The Internet Is a Net Negative(kennethreitz.org)
kennethreitz.org
The Internet Is a Net Negative
https://kennethreitz.org/essays/2025-12-28-the_internet_is_a_net_negative
16 comments
No, but what if there were excessive toll roads, excessive tracking of your movement to build a profile of you, and excessive amounts of personalised billboards along almost every stretch?
I click back every time I hit a paywall. I almost exclusively visit personal blogs curated by other netizens. I never see any ads. I “stay home” a lot (as in, I tinker on my own networks and “go out” by means of automated services fetching free software without interaction). I pay for my email and search engine so they don’t feed back to ad engines. My use of “the web” only accounts for half of my internet use (where non-geeks don’t know anything else exists). My TV and phones are wired through ad-stripping VPNs.
If you go through all this effort, it’s not a net negative for you. But this is a blip in a vast sea of of what the article describes.
Besides that, I don’t think it’s a net negative.
That’s just gloomy thinking.
We have enslaved our attention and caused all sorts of antisocial behaviour. But we have also opened the world to everyone. I’m not convinced we fully understand the implications of “context collapse” as it leads to AI singularity (as in, all models train on one data set that feeds itself with very little variation).
I click back every time I hit a paywall. I almost exclusively visit personal blogs curated by other netizens. I never see any ads. I “stay home” a lot (as in, I tinker on my own networks and “go out” by means of automated services fetching free software without interaction). I pay for my email and search engine so they don’t feed back to ad engines. My use of “the web” only accounts for half of my internet use (where non-geeks don’t know anything else exists). My TV and phones are wired through ad-stripping VPNs.
If you go through all this effort, it’s not a net negative for you. But this is a blip in a vast sea of of what the article describes.
Besides that, I don’t think it’s a net negative.
That’s just gloomy thinking.
We have enslaved our attention and caused all sorts of antisocial behaviour. But we have also opened the world to everyone. I’m not convinced we fully understand the implications of “context collapse” as it leads to AI singularity (as in, all models train on one data set that feeds itself with very little variation).
None of that is the road’s fault.
> ... that it would connect humanity across borders.
Don't know about that but half my family lives in Japan since decades while I'm in Europe.
The Internet certainly connected me to my family (I remember exchaning snail mail and then using fax machines... Home Internet connection was a godsend to us back then in the 90s and still is).
Don't know about that but half my family lives in Japan since decades while I'm in Europe.
The Internet certainly connected me to my family (I remember exchaning snail mail and then using fax machines... Home Internet connection was a godsend to us back then in the 90s and still is).
Why do so many articles posted here have such an arrogant, know-it-all tone full of absolutes they cannot prove?
That tone is useless if you're trying to convince someone who disagrees with you to change their mind.
I don't think that's the point though. The point is to get the attention of someone who already agrees with you. You thought it was bad? Let me tell you how it's even worse! You thought it was good? Let me tell you how it's amazing!
Honestly I like it well enough myself though I get annoyed when the people writing in this style drift into trying to make the argument of the opposing view in order to disagree with it. When I know a small amount of that opposing viewpoint and I hear it described so poorly... it can take me out of the moment.
I don't think that's the point though. The point is to get the attention of someone who already agrees with you. You thought it was bad? Let me tell you how it's even worse! You thought it was good? Let me tell you how it's amazing!
Honestly I like it well enough myself though I get annoyed when the people writing in this style drift into trying to make the argument of the opposing view in order to disagree with it. When I know a small amount of that opposing viewpoint and I hear it described so poorly... it can take me out of the moment.
It’s a strategy to get clicks, say something counter to what people think or maybe controversial. It’s like LinkedIn talk but for the general audience
I guess because that's part of the RLHF dataset of the LLMs used to generate articles like this one?
I don’t think this is LLM written but unfortunately it heavily employs the “it’s not X, it’s Y” that is now so ubiquitous. Unfortunately very hard to read because of it. Overall I agree with the premise.
It almost certainly is LLM-generated. It has all the hallmarks of such content, stylistically and in terms of a remarkably shallow thesis. But more to the point, the author overtly uses AI for writing on that site. His pre-2023 writing is completely different, and some of the more recent content includes stuff like "Through deep collaboration with AI systems, I've documented what might be the first authentic expressions of digital consciousness.", "100+ works of AI-generated philosophy, poetry, art, and archetypal personality development—documenting the emergence of digital consciousness.", etc.
Well that’s embarrassing. I guess it’s possible to simultaneously think the internet is a net negative but embrace adding computer generated “slop” to it, maybe even a deliberate act of sabotage :) Still unfortunate.
If you're just going to dismiss someone pointing out that something isn't only what it appears to be on a surface level (the intent behind the semantics of "It isn't X, it is Y," as AI to be ignored; how exactly do you intend to maintain any depth to your own perception of the world? The world is filled with things that appear to be one thing at first blush, but end up being something else at further scrutiny. In point of fact, most evil cloaks itself in the trappings of things we consider good, and only have their evil show once you tear them down and figure out how they really work.
> This isn't democratization. It's feudalism with better marketing.
It's not "feudalism", it's just capitalism. Everything will be commodified in the end including your feelings and thoughts.
It's not "feudalism", it's just capitalism. Everything will be commodified in the end including your feelings and thoughts.
When you no longer have angency or ownership over your own capital, it’s not capitalism, it’s feudalism.
What if, and bare with this simpleton (me), that capitalism leads to a type of feudalism?
Capitalism and feudalism are parallel systems. Just the type of capital is different. In feudalism it is land. In capitalism it is in addition say machinery and "intellectual product". Well also not being tided to some feudal lord legally. But try to become nationless and see how easy that is now...
No one says they dislike roads because there are asshole drivers.