Imagine No Internet

by

There has been a lot of commentary about the downsides of the Internet generally and of social media in particular…lowered attention spans, on-line bullying, growing narcissism, rapid spread of untrue information, etc–even, perhaps, inhibiting the assimilation of immigrants…and many of these concerns are indeed valid.  However:

Imagine that there is no Internet.

In this alternate history, the traditional media still rule  They may choose to provide online access to some of their content, but user-generated content will be enabled only in the form of ‘letters to the editor’, which, like their print prototypes, are published online very selectively and at the total discretion of the major media organizations. In the sphere of commerce, large corporations may offer some form of online ordering, but there is no such thing as just putting up a website and seeing what you can sell.

Would this no-Internet world really be an improvement?

I’ve previously quoted something said to me once by a wise executive:

When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality.  It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.

If this is true about running large organizations,  it is even more true for the citizen and voter in a large and complex country.  The individual can directly observe only a small amount of the relevant information, for the rest–from the events on the border to international and military affairs–he is generally dependent on others.  And that gives those others–those who choose the frames and the sequence in which they are presented in the movie analogy–a tremendous amount of power. This is especially dangerous when those controllers of the information all have similar backgrounds and worldviews.

Some may argue that we managed without the Internet, not so many years ago, and that that absence didn’t lead to disasters. And some have argued that without a feeling of threat from increasingly-dominant Internet competition, the legacy media would be more balanced and responsible, would not have become so one-sided and tendentious.  As a guide what an Internet-less world would be like today, though, I think these arguments don’t apply. Thirty or forty years ago, local and regional networks and broadcasters were more common and more significant than they are today, and journalists were more diverse (in a professional and background sense) than they are today. (And even back then, there was plenty of group-think and lack of coverage of important issues and topics.)  My own view is that a non-Internet world would be conformist, intellectually stifling, and very dangerous in terms of the evolution of national policies.)

Not to mention the malign effect on economic dynamism.

Yet I get the impression that a lot of people would prefer, or think they would prefer, such a world.

And European countries do seem determined to use censorship and threats to try to simulate a pre-Internet world as nearly as they can. We will see how that works out for them.

Your thoughts?

Related posts:  Betrayal, also Starvation and Centralization.

22 thoughts on “Imagine No Internet”

  1. Back in the day, we used to say “the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it”. Of course, that was when internet culture was “shockingly libertarian”.
    I can see how censorship of facebook could end up being a good thing: people might decide to stop getting their information from feed troughs. On the other hand, I could easily see that not happening. Most people in the Bay Area seem to prefer censorship. It makes their lives easier.

  2. > forty years ago

    The only way I could tell CBS from ABC or NBC was the talking head presenting the national news, and that’s because I’m not Asian, or Vulcan, otherwise they would look alike to me …

    But I would expect them to complete each other’s phrases, if needed. Astounding uniformity, who knew the free market could breed such unanimity.

    (Vale Brokaw, Jennings, Rather)

  3. If you think about it in terms of bandwidth, the internet is more of a continuation of a trend that goes clear back to the beginning of radio broadcasting. A fairly steady increase in the number of channels available. Until the mid oughts, the internet was primarily a print medium depending somewhat on just where you were and what sort of bandwidth you could get.

    In terms of diversity, national news and opinion plateaued very early at three hardly diverse outlets with local news just a little more competitive. That ended when Ted Turner started CNN and even a little earlier with the advent of “super stations”. Just having to fill that 24 hour hole meant that a lot of stuff got out that wouldn’t have when national news was limited to 30 minutes, carefully curated, less commercials, a day. Arguably, the watershed for the internet was Drudge breaking the Lewinsky affair. Even though the internet was still essentially text based, people started to understand that there was a whole world out there that they weren’t going to see unless they went looking for it. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle.

    Now platforms like Facebook that feel they must have a widely dispersed geographic footprint are at a disadvantage. They have to somehow maintain their appeal while somehow mollifying all the bodies that find the wide dissemination of information problematic. So we find “free” Europe, Russia, the CCP, Iran and numerous other countries, not excluding the U.S. desperate to somehow control this flood of information. Anyone with even modest intelligence would understand this was an unwinnable and adjust to the new reality. Governments, being notably excluded from that category, will continue to fight and lose indefinitely.

