[ctxc]

Fancy words, but would it even be...an open, accessible web making differences in the lives of billions?

All mobile carriers in my country (or any, I'm guessing) go to great lengths to extract every last penny from my call plans. Should we go back to letters then?

[krapp]

What difference has it made in the lives of billions, other than inciting hatred and addiction? Indoctrinating the masses with disinformation and propaganda? Eliminating our attention spans, reducing our literacy and regressing us culturally to the level of spoiled children? I mean sure, maybe here or there one or two people have something interesting to say, or there's something worth watching or listening to, but the vast majority of it is at best objectively garbage and at worst actively malicious and harmful.

Maybe we should go back to letters. Physical, hand-written letters. A world in which everyone is forced to deliberate over their words and where the pace of information and progress is slowed down to what a human can comprehend, as opposed to the schizoid mania of constant noise we have now, seems objectively better.

[ctxc]

We could go back to letters. And then scientific findings will be silos, our medical progress would be in the stone age, people would find out their loved one is sick after they've passed, and so on. There are wonderful things technology has enabled us to do.

But the sampling of the internet we're exposed to is heavily biased to hate speech and nonsense - the internet is pretty much social media for many. Looking through that lens, I'm leaning towards your view.

But there's also that other side.