Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

[Pursuivant]

An interplanetary or interstellar society might find "traditional" Earth-based internet to be unacceptably slow due to high costs, insufficient bandwidth, and/or relativistic problems. They would turn to locally-administered datanets or something similar.

You might also have a very different sort of internet if people have implanted or wearable computers. To avoid distraction, power drain, and other problems, the datalink is usually turned off. When it's on, the datalink is well-enough protected that it only provides pertinent data from trusted - or approved - sources. For example, people might still use datanets to get factual information like weather forecasts or street addresses, but not for other purposes.

Finally, Gresham's Law might apply to the internet. As quality of meaningful internet content goes down, people learn to distrust it and stop using it. If criminal gangs, hostile ideological forces, authoritarian governments, and similar bad actors become dominant on the internet, people will abandon it for something better.

Imagine an internet which consists of nothing but the dregs - scam and phishing sites, domain campers, product shilling sites, content scraping sites filled with pop-up ads and legally dubious click-through advertising models, etc. Now imagine search engines which just served up those sites, with any meaningful useful content hidden behind paywalls or moved back to private servers reminiscent of early 1990s-style bulletin board systems (BBS).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

internet content goes down, people learn to distrust it and stop using it. If criminal gangs, hostile ideological forces, authoritarian governments, and similar bad actors become dominant on the internet, people will abandon it for something better.

Vernor Vinge hints at this in some of his later novels, and Neal Stephenson makes it explicit in Anathem.

[The Colonel]

Prolonged cyberwarfare could certainly put a crimp in the international aspect of the interwebz, and presumably extensive government spying and meddling could make domestic networks a lot less effective. I've seen these posits used together to roll back progress to fit the less ambitious assumptions of older RPGs - including the idea of unregulated local networks based on peer-to-peer systems. This also works well with the traditional authoritarian but incompetent government common to cyberpunk - the government destroys everything it touches, but doesn't police those who are able to withhold their consent to being policed ... expect regulated networks to be constantly traced and more or less free of useful content and unregulated once to require excellent security software, substantial systems competence and a tolerance for frequent outages caused by applied violence.

[AlexanderHowl]

Cyberwarfare might make the Internet completely unusable due to public revulsion. Imagine a simple cyberattack that destroys the turbines used to generate electricity within power plants (or the motors that change wind turbine orientation or solar panel angles)? How would a contemporary developed society function without electricity except from generators for six months? How would the population react when they find out that their suffering was caused by the connectivity of the Internet?

[Tyneras]

Given the trend of current big name tech companies (Google, facebook, etc.) to hold political ideals above profitability and pursue them via censorship and such there could be a cyberpunk style spin on the concept. You have one always-online society with no privacy and dire consequences for disagreeing with the CEOs on virtually anything, and another society that has turned away from the internet completely (or been thrown out for whatever reason). The offline society might not have turned away voluntarily but the consequences are the same.

[acrosome]

Ideology, of course.

There are a lot of ideological groups that do not want their members exposed to anything contrary to the ideology. God forbid, then they might question it. Look at FLDS in the US. Of course, it's hard to scale this into an entire society. If the ideological group was the whole society it would just control what is on the internet, a la China.

Ideology is nasty stuff. All ideology.

[AlexanderHowl]

But the Internet is designed to allow people to insulate themselves from competing ideologies. Search engines learn about the search patterns of users and give them only selections that match their previous searches. Social media sites learn about the preferences of their users and match suggested articles and blogs according to those preferences. If someone is not careful, the Internet provides them with an ideological bubble that reflects all of their beliefs and filters out every opposing belief. Ideologues who understand the Internet love it because it protects their followers from their own curiosity and prevents them from seeing the other side as anything but delusional.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

But the Internet is designed to allow people to insulate themselves from competing ideologies. Search engines learn about the search patterns of users and give them only selections that match their previous searches. Social media sites learn about the preferences of their users and match suggested articles and blogs according to those preferences. If someone is not careful, the Internet provides them with an ideological bubble that reflects all of their beliefs and filters out every opposing belief. Ideologues who understand the Internet love it because it protects their followers from their own curiosity and prevents them from seeing the other side as anything but delusional.

That's not the Internet as such. That's specific service providers on the Internet. Widely used providers, to be sure, but not the only ones. And again, that sort of filtering was around even before there were computers; which radio station you listened to or which paper you took had a similar impact.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Cyberwarfare might make the Internet completely unusable due to public revulsion. Imagine a simple cyberattack that destroys the turbines used to generate electricity within power plants (or the motors that change wind turbine orientation or solar panel angles)? How would a contemporary developed society function without electricity except from generators for six months? How would the population react when they find out that their suffering was caused by the connectivity of the Internet?

What kind of idiot connected something that low-level to the internet?

--

Honestly, it still feels like there's a conflation of services that operate on the internet (or more accurately, the web), with the internet itself. Packet switching networks are probably than the alternatives, given it can work in a relatively decentralized fashion. Hypertext and web based scripting languages can build anything, more or less, it's just what you decide to build. You could build social media to stick people in bubbles, or you could build social media to put people in anti-bubbles. The existence of social media that promotes bubbles says more about the people than it says about the web.

[tanksoldier]

There is a Twilight Zone where most of the population is connected by a wireless internet. Information is downloaded directly into the brain.

The computer network decides to rebel and kill off humanity, and the hero is the one guy not connected for some medical reason or other... and after the network is destroyed, no one but the unconnected guy knows anything... math, reading, anything.

A society which has gone thru that is probably pretty wary of computer networks.

There’s also the Dune example, if it hasn’t been mentioned.... the Butlerian Jihad, the revolt against enslavement by thinking machines.