[jMyles]

> Why do you think humans today are special and will eliminate war?

Isn't this _the entire point_ of the internet? To evolve beyond states and boundaries and warfare as a way of making decisions about resource allocation?

It strikes me as very short-sighted to decline to act as a generation on this matter. Humans today (or lets say, in these next few centuries) _are_ special; we have arrived at an evolutionary milestone with the birth of a new organism that does seem capable of lasting peace.

[pasc1878]

What a thing invented (or at least large parts) by DARPA. An agency of the United States Department of Defense.

You expect that the whole point of something there not to boost the US military?

[jMyles]

Two things:

1) Sure, good things do emerge from less good things. That's how improvement happens. That's why we have thumbs thumbs today, even though none of our ancestors in the neoproterozoic era did.

2) On longer time scales (say, measuring from about 5,000 years ago to 5,000 years hence), I'm not sure we can say that DARPAnet was the most important evolutionary milestone in the emergence of the internet. It has been long and steady with several exciting jumps, where DARPAnet is just one.

I'm also wary of being steered too much by the physical models (from vacuum tubes to GPU data centers) and not enough by the founding notions and ideas and songs and treatises.

To me, The Two Sisters -=> Salt Creek -=> Terrapin Station -=> A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace -=> archive.org is a more dispositive lineage than the circuity, especially with regard to the potential for peace that exists in this domain.

[zdragnar]

No... that sounds an awful lot like revisionist history trying to force a utopian ideal where none exists. If anything, the advent of the Internet and social media in particular has made us more tribal, not less.

The majority of the Internet is geared towards feeding the hedonistic treadmill of porn, cat pictures, selling things, influencer chasing, faking happiness on Instagram and trolling political sides on X or Blue sky.

We aren't better people as a result.

[eigencoder]

I don't see how we could remove states and boundaries and warfare. Boundaries aren't bad things, they're a natural consequence of living in a natural world

[mhb]

If you think suicidal fanatics or megalomaniacal dictators are motivated by sub-optimal resource allocation, you haven't been paying attention.