I thought about this multiple times, I’ve went digital minimalist and it partially is better, you just unlock so much space and mind relax once you are a few days without an internet connection. But I think that’s not enough. And the internet today is shit, like every communication media, if it isn’t permeated by enough novelty it starts being in control of the few and it starts entering game powers and becoming shit. Think of printed press, radio, TV: all great inventions but they all eventually just lost their original empowering and sharing purpose and became redundant stuff, getting worse and worse, more and more controlled, less and less free and reachable.

And this is happening to the internet as well, it’s not a novelty, it’s just that we’ve grown up with it, and as the tool is new its way of getting out of reach is new as well, and there aren’t worthy alternatives yet, at least not so used that you can even build very effective communities / new medias of communication on. It’s not even internet fault, it’s human fault. We love power games and control so much that we end up using our tools to destroy ourselves instead of empowering ourselves, that’s not a technological problem, that’s a cultural one. We are stressed animals, we’ve been like that for centuries.

I am also very very very, and I mean very tired. Every business wants to enter social medias, and every person who joins social medias ends up becoming the same: they want more, more followers, more attention, more posts. People are starting to lose actual human contact and interactions, even sex is starting to be more about a screen than body on body.

We have AMAZING tools. Internet is amazing, AI is amazing. We could solve so much of the world’s problems if we used them the right way, but we didn’t. We like becoming stale, we like to avoid novelty, to avoid connection, we are sick and stressed. We simply focus on the wrong things. All the time.

I mean think how software just progresses better if it’s open source, think about Linux, it’s just an open, novelty seeking OS. Even Linux Torvalds said that every kind of locking development with licenses, every kind, even GNU licenses that made illegal to close source the code, was detrimental to the development, he was an advisor of completely open licenses as MIT. And that’s because he loved what he was doing, and loved that the code was completely accessible and most companies originally were selling support, not their code.

Proprietary platforms mask the same ways to profit on you as novelty accessibility. They lock down their code and they make it stale, the problem is not even they wanna profit from it, it’s they wanna subtly profit on you without you being completely aware on what they are doing (whether we can still debate if money is a good way to exchange value between people). It’s they wanna play tricks on you. It’s okay if you sell a platform to someone for a service in exchange, it’s not okay to strongly push people on it, locking their machines down, closing down hardware and software on a single platform, influencing the politics, people’s view of reality, actively destroying alternatives, for selling your product.

They all knew what they were doing, but they saw the profits and started to ignore everything else.

Power makes people sick, power is our problem, the concept of power is something typical of a carnivorous animal when it predates other animals, or in hierarchical structures all deriving from the stress of the animal about not being able to satisfy its needs. And being so aggressive towards our own species to the point of creating institutions made specifically for that purpose is something that can arise just from a highly stressed species. We ignored the existing networks in nature and ignored that real harmony can be found in relationships that are more similar to symbiosis, not to predation. We are definitely capable of satisfying our basic needs as a collective species thanks to all our technologies, but we did never seek for balance, we seek for power. Instead of accepting death and pain we started to reject them, and in that process we created way worse pain and more death, and we became blind to beauty. Sometimes somehow we seem to realize it and create better situations, but history teaches that we always come back, it’s a cycle.

I don’t even think this can be solved by human beings unless we somehow change our brains, the alternative is some sort of external entity interacting with us, something that can be incredibly fast and distributed. Otherwise, with the help of our beloved technology, we’ve happily became so powerful that we can destroy ourselves.