Ask Lemmy

I believe that the perfect internet is 1999 but with Wikipedia.

That’s it.

All tech: 1999 and before. Flip phones. MP3 players. DVD. Etc.

It was perfect and corporations did not suck our souls out through our assholes.

I'm on the internet because I can actually find others who share my intereste and have something to talk about. If the internet died, I'd be even lonlier.

Religion will become popular again and people still start falling for nonsense like ghosts and superstitions. People born after the 80s don't really remember just how batshit crazy people went for misinformation before we had the internet.

We need a new internet without corporate bullshit and some integrity in terms of knowledge. But seeing what happened to the current one, I don't think that will be possible until we kill capitalism.

The internet is helpful for finding community and support, especially for LGBT+ people, people with mental health issues, or neurodivergent people. I for one am very glad that the internet is very much up and that the legislators have not succeeded in fully censoring it.

Yes.

I grew up in the 70's where you'd run naked out of the shower to take a phone call, because that might be your only opportunity to be invited to a social occasion or event that day/week. Nobody ever turned down an invite to lunch, cards night, bingo, pot luck, watching vacation slides, etc, etc, etc. That was the chance to see the world, connect with people and hear what was going on.

I grew up when you'd read the same shampoo bottle 10 times every time you took a shit, hoping you'd find some new detail you once missed.

I grew up when reading every single word of the newspaper, literally from cover-to-cover was a normal thing, for want of better options.

So I feel if people were forced back into the system of non-instant communication, it would automatically make humans come back together. We are social creatures, and The Internet & SM is an ersatz version of socializing, but if it were gone people would have to find it in real life again.

It would probably take a while but yes, I do think people would become less isolated.

People use social media as a substitute for social interaction, it is not. Even texting is not good enough most of the time.

I'm pretty sure we'd have a lot of blood on our hands. The internet does in fact facilitate medical appointments, records, and makes drugs and supplies more accessible.

That's rough. Don't wanna go outside, lots of armed masked men outside.

(Am a foreign-born non-white American)

Probably just have to to get a bunch of DVDs and actually get a DVD player that works since the old one is filled with dust and broken. (Or is it a "BluRay" these days?)

I'm probably gonna have to get ham radios, without the internet, there would be a lot more traffic, so I'd probably have to get comfortable using my voice. Probably get a shortwave radio so I get get foreign broadcasts. TV also needs to be replaced.

I'd have to get like actual encyclopedias.

Honestly, it'd be a pain. No piracy is gonna make things cost too much. I doubt Libraries would even have them since they'd all be loaned out.

TLDR: It'd suck, very fucking much.

We could just get rid of Internet 2.0 - that's when the tech broligarchs took over the beautiful original internet and make it into a bunch of surveillance capitalist walled gardens with psyop addictive algorithms that turned people into ad-consumption cash cows.

Leaving the infrastructure in place for useful, non society-destroying uses would avoid throwing the baby out with the filthy bathwater.

Honestly, I don't really believe people are fundamentally much different now than they were before the internet, I think people are just aware of negative events from a wider area now and that things that previously would have gotten blamed on something else get blamed on the internet instead.

What is 'the internet' to you? I think this term means different things to different people. I imagine to people born in the latest generations the internet is social media and productivity corpo sites. To them the internet is youtube, tiktok, twitter, reddit, their bank, and whatever slop services they subscribe to magically beamed into pocket computer through technomagical nerd shit like "5g" and processed through "microprocessors" and other stuff they' dont care to really understand because its all abstracted away.

I was born early enough for the internet to be nothing more than two computers barely powerful enough to run a GUI calling eachother up through telephone wires to share goofy web 1.0 blogspam. I remember when low res images were the norm and when pre-google youtube was just coming into being. When AOL and Myspace and Newgrounds/flash games. I remember being a kid and loving computers because I never knew what new cool website was on the horizon to discover and play with. I remember that people used things like newsgroups and pre-craigslist to meet up for transactions.

This is the internet, to me. At least what it once was and what it can be again. People using the digital landscape to freely express themselves with their own hardware. To come together to share in hobbies and interest and passions.

We could have that again if we all bought into a standardized radio based mesh network that could host personal sites while acting as a routing node.

But I don't know if the general public will ever be pushed to partake in this network. They would have to be squeezed very hard to try alternatives to the common way of things.

No. We are all online for lack of better alternatives, which wouldn't magically appear

no, people hated each other before the internet...even moreso than they do now. believe it or not, media giants has an easier time bubbling people pre-internet

No. Alcohol usage would go up in that scenario though.

