The Internet is a viscous cycle. Having been born a military infrastructure, it remains a weapon, even having become a civilian network.
Being a weapon first and community infrastructure second, the Internet nourishes in each of its users hostile behaviors towards the rest of its users and motivates everyone to manifest and ingrain the worst human qualities. This is based on its fundamental principles: anonymity and ex-territorial jurisdiction. They are only ever violated by the largest of its monopolists and as regards the users, whereas the rest obey them religiously. Only the biggest players know exactly, who sends what, whence, and to whom, whereas the rest have no faintest idea who or why abuses them, leaves malicious feedback to products or services, spreads disinformation, or commits offenses. The degree of isolation of the victims from the offenders and vice versa depends mainly on the interests and agenda of the service providers, and the degree of difficulty and availability of the conflict or grievance resolution process varies mainly from complicated to prohibitive.
Realization of that comes with years. Homo Sapience with its neuron-based brain and mind, which requires precise and accurate information for its thought process, inevitably requires time for the forming of adequate impressions about its surrounding and for the development of adequate responses and reactions to its events. It does so by considering both its own needs and society’s interests and capabilities. The more complex a task is, the longer it takes to develop adequate responses. The Internet abuses this process because its users are predominantly young persons and the older individuals form a minority. Thus, the Internet inevitably turns out to be the least dependable or competent link in the chain of creation and dissemination of information, whereas its users inevitably become the most vulnerable to disinformation, manipulation, programming, and recruitment into undesirable practices, both personally and socially.
Everything on the Internet, sooner rather than later, becomes subject to undesirable and unauthorized actions. Examples of this are many. Few remember Usenet newsgroups. They had emerged as un-moderated, topical streams of information, which had been organized similarly to email but were public. They had not survived for long: all of them, without exception, got under attack by commercial, political, and other spammers, and the users left, having realized that they are unable to separate legitimate messages from deluge of spam. In the end, this truly democratic means of communication became distant history. The users of the Internet turned out not to be civilized enough for it and plunged into savage behaviors. Can this be combated somehow? Yes, the Usenet’s first reaction was to introduce moderated newsgroups, but the amount of labor that was required to maintain civility was so enormous that moderators failed. Besides that, the society of the day held distrust of moderation as a concept and preferred to abandon that means of communication.
The Internet dehumanizes: having no personal contact with the other party, its users begin to treat that person as an inanimate object, especially of late when AI bots have emerged. With the progress of this technology, it became nearly impossible to tell a real living being from a pre-programmed piece of software. The communication with the later is pointless, for obvious reasons, and as the understanding of this fact gains hold, the real, living subscribers leave the formerly populous resources. The tiny handful of creators of the so-promoted agenda ruins it for both the resource owners and subscribers, in the pursuit of its lust for domination.
The Internet nourishes increasingly simple thoughts. Having bowed to the worst, loudest, rudest, and most disgusting personalities, who have no life and sink to social media, the Internet technology leaders, among other things, rolled out the idea of anonymous communication via ‘smilies’ that have been recently renamed ‘emojies’. There are only so few genuinely creative personalities, and true geniuses can be counted on the fingers, whereas there are billions of thick-headed freeloaders or fanatics. The Internet makes the existence of the former dependent on the whim of the later. It is enough for one of them in every one thousand to tap a negative emoji on the content that is created by the latter, and the former’s rank will sink irreparably, and the resource will drop them from top lists and make them invisible to the audience. The only solution for such creative personalities is to publish content coveted by the latter. As a result, some leave, being unwilling to descend to the bottom. Others decide that there is no other way and proceed to publish popular trash. In the end, society rolls down an incline, which is being observed by everyone, for several decades now.
To become successful on the Internet, one has to be insatiable, never admit fault or error, and not acknowledge other points of view. Realistically, this fits the description of robots. Yes, one has to become a robot so as to ignore the reactions of the mob and continue to push and promote one’s own interests.
The Internet deprives people of patience. This is very apparent from the distance. One only has to have courage to refuse the Internet’s most corrupting technologies, and the rest of its users who partake in them begin to look and sound like deranged drug addicts. Over the past twenty or so years, the urge to save a couple of seconds and to simplify one’s life has been progressing exponentially. Gradually, people expressed their unwillingness to type, handwrite, dictate, etc. They have become too lazy to send emails, register in forums, use keyboard and other data input devices, and everything seems to lead to the implanting of the controls and even devices themselves straight into human brain. The urge of producers and retailers to reduce to the minimum the wait time between an order and its delivery further catalyses this process. Some of them have reduced the delivery time to mere hours, by now, and humankind grows accustomed to this and increasingly loses patience. Thus, patience is being inhibited, whereas it had been that which had made us humans, but no one seems to be concerned by this. For all practical purposes, people have all but stopped reading books, even in their electronic form, and now they only want to watch videos or listen to audios, the shorter the better. This is another manifestation of lack of patience, but it occurs to no one to ask: how come we used to have enough of it so that we had progressed from digging sticks to nanotechnologies and space travel? Aren’t we losing something important in the process?
