Well, that didn't happen. What happened instead is that the ongoing discussions seem to stir up even more disagreement; and people are not really talking to each other, they rather signal their belonging to this or that faction. Also, the internet has been weaponised: leaving aside the organised "troll factories", any group that feels strongly about something can try to impose it to everyone else just by occupying as much space as possible. And then, if others express publicly their own ideas, don't you want your idea to be represented too? Then it becomes a shouting match, where each faction tries to fill as much public space as possible by shouting at the top of its lungs.

Part of this is the traditional media's fault. We thought newspapers and tv networks were going to die, drowned in the huge amount of available information sources. Instead, the web is still hierarchical: few media outlets shape the conversation deciding what to report on and how, then everyone else has the choice of closing ranks around the proposed narrative or in opposition to it. The dream of global peer-to-peer conversations didn't really come to be.

We all thought, like the author, that access to the Internet will put people in connection who otherwise don't hear from each other, that we will be exposed to new views, be more open-minded, etc. And the opposite has happened. We forgot that the traditional barriers to intercultural understanding are still there: language, tribal sentiment, political and economic power structures, etc. At the end of the day, in a democracy the majority can do anything it wants, even if what it wants is to punish the minority. The Internet has had all the failings of a total democracy in that sense.

I also love the point the author makes at the end. Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a bastion of rationality. But like every group and every ideological movement and every person, it has a set of core beliefs taken on faith and not on evidence. It's very possible that the core beliefs and faith on which the Internet as a radically open, radically free, nearly anarchic space was founded, are...wrong...

I feel cheated.

The new Internet was like a telephone and could connect anybody to anybody.

This 'peer-to-peer' idea was good thing. It felt exciting and democratic. It remains a fantastic leap for humanity, worth defending to the death.

However, for some - a possibility once becomes a necessity unto the limit - that is to say the idea that;

"occasionally anyone could talk to anyone"

silently transformed into the idea that

"everyone should talk to everyone all the time"

whereas in fact

"most people don't want to talk to most people most of the time".

That is a problem at the intersection of people, technology and culture. As the earliest culture-shock pundits predicted, we still haven't really worked out what we want to use this technology for.

It would be best not to optimise too early, to leave our options open and not let any one model dominate development - which is the theme of resilience through diversity in the OP.

Nothing this guy is saying seems implausible, but I'll believe it when I see it.

It reminded me very much of how I first experienced the net in 1995: I was too amazed at talking to some random person from across the world to bother with petty arguments about politics or religion.

Now, novelty has worn off and, perhaps more importantly, for some people it's never been new - they weren't around to consciously and with great curiosity try it out for the first time. Add to this the factor of prevalence, the scale that brings and how centralized things have become.

I used to hang out on different special interest forums and IRC channels and I have to say there was as much drama, cliques, in-fighting and groupthink there as it is now. It was just smaller and more self-contained.

With today's massive community tools like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, where there are no clear boundaries between factions or groups of interest, it's just a free-for-all: there's always someone willing to argue about something, and they're all on the same platform, which they have access to all the time, as opposed to having to deal with the diplomacy of dial-up and a shared family phone line.

If tech is to blame, it is only because it's too cheap and ubiquitous: The Great Invention that was supposed to bring us together finally has, and it turns out that we just fucking love to argue.

The apart-ness that some original netizens imagined for themselves was always fantasy and, I would argue, destructive fantasy when it crossed over to belief in personal elitism. Is being online to the exclusion of real world relationships with those physically adjacent to us building a new, better culture, or the digital equivalent of hiding out in the woods?

In that sense, an open and universal internet is an anomaly. It was a great thought experiment by hippie technophiles, and "connecting the world" is a commonly parroted platitude by social media executives, but humans are far from ready to interact with millions of strangers from their own country, let alone from around the world.

If anything, all this technology that was supposed to bring us together, has instead driven us further apart. The internet is our main source of information, yet it's been corrupted by advertising, corporations and governments to spread disinformation and propaganda on an unprecedented scale, and influence the masses towards their own agenda.

We're still in the early stages of the technological revolution, but it's clear that a universal communication medium cannot exist yet. We're not ready for it. China and Russia already have isolated alternatives, and it's only a matter of time before other countries or coalitions follow suit. In any case, we can safely assume that all of it will be heavily censored and controlled by each government. Cryptography will exist in some form, but there will be backdoors for any government to exploit as needed.