Idk my neighbors are pretty openly racist and so are 90% of the people in my uni. Internet has few cool people at least.

before the internet people watched a lot of broadcast tv and rented videos a lot. now since there was a limited amount of media people did talk about popular shows a lot.

There was a power outage in the Modwest in 2003 or so. It lasted a few days.

Businesses were mostly closed down, so everyone basically had a few days off. There was a life to the community that I had never experienced. People with generators were visiting old friends, running their fridges for a few hours at a time, and the parks were full. People were generally friendly and helpful to each other. Then after a few days, the power came back on and life went back to normal.

If we destroyed the internet, I wouldn't expect the same thing to happen. Businesses would readjust, and life would find a new normal (perhaps looking a little more like the 90s). But I doubt it would change much with how neighborly people are.

What seems to trigger that sense of community is a shared experience, especially hardships. So if things keep going downhill, a silver lining will probably be a renaissance of community.

I think this would work because people weren't bigoted until the internet came about

Maybe, depends on the people. Some neighbours might love to get back together like how they used to, others might start fighting again.

Personally i'd just quit on living. I highly doubt i'd find the same community where i currently am, i'm not going back to feeling completely alone and just faking my life again.

I can't talk about younger generations, I'm well into my 50s, but I know they do a lot of things online. Heck, they even date online which to me seems as odd as wanting to eat an... air sandwich (so odd that I'm half expecting some app to popup offering them to have virtual sex too... for a monthly fee, obviously). But even like that there are still a lot of people (of all ages) that prefer IRL/physical/analog to online/digital to a subscription-based lifestyle. They're just... less visible online (and they seldom complain about it online either) ;)

The thing with the Internet is that it creates this self-validation bubble, and I mean not just for political discussions where people expect to never have to listen to anything/anyone not agreeing with them, I mean it as a space itself, the Internet is good at downplaying alternatives to itself as a place to be and do things... Things like meeting people IRL, doing offline activities and hobbies. Who decided we needed to use a phone to watch a movie or to read a book or an app to meet someone we find attractive?

To me, all of that should have been one of the things education needed to talk more about to kids. If it ever tried, it obviously utterly failed. The real question being then: who decided we should stop doing all of those things our species have been doing for... ever. And why? And the answer may be as simple and obvious as: ourselves. It is us that did this to ourselves, it's our own laziness and maybe our own fear, and our own stupidity.

Until then, ill go back to being mostly disconnected on weekends. Its great.

I don't have dedicated offline days, but i do have a lot of offline time so allow me to congratulate you nonetheless on that decision and wish you had an even better WE than usual when you will read my comment. Because, you're 100% right:

Its great.

And not just on WE ;)

It’s not so much the internet as it is advertising. A lot of what we’re dealing with now came from the advent of 24 hour news networks. Prior to that, there was a half hour of local news and a half hour of national news twice per night and then a morning news show on each of three networks. Then 24 hour news networks came around and they had to fill that 24 hours with whatever would keep people glued to the channel so the network could pull in more ad revenue. That lead to more sensational stories and to other networks specifically catering to people’s baser emotions. Then the internet comes about and it all starts happening on a grander scale, working for clicks instead of ratings. There’s always people willing to encourage the worst of us as long as they can make a buck off of it.

I live in a neighborhood where everyone has a smartphone. We still go out and spend time in person, have community events, know our neighbors.

It's not the Internet's fault. In most cases, it's lack of density, lack of parkspace, and lack of public transit. Suburbification, if you will. People don't go outside unless there's pleasant outdoor spaces to go to. People can't get to know their neighbors on the house-car-office pipeline, you need sidewalks and pubtrans and mixed zoning for that. You need front stoops and block clubs and people who have lived there for more than a couple years.

The internet is probably much older than you believe ... by several decades ... so your question does not exactly fit with your worries.

Maybe if it was out for 3 or 4 hours each day. I think I'd like that.

My friends and neighbours and I all use a variety of messaging services and apps like Spond to organise get-togethers, sporting events, working bees etc etc. I'm in a ridiculous number of WhatsApp groups, all very active, and I see most people in them irl regularly. Without the internet I don't know how we'd cope. It's hard enough herding cats in a group chat, imagine the number of phone calls we'd be making!

Yeah, most likely. People still would want to socialise so they'd force themselves out of their comfort zones. Also, the dummies wouldn't be so heavily propagandized so at least they'd have a chance to naturally grow out of blanket xenophobia, for instance.