This blog is a statement against the modern internet. I have made an effort in not releasing this in the normal blogging space. Almost everything “normal” in the modern internet is deeply sick in my opinion.
Last update: 2020/05/28
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The Buro
When thinking about blogging, what comes to mind is articles thrown around social media in order to incite extreme emotions. This is something I have no interest in. If I do provoke you, it happens within the context of my choosing instead of the sort of storm of random opinion pieces on social media.
I find it absurd that the basic function of internet has been obfuscated under a pile of abstractions. I tried blogging on Wordpress, I tried Grav, Jekyll. These are way too complicated tools to achieve a simple task. Getting words online.
No, I don’t have a sponsor. I am not in any way “professional” in issues to do with internet. The professionals wouldn’t tell you their honest opinion anyway. The problems with the internet are sort of a mirror of problems in politics and government at large.
Representive democracy is an attempt at a hidden meritocracy. It works best when the amount of functional democracy is lowest. In other words, when people of merit are selected behind closed doors but presented to the public as democratic leaders.
When democracy works in giving people more voting power, it actually fails in delivering good leaders. This has to do with qualities that are selected for in the process of wooing the voters. What you need to have a successful ad campaing is not the same thing as what you need as a leader.
This is not to say that egalitarianism is not worth aiming for. But when looking for a leader, one should have a selection process that is designed to find qualities that a good leader should have. Not the other way around.
When you start finding out about how the systems we are embedded in work, it always seems that there are increasing layers of abstraction to get through. Who can say they understand:
Out of these, only science seems to have a built-in system of limiting complexity and even that isn’t working out. More about this later.
I would assert that the reason these systems are getting more complicated is because people are “gaming” the system in order to squeeze money out of it. In the same way as trash loans can be repackaged and sold further, the increasing levels of abstraction in any field create more evolutionary niches for people who are not participating in the system for any other reason than gaming it.
In science, for example, the scientific journals are such a game. They are controlled by a handful of publishers and slow down scientific process by adding this unnecessary overhead. Poor universities are even unable to pay for them, and thus have to be limited in their scope of research and training. Of course, there are some free services that are trying to cut off the journals as a middleman and these services are being swamped by “research” that I would call “scientific trolling”.
These two strategies (gatekeeping and trolling) create a tension that creates complexity. Basically either side is trying to outmaneuvre the other with more elaborate schemes. This same has happened with the internet.
The web page was a functional way of presenting text and images. But if everyone is competing only in who makes the best pages, the competition will find a stasis. The market doesn’t like that. Stuff has to grow! The only way something can grow after it has saturated the space is to find more connections within that space and diversify.
I think that may sound a bit hard to understand. The creature is not “growing” if it fills up a finite space and just diversifies. But it does use energy to go through the transformations. For market, growth actually means something like use of energy. When money changes hands, this is said to be growth even if nothing got bigger in the process.
In this way, whatever is built up and brought to fruitition has to be pulled apart and eaten by the many.
The reason you will not hear the truth from the professionals is this: The complexity is what provides them with their daily bread. As a class of people their function is not to find solutions and simpler ways of doing things.
Because the complexity is unnecessary for the function of the product, it has been assigned other, secret functions. Thus, most websites will play into the hands of the spy corporations and social media giants. The space for “just getting stuff done” is getting more narrow as the operator has to be more and more “educated” to run the machinery. As the websites need bigger engines, the chance for mess-ups will increase and this is good for the profits of the security companies.
Do you remember the times people could actually just have a static IP and have a website right there at their home?
I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to allow them have the net if it wasn’t first ours. There was something like a decade when the internet was still free. Worm-infected wilderness. That wild is being pushed aside and taken over by the corporations. I feel like strangled by a hundred nooses. At every direction there is someone creeping in, trying to collect my data, trying to identify me. And the worst enemy is the future.
In the future there will be more and more analytic tools to turn this data into more accurate representations of me. These pseudo-mes will be going around showing the corporations what I would do in any given situation. They will be able to plan propaganda that sees the future in a sense. Even if I manage to avoid one trap, the next will be set with corrected parameters based on the trap I avoided.
Have you considered what sort of propaganda power Disney has? Culture is not benign. Bambies and Dwarfs are carrying a payload. Hollywood is sort of a deep troll that has penetrated global information space quite completely. Now of course this has changed and the Western propagandists are getting too scared to let people talk on Youtube. If you can’t control it, put it down.
There was never a time information space was not a battlefield but it has been an invisible fight. Now it is quite explicit and I think we are going to see more radical censorship and more radical messaging.