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

[AlexanderHowl]

So, I was thinking about setting ideas, and I was wondering what would be the reasons that an advanced society would turn away from the Internet? What reasons do you think that the Internet would become banned and/or unpopular within an advanced society (TL9+)? What would be the consequences of an advanced society turning away from the Internet?

As a criminal justice scholar, I see many reasons why a rational advanced society would turn away from the Internet. Crimes, ranging from child pornography to identity theft to tax fraud, are more easily facilitated by the Internet than they would be without an Internet. Cybercrimes, ranging from digital espionage to swatting to virtual revenge porn, are crimes that would not exist without the Internet to facilitate them. Beyond the criminal side of things, social media makes it easier for people to be spread propoganda and other lies and to just be mean and vindictive from the safety and the anonymity provided by their social media accounts.

I think that a society without the Internet would probably go back to the way things were before the Internet, but it would still benefit from the social progress of the last couple of decades. Without social media to spread propoganda and lies, and to facilitate vindictiveness and meanness behind the shield of anonymity, the petty and spiteful trolls that make everyone's lives less happy would have to just stew in their own fluids. In addition, the traditional media would recover, and the majority of the crap distributed by the Internet would fade away. There would be negative consequences of course, academic articles would be harder to access, but I think that a society that decided to ban the Internet would be willing to accept the negatives.

So, why do you think that an advanced society would ban the Internet? What do you think the consequences would be for such a society? Would you use such a setting in your games?

[John_A_Tallon]

What a humdinger of a discussion topic!

Well firstly I'll say that while the increased connectivity of the internet may make some crimes more simple, the value from having free and open networks to society greatly outweighs the negatives. This is apparent by virtue of how we use our internet today. Wire fraud, child porn rings, identity theft, tax evasion, all these crimes were possible before the world wide network was instanced and popularized; in fact these crimes were often simpler to perform and get away with prior to the internet and associated technologies giving crime fighters new tools to address old problems. Or new tools to address new versions of old problems.

Likewise, the trolls you malign were not odious persons simply stewing in their own juices prior to the internet. They were out in the world, being jerks, crazies, and agitators. While there is a real emboldening of bad actors that occurs when they can misbehave and not risk getting punched in the nose immediately, they were always present. They've always been a part of life beyond the hunter-gatherer stage. Their ill behavior is not the fault of the internet, but of having human society in its present configuration.

Propaganda and lies were harder to tell from the truth prior to the internet. The variety of viewpoints that exist on the net now, even if it's easier to find echo chambers and self-selecting delusional communities, puts to shame the pre-internet media options. I am sure some people here remember when we only had a few broadcast television and radio news channels to pick from, a handful of national periodicals, a couple of large newspapers per region, and one or two local papers to pick from for getting the news and popular views. While dissent was offered by the patriotic and the dutiful, it was always subject to the whims of a handful of editors. The system then relied on editorial independence and a sense of professional pride within the newsroom; something that disappeared as many news agencies were bought up by mega-corporations. By the late 90s it was apparent that a handful of big companies were going to be controlling all the old media news, and that the internet was a gift for dissenting opinions and coverage of inconvenient truths.


So with my piece said, I will now address your original question. An advanced society would ban the internet to maintain tight control of propaganda and information channels. Making the world network they use have strict gatekeeping instead of popular access would limit the usefulness of the network, but would also make it much more controllable and subject to editorial veto. That's the most obvious reason, and that's the question a lot of more authoritarian countries are grappling with today. If the hands that pull the levers of power can't keep dissent quashed, they quickly become accountable to the majority and thus find it very advantageous to pursue various ways to quell or prevent direct action, violent action, and non-loyal opposition. Leashing the internet now that the genie is out of the bottle is the work of spy agencies and the seamy side of corporate direction. They are working quite hard on it, honestly; the matter of backdoors and hidden ring privileges being integrated into current generation of CPUs is a very real way for agencies with vested interests to maintain their control of intelligence on what dissenters are doing, never mind the more overt attempts at control like the Chinese Great Firewall.

A stratified society that believes that all men are not equal, that some men merit access to information more than others, and that some men are more worthy in their opinions than others would certainly embrace a shackled internet, or even outright shun the technology in favor of compartmentalized networks.

[a humble lich]

One possible rational to remove the internet could be for security reasons. First, is the Battlestar Galactica motivation where any networked computer will be taken over by hostile artificial intelligence. Even in settings without pervasive hostile AI, you could see societies shunning the internet is it became too easy to hack into networked computers, perhaps as a result of common quantum computers. If it becomes dangerous to plug a computer into the internet, then many people will avoid it.

Another rational is a society which places strong values on privacy might feel that an internet makes tracking people too easy.

In both cases, there still might exist an internet, but possibly smaller in scope and only used by a subset of the population.

[David Johnston2]

Spontaneous AI leading to cyberparanoia and an abandonment of the networking of computers.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Society decides it wants to do as much damage to niche hobbies as possible, so it gets rid of their best sources for finding info and people to talk to.

[Tyneras]

1. A devastating event. Maybe the entire economy was destroyed by internet based attacks on all sectors of the economy, only those with cash survived and are fearful of a repeat event. Maybe internet enabled hospitals were hacked and slaughtered millions of people directly (turning off life support, using surgical bots to kill) and indirectly (all pharmacy machines hacked to add poison, or make lethal doses). Self driving cars and planes on autopilot hacked to become homicidal. Maybe all of the above! After all the damage, it was proven it was impossible to prevent from happening again short of destroying the internet completely.

2. Social woes. Society, or a society, determines that the internet causes far more harm to society than good, and then remove it. Even if not everyone does this right away, they are proven correct in the end and those who kept the internet become failed states as their society fragments. The survivors rebuild them, now internet-free!

[Donny Brook]

It's already happening in the RW. Corporate oligopolists squeeze out everything else, and just like networm TV, audiences just switch off.

[edk926]

The World's Governments make memes illegal.

[whswhs]

They were, he said noticeably kind, quiet folk, but a little exacting, as all flat countries must be, in their notions of privacy. There had, for instance, been no printed news-sheet in Illinois for twenty-seven years. Chicago argued that engines for printed news sooner or later developed into engines for invasion of privacy, which in turn might bring the old terror of Crowds and blackmail back to the Planet. So news-sheets were not.

Rudyard Kipling, "As Easy as A.B.C."

Written in 1912, I believe, but Kipling foresaw a lot of things. . . .

[AlexanderHowl]

One of the recent unsettling discoveries in recent years is that autocratic regimes have been learning how to manipulate social media and the Internet at large through using agent-based modeling, artificial intelligence, and autonomous programs. By examining the social media posts and the search engine patterns of individuals, they can determine their biases, preferences, and prejudices with enough accuracy to influence their emotions, opinions, and even thoughts through selectively filtering out the social media posts and search engine results that they gain access to. In effect, social media and the Internet has become the very tools of manipulation and survilleance by autocratic regimes, allowing them to manipulate every aspects of their citizens in a fashion unimaged by the autocrats of the past.

Since that is true, how can democratic nations remain democratic when autocratic regimes use social media and the Internet to manipulate the political opinions of the citizens of democratic nations? Is not the very foundation of democracy then threatened by social media and the Internet, as the people become tools of foreign dictators? The corporations that run the Internet do not care who is on top as long as they make a profit, so is it not up to democratic nations to restrict access to the very tools that foreign dictators use to manipulate the citizens of democracies? Otherwise, will not the democracy just become a puppet state of the dictator and one whose government was overthrown not by expensive militaries but through inexpensive manipulation?