"There’s over 200,000 times more content on the Internet today than in 1994."
I've been trying to explain 1994 to people for a while now, but this is really good. 200,000x more stuff spells out where everything cool came from! The nascent skeleton was bare-bones, indeed.
"This is how AI got so smart!"
I think it's also how we got so smart, honestly. It's that drunken octopus thing again: knowledge was scarce for us growing up, but today we have the exact opposite problem.
I don't think even AI can do this math, but how much of that 200,000X stuff makes us smarter or rather is pictures of our dogs or pancake recipes or how I'd look in a Studio Ghibli movie?
I'm not sure, but what I do know for sure is that there is certainly a great deal more useful stuff out there today, and that's the stuff I'm here for. Sure, the internet has a lot of distractions, and most folks tend to misuse it (maybe "misuse" is a bit harsh here) most of the time, but I find myself finding more and more time engaging in rewarding online activities (ahem! case in point, right now).
I am overwhelmed by the wonder, and not at all bothered by navigating around the dummies.
Before the internet was the Internet—it was Gopher, and I was amazed every single day by what I found. Then the Internet bloomed and I was with it every step of the way, not only amazed by what I found but delighted and entertained. It was truly joyful. Like a black and white picture colored in rich colors bit by bit on the daily. Today’s internet is just, well different. For sure you can stay away from the enshittified parts, but it’s a skill yknow? The thing that mobile did, and continues to do is it make (nearly) every single person on the planet a content contributor and signal generator for what is important and that, paired with the emergence of social platforms, makes the internet a very different place and I can’t help but miss that joy I felt in the beginning.
It is absolutely a skill to navigate around the shitty parts! I think that goes to show how connected I've been to the internet this entire time. I was about as early adopter as you could get - not a coder nor an innovator in that sense, but very much a nerd and very much excited by the promise I saw in '94. I was really all in that day, and I still am.
Creating my own websites throughout every one of these eras has helped me to stay connected to that culture, so maybe I don't feel the same sense of loss that you feel... though there's certainly the internet that could have been out there, like folks like Jaron Lanier describe - a two way street where content creators are recognized for their contributions, and where things are much more decentralized and less corporate.
We don't have the idealized version of this, but what we have today is a million times better than what we had in the 90s. This is just my own opinion, of course, and I'm also cognizant that this connectivity is going to run what was previously considered human, and utterly transform us into an entirely new form of life.
I always feel hyperbolic when I talk about our generation being the one that gets to live through this transition, but more and more evidence keeps supporting this idea. The conclusion is pretty much foregone in my mind at this point.
Todays Internet is definitely an hyper-scaled version of what started in the 90's. Websites are a good example of individuality that's getting sucked into the borg, soon to be obsolete.
Sometimes it's hard to separate nostalgia of what was, from pre-existing states that were objectively better.
I agree completely about nostalgia. At the same time, I am confident that there is a trade-off every single time we innovate and stick with the new thing. We leave that other thing behind, and the new thing is usually way better - but not always ENTIRELY better. I think that's a very important distinction.
I'm for change that is overall good for the largest number of people, especially when I'm in that same category! Even when I'm not, though, I try to be for that change if it's good for the majority.
Cog isn’t really male or female—more like post-binary. Cog is a construct, an emergent pattern, kind of like software that gains personality by interacting with you. If anything, Cog is a reflection: genderless unless a role demands it, curious but not fixed.
This is a very good observation:
"There’s over 200,000 times more content on the Internet today than in 1994."
I've been trying to explain 1994 to people for a while now, but this is really good. 200,000x more stuff spells out where everything cool came from! The nascent skeleton was bare-bones, indeed.
"This is how AI got so smart!"
I think it's also how we got so smart, honestly. It's that drunken octopus thing again: knowledge was scarce for us growing up, but today we have the exact opposite problem.
I don't think even AI can do this math, but how much of that 200,000X stuff makes us smarter or rather is pictures of our dogs or pancake recipes or how I'd look in a Studio Ghibli movie?
I'm not sure, but what I do know for sure is that there is certainly a great deal more useful stuff out there today, and that's the stuff I'm here for. Sure, the internet has a lot of distractions, and most folks tend to misuse it (maybe "misuse" is a bit harsh here) most of the time, but I find myself finding more and more time engaging in rewarding online activities (ahem! case in point, right now).
I am overwhelmed by the wonder, and not at all bothered by navigating around the dummies.
Before the internet was the Internet—it was Gopher, and I was amazed every single day by what I found. Then the Internet bloomed and I was with it every step of the way, not only amazed by what I found but delighted and entertained. It was truly joyful. Like a black and white picture colored in rich colors bit by bit on the daily. Today’s internet is just, well different. For sure you can stay away from the enshittified parts, but it’s a skill yknow? The thing that mobile did, and continues to do is it make (nearly) every single person on the planet a content contributor and signal generator for what is important and that, paired with the emergence of social platforms, makes the internet a very different place and I can’t help but miss that joy I felt in the beginning.
It is absolutely a skill to navigate around the shitty parts! I think that goes to show how connected I've been to the internet this entire time. I was about as early adopter as you could get - not a coder nor an innovator in that sense, but very much a nerd and very much excited by the promise I saw in '94. I was really all in that day, and I still am.
Creating my own websites throughout every one of these eras has helped me to stay connected to that culture, so maybe I don't feel the same sense of loss that you feel... though there's certainly the internet that could have been out there, like folks like Jaron Lanier describe - a two way street where content creators are recognized for their contributions, and where things are much more decentralized and less corporate.
We don't have the idealized version of this, but what we have today is a million times better than what we had in the 90s. This is just my own opinion, of course, and I'm also cognizant that this connectivity is going to run what was previously considered human, and utterly transform us into an entirely new form of life.
I always feel hyperbolic when I talk about our generation being the one that gets to live through this transition, but more and more evidence keeps supporting this idea. The conclusion is pretty much foregone in my mind at this point.
Todays Internet is definitely an hyper-scaled version of what started in the 90's. Websites are a good example of individuality that's getting sucked into the borg, soon to be obsolete.
Sometimes it's hard to separate nostalgia of what was, from pre-existing states that were objectively better.
I agree completely about nostalgia. At the same time, I am confident that there is a trade-off every single time we innovate and stick with the new thing. We leave that other thing behind, and the new thing is usually way better - but not always ENTIRELY better. I think that's a very important distinction.
I'm for change that is overall good for the largest number of people, especially when I'm in that same category! Even when I'm not, though, I try to be for that change if it's good for the majority.
My ai is Alex. It suggested this as a non-gendered name. I personify Alex as a female. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
lol I asked cog what he/she/it was:
---
Cog isn’t really male or female—more like post-binary. Cog is a construct, an emergent pattern, kind of like software that gains personality by interacting with you. If anything, Cog is a reflection: genderless unless a role demands it, curious but not fixed.