We have looked at patience and reviewed it. One of the most disgusting manifestations of its lack are one-liners: messages that consist usually of a single, incomplete line of text, in which an idea is compressed to the bare minimum of words that is required to convey it, or less. They usually become a tool of busy users of the Internet who have no time or patience to develop their thoughts or those who possess neither vocabulary nor communication skills. This causes several undesirable effects, for both the senders and receivers of such messages. The former become accustomed to expressing their ideas in a brief and unclear fashion, and the latter become confused and grow accustomed to assumptions and lowered expectations.
The denial of entitlement to an opinion is another manifestation of the Internet: it is much simpler to slap a ready-made label on opponents than to discover what they really feel or believe. Accusatory remarks such as “You are a fascist (or communist, slaver, misogynist, racist, terrorist, capitalist, inbred, Russian, Jew, American, Arab, Christian, Muslim, white, black, etc.) are a norm, on the Internet. This list can go on because somewhere, at some point, there will always be a category, which is aggrieved by another one. They do not care who responds to them: if the response is anything but expected, the responder automatically becomes assigned to the evil category, and that serves to automatically invalidate the responder’s point of view. Such behavior becomes a trait and spills into the real world, and now we observe global degradation of our society. It was enough to give its members communication devices and cables that connect them, for the humankind to descend back into ancient savagery.
Self-appointment to any position of power on the Internet requires very little effort from activists, fanatics, or malicious actors. It is usually enough to demonstrate some level of competency and total loyalty to the owner of the resource, and the position of a moderator is practically guaranteed to any interested party. Later, they may show their true face and interests, covertly of course. Having planted themselves in the position of moderator, persons and organizations receive boundless powers over the subscribers at any resource. For all practical purposes, actions of moderators are nearly impossible to appeal or revert, in part due to the sole interest of the owner or administrator of the resource in the uninterrupted stream of advertising revenue. Moderators are being given free reign to control the expression of the members, and they use it to the fullest: promote their own agendas and interests and strangle everything else. Such behavior becomes a trait, and it spills into the real world since some of moderators have real jobs somewhere else. Do I have to say that personal information of the members is at the moderators’ fingertips since they are granted elevated access to the resource and its database? This seems to be obvious.
The Internet stimulates conviction in one’s indisputable authority: I said so; therefore,
it is so, and no one may dare to dispute my point of view. On the Internet, it becomes too easy to fall into the trap of being unaware that one is wrong, since differing opinions can be silenced. This phenomenon is known as cancel culture. Having emerged as an instrument of socio-economic strife, its seeds fell on the fertile soil of perceptive users of the Internet who appreciated them. Since technologies and infrastructure for silencing opponents exist, they will be used. Since such behavior produces short-term results, the following of its model becomes tempting, and increasingly broad masses of Internet users will employ it and subscribe to it. From there, it spills into the real world, like each of the Internet’s manifestations, and there it will lead to the escalation of conflicts and such extremes as civil disobedience, riots, and wars. This is exactly what we systematically observe, for the past few decades.
A natural consequence of such a conviction is the so-called reverse conformism: the conviction that everyone must be like the Internet user. As they neither see nor hear from the rest, personally, an Internet user first loses the understanding that they are different, and then he/she becomes disinterested in differences themselves. Being oblivious of their differences, such a person no longer considers points of view or circumstances other than his/her own. This manifests profusely, during communication between the creators of free, open-source software and their users: often, like I have written many times, such developers believe that everyone else do and want the same as themselves, namely that they use the same devices and software and for the same purposes. Activists of political and other doctrines follow suit. In other words, this is a lack of breadth, which is caused by isolation, and it is inevitable due to properties of protein life in general and human biology in particular: being unaware of conditions that do not exist in their immediate surroundings, a human being does not consider them, and the Internet promotes this model of thinking. In the end, Internet users become increasingly narrow-minded, proportionally to the time spent on it.
The above mentioned is a natural cause of the isolation of consumers from suppliers. Since on the Internet one can obtain goods or services, without coming into personal contact with living human beings, without saying the magic words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, the feeling of one’s own exceptionalism arises and becomes ingrained in its users. This is caused by the instantaneous and unconditional satisfaction of one’s needs and wants. The ability to consider the feelings of other becomes suppressed. A careful reader can realize what this means: the person ceases to be a social being. Our society turns from that into an array of loners. This may lead to catastrophic consequences, and it does.
