[raincole]

I think you underestimate people's grievance with technology. If you make a poll my guess is more than 50% of people will say the world was a better place pre-social media.

If the AI tech keeps going at the direction it's going now, more and more people will start believing the world would be better if the internet and computer had never been invented.

You talk like the internet being a net positive is a given. It really isn't, especially after it's proven that it doesn't democratize power (see Arab Spring, and China, and the US, and everywhere.)

[simianwords]

Its usually the educated and elite PMC types who have grievance with technology. They secured their status and have lucrative jobs mostly with the help of technology and they are too scared to have anything threaten their position in society. It is highly hypocritical to behave this way but they don't seem to have the self awareness to observe it objectively.

Ask any poor person in India what their sentiment is with tech - it is usually optimism.

> You talk like the internet being a net positive is a given. It really isn't, especially after it's proven that it doesn't democratize power (see Arab Spring, and China, and the US, and everywhere.)

The world is far more democratic now than before and I attribute it to technology because it reduces information asymmetry.

[intended]

I’m in India, and I sure as shit haven’t seen what you are talking about.

In 2025, we lost 22931 crores to cyber fraud - about 2.7 billion USD. People are now saying that they are relieved if the losses were only single digit crores lost.

India invented digital house arrests. There’s entire districts/cities where the primary revenue stream is from scams. Cops don’t want to involve themselves with cyber crimes because they can’t resolve them.

India’s information economy is so broken, that the idea that we are less or more democratic is not even relevant.

The amount of revenge porn, non-consensual intimate imagery released per day is heart wrenching.

I REALLY want to agree with you. I too want to talk about the good that tech can do. India cannot afford to talk about the good without dealing with the bad.

The motto of move fast and break things assumes someone else will pick up the pieces. This doesn’t hold true for India - we need to pick up the pieces.

[simianwords]

It’s easy to fall into the trap of overindexing on local issues. On a holistic level internet brings people to the same level by democratising knowledge.

I’ll ask you this: would India be better off without internet? If your ultimate goal were democracy, would you end internet to promote democracy in India?

[raincole]

> The world is far more democratic now than before and I attribute it to technology because it reduces information asymmetry

That is fantasy. Information technology has created an unprecedented level of information asymmetry and the gap is widening everyday as the total computing capacity grows.

Before information era, the ruling class was roughly as blind as peasants. Population census took years, and sometimes outright impossible. The opaqueness was two-way. Now it's one way - people in power know everything about the citizens.

[simianwords]

Take two countries. One with open access to information in the way you described and another country where internet is not allowed. Which one do you think will be more democratic?

(hint: there already exist examples like such)

Without information, there is no way a voter may know which person to vote for and whether to believe in them at all and you are easily susceptible towards manipulation.

It will become more clear when you try to answer this hypothetical: if your objective were to bring in more democracy in North Korea, would you allow the global internet to proliferate if you could? According to your theory, it would just make it worse in general.