Is the Internet a Good Thing?

The Internet. I was one of a million people who helped bring it into being, and as I reach the homestretch of my run, I’m wondering if it was a good thing we did.

What does the Internet do? It makes some business transactions more efficient, far more. It allows the spread of knowledge and technical skills at much faster rates. It allows people to form online communities; to find new friends, and even lovers. It allows commerce and the movement of goods in ways and places that were impossible before.

But what all these benefits have in common is that they are only as socially useful as the people who are involved. We sell more consumerist crap at far higher speeds to far more suckers. The “knowledge” that is spread includes the poisonous “realism” of bigots, Q-nuts, quacks, religious hucksters and greedheads, who can find their marks and gulls more easily. It has given criminals and terrorists global scope, and brought us every form of evil smut from every corner of the Earth. Before the Internet, child porn was a few perverts trading polaroids and home movies. Now, it’s a few clicks away, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can’t tell me that more children haven’t been harmed to feed this now constant demand.

Perhaps worst of all, in terms of scale, it shoves a continuous stream of emotionally manipulative advertising into your face during most of your waking hours. Online databases sell your private details, and scammers, spammers and all species of grubby hucksters intrude on your privacy continually.

The Internet has been great for people who want to sell things, legitimate or not. But it has become a deadly enemy to peace, privacy, and the ability to concentrate. I remember a world where you weren’t available to hustlers during every waking hour, where every detail of everyone’s lives wasn’t continually available. Was it really so bad to have to go to a bookstore to buy a book, or to a movie theater to see a movie? Was it intolerable to be limited to talking to one person on the phone at a time? Where crackpots had to work at finding other crackpots, and lacked the means, aside from pamphleteering on street corners, to badger you?

Obviously, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Your every wish is a click (and a credit card number) away, and very few people are going to give that up. But I wonder if we’ve really reckoned the cost of putting our privacy, our capacity for attention and even our worldview in the hands of people who can’t consider anything about society or individual human beings that doesn’t show up on a quarterly profit report.

And, of course, here we are, you and I. On the Internet, me sharing a thought with you. Would that have happened without this impressive, complex, and in the end, ungovernable technology? Maybe. But more slowly, more personally. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

Does it seem strange to you to think about a world without the Internet? Can you picture your life without your smartphone? I can. I remember it.

And it really wasn’t all that bad. Fewer options, sure, but you could consider them at human speeds.

When you can't picture your life, or the world without something, it is impossible for you to change it. Very few people, including those of us who are old enough to remember the analog world, can imagine their lives without interacting with the Internet hundreds of times a day. And remember, you don't have control of the Internet in any significant way. Neither does your government. A significant portion of your life is now completely out of your control.

You say you can turn it off? Try. Most jobs require it now, in one way or another. Your friends, even your family probably coordinate their social lives with their phones. It's not “FOMO,” Fear of Missing Out,” it's a certainty that you will miss out. We have been cozened into putting our whole lives online. We've become dependent.

Try an experiment. Turn your phone off. Shut down your computer. Turn off your television. Of course you probably are paying a dozen different streaming services, maybe hundreds of dollars a month, but bear with me here for a moment.

Do you think you could do it for a week?

If you can't, what does that say about your relationship to this technology, and to those who control it?