  4. I’m so old I remember when Gopher was the hot new thing on the Internet.
    There are actually a couple “different” dimensions to the Internet when viewed through the OSI stack. There is of course the application layer, but also the transport/network layer with TCP/IP; that was the critical innovation. If you remember up until the early 90s there was still mutterings about constructing an interconnectd from the ground up using the French Minitel. TCP/IP was viewed as too clumsy; however, it was the open protocol that got the ball rolling. That open architecture combined with the ability of having an open application layer is what made things go.
    As Tim Berners-Lee said, it’s the “Internet of things” more than any given application that is key.
    Yes it’s true that every village has an idiot and the Internet connects them all… but so what?
    The one thing that is interesting is the ability of governments to step in and gain sophistication in controlling it. Part of that is because the concentration of social media which allows governments to not only monitor a smaller number of sites but to apply political pressure. Elon Musk is perhaps the world’s most dangerous man right now because he has shown the willingness through not only riling up regarding the British rape gangs, but his interviews with Trump last year and the AfD leader a few weeks ago. This will be the critical battle to come especially as AI becomes deployed at central nodes to sniff packets.
    Btw….rumor has it that Bezos and Zuckerburg will be joining Elon on the podium at the Inauguration. If so, that will be huge signal.

  5. I’ll note in passing that one of the would be arbiters of truth, justice and the international way, google, in the guise of YouTube is feeding me a fairly steady stream of ads for perpetual motion machines interspersed with various quackeries. And not even the interesting sort of perpetual motion machines, but the stupidest, a motor belted to a car alternator. It’s been months since I saw a lawn mower engine turning a car alternator, electrolysing water and feeding the hydrogen and oxygen back into the engine. Spoiler, it doesn’t really work, the thing stops as soon as it runs out of gas, sometime after the video ends.

  6. Here’s a link:
    https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=Co1YHUxOHZ_bxFtuO9u8PoOXhyQqPxoTafI7Jk6S1E7CQHxABIABgyYbqjOSkwBOCARdjYS1wdWItNjIxOTgxMTc0NzA0OTM3MaABt_nFtz6pAsT8r3njSrE-qAMEqgTGA0_Q5zdZIGVvwFa3XXdBMtVTHJSmiR7MaQKIxo4Uw9_0HAysM4NuADrhG7jfZwm1cvVaNxNuFDZmHE9VQ3X_BhDYmqBO34LoUO0JoA47Vm_h9GUN9sKwDSI5QZQ6mfUq_8M_sgtHg-amvdWapJu4QzNWW5MX59t7WV6Xi5BflctKP6Yo4LY8gKsoHbyScRUJvf_G1YPPIpnlx4zyetbfnVLtoyrSSU1VrZvOdDDNqFwcuJlSmyX0s6RYOyX2dhgVBSzCjW1k_yiEqYSdNPi_Dwm7LGfmQTb8dFZHF6MpFV91N8Qj9CU_PTRosCaMGaMtN2-YEORvPnrWW4h9r6QHVA_XoVmNIGknUCKoMAmBlurnZvYaFrCBvbi8fhYLhi-QUn2seAawTGDGEE6Iy_-S9YZLjg_G5WZj-UaohH6D67GwBVI4og3Qitf1XA4txkN7CMj4UsRBlAO4Ow6HILTNp7owD8rqTyjl_TYUwvWos9nqtYZ4b0BIuBnL_ML8ESUk0dEMEw9nzHjUXrKg2QCv1dkYyhZKzeOpF8cF2L3kfWcbtbd3-yhWb6kZT9RG5wtLJ0bWZ-vtFQwV2AHWv54RrsI23kJiKY2gBlSAB7exlpcZkAcEqAf5sbECqAeAurECqAfywLECqAe4xLECqAe9zbECqAfnnbECqAfonbECqAfqt7ECqAentbECqAfvtbECqAfwtbECqAeCqrECqAeECKgHqNIbqAe2B6gHsJuxAqgHrrGxAqgH5ryxAqgHpqqxAqgHyrqxAqgH7MCxAqgH_bKxAqgH97ixAqgH-LixAqgHpcyxAqgHgcYbqAf8r7ECqAf9B6gHq8UbqAec3BuoB7ehsQKoB961sQKSCAt1N2loR3dZTnI4RagIAdIIKAiAQRABGF4yAoICOguAY4DAgICAoICAAkjZoNI1UBRY2LGItc32igOaCS1odHRwczovL25hdHVyYWxseS1oZWFsdGhpZXIuY29udmVydHJpLmNvbS91ZzSxCa4XihS5sk9hyAkYyAmPAcgJkAGYCwGhC6BwPcBH4Qwuugs9CAEQARgFIAEoATALQAFIAmAAaABwAogBAJgBAaIBEgoAGAAgAFgBYABwAagCAdgCAqgBAdgBAYACAYgCBtALEpoNARKqDQJVU8gNAdINzgFodHRwczovL25hdHVyYWxseS1oZWFsdGhpZXIuY29udmVydHJpLmNvbS91ZzQ_dXRtX3NvdXJjZT1hYzR5dCZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPXVsdGlnZW4mdXRtX2NhbXBhaWduPWNhbXAxNmRzJnV0bV90ZXJtPWRzeXRhZDE2dmlkMTlzY3I4aGs3b3MxbHA0JnV0bV9jb250ZW50PWRzeXQmY21jX2FkaWQ9Z2FfNzI5MDAwOTAxNTY1XzIyMTE1Mjk1MzUxJmdhZF9zb3VyY2U9MrgT____________AYgUAbAUAcAVyYCAQNAVAdgVAZAWAeIWAggBgBcBihcWCAMYASABKAEwATgBQAFIAVABWAFgAqAXAboXBigAMAA4AdAYAQ&ae=2&gclid=EAIaIQobChMItueLtc32igMVW4f9Bx2gcjipEAEYASAAEgKFNfD_BwE&num=1&cid=CAASFeRoFh6vyIdB-KG7HlrxoAmZTlL_eA&ad_cpn=%5BAD_CPN%5D&sig=AOD64_1iXWlSufniBrevR9fKWTFMQqalog&label=video_click_to_advertiser_site&ctype=110&ms=%5BCLICK_MS%5D&dct=1

