AIBU to think the internet has ruined everything?

[Emori]

My phone now sits in my pocket like a malign white dwarf star, simultaneously compact yet also brimming over with useless garbage that nobody wants. The only contact I have with the corporations I hand over my money to is via a bot that doesn't understand, I have to password and create accounts and two step authenticate everything I do, and even then it's a mere matter of time before Putin raids my bank account and I am held liable because I didn't check my transactions every millisecond.

Libraries are now coffee hubs with no encyclopedia and precious few books, but good luck getting a sensible answer to a Google query these days.

All the fun jobs will soon be taken over by AI. Which will be shit, and will probably kill us.

The only people who benefit are misanthropes, pornographers, misogynists and the almighty conglomeration of that unholy trinity in the form of Donald Trump.

What the fuck have we done?

Yeah. We're fucked.

I have to agree.

Yikes… 😳 No snark but maybe you would benefit from human in person contact and stepping away from the internet for awhile.

Without the nternet you wouldn't be able to use MN yes there is bad but also good, anything in life is what people make it

It's ruined men, thats for sure.

1,000% agree though you’ll def get some opposition (naturally, it’s MN) but yep! Life genuinely was better pre-internet in my opinion

Look at what they're doing to schools. I really despair. Every child is to have "a one-to-one device" and all homework is via an app and the device can be remotely monitored by a teacher at any time...

It's dystopian.

You are wonderfully eloquent.

It has also ruined my ability to read, and ruined my sense of direction (in all meanings of the phrase).

People don't know how to be in the room with one another- they are always elsewhere.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👍🏻

Just to check...you came to an internet forum to explain your despair that the internet has ruined everything?

Disagree. The Internet is a fantastic resource, and finally we have a source of information that can't be wholly repressed and censored by malicious actors. It's also an enormous source of entertainment, education, communication etc.

The fact some people can't self-regulate and/or only use it for malign purposes doesn't make the entire thing insidious.

It’s very Black Mirror but here we are 🤷‍♀️

I was about to say YABU for a second, until I read all the points in your post. I agree @Emori

Hardly any quirky shops now (and lots of normal shops shutting) because people buy a lot of stuff off ebay, amazon, etsy etc. Many towns with no banks. Gas, electric, water and the like all dealt with on the internet. (Try to get through online if you have an issue, and you're kept waiting an hour, and then the person can't help half the time, and they don't solve the issue.) Trying to get through to the DWP or DVLA is farcical. At least 40 minutes on the phone just to get to speak to someone.. Can't get a GP appointment as it's all Total Triage now, and some random on the end of the internet decides if you're worthy of a GP appointment. Covid jabs, flu jabs all booked online. Asthma reviews are over the phone now.

And now they are taking our landlines away. End of 2026.

I am dreading the loss of the landline, as we have quite regular power cuts being rural, and the internet goes down too, and without the landline we have only the mobile phone, and the signal is sketchy on that sometimes, especially in the inclement weather that caused the power cut!

I feel sorry for people older than me... (70+) I am nearly 60... Quite a few I know are lost and confused at all this going on, and their old world disappearing.... And I am exasperated about how everything is not the same. Some things are made easier - like taxing the car and moving money from one bank account to another, and being able to source something online that you can't find in your local shops, and I do enjoy being able to watch almost anything if I have missed it - on catchup TV and YouTube...

But much stuff has changed for the worse. Customer care and the personal touch has gone out of the window with most companies. And as I said, trying to get through to the DVLA, British Gas, or the DWP, the council, the tax office, the water board etc, pre 2014-ish took about 5 minutes. Now, you're lucky if you can get through to a human within an hour.

I sometimes wish it was the 1990s again.

And the ability for mass propaganda. Russia, the king of propaganda is having the best time. And so many people are falling head first for it (waves at Reform voters).

It’s a twix imo. We are so well informed, about health, psychology, sociology- anything we’d like to learn about it’s instantly accessible. I think general understanding of rights, wrongs & the opportunity for open discussion is of value.

on the flip side, I struggle to read & my teen has no interest in doing so. I used to love getting lost in a book. My attention span is awful & I find myself defaulting to my phone for ‘breaks’ & ‘rest’.

