2007, the year the internet went to shit
2007 is 14 years ago now. 14 years ago, things have gotten so much worse. One could go so far to say that Humans are a treacherous race betraying themselves every day...
There's a relatively common joke floating around that 2007 is the year the Internet went to shit. I don't personally know what year it went to shit, but I will list the events of 2007 that mark why this could be seen to be the case:
- 1st Generation of IPhone
- FoxNews does its first report on 4chan
- Tumblr is founded
- Facebook allows non-college emails to register
- Twitter explodes in popularity after SXSW Festival marketing campaign
- Big Bang Theory debuts
I'll cover each in some detail. Firstly the 1st generation of IPhone. Relatively speaking from a hardware standpoint it was revolutionary as it pushed smart phones as the frontier of media consumption and use. It also made it incredibly simple to use. As a result it opens the floodgates for idiots to access the internet. There's also the fact that Apple does this all off the back of child labour, but don't worry too much about that. Any competitive technology company violates human rights in innumerable ways, and advocates them in western marketing scams like the eternal corporate hypocrites they are.
Secondly Fox News doing its report on 4chan. I am relatively surprised they even did reports on what is effectively a generic internet forum. Regardless, this just opens the floodgates for edgy kids to pollute the threads and posts. I would generally say this wasn't as bad as 2016 and the few years leading up to where a lot of message-sharing sites became vitriolic with political nonsense. Left vs Right and "Us vs Them"-isms are only deserving labels for people who have no sense of nuance.
Thirdly Tumblr is founded. I think this explains itself, but it sets itself up as an area for degeneracy. This can quite simply be seen from the Tumblr porn ban. I am not pro-censorship, I am certainly pro-autonomy; as such I believe it's Tumblr's right to determine what content they allow and disallow on their site. The fallout of their decision shows just how degenerate the Tumblr userbase is. Naturally of course, a great deal of these degenerates migrated to Twitter- arguably worse due to the use of curt messages and spamming "^" messages in the form of retweets and likes. Remember that "^" was considered bad practice and disrespectful on old forums as it would both, clog up the thread and contribute nothing.
Fourthly, Facebook allowing non-college emails to register. Read into Cambridge Analytica yourself. I won't elaborate here.
Twitter exploding in popularity. Now this one might need some description. Firstly, 140 characters is far too few to adequately communicate. Human communication is by nature incredibly messy and hard to get right, and no matter what string of words you put together somebody else will pattern match that string to mean something you didn't intend. There's also the nature of threads being non-linear, which makes it very hard to go through and see what the discussion leads to. Also the fact it rewards "Slam Dunking" people with witty curt responses makes that a standard behaviour on Twitter.
Finally, Big Bang Theory debuts. I put this one here as I would generally say this is what has normalised and popularised "Geek" Culture. Geek culture is quite distinct from nerd culture, being that it tends to focus on shallow elements, commonly revolving around some brand a person consumes. Nerd culture is quite simply a love of learning to a relatively autistic extreme. One can see, that one answer is a hedonistic answer. One is a poetic worldview(poetry originates from the Greek Word "To Create/Make/Produce"), so one creates. I will also mention that there is a 3rd point being the ascetic answer, which is by nature a reaction to hedonism. Often times though it's a circlejerk, one ascetic culture is that of veganism.
Anyway, I leave this short article off as just me looking back at 2007, as possibly a year the internet went wrong. In general though, it has gone wrong mainly due to commercial interests. A decade ago, you could find hobbyists using Google Search but it has gotten harder with time, as the commercial and advertised answer is more important. The bottom line is more important.
Think about it for a moment, that the medium of information exchange that so many people rely upon, are built on obtuse AI Algorithms that in the case of Neural Networked Algorithms, even the designers don't fully understand- and that they are trained as such to push the commercial interests and commercial informations over the useful information(I would also think this goes along with the concept of Intellectual Property being a scam. A lot of great works today exist only because people disrespect the idea of "Intellectual Property", because knowledge is not a zero-sum game. Sharing knowledge is in Human Interests). There are a number of other events that have taken place that could be pointed to. The use of Wikipedia is a de-facto expert over actual experts for example. The use and advertisement in search engines. The numerous privacy violations by the NSA, GCHQ and other "National Defense" groups(This is ignoring that by nature privacy is a pretty vacuous term on its own, and needs elaboration to be useful. The strong form of the "Nothing to Hide Argument" shows this).
"Some people think this is paranoia, but it isn't. Paranoids only think everyone is out to get them. Wizards know it." - Terry Pratchet