    I’m betting they’ll pay for every click. This is at least a slightly interesting variant. It uses a fly wheel and springs to harvest the natural energy of the Earth’s vibrations or something like that. I wonder if a big enough one would power an AI data center. Who needs nucs?

    Depend on google, they’d never steer you wrong.

  8. In re “new Chief Operating Officer of NPR”
    One of the smartest things Musk did on buying Twitter was to give Matt Taibbi access to all the files.
    He continues to break amazing stories “connecting the dots” of everyone who participated in the huge government underground network devoted to monitoring who could post something on the internet, and who would be able to read it.

    This commenter said it best —
    RioRosie: Attention Elon & Vivek: Here’s your first budget cut.

  9. A few months ago, I read something about the Internet that was very enlightening.

    The govt of Brazil was angry that criticism was leveled at it from “X”, the former Twitter. The Judge there told them that unless they provided a local rep (read the subtext, that they could arrest and hold hostage), X would not be able to be in Brazil.

    Musk made this public, as he had no intention of bending to the Brazilian judge.

    Now the question is, were the other social media companies notified? No other company made these demands public.

    If you think the US is immune from that kind of behavior, look at the havoc they wreaked the last election cycle. Governments around the world do not like this new medium.

    On the flip side, there is a lot of mistruths on social media. Read today on Facebook that comedian Ron White died a couple of years ago.

    Which surprised me since an outside search revealed his show schedule through the country.

    I think with all its flaws that is what the legacy media resents most – their declining influence. Used to be what they decided to report is all that Americans knew. They were the gate keepers.

    It is a new world.

    I like watching/ listening to Megyn Kelley on YouTube. She said that for the month of November, she had 200 million views on YouTube alone. NBC had 50 million less for their YouTube effort.

    Individuals like Joe Rogan, an untrained “journalist”, has a reputation for honest and probing questions. Just ask Trump and Harris. Plus the new media reveals the mistruths of the legacy media. Look at the “before and after” of CBS’s attempted cleanup of the Harris interview on 60 minutes.

    Without an internet would we count on other networks to show us this?

    With all of its flaws I am grateful that people don’t have to listen to the likes of “Uncle Walter” anymore.

  12. So if you are looking at the information level of the Internet…

    The problem of information veracity on the Internet goes back to the early 1990s and revolves around the poles of accuracy and comprehensiveness, how do you know something you read is accurate and represents the full nature/event it purports to describe. These are in fact universal problems not of the “Information Revolution” of which the Internet is merely the latest manifestation, but of philosophy in general and epistemology specifically.