Disinformation is widespread- we need to be so aware of what is potentially fake.

I don’t necessarily wish the internet away, but I wish we didn’t all rely so heavily on our smart phones & could achieve a better balance with the tech in our lives.

The internet was a brilliant invention pre smartphones. It’s the constant access to it that is the biggest problem.

Well said. Smartphones have fucked life as we knew it.
From what I remember of the rose-tinted 2000s, the internet itself was OK. Fun, even, when it was a useful repository of a lot of high-quality and free information that we ‘checked’ a few times a day on a laptop.
Having a powerful tiny pocket-sized PC has been a nightmare for me. First, massive indecision about which time train to get, which restaurant to go to, which new hoover to buy — all of these decisions requiring vast amounts of pointless research. (Pointless because everything is sponsored or monetised, so no neutral information.) Then the erosion of friendships because no one picks up for a chat and everything is shitty WhatsApp messages. Being bullied into conformity on social media. Outrageous news stories (Trump’s messages today to the Norwegian PM!) because world leaders are also on their phones all the time.

I was almost run over on a zebra crossing the other day as a man in an SUV was so busy engaging with his SatNav/in-car computer that he didn’t notice either the crossing or me and rolled relentlessly forward…

I loved the internet at the start: ICQ chatrooms, Joanna Lumley on AOL, asking Jeeves (who didn’t serve me ads by scraping up my data), DeviantArt, what song I’m listening to on MySpace posts, livejournal, endless personality quizzes (which Buffy character are you?), getting poked on Facebook, stupid hotmail addresses, ‘Charlie bit my finger’. It was a place to entirely be yourself, in a way I often didn’t feel I could be in real life. And have fun.

Now? It’s fucked. Everyone’s a brand, pretending to be something they’re not, comparing themselves to everyone else’s bullshittery when they’re not talking absolute cobblers in the darker rabbit holes online. Everyone found their tribe but then all went to fucking war. Sigh. I miss Farmville and CtrlAltDlt.

edit: the cat videos are still good though.

Personally I love it. I have thousands of books in my pocket and I can read them any time, and I do. I can video call my family with my children whenever we want (in-laws live closer and we see them in person all the time, but this gives our children a way to connect to my family that live further out).

I can work remotely. I’ve got jobs built abroad for a fraction of the cost. I can see my children and work a full time job. I can see my family, message them, for less than a cost of a stamp and in real time.

I have gained qualifications I wouldn’t have got as I would never be able to take that time/cost to do it in person. It’s revolutionised our home dynamic as we can both do equal work when one of us was earning less.

It’s made my job safer, and the thousands of people we employ safer. We can do things in real time rather than rely on out of date drawings and method statements.

I can see and hear from my friends who don’t live near me. I feel so close to them, especially as some of us can’t afford the trip (many a happy group call wine night that’s fine in for hours).

I don’t deny there are bad things about it, but there are bad things about everything. The ‘internet’ is just a thing, like a phone cable in the old days. It’s a way of accessing communication and information. It’s what you do with it that counts.

Completely agree but also loved your post

Also agreed with pps that those of us millennial or above have lived through peak internet. It helped us do things without becoming the only thing we do. It made life better, it was not inextricably enmeshed into life itself.

I disagree. There’s loads of things that are much easier due to the internet.
I can work from home, get my shopping delivered to my door, find really obscure things I need without enormous effort.
I can keep in contact with friends that are all over the world, message them pretty much instantly.
I can watch telly: what I want, when I want.
There's lots of crap online, I don’t engage with that though.
Cherry pick the good bits.

I do agree there is a lot of shitty aspects to the internet but there is also so much that is great about it. It’s up to us to navigate the good stuff. I love that I can find the answers to so much, work remotely , plan trips on the move, use loads of useful apps and so much more.

THIS. Spot on.

Yes, I completely agree.

There are some very genuine and important upsides to the internet but overall the bad far outweighs the good.

Its had a profoundly negative impact on society.

It would have been better if it’d never been invented.

I definitely think AI is spoiling things, Its hard to tell what's real and what's not anymore and everything just seems a little...off. I Googled "second person narrative examples" and this was what it came up with! Wtf!