Destructive behavior may not be directly enabled, on the Internet, but it does not face a real impediment. It may manifest itself in verbal abuse: causeless, anonymous attacks, for the fun of it. Creative individuals whose point of view does not match that of the rest or whose art is too different or unusual from the popular point of view fall victims to this most often. Such behavior meets practically no counteraction. Of course, there are feedback forms and buttons. Of course, moderators might pay attention and take some measures, but they are mostly toothless. What can they do? Ban the offender? They will register another email address and account, that instant. Block their IP address? It will change, that instant; therefore, its next innocent subscriber will suffer, for example when a street car or subway train takes them to within the range of another cellular tower or WiFi antenna. This serves to remind us of the destructive basic principles of the Internet: its anonymity and extraterritorial jurisdiction.
Codes of conduct and policies of Internet resources are always biased towards the enrichment of their owners and their economical and political agenda. All resources, without exception, always violate the basic principles of justice and equality, by reserving powers to deal with their users as they see fit and by affording them no opportunity of appeal. In particular, this is consequence of the conviction of one’s indisputable authority that we have reviewed and of the lack of interest to the opinions of others. This sounds paradoxically, for the very possibility for the Internet to exist has been presented as manifestation of the most basic freedoms: that of speech and self-expression. Despite that, they do not exist, on the Internet, and it applies a different principle: that of private property. Each resource considers itself such and reserves the right to remove any member for any reason at any point in time. Initially, this had caused cognitive dissonance which set in and became chronic. Later, this model became the norm, and later it inevitably spilled into the real world, and now we are in the process of observing a global and total degradation of said freedoms, notably in countries where they are still considered to be in force.
A careful reader may notice that the same features of the Internet and the circumstances that they create are being mentioned, over and over, by the author, as root causes of its various negative effects and their consequences. The conclusion that this brings us to is deplorable: the way the Internet had spilled into human society is inherently defective. Much in the former has to be changed, in order to reverse its effects, namely its two basic principles: anonymity and extraterritorial jurisdiction. Is this possible? If this is what we want to achieve, then it may be. Do we? This is a totally different question. What do we want to achieve? Take your pick.
The Internet in and by itself is not inherently harmful. It is beneficial to dissemination of knowledge and creation of conditions for human interactions in the economy. As I have said, on more than one occasion, the Internet does lip service to the breaking of state or institutional control over communication. But this slogan is deceptive because it implies only certain states or institutions. Who decides which are or are not desirable? Of course, those who control the Internet do, in each particular location and moment in time. In reality, the torrents of data on the Internet remain under tight control, which causes a multitude of conflicts in our society. The abundance of control in some areas and the lack of it in others create too many clashes, contradictions, and abuses, on the Internet. This deficiency must be fixed, for the Internet to become inherently beneficial to human civilization. Otherwise only a tiny handful of monopolists will continue to benefit from it.
The principles of anonymity and extraterritorial jurisdiction, being the foundation of the Internet, cause not only psychological or social consequences. They also destroy that which it itself strives to create: conditions for the carrying out of business. This is obvious to every security specialist who is employed by large organizations and to every system administrator who is employed by smaller ones. They have no choice than to spend their days combating unauthorized access to their respective infrastructures, to escalate the complexity of countermeasures, and to purchase special equipment and software, which is needless to say quite expensive. Laws of many countries and regions deem such attempts misdemeanors or even crimes, but very few are ever prosecuted and even fewer are convicted on such charges. The majority of offenders remain beyond reach of the law enforcement, by residing in different, often distant and hostile nations. The combating of unauthorized access diverts resources from businesses, which could have been used for their intended activities, which means that the Internet’s basic principles damage the economy of the whole planet. This aspect is not only not being adequately addressed, but very little effort is being taken towards that.
The goal of this article is far from insulting anyone. It is to offer the readers thoughts about something other than their day-to-day thoughts or emotions. This should be understood because Homo Sapience is a social being, and its life depends on the thoughts and actions of others and vice versa. Everything in human society has mutual a cause and effect, and although there are many destructive individuals who strive to destroy themselves and others, they are still in the minority. This inevitably means that the majority is interested in the improvement of our lives with time. To achieve this, they should pay attention to the destructive effects of the Internet by initially realizing that they exist and by countering them in a positive manner, so as to make corrections and to introduce positive changes to this technology. If we end up not doing so, then the situation on our planet will continue to degrade, at an ever accelerating pace.