[anonymous908213]

I don't think this is a very difficult question to answer. The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place. The internet of the year 2025 makes the world a much, much worse place. We now live in an era where not only governments but every private business willing to pay a data broker has access to unlimited data for roughly every individual in a population, including their age, gender, occupation, hobbies, friends, political positions, sleep schedule, every phone call they've ever made, every website they've ever visited, every location they've ever taken their phone, every thing they've ever purchased. This information is currently used to shape the course of politics by manipulating what every individual sees, and will undoubtedly be used for unthinkable crimes against humanity in the coming years.

[Terr_]

Feels of 1995: "A personal computer and an internet connection are democratically-cheap pieces of capital-equipment than you can use to accomplish the goals that matter to you! Vast new realms of agency and autonomy! If you don't like it, make your own!"

Feels of 2025: "The device in your pocket is a way for companies to make you see the things they want you to see and nothing else you dirty criminal. You can talk to your friends but if your GPS trace is interrupted your account will be suspended. If you don't like it, sucks to be you."

[idiotsecant]

The internet of 2025 isn't the same thing at all. The early internet was a toy - a place for deviants and weirdos to do weird deviant things (and it was glorious). The rest of humanity found it and turned it into a mirror of the real world. That doesn't make it bad, in some ways it makes it better, in some ways worse, just definitely different.

[anthk]

Early internet was just a world of academics, scientists, engineers and maybe on the very early web and IRC, journalists.

[quietsegfault]

I'm not sure that's the /internet/'s fault, but the humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology and our inability to regulate the technology to prevent harms.

[georgemcbay]

> humanities inability to anticipate what we can do with the technology

I think it is more a problem of not caring (especially when not caring will result in social and/or economic reward) rather than not anticipating.

For any technology that is created you can and should anticipate that it will be, literally, weaponized since there are hundreds of thousands of years of precedent for this happening.

[immibis]

We - technologists - mocked the humanities for decades for being useless. Now look where we got without them.

[aleph_minus_one]

> We - technologists - mocked the humanities for decades for being useless. Now look where we got without them.

A lot of programmers were very critical how in particular since the release of the iPhone people suddenly accepted the golden cage against which programmers before very aggressively fought.

So the issue is rather that people did not listen to these old-school programmers, (as usual) mocked these as nerds, and instead listened to "hipsters" and marketers.

One can discuss a lot how useful humanities are, but what brought us in the current situation is rather that the masses did not listen to the old-school programmers.

[quietsegfault]

Ha ha - I meant "humanity's", not "the humanities". Stupid autocorrect! I blame the internet.

[SoftTalker]

> The internet of the year 2000 made the world a better place

How so? Because we could send mail instantly instead of using a stamp and envelope?

Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house?

Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?

[torben-friis]

>Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?

I can tell you I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am without this, yes.

First because I (/my parents) didn’t have the money, second because of pure geographical access.

I saw movies and shows from countries that would never sell near me, read books that would never be in my country’s libraries, took courses straight from scientists and engineers rather than a thrice translated work…

The barrier of entry was also useful, curiosity is much better fed when you can download a medicine textbook just to check rather than venturing into the library of a university you’re not part of.

That is the one thing the internet did right, spreading culture. It was over when they took boredom from us, that was the big evil.

[anthk]

Ditto here in Spain. If you were able to watch Northern Exposure or The X Files with the Spanish dub in the 90's with a normal TV schedule (read: with human schedules, you need to sleep), I would ask you a unicorn just in case, because I woudn't believe you. After 2003 with Emule and BT? Damn it, I've got whole NE series over torrent and I regret nil.

My public TV already paid the US TV producer with money from our taxes, so in the end it's a draw.

Programming books? Your elder brother/sister it's doing CS at some uni, right? Then, good luck paying $50 on big book stores from malls. Entry courses you mean? Pay ~$50 a month for a private school and try enjoying Visual C++ 98. Linux? That's was for CS engineers and PC freaks right?

Nowadays you can learn damn Calculus on your own and install Maxima from any distro with online guides and tutorials. I had to learn Calculus from my own (I was some HS dropout) early Debian DVD's which had a PDF on Mathematics and from that I tried to understand every exercise and equation under Maxima. No upgrades, no updates, no tutoring. Hard mode my default for everything. Your TV tuner didn't work? Messing with Linux kernel modules like crazy and even editing the source code to fake the tuner and PLL and watch something in XawTV.

