Has the Internet doomed humanity?

[DuskEngine]

There's a whole story behind this. Watch "The Century of the Self". It's on Youtube.

HyperNormalisation is also good (even if it's like 3 fuckin hours)

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

maybe it's the couple shots of whiskey but when i think of how the internet has affected us i am reminded of a quote by charles bukowski.
"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
there is an infinite wealth of information and communication at our fingertips, but as a whole we are more interested in trivial shit. social status, getting other people fired, the current rape statistics in sweden, and pornography of cartoon characters. i believe that humanity as a whole will continue to invent shit we're just not ready for, for better or worse. it would be too easy to say the internet has opened pandora's box, that shit has been open since 1945.

 

[AnOminous]

maybe it's the couple shots of whiskey but when i think of how the internet has affected us i am reminded of a quote by charles bukowski.
"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."
there is an infinite wealth of information and communication at our fingertips, but as a whole we are more interested in trivial shit. social status, getting other people fired, the current rape statistics in sweden, and pornography of cartoon characters. i believe that humanity as a whole will continue to invent shit we're just not ready for, for better or worse. it would be too easy to say the internet has opened pandora's box, that shit has been open since 1945.

I miss Bukowski, even though he was arguably a lolcow himself.

He may have been doomed by our form of civilization, but he had little interest in the Internet that I know of, and was probably little influenced by it.

OTOH he wrote this.

“now it’s computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year-olds will have computers
and everybody will know everything
about everybody else
long before they meet them.
nobody will want to meet anybody
else ever again
and everybody will be
a recluse
like I am now.”


― Charles Bukowski, The Continual Condition: Poems

He died in 1994.

 

[Mysterious Capitalist]

This is not a remotely useful analogy for the world today.

While it doesn't represent the whole world, I think it represents fairly the majority of civilized, first world countries: with social security nets, even the poor have food and shelter. Sure, people are killed by external factors while the mice weren't, but reality can't be as sterile and clean as a test environment. I think it gets pretty close regardless.

Honestly, I think this thread might best become two: "how has the internet affected interaction" and "is the Calhoun experiment even viable as a model for human society". They're completely separate and I think equally interesting discussions, but in one thread, it becomes muddled.

That's fair. This post was very "stream of consciousness"-y and was meant to offer some food for thought more than anything else. I think it got the job done, to an extent.

I don't think it's possible to consider how the Internet has affected culture without acknowledging the fact that material insecurity has drastically increased for many people over the last few decades and that this will obviously affect 'culture' as well.

While the gap in income and net worth has widened between rich and poor in the last decades, it doesn't mean that we aren't, generally speaking, richer than ever. Of course, I'm still speaking in the "limited" environment of rich countries, as mentioned before. After all, I don't feel the results of this experiment can be applied to countries where the fight for survival is still very much alive. In fact: you never hear of emasculation or gender privilege as a concept existing in backwater African villages; that's the point I was trying to make.

I miss Bukowski, even though he was arguably a lolcow himself.

There must be a reason if Tumblerinas and "I'm not like other girls" like to quote him so much

“now it’s computers and more computers
and soon everybody will have one,
3-year-olds will have computers
and everybody will know everything
about everybody else
long before they meet them.
nobody will want to meet anybody
else ever again
and everybody will be
a recluse
like I am now.”

While it's true to a degree, I feel that for every meeting that the Internet killed with too much information, two more were born out of people that would not have known each other otherwise. That's my experience anyway.

 

[Mysterious Capitalist]

An interesting video about the mouse experiment, with some more insight, for anyone interested

 

[AnOminous]

While it's true to a degree, I feel that for every meeting that the Internet killed with too much information, two more were born out of people that would not have known each other otherwise. That's my experience anyway.

We need better birth control.

 

[Un Platano]

If the phenomenon of 'the beautiful ones' was applicable to the internet then we would all look like Fabio, and that clearly isn't the case.

 

[Mysterious Capitalist]

If the phenomenon of 'the beautiful ones' was applicable to the internet then we would all look like Fabio, and that clearly isn't the case.

While the grooming part might be hit and miss for the analogy (they were beautiful mostly because they never fought over anything, anyway), the part about not wanting any form of social interaction (arguably the most important factor to take into consideration) even when prompted is eerily similar to a lot of modern "internet communities".