Is this too pessimistic? :) I'd really like to be wrong about all this, but I can't picture a scenario where billions of us happily sing kumbaya together around a virtual campfire.

Racism and hate did not go away. People were much less capable of organizing it and normalizing it's behavior before the internet. You actually had to go vast distances to get people together before. Now, it's a facebook group or 'conservative social media' platform away.

With the dawn of anonymity began the demonstration of human nature when it does not receive local social pressures. A completely new and unique prototype of communications that bypass our evolutionary social ques.

Without identity, pressure from peers, and authority, humans are left with the freedom to choose any way they want to conduct themselves.

Sadly, humans chose to conduct themselves poorly. A result a 2nd grader could also predict. Instead of caring about the truth they care about superiority. Instead of honesty they care about being on a team.

We can censor people. Governments can absolutely create a great firewall where only approved businesses are licensed and given access by ISP's to receive incoming socket connection requests. ISP's prevent this all the time due to multi layer NAT. ISP's can lock down ports and prevent two subscribers from communicating without a server that is explicitly allowed on their IP range to do so.

Certainly, we could. But anonymity has benefits. People can discuss important matters without that social threat. People cannot seek a recourse when they are offended, cannot censor information, etc.

Ghost in the Shell had a very interesting scenario in which people would VR dive into a group chat to discuss controversial events - and it all went mostly professional and fact seeking. This prediction is so far away from what we actually have now - actual fabrication of facts and cults that surround them. People entirely uninterested in reasoning or being reasoned with. Just a room full of people reinforcing each other without any basis in fact.

Also the author disagreeing "hate crimes" being a thing: the reason for hate crimes is that individuals would organize to intimidate the lives of others that belong to specific ethnic groups. People have a right to be free from that, and it's absolutely the purpose of government to uphold that right. Organized crime has always received special laws targeting it to deter it.

A short read on news stories or youtube videos reminds me of that. I'm nearly always disappointed. I'm one of those techno utopians. I had great hope for the internet 20 years ago. You know, folks broadening their minds, learning things, not being so racist, finding similarities between places, and so on. And while they have, to an extent, I'm still sorely disappointed.

Even on HN, I was doing fine until I started commenting on political posts. My account started getting restricted when I stated the idea that Tor and similar software being used to undermine foreign governments and the works of many tech companies in this area is wrong, that democracy works for us but the "manifest destiny" approach of forcing democracy on others amounted to neo-colonialism.

If my views are wrong and unpopular, the downvote/karma system takes care of that. What's wrong today is, moderators and algorithms are herding us into tribal camps. People have forgotten how to passionately disagree with others without hating them or excommunicating them. We are being excommunicated from each other for the crime of thinking for ourselves.

One theory I've heard is that the nation state is over, and the Internet killed it. Demos, the shared group of people that makes up a voting democracy and validates democratic choice as a group will, is breaking down. People are starting to identity at global levels by social class, education and political outlook, rather than national identity. People no longer participate in the same national narrative. I think this would have happened eventually if we only had newsgroups and chain emails, it's just happened faster because we have easier to use software.

I don't think some unholy union of state and corporate control of free speech is the answer. If anything, it's a path to civil war, eventually.

Oh boy, are you in for a surprise.

Back in the early 1990s I was convinced that mass adoption of the internet and social media like forums/usenet groups in particular would lead to a renaissance of selfless cooperation, civic involvement, responsive institutions etc. I particularly expected that coupling this with news reporting and allowing people to comment on news about emerging issues would elevate public discourse significantly.

Egalitarian cries of "Internet for everyone!" have devolved into bullshit that ruthless companies looking for more profits have co-opted. Again, it's not like it would have worked out anyway.

This article misses what really happened, and tries to read what happened then through a specific, contemporary political lens — its conclusions are predictable from early on in the article, and roll out just as predicted. Those who whine about gatekeeping are generally seeking to become gatekeepers themselves; this article is not excepted from this rule.

The real problem of the Eternal September is not the noobs; the problem is that the legitimate demands of non-technical people to be able to have online access has led to the removal/deep hiding of the communication tools more technical users were building and expected to be able to use (perhaps we could call it the iOSification of everything). Example One: Google's dumbing-down of search, making it partially useful for casual users, and anti-useful for those who want to be specific, targeted, and deep in their searches. A tiered-level internet (accessible to all, but not built for the LCD) would be far preferable to what we have right now, and would help to build actual communities.