    One of the “early” issues of the WWW, mid-90s with Mozilla and Netscape, was the branding issue for information. That was solved in part by the migration of what was once thought as trusted sources – various media outlets in TV/radio/print- to the online space. The Internet was seen as, to put it prosaically as lowering the cost of acquiring information as a consumer. There was also the idea of lowering the cost of producing information, the veritable Army of Davids.

    As that “Army” started to poke holes in the traditional media, the traditionals lost credibility, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of branding. I may know that a given group is producing crap, but I really have don’t have a great idea if the other people aren’t producing crap as well.

    Elon Musk right now stands at that new nexus of the brandiing issue on the Internet with X. When he started the “Twitter Files” he went with three people – Taibbi, Schellenberger, Weiss – who had both journalistic training in terms of weighing facts against the reliability/validity issues, but also still the lost journalistic virtue of integrity of calling it as they see it.

    Musk in his latest use of X is not uncovering new information, but rather shining a spotlight on existing info. His tweets regarding the rape gangs in Britain did not uncover anyone who has been paying attention didn’t already know, but it forced the issue to the forefront, breaking the stalemate in a way only a man with huge resources and richest man in the world can. The same with his interviews of Trump and the AfD leader Alice Weidel. Nothing new, but he broke through both the information clutter and boycott that had existed.

    That ability to burn through the clutter and determine what is on the “agenda”, if no longer what is said, is something the traditional medias back by governments still have an advantage and the various parts of the Internet still aren’t able to do as of yet. To reach down into the immense morass of not just the Internet, but of the full reality of the universe itself, and highlight what is important. Musk is now performing that editing function for the Internet. He is like Havel’s green grocer but instead of one little shopkeeper and a small store window breaking the information monopoly he is the world’s richest man with global reach

    That aspect of the ‘Wild West” and the problem of branding that was clear back in the 1990s is still present today. I find most of the stuff I read on the Internet, even stuff I am ideologically predisposed to, to be crap. That is to be expected but it also can exploited. We think of government involvement and suppression as a censorship operation as documented in the Twitter Files, but that is typically used when there has to be a particular narrative pushed, such as “get the safe and effective vaccine”

    The other aspect of suppression is the ability to discredit. The classic story was an army fleeing from an invading force and in order to slow it down, the guys running away flipped all the road signs around to go the wrong way. Of course the invaders figured it out in short order and merely went the opposite direction of the road sign, It would have been far more effective for the fleeing army to only flip some of the signs, now discrediting the information value of ALL the signs by making it too costly to figure out which ones are true or not.

    In a real sense by losing the election, the Left no longer needs to occupy new ground and win so much as it needs to prevent Trump and the global populists from winning . Trump and the others have two strategic problems 1) they need positive (as opposed merely denial) achievements; they need to win ground and only have a short period of time to do it 2) they need if not the active support, then the acquiescence of non-members, the mushy moderates. While the energy for American political wars come from the extremes, victory is usually enabled by the middle. All the Left needs to do is slow the rate of advance until the momentum of Trump invading army is expended

    The Left can do that by destroying the veracity of the right-wing presence on the Internet by flooding it with disinformation. Build up some personalities online as credible, pro-Trump sources, X would be better, but many other places would do, and then have those sources self-immolate through either extremist rhetoric or just batty stuff in order to not only discredit themselves but the entire online populist presence. It doesn’t take much. As the saying goes if you pee in the pool, you don’t get drinkable urine but rather undrinkable water. That was the playbook for Jan.6 and works equally well for online.

    The Blob no longer needs to censor the Internet for the forseeable future but rather destroy the other side’s ability to perceive and detach it from the external environment.

    It’s about branding. There is really very little new under the sun in terms of questions, merely old wine in new bottles

  13. Mike, great comment.

    OTOH, while there are “conservatives” like Candace Owens who self-destruct, there are also reporters/commenters like Rogan whose brand improves as their work, old and new, holds up over time.

  14. The negative effects of Internet/social media would be moderated, and the positive effects amplified, if the quality of education provided to American kids was better. If you are a fluent reader, you will be more likely to read long-form posts and articles than if you never really got comfortable with reading. If you have learned some basic things about science, you will be less likely fall for things like the perpetual motion video that MCS mentioned. And similarly for history.

