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

[tbone]

The answer would largely depend on what you mean by "the Internet".

Do you mean a society turning away from the very idea of computer networks (and networks of networks) that use common protocols to facilitate communication? It's easy enough to imagine governments (with or without citizen support) controlling access, protocols, a hundred other aspects (plenty of real-life examples), though I can't think of why a government would shut down the great convenience of computer networks for itself (and approved sectors of business, etc.).

Or do you just mean society turning away from certain outward-facing aspects of the Internet? That's really plausible, too: services that are dropped because they're outdated/unneeded (Gopher, Archie) or no longer popular (MySpace) or becoming unpopular/tiresome (Facebook and Twitter for a number of people) or feared (any services viewed as tools for monitoring, manipulation, etc.), etc.

In short: Yeah, I can see the populace turning away from many public-facing aspects of the Internet, for a lot of reasons (though in reality, there'd be a lot of people wanting to hang on to a lot of aspects). But I have a hard time imagining why government, businesses, organizations, etc. would want to give it up for their own back-end purposes. (It's interesting, though, to imagine the sort of dangers and fears that could lead to that!)

[ajardoor]

1) The Madness Dossier option; the Internet becomes flooded with nasty memetic agents. A nationwide ban on the Internet is imposed until we get that cleaned up.

2) If Technomagic is acceptable as a world building element, the Internet becomes flooded with curses and hexes. You log on, and some wizard will unleash arcane fury upon your frontal lobes - turns out immersive VR makes you vulnerable to magic.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by ajardoor

1) The Madness Dossier option; the Internet becomes flooded with nasty memetic agents. A nationwide ban on the Internet is imposed until we get that cleaned up.

Something a little worse, in the form of pictures that crash human minds, which can only be resolved by banning image files from the Internet.

[smurf]

Well currently this one is what gets my goat.

Adverts.

You watch anything now and it will have an advert at the beginning, severall interruptions due to adverts.

Then somewhere (I know FB has asked) there will be a question if you seen an advert.

All content wil ask you to subscribe, so you can have more adverts.

Constant, pop ups, 3 or 4 adverts, plus side bars of adverts.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Maybe the society starts running low on power and starts cutting down on Internet use as a drain on resources. (I have no idea how much electrical power "Internet use" consumes.)

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

(I have no idea how much electrical power "Internet use" consumes.)

It's tricky to define "Internet", as well as whether all the power for devices like computers or smartphones should count, not to mention that a lot of the data -- like the number of data centers operated by private companies -- is proprietary. But it's somewhere around single-digit percentages of electrical production (2% in the US, 5% worldwide, 4-6.8% worldwide, according to various studies).

Efficiency is the real question, though. If you turned of the Internet to "save electricity", how much more electricity or other energy sources would you use to get the same jobs done? Or are you going to settle for less, and increase unhappiness, poverty, shorten lifespans, etc. to save energy consumption -- and don't forget to include the cost of enforcing your decree, whether that's just policing or outright war. Perhaps cat videos are the opium of the people, and it's actually cheaper to run the planet this way.

[AlexanderHowl]

In my experience, the Internet has increased poverty through displacing workers, increased unhappiness through spreading bigotry and prejudice, and has shortened lifespans through encouraging a more sedentary lifestyle. People are becoming more ignorant, not more educated, as even academics are allowing search engines to determine what they read. The promise of the Internet has been lost as everyone rushed to turn it into a commodity, and I doubt that many people know what was lost.

I am part of the original Internet generation, I still remember when the first commercial ISPs came online when I was a child and how the adults were bemused by this new toy, and I have seen the promise of the Internet violated by the greed of corporations. Now, our data is the most valuable commodity that we possess to them, and they constantly seek to manipulate our behavior by guiding our purchasing and search behaviors. It is even worse though, as corporations are willing to share their data with anyone, for the right price, whether they are criminal organizations or dictatorial governments.

Ads were annoying but manageable when they were generic, now that they are targeted, they are scary in a fashion that would give Orwell nightmares. Who needs to worry about jackbooted thugs randomly kicking down your doors when autocrats can program your behavior subtly through the Internet with the assistance of the willing corporations? Even if you resist, they are programming the other people in your life, from your boss to your spouse, so that you comply or else you risk alienating everyone who matters to you.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

In my experience, the Internet has increased poverty through displacing workers, increased unhappiness through spreading bigotry and prejudice, and has shortened lifespans through encouraging a more sedentary lifestyle. People are becoming more ignorant, not more educated, as even academics are allowing search engines to determine what they read. The promise of the Internet has been lost as everyone rushed to turn it into a commodity, and I doubt that many people know what was lost.

If that set of judgments is meant to be an argument for why we should do away with the Internet in the real world, I think it's off topic. If it's meant as a model for the arguments that people might advance for getting rid of the Internet, it's plausible enough. It rather suggests a "moral panic" model, in fact, and such a model might be worth developing.

[AlexanderHowl]

It is more of an outline of plausible arguments from the real world that a democratic society could use to justify banning the Internet in a fictional future setting. If a future democratic society faces the prospect of a 'soft coup' by autocratic foreign governments through the use of the Internet, then they might ban the Internet in order to preserve their democracy, regardless of the incidental costs to society. The fact that it would bankrupt the companies that have corrupted the Internet within the setting, who had allowed autocratic foreign governments to use the Internet to subvert democracy outside of their borders, would probably only be seen as an incidental bonus by the societies of the setting.

After determining the why, it would be a question of the costs and benefits of returning to a society without an Internet. What would be the social costs to a society that bans the Internet? What would be the social benefits to a society that bans the Internet? Beyond the preservation of democracy, would the costs outweigh the benefits or would the benefits outweigh the costs?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

After determining the why, it would be a question of the costs and benefits of returning to a society without an Internet. What would be the social costs to a society that bans the Internet? What would be the social benefits to a society that bans the Internet? Beyond the preservation of democracy, would the costs outweigh the benefits or would the benefits outweigh the costs?

I have to set aside "beyond the preservation of democracy," because I don't count that as a benefit. Indeed, from my viewpoint, the worst thing about the Internet is that it has enabled the enhancement of democracy.

But looking at the economic aspects, I think it's clear that the Internet has moved the production-possibility frontier a long way outward, and has done so partly by accelerating the "creative destruction" process that Schumpeter wrote about. Over the past quarter century or so, we have seen a lot of long-established firms go down, and a lot of new firms move up. And the new firms in general couldn't survive without the enhanced communications and coordination that the Internet enables. So I think that by doing away with that part you would be causing both a lasting impoverishment of humanity, and a short-term crash. I think I have to say that nostalgia for the pre-Internet world is like nostalgia for the pre-railroad world.

I'd also note that the commodification of Internet users as audience isn't a radical change. Back in the early 1980s, I read a Marxist analysis of the broadcasting industry that said that what television produces is audience, which it sells to advertisers; the television shows were not "product" but "means of production"—or as we say now, if you don't pay, you're not the customer; you're the product. And even earlier, we had Robert Heinlein's "If This Goes On—," which envisioned the control of the electorate by scientific mass marketing against which the ordinary person was helpless, perhaps inspired by the work of people like Bernays in the 1920s. If there are arguments against this, they also apply to the broadcasting industries, and perhaps even to newspapers, and surely to the use of mass media for political propaganda, preaching, or commercial sales (though the commercial uses might well be the least harmful).