will be told to never ask Why did things get this bad in the first place? If you find that there is a financial incentive to make your entire neighborhood’s life miserable, and say that “hey these people should stay out of our homes”, people will say you are drawing “incorrect conclusions”, that you are a racist, or a lunatic. This isn’t a racist dog whistle, okay. I’m saying that you and I can’t live in this state of permanent stress, and somebody made it this way.
Japan of course is a great place, I think one of the only few places in the world where you can work any job, and have enough money to pay for rent, eat and even have a couple of beers at the pub. It won’t be a luxurious existence, of course, but I remember having my first job in Estonia and I was like “Fuck, I paid my rent, now the winter is coming. I got nothing in my hand anymore!” Japan’s hiring of new grads is also making sure that if you have graduated from the “right universities”, you will find a stable job.. Of course if you graduate from the wrong university, it’s fucking over for you, but at least you got a shot. When I moved here, I was a waiter god damn it, and now I’m a software engineer. I turned my life around here because I wanted to do so, and I could speak Japanese. If I had come to any company in 2016 with just hopes and dreams of becoming a software engineer, I’d be kicked out of the door because I didn’t major in computer science. I’m telling you, people shouldn’t be screwed over just because they made a bad choices down the line. We can’t live like it’s a min-maxxing RPG.
So how will this New Internet help us keep this lifestyle? Simple: phoneposters will be completely segregated from the thinkers. If you don’t own a real computer with a real keyboard, you will be left out. Gatekeeping, for a lack of a better word, is good. Gatekeeping is right. Gatekeeping works. Gatekeeping clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. BBS, with its text-only interface, will reject anybody who can’t RTFM and the AI lusers will burn through their tokens trying to analyze ANSI graphics on what to do next. Once again, I’m not being a chud here. I will not stand for bigotry and hate, but I will stand against ignorance and stupidity. You got to know how to drive a car to go on the road. You got to know how to handle a knife at the kitchen to cook. So why do we try to make the internet MORE accessible to these people who can’t read or write? My utopian idea as a teenager was the internet is like an Library of Alexandria, the infinite wealth of knowledge and culture will open us up to the New Age of Enlightement. Unfortunately, and I must stress this enough, there is a huge financial incentive to keep people stressed, afraid and poor. If you have the means to think, then that means you have the means to reject. If you have means to connect, you have the means to resist. Divide and conquer, it works every time!
I wish that when my child gains consciousness, he will not live in a world of fear and outrage, but with learning and understanding, with the means to build the future he would want to have with HIS children. And indeed, maybe he would finally be able to go to space. We will not be able to go to space and conquer planets and galaxies when we are split up this way. I really think things are getting BETTER rather than worse, as long as we want it and work for it.