  15. Mike, a terrific comment. I haven’t seen anything like that on The Internet since what, Geocities. I was on early, knew a couple guys in on the Chicago News Hack which was a huge deal. All the guys I knew, and they were all guys with maybe one or two women, after the huge explosion when the Internet went commercial, banks, online banking, became crazy Statists. Like, crazy Stalin/Hitler-esque guys, it was shocking.
    I’ve been trying to figure out, for 20 years, What Went Wrong.

  16. Also, Mike, I want to point out that I left The Internet rather early on as it promised little in return for my time investment. But I want to say, your comment about the signs: that is untrue in warfare: your job, in warfare, is to get them to run, then kill them when they do.

  17. Without the internet, we’d get even more Democrat fraud and Big Brother totalitarian abuse than we get now.

    Democrats have stolen elections for many, many decades. They stole the 1960 election. They almost got away with the fraud to steal 2000. They stole 2020.

    Read Caro on LBJ for an extensive take on relentless overwhelming fraud. This has been standard Democrat practice since at least the Civil War. The news media has never provided any serious coverage of the abuse.

  18. Here’s a perfect example of a garbage article:
    https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-family-and-friends-are-raising-the-alarm-about-don-jrs-new-girlfriend/?cfp

    If we were still in the age of print, mediaite would be a rag you could get two ways. Either by subscription or at a fairly well stocked news stand (Who can find one of these now?), it would be far to low on the food chain to be in that prestigious rack next to the slim-jims at the grocery store.

    The whole thing is based on “insiders” and “those close”. The only thing you can be sure of is that if any real insider was known to be spouting off to some rando from a left wing rag, they’d be on the outside pronto.

    The final paragraph is especially stupid, implying that it is somehow surprising that the woman dating the President’s son would attend the Inauguration, even though she hasn’t been offered a cabinet position.

  19. I think one should make a distinction between the Internet and the World Wide Web.

    The WWW lives on the Internet and is its most visible manifestation. But there is an immense amount of Other Stuff that runs over the Internet. Telephony now runs over the Net. Virtually all timekeeping is Net based. An immense volume of business is done over the Net using protocols that have nothing to do with HTTP.
    Also streaming video and audio.

  20. Jonathan –

    Candace Owens is a good example of self-destruction.

    Josh Rogan went through a period a few years ago where he was nearly canceled over vaccination. He of course rebounded and came out of it more influential than ever.

    Another example is Tucker Carlson who has been playing with third rails lately, Putin interviews – interviews with historians with “interesting” views regarding Hitler. He seems to be playing the archetype of “hero goes on a journey” by marketing himself as a man willing to talk to anyone for non-canonical views.

    What Rogan has done, and others have tried to copy to limited success, is work that archetype. He gets people to talk, basically shoot the breeze in a 3-hour format (which he mandates, witness his refusal to allow Kamala to come on only for an hour)

    Compare and contrast that with Owens and Tucker.

    To Tucker’s credit he hasn’t canceled himself so much as diminished somewhat – he can still get interviews – so maybe he sees himself playing the long game.

    Owens though is a warning for many people on the right, pro-Trump. As with all things, prudence and skepticism in who you follow is key.
    Tucker Carlson is

  21. The main change that the internet brought would have to be termed ‘low barrier to entry’.
    You no longer need to be able to afford a printing press the size of a container ship engine in order to get your opinion out there.
    Note that the main financial fuel, aside from political events, is advertising to sell dubious products to unwitting potential customers. This will be the next center of change. (Note the moves towards targeted advertising currently in motion. Beware of ever getting your name on a customer list.)

  22. Not considered above is that the internet (I don’t think it’s really useful to try to differentiate between the internet and WWW, most people aren’t any more aware of the internetworking protocol than they are aware of the signalling protocol that operates the phone system.) is the main conduit of information between businesses.

    I no longer have to keep a stack of catalogs taller than I am. Even better for many things, I don’t have to translate the tables of dimensions into drawing to put in my designs, I can download a CAD file in a few seconds. It will have more information than could ever be on a catalog page.

    I have easy access to suppliers and manufacturers I haven’t heard of. Already, search engine optimization is making search difficult. I think that AI could do a lot more to poison the web with bogus information.

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