[roadside_picnic]

> Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house?

I'm guessing you were still pretty young/not yet born at the time?

Online shopping didn't just mean "I don't have to leave the house", it opened up a whole world of what was even possible.

Prior to the web if you didn't live in a big city (and less people did then) then your access to books, music, movies was insanely restricted.

I deeply recall how painfully limited my local Sam Goody was, even major "alternative" bands only had partial discographies available. I remember visiting my father's college campus as an early teen and being beyond excited to find a copy of NIN's "halo 1" in a college town record store. True indie music was reserved for kids with cool older siblings that both knew where the stores were and could drive there. In order to watch Dragon Ball Z I had to rely on a friend whose dad was a plumber in NYC and knew where the bootleg stores in China-town were. I got to tag along once and picked up a single random episode of a Gundam series, never to be finished because I could never find another.

Sure it was sort of fun to figure all this stuff out, but at the same time my bookshelf is filled with books that changed my life in various ways I would simply never had been able to find (or even be aware of) in the pre-web days. If you wanted to learn programming in the 90s you had to hope your local Walden books had some good options, and you certainly weren't going to learn Haskell or Lisp. Mine only had books on Excel, so I didn't learn to program until I was older.

Now the fact that American suburbs where a complete cultural wasteland in the 90s might be the bigger issue than the cure which was the web, but nonetheless the early web did make the world of information much bigger.

[anthk]

Same for indie music and culture, except for DB, where in 1990 in Spain Goku was more widely known and read than Superman. We finished DBZ in 1995-6 with the translated manga. Marvel/DC existed, but DB was everywhere. For the rest, almost 100% the same. Mangas were for kids wich cool elder brothers, they were expensive, but shared like drugs. At least regional TV's aired tons of anime back in the day (Sakura, Doraemon, Lupin...), we were covered.

But for the music, the crappy pop was on every radio and TV, altough it was far more variety than today where's 90% reaggeton (even faking Latin American accents from Spaniards) and mediocre pop singers. When I got some discount CD's - Def con Dos, similar to Public Enemy- and the like, it was like crossing to a different universe being myself a son of a blue collar worker.

Oh, and thanks again for the regional TV's in Spain (from autonomous regions), as they reran The Outer Limits in mid 90's instead the usual shitty sitcoms. That drove me into scifi, among getting 1984, Brave New World and the like from dollar stores at very cheap prices in early 2000's. Yes, once they sold classic in "Spanish Dollar Stores" (under a different name), it was glorious to find pulp fiction books, staunch joke books and often an Asimov or Bradbury book. That under ~$1 back in the day, almost the price of a bread baguette or your daily newspaper. A damn bargain compared to the $10 pocket cardboard cover book or worse the normal, thick volume $20 book. Comics from Tintin and Astérix were expensive too. But the English edition of these were also available in these stores, so often I bought them understanding maybe a 30% of it, 80% with a dictionary.

Video games? A single one per year and that's it. Choose wisely. An RPG? Great, tons of replaying. In order to save money, the next year I could get a Chinese pirate 21 in 1 cartridge with platformers and games like Batman, Goal, Metroid II... in order to disconnect from the RPG.

But when I could get scifi games, text adventures and the like from cybercafés 2000-2002 the 1990's felt rancid, outdated and tacky compared to Emule, Soulseek, Deus Ex, the first Linux distros...

[SoftTalker]

No I'm much older than that. My comment was somewhat sarcastic, rhetorically asking whether amplifying our consumer culture "made the world a better place."

I grant that it made hard-to-find stuff easier to get. But any bookstore I ever dealt with in those days would be happy to special order anything they didn't stock.

[1bpp]

Yes. The current generation of creatives could not exist as it is without free information and pirated professional software.

[anonymous908213]

For many reasons, but if I had to pick one for brevity: because there was unprecedented access to educational information, allowing anyone to learn about the world and develop skills that would typically have required a university education. Of course, even that has been corrupted, and now while the information still exists it is drowned out by orders of magnitude more misinformation.

That's not to say that the internet in 2000 was without flaws, but I do think on net it was beneficial to humanity.