Heat Death of the Internet
Heat Death of the Internet
You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring
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The internet is doesn't suck. Only sucks if you're being cynical and contrarian and write articles on the internet.
You can literally do stuff like access part of the Soviet Archives, auto-translated from Russian by a Russian website https://translated.turbopages.org/proxy_u/ru-en.en.65303c73-6639cc30-cb15c6e5-74722d776562/https/sovdoc.rusarchives.ru/
Read an Iranian news outlet's international edition https://www.presstv.ir/
A Latin American news outlet in English funded by left-wing governments of LatAm? https://www.telesurenglish.net/
Or get automatic updates from their websites? https://www.telesurtv.net/pages/rss.html
I do wish it was easier to use social media sites used by people who speak other languages.
and I wish people would actually create mastodon accounts...
people talk about centrialization or corporations or whatever, blah blah blah, but that isn't actually anything worse than before we had ubiquitous instant global communication.
The internet has a remarkably low barrier to entry and the hurdles to access most resources through the internet are surprisingly low.
Plus the "internet" is more than web pages. It's also real time and turn based multiplayer video games. And it's insane that they exist and work. You can communication and interact with people hundreds of miles away in sub-half-second real-time, without even using some expensive internet plan.
It's also all of the software that makes everything else in the world work. Like transportation, research and development, remotely initiated computer simulations, and so on.
It just sucks that so many people live such precarious lives that they can't experience it's benefits and are harmed by the oppression it enables. As with any other technology.
I think there is a difference between "voluntarily accessing information through a global communication network" and "requiring more and more basic life activities to be accomplished through some mediated software layer requiring an always on internet connection".
Most of the article is just complaints about random things including hypotheticals, but also don't think there are really any "basic life activities" that require being always online. Nothing really expects immediate responses to text messages or emails.
Its not so much the "always online" for basic life activities, its the automated/online website/applications that sit between you and the thing you're trying to do that are required to do basic life stuff.