wishing the internet would disappear

Yes, but mostly, I just wish I hadn't had a computer as a kid.

 

I wish I had been better guided and monitored by my introduction to the internet. It's just so darn hard getting lost in it.

 

I'm going to have some time off of school and work soon so I hope to have time to go "Monk Mode". I'm tired of computers as a whole, I just want to enjoy nature, keep my mind clear

 

You can't make that choice for everyone. You can't stuff all that back in Pandora's Box. So what do you do?

You do that. Restrict your own access.

You can rail about what it's doing to society, exacerbating all of the anti-social behaviors we already had, enabling corruption, encouraging consumerism, etm., but you aren't responsible for society. Thank God, because you have no power over society. But you do have power over yourself. You can choose what you do today, and today you can unplug from the Internet.

So what are you going to do? Whine, or do something about it?

 

I get that. It all depends on where in the process you are about expressing your opinion. If it's early in the process, that's fine. If you reason it out, though, and keep talking about something that can't be changed, or talking about something you refuse to change, it transitions from expression to whining.

I don't understand the precautions erasing the Internet, though, that's... There's no universe where that's true. I think if you take precautions, you can mitigate some negative aspects of the Internet, but short of worldwide apocalypse I don't think there's anything that can turn the Internet into a non-thing. Care to elaborate?

 

But... but you can't. I wish the same thing. I wish I had a billion dollars and a pony too.

 

The point being, the printing press was a technological revelation that sent shockwaves through every aspect of life; religious, political, educational, relational. People died. A lot of people died, over the proliferation of the printing press, I don't think modern people understand or appreciate this enough, maybe they don't even know. Maybe they were never told, maybe one of the great ironies of the printing press is that it isn't used to inform people about how significant it was. But now in retrospect, we can see that in aggregate, the printing press was a good thing. We just had to get through the growing pains. As for TV, this was another tech innovation that caused a huge moral panic. You want to go back to the 90's, I was there for the 90's man, they were wringing their hands about TV. I grew up without one, my parents thought it was that bad and we were so weird for doing it, but still people were talking about the corrupting influence, and the dumbing down from kid's cartoons, the mindless nature (before reality TV!), the passive entertainment, the potential TV had for spreading propaganda. They complained about it, just most people didn't have the moral fortitude to do anything about it on a personal level, and of course nobody could stuff that genie back in the bottle. You know the book Fahrenheit 451, that everyone now says is about the 1st Amendment and book burning? Bradbury wrote that as a prophetic warning against television. He wasn't saying the government was going to swoop in and burn all our books out of nowhere, he was saying people are going to ask the government to swoop in and burn their books because they are all going to be pacified by the mindless drug of nonstop entertainment, and educated people are going to become aware of a better possibility and rock the boat. Technological innovation has always made people nervous and regretful, that's @Saspriluh 's point and it's one well made.

On the other hand, @zadxmq 's point is, the press and TV are all well and good, but the Internet is a step above, man, the Internet is its own thing and i have to say, I don't see as eloquent an argument from him but he still has a point. I grew up in an era where porn was printed. My first encounter with it was as a kid, my friends found a magazine in the woods, probably left by some other kid who found it in his dad's drawer and took it out there for some privacy. I grew up in an era where porn was on TV, on VHS. I still don't think I would have gotten addicted like I have, because those means took way more effort. There were lines you had to cross. With Internet, unlimited porn is available on impulse. I got started by searching underwear ads on JC Penny dot com and glam pics of Heidi Klum on ebay.

But I'll reiterate my point. "I wish the Internet didn't happen" might be a true sentiment, but it's not useful. We can commiserate about it, or any of the other tech innovations, and we can argue back and forth about the merits and the problems, but it's not going to happen. So can we turn this into actionable intel? What are we going to do about it? For ourselves?

I say, if it's getting to you, unplug. Don't stop at complaining about how it's making your life worse. Put the phone away. Put the computer down. Touch grass.