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It's Official: The Internet is The Worst Thing Ever

None of this should be a problem with a well educated populace who have been taught good critical thinking skills, and due to public education, we can be sure that...

What's that you say? Oh? Really? That bad?

Oh.
 
It seems like the extremely bad and the extremely good accelerate alongside each other with the internet. It's basically an impossible task to suss out if the invention is an overall net positive or negative, I think.
 
dann said:
Before the internet, guys like Armin Meiwes and Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes didn't even exist, as such. Guys with those fantasies, yes, probably, but they would never have been consummated. (pun not intended!)
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Before the Internet, they would have been mostly cannibalistic serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ottis Toole, or Andrei Chikatilo, and would have been lower-profile until they got caught; or they would have been one of the higher-profile nutcases like Issei Sagawa.

The internet was also a recruitment tool for the Heaven's Gate cult: Heaven's Gate 20 years later: 10 things you didn't know (Rolling Stone)
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Suicidal doomsday cults also existed long before the Internet. Anyone remember Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple/Jonestown mass suicide? How about the Order of the Solar Temple? The Branch Davidians?
 
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I know that "suicidal doomsday cults also existed long before the Internet," but they were different from the Heaven's Gate.

Jim Jones started out as a Christian-Socialist-Humanist Utopianist, and only turned 1) authoritarian, 2) paranoid, and then 3) homi-suicidal when it became increasingly obvious that his Utopianism was actually Utopian, i.e. a delusion, and that the authorities were on to him.
The weirdness of the Heaven's Gate with their cult of castration and "the level beyond human" was much more obviously weird from the outset.

I don't think that there's any reason to assume that Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes would have been a serial killer. Maybe an auto-mutilator ...
 
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luchog said:
Before the Internet, they would have been mostly cannibalistic serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ottis Toole, or Andrei Chikatilo, and would have been lower-profile until they got caught; or they would have been one of the higher-profile nutcases like Issei Sagawa.




Suicidal doomsday cults also existed long before the Internet. Anyone remember Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple/Jonestown mass suicide? How about the Order of the Solar Temple? The Branch Davidians?
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Gozer worshippers...
 
The Atheist said:
I think when you're the first female journalist to win a Nobel Prize for literature it's not clickbait.
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It was the Nobel Peace Prize, which is easily the clickbaitiest, most well-poisoning of all the Nobel prizes. Not that the prize for literature is such an authoritative arbiter of opinion, either.

Who actually reconsiders their opinion, upon learning that a Nobel Lit prize winner disagrees with them? Who actually needs a lady journalist from New Zealand to vet and validate their own opinions about the Internet?
 
theprestige said:
It was the Nobel Peace Prize, which is easily the clickbaitiest, most well-poisoning of all the Nobel prizes.
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Quite right, my mistake.

theprestige said:
Not that the prize for literature is such an authoritative arbiter of opinion, either.
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I didn't suggest it was authoritative, but it's hardly clickbait.

theprestige said:
Who actually reconsiders their opinion,...
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Nobody ever, as far as I've been able to ascertain.

theprestige said:
Who actually needs a lady journalist from New Zealand ...
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She's not from NZ.
 
The Atheist said:
Wasting time
10 hours a day spent playing on a screen isn't achieving much.
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/30/health/americans-screen-time-nielsen/index.html

<snip>

tl;dr
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That's quite a long post. How long did it take you to write it?


The report, which was released Monday, included how much time we spend daily using our tablets, smartphones, personal computers, multimedia devices, video games, radios, DVDs, DVRs and TVs...

About 81% of adults in the United States have smartphones, according to the report, which are used about one hour and 39 minutes daily on average to consume media. However, the report shows that despite the growing options of devices available to users, radio and television are still used the most. About 94% of adults have a HD television, and the average adult in the United States spends about 4½ hours a day watching shows and movies.
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Notice what's missing from those figures? The Internet.

There's a vast amount of useful information on the Internet, and it's an excellent platform for productive communications. If people 'waste' it on entertainment or spreading disinformation then that's their fault.

Misinformation

The internet has allowed exponential growth in conspiracies and pseudoscience. I don't know that the link between the ease of spreading false propaganda and the rise of antivaxers has been proven, but the numbers indicate an awfully strong link:
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The rise of antivaxers wasn't caused by the Internet, it was caused by Covid and politicians too scared of losing votes to deal with it.

You don't need the Internet to spread fear and misinformation. Radio and TV, telephones and good old word-of-mouth are just as effective - if not more so because they don't give you the same ability to fact check. Where is all the disinformation coming from? Not trustworthy sources that know what they are talking about - but from anonymous posts on Facebook and Twitter, personal videos uploaded to YouTube or websites produced by obvious conspiracy nuts. If people want to chose that trash over all the good information out there then that's their fault.

Business/Education

While companies like Amazon & Google have risen on the back of the internet, and it enables efficiencies in accounting and other areas, I'm not convinced that overall, companies are more profitable as a result of the internet. The cost of security measures alone is more than most companies generate in additional profit from having internet-based commerce.
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I highly doubt that. I was an employee in a business whose website got hacked. They could have prevented it with about 30 minutes work at minimal cost if they had just kept the website software up to date. The same business also suffered a good old 'smash-n-grab' that cost far more, despite having pretty strong physical security measures in place. That small business got half its revenue off the 'net (probably would be even higher in today's Covid world).

a good example is my boy's primary school of 700 kids. They have two full-time IT workers, and I have yet to see any benefit from the school's connectivity. It doesn't seem to speed up or improve homework, and I don't see any way it saves teachers time, but it does mean they have two fewer teachers because the salaries go to a couple of backroom geeks.
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So you say. Schools used networked computers long before the Internet became popular for education, and needed 'backroom geeks' to maintain them even back then. It's the not the fault of the Internet if your school's administration is incompetent.

we're looking at internet crime being worth around $750B a year, being roughly 1% of world GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

That's all money that wouldn't be leaving the system if the internet didn't exist.
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Yeah right. Criminals always find a way, and many of those ways do a lot more harm than scamming a few suckers over the 'net. But even if true, 1% of GDP is a drop in the bucket. The real criminals are the ones profiting from the release of >36 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. According to the Swiss Re Institute, the US stands to lose 13% GDP to global warming by 2050 if current trends continue. But we won't be the worst affected. Australia can expect to lose 33% (serves them right for pushing coal!).
 
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The Atheist said:
Quite right, my mistake.



I didn't suggest it was authoritative, but it's hardly clickbait.
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The Nobel Peace Prize? Totally about drumming up engagement with a surface appearance of quality but no actual quality underneath. "Clickbait."

And you did suggest it was authoritative. Someone dismissed the article as having a clickbait headline. Your rebuttal was that author won the NPP, so it's probably not clickbait.

As I don't share your views on the authority of the NPP, I reject your argument. Maybe the article is well-written, but the NPP doesn't tell us anything new. NPP winners are certainly capable of writing vapid material.
 
theprestige said:
As I don't share your views on the authority of the NPP...
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Oh really? You think it's an honourable and good thing then, I can only presume, since my views are not just known, they're known to you.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=347946&highlight=chalice

Regardless of that, Maria Ressa has won a plethora of other awards as well, has an impeccable reputation, and is clearly one of a handful of legendary journalists. Accordingly, categorising her as clickbait is both ignorant and pathetic.

She certainly holds a vast amount more respect than some bloke on the internet.
 
Someone unwilling to put their name on it says exactly the same thing: https://dailyboulder.com/the-internet-is-bad-for-our-mental-health-and-we-cant-escape-it/

Rather than saying this:

A mounting body of evidence highlights the detrimental effects of the internet on our well-being. Studies show a correlation between excessive social media use and increased anxiety, mental health issues, loneliness, and diminished self-confidence
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.

...the article would have been improved by noting that growing body of evidence, with links and stuff.

I guess supporting evidence is another victim.
 
The Atheist said:
Someone unwilling to put their name on it says exactly the same thing: https://dailyboulder.com/the-internet-is-bad-for-our-mental-health-and-we-cant-escape-it/

A mounting body of evidence highlights the detrimental effects of the internet on our well-being. Studies show a correlation between excessive social media use and increased anxiety, mental health issues, loneliness, and diminished self-confidence
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Correlation <> causation. Do people become anxious and lonely and have lower self-confidence because they use social media 'excessively', or are lonely people with anxiety and low self-confidence likely to use social media more as a result? I think the latter is far more likely.

The truth is, the internet provides people with more opportunities to interact socially at lower risk than 'traditional' methods, enabling them to reduce loneliness and boost self-confidence in an anonymous environment where nobody knows (or cares) if you are a dog. The internet also reduces anxiety by providing more information about things people fear and how how others are handling it.

The internet isn't the cause of those 'mental health' issues, it's the cure!
 
The mental health angle isn't one of my concerns, which is why I noted the lack of evidence. There's a handy list of what I think is wrong in the OP.
 
it's an old post, but the incredible advancements in advertising/marketing/manipulation and their role in addictive of smartphones, particularly in children, is to me a huge